Silver Adept (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
silveradept) wrote2021-07-21 02:36 pm
silveradept) wrote2021-07-21 02:36 pm
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Sunshine Challenge: Defined By Your Relationship to Someone Else
Prompt 6 for the Sunshine Challenge is someone about who little is known but their relationship to someone else: Amphitrite
Having been recommended some resources in the last post, I went and took a look around to see if there was anything additional that could be gleaned, but there doesn't appear to be much about the wife of Poseidon other than her heritage and the story told of how Delphin ended up as a constellation for his service to Poseidon in convincing Amphitrite to marry him and taking charge of the wedding preparations.
One of the things that is interesting about all mythologies, even the Abrahamic ones, is that the deity/ies tend to behave more human-like, with jealousies and vendettas and boasts and humans who, either through their own hubris or because some other entity challenged a god, end up having much more direct interaction with the gods (or have their destinies and fortunes heavily impacted by those same gods). To an audience stepped in cultural Christianity, where theodicy (the question of why an all-benevolent God would permit evil acts) is often a thing shunted away to those who are doing academic study or simplified into a cudgel that places the blame for evil done to a person solely on their transgressive behavior or insufficient faith in the selfsame deity, it is worth reading the material in the early parts of the codex to remember that the Being Represented by the Tetragrammaton has been repeatedly successfully bargained with and, in one notable case, wrecked someone's life (temporarily, we are told) because He was insecure about how devoted His people were and got goaded into testing it.
Which brings us back to the small amount of story we have about Amphitrite, and her very relatable desire not to be wed to Poseidon. Regency and other historical romance fandoms are very aware of the trope of someone being courted by a person who will be able to provide for her material needs easily, but would presumably treat her as another possession of his, versus the person who is penniless but who would love her passionately and devotedly, and all the forces at work trying to get our heroine to marry for love or for money. Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton sets up this situation with the Schuyler Sisters, despite its ahistoricity, with Angelica refusing Alexander Hamilton's suit because (in the story) she's the oldest sister who is expected to marry rich. She's very intrigued by this brash man with ideas and a lack of polish, though, and so she introduces him to her younger sister, Elizabeth, who has no such obligations, and Elizabeth falls helplessly in love with him, leading to their marriage…and no small amount of regret on Angelica's part that she didn't take what was on offer. And the primary driver of a story like Pride and Prejudice is that there are a lot of sisters that need to be married, each of which has to be debuted, courted, and married off in proper order and to good gentlemen (and how much appearances can be deceiving about who is good). When your society is set up so that women have to depend on men for even the most basic of their needs, you get stories of someone being pressured into marrying the first eligible person and the stories of someone steadfastly refusing to marry anyone, impractical demands for impossible things or tasks optional.
One of my favorite subsets of the steadfast refusal story is "the princess who runs away to the dragons," (or otherwise arranges for her own abduction/disappearance) which I owe a lot to Patricia C. Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles. It turns a couple of dead horse fantasy tropes on their heads so that instead of getting ourselves a narrative about the brave hero who has rescued the eternally grateful damsel in distress, we instead have either an accidental hero who manages to get to the goal and then everyone has to sit down and plot about what to do next, or it turns out the hero sent after the princess is the person she actually wants to be with, and there's feelings and conflicts of duty, and also dragons. One if the first exchange gifts that I got, Frost From Our Bones, hit all of those beats and more and wonderfully so. The original Shrek movie also played with the idea of rescuing the princess from the dragon, since it was an ogre sent on the quest to retrieve her, the dragon pretty clearly got the hots for the donkey, and the princess herself was hiding an additional curse that would have made her unsuitable for the perpetually-compensating-for-something lord of Dulac.
