homoerotic text

🌱 the peacemaker spirit 🌱

the entire conflict of the Trojan War is who gets to own and have sex with a woman, Helen. sure, the Greeks probably also wanted control of the Dardanelles and all the treasure in Troy, but Helen got the blame for the conflict, so let's take that at face value.

the conflict of the Iliad in particular is who gets to own and have sex with a woman, Briseis, and to a lesser extent Chryseis. Briseis is unquestionably a slave. there is no romanticising her relationship with Achilles (or Patroclus, for that matter), he killed her entire family and destroyed her home, kidnapped her, and rapes her basically nightly. towards the end of the Iliad she also gets the blame, Achilles says he wishes she was dead rather than come between he and Agamemnon, even though she had literally no agency in the situation.

Epic entirely omits the slaves of the Odyssey. there is no Eumaeus welcoming Odysseus to his hut, no Eurycleia caring for Telemachus, being a confidant for Penelope, and recognising Odysseus, no Philoetius helping Odysseus kill the suitors, no Melanthius helping the suitors and being tortured to death by Odysssus, and no maids sleeping with the suitors and being hanged by Telemachus. slaves both positive and negative are erased. is it because acknowledging that Odysseus, Penelope and Telemachus have slaves would be uncomfortable?

whatever the reason, you cannot ignore the slavery of the Iliad without majorly changing the story and Achilles' actions.

Epic also erases any suggestion that Odysseus has sex with Circe or Calypso. this post would get way too long if we try to dissect how consensual those relationships were in the Odyssey, but whatever case it seems to me like it was trying to avoid any suggestion that Odysseus cheated on his wife. i don't know who the hero of Ilium is going to be, but if it's Achilles, will his extramarital sex be erased too? he had Deidamia and is son waiting for him to come home too, after all. Hector is loyal, you could make the Trojans the doomed heroes, but if you're going to focus on Hector, you have to focus on Astyanax too, and that will make Odysseus in Epic look a whole lot worse. i don't think Ilium will risk presenting him as the villain in somebody else's story.

however, Epic doesn't entirely shy away from sex. it invents a scenario where the suitors plan to rape Penelope, which makes Odysseus even more heroic for saving her. was xenia too hard to explain, so we had to give Odysseus another motivation? and if so, why rape? well, because writing violence against women to motivate your male protagonist is nothing new. but it's always unpleasant; it diminishes women down to narrative tools and prizes for heroes. Penelope's own intelligence and emotional strength is largely ignored in Epic, she is little more than Odysseus' happy ending.

i'll bet anything the character who will be turned into a cartoonishly evil rapist in Ilium will be Agamemnon. but the truth is, pretty much every Greek hero in the Iliad was a rapist. Odysseus is said to have a bed slave in the Iliad (in Book 1), but every adaptation forgets that because she isn't named and never appears on the page. Patroclus' bed slave, Iphis, who does appear, is also always omitted, presumably to make Patroclus more likeable. Nestor gives a speech where he says every man should rape a Trojan woman to avenge Helen's supposed rape, and later stories like the Posthomerica and Euripides' Trojan Women show us how that is exactly what happens.

there's also the bizzare choice in Epic to have Odysseus and his men come into direct contact with the sirens then brutally mutilate and kill them, when in the Odyssey they don't get anywhere near that close. another example of using women's bodies as a man's narrative tool, this time to demonstrate Odysseus' monstrous side. (i've seen people argue that the sirens aren't really women because they're monsters, but they use feminine pronouns in the book, they're voiced by women in the musical. if it walks like duck and quacks like a duck...)

so yeah. the Iliad is a story about the horrors of war. slavery, rape and violence against women were part and parcel of bronze age warfare. meanwhile, Epic is a strange mishmash of avoiding sex for the men and increasing the violence, sexual or otherwise, against the women. unless those women are slaves, then they don't exist.

but you cannot tell the story of the Iliad without addressing violence against women, and in the 21st century there should really be some sympathy and humanity for the victims. they should not just be props to be brutalised for a man's character development. and you simply cannot ignore the slavery without doing rape apologism. if you write Achilles and Briseis as consensual, that's what that is.

Epic suggests that these nuanced subjects are things the writer is not prepared to tackle. but if you want to write a lighthearted, PG 13 adventure story, you shouldn't look to the Iliad, a story about the horrors of war. go adapt the Argonautica or something.

Today I received my share of that settlement: forty-nine dollars and eleven cents.

It's simply a matter of time

Hey gang what is up dog

Been a while since I did a proper drawing like this — my art has changed a lot over the course of a few months so pieces like this are a lot harder for me to produce because I’m not quite used to the change yet