30Days: Olimpos | Aki
Title: Olimpos
Artist: Aki
Warnings: none
Status: complete, scanlated by Storm in Heaven
Description: A complete reworking of the myth of Ganymede, including a bishounen Apollo, an utterly heartbreaking rendition of Artemis, and more metaphysics than you thought possible in a two volume series.
Reason for recommendation: Okay, so this is cheating, because Olimpos isn't a bl manga at all-- it's shoujo. But! I have an explanation! And the explanation is that the original myth of Ganymede, as Wikipedia will tell you here, is pretty much ideal fodder for bl. For god's sake, the word "catamite" is actually derived from the story of Ganymede. So, honestly, this retelling seems to me like Aki is just winking and nudging us along towards a totally homoerotic reading of everything, including but not limited to the epilogue about Zeus' smile, every time Hades ever speaks (which is always to a male character), and, well, Apollo and Ganymede's relationship. So with that disclaimer out of the way, onto the rec.
First and definitely not least is Aki's wonderful art. It is heavenly. It is a shoujo/josei dream. Her reimagining of Apollo as an ornate, willowy, feminine, and slightly bitchy wisp of a sun god is one of the most imaginative and perplexing things I've ever seen done to Greek mythology. It's hard not to see her Apollo as a sun god when you look at the cover of volume one: decked out in the world's most elaborate gold choker, hair the color of embers and tucked back with bountiful flowers and leaves, and a smile burning with mischief. Ganymede, cup-bearer and eromenos-incarnate, is given an ambiguous and wholly sexless as a slim youth with long flowing hair, enough jewelry to choke a man more than three times his size, and a sword. Hades is half-Satan, half-Pan, and completely niko-niko about his every line.
And then there's Zeus.
One of the things that stuck with me for a long, long time after reading Olimpos is how very Christian the mythology of the manga is, even though it's based off of Greek/Roman paganism. No one exemplifies this better than Zeus. In the Greek/Roman myths, Zeus is a middle-aged decadent pervert with a temper that could eat the world. He hates it when people imitate him, he likes to snatch pretty things (read: attractive people) without asking for permission, and could be as much of a hedonist as Dionysus who kind of has that market cornered in Greek myths.
But in Olimpos, Zeus is a distant, incomprehensible figure who not only has dominion over the sky (as befitting the myth), but has somehow also created, for the purposes of housing Ganymede, a garden that defies Hades or Poseidon, his two brothers. He comes in a form that is too beautiful and too monstrous to comprehend. One cannot even look him in the eye when he descends. "Living beings are born to bow down before God. That is fear," Apollo says to Ganymede in chapter 5. "God descends, and man is laid flat before him."
This is not the Zeus of Leda and the swan. This is not the Zeus of Heracles. This is not the Zeus of numerous infidelities and laughable pursuits of women in the guise of cows. No, this is an almost Christian patriarch, whose love and anger are too large for us (as Ganymede) to contain, who keeps us alive for incomprehensible reasons, who moves--dare I say it?-- in mysterious ways.
There are other joys in Olimpos. There are genuinely funny parts, like when Apollo is forced to interact with one of the sacrifices offered to him at his temple. Or Poseidon in all of his scenes. There are some really interesting tangles of free will and truth and reality that come into play with all the gods. Artemis and Apollo's story is kind of awful, in the way it reveals something uniquely human about companionship (while at the same time being very clever about diffuse reflection). And I could complain about the end of the series, which comes abruptly and without a satisfying conclusion, but it occurred to me just recently that maybe Olimpos is to the Greek myth of Ganymede what Nemureru Mori no Binan is to Tomoi. It's not a story that's supposed to stand on its own. It's actually an attempt to show you, in brief, Ganymede's learning process before he acquiesced to being the cupbearer of the gods. It's probably not what Aki intended. But it's fun to think about, all the same.
Artist: Aki
Warnings: none
Status: complete, scanlated by Storm in Heaven
Description: A complete reworking of the myth of Ganymede, including a bishounen Apollo, an utterly heartbreaking rendition of Artemis, and more metaphysics than you thought possible in a two volume series.
Reason for recommendation: Okay, so this is cheating, because Olimpos isn't a bl manga at all-- it's shoujo. But! I have an explanation! And the explanation is that the original myth of Ganymede, as Wikipedia will tell you here, is pretty much ideal fodder for bl. For god's sake, the word "catamite" is actually derived from the story of Ganymede. So, honestly, this retelling seems to me like Aki is just winking and nudging us along towards a totally homoerotic reading of everything, including but not limited to the epilogue about Zeus' smile, every time Hades ever speaks (which is always to a male character), and, well, Apollo and Ganymede's relationship. So with that disclaimer out of the way, onto the rec.
First and definitely not least is Aki's wonderful art. It is heavenly. It is a shoujo/josei dream. Her reimagining of Apollo as an ornate, willowy, feminine, and slightly bitchy wisp of a sun god is one of the most imaginative and perplexing things I've ever seen done to Greek mythology. It's hard not to see her Apollo as a sun god when you look at the cover of volume one: decked out in the world's most elaborate gold choker, hair the color of embers and tucked back with bountiful flowers and leaves, and a smile burning with mischief. Ganymede, cup-bearer and eromenos-incarnate, is given an ambiguous and wholly sexless as a slim youth with long flowing hair, enough jewelry to choke a man more than three times his size, and a sword. Hades is half-Satan, half-Pan, and completely niko-niko about his every line.
And then there's Zeus.
One of the things that stuck with me for a long, long time after reading Olimpos is how very Christian the mythology of the manga is, even though it's based off of Greek/Roman paganism. No one exemplifies this better than Zeus. In the Greek/Roman myths, Zeus is a middle-aged decadent pervert with a temper that could eat the world. He hates it when people imitate him, he likes to snatch pretty things (read: attractive people) without asking for permission, and could be as much of a hedonist as Dionysus who kind of has that market cornered in Greek myths.
But in Olimpos, Zeus is a distant, incomprehensible figure who not only has dominion over the sky (as befitting the myth), but has somehow also created, for the purposes of housing Ganymede, a garden that defies Hades or Poseidon, his two brothers. He comes in a form that is too beautiful and too monstrous to comprehend. One cannot even look him in the eye when he descends. "Living beings are born to bow down before God. That is fear," Apollo says to Ganymede in chapter 5. "God descends, and man is laid flat before him."
This is not the Zeus of Leda and the swan. This is not the Zeus of Heracles. This is not the Zeus of numerous infidelities and laughable pursuits of women in the guise of cows. No, this is an almost Christian patriarch, whose love and anger are too large for us (as Ganymede) to contain, who keeps us alive for incomprehensible reasons, who moves--dare I say it?-- in mysterious ways.
There are other joys in Olimpos. There are genuinely funny parts, like when Apollo is forced to interact with one of the sacrifices offered to him at his temple. Or Poseidon in all of his scenes. There are some really interesting tangles of free will and truth and reality that come into play with all the gods. Artemis and Apollo's story is kind of awful, in the way it reveals something uniquely human about companionship (while at the same time being very clever about diffuse reflection). And I could complain about the end of the series, which comes abruptly and without a satisfying conclusion, but it occurred to me just recently that maybe Olimpos is to the Greek myth of Ganymede what Nemureru Mori no Binan is to Tomoi. It's not a story that's supposed to stand on its own. It's actually an attempt to show you, in brief, Ganymede's learning process before he acquiesced to being the cupbearer of the gods. It's probably not what Aki intended. But it's fun to think about, all the same.