האַק מיר נישט קיין טשײַניק

bluh bluh let women be feminine WHATEVER but it kills me that while adaptations of Athena often leave out how genderblurry her presentation of herself and her form is over the course of the odyssey IS, she’s both strongly linked to the world of war and to internal domestic works of clothes and weaving which in the odyssey manifest as directly noted links to storytelling trickery and cunning. So it kills merchant Athena is rarely shown in the many incarnations of gender age and class she takes the form of across the odyssey but it also kills me that while she’s rarely shown with her armor and helm in adaptations she’s …. Also rarely shown in outfits that make manifest her expertise in weaving and clothing as well, which would include things like a lot of fabric, many folds, designs and patterns and layers. Modern adaptations tend to portray Aphrodite as “the goddess of love and beauty” and then relink beauty to a modern idea of “fashion” but I think Athena is far more powerfully linked to what we might consider “fashion” today in terms of the clothes themselves. Let Athena wear couture

like it kills me a lot with the pjo series and the very specific gendering of a lot of middle grade adventure literature where girls could neither be “too girly” but also had to inexplicably take second string as one of a trio no matter their qualifications when like even within the odyssey and even iliads as text, Athena at LEAST as central and active a figure as Poseidon. If not MORE SO! Like let annabeth be weird and cunning and kind of manipulative because that’s what war strategy is but also let her know bad seams and fashion from a mile away and have a room full of weird embroidery and weaving projects and an endless adhd finger knitting project that may or may not be somewhat animate. all this ignored in canon until the far inferior heroes of Olympus series but then she still has the matter of percys shroud. Like I’m not saying she should be into the modern evolutions of cloth and weaving because she’s A Girl but because if Percy gets to have physical magic powers due to his dad why the fuck can’t she.

I’m not entirely sure you can write a “feminist retelling” of the odyssey from the perspective of a single female character because where the position of women becomes so interesting in the context of the epic is as a collective and how simply inescapable the presence of women is as the major scaffolding of the entire story. it is not imho the physical journey home that is the major backbone of the odyssey nor Odysseus on his boat with his men, but the consistent metaphor of weaving which reflects womanhood as an identity that is actively constructed and physically tangible in the cloth and clothes he is constantly having to receive from the xenia of other people, and this forms the connecting sinews between a lot of parts of that are slightly smaller but that ultimately do end up forming the physical bulk of the narrative - Athene, penelope, eurycleia, melantho, Helen, calypso, ino, nausicaa, arete, Circe, Persephone. The story starts with Athena’s actions and it ends with her too. Odysseus is undoubtedly gendered as male but he moves through a world in which the individual actions of diverse women stitch into an inescapable web. Even when Odysseus goes to the land of the dead its Persephone’s land. He meets the blind seer but he also meets his mother

I guess I’m not against the specific point of view limitation and I have fiddled with it myself and find it interesting, so much as the current publishing need to do this at the same time I don’t think I’ve seen a single modern adaptation/retelling that really includes what a major presence women as a whole are in the odyssey. I think I’m haunted now I’m actually reading it by how the retelling tends to restructure the story specifically in a way that limits their centrality in the narrative (to focus on Odysseus’s quests before Ithaka! Which is fine! Not a bad thing! But has lead to a social construction of the odyssey in which women collectively hold less space in the text than in the original odyssey, and it’s from this perspective of semi-erasure the new retellings are working from. You can’t put a voice back into the story in the space of the erasure of the voices already there

the thing about the omg why are the women in the odyssey just sitting and weavinggg thing is that like I am absolutely not here to argue they are NOT living patriarchally confined lives! But the social situation in the odyssey is not a divide between getting to go on a cool YA anime magic quest with a sword or sit home and do nothing. The social setting in the odyssey is that the war is over and the war was a real war, which means it fucking sucked and people died. Odysseus’s men have died. “Why doesn’t she get to pick up the cool swordy thing?” Because the men who picked the cool swordy thing up are literally dead and often for reasons far beyond their personal sphere of control and they aren’t here any more and who is are women with their looms

there’s really such interesting content with travel influencers in terms of like, the one reality of the fact places CAN be very different and that anywhere on earth can break a person down and being overwhelmed by any one area and its problems is not a moral failing. And then on the other that they follow absurdly different logical processes while in China or India or Central America than in their home countries. Like there’s an Australian guy who made a three part series about how “Indian broke him” and he left disgusted and traumatized and then it turned out his entire travel channel is dedicated to finding extremes and quirks of human behavior and his trip to India was largely following a path between kooky religious figures and extreme cultic practices like surely the way to find the normal and of human behavior and cleanliness in any nation. I went to the U.S. between Westboro Baptist Church and Provo Utah and their behaviour shocked me!

We need more women characters who are Male Protagonists. You know. Slightly haggard. She's splashing cold water on her face and gripping the edge of the sink staring in the mirror for a minute. She's coping badly with her deadwife

Ok listen I get that people tagging posts with men is a rule of physics on this hellsite but it's kind of bizarre how badly some of you have failed the assignment on this one. A generic male protagonist archetype who is a man is nothing. That's just the normal cliche I'm talking about subverting. What?