LORE OLYMPUS has a FERTILITY PROBLEM

I always thought fertility goddesses was an allegory for womanhood. Like women has this special power of creation which is a blessing but also leaves them vunerable to men abusing them. And at first it worked in the narrative pretty fine UNTIL Rachel decided that men need concent for those powers to work, and then Persephone was "blessed with wrath" so she's not like other goddesses but special more powerful one. And it's ruined an entire allegory. But not only that it's ruined the idea of Hades coming from lineage of men who abused women and their powers but later breaking this cycle refusing to use Persephone as a battery for himself.

As a Greek i will say that LO failed to do the myths justice or create a compelling story. The story just has the Greek pantheon names and the author called it a day. As for fertility it has never ever, be anything more than just the meaning of producing life. It has no connection with super boosting powers of anything the comic tries to imply. They make no sense and have no purpose on the story other than to confuse 😅 This comic is THE very definition of exploiting Greek culture for profit. I doubt the series would be as popular had it not be a "greek myth retelling".

Honestly, ima say it: For a feminist comic, the concept of how Fertility Goddesses work is inherently misogynistic. not sayin it's offensive, but the fact is that the point is that it needs/requires a man to use it or help you use it. For a feminist comic that's a bit..... weird.

I hate when people re-tell the history of Persephone and hades and make it as they both wanted to be together and Demeter is just a crazy mom who can't accept Persephone growing up if they wanted a feminist retelling they could have kept the original one, a mother triying to save her daughter from a guy who forced her to marry him If i remember correctly,the history was used to comfort mother's who's daughters had been taken away, giving them hope that maybe they could return some day.

Also what about deities that were historically worshipped as fertility goddesses? Demeter was in some capacity and Aphrodite too, I think. Did Smythe really not do any research on who the actual fertility deities were? That would be the first thing I would do.

I just remembered that right before Persephone turned Minthe into a plant, Minthe shouted, “Does she know that you can’t have children?!” There’s a difference between infertility and being sterile, you can still have children if you’re infertile it’s just harder. Hades did try to spring a surprise proposal at Minthe even though they weren’t exclusive, has he tried to get Minthe pregnant or did they have a pregnancy scare?

As a butch woman, the entire discourse around this comic feels like a fever dream. Most of all, the (usually straight, almost exclusively cisgender) people who love or used to love it. It's supposed to be 'feminist,' but it was made at such a time and by such a person that it's entirely suffused with some of the most hyper-binarized, ultra-feminine, ultra-masculine aesthetics I've ever seen. Apparently in this feminist comic, women are more empowered by 'divine femininity' and sass than by any of their powers that DON'T revolve around their womb. A feminist retelling where Demeter never snaps like a real mother would. Where her concern for her daughter is panned as controlling, because Persephone always wanted it, and it's only those misogynistic ancient Greeks who'd ever tell you that a cute, curvy, sexually innocent girl WOULDN'T want to be spirited away by an older man. I think there's a reason characters like Athena and Morpheus take a back seat to the pink, tiny, younger half and the older, huge, blue half of the main straight couple. Lore Olympus is 280 episodes of the art style SCREAMING complimentarian, gender essentialist propaganda into your ear. It's oddly Christian for a comic about Greek polytheism.

Honestly instead of fertility they should have been vitality. Also yeah the dead humans seemed to know what a fertility goddess was near the beginning since they called Perse a fertility goddess but later on it's some sort of unknown concept even to the gods??

LO has pretty lackluster writing in general. It would've been better for Rachel to stick to making fluffy vignettes instead of trying to write an overarching plot.

FINALLY someone else besides me has this gripe! I can accept that Smythe wants to do their own thing and it is well within their right, even encouraged to make their own spins on the myths, but I can’t for the life of me understand what makes Metis a fertility goddess in this story and not Demeter.

I feel like this mythology has a layer of Christian beliefs imposed on it and “traditional” views and the further we get in the more the creator is fumbling to reconcile with that and is being hit with criticism so I think a different route was intended. Like is fertility is being able to create life independently and hades can’t have children then was this meant to be a virgin mother character but then there was the assault aspect that they included and it just slowly sank the story and I don’t think it really ever recovered from how the creator handled it. So there was this addition of attempting to give women in the series power of their own but since all women in this series are tied to a man in some way it just crumbles because nothing of value is being said or examined through the tropes included. So it’s hollow and just makes less and less sense

At the time I was reading the comic I thought that fertility meant the power to create life like plants and that kind of stuff but in a more out of control manner.

