want to see a take on the greek gods that’s focused on like. all the olympians are complete whackadoodles because. zeus grew up in isolation on a hidden island with a centaur, training to kill his father.
and all his siblings grew up in their father’s stomach.
and then once they got out they leapt right into a war! there’s no way these people should be remotely well-adjusted! their formative life experiences were utterly whack!
poseidon hates closed-in spaces because Stomach. hades is agoraphobic for the same reason. (because people can have wildly different responses to the same trauma.) zeus doesn’t like being in small or dark or wet spaces because he was never swallowed but he sure grew up aware of the possibility.
(or if you want to be fucked up swap poseidon and hades’ issues and watch them lose their minds, since their jobs were supposedly determined by drawing lots, but hades is kinda noted for his stability so i doubt he hates being underground. the lots were fixed, come on.)
zeus is the only one with anything remotely approaching social skills, due to not having grown up in a stomach, and everyone in his family thinks he’s really smooth but in fact he is zeus.
hera has regular anxiety meltdowns about zeus’s general behavior because when Rhea married Chronos he was the one who’d overthrown their tyrant dad and taken his place, and she didn’t expect the child-swallowing, what if zeus comes up with some new idea about How To Be The Worst and she doesn’t notice in time???
it took rhea five kids to come up with a workaround, you can’t be that slow.
demeter avoids her whole family whenever possible because they had way too much Togetherness in their formative years and whenever she’s around her sibs too long she gets the bad kind of nostalgia, and also she’s even more claustrophobic than Poseidon and refuses to even go in buildings.
this makes persephone’s marriage particularly hard on her, as she cannot visit.
hestia takes her obligations as the eldest child very seriously even though nobody else does, and has the persistent feeling she should have solved the Being Eaten problem back when it only affected her.
she overcompensates by trying to take care of everyone all the time now they’re full-grown neurotic adults.
of the second-gen Olympians, athena relates best to the older set because of her Birth By Migraine experience, and the fact that by sewing her dead mom into his body Zeus saved her life was like. huge for him in processing his ongoing issues about his dad. reenact the trauma backwards.
they’re very close, in a ‘we don’t have that much in common so we don’t talk that much, but we don’t really need to’ sort of way.
ares got a particularly large dose of generational trauma by way of hera’s overinvolved and anxiety-riddled parenting, and his main coping methods are repression and finding something to fight so he knows what he’s worried about, and that he can kill it. also sex.
(aphrodite only married into the family, but she’s still been dealing with their issues enough from an early enough age that they’ve left an imprint, mostly in her draconian patrol of her own boundaries and refusal to set them where anyone else thinks she should. even if their opinions are eminently rational, which does happen.)
artemis and apollo mostly grew up with their mom and escaped the lion’s share of the olympian dysfunction; apollo is actually smooth, which makes him a family legend.
the fact that artemis has trusted two men ever and apollo didn’t entirely deserve it is definitely driven by the fact that zeus is a massive improvement on the previous two generations of patriarch, tho.
hermes takes the common and relatable step of being home as rarely as possible and having an excuse to leave immediately, so he only gets endurable amounts of family time.
whichever parent threw hephaestus away for being ugly, their feelings about having done so (and made his physical problems worse in the process) are all tangled up with their chronos issues, and he knows this.
so his adult relationship with them involves a lot of complicated stepping around the gulf of Not Talking About It, because he also knows he wouldn’t get enough satisfaction out of airing his frustrations to make up for then having to deal with Parent unbottling their own repressed daddy issues.
see i saw someone tagged this with objection to the effect that the greek gods are really shitty and that should never be ignored, but you see that is the point.
i see a lot where they’re shitty, per their various recorded behaviors (which is tbh from a very few texts by specific individuals and the older i get the less Seriously i take that Written Canon; this was not a Book Religion, we are missing many thousands of stories and the attendant perspectives here) and i see a lot where they’re reinterpreted to be actually decent according to the writer’s personal metric, or some of them are and others are made worse as if to compensate.
this take here does not engage with whether they are shitty. they probably are. they certainly make each other pretty miserable a lot of the time.
the point however is viewing them as people who exist within linear experiential time, with their established traumatic early lives and attendant poor socialization having a meaningful impact on their adult identities. rather than their origin story existing at a remove from the essentials of Who They Are.
because that’s not really how people work. and if we’re going to be treating them as people it’s a damn waste not to buy the whole cow.
amhrancas 