האַק מיר נישט קיין טשײַניק

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?