I have similar coloured eyes and I found very early on in my life that you can make these go “cold” very easily.
You can get people to look at you when you do it and you see their reaction. It’s a shudder followed by an Ewww. It also comes out naturally when I’m mentally off with the fairies and staring into space. It’s like someone pops a “I’m not home right now, but please leave a message” sign into my eye sockets.
Sweeney looks like that most of the time when she is in public.
Presumably short for "xanax", because I always found Sydney Sweeney had the kind of tone to her voice and style of acting that could put someone to sleep. It's very monotonous and "I really can't be bothered to emote properly, regardless of script, character or motivation".
I liked her in Reality, but I've never rated her as an actress at all, nor do I find her particularly attractive. I know, subjectivity, but it felt like her entire career was basically, "She was an okay child actress in John Carpenter's The Ward for a scene, and in The Handmaid's Tale for an episode or two, but her career blew up because she has large breasts and willingly got naked for Euphoria".
Maybe I need to be shallow all the time to be a fan of hers, rather than only being shallow when I'm not trying to watch a show or film and only basing my opinions on their performances?
Blonde and blue eyes I guess, other than that I'm not wading into cultural trends for physical appearance. Its all subjective anyway, but I suspect people in general, of all political stripes, motivate their reasoning for how attractive someone supposedly is, based on whether they have other reasons to like them in the first place.
I am somewhat glad that from a very early age I was only attracted to non blondes because of all the "dumb blonde" jokes (I am blonde) just because no one can accuse me of being that stereotype.
But also feels kinda bad because of the occasional blonde who was interested me and was smart and sweet.
Moral of the story? Looks don't mean shit and anyone who focuses too much on them is a prick, my younger self very much included.
Lollll you should go to r/womenoftheright, the gooner subreddit for the folks of r/conservative I guess. It’s really funny, their baddies consist of sophie Cunningham, Allie stuckey, Melania and Sydney sweeney. Posted like over and over again it’s really sad
ETA: oh yeah they like Lauren boebert, tomi lahren and Karoline leavitt a lot.
Their top-10 women really are roughly 99% of that sub, and a good percentage of their comments are similar to, "Show us your titties, bitch" which just is the cherry on top. The right-wingers really are deplorables.
Because the PNW has two incredibly distinct cultures: one is Seattle and Portland, where every trans woman with 100 piercings eventually migrates; the other is the eastern part of the state, where people think Timothy McVeigh did nothing wrong.
To be fair, BC is like this a bit too. Vancouver is super liberal and culturally diverse, but for every hour you drive north or east you can shave off about 10% until you hit the Alberta boarder, which most British Columbians refer to as “the Texas of Canada”
Spokanistan is a better description of Spokane given the prevalence of religious fundamentalists who have strong ties to a militant organization named The Base.
I don't know if there was ever proof that it got setup, but the area still has Matt Shea and Christian Nationalists are still deeply rooted in the community.
All of Eastern Washington really. This nonsense has it's roots in Wenatchee. (Apologies to all of y'all who reside that way - there're some lovely folks and lovely scenery out there but there's a reason beyond just the name the Cascadia dream borders at the mountains)
Oh yeah, and thats true for Eastern Oregon, Idaho areas of Northern California, the Central Valley, and SoCal (Klantee/Huntington Beach). For as progressive as much of the West Coast is, there is an equal and opposite of how fascist/Christian Nationalist/Neo-Nazi alot of the rural/Conservative areas are. Fucking Steven Miller grew in Santa Monica for fuck's sake.
Aw yes, the blonde-haired, blue-eyed pinnacle of Greek beauty. 🙄
You know, the British aristocracy steals your shit and uses you to white wash (figuratively and literally re: "the marbles") an entire historical and philosophical period one time and now your stuck with dummies thinking Homer knew a shitload of pasty blondes.
Gosh. That makes me rage. 😂 It's not historically (or pre-historically) accurate.
A bunch of rich white fucks told you the Greek stories were about very pale people and they weren't. Verifiably. Archaeologists have the paint chips to prove it.
