Lo Critical - Blog Posts
Are there any other LO-critical projects like LR?? Doesn’t have to be comics, I like fanfic(critic-fic?) too, I’ve been really interested in reading stuff like LR
Sure is! The list I have here are just the ones I know of, there are definitely more out there if you browse the #antiLO #lo critical tags or filter your searches on fanfic sites like AO3, but I hope this gives you a good start into finding more works that scratch that itch!
Lore Asgard (AO3) - Briefly in the original LO, Persephone jokes about running off to the Norse Pantheon; Lore Asgard is what would have happened if she actually went through with it.
Lore Mictlan (AO3) - Also plays with the question of "what if Persephone ran off to the Norse Pantheon", but instead she winds up in the realm of the Aztec gods.
Pomegranmints (AO3) - Re-imagines the plot of LO if Persephone and Minthe kissed instead of fighting over Hades ٩(♡ε♡)۶
Survive the Night (Tumblr) - Not sure how long this project is planned to be but it's basically a re-imagining of LO that further explores all the deeply-rooted issues of Hades and Minthe's relationship. Very tense and emotionally raw dialogue scenes, Minthe gets a lot more agency and character exploration here.
Desire for Peace (Webtoon) - Though it's an entirely unique work separate from LO (it's not a fan comic or retelling), the creator was compelled by a distaste towards modern Greek myth retellings to create their own Greek myth comic, starring Ares as the main protagonist. It has both beautiful and unique art, and it presents a writing style that isn't as watered down and simplified as so many popular commercial Greek myth retellings tend to be. The creator is very cool and has done an amazing job at creating a true Greek myth retelling comic, without all the bells and whistles and crutches of "modernizing" the stories.
Theia Mania - Also not at all related to LO, it's just a great comic series that covers all sorts of different myths and tales, but it's most famously known for its ongoing retelling of Hades and Persephone in Queen of the Dead. Like the creator of Desire for Peace, the creator of Theia Mania is someone who Gives a Shit™️ about the source material they're writing about and does a great job at both presenting the culture of Ancient Greece at the time (so again, no modern 2000's stuff here) but also putting some of their own unique twists on an old tale. And the best part? No Demeter scapegoating to be found here <3
Lore Valhalla (Youtube/Patreon) - A brief one-shot that remakes the first episode of Lore Olympus, but with Norse gods instead of Greek. This isn't an ongoing series, just a fun project that Youtuber Crown Obsidian challenged himself to make after he read (and did not particularly enjoy) Lore Olympus.
Interesting really...
I don't want to even imagine the face Kore would make when she finds out that in the creation of the universe the Aztec gods caused not one, not two, but FOUR genocides 🤣😭 some intentional, some not
First of all, thank you for the ask!
There’s going to be a lot of whiplash between how certain deities behave.
I won’t ramble too much but one thing I want to make clear is that I definitely won’t shy away from making the gods assholes, and in some aspects what most people would consider “evil”.
The mexica gods are pretty much always noted as being very…dual. Duality has always been a focus in the mexica religion, a god can be the god of fertility and the god of death, because life is ultimately a cycle of birth and death. They’re not good people because they aren’t humans, why would they want to conform to morality when they’re the personification of nature, of disaster, of life, of destruction, etc etc? Nature and life aren’t fair, why would deities be any different?
This can also be applied to many other deities not just the mexica ones specifically. But I do want to highlight that they’re pretty much all petty asses in one way or another. It’s one of my major complaints for LO how Persephone and Hades can’t ever be flawed, if Persephone kills 10 trillion people it’s not her fault and if Hades mutilates a guy then he had it coming, etc etc. let gods be gods and be immoral, half(or more tbh) of all myths wouldn’t exist if gods were tied down to the morality of what now most societies consider good.
Im not sure if I explained myself correctly, I usually have more ease explaining these sort of things in Spanish(but only by a bit), but hopefully it was coherent enough. Anyways I’m not going to sugarcoat anything, which other than adding more accuracy and more depth for these characters, adds more possibility for comedy lol. Persephone is in for a ride😭
Interesting, I really like this post
i find it funny that one of rachel’s drawings of herself in the afterword that just went up is just fully persephone. is that something she does a lot?
