salty aunty

💌 BEFORE SENDING AN ASK: Check my F.A.Q. , tags, and/or Google.

I answer asks slowly depending on my health and how much research/thought each needs. Check the #answered tag once a month and you'll be covered!

Important articles and essays:

🌊 Nolan's Odyssey & The Western View of Greek Culture

🏺How the West is mistreating the Greek myths.

Related article for the history of this attitude:

📝 "On not knowing modern Greek"

🌖Stealing Hellenism: The Erasure of Greeks by NeoPagans

https://www.instagram.com/p/Da45ZQYTNkb/?igsh=MTBvN2VnMWdjaWNvYw==

Produced by Tanweer Productions in Athens, U.S.-based Tectonic, and Armenian-American broadcaster USATV, the project will film on location in both Greece and Armenia. Armenian-American producer Vaagn Sarkissian serves as one of the executive producers. The creative team brings together industry veterans from several major international productions. Karl Gajdusek, an executive producer on Stranger Things, will serve as showrunner, while acclaimed director Roel Reiné, known for Black Sails, Halo, Wu Assassins and Washington, will direct the series. Speaking about the project, Gajdusek said the goal is to strip away the fantasy surrounding Homer’s epic and reveal the human story beneath.

The last part of saying to remove anything fantastical is already a huge red flag for me and a proof that these people never fricking learn tk just FOLLOW THE SOURCE

Nolan is racist. He's racist towards everyone in the film including Greeks masked as "diversity". Racism isn't measured to how many shades darker someone is or not

I haven't read Barker, but I read Miller's Circe, Saint's Ariadne, Hauser's For The Most Beautiful & Heywood's Daughters of Sparta... And all of them are so similar, pessimistic, lazy in their characterizations, all men are awful, women are also badly written, gods can't be anything but tyrants... I have read Homer & some tragedies and despite the difficulties of reading The Classics, it's much more rewarding (and more diverse in characterization, motivations).

I've been reading many, many retellings on King Arthur, and, despite some clichés, and of course the sad/bittersweet endings, they're much better done, and I don't feel this pessimism (& heteropessimism) that pervades these "Feminist" Greek Myth Retellings.

What are your thoughts on it? Have you read Barker's book(s)? The fact that Thompson is behind this project makes me less skeptical about it, but still...

Akh.... (sighs in Greek)

I'd love stories which center the female experience and present the nuances of the time, in respect to how women were viewed and how they traversed the world. But popular Western productions that call themselves "feminist" do not do that. They exaggerate and simplify things, making a mockery of our women's struggle and of our men, too.

And then they wonder why people don't like their "feminist works". It's because their works are deaftone when it comes to reality and culture. No person who aims to engage in real social conversations will take them seriously. Maybe this movie will be good but I don't have any hope at this point. Emma Thompson is a White British woman. I have nothing against her, and I will cheer her up if she does a good job.

But please pardon me, as I'm being pessimistic when it comes to how her demographic presents our people. They may have the best intentions but they'll have no introspection.

People use ai to make books, fanfics, videos, photos

Globally we have a literacy crisis

People barely care to read a book they prefer to only learn visually, or everything needs to be told simply to understand.

This is new level of Fahrenheit 451 at this point no wonder people believe everything online. In our case is also Greeks who believe Hollywood because they simply dont bother to research and also foreigners who refuse to acknowledge or read books about the myths

They never bother to see what Greece had to endure to survive, the centuries of slavery, massacre and genocide that brought us to our knees, the brave heroes that fought so we could have a free country now! They are all too comfortable typing on a keyboard away from Greece how we look because they dont bother to "see" us beyond their bubble its tiring

Her translation is atrocious and it's no surprise it's only Anglos (mostly Americans, from what I've seen) who praise her for that disaster. How one is able to suck the formality and grace from the Homeric Poems is a mystery to me (can't wait for her translation of Dante's Comedy! She will translate only the part in hell, and it'll read, "When I was middle aged, I started wandering in a forest I had never been in before.")

I can't even begin to understand why so many take her seriously when she couldn't even be bothered to keep it in verses and have any kind of metric to it.

