men in greek mythology? scoundrels. just terrible. woeful social skills. murderers. kidnappers. violent misogynists. most of them… never described as handsome so we have to assume they were ugly.
narcissus? unproblematic. beacon of transformative self love. king of the swerve. gay icon. couldn’t recognize his reflection but neither can my dog, we aren’t holding that against him.
Narcissus wrote this
I refuse to believe Narcissus could read.
i’ve been thinking about this response for the better part of 2 hours and it hasn’t gotten less hysterically funny to me
So I’m watching a Sir David Attenborough (Natural Curiousities on Netflix), to cope withe the crushing lonliness of solo housesitting, and he’s on about Really Weird animals and talks about the origins of the pheonix- a bird that people travelling though Africa only rarely saw shrouded in the streamy mists of volcanic soda lakes (which are literally boiling hot and also extremely caustic).
And all they’d see is the occasional bit of bright red plumage and see these things bobbing in and out of the horrible death clouds coming off the lake, and naturally came up with the myth of a firebird what the fuck ELSE would be living IN A GODDAMN VOLCANO??
The Central Africans told this to the Egyptians who told the Greeks* about this mysterious animal, and they ran hog-wild with it to create the now-famous Pheonix, but-
The bird they were seeing in those volcanic lakes?
*There is significant academic debate about who told who what when (esp as the firebird myth has cropped up multiple times and been culturally exchanged many, MANY times) but the Flamingo>Egyptian Bennu>Greek Pheonix>European Pheonix chain is fairly well agreed upon.
we think Greeks were a very rational people and all until we learn about the Buphonia, an Athenian ritual where a laboring ox had to be sacrificed but at the same time, this was considered a terrible crime. so when the priest killed it with an axe, he had to throw it aside and get the fuck out of there running for his life. then the rest of the people discovered the crime scene and blamed the axe, the only one present. the axe was immediately carried before the court of the Prytaneum which charged the axe with having caused the death of the ox. sometimes it was absolved, others, it was thrown into the sea,
You cannot tell me they didn’t do all of this with a sense of humor.
Athena, goddess of wisdom, watching her dumbass patron city do this shit:
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