Alright so I've been making it a general rule for myself to like, not harp on Rachel in any way outside of LO as much because frankly the horse is dead now and there's not much left to say outside of what can be analyzed in hindsight. I think despite everything I have to say about her and her work, she still deserves to get away from this nonsense and I don't wanna spend eternity hovering over her shoulder.
But the afterword was posted within the LO series and is clearly meant for readers of LO in the functioning of being an afterword so let's just call it fair game LOL
I will say, on the whole, it does feel very honest and sentimental and I can respect Rachel for taking the time to write out and illustrate her afterword in a way that was personal to both her and her fans. I can understand why she went at it from the angle that she did and I'm not gonna fault her for that.
But there's also something that feels deeply... disingenuous about her approach right from the starting gun. I will say, before I continue, that I'm well aware I am biased towards Rachel as a creator, and I fully acknowledge that I could very well be reading too much into things. This is just my opinion, take it with mountains of salt.
I can get looking back on your own childhood, your past self, whatever, and going "see! it all got better!" because sure! For a lot of creators like Rachel, it must be wild to look back on where they came from and there's a lot of sentimentality on expressing that through an afterword like this where she reflects on where she came from. Though she STILL didn't acknowledge her other comics outside of LO, I can understand if she wants to leave those skeletons in the closet.
But I feel like her drawing herself as a child who's being given an Eisner by her adult self and all that just feels like some gross attempt to disarm any criticism of her because "don't make fun of me, I'm just a sad lonely baby girl!"
She's not a child. Child Rachel didn't grossly misappropriate Greek myth into their own self-indulged vanity project. Child Rachel didn't claim herself a folklorist of a culture's works only to bastardize them completely. Child Rachel didn't create a hostile environment within her fanbase by bullying anyone who she perceived as a threat, sneaking into critical spaces to try and cause trouble, and writing her own clapbacks into her comic. Child Rachel didn't claim to be challenging misogyny and purity culture only to reinforce misogyny and purity culture through her own self-insert baby-virgin-gets-rescued-by-rich-tycoon power fantasy that regularly glorified abuse towards women and the lower class.
30-almost-40-year-old Rachel did though.
At best it comes across as really cringe sentimentality from a Greek-weeb (heh, greeboo) and goes to show how much Rachel inserted herself into Greek myth without ever absorbing its messages or cultural contexts, it was all about her and her feelings as a sad New Zealand girl with dyslexia who thought Persephone's story was about another sad girl being rescued from her "horrible childhood".
At worst it's an active attempt to play on people's heartstrings by drawing herself as a child who people will naturally not want to criticize. I don't want to assume she's doing it intentionally, I really don't want to leave her afterword on a bad foot, as I can definitely understand as both a creator and a person who struggled with learning disabilities in their own childhood how and why she wants to pay homage to her past and where she came from... but let's just say, as someone who's also gotten way too "lost in the sauce" concerning personal self-reflective projects, I think there's a lot to say about how this confirms that Rachel made LO entirely for herself, about herself, without any actual intention to respect the original myths, because she never truly separated them from herself when she was a child. And, in my humble opinion as someone who has Been There with the self-insert OC's and self-reflective angsty plotlines, I can fully attest to the fact that that's not fucking healthy. Even with personal projects, you NEED to learn to get your head out of the sauce, you NEED to learn to objectively separate yourself from the narrative so the story doesn't fall apart under your own hubris and ego, you NEED to learn to draw a line if you want to have any sort of identity as a human being outside of what you make for people. And that's with just normal original stories, this was a story based on Greek myth which doesn't belong to her.