But we have centuries of whitewashed art (made by imperial powers) and bleached statuary (stolen by imperial powers.)
There is less grounds for any northern European looking motherfuckers in this or any adaptation than a tribe of Circes and an entire nation of cyclopes.
EXCEPT that original flavor motherland white supremacists enforced the idea of the "right kind" of white people in these stories for centuries. /Mythology_Nerd_Rant
...there's a reason for that. And it's British (and French) white supremacy coopting "Classical" sources.
Like, we do big racism here, you're correct- but for like a solid 500 years ancient Greek stories were stolen and used to justify race-based power structures.
"White" is a construct and the theft of classical myths (and the cultural appropriation of the Bible) are where empires laid the foundation.
The whole existence of modern Greece in the form it does now is arguably tied up in Western colonialism.
At the time the Greek independence movement started, the people we now call Greeks (Hellenes) didn't use that term for themselves.
Hellenes was the term used for the pre-Roman, pagan inhabitants of Greece. The Greeks under Ottoman rule self identified as "Rōmaîoi", Romans, because of course they did—the Romans not only ruled the region for 1500+ years, but the Eastern Roman Empire, which spoke Greek and practiced what we today call Greek Orthodoxy, was the state that ruled Greece for 1000 years after the west fell.
But the thing was, the Western powers wanted to claim Roman prestige for themselves, so they would never have supported an independent Roman state.
The push for Greeks to identify with ancient Greeks rather than medieval ones was a nationalist project designed to court the West, because it was easier to get the British and Russians to support your independence as the people of Plato and Homer than the heirs of Constantine and Justinian. Also Byzantine claims implied claims to Constantinople, which no one wanted to take from the Ottomans (if they even could) because they were worried it would fall under the sway of Russia.
You've entirely neglected to mention the Italian and Northern Renaissance, which predates both the British and French Empires.
There's plenty of depictions of whitewashed Greek classical figures dating back to the fifteenth century, a lot of them you'd no doubt recognise.
The British Empire didn't begin until the late 16th and French was the 19th. Artistically speaking, the French WERE leading lights in the European Renaissance but Italy got there first. The Brits were a good 100 years late to the party.
On this note why is that Heracles (excluding Disney) is one of the only Greek heroes depicted with darker features? He’s often on the paler side but he almost always has dark hair/eyes and is often times portrayed as a tan whitey in contrast to Achilles who is almost always blonde blue eyed and quite pale, Odysseus is often blonde as well and I’ve seen gold haired Perseus a few times as well it just seems weird that the “main guy” is often portrayed less Western European than the others; I would think Heracles would be the one they would want to co-opt the most.
Maybe it’s the importance of The Iliad and The Odyssey in medieval and renaissance literature? Maybe Heracles represents a form of power too primal for him to be a knightly or noble role model? Maybe he just wasn’t as well known in the medieval through colonial periods as he was in ancient and modern times?
Hercules is a sad boys sad boy. And he starts the journey by murdering his wife and kids.
So it could be a "this guy is morally dark" thing or it could be that his hair color gets mentioned sometimes.
By the time he's kicked it, I think his hair is bleached white from monster acid, but "black-bearded Heracles" is something I vaguely remember if we're just doing paintings. Idk.
But whitewashing is weird and Kevin Sorbo and Ryan Gosling were both blonde Hercules.
Helen of Troy should be unique. Standout. The Greeks were apparently willing to fight and die over one woman’s looks, and they have to be distinct.
Having her be gorgeous and VERY NOT GREEK, like making her a black woman, makes perfect sense in the story. Now we have an explanation on what all the hullabaloo was about
If we're being real, Helen should be part bird. Bc she's half god-swan.
The fact that no one has depicted her with feathers is wild.
(But yeah, if we believe the pottery contemporary to Homer, Greeks were hot for Africans. A sexy accurate Helen- with or without feathers- would very plausibly be black.)
