GFT Retrospective #68: Goddess

Article by Sean Wilkinson,
a.k.a. the Ticketmaster

This will be a pretty short post, as there is no fairy tale to do comparative analysis, and the short story doesn't have anything to talk about in terms of Easter eggs, so please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment something clever at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read so I can afford to pay people to come up with clever things for me to say, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest Grimm news on my content.

GFT Short Story #9: Goddess

The titular goddess in question here is Venus, known in Greek circles as Aphrodite. Which is interesting from a few angles because when Sela and Erik are attacked in her flashback from the beginning of The Grateful Beasts, the god responsible is referred to as Ares, rather than Mars. One could assume that this is yet another case of Zenescope not being able to keep their lore consistent, but seeing as how Ralph Tedesco and Joe Brusha were among the rare exceptions to "you can't make money with a degree in fairy tales," I will play Dark One's advocate and say that marketing and the Rule Of Cool were responsible for the pantheon inconsistency here, rather than early Zenescope doing what early Zenescope be doing.

Clearly, Venus likes dudes. Her favorite tomato is beefcake, she gets all of her furniture from Chippendale's, her favorite seafood is mussels, she measures computer memory in giga-Chads, and her favorite YouTube videos are Dragon Ball shorts about Trunks. And those were all jokes because so far, the most interesting thing about her is that, despite having a female assistant whom she seems to trust, Venus' personality falls somewhere between willing reverse-harem protagonist (but she's the villain, so she wants to control all men and not share them with other women like "that Falseblood tramp," Sela), insatiable succubus, and jealous, controlling slut. I said, "so far." This is a brief introduction to her in the Grimm Fairy Tales canon, and we are talking about someone who was born fully grown and naked from a clamshell full of Neptune's foamy sperm, and who once turned a man into a flower because he looked at his reflection too much. But even considering the lewd and vengeful nature of her mythological origins, it's still shallow enough to make Pan and Belle feel three-dimensional.

Which is where the Dark One comes in! Yes; this is the first look we get at events outside of Myst since the finale of Hard Choices. Venus has her Man-Eating Woman-Hater's Club (ask your grandparents or surviving great-grandparents about that reference because I feel too old to admit that I understand it) where she can "invite" men to join her and disappear by the dozens, and no one bats an eye. And like I said, Malec is here (and is the one man she can't stand, even though Fenton, Pan, and Charles Dodgson exist). He brings news of the end of Death's Key (where Morrigan used Sela to find a way to return to the Nexus) and Sela's growing power and returning memories. As it turns out, Ares was not working directly for Malec, but kidnapped Sela's and Erik's child for Venus herself, as she thinks the child will one day help her regain her "former glory" from a time when even her Olympian family bowed to her influence.

I'm not going to spoil anything here because this one conversation sets up a lot of important events and characters for later (like, at least a handful of miniseries and events and one character who I think is still a series focus to this day), so that's pretty much it: just a heaping helping of shallow character introduction and one conversation that clues us in on the state of the Nexus and sets up another journey for Sela far down the road.

That was longer than I planned, but please send all of your platonic love as you remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment something brief, shallow, and important at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read so I can afford to be long-winded, shallow, and important, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest Grimm news on my content.

Ticketmaster,

Out.