No, I could think of some who had it worse. Normal humans who knew about the gods. How many books had I read, or movies had I watched, where some normal teenager discovered they were special or had some ability that set them apart? Mortals craved that distinction, that power. They dreamed and wished and wondered. How much would it suck to realize all those things you’d dreamed of and hoped for were real, just not for you?

~@~

Growing up in the nineties, I was bombarded with super special people. Mutants, superheroes, vampires, and pretty much any other unique species. Most of the time the agent into the story was someone who thought they were normal, right up until they figured out that they were secretly a super special person.

There’s nothing wrong with that plot line. The idea that somewhere within you lies this untapped potential to be something better, something more, it’s not a bad thing. Personally, I can remember the day when I realized I was a lot happier with my life as it was then I would be if I found out I was really a super hero, or a lost princess, or some random alien species. But I never stopped wanting something that each and every one of those characters had.

The super special coloring or marking they had.

There’s always something. An unusual (yet conventionally attractive) birthmark. Unusual (and once again conventionally attractive) hair or eye colors. Glowing symbols that appear on your forehead when you shout out magic words. YA protagonists could never just be average looking. OR worse, when they were “average looking” they were always described as too thin and had three or more guys chasing after them at any given time (I’m looking at you Vicky Austin). And I kept the trope going. My gods and demigods are very attractive people. They’re gods. Unrealistic, unobtainable beauty just kind of made sense. But it’s not something I plan to keep up with outside of this series because I remember hating the way I looked because I had nothing that set me a part, nothing special. It wasn’t until I had a kid and actually got upset when her eyes changed from blue to brown (at 18 months, that six month thing is a lie) that I realized how deep my bias against the way I looked went.

The thing with super special markings or coloring is, as cool as it was, in a way it was just as damaging to me as the unobtainable models and movie stars I’m surrounded by every day. It made being normal, not having some super special (but don’t forget conventionally attractive) thing that set me apart seem like it wasn’t normal. I couldn’t see myself in the books I was reading or the shows I watched, but I wanted to. Books like Twilight and the Hunger Games would have meant a lot to me as a kid. And I’m still luckier than most. Ever notice how often the super special hair color/eye color/symbol code the character as white? Even when they don’t. I got an email complaining that I’d white washed the demigods by turning them gold. And despite the fact that gold skin/hair/eye tones can exist across every ethnicity, I completely understand how the reader got that impression. We’re so used to it that we don’t see anything else.

It’s entirely possible I was just over sensitive as a kid reading those books. I didn’t beg my mom for plastic surgery so I could look like a super model, I begged for purple contacts so I could look magic. It is entirely possible I’m just weird. But on the off chance that it’s not just me, I’m going to try harder not to fall into that trope in books I write outside of the Daughters of Zeus series.

I grew up on L. J Smith and Sailor Moon. Every single show I watched or book I read marked their supernatural beings with some super special physical marker. Be it unnatural beauty, purple eyes, or crescent moons on their foreheads. So naturally when I wrote my gods, I had to follow suite. So my gods are ridiculously attractive ala L. J Smith and my demigods have a very distinct look determined by the ichor in their blood.

There are more examples of this than I can detail (though do chime in with your favorite ones!) but I thought I’d share this extremely funny comic that toys with that trope.

Scott Westerfeld linked the Pygmalion myth with plastic surgery and brain damage in Uglies, and it was beautifully done because in one fell swoop he nailed the two reasons why the Pygmalion myth is so pervasive in our culture. We’re terrified of being forced to become something we’re not or being replaced by something or someone that can fill our role better that we can. The fear behind this myth is why it keeps popping up as a cautionary tale in AI stories or Frankenstine stories or Pinocchio stories or any other inanimate object turned to life story. If you want to know a cultures fear, study its stories.

But there’s something else that makes it into the cultures stories. Longing. And that is where the second variation of this myth comes along. It is just as popular, just as pervasive, and the beauty industry absolutely thrives on it. We want to be remade. Reshaped. Plucked from our ordinary lives by a rich stranger and remade into a better version of ourselves. We want the make up, the surgery, the weight loss miracle. We want more.

And that’s fine, when the wanting is healthy. It’s okay to want to get into great shape and look wonderful. It’s when we cross the line from healthy wanting and unhealthy obsessing that it becomes a problem. Its when girls look at models who’ve been given the pygmalion treatment, reshaped, retouched, recreated so much that the models don’t even recognize themselves, and starve or despair because they can’t become that, that it becomes a problem.

It’s a problem when a person looks at their significant other and tries to reshape them to meet unrealistic expectations.

It’s a problem when parents put so much pressure on their kids to make them better, smarter, prettier, more perfect, that the children snap.

It’s a problem when schools are so focused on the perfect score they forget about the people the numbers represent.

Pygmalion is alive and well in our culture and that is why I hate that myth. Because it’s not a myth. It’s our reality. And rather than see it for what it is, we romanticize it. Reshape it. Remold it until it tells the story we want to hear.

And that’s a problem.

I could never name all the Pygmalion references and tropes that popped up when I was growing up. It’s a myth our culture is obsessed with. But I’ll try to hit the highlights.

My Fair Lady/Pygmalion

Both versions of this play, the original and the now famous production pictured above influenced my perception of this myth. Eliza was no man’s statue and she resented being remade as much as she didn’t. She’s a pretty complex character. The original ending leaves her stranded between two world’s, something only hinted at as a potential outcome in the movie. That always resonated with me for some reason, and it works as a theme in a trilogy that’s going to focus so much on demigods.

The reshaping an already living person to fit an idealized version of them was revisited in a lot of other media before and after My Fair Lady. Namely

— The Taming of the Shrew

— She’s All That

— The Princess Diaries

— Anastasia

— Vertigo

— Greece

— Josie and the Pussycats the movie

— Jem and the Holograms

— Aladin

— Pretty Woman

— Literally every other movie or book that features a character needing a makeover and etiquette lessons to pass themselves off as something they’re not. Usually at some point in the story the disturbing/sexist/classist implications of this are explored and the person doing the shaping either figures out the person is perfect as is or the person figures out how to use both who they ARE and the skills the learned to be someone else to be a better version of someone true to themselves.

This variation of the trope was beautifully subverted in Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series.

Frankenstein

Obviously subverted but echoes of the myth are there loud and clear.

Pinocchio

Possibly the only version of this myth that isn’t disturbing, inherently sexist, classist, or fetishy. Yet I still hate it. Seriously, the move scared me when I was little so much that I only remember fragments of it.

Pixel Perfect

Disney’s answer to the Pygmalion myth. I don’t remember much of this other than the girl who liked the guy the entire time was super upset to find the hologram he’d made had her ears. I actually thought that was an interesting touch though. He pulled all the bits of the hologram from features of people he knew.

Also the same girl tried to be like the hologram, which really added layers upon layers to the myth.

A whole slew of anime:

Chobits, Dears, Ghost in the Shell and others followed the theme of creating perfect women or AI interfaces being made real. I watched a lot of anime in my teenage years. Some of these series handled all the implications and complications of this trope well, others were more interested in hyper sexualizing the myth.

And of course: Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Of course there’s a callback to the myth with the robot girlfriend and the Buffy Bot. But Dawn also fits the myth as do the slayers themselves. There are a lot of Galatea echoes in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Enjoy some fireworks.

I’m off to enjoy a weekend of barbecue, fireworks, and family. I am very grateful to be born where I was and to live where I do. But that does’t mean there’s no room for improvement.

Have a great weekend everyone.