A lot of people like the headcanon that Aphrodite appears differently to each person depending on what their ideal of beauty is, but I don't think we talk enough about the potential of Helen doing the same thing.
Leda gives birth to the daughter of Zeus, and everyone says she is the most adorable baby they have ever seen. But no one can agree on the color of her hair or the shape of her features. When the young Helen looks in the mirror, she thinks she looks just like her big sister, the most beautiful woman she can imagine. But when she says as much to Clytemnestra, her sister is confused. Helen is unlike any woman she has seen in Sparta, she says, with forest-green eyes and hair like sunlight on wood.
Helen starts training with the other girls, and she sees less and less of Clytemnestra in her reflection. Instead, she sees the warm brown eyes of the visiting prince who smiled at her across the table, the square jaw of the girl who pinned her in wrestling practice and shot her a wink before she rose. The sons of Atreus come to stay in Sparta, and after a few conversations with the younger brother, Helen finds that her hair has turned his exact shade of red. It stays that way for months after he leaves, and so when scores of suitors arrive hoping to claim the woman of their dreams, he is the one she picks. And they rule together, and laugh together, and lie together, and he tells her that he loves her. But in the long hours of the night, she can't help but wonder if he would still say so if her face wasn't perfectly tailored to his desires.
She is the woman of every man's dreams, and so of course she is the perfect prize for the goddess of beauty to promise the Prince of Troy. With Paris, it is never a question of whether or not he loves her- if she were not a perfect beauty in his eyes, he would have stayed with his first wife, with whom Helen is certain he had more to talk about. In Troy, she is never just Helen. The women look at her and they see the sister that was taken in a raid, the husband that was killed on the battlefield, and they despise her.
And are the Greeks any better? Her unnatural beauty called them to the shores of Sparta all those years ago, drove them to make a pact that only one of them stood to gain from. They have been at war for ten years because of her, they mutter, and so they despise her too. But when they have her in their clutches at last and they gather together to stone her to death, she lifts her veil, and the stones drop from their hands. She bears the face of the wife they have spent ten years yearning for, the lover they lost to a Trojan blade, and not one of them can bring themself to kill her.
The gift of her beauty saves her life, and the curse of her beauty condemns her. Because for the rest of her life, she will be the most beautiful woman in the world, a woman who brought so much suffering and death simply by existing, a woman who escaped the war unscathed but bears the face of every soul lost in it. She will always be someone else's Helen, and she will never know who she is when no one is looking.
stormborns
germansingergirl
