/bl/ - General BL

Only one that comes to mind is "The Epic of Gilgamesh"
Gilgamesh is promised a man whom he will "love like a woman" and finds the wild man Enkidu. When Gilgamesh's boyfriend dies so he has to go on a long journey to find the secret of immortal life to save his man.

>>3971
Every time I hear about epic of gilgamesh yaoi all I can think about is picrel kek

>>3972
As they should. Enkidu x Gilgamesh is trash. I hope she gets her copper from Ea-Nasir for having such garbage taste

>>3973
True everyone knows Enkidu is a total bottom I mean why else would the goddess send him to Gilgamesh? I just don't get ExG shippers.

>>3971
It contains many good elements IMO. The taming of the wild beast man, the enemies to lovers trope, the sole guy that is equal to the king, the close friendship that includes the deepest from of comradeship as well as romantic elements and the relationship and following tragic death that trigger a breakdown that is eventually followed by a massive growth and character development.

And it's one of the earliest stories of humanity and one that influenced the Illiad, Odyssey and the myth of Heracles. Fujos don't need to win because they won before anything else even existed.

>>3972
Funny trivia: the earliest known named author is most likely Enheduanna, an Akkadian high priestess. And Babylonian porn (this actually exists) was always written by women too as far as we can tell.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were women shipping back then even if they didn't write it down or if the scriptures aren't preserved. I read a bunch of private letters from fathers to their daughters that suggest that women of wealthier families often ended up leaving the hometown to join the class of priestesses and learn to write and read. It seems like literary fiction was mostly written by women.

There is even a "female" version of Sumerian, the Emesal dialect. It suggests that women wrote enough poetry and literary texts to coin their own dialect or that certain classes of women were at least involved enough to form a own one. It's basically poetic language.
Bar keepers were also women btw.

>>3974
>>3973
Enkidu topping Gilgamesh is the world's oldest omegaverse and you WILL respect that. J2 kinkmeme? No. The amount of clay ancient fujoshi used to render Enkidu's first rut with Gilgamesh could have housed the entire population of Uruk twice over. You are letting FGO dilute canon! You deserve they/them Enkidu!!!

>>3970
Horus and Set are super fruity.

>>3976
kys ExG fag. Enlil should've drowned your family in that goddamn flood. You don't deserve Lord Enki's mercy.

Speaking of Enki, not exactly yaoi, but he was one of the first examples of mpreg in myth. Set as well!

I like to think it was a priestess who immortalized those words and made her Horus x Set fanfic canon by putting it all over some dead moid's mausoleum walls.

>>3977
I always lowkey shipped Enki/Enlil, they are the typical pair of the haughty, pessimistic lawful main antagonist who is blind to his own weaknesses until they come back to bite him in the ass (see the flood myth) and the optimistic rival that enjoys hanging out with the plebeians that the first would love to get rid of. Enki deserves to win and turn the tables around by showing that guy what fun is.

Didn’t read Mesopotamian myths but played vn inspired by there were canon Shamash/Enlil antagonist duo having some history with musician ||who is one of the LIs||. Enjoyed every time they showed up. They were so unapologetically evil couple, Shamash even tried to kill musician with himself so Enlil would met with them both in afterlife simply because Enlil loved raping him lol

A lot of you probably know this one since it's such a classic, but for those that don't:
>In the last years BCE, Emperor Ai was enjoying a daytime nap. He was in his palace, in Chang’an, hundreds of miles inland, wearing a traditional long-sleeved robe. Lying on one of his sleeves was a young man in his 20s, Dong Xian, also asleep. So tender was the emperor’s love for this man that, when he had to get up, instead of waking his lover, he cut off the sleeve of his robe.
>This story of the cut sleeve spread throughout the court, leading the emperor’s courtiers to cut one of their own sleeves as tribute.
>Ai bestowed Dong Xian with the highest titles and ten thousand piculs of grain per year. Everyone in Dong Xian’s family benefitted from the emperor’s patronage; Dong Xian’s father was named the marquis of Guannei and everyone in Dong Xian’s household, including his slaves, received money.
>When Emperor Ai died in 1 BCE, he wanted to leave the kingdom to his beloved Dong Xian.
The End

>>3978
Honestly, I see it. Especially with Enki trolling Enlil all the time. It's a great ship

>>3980
I've never heard of this but it's so romantic. It would be even better if the love was one-sided. One of my favorite things is doting old men and their careless, bratty young lovers. And it's even better on top of that if they're not lovers at all, just an obsessive man chasing a young man who's stringing him along.

Achilles x Patroclus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achilles_and_Patroclus

>Homer never explicitly casts the two as lovers,[1][2] but they were depicted as lovers in the archaic and classical periods of Greek literature, particularly in the works of Aeschylus, Aeschines and Plato.[3][4]
Gay.

>He laments Patroclus' death using language very similar to the grief of Hector's wife. He also requests that when he dies, his bones be mixed with Patroclus' in a vase.[a]
Gay.

