#aeetes

Ai generated image on the cover

It was shocking to see that this book has 885 pages

"Circe was the daughter of Helios, born into a divine court where beauty was currency, daughters were property, and silence kept powerful men comfortable."

So you're probably using that retelling as reference

"The world may call her monster.

For the wounded, she will become home."

But... she wasn't called a monster?

Saying it here because I don't like this book, she kinda turned the guy into a pig, but actually it was a boar

Myunique is an american arguing this ridiculous book will "reclaim" Circe 😑

And according to the "What's it about?" in this book Aeaea works like a women's shelter 😐

"morally gray heroines,"

Your character isn't morally gray if she's organizing a women's shelter and only curses abusive men

Reading this thing shortly after The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe only made the experience worse

"I laughed when priests grew solemn."

Well smiling during serious moments can be annoying, so in this case I don't blame them for criticising you

"He called me daughter when he wanted me to remember that names could be taken back."

By page 2 we see that Helios is a bad father

"A better question is what kind of world teaches a woman to make bodies confess."

So it's fair to assume the myth of Picus will be ignored

Looks like she's in good terms with her sister Pasiphae

"I learned which kings paid tribute in public and traded girls in private. I learned which priests blessed marriages they knew were cages. I learned which gods laughed when mortals begged. I learned which women kept small knives in their sleeves and which ones kept poison under the tongue."

All deities are terrible except Circe, all men are terrible except the love interest Theron 😑

"Feasts in my father's court were never meals. They were declarations with seasoning. Mortal kings arrived to display loyalty. Minor gods arrived to display access. Nymphs served wine, poured water, lowered their eyes, and learned which hands to dodge."

The first 3 chapters are basically this paragraph, over and over

"People often mistook my father's warmth for mercy, which proved how easily heat can confuse the desperate."

Helios wasn't like that

"I went to him because daughters in sun courts learn many forms of walking toward fire."

Honestly at this point it's good the writer doesn't know about Helios' daughters Lampetia and Phaethousa, because she would find a way to ruin these characters and for sure would turn their mother Neaira into a victim of abuse or something like that

"The nymph lowered her tray as he leaned toward the men beside him and murmured something meant for their amusement. Their laughter came easily. Hers cost more. She kept her face smooth, the practiced kind of smooth women learn in rooms where fear must look like service."

You have to be kidding me 🤦‍♂️

Being able to use this meme a second time is sad

Helios have mortal men from nobility as guests in his parties. The Titan is the leader of Sun Colonies(whatever that means) and invited mortals to form alliances

The prologue is mostly about how Circe is opressed in the court of Helios and how servant nymphs work in fear of Lords, divine or mortal

"『Shrine cows live longer than opinionated daughters.』"

Can you two talk about anything else?

", and a mortal lord who has already asked whether Helios' daughters all glow in the dark."

In what universe mortal men can make such comment to the daughter of a Titan, in the house of said Titan, and not fear punishment?

"『Sent here or sold here?』"

So... in this book nymphs can be sold and trafficed into service to deities. The ammount of misoginy in this retelling goes beyond the myths

"Makron leaned from his saddle and said something to a nymph holding the awning rope. The nymph looked down. His companions laughed."

Myunique you know not every interaction between a man and a woman worked like a hostage negotiation right? 😑

"If he touches someone he should fear touching, remember every room has corners where women survive because another woman stayed quiet at the correct moment."

That's not how life works

"Pasiphae at twelve, already learning to smile through insult. Circe at eight, still asking why servants cried where gods could hear them. Their mother absent."

Many pages later Pasiphae had this comment when talking about their mother:

Aeetes should learn to let buried women in peace.

So, yeah. Another retelling where a mother character is ruined

Perses exist but he's mentioned once, when Circe made a comment about him using beauty as a weapon or something like that

This review will be long

• The Ultimate Subversion: A brilliant, agency-driven twist on the classic tragedy that avoids the tired "victim narrative."

The "subversion" is simply that Jason is arrogant, stupid and took credit from Medea the girlboss 🙄

• A Ruthless Anti-Heroine: A morally gray protagonist who wields her dark magic and intellect as weapons of survival.

Jason, Aeetes or just men in general will be described as the worst and dumbest people ever so our Mary Sue- I mean protagonist Medea will look superior

Perfect for fans of Madeline Miller’s Circe, Costanza Casati’s Clytemnestra, and Natalie Haynes’s Stone Blind.

The myth is a lie. The fire is real. Order your copy today.

Judging from the 3 retellings used as reference, you already know how annoying this will be

Since the start of the book we have the protagonist going on a internal monologue on how men are cruel and don't appreciate her work because she's the most special there

"Beneath his palace, before my altar, I was not the girl he had fathered for alliances and lineage. I was the hand that had kept his enemies from his gates."

"You are Hecate's priestess. You are the dark mouth of Colchis. Be that, or be of no use to me."

...

"Human lives, counted with less care than amphorae of oil.

This was the law men made and then dressed in fine words. They built halls for justice over pits of bone. They praised order while slaves raised the walls."

Now I'm supposed to believe that Medea cares about slavery or human life in general? 😑

"They expected fire-breathing bulls, a sleepless serpent, a barbarian king, a witch-princess bred from night and foreign excess. Their poets had likely begun the shape of us before the ship left harbor."

Turn outs these poets were right

I really don't like this character

"There stood a giant, draped in the suffocating pelt of a lion, his unnatural, swollen musculature a mockery of the mortal form."

Weird way to describe Heracles

"A polished emptiness festered behind his golden exterior. His confidence was not born of profound understanding or endured ruin; it was the shallow arrogance of a man who fully believed the kosmos was ordered solely to serve his desires."