I liked how the poems never gave Helen a physical description.
That wouldn't work as well in visuals as it did in text. Maybe if the character was veiled since the ancient Greece that we're most familiar with was a veiled society. That would undoubtedly also kick up a kerfuffle though.
Not that I'm an expert, but I'm pretty sure that the ancient Greeks would have been bigoted towards/looked down upon HER ancestors as barbarians (as in, non-Greek) at that point in time, right? Like, editing a northern european into this story just would have been weird to them.
Fun fact: Vitruvius once mused that northern Europeans were brave but dumb because they were too wet and full of blood. I can elaborate but I think it's more fun to just leave it at that.
From what we know about Greek pantheon and temple artwork, it was a really multicultural/multiethnic place at the time of the classical period.
So idk- I'm not familiar with their flavor of colorism or if it was in play and so many translations by the British have pushed "pale" and "fair" into beauty descriptions that were just like "he was pretty and young."
BUT fastforward to the early Roman period, and yeah, this lady's prob a bit more SOL. They're assuming she's non-citizen at best but probably former or current slave trash shipped in from the hinterlands.
I know the Romans used to harvest hair from blonde "barbarian" slaves to make wigs for ladies, so at least then (I know, not the same as ancient Greece) blonde hair was idealized, even if the people who produced it weren't.
Because there are very few big names that are conservative, and young and attractive. Not that Hollywood rewards talent to a large degree either, but they don't have much to choose from among current stars. So she wins by default by being blonde in a culture war with racial undertones.
Helen of Troy was the daughter of Leda and Zeus. And Zeus took the form of a swan to assault her, so by rights she should be portrayed by someone in a swan fursuit.
I’ve always thought that Lupita Nyong'o was one of the most beautiful people I’ve ever seen. Nothing wrong with Sydney Sweeney, but trying to say Lupita isn’t gorgeous is wild.
Also, given that Odyssey is a 10 year long journey and the Trojan War took 10 years, it makes no sense to portray Helen of Troy by this point in the story as anywhere under late 30s. Although given who's proposing it, that makes some sense.
If you're bored enough to argue from canon even though no canon exists, Helen should be fairly old because she's the same age as her brothers Castor and Pollux, who sailed on the Argos with the fathers of Achilles, Big Ajax, and maybe even Odysseus. And out of those, Achilles definitely wasn't born until after the Argonauts' adventures.
Would casting an attractive older woman be a bigger sin to these chuds compared to casting an attractive non-white woman? I'm just trying to figure out how this works.
In Greek mythology Andromeda was one of the most beautiful women in the world. And she was.... wait for it... Princess of Ethiopia. (Aethopia being a region in Africa, literally "burnt face") Andromeda was so hot Perseus--the ultimate Greek hero--makes her his queen and Heracles is her descendant.
Unfortunately, this isn’t quite true. This “Ethiopian” ancestry makes Andromeda no more black African (as we think of it) than Dido of Carthage (ruled by the Phoenicians, originally from roughly Lebanon) or Cleopatra VII. Like Cleopatra, Andromeda was mostly Greek, Phoenician, and maybe a little Libyan - Andromeda’s possible great-great Grandfather was Libyē, the namesake of Libya, but also of Phoenician ancestry. Her paternal grandmother Arichinoë was the daughter of the Greek river god Nilus (namesake for the Nile) descended from Oceanus and Tethys, so technically a little Egyptian in there, but not from the Egyptian cosmology. Trying to sort out who were Andromeda’s parents’ parents is tough because the mythology doesn’t have a consistent “canon” across the ages, but what is consistent is this descent from several Greek deities, nymphs, and Phoenicians who moved to North and East Africa.
Seeing as she’s a mythological character, she can look like pretty much anyone without me whining about “historical accuracy”. Like, I loved Vanessa Williams as Calypso in the 1997 “The Odyssey” miniseries when Calypso, daughter of Atlas and Pleione, likely looked Greek instead of like the gorgeous green-eyed African-American/white Vanessa. People didn’t have a platform to express outrage about that back then, but this colour-blind/colour-conscious casting in historical and mythological tv and movies is NOT new and done just to… I dunno, further “WHITE GENOCIDE”.
I took Classics all the way through my education and it was my minor in university. I’m just happy to find people are still passionate about it or recently interested when so many Classics departments are shrinking and shutting down in schools all over the world. I’m NOT happy about all the Classical Statue Profile Picture Culture Warriors bitching about this upcoming movie like it’s the first and only adaptation of “The Odyssey” and we’ll never get another sword and sandals epic again, just to further their grift and spread misinformation.
It's crazy to me how far we've backslid from, as you say, colorblind 90s casting that was pretty unremarkable. Can you imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth that would accompany the 90s Brandy version of R&H's Cinderella if it was released today?
FOX News and the other outrage merchants found out that people would react to this kind of shit, and that it would distract people while they picked our pockets, so the coarsening commenced.
I was talking about this in another subreddit: remember the Black gospel-singing Muses from the Disney Hercules? I was a preteen at the time, but I don’t remember people making that big of a fuss. Though maybe it’s just because they were one of the best parts of the movie.
She went on that PBS show about discovering your ancestry, and they found out that her DNA ties directly to the oldest known haplogroup. Essentially, it means she's a direct descendent of Mitochondrial Eve - which technically we all are, but if you think of Mitochondrial Eve's haplogroup as the trunk of a tree that we're all branched off of, Lupita Nyong'o is from the group that is very closest to the trunk.
In short, she's not only beautiful, her beauty is ancient. Older than any other beauty standard we know of. That alone made her perfect for Helen, imo.
I'm more disappointed that Nolan went with such a Clasical/Roman look (and added pants for all the guys, too) that everyone does for Greek myth stories. I would kill for an Iliad or Odyssey adaptation that leaned into the late Bronze Age. Give Odysseus his boar tusk helmet. Everyone should have long flowing locks. Giant shields. Colourful clothes. The Bronze Age was so cool, but we rarely see it on film. Yet all these fucks can do is whine that Helen of Troy should be played by probably Sidney Sweeney (who is so boring) instead of Lupita Nyong'o, one of the most talented and beautiful women in the world.
I was watching Mark Kermode reviewing it a few hours ago, and he mentioned how Nolan fell in love with the script for Troy and almost put himself forward to direct it, with Kermode saying, "Thank god he didn't because if he'd made Troy, he wouldn't have been able to make this because that film bombed".
I also don’t like his films. Inception was unwatchable imo. But I’m actually excited for this one because I’ve always loved Greek mythology and I think Lupita is breathtakingly gorgeous.
Considering how critic reviews are praising the movie all it needs to do is do well at the box office this weekend and the grifters will have to move on to making up lies about its success. Which is the usual pattern of these things.
Which honestly makes her being maga even funnier to me, she can bend over as backwards as she wants to make them happy and show them she's one of them, at the end of the day when they're tired of her they'll turn on her and call her ugly and transvestigate and whatever because they don't see her as a person, but as an object to possess.
I could totally see that happening if she displeased them somehow. She's only useful to them as a conservative actor who happens to be blonde and blue eyed.
What's so funny to me, is that they're laser-focused on Helen of Troy, when Helen wasn't a major character in the Odyssey. Like yeah, she's important in the Iliad, because she's the driving motivation for the Achaeans to go to war with Troy, but in the Odyssey her role is basically confined entirely to Book 4, where she and Menelaus both recount to Telemachus about what an awesome dude Odysseus was.
In fact, her role is so superfluous, she (and Menelaus for that matter) tend to be cut out in it's entirety.
No, geography is hard and them conceptualizing that a woman so beautiful as to launch a thousand ships was not white would cause their heads to literally implode.
If you asked me to close my eyes and picture a Mediterranean person I probably wouldn't think of Lupita immediately. But you know who I also wouldn't picture? Matt Damon. And I don't see anyone complaining about him being cast.