The bonus prompt, Scylla and Charybdis, fits in nicely with Amphitrite, as well, as both Scylla and Charybdis were known dangers of sailing and the sea, and are somewhat more famous, since they often represent what is more colloquially known as being "stuck between a rock and a hard place." To pass by Scylla would surely lose people to the monster's appetite, but to try and sail through Charybdis's whirlpool might mean the loss of an entire ship and crew all together. So we get someone who doesn't want to be part of marriage (and seriously, given how faithful a lot of these gods are to their marriages, what would the actual benefit be to getting hitched to one of them?), but also, he's a god and you're not, so how much actual refusal do you get to do in this situation, and how much is the god going to escalate to try and get you to marry him? There are no good choices that make everyone happy in this situation, and the way the story gets told from that point forward likely says as much about the teller of the story as the narrative explains what happened, because any number of options can be put on the frame of this story to indicate whether it's a story or a man going out to claim what is rightfully his, a guile trickster achieving for his lord what brute force could not, a woman making demands regarding equal treatment and autonomy before she allows herself to be married, and so forth. The possibility of remaking, retelling, adjusting, changing that is at the core of transformative fandom. Μ, but it's Ι. The characters are the same, but it's the Atlantica coffee shop instead and he's a manager and she's a barista. If character is the base unit of fanworks, then infinite possibilities open up simply by exposing the characters to novel situations and seeing how they react to it.
All benefits have shadow sides, of course. As someone in the last generation who went through adolescence before "ubiquitous" broadband access to the World Wide Web (whether mediated by general purpose computers or by smartphone and tablet apps), I got to watch an already fracturing media landscape shatter into ten thousand shards that each became their own alternate universes, each choosing to interface with or refuse to acknowledge any other shard. The generation before mine, in the United States, anyway, got to experience the shift from a mass media that was carefully curated and controlled, offering you your pick of the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Columbia Broadcasting System, or the new upstart from Rupert Murdoch's Twentieth Century Fox, to an explosion of new networks and channels, many of them spun off from those four, each with their own particular area of focus (the MS in MSNBC is Microsoft, after all) and programming lineup that all but guaranteed there would be much less likelihood that "the country" would be watching the same things and receiving mostly the same news content deemed important enough for the national audience. (You could get a little more variation in newspapers, but there would still be a lot of the same content across the major ones.) The increased availability of platform and bandwidth, in both of these cases, had great benefits in making it possible for content that hadn't been able to get to the national network level to find a home in cable or on the Web and for people who were interested in that content to be able to find people who would provide it to them. We had an entire channel dedicated to showing us animated shows and another devoted mostly to showing us music videos. At least in the beginning, the algorithms were concerned with finding what we liked and shoveling more of it at us. Now, of course, the algorithms have been tuned to show us what we will engage with. If all we engage with is what we like, then that's what we get. But since many of us will engage with what we don't like, we start getting more and more of it showing up, so that we'll see more ads and stay longer on a site. And the algorithm can usually serve it up faster than we can block it.
Equally shadowly, the same tools that brought together people whose fandoms are Kirk/Spock and Korra/Asami have also brought together people whose fandoms are Bull Connor/Pat Robertson/Ayn Rand and Jim Jones/Reader. Which puts us into Amphitrine's position, or, if you prefer, between Scylla and Charybdis. We'd rather not be dependent on or supporting companies or politicians that have none of our best interests at heart, and that are sometimes actively trying to aggravate us or show us to other people so they can vent their aggravation on us, but they're also the method by which we find new communities and friends and get introduced to new fandoms that we might enjoy (or not). They censor and determine the boundaries of what is acceptable to talk about (either by corporate fiat, advertiser fiat, or roving bands of users determined to drive away anyone who holds an opinion different than theirs), and they help us feel connected to a greater community of fans so we don't feel so isolated for liking what we do like. Each of us makes our decisions about what it will take for us to go back and marry Poseidon, or which path we're going to chart and what potential losses are acceptable to achieve our goal.
And, y'know, I wish the most consequential decision that we were making these days was how much good-natured shit we're willing to take for our fandoms from people who like us and would apologize and stop if we said it hurt us.
Amphitrite is the goddess of the sea, wife of Poseidon, and eldest of the fifty Nereides. She is the female personification of the ocean: the mother of fish, seals and dolphins. Poseidon chose Amphitrite from among her sisters as the Nereids performed a dance on the isle of Naxos. Refusing his offer of marriage, she fled to Atlas. The dolphin-god Delphin eventually tracked her down and persuaded her to return to wed the sea-king. She also bred sea monsters, and her great waves crashed against the rocks, putting sailors at risk.
