Richard E.

the first time they meet, menelaus just lost his father and was exiled from his kingdom with his siblings, he just lost everything and now has to live with a stranger, but then he sees helen. beautiful, smiling, kind helen. yet to know grief or pain helen. too perfectly to ever possibly be a mortal, a mortal like him, helen. and menelaus is immediately drawn to her, he starts viewing helen as a goddess he is lucky to even be in the presence of, he loves her because she is everything he's not to him. she is perfection.

but helen isn't a perfect and helen isn't a goddess, helen is a person with her own flaws and pain, but menelaus ignores that because it ruins his perception of her. it ruins the fantastical illusion he crafted of their relationship as a mortal man and his goddess.

I think at some point helen used to view menelaus through her own fantasy as well, but her fantasy was childish and she grew out of it when she got older, menelaus' fantasy warped his perception of helen to the point he could never grow out of it, at least not until the war.

helen still loves him back, of course she does, he's her best friend and her husband and the father of her child. yet still after marrying him, something she used to always dream of doing, his love feels too strong, it doesn't feel like he listens to her, it doesn't feel like he genuinely loves her, it doesn't feel like how she imagined marrying menelaus would be like. he's not trying to be a bad husband, he's always showering her in praise, always buying her gifts, always around her, but it's to the point it feels like it's too much.

so much that helen starts to question their love, she still loves him, but their love isn't as she pictured it being, she wanted to be menelaus' wife, she never wanted to be his goddess. menelaus doesn't question their love, he thinks their love is eternal, he doesn't start to question it until helen leaves, because only then can he finally learn to let go of his view of helen as something divine, only then can he finally learn that she's a human too, imperfect just like him.

Homer's Iliad, book 10

Close up

References:

Silly grayscale study to which i still dont understand:3

DO NOT BE AFRAID

this is combining Ovid's Heroides and the Excidium Troie because I can't stop thinking of Hermes telling him not to be afraid. what the fuck!! Ares is wearing the crown that Paris gave him.

I have. thoughts. about Paris. he's almost got this Troilos parallel in my mind, that the event that defines him in detail exists in a lost narrative that we don't have (the Cypria), but everyone else knew. the event that defines Troilos is his death (murdered, butchered by Achilles, the violence of which haunts everything after. Achilles, child killer, you can't escape that!), and the event that defines Paris is the Judgement. what's a lost text but a kind of grave!!

idk I don't think that Paris before the Judgement would recognize himself after bc when you become god touched, it rearranges your guts. you become transformed in the worst way possible! how could you recognize yourself! but I also think that all the Parises after the Judgement would recognize each other because that event is so locked into the trauma of war and the scar it leaves on the land, it's like a scar on the narrative too. it exists like this forever, over and over again, so you exist like that forever too. Troy collects grief and despairs.

Troy as trauma: Reflections on intergenerational transmission and the locus of trauma, Andromache Karanika

and Paris is like. a miserable little god/corpse-puppet or something, like a match for the gods to throw onto gasoline.

The Excidium Troie + Ovid's Heroides:

Excidium Troie, trans. Muhammad Syarif Fadhlurrahman

Ovid, Heroides 16 (trans. Harold Isbell)

a collection of things regarding Paris that made me go 😬 but under a cut bc this is getting. very long.

In the film, Helen and Paris are essentially still in the honeymoon phase. Their relationship hasn't gone through the same years of warfare, grief, and disillusionment that their epic counterparts did. Because the war lasts a month at best, the audience can still believe that they're running on the same passion that brought them together in the first place.

In The Iliad, however, we're dropped in the tenth year of the war.

Helen has spent a whole decade in Troy, watching countless Trojans and Greeks die in her name. Whatever excitement or romance that accompanied her arrival has had ten years to collide with reality.

By then, she's not looking at the beaches of Troy as someone swept away by love, but as someone who has had years to contemplate the consequences of their actions, something we see even more clearly in The Odyssey.

The Paris of the beginning might have been a handsome prince offering adventure and escape. But the Paris of the Iliad is a man Helen watches avoid responsibility while others fight and die.

We see how frustrated she is when Paris returned from his duel with Menelaus, and she makes no excuses for him, disappointed, and it doesn't help that he brushes her off.

It's very much a, "This is the man I threw everything away for?!"

The war in the film is treated like a detour for the Trojans, something that will end soon, and once it does, Helen and Paris can have a future of romance together.

Yeah, bullshit, no way when the war has lasted for ten years.