>In Athens, the relationship was often viewed as being loving and pederastic.[8]
Gay.

>In Plato's Symposium, written c. 385 BC, the speaker Phaedrus holds up Achilles and Patroclus as an example of divinely approved lovers. Phaedrus argues that Aeschylus erred in claiming Achilles was the erastes because Achilles was more beautiful and youthful than Patroclus (characteristics of the eromenos) as well as more noble and skilled in battle (characteristics of the erastes).[17][18] Instead, Phaedrus suggests that Achilles is the eromenos whose reverence of his erastes, Patroclus, was so great that he would be willing to die to avenge him.[18]
Gay.

>Aeschines, at his trial in 345 BC, placed an emphasis on the importance of paiderasteia to the Greeks, argues that though Homer does not state it explicitly, educated people should be able to read between the lines: "Although (Homer) speaks in many places of Patroclus and Achilles, he hides their love and avoids giving a name to their friendship, thinking that the exceeding greatness of their affection is manifest to such of his hearers as are educated men."[19]
Gay.

The myths about Orestes are an underrated mythological source of fujo material. There are a lot of plays written about him. We all know about Agamemnon during the Trojan War; he was the king who sacrificed his daughter, Iphigenia, and was killed by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover when he returned home with Cassandra. Well, Orestes is the other part of that story. He and his sister, Electra, end up conspiring to kill Clytemnestra and her lover to avenge his father (in the most popular depiction of this myth, he does so under the orders of Apollo). After committing this murder, because it's a big no-no in Ancient Greece to kill your parents, he's pursued by the erinyes. Regardless, the myth ends with Athena setting up a legal trial to determine if Orestes should be punished for what he did. The fujo material comes from another character, Pylades. Pylades and Orestes have this incredibly close bond because they were raised together, and it's clear in the majority of depictions I've read that their interactions are built on like this implicit trust between them. Pylades plays a really important role as Orestes's main ally and support system, I guess? The romantic interpretation of their relationship was pretty supported by the Romans later on. There's multiple plays depicting the myth, but I think Euripides's play, Orestes, is the most homoerotic. Anne Carson has a really good translation of three different playwrights' depictions of different parts of the myth, which she combines together in a way that flows really well. It features the aforementioned Euripides play.

>>3985
"I'll take care of you"
"It's rotten work"
"not to me. Not if it's you"

aghhhhhh *rips all the hair out of my head and combusts into flames* it's perfect holy shit

Not an explicitly gay myth, but I wish The Bacchae would get a modern adaptation or retelling. It would be popular among fujos; there's no changing my mind on this. The Bacchae is a play by Euripides about Dionysus going to Thebes. There, he encounters the king, a young man named Pentheus, who becomes infuriated with Dionysus, and outlaws Dionysus's worship. Pentheus proceeds to chain the god to a bull, only for Dionysus to break free. What follows is Pentheus's descent into madness and obsession as Dionysus repeatedly evades his control. Pentheus is extremely fixated on Dionysus, whereas Dionysus just enjoys fucking with him. Their conflict is portrayed as order versus chaos, but the play's events reveal that Pentheus isn’t as orderly and morally upstanding as he’d like to think. Dionysus brings out the worst in Pentheus, which leads to Pentheus’s eventual downfall.

The whole play is basically Dionysus mentally tormenting this man until he breaks down. Dionysus helps Pentheus crossdress to spy on the Bacchae, which results in Pentheus’s super grisly death- one of my favorite deaths in all of mythology. Again, the myth isn’t explicitly gay, but there is SO MUCH shipping potential here, and the way they talk to each other is very easy to interpret through a fujo lens. If there were an adaptation with them as pretty anime boys, everyone would see my vision. The pretty anime boy thing isn’t as much of a stretch as it sounds- Pentheus is supposed to be a young man, and Dionysus is often portrayed as a youthful, attractive man (yes, there are other portrayals, but the younger version is more common, and it’s the one the play uses). The sculpture I’ve attached to this post is a Roman copy of a Hellenistic sculpture (more Roman versions of Greek sculptures exist today solely because the Greek ones were made of bronze, which means that they often got melted down due to bronze’s utility and value. We have fewer than 30 surviving bronze originals, but the Roman copies are faithful).

I almost posted this in the rarepair thread, but this felt more fitting. I'm sorry if this isn't the appropriate place, and I'm sorry for the long, boring post about a play nobody but me cares about. There’s almost no fan art of these two, and there’s very little ancient art of Pentheus outside of when he’s being killed.

>>4106
What a gem, nona! Thank you for sharing, I want to read it.

>>4106
This reads almost like a Coyote vs Roadrunner cartoon. I love it. Thanks for the rec!

>>4106
This post made me so happy, nonna. I read this story in Latin class and I was shipping it. I think there is some fic for Pentheus/Dionysus out there, recently even.
I also shipped Aeneas/Turnus.

