solrin

pessimist: "the glass is half empty"

athena: "statistically, it contains 50% of its maximum volume."

ares: "SMASH IT."

aphrodite: "you don't get it, half the water evaporated because of my beauty-"

hera: "is this the thing that left a mortal pregnant?"

zeus: "i shapeshifted into this glass and fucked a morta- uh. hi my hera! anyways."

hades: "eventually it will be completely empty and it'll arrive to my empire."

artemis: "who drank from my glass?"

achilles: "i could drink it faster than anyone here."

patroclus: "i can drink it and act like achilles drank it, if he doesn't want to, so people won't hate him."

odysseus: "if we tilt it in a 67 degree angle the trojans will think it's full and-"

penelope: "...i am NEVER letting my husband near any tiny puddle of water ever again."

agamemnon: "i'd sacrifice my daughter if you gave me this."

cassandra: "IT'S GOING TO TURN INTO A STONE, NONE OF YOU IS LISTENING-!"

hector: "this reminds me of my son, astyanax, oh my baby-"

heracles: "is this one of my labors."

persephone: "it's half full now and it will be half empty six months later."

dionysus: "ferment this bro"

narcissus: "wow. look at that reflection. who's that pretty guy over there?"

thetis: "MY SON IS GONNA BE IMMORTAL! YOU UNDERSTAND?" yells to the glass

paris: "wow. I'LL GIVE THIS TO THE PRETTIEST GODDESS! WHAT ARE YOUR OFFERS?"

hermes: "who wants to bet on which half wins?"

apollo: "i'm in love with this glass... my glass oh my glass.." stares at it for 5 seconds and then it turns into a plant

“hermes is the god of in-betweens” symbolism is cool but this is a camp full of traumatised kids who don’t know where they belong yet.

like just think, what if you’re not a hermes kid, you live there for months thinking “i’ll move out soon anyway,” never settling in, and then boom. actually, twin, you are a hermes kid!! congrats!! you’ve been homeless inside your own cabin the whole time!!

another thing is that, hermes cabin is already one of the biggest and most crowded ones. why are we adding more kids there?

and all this while hestia is RIGHT THERE.

she's the goddess of the hearth, home, sanctuary, hospitality, xenia... the literal cultural backbone of “you are safe here.” she doesn’t want power, she doesn’t want to claim anyone, she doesn’t want drama.

she would absolutely take in unclaimed kids, keep them fed and warm and safe, and let them stay until their god shows up. a small, quiet, neutral hearth cabin where no one belongs to a god yet but everyone belongs somewhere. tell me that doesn’t make more sense

the patroclus discourse is genuinely exhausting because somehow he's a... femboy?? r we talking about the same patroclus twin

okay so first of all. homer places him as a very irreplaceable person for achilles. he doesn’t call him a twink as y'all assume

“ὃς μοι φίλτατος ἦεν ἑταίρων” is what he calls him, which means, “the comrade who was most dear to me of all” (iliad 18, phrase may vary in different translations)

that word you see there, hetairos (a way to say companion, but in like a "need him" way), matters.

and yep, achilles also says shit like

“i would not accept life itself if he were not beside me” (paraphrase of iliad 9 & 18, bc he says this sentiment multiple times)

yea bro ok we get it he's dear to you. (you can see that even without pointing out phrases. he's a dickhead to anyone but patroclus. if you have even the most basic interpretation skills, you can tell he values him SO much.)

now. do i personally think they could be lovers? YES OBVIOUSLY.

i mean if i called someone “the companion of my life” and after on i went on a suicidal rampage after their death, without any further extensions i’d simply admit we were fucking.

plato also thought so. in the symposium (179e–180a), he straight up talks about achilles and patroclus as lovers and praises achilles for choosing death to avenge him. cool. valid reading.

BUT. and this is the part fandom keeps tripping over.

even if they were lovers, patroclus is not feminised in any of the texts. that, ladies and gentlemen (and everyone in between), is a modern projection. a very specific one.

this man is a trained warrior, he kills multiple trojans, specifically, he literally kills sarpedon, son of zeus (iliad 16).

he wears achilles’s armor and leads the myrmidons, is trusted enough to command an entire army is also a healer, personally tending eurypylus’s wounds (iliad 11).