That's the description of Achilles, not Jason

"This was the work of Aphrodite. The work of Hera. The cowardly, meddlesome queens of the western sky, looking down from their cold marble peaks, twisting the lives of mortal women to ensure the survival of their breakable, golden heroes."

To my knowledge, that's the ONLY time such event happened. But of course she'll treat it as a universal experience

"If we were ugly, we were witches to be hunted. If we were powerful, we were monsters to be slain. If we were useful, we were cursed into submission, our brilliant minds seized to serve the story of a lesser man's glory."

People weren't hunting witches in ancient Greece

"He believed himself the golden center of the Fates' design. He believed the gods had paved his path with gold."

Let me remind you that Jason has yet to do anything to deserve such negative description

"Down on the beach, Jason tilted his face toward the sudden break in the storm. He smiled, a foolish, confident expression, undoubtedly believing the sudden clearing of the skies was a sign of divine favor."

Not ashamed to say I searched @sarafangirlart account to find this meme

Seriously look at the page. All he did was smile because a storm was over, but Medea talks as if he's a terrible person for that

"Women in his songs had likely softened at the first bend of his knee. I gave him only the dark and the roots under it."

Actually the when he visited the island of Lemnos the women there were holding weapons preparing for battle

"The hall-born hero in him strained to survive the plainness of his own end."

He was raised in a cave by the centaur Chiron, but whatever feeds your ego Medea

Now thinking about this line it would be nice to have Medea learn that just because Jason is a man, doesn't mean he was raised in privilege

But that's not going to happen because Thea Mercer isn't capable to understand such concept

"He did not see Colchis, only a barbarous edge of the world from which a useful woman might be lifted."

This Medea has such a horrible personality she would find insult in a man saying "Good Morning" to her 🙄

She assumes Jason sees her as a barbarian princess, while calling he and his friends "a brutal company" with zero self-awareness

"Marriage, marble, songs—he offered chains polished bright enough to admire."

Being part of a song isn't death sentence, stop!!

"Your marble cities are tombs. Your women are locked behind doors to weave their lives into cloth for men who inherit their breath. You would trade me one prison for another and name the second civilization."

"They are contained. Their names vanish into their husbands houses. Their bodies become fields for sons. Do not dress the bargain in the clothing of romance and expect gratitude."

If you hate life so much, jump off a cliff then. Spare us of the pain of your existence

"He did not like being corrected by a woman, much less a foreign one, but death had made him teachable."

No one likes being corrected, it has nothing to do with you being a woman

"You need only stay alive long enough to claim credit.

A flush crossed his face. Even frightened, he heard the insult."

This book is 300 pages of Medea having terrible attitude towards everyone around her, while still claiming she's the victim and that men should kiss the ground she walks on

"Perfect for fans of Madeline Miller's Circe, Jennifer Saint’s Elektra, or Scarlett St. Clair's A Touch of Darkness, this story combines romance and Greek mythology in a twist of several famous myths."

I'm saying right away: all the women Hercules dated ceased to exist. It's another book where he's gay only

"There was a disturbance near one of her temples. Some mortal men were harassing her acolytes. It pissed her off to the point where she decided to go handle it...personally."

What a way to remove Hecate from a scene 😑🤦‍♂️

"Emotions are for mortals. They're pointless."

Guess that he felt nothing over Daeira, Peitho, Karmentis, Okyrrhoe, Rhene, Tanagra, Akakallis, Alcidamea, Crocus, Polymele, Amphion 😑

Alcmene is killed off-screen in a flashback. I said it before, but saying it again: these writers want a symbol of women's suffering, not a character

Retellings really HATE mother characters

Greek mythology has hundreds of examples of women having kids out of wedlock and it was rare for them to recieve such treatment

Instead of seeking redemption over the death of Megara and their sons, here Hercules is going on the 12 Labors to become a god to achieve... something

Why american writers are so dedicated in making any greek name with more than two syllables into a weird short form?

"Perfect for fans of Madeline Miller's Circe, Jennifer Saint’s Elektra, or Scarlett St. Clair's A Touch of Darkness,"

It's dumber than what you fear

Don't know how, but that's supposed to be Hecate

"In the last great conflict witn Kronos, it was Erebus and Nyx who had delivered the deciding blows. Nyx had developed the pantheon and cursed Zeus, imprisoning him on the mountain before returning to Tartarus with Erebus."

"The acolytes of Zeus and Hera, embarrassed by the defeat, set out in numbers to change the perception of the battle."

That's such a pathetic introduction

This writer is unironically trying to put the Maiden-Mother-Crone bs template as part of Hecate's worship

Here's the actual titles she had

So now instead of Hera, the goddess of women became Hecate 😑

Remember when the Disney movie Hercules treated the Grey Sisters and the Moirai as the same trio? This book does this too

Perse ceased to exist I guess

Pelias, instead of a king with a wife and 10 kids, is now a childless sailor?

We're only 3 chapters in and the glazing towards Hecate is already annoying me

Would you believe if I said that's the beggining of chapter 4?...

Immortal goddess who can teleport, change her appearence at will and uses magic complains that somehow mortal men have it easy 🤦‍♂️

"The expression was one that Hecate had seen on the faces of men since, one that Hecate had seen through the eyes of all her acolytes. It didn't matter their age, their looks, their marital status... every woman knew that look."

I went to check Theoi ('cause I don't have the fucking Argonautica yet) and I only read that he wanted it for his throne to stay secure and the closest I got to what I thought was this fragment: