☆《The moon and stars》☆

i find it so odd whenever people think aeneas is just pious and nothing else besides that. like many people think he is a boring character. aeneas? that guy is so not boring to me. yes hes pious but he also has wants and needs of his own. only he can't have those because above all he is pious, as much as he doesn't want to be sometimes. he is a character with immense trauma from the trojan war, who has lost his home and loses almost all of the most important people in his life. he is forced to leave the woman he loves and only finds out she's dead when he sees her again in the underworld, where he tells her he didn't have a choice. and when he gets to italy he is thrown into another war, that he didn't want but still has to fight. he loses more people and is then overcome by a rage and kills an enemy he could have spared. how is he boring?

I think Andromache has a lot of potential to be a subversion or deconstruction of the "ideal woman" trope. She is so often portrayed as the perfect wife and mother: devoted to Hector, loving toward Astyanax, obedient, and composed. But what happens when she is also expected to be the perfect enslaved woman? Something breaks in Andromache after she is made a slave by Pyrrhus. She develops a kind of rage she has never felt before, a silent rage, but rage nonetheless. She is not completely passive or accepting of her fate by her captor. And I think this becomes even more complicated when she becomes pregnant with Molossus and develops postpartum depression. Andromache can perhaps rationalize her inability to become the "perfect slave woman" because she was a queen. She has lost her status, her family, her home, and almost everything that once defined her. But motherhood is different. She was a mother before, and now she is a mother again, yet she is unable to love her child in the ways she believes a mother is supposed to. That could create a really interesting internal conflict for her. She might even wonder whether she has genuine affection for Molossus, or whether it is purely opportunistic something driven by survival rather than genuine maternal love. And that guilt could be especially painful because of the expectations placed on mothers. There is this idea that a mother should automatically and unconditionally love her child no matter what and that failing to experience that immediate affection makes her a bad mother or even a bad woman. Andromache could internalize that expectation and conclude that something is fundamentally wrong with her because she cannot simply be the loving mother her society expects her to be. In that sense, her postpartum depression would challenge the idealized image of Andromache herself (and motherhood in general). The "perfect wife and mother" is not actually invulnerable, endlessly patient, or incapable of resentment. She can experience rage, grief, numbness, guilt, love, and even contradictory feelings toward her own child. I also have a headcanon that Andromache experienced postpartum depression after Astyanax was born, but that it was much shorter-lived and she managed to make sure nobody noticed. That would make her experience with Molossus even more painful, because this time she cant hide it from herself as easily.

I think that while Paris’s family sees being a shepherd as a lowly occupation, they are still surprised by how much knowledge he retains. They may expect him to be completely uneducated and ignorant because of his upbringing (he was also a slave) and personality (him being feminine,"vain" and not liking having dirt on his hair for example). Like i imagine that whenever Paris sees something that reminds him of his old life, he would probably start info-dumping (without realizing it) about everything he knows: how to handle and care for animals, recognize different plants and their uses, identify changes in the weather, navigate using landmarks, manage grazing and pastureland, protect livestock from predators, and understand seasonal cycles. He could also have extensive practical knowledge of the countryside, local geography, and basic survival skills.

Paris is kinda like a mix of Princess and the Pauper and Rapunzel