What I don't get is why they even used the whole "fertility" thing in the first place. Narratively, they just want a magical girl style power-up. They didn't need to call it "fertility powers". They literally could have just said "Screw it, all the gods can do it" or "all the goddesses can, but the gods can't and need to channel a goddess to grow giant". But, since "fertility god/goddess" is simultaneously both a nebulous and a narrow term, you end up with contradictions. Metis isn't a fertility goddess, while you could make an argument that Eros is a fertility god. And what about dryads and other minor deities? There's a ton of them based on various plants, which would make them as much fertility goddesses as Persephone (who is, in mythology, actually a chthonic goddess and only related to spring because she "brings the plants back" (rather, Demeter does when she returns)). Fertility gods should be super-duper common. Like, the most common.

as an SA survivor with an animation degree, the comic gave me the ick with how they handled Persephone's SA from the moment it happened. I love the art style, I think it's so gorgeous and unique, the fashion is amazing and cute. Everything about this had potential, but it just ended up being a creepy "Pretty (Greek Goddess) Woman" with so many contradictions and repetitive elements and aspects. It had potential, but i kept getting lost in everything and some themes were not handled well. I want to try to re-read the comic and push myself to get through it, but all the deep-dive videos make me cringe at the thought lol thank you for sharing your thoughts!

Anyone else also just find the art eh? Like Idk I get it was smart to make people color coded, but you could’ve still done that without limiting the style so much. I just honestly got sick of it. New characters looked like old ones and I eventually couldn’t even remember who was who panel to panel

So in LO Fertility translate to "Life and Grow", Fertility goddess are deities that have the ability to generate life and boost that life, they are like huge living batteries of life and power. That start with Gaia the primordial of earth (Mother Earth) the living personification of the planet itself, and the matriarch of at leas 70% of Greek mythology. The other fertility goddess are echos of Gaia, smaller and with less power but with similar power to generate life. LO explain that every generation has one fertility goddess, no more no less, and they need to be related to Gaia, Rhea and Metis are normally deities associated to motherhood and healthy, same for Hera and Persephone is the deity of Spring, (return of life and grow) in short they are goddess related to "Life and Grow" dont necessary just childbirth, because they can create life in more "Raw" ways

I could never get into LO because it always felt like the author just slapped greek mythology onto their characters and called it a day without doing any research into the actual mythology that they're using. Feels very exploitative, especially because they make so much money off of the comic.

As an advid greek mythos fanatic, its honestly pretty fantastic how badly Smythe fucks up every myth she tries to "reinterpret". Because yeah, the myth about Hades and Persephone is shrouded in mystery and concepts lost to time. Persephone has only been a nature deity post Hellenistic Greece era, during her Mycenaean days she was a cthonic deity along with her mother. The pottery that their story is painted on even uses the same poses for kidnap, sa and marry. Conceptually speaking, making it a secret consenting marriage could work. But Smythe seems to fuck it up entirely. Every single myth she uses is wrong. Apollo is only Apollo in name, he's not the nice and sometimes goofy lovebird he tends to be. Minthe was Hades mistress mythologically speaking, or at the very least tried to be his mistress when he was already married. Hell, Smythe somehow fucked up the myth of Dionysus. Semele, yknow, unaliving is directly how he's created in the first place. It could even be argued that Dionysus being birthed by a god instead of a mortal could be why he's not a demigod, but just a frfr god. Spoiler alert, magically bringing Semele back to life for the nice happy ending epilouge just has no mythological standing. In her myth, Semele was tricked by Hera into getting Zeus to swear by the river styx for anything, and asking for Zeus to show her his godly might, which DISINTEGRATED HER. Every myth Smythe gets her "feminist retelling" hands on his butchered and modernized so much it loses the original plot of the story. I could go on and on about each myth and the differences between the fr myth and Smythe's bullshit mary sue write ins. But, regardless, Smythe should be permanently banned from ever touching a myth again, Greek or not.

I thought that fertility goddesses were just goddesses with a life domain(ie. nature, childbirth) but the fact that Demeter isn’t one but Persephone is weird. Clearly that’s changed completely since I stopped reading.

Even Artemis is a fertility goddess in Greek mythology lol. She’s believed to preside over childbirth since in one of her birth myths she helps deliver her twin brother Apollo. It’s so common that it actually annoyed me how many goddesses were casually given fertility aspects despite the fact that it didn’t seem to fit with their other aspects.