kahavave:takashi0:true-king-of-monsters:So lemme see if I can get this straight for a second.As a wa
kahavave:takashi0:true-king-of-monsters:So lemme see if I can get this straight for a second.As a way to commemorate the #metoo movement, a 7ft tall statue of Medusa is gonna be placed across Manhattan’s criminal courthouse….while she’s carrying the severed head of Perseus who didn’t rape her in the myths!This is beyond tone-deaf. This is tone-deaf, blind, and fucking insulting to sexual assault survivors and Greek Myth scholars. Poseiden raped her, Athena cursed her, but Perseus is the one who gets blamed because she was an obstacle on his way to rescue andromeda and save his mom.yeah it wouldn’t be MeToo if they didn’t leave out context, now would it?Also the ‘being raped then cursed’ thing was a very late addition to the mythos. She was originally just a monster/probably demigoddess by the modern understanding of the word but not the classical understanding of the word. Literally the child of two different sea gods and never having been human.Ovid, the person we first have recorded as providing the curse version of events, lived during the reign of Augustus (as in, he died in the first century AD) and he was known to add in or change events in his poems or works based on his own views and to reflect his political opinions (this was not an uncommon thing, for the record; while we can’t prove it for everyone a lot of hellenic poems and stories we have recorded as coming from specific times suspiciously teach on things either mythologically or culturally in question), and he was known to be having problems with Augustus. Meaning he would have a bone to pick with people he considered unjust authority figures.So to recap; they have a statue of a woman who wasn’t raped and known specifically for enjoying hurting people holding the severed head of a man who (unusually for greek heroes) seemed to be overall a genuinely good guy with his major issue being, iirc, accidentally fulfilling a prophesy relating to killing another dude (he either invented a game involving throwing heavy steel rings and the dude stepped in the path of his throw, or he was participating in the olympics discus toss and fucked up the throw and the dude was unlucky, or the dude was being a complete asshole about the whole medusa thing and demanding proof and saw the head and got petrified).So yeah, that’s pretty much par for the course.If I say “woke US Americans at it again” are you guys gonna be mad at me? xD NEEDLES to say, sexual assault is bad. The thing is, they were so busy trying to pass a message of justice that they forgot to do a simple Google search. The statue is missing the point. Seeing this I pictured Medusa saying “I killed the hero and now I am going to continue the massacre unbothered”. Wow much justice -- source link
#ovid#medusa#greek mythology