Just Readin'

So, recently I read the play Andromache by Euripides, because you know, I like Greek tragedy because it's just so cheerful. Anyway, this time I made the unusual move of reading the introduction reading a paragraph and a half of the 10 million page introduction and something it said caught my attention. The introduction was talking about how the play was written on the premise of a the best of women in the worst of circumstances. While that seemed like a valid idea at the time, after I actually read the play, I thought that that was a really weird thing to say. In case you're not familiar with Andromache , I'll give you a super quick summary. It's the story of Hector's (Hector is the prince of Troy) wife after the fall of Troy. Andromache has been taken prisoner by the Greeks and given to the son of Achilles (Neoptolemos) to be his wife/slave. After a few years, and, importantly, after Andromache has had a son to Neoptolemos, Neoptolemos marries Hermione, the ...

In case you don't read my main blog , let me tell you that I'm a huge fan of the A Song of Ice and Fire series and the Game of Thrones TV series. One of the reasons I like it so much, is that the characters are so realistic and well rounded, especially the female characters. So often in fantasy novels that take place in a medieval world, the female characters take one of three forms: the tough but noble  do-gooder, the evil queen, and the locked in a tower princess. I think this is partly because  medieval writers had an extremely limited vocabulary when describing women, so fantasy writers who look back to that time period think that only two types of women existed in the medieval age: the paragon of virtue and the disgrace to the human race. What's so often ignored is that no one individual embodies any one of these archetypes. Real people aren't just evil queens or damsels in distress; they're a mixture of both. And no character exemplifies that princip...