Having been recommended some resources in the last post, I went and took a look around to see if there was anything additional that could be gleaned, but there doesn't appear to be much about the wife of Poseidon other than her heritage and the story told of how Delphin ended up as a constellation for his service to Poseidon in convincing Amphitrite to marry him and taking charge of the wedding preparations.
One of the things that is interesting about all mythologies, even the Abrahamic ones, is that the deity/ies tend to behave more human-like, with jealousies and vendettas and boasts and humans who, either through their own hubris or because some other entity challenged a god, end up having much more direct interaction with the gods (or have their destinies and fortunes heavily impacted by those same gods). To an audience stepped in cultural Christianity, where theodicy (the question of why an all-benevolent God would permit evil acts) is often a thing shunted away to those who are doing academic study or simplified into a cudgel that places the blame for evil done to a person solely on their transgressive behavior or insufficient faith in the selfsame deity, it is worth reading the material in the early parts of the codex to remember that the Being Represented by the Tetragrammaton has been repeatedly successfully bargained with and, in one notable case, wrecked someone's life (temporarily, we are told) because He was insecure about how devoted His people were and got goaded into testing it.
Which brings us back to the small amount of story we have about Amphitrite, and her very relatable desire not to be wed to Poseidon. Regency and other historical romance fandoms are very aware of the trope of someone being courted by a person who will be able to provide for her material needs easily, but would presumably treat her as another possession of his, versus the person who is penniless but who would love her passionately and devotedly, and all the forces at work trying to get our heroine to marry for love or for money. Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton sets up this situation with the Schuyler Sisters, despite its ahistoricity, with Angelica refusing Alexander Hamilton's suit because (in the story) she's the oldest sister who is expected to marry rich. She's very intrigued by this brash man with ideas and a lack of polish, though, and so she introduces him to her younger sister, Elizabeth, who has no such obligations, and Elizabeth falls helplessly in love with him, leading to their marriage…and no small amount of regret on Angelica's part that she didn't take what was on offer. And the primary driver of a story like Pride and Prejudice is that there are a lot of sisters that need to be married, each of which has to be debuted, courted, and married off in proper order and to good gentlemen (and how much appearances can be deceiving about who is good). When your society is set up so that women have to depend on men for even the most basic of their needs, you get stories of someone being pressured into marrying the first eligible person and the stories of someone steadfastly refusing to marry anyone, impractical demands for impossible things or tasks optional.
One of my favorite subsets of the steadfast refusal story is "the princess who runs away to the dragons," (or otherwise arranges for her own abduction/disappearance) which I owe a lot to Patricia C. Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles. It turns a couple of dead horse fantasy tropes on their heads so that instead of getting ourselves a narrative about the brave hero who has rescued the eternally grateful damsel in distress, we instead have either an accidental hero who manages to get to the goal and then everyone has to sit down and plot about what to do next, or it turns out the hero sent after the princess is the person she actually wants to be with, and there's feelings and conflicts of duty, and also dragons. One if the first exchange gifts that I got, Frost From Our Bones, hit all of those beats and more and wonderfully so. The original Shrek movie also played with the idea of rescuing the princess from the dragon, since it was an ogre sent on the quest to retrieve her, the dragon pretty clearly got the hots for the donkey, and the princess herself was hiding an additional curse that would have made her unsuitable for the perpetually-compensating-for-something lord of Dulac.
