The Labyrinth AU

Ok... so, the weird mythology crackship of the day will come from my blog. @sarafangirlart and @just-1-scorpio can catch a break.

Basically it comes from a french retelling of Atalanta (NGL the idea itself sounds good, she's very interesting and badass, but I'm always on my guard with this kind of projects)

I was like "ok, if it's good then at LEAST I can read it because it's in my mother tongue". So I was curious and checked out the summary...

BUT, here's the kicker, not only is Atalanta in this mess today but there's a surprise guest that I did NOT expect to show up in this kind of retellings 😅.

Here's the translated version:

Basically my reaction when Asclepius was mentioned :

Epione doesn't matter, I guess. Neither do the 10 kids she had with Asclepius.

Or the fact that Atalanta ALSO had other partners that aren't him. In fact she never even met him. Even in the Argonaut story, the only opportunity, there's not a source stating they're in there together.

Ares, Meleager and Hippomenes seeing their baddie getting shipped with someone other than them:

Ariadne for my Katabasis RPG project

This is her after she marries Dionysus, she becomes a lot happier!

I love her wild hair and her outfit :3

Of course she's happier now that she's loved and not in the middle of familial turmoil.

my OCs are sooo cool you guys don't know what you're missing. if you could see the show i'm watching in my head rn you'd go so crazy i'm telling u

Ah yes, the classic "daydreaming instead of writing" technique

Made an animatic summarising the entire book as a tribute to Dracula Daily and @re-dracula ! English subtitles provided, with translation by me and @ignitingthesky.

To everyone who enjoyed reading Dracula : check out this animatic, it's so COOL !! Like a short film that summarizes the whole book.

1 am, too tired to type ”dandyism” into google.com so I guess this is what they’re wearing

🤣🤣. Also, the creature speaking French is spot on.

I was doing some research on Phaedra and stumbled on this gem. After clicking on the research, I was relieved to realize this isn't about Apollo and Phaedra from mythology but two real-life people. The guy is named Apollo Nida and a woman Phaedra Park. I know nothing about these two btw so the details won't be explained.

But now I'm imagining Phaedra somehow having a thing with Apollo, marrying him, then divorce and be married to Theseus afterwards and THEN fall in love with her stepson. As if Phaedra's love life wasn't already a trainwreck.

Or maybe she thought "If my sister can handle marrying an Olympian god, then so can I >:3" before realizing she can't or smth. With Apollo being confused the whole time. Yet another love story that ends up badly for him...

Going from Apollo to Theseus would be a big downgrade but then again, Coronis DID choose to cheat on this gorgeous deity with Ischys who seems remarkably unremarkable so maybe it could've happened. Even though she did seem to want him, contrary to Daphne or Bolina, so she just made a stupid choice.

(note that ofc there is absolutely zero source neither Greek nor Latin even slightly hinting at anything between these two and it's just me making a joke post about an impossible crackship.)

This is such a cursed crackship like,,, I don't even mean that insultingly, I'm just thinking about it as a concept and I'm laughing cause like, okay listen;

Firstly, the idea of Apollo's whole 'never marrying anyone ever' thing being broken - not by any of his consorts, lovers or baby mothers - but by a woman in the line of Helios, specifically from Pasiphae's cursed line, is objectively hilarious. That's just made even funnier with the thought that Apollo's singular, sole marriage somehow still ends in a divorce for a HUMAN -- and not just ANY human either, the mortal man who just waged war against his sister's beloved Amazons and who assaulted and ultimately led to the death of specifically her beloved Hippolyta in that war.

And then, somehow, by some streak of divine providence, neither Apollo nor Artemis vaporises her for that madness, Phaedra ends up falling in love with Hippolyta's only begotten son who Artemis also adores with all her heart leading to what has to be the strangest love triangle of all time where Artemis and Hippolytus love each other platonically while Phaedra just torments herself over her forbidden lust of her stepson (who is also her ex-husband's sister's current favourite mortal and hunting partner!!)

Keep in mind btw, Apollo is one of the gods Theseus respects and actively worships. Like, I'm just reminding the court how interconnected this whole thing is at this point - Theseus is literally credited with the mythical creation of one of The Attic Culture Festivals, specifically Pyanopsia which is not only a major agricultural festival but also got started because Theseus promised Apollo he would give him a bomb dot com offering if he pretty please made sure the Minotaur didn't crush his bones into dust and upon miraculously surviving, he made the world's best bean stew and offered it to the god. Y'know,,, the Minotaur? Phaedra's little brother the Minotaur?? The one whose death she now complicitly celebrates by eating bean stew every pyanepsion with the rest of Athens?

Then, to top ALL of that off, somehow, it STILL takes HIPPOLYTUS BEING AROACE to insult Aphrodite which leads to her cursing Phaedra like Poseidon cursed Pasiphae by intensifying the lust she held for Hippolytus while Theseus is away for Phaedra to actually make a move on Hippolytus which makes him insult her so badly that she kills herself.

All of that. All of that divine entanglement and drama and Phaedra still ends up dying because her stepson called her an incestuous creep.

This timeline is absolutely insane 😂. I knew it was from the start but your points really just highlighted everything funny and wrong with this whole idea.

Imagine how family dinners would look like, though. Even without the whole Phaedra and Apollo crackship, it'd be horribly cursed and I think Theseus would want to jump out the window. But if we add THEM into the mix, it's so funny.

And then the possibility that they had kids 😅. Yes, because if the situation isn't cursed enough, imagine if Phaedra and Apollo had kids.

Also, Apollo's only marriage being THIS mess is the cherry on top.

So much rambling for an impossible crackship, I love it !

The more I look at it the more I like his younger look. Apollo will be pleased with me.