"It's easier to read!" so... rather than making an extra effort, which is what should be done when studying literature, we just... dumb everything down? Make everything easier and stupider and plainer, even if it means stripping it completely of its cultural weight?

Here we study Odyssey and Ilyad (and Eneyd too) starting from 7th/8th grade... we get the "formal" translation on one side, and the simpler paraphrase on the other. My school used the Ippolito Pindemonte translation too, which was published in 1822. I don't want to say that we're smarter than the average USian, but the track record here isn't exactly good for them.

I have also noticed that the majority of Anglos write about Homer as the writer of the Odyssey, which is... fascinating, I guess. Like, they truly talk about him as though he used to sit at a desk and write the verses down. It's like watching them discuss Stephen King or Colleen Hoover.

Guys, wat. Classicists have been debating if he even existed for like 400 years. Odyssey and Ilyad are known as poems of the oral tradition because for centuries they were passed down orally. Hello??

And now these morons are the same people who are scolding and trying to educate us on stuff we've been reading since pretty much childhood, all because an Anglo director who uses his wife as a secretary and who cannot write a female character to save his life decided to make a crappy, over-budgeted movie that polluted our sea.

Anyways, let's all kneel in front of our Anglo betters, who were naked hunting groundhogs while we were killing Caesar and yet now want to school us on our own culture. May we develop their same egos, I guess. I feel like we could do some good if we felt like the main characters of the planet again.

Nothing like a good Mediterranean rant full of insults 😂💙 You're spot on on so many things! The entitlement and ignorance of those people are insufferable.

As with any big endeavor, this needs study on the writer's part. You can check my tag #retellings for commonly appearing issues. @wordsmithic has some more posts in her tag #retellings about those issues. You can also get advice from a Greek Beta Reader who will comb your manuscript for every cultural element.

For places mentioned in the Myths (like Hyperborea) you need to know how the Greek culture viewed them. You can be helped by ancient Greek texts that describe those places. But to fully flesh them out for a story, you do need to have a good understanding of the Greek culture as well.

If you want to create a fake-Greek world of your own, it's useful to know the culture in depth, and actively choose to include or exclude certain elements. The only way to know if you've done a good job is to have someone - preferably a Greek person - look into the line-by-line level in your story and have discussions with you.

Hi! This is not simple to answer but I can at least direct you to texts and people who can help. To achieve proper representation you need to study and get help from the right people. Please take a small tour around my F.A.Q. (link in bio and pinned post) if you have not already, so you can get a glimpse of the local culture in antiquity.

You can also visit my tag #ancient greek religion for an insight into the ancient Greek mind.

So what is next? Scandinavians shouldn’t claim viking history because vikings were secretly Italian in their ancient past or smth? I mean, they don’t even speak the same language as the norse! That must mean that Scandinavians are just too germanicised atp and therefore not deserving of viking heritage of course🤪

This refers to an older ask, but it echoes a sentiment that people who see our culture as their own property often express. Instead of thinking deeper about their own arguments, they seek to demoralize the other side instead. But I wonder, after so many years of them doing that, who takes them seriously?

(I know there's the historically Black/Latino/Latina/Asian, Multicultural, and honor societies that also use Greek letters. I don't know much about those, so I'm talking about the historically white ones that are basically known for parties and high dues/membership fees LOL)

I honestly don't know if I'd go as far as describing it as racism, but I definitely understand why some people think it is. Idk your familiarity with it or if you've posted about it before, but it really does irk me.

I was wondering how you felt about Ulysses? I'm reading it for the first time this year (shoutout AYearOfUlysses on reddit!) and think it's pretty damn good, though of course with all things Joyce it is a bit of a learning curve.

Also how do you feel about Epic: The Musical? That is something I am NOT a fan of, it's catchy enough, but as far as Greek Mythology musicals go, I prefer something like Hadestown, Mythic, or The Lightning Thief (I know you've posted some criticism of Riordan and Percy Jackson in the past, which I don't disagree with, but I do think TLT is a cute play, and WAY better than the movies or Netflix show as an adaptation!)