The Gods Must Be Cranky..

I'm going to let you, my regular audience, in on some of the behind the scenes workings of When Fangirls Attack!. Mainly, how I find some of the posts.

Now, I get email submissions, and I use search engines, and I have my regular checks (not even half of which are on the blogroll!) for columns, wordpress, blogger and myspace -- but when it comws to livejournal I have a special helper: Community Friendslists.

Yes, dear readers, on slow nights I will scan the friendslists of at least 8 different livejournal comics communities in search of topical posts. I've learned a number of interesting things.. about a number of interesting people this way. I've found a number of topical posts, as well, so it is worth the effort, and the risks, involved.

There is a point to this... Sort of.

I must caution you: Do not try this at home.

I'm serious. This way lies madness.

I am an experienced link-farmer, qualified to do this by virtue of my expertise in the field of just about everything that is important, and the excessive use of prepositional phrases. I will not be responsible for the sanity of those who attempt this dangerous and untested method of linkfarming. Stay with Technorati and Google, for this sidepath leads to depression, euphoria, and the dreaded onset of Emo!

Nevertheless, I've found some damned good posts that way.

This is not one of them.

Before I go on, I'd like to state that this is one of my favorite stops. Sometimes she scans early Justice League panels and posts them all in a row! And I've spoken to the other conversant a few times on the subject of Star Sapphire. Green Lantern fans, good people. And I can understand wanting to archive an unusual conversation (I've considered a few of the ones between me and Kalinara or ISB proprietor Chris Sims) in a public place.

But this shocked me:

Fan #1: Athena would've loved Ollie
Fan #2: she probably writes Ollie/Hal fanfiction
Fan #1: a;dhf;adjf;adjf;adjf
Fan #1: H/C epics
Fan #1: Sometimes she writes Barry in, but then she thinks of Hermes and gets a little weirded out
Fan #1: Hal makes her think of Apollo, which also weirds her out but also totally turns her on
Fan #1: Aphrodite totally knows all this and mocks her
Fan #2: does she write Carol/Dinah femmeslash sideplots?
Fan #1: Naturally!
Fan #2: hot

I have never, in my life seen such a blatant misunderstanding of the Greek Pantheon.

(Well, George Perez... But anyway..)

Athena? Love? BAH! Athena is the Goddess of Wisdom, only Fools fall in love. (Aphrodite is not a fool, nor does she fall in love. She is Love -- and Hot Buttered Lust, and "Let's Just Be Friends"ship, and Painful Yearning, and Fangirl Crushing, and... -- there's a major difference) She doesn't crush on heroes, she makes heroes.

Athena has never crushed on anybody. She sprang fully formed from Zeus' head (after an educational childhood at the feet of her mother, the Goddess of Prudence, inside his skull). She bypassed puberty and the silly girlish afflictions therein. Arguably, she still considered boys "icky" unless they were doing interesting things like fighting. There was a reason Aphrodite had to resort to mocking her appearance, it was because her usual method of revenge simply didn't work. Love did not stick to Athena, and the other trick didn't work either. No one who fell for Athena ever got anywhere near her.

Athena would not write slash-fiction or bother with such fantasies. She was a War Goddess, and an Intellect Goddess. She would write adventure epics! With meticulously detailed histories, and cross-referencing, and culture for the new races and a fully developed language, and mathematical statistics, and dice, and probabilities, and percentages of success, and carefully outlined skill levels and armor classes and realistic weapon statistics...etc...

Yes, Athena is a nerd, but she isn't that kind of nerd.

Artemis, on the other hand -- Yeah, totally into the femslash (Oh, we all know, Silver Sister! 50 nymphs alone in the woods, bathing together, you got so pissed off at Callisto...). Demeter and Hera? Definitely crushing on fictional characters. Aphrodite's bringing them to life to pleasure her. But Athena? No, straight action, no mushy romance, kissing is yucky. Boys have cooties. (You think they don't? Try attending a military public health briefing sometime.)

She did skip puberty and go straight to adulthood, after all.

And what is this nonsense about being wierd out by thoughts of Hermes and Apollo?

Please! It's Olympus! Sheesh, if she wasn't asexual she would be totally in bed with Hermes. Haven't you ever seen that picture on Zeus' fridge? He's the closest diety to her, office-wise. And they are symbolically married in alchemy, computer science, and all sorts of other disciplines according to neo-paganism. Hell, I was half-convinced in Wonder Woman: Land of the Dead we'd see him promoted to Queen's Consort and I'd be really, really pissed off at Greg Rucka. (We didn't, but I saw a possibility. Especially with the ambiguously related Ares coming on to Cassie so often, you could tell that writer wasn't afraid to touch on this!)

There wouldn't be any wierded out by this. Incest is business as usual for the gods! Look at all of the marriages up there. Athena's mother was her father's cousin. Her stepmother is her aunt. Her other aunt is her half-sister's mother. Her sister-in-law is also her sister. Her brother-in-law? Her uncle! The family tree goes straight up and down.

That's just how they roll on Olympus.

And if any goddess is writing slashfiction with Oliver Queen and Hal Jordan, it's Persephone.

That's why they both stayed dead as long as they did.

Eventually Ollie pissed her off.