I’m going to try to make up for not having tes out today, in order to make up for not having one last week. We’ll see if that works out.
I just finished reading Moving Pictures, and next I’m going to read the last book of the original Skulduggery Pleasant series.
I don’t have a system to play it, but February 2 is the release of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, from the same developer as the Batman: Arkham games; coverage for that has been….interesting, to say the least. I’m very curious to see what reviews will say once the game has come out.
On Athena
I don’t have Disney+ anymore, so I can’t keep up too well with the Percy Jackson television series. I read reviews and such, though, and I wasn’t thrilled with what they did to Athena in the show’s story. And it made me think about how, in modern fiction, I feel as if Athena doesn’t get that much respect. Which is crazy, because if anyone in Greek mythology ever struck me as being incredibly cool, it would be Athena. She’s a warrior goddess! She doesn’t have any stupid love stories! She kicks Ares’s butt! She invents stuff! She has the keys to her dad’s lightning bolts!
Except, a thing I’ve noted is that modern fiction, in depicting Athena, very often downplays her prominence by making her just another one of Zeus’s children, and an egotistical, hypocritical, jerkface know-it-all. And that’s annoying.
Alright, so let’s back up for people who don’t know Greek mythology so well: Athena is the daughter of Zeus and Metis (the personification of wise counsel and the first wife of Zeus). Zeus heard a prophecy that if Metis had a son, he’d be more powerful than his father, and considering both Zeus and his father got their thrones by overthrowing their fathers, he is very worried about this happening to him when Metis gets pregnant. So through divine shapeshifting shenanigans, he convinces Metis to turn into fly, and Zeus eats her.
Welp, gods are weird, and so Metis somehow survived this, and one day later on Zeus has a splitting headache, and Hephaestus takes an ax to Zeus’s head. Athena pops out, fully-formed, an adult, with armor and weapons forged by her mother inside Zeus’s brain. And she’s goddess of wisdom and war, now. Hope you’re cool with that, Olympus. She’s apparently very attractive, as she has some suitors, but she remains one of the virgin goddesses who never has children.
[Riordan gets around this in PJO by explaining that her children aren’t biologically produced, they’re literally “brainchildren” birthed from her head.]
Despite clearly having a mother, and that mother giving her weapons/armor, Athena is often said to have been born by Zeus alone. In fact there’s a text in which Athena more or less says she’ll uphold The Patriarchy because she was born of just a man, when she should know better. Greek mythology be like that, sometimes.
So no, it’s not as if Athena follows modern ideals of morality and goodness–this is true of a lot of Greek mythology. Best get used to it. What counts as ‘wisdom’ to us isn’t necessarily that of the Greeks. And yes, Athena is often boastful, proud, and hypocritical–she quite often punishes people for offending her in what are essentially petty slights. We can argue over how seriously we’re meant to take these stories as “canon” or as ways to teach religious ancient Greeks about hubris, but that’s besides the point, as most modern stories featuring Athena more or less take these stories as true in that continuity. I don’t think it’s actually bad to portray Athena this way in fiction, because it’s true to the character in the stories.
What bothers me is that it’s very often all we see of her. Athena is consistently in Greek myths a champion for heroes, for instance; in Percy Jackson & the Olympians, she rarely ever helps the protagonists, Greek heroes, even when one of them is her daughter. The television series takes this further by having her even revoke favor for her daughter and let a monster loose on her for not stopping someone (Percy) from doing something that’s perceived as an insult (mailing Medusa’s head to Olympus). In Cronus Chronicles, she appears with some other gods shortly in the final book and refuses to get involved in the battle with the villain because she’s scared of getting destroyed, though she paints it as being disinterested.
C’mon, man. She’s one of the only ones who stood up to Typhon.
I think worse than that, though, is that Athena’s wisdom in war and strategy is rarely shown in modern fiction. I suspect that part of this is the problem of writing a genius-level character–if you can’t think like a genius (a problem most of us have), it’s hard to even consider how to write a character as such a military strategist, especially as that’s a field most writers don’t have much experience in. This is why you’ll see historians and experts pick apart so many Hollywood battle scenes–they’re written to be dramatic and cool, not accurate. I have yet to actually see in memory, however, an Athena in modern fiction who actually acts like a military genius. In Percy Jackson she points out Percy’s flaw (which is BS but that’s a topic for another time), but she also suggests killing him to prevent him from destroying Olympus, when he’s never shown any inclination to do so. She’s also gone completely insane in the sequel series. Rise of the Argonauts emphasizes her wisdom and commitment to justice over strategy. God of War flip-flops on whether she actually cares about Kratos or his a conniving backstabber (eventually landing on the latter).
I want to be clear: I’m not against an unsympathetic or ambitious version of Athena in fiction. I think she would make a fantastic villain, if written well. And she’s been in coup attempts before–there’s a myth where she helps Poseidon and Hera trap Zeus, and she conspicuously isn’t punished for it. I would love to see a version of Athena as a dark, nigh-unstoppable queen who has taken over Olympus.
Because she would be nigh-unstoppable–she’s both insanely powerful and well-loved by the Greek people. Again, Athena is not just another of Zeus’s kids. She’s the most powerful and favored of them. She is goddess of war, wisdom, strategy, crafts, civilization, and the city of Athens, and yet also has a major temple in Sparta (the idea that Ares was more favored in Sparta isn’t actually true). Aside from Zeus himself, she alone of the gods has been given authority to wield the lightning bolt. When the gods get into a fight in The Iliad, Athena completely shuts down Ares, after taking a shot from as if it was nothing. She should be something like a divine ancient Greek genderbent John Wick.
[Hollywood, get on this movie now.]
I get that, for dramatic effect, especially if you have Zeus as the Big Kahuna of the Greek pantheon, you have to power down Athena. It’s like, why would anyone care about the other gods when Athena’s right there? So you Nerf her. But know that it’s not being faithful to the myths.
Athena is insanely intelligent and powerful in Greek mythology–if you’re going to feature Athena in the story, you should make sure to acknowledge that in one way or another. She’s not just another stuck-up Greek deity. She’s one of the most important and meaningful ones.
—
Here, have a musical number.
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