(also, being a healer does not cancel out being a warrior. in greek culture, that’s a flex, as you can interpret. achilles himself was taught medicine. chiron didn’t raise femboys, guys)

the “patroclus is a shy soft boy who exists only to emotionally support achilles, can't fight and is only there js bc his bf needs him!” thing is not ancient. it’s modern and uh... why does this thing exist again? (sorry tsoa i'm staring at you here)

and it reeks of the need to heterosexualise a homosexual relationship by feminising the gentler one. as if two masculine figures can’t be emotionally intimate unless one of them is turned into the girlfriend.

no like, there's absolutely zero reason to feminise patroclus too, he's the erastēs, i mean, like, it's basically what we call the "top" in greek (not exactly, but you could say that.)

and when i say this people be like "but he's gentler!"

BROTHER.

being gentler than achilles is a bar deep in the underworld. achilles is a feral rage machine, his FATAL FLAW IS RAGE, the iliad starts with the words "sing, o muse, the wrath of achilles (...)", his anger is the reason of his and many others's death !!

so, being calmer than him does not make patroclus delicate. if you think being gentler than someone with severe, i mean severe anger issues is feminine, then congrats dude, you're officially a dumbass.

this is why the femboy-ification needs to be studied. why are we making him a twink kitten that's scared of the sight of the spears wtf

(hey! so... i have nothing against femboys or twinks or men who are scared of fighting. my whole point is that patroclus isn't one of the above himself, that's all. be whatever you are if you don't harm others, you're safe here !!)

and yeah, okay, tsoa exists. i’m not here to bash it. it’s a modern retelling, not homer, and people are allowed to like it. i do too. as a book.

but the problem is when people start treating that version as the default and then act like homer somehow “implied” patroclus was weak, passive, or defined solely by being in love.

ancient texts did not view men primarily through their sexuality (uh... i mean they did that with women but, whoop, that's another time's discussion !!)

ancient greeks didn't care about sexuality entirely (when it came to men... gosh, i hate misogyny). but fandoms do care. that’s the thing that causes the great disconnect.

patroclus is not just achilles’s gay lover, dang

he's a warrior, a healer, a leader, and the one death achilles could not survive. (yeah i just did that. sorry.)

if you want to ship them, fine. i get it. I DO TOO ARRRRGHH I LOVE THEM

but PLEASE just stop erasing who patroclus actually was to make the ship easier to digest (stop this with the other ships too pls twin)

blonde hair doesn't mean fair skin. and not all shades of blonde hair are the same. achilles is described as ξανθός (xanthos), which is used to describe fiery colored hair, not platinum box dyed ones.

menelaus was a redhead and his hair is described as ξανθός too. the same term gets used because what stood out wasn’t "this man is icy blond," but "this man has lighter, fiery-toned hair compared to the norm."

you see, i hope you see, mediterranean blondes exist right now. greeks, turks, levantines, southern italians..

i'm turkish. i have greek blood too. trust me, i've seen the world, and most of the mediterranean blondes are olive or tan, especially if they live under the sun. which achilles very much did.

also. y'all, this man was a warrior. he trained constantly, fought for ten years, lived by the sea, and existed in a mediterranean climate. even someone who starts out lighter would tan.

the idea that achilles could spend his entire life outdoors and somehow look like he’s never seen daylight is way more unrealistic than him being golden haired AND tan.

ancient greeks also didn’t think of themselves as “white” the way modern people do. that’s a modern racial framework being projected backwards usually from the us.

greeks literally described people from COLDER REGIONS as unusually pale and red haired, meaning they knew they weren’t that.

in the mediterranean, in between and sun browned skin was and is the norm. making achilles porcelain white feels offensive for some reason.

you can draw whatever you want, obviously. but if we’re talking about accuracy or even just basic logic, blonde hair and mediterranean sun does not equal paper white skin.

like, yes, i know the myths say he is. yes, i know about hera throwing him off olympus. but hear me out.

there’s no way that man is "ugly" by OUR standards.

the gods are literally divine. even if one of them is described as "less perfect," they’re still… gods. they are supposed to be otherworldly and unreal.

so when the olympians call hephaestus ugly, it’s not because he’s actually hideous. it’s because he’s being compared to literal supernatural supersupersupermodels, like beauty themselves level supermodels..

if you wanna see what i'm saying, imagine you put an attractive looking person compared to the average looking people in a room full of insanely perfect people, and suddenly they look "ugly" by comparison. that doesn’t mean they are ugly. it just means the standards are messed up

so no, i don’t think any mortal would look at a god and think "eh, he's mid."

i mean pjo fans that have no idea about mythology drag the poor guy on the floor just because "he's ugly," so