>>4119
>I also shipped Aeneas/Turnus
nayrt but nonnie nonnie nonnie nonnie!!!!!!!! im obsessed with The Aeneid!!! I love this ship too. Aeneas/Pallas is also cute; some scholars think that Vergil wrote them as lovers. Honestly so much conflict could have been avoided in The Aeneid if Aeneas just made a harem with italian royals lol. Other potential ships are obviously Nisus/Euryalus, who intentionally were written as a couple. There is also Turnus/Pallas, if you're into darker stuff. I read that the scene where Turnus kills Pallas may or may not have some parallels to rape. I have only read a few parts of the Aeneid in the original Latin; otherwise, I have read translations. I think when my current term is over, I'm going to read the whole story in latin and make my own translation. My latin is bad, but I'm determined to do it because I love the story so much. Unfortunately I can't find much fan content for The Aeneid. Sometimes I envy people whose primary interest is in Greek myths. Not only do they have active fandoms, they also have plenty of Renaissance artwork that depicts their favorite myths

>>3970
I don't know why we don't have more homoerotic myths with Apollo. He's supposed to be handsome he should have been breeding ground for gay stories.
>>3977
>Set as well
Should have been a whole epic about Set and Horus' (homo)adventures.
>>3980
Wasn't this about a cat instead? I swear I've read both versions but the cat makes more sense to me.

>>4499
>Apollo
I think the lack of him is due to a lot of modern retellings using him as an antagonist. Like Lore Olympus made him Persephone’s ex rapist or something. He’s got a bad rep in modern times despite having only one bad myth that could honestly be read as not that bad.

>>4502
Kind of a weird one to single out as "bad" for that reason, I'd have figured Zeus himself would be the easy Greek god to play the villian if you are going by terrible deeds.

>>4506
I decided to look into it more and apparently it was really only Lore Olympus that smeared Apollo’s reputation so badly. And that combined with popular retellings (earlier Percy Jackson) having Apollo be kinda an asshole didn’t help. Like it’s bad to the point of people that are fans of Lore Olympus have sent harassment and threats towards people that practice Hellenism. Zeus and Hera definitely still get a lot of hate and do often get villain roles. Apollo just got the short end of the stick for being the main antagonist in one of the most popular retellings of the Hades and Persephone myth. Like a lot of people who get interested in Greek Mythology because of Lore Olympus will have a bad image of Apollo even if they find out that Apollo is arguably one of the least rapey of all the male Greek gods.

>>4509
This makes me wonder what peoples introduction to the Greek myths are in the first place and what effecf that will have on their perception of the gods. For me it was "Greek Myths for Young Children" by Heather Amery, so no rape and a very simple good vs evil view of them. I imagine for a lot of people it's Percy Jackson which is fun, and I like how most of the gods are some flavor of awful in their own ways.

>>4502
WTF????? As someone who has loved myths from different cultures since she was a kid, I don't get these 'modern retellings'. They seem to lack the worldview, understanding, and culture that made the myths fun in the first place. This is why I've left off of playing Hades, MC looks hot, but the Greek culture stuff seems very superficial.

Apollo is a shiny fucking beacon of homo :( Why the _fuck_ is he not venerated as such? I read these myths as a kid as previously stated, this guy is far from a 'bad guy', it baffles me honestly.


>>4512
For me, it was D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths. No rape, very fairy-tale-y, which made it feel a bit ethereal and timeless. Worthy of a certain respect, if that makes sense. Not that people should respect their blorbos, but it feels ultra strange when people just up and ignore the OG canon context, where is a huge part of the fun for me as a historyfag.

>>4513
Well the thing is that these myths of old have been reworked throughout the centuries across continents so nothing is set in stone as far as stories and characters go.
Apollo might get conflated with Apollyon/Hyperion, which is a far cry from the youthful Apollo most of us are usually initially exposed to, for example.

>>4512
My introduction was Disney’s Hercules and I still have a subconscious anti-Hades bias from it. I imagine the people that get into Greek Mythology through Lore Olympus will have an inherent anti-Apollo bias which means that any future fujos that grow up on Lore Olympus will probably not be interested in Apollo. In fact apparently Hermes and Thanatos is the big gay ship in Lore Olympus’s fandom they aren’t canonical in Lore Olympus as far as I’m aware. So I wouldn’t be surprised if a story about them getting together becomes a popular retelling eventually.
>>4513
I like Apollo too for his homo potential. I’ve long been waiting for the day his myth with Hyacinth gets adapted.
>Hades
The artstyle puts me off tbh

>>4513
>>4517
>This is why I've left off of playing Hades, MC looks hot, but the Greek culture stuff seems very superficial.
It's actually a really good game and I'd rec it for it's own merits regardless of theme if you like rougelikes; it has canon homo too. It wouldn't say it's surface level the greek setting and theme are important, but it does feel modern. They've got the essence of each god and they aren't smoothed over per say, but the way of talking and tone of characters doesn't feel very ancient or godlike.

Great fanfiction and art in general too :p

What are some good non-Greek myths to check out?

>>4560
Horus and Set (Egyptian) are pretty fruity.