And this goes for a lot of the things she's said and done in the past, so much of her own "sources" even are tethered to things that she read / watched in her childhood and only vaguely remembers, as if she never mentally left her childhood at all, which just... if the point was to highlight her past and the traumas she went through and how they contributed to her present, an Eisner isn't going to validate those experiences. And drawing attention to her past through the lens of her childhood self absolutely 100% does not absolve her of the negative effect her work has had on the modern Greek myth zeitgeist nor the things she's said and done as a 38 year old woman who should absolutely know better.
The community she entered and took from will forever remain changed by her influence and taking, in many ways not for the better. She has the privilege of walking away and never having to think about it again, with all the awards and accolades that were bought for her, the bravado that she built around being a "folklorist" with zero credentials, and the platform she was given over many other creators struggling to even be heard.
That "place" she claims to have now was built entirely on inserting herself into another culture's works and doing nothing but taking, taking, taking, while offering nothing in return but vanity and lip service. That "place" was paid for and brought to you by Webtoons.
the golden bastard
hades of olympus lore
and I want to talk about some of their relationships.
I hate Hades because he doesn't stop hurting, he hurt a madman for no reason, also a poor photographer and he could have gone for the company to close it and not for the kid, and he has no respect for his brothers, he kissed his wife's wife own brother and cheated on his much younger partner, and it was because of her physique Hades only fell in love with Persephone's physique.
minthe
Hades didn't care about minthe if not when she didn't show up for her date or answer his messages he would have been worried.
Dementer
He never liked Hades and he doesn't stop hurting her that he couldn't leave the mortal kingdom for the volcanoes and he could have negotiated it and on top of that he falls in love with his daughter he sees her naked underage, he sneaks into her house and into her room daughter.
Persephone
Hades fell in love with Persephone purely physically, he saw her at a party and fell in love with her.
i hate persephone from lore olympus
she's just a mary sue who has no development
and minthe i need two chapters and already persephone has 200 chapters of her
and his relationship with hades is horrible They've known each other for a few weeks and it's as if you've loved each other all your life
The amount of fun to be had with Catisephone lmaoo, I can’t wait to give her a prickly pearfict wardrobe one day
She truly is our desert rose Nelum xD
behold Cactusphone
Much love and a succulent life be onto you.
She has come with a nice story to tell and cozy times , a desert flower ever blooming and ever lovely.
(A friend of mine showed me this and made a cactus joke , so i had this brain child. I am a monster. XD Anyway, hopefully this gives you a laugh and brightens up your day.)
Redraws of the ❤️ girls 🩷 to help with my art block
LET'S ENJOY GREEK MYTH RETELLINGS AND STORIES BUT NOT TAKE ALL OF THEM SERIOUSLY
You know, I really have to say this.
I don't think that Greeks, Hellenistic Pagans and other people who know Greek Mythology would be as frustrated as they are today if people DIDN'T TAKE MODERN SOURCES DEPICTING GREEK MEDIA AS ALWAYS ACCURATE.
Bear with me now.
All right, so, we all know about Percy Jackson.
And PJO was basically the Greek God make or break of its time and it broke the Greek Gods. Greeks and Hellenistic Pagans had the unfortunate experience of being bombarded with false, incorrect interpretations and thoughts about their deities.
And we have to remember here that to these Hellenistic Pagans, their gods are as sacred to them as God is to Christians. Maybe they wouldn't kill people over their gods, an added bonus, but we must respect the fact that they worship the gods and we must be respectful of Greek Gods when interacting with them.
See, I'm not saying that you can't be lighthearted. You can joke around and all that-it's just that actually hating and condemning the Greek Gods shouldn't be done when you're interacting with their worshippers.
Now that I'm done with that, well, Rick Riordan fucked up with Greek Mythology big time. Making Athena have children, HIS MISOGYNY. THERE ARE ENTIRE TAGS DEDICATED TO RICK'S MISOGYNY, NOT JUST OF HIS FEMALE CHARACTERS BUT OF ACTUAL ANCIENT GREEK GODDESSES. If I did a whole essay on his misogyny, I'd have to make multiple posts.
Rick done fucked up with them. I do not have to be the first person to tell you that.
HOWEVER, I am obligated to say that any author is freely able to portray the Greek Gods as they want (unfortunately at times).
