Seeing all the posts about st@rweaverblog and honestly? I'm kinda proud to admit I never liked her work. I always thought the colours she uses are too dull and flat, and she suffers a MASSIVE case of same-face syndrome. Ordinarily this would be fine with beginner artists but afaik she's literally an Art student. Plus didn't ancient Greeks love colourful clothes and jewellery? For someone who hankers about accuracy in Greek myth retellings all the time, she sure doesn't seem to mind inaccuracies so long as they're to HER liking.
I also always hated the way she portrays Patroclus. Ofc her homophobic ass can't stand the idea of Patroclus and Achilles being lovers, but there was this piece she drew of Achilles with Deidamia and Medea (some sources claim Medea and Achilles married in the afterlife. Personally I don't like or care for it) and Patroclus is like, relegated to the sidelines, like a sidekick of the popular kid from an early 2000s coming-of-age movie. It's just such a dudebro-hetslop way of looking at their relationship, even if you don't necessarily see Achilles and Patroclus as lovers. Achilles is the guy who gets all the girls and Patroclus is the loner sidekick. How fucking revolutionary. Not to mention it's completely antithetical to the sources, which repeatedly state that Patroclus was the most important person to Achilles, while some directly state them to be lovers. So clearly the sources don't matter when they don't align with her views.
And like you've mentioned, the way she portrays Dionysus and Ariadne is truly awful. She claims to hate inaccuracies in Greek myth retellings but has no problem portraying Dionysus as this ultra-hetero-monogamous man, something he is very much not in the sources. Notice how she never brings up Ampelos, a male satyr who was the lover of Dionysus. As the deity of chaos and wine and parties, he rules over those who live outside the norms and conventions of society, yet she turns him into the epitome of all the things he is not.
Her racism and xenophobia hardly come as a surprise when you consider all these things. Greek people can be pretty fucking racist and homophobic, like some of the Greek dudebros I saw having meltdowns on X over a Black Helen (they had 0 qualms about inaccuracies and authentic casting with movies like Troy and 300, which coincidentally do not have non-white actors) and shouldn't all be treated as some authority of Greek myths when they have proved that they themselves can be pretty uneducated on the subject. Kudos to you for exposing her and her ilk!
This rant got way long but I really wanted to talk about this. Have a great day!
same-face syndrome, you say 🤔