I here make a vow to Apollo that I will finish their little comic next month or I won't walk under the sun again.💢💢💢

You're preparing ANOTHER Apollo and Asclepius comic ?? 👀👀👀👀

(also, I love how you design his younger versions. He looks great !)

I have the feeling that retelling writers no longer read the source matterial, at least when it comes to Greek mythology, specificly Medusa and Persephone and Hades retellings.

Search Persephone and Hades retellings on Goodreads, or Amazon, and look at the discription, book covers, and if you want you can look fourther and look at the advertaisment.

Similarly with Medusa retellings.

It just feels like, because of how many of it are there, it just feels as if the retellings canibalise each other. And usually when one stands out, it's because of the wrong reasons.

It's actually so true 😅. How many HxP retellings have the same tired plot structure that's either the cliche BookTok stuff or straight up pulled from Lore Olympus?

And the trend of retellings taking place in the USA reeks of reading PJO as a kid but nothing else.

(again, I have nothing against fans of either franchise. But just be honest and tell you're retelling these two popular adaptations and not the real stories).

Also, I noticed it's often the same few myths that get retold with the same inaccurate structure over and over again while a lot of very interesting stories are ignored.

The same few myths being Hades and Persephone, some variation of Ovid Medusa, OOC Aphrodite and Hephaestus, etc...

This goes hand in hand with OP's cannibalism analogy that I find very funny.

Because these ignored myths aren't in this cycle of being constantly retold and people would need to read the source material to understand the nuances. Btw I refer to popular myths that we all heard about but don't see explored in depth, not some obscure story that's hidden in a sentence of some scholiast's analysis.

Of course, at this point, a lot of stories and especially romance myths have at least one extremely inaccurate version (and I'm not even mentioning crackships) but there are some that always come back.

Not that the popular myths are treated any better, but yeah 😅.

All I can hope for is that stuff like Eros and Psyche or Dionysus and Ariadne's story don't get turned into the first category.

(especially since adaptations seem unable to understand their characters).

From Ariadne by Jennifer Saint

This passage from Jennifer Saint’s Ariadne exemplifies many of the ways modern Greek myth retellings distort the original myths, often imposing contemporary narratives of suffering and victimhood onto characters and stories that do not align with them.

First, the inclusion of Medusa in Ariadne’s lament is historically and thematically jarring. Medusa’s myth has no direct connection to Ariadne, Pasiphae, or Semele. While modern interpretations often frame Medusa as a victim of divine cruelty, her story belongs to a completely separate lineage of myth. Ariadne, the princess of Crete, abandoned by Theseus and later embraced by Dionysus, would have no reason to invoke Medusa’s fate alongside her own. This forced grouping suggests an attempt to create a broad “sisterhood of suffering” among female figures in mythology, even when their stories do not naturally intersect.

More egregiously, the passage distorts Ariadne’s relationship with Dionysus. Classical sources portray their union as one of love, celebration, and even divine joy. Unlike the tragic relationships of other mortal women with gods—such as Semele’s fiery demise due to Hera’s trickery—Ariadne’s marriage to Dionysus is one of the few happy endings in Greek mythology. Far from being deceived or discarded, she is crowned a goddess, her love returned in full measure. The idea that she would see Dionysus as no different from the "mightiest of the gods" or "the basest men" completely contradicts the reverence and devotion their myth traditionally conveys. If anything, Dionysus is often portrayed as an outsider among the Olympians, more sympathetic to mortals, women, and the marginalized than gods like Zeus or Poseidon.

Ultimately, this passage misrepresents not only Ariadne and Dionysus but also the very nature of Greek mythology. It replaces mythic nuance with a one-size-fits-all feminist tragedy that, ironically, removes the agency and joy from characters who originally had them.

I read the book a while ago and remember liking the beginning but being sorely disappointed by the second half for precisely this reason (and Ariadne being way too passive because women suffer all the time and don't do anything else).

She's not involved in Dionysus' cult, she doesn't meet any other mythological creature or figure, barely interacts with maenads, etc. Kinda ironic that the "feminist" retelling chooses to depict her in such a way. Maybe to highlight how much of a victim women are to evil men or idk what. Making Ariadne a doormat doesn't give justice to the myth version.

And this is too bad because this retelling had the potential to be great. It had all the building bricks : a chronological story of Ariadne's life, her relationship with her family especially Phaedra, Dionysus, the kids, even the myth of the war against Perseus!

But ultimately, it fails in the execution department, specifically with the themes and the link with mythology like @margaretkart explained.

The ending is also very weirdly placed considering Ariadne dies, iirc like in the myth where she's turned to stone (I don't exactly remember the ending of the book so correct me if I'm wrong) and... that's it. Whereas in the myths, Dionysus resurrects her and makes her a goddess. But hey, why should we show him being a good husband when we can have more scenes of Ariadne lamenting her fate ?

To me, Dionysus and Ariadne have to match each other's freak. You know what I mean ? They're in-synch, gossiping together and ready to fight alongside each other.

The few versions where Ariadne has an unhappy ending because of him are SEPARATE form the versions where they meet and marry each other (most notably Homer's). So it's just treated as some divine punishment.

Listen, I'd be super hypocritical if I suddenly asked adaptations to portray Dionysus as soft and meek. Because he's not. He's 50% a party animal and 50% a lovecraftian menace to society. BUUUUT, he's soft towards Ariadne and if I see someone like Pentheus describing him in a terrible way and being terrified, she would never do that.

Portraying conflict in their marriage is fine, even showing her being overwhelmed and having abandonment issues is ok, but Dionysus should always strive to support her and again, they have a happy marriage and I'm not open on discussion about this last statement.

i will defend jonathan and mina harker from bad dracula adaptations By My Sword. anyway have this