And so Rick is free to interpret them how he likes.
Let's also remember that Rick thought terribly of the Gods and their worshippers when he was writing Percy Jackson and the other series.
Of course, he HAS changed for the better. Now he's more respectful of Pagans and has apologised, which is nice, but I just thought I'd let you know.
See, now we can accept and criticise Rick's writing, but before-
Well, before, it was absolutely awful for Greeks and Hellenistic Pagans. I mean, it's still awful, but it was more awful back then because almost nobody criticised Percy Jackson about depicting Greek Gods terribly. Everyone said that Greek Gods were American and belonged to America-ugh, that was horrible. It's absolutely appalling to do that, no less to Greeks themselves. People ranted about how horrible the gods were.
And I mean yes, the Greek Gods could be awful by modern standards, but we need to remember two things-
The Greek Gods were based on an ANCIENT SOCIETY with DIFFERENT MORAL STANDARDS. Judging them by modern moral standards isn't going to do anything.
The actions of the gods were SYMBOLIC, NOT LITERAL.
a) Artemis' cruelty towards humans? That's the cruelty of nature towards him. Artemis was a nature goddess and she hunted and resided in the wild.
b) Dionysus being kind and charming but also mad and ruthless at times? Well, that's what wine does. It can make people funny and charming to a point, but it also drives people mad and makes them violent.
c) Hades kidnapping Persephone? Well, Hades represents death, and that's what death does-it rips children from their parents' arms. Also, it signifies the fact that daughters and mothers did not have a say in their marriage, the father could give the girl away to any man in those times. Demeter actually being able to get Persephone back was a comfort to grieving mothers.
d) Zeus cheating on Hera multiple times?
There are multiple explanations for this one.
First, kings and princes often claimed to be descendants of Zeus, so Zeus was said to have many affairs with royal mortal women so that their claims to divine lineage could be accurate.
Second, Zeus' rain represented fecundity and fertility. As I said above, the actions of the gods are symbolic and they represent their domains, so he had multiple affairs and loads of children to signify his fertility.
Third, the Greek Gods were based on Ancient Greek society where multiple men took concubines and lovers. And Zeus did this too, because he was a king!
e) Hera punishing the lovers and bastards? That's what queens did to some concubines for revenge, since they couldn't take it out on the king.
It's all either symbolic or based on Ancient Greece. The gods that humanity created were based on those times, and they were created millennia ago, when things were different in nearly every way possible.
Anyway, what I'm trying to tell you is that we're allowed to have fun with these stories and retellings that include Greek Mythology, but if you really want correct information on Greek gods, go and read the myths and the compositions of Ancient Greek poets and playwrights (Homer, Hesiod, etc).
Because many people, when reading these modern retellings and the like, think that they are actually real mythological information and accordingly spew nonsense.
People call Apollo 'Asspollo' and harass his worshippers because of one incorrect comic that came out in 2018. Apollo never raped Persephone.
And people also view famous figures like Odysseus and Achilles incorrectly because of incorrect translations that don't correctly capture the original and CERTAIN RETELLINGS (cough-Madeline Miller-COUGH)
And there are so many more examples I could give, but then this would be too long to post.
See, it's not that the writers completely rip the original lore out. They keep a lot of it, but they also add in some incorrect information. And sometimes this isn't that bad or malicious, it's just incorrect.
So if you're not sure about whether something in a retelling or story depicting Greek Gods is true, you should search it up online or ask someone who knows.
Because Greeks and Hellenistic Pagans are constantly frustrated at how their gods are portrayed and that everyone just takes the retellings as mythologically correct.
TLDR Greek mythology retellings can be fun for you to read but don't take all of the info in them as mythologically correct. You can be lighthearted about the Greek Gods but please don't actually loathe or mock them with others who believe in them and worship them. If you're not sure about info in a retelling or story, then search it up or ask someone you know.
There are multiple blogs on tumblr who can tell you more information about the actual Greek Gods and they're pretty nice about it too, so don't be too afraid.