Man oh man

Come to read the latest chapters and oh man does the author stack on the layers of drama and relationship dodecahedron.

So thus far...(up to chapter 64) [Spoiler]

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Seth <--> Nephthys are married. Isis and Osiris are married. Isis loves Osiris. Osiris wants Seth as a wife but couldn't because he is male and male gods can't create life in the way females can. Osiris secretly steals Seth's fertility knowing that Seth would feel like a failure and knowing that Nephthys, out of wifely duty, would go to Osiris to ask for help. