On gods and fucking and such

Nov 17, 2011 | Personal Journal Entries

So I recently finished reading The Lightning Thief, and thought it was freaking adorable. I will definitely read all the other books one of these days, but for now I’m just musing about what was presented in the first one. What interests me is that, in the very brief coverage given to the topic of the god/mortal pairings that result in half-bloods, there are a lot of unanswered questions and some strange implications. Back in the day, it made sense that if a god fucked a mortal, pregnancy would be the result; but in modern America, is that necessarily the case?

How do these pregnancies even get going? Giving them the benefit of the doubt by assuming that when the book gently says “falling in love with” it actually means “falling in love with” and not just “fucking” (and we know Poseidon actually loved Sally), I find it unlikely that these pregnancies are all the results of drunken one-night stands where neither party happened to have a condom handy. I mean, I suspect there were some of those too, but that can’t possibly account for all of them. Do contraceptives just not work on gods and goddesses? Contraceptives fail at times… perhaps all the half-bloods we see are the results of that, and really only a tiny, tiny fraction of the number of relationships the gods get into.

Then there are some gods, I suppose, that just don’t think about it at all. I can totally see Aphrodite being like, “What, I’m pregnant again? Oh, I wonder whose it is…” Which would be perfectly fine if her inadvertent children didn’t ATTRACT FUCKING MONSTERS. The gods overall don’t seem to care too terribly much what happens to humans in general, so if a god that isn’t paying attention hooks up with a mortal that doesn’t think about using contraceptives, I guess that makes sense.

Or maybe sometimes the gods want to initiate pregnancy. Some misguided individuals believe that a relationship isn’t “real” until it’s been consummated by the advent of children, and that’s a mindset fucked-up enough that I can see it belonging to any number of idiot gods. Then, some women enjoy being pregnant, and it is a sort of creation, so perhaps some goddesses get themselves knocked up just because they like it. Once again, that would be fine, if only it didn’t produce people destined to spend their lives on the run through no fault of their own. One thing that seems certain is that none of the gods appear to be doing this out of any sort of desire to rear a child, since it’s obvious that not a whole lot of that is going on.

Then once someone is pregnant, be she mortal or goddess, what about abortion? Given, once again, the apparent widespread lack of concern for the well-being of mortals in general, I can see that a lot of gods might not declare themselves honestly to their mortal lovers or warn them about the type of life their child was in for, but we know that it does sometimes happen — Poseidon told Sally, Athena told Annabeth’s father — so it’s possible that a human mother bears the child, or a human father accepts the child from his erstwhile goddess lover, without without having any idea of the ramifications.

But in those cases where there is some warning, where the mortal in question does have some kind of expectation of what’s to come, is abortion ever an option? Obviously some people are going to have moral issues with it and choose not to do it; and if a god actually loves a mortal woman, hopefully he isn’t going to be enough of a dick to force the decision on her one way or another (though I certainly wouldn’t put it past some of them). And, then, perhaps half-bloods are immune to abortion. But I wonder if there are fewer half-bloods in the world because some women have gone with this option.

I kinda want to write a fanfiction where Zeus hooks up with some mortal guy, thinking it’s totally safe (in regards to the oath) because, well, it’s a guy… and at one point decides it’s time for them to have sex and descends upon him in the good old shower of gold as a sort of joke, only to find that the guy has body parts typically considered female. They hadn’t progressed far enough into their relationship for the guy to want to mention this yet, and Zeus was arrogant enough to believe he could tell at a glance what gender and physical sex someone was, and (on a less condemnatory note) omnisexual enough not to care — except then there was that oath, and he has to care, because now he’s gotten this guy pregnant and is totally going to have to deal with breaking his word in addition to getting his boyfriend pregnant without, you know, warning him at all.

OK, so that’s all my Olympians thoughts for the evening. If anyone that’s read these books happens upon this entry and wants to reply, please be so kind as not to spoil any of the other books for me.