The bonus prompt, Scylla and Charybdis, fits in nicely with Amphitrite, as well, as both Scylla and Charybdis were known dangers of sailing and the sea, and are somewhat more famous, since they often represent what is more colloquially known as being "stuck between a rock and a hard place." To pass by Scylla would surely lose people to the monster's appetite, but to try and sail through Charybdis's whirlpool might mean the loss of an entire ship and crew all together. So we get someone who doesn't want to be part of marriage (and seriously, given how faithful a lot of these gods are to their marriages, what would the actual benefit be to getting hitched to one of them?), but also, he's a god and you're not, so how much actual refusal do you get to do in this situation, and how much is the god going to escalate to try and get you to marry him? There are no good choices that make everyone happy in this situation, and the way the story gets told from that point forward likely says as much about the teller of the story as the narrative explains what happened, because any number of options can be put on the frame of this story to indicate whether it's a story or a man going out to claim what is rightfully his, a guile trickster achieving for his lord what brute force could not, a woman making demands regarding equal treatment and autonomy before she allows herself to be married, and so forth. The possibility of remaking, retelling, adjusting, changing that is at the core of transformative fandom. Μ, but it's Ι. The characters are the same, but it's the Atlantica coffee shop instead and he's a manager and she's a barista. If character is the base unit of fanworks, then infinite possibilities open up simply by exposing the characters to novel situations and seeing how they react to it.
All benefits have shadow sides, of course. As someone in the last generation who went through adolescence before "ubiquitous" broadband access to the World Wide Web (whether mediated by general purpose computers or by smartphone and tablet apps), I got to watch an already fracturing media landscape shatter into ten thousand shards that each became their own alternate universes, each choosing to interface with or refuse to acknowledge any other shard. The generation before mine, in the United States, anyway, got to experience the shift from a mass media that was carefully curated and controlled, offering you your pick of the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Columbia Broadcasting System, or the new upstart from Rupert Murdoch's Twentieth Century Fox, to an explosion of new networks and channels, many of them spun off from those four, each with their own particular area of focus (the MS in MSNBC is Microsoft, after all) and programming lineup that all but guaranteed there would be much less likelihood that "the country" would be watching the same things and receiving mostly the same news content deemed important enough for the national audience. (You could get a little more variation in newspapers, but there would still be a lot of the same content across the major ones.) The increased availability of platform and bandwidth, in both of these cases, had great benefits in making it possible for content that hadn't been able to get to the national network level to find a home in cable or on the Web and for people who were interested in that content to be able to find people who would provide it to them. We had an entire channel dedicated to showing us animated shows and another devoted mostly to showing us music videos. At least in the beginning, the algorithms were concerned with finding what we liked and shoveling more of it at us. Now, of course, the algorithms have been tuned to show us what we will engage with. If all we engage with is what we like, then that's what we get. But since many of us will engage with what we don't like, we start getting more and more of it showing up, so that we'll see more ads and stay longer on a site. And the algorithm can usually serve it up faster than we can block it.
Equally shadowly, the same tools that brought together people whose fandoms are Kirk/Spock and Korra/Asami have also brought together people whose fandoms are Bull Connor/Pat Robertson/Ayn Rand and Jim Jones/Reader. Which puts us into Amphitrine's position, or, if you prefer, between Scylla and Charybdis. We'd rather not be dependent on or supporting companies or politicians that have none of our best interests at heart, and that are sometimes actively trying to aggravate us or show us to other people so they can vent their aggravation on us, but they're also the method by which we find new communities and friends and get introduced to new fandoms that we might enjoy (or not). They censor and determine the boundaries of what is acceptable to talk about (either by corporate fiat, advertiser fiat, or roving bands of users determined to drive away anyone who holds an opinion different than theirs), and they help us feel connected to a greater community of fans so we don't feel so isolated for liking what we do like. Each of us makes our decisions about what it will take for us to go back and marry Poseidon, or which path we're going to chart and what potential losses are acceptable to achieve our goal.
And, y'know, I wish the most consequential decision that we were making these days was how much good-natured shit we're willing to take for our fandoms from people who like us and would apologize and stop if we said it hurt us.
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I don't remember Job's children coming back to life after they were killed to make Job suffer. He has new children, yes, but his dead sons' lives did not get un-wrecked.
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I think this is also the part where my "English Bible as Literature" professor pointed out that after Job, the Being Represented By the Tetragrammaton stops acting directly in the lives of his people for quite some time. The implication there was that winning the bet with the satan made the Being recognize that He was not the best deity that He could be to His people, so He decided to engage in some introspection.
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