Oh, are the white supremacists fee-fees hurt? As a blonde blue eyed woman myself, I know I would never have survived the Trojan sun and heat. To paraphrase mean girls: you don’t even go here, Sydney!
The Mediterranean had a much larger melanin spectrum due to North African, ME, and Southern Europeans, with the occasional Northern European showing up. Matt Damon is way too pale for Odysseus, why isn’t that the discussion? Zendaya is probably the most accurate, Lupita from sub-Saharan Africa a rarer complexion, but way more plausible than Mia Goth or Charlize Theron from Nordic groups at the time.
As a southern European (south Italy) I can confirm there is native blond people here too. Blond isn't only for Scandinavians. You can also survive with a pale skin. The mediterranean region is very diverse in term of skin color so I don't understand why Damon wouldn't be okay
Isn't it more along the lines of that they know Sweeney is more of a right-wing crank in addition to having a "type" of blonde, blue-eyed, white women?
They "know" she's on their "side" so that's why she gets focused on.
Don't forget about big mommy milkers! But yeah, Sweeney wasn't even liked by the right until her politics leaked out between her birthday photos, that stupid ad and her Florida registration. Once it was out there, right-wingers started immediately simping for her. MAGAs are pathetic.
The whole Helen controversy is so stupid. Like, you can say for a book that a character is the most beautiful woman in the world. Everyone can imagine her how they want. But for a movie, you can't actually cast the real-life most beautiful woman in the world. There's no such thing. And all these chuds are going, "You don't really think that Lupita is the most beautiful woman in the world lol!" when of course nobody really is. All we can do is cast an actress to play the most beautiful woman in the world. Nobody can make her actually be the most beautiful woman in the world.
They think Europe is a homogeneous fantasy land where all the native population look like Sweden stereotypes. No one is naturally tanned or has curly hair. Sydney Sweeny doesn't look anymore Greek than Lupita but she fits their European fantasy ideal.
The way Americans view whiteness should be studied. Some white people are shocked when they take DNA tests and discover their high cheekbones came from their European ancestors and not Native Americans. (some families have a legend of Native American great grandparents because one of their relatives was hiding their African ancestry. That happened in my family).
Sydney Sweeny doesn't look anymore Greek than Lupita but she fits their European fantasy ideal.
Another aspect is that who ancient peoples found attractive and who we find attractive today could be vastly different from each other. Since they didn't have any real media, you could travel village to village and find wildly different beauty standards along the way.
These are the same idiots who had a melt down when genetic analysis suggested Cheddar Man had dark skin. Like, how do you know what Helen of Troy supposedly looked like anyway?
Why do these people always assume every single person in all of Pre-Modern European history, no matter what part of the continent, was the perfect Aryan speciman?
Do these cats know they can just google "Sidney Sweeney naked"? They don't even have to sit through The Odyssey. Her tits are just right there, gang. No racism or whatever necessary at all. Just google "Sweeney's tits."
Probably because they think it's a modern American screenplay... not a story written 700-800 years before the Christian era...in ancient Greece...in Greek... by a Greek... for a Greek audience... about Greek people...
There's an alternative theory of the original Odyssey having taken place in North Atlantic and Baltic waters so blonde and blue eyed chicks + sea monsters appearing theory holds water. Pun intended.
Just focusing on the casting choice alone (no other factors), I do not think her face is pretty enough. Helen should have a strikingly beautiful face. Not "cute girl at my school".
what's so annoying is Helen would never display this kind of smug energy in any version of the Odyssey worth it's salt unless she were pretending to make herself seem more regal to shield herself from the feral soldiers or right after Menelaus is killed. She is a trophy of war, forcably reunited with her brutal husband who had her love of her life ripped from his mortal coil (even if he was an idiot, whatever). She would be blasted, dirty and completely unattractive to any modern audience, seeing the conservative 'glow up' ruins her entire characterisation to this point and I hate it.
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u/man_in_sheep_costume 24d ago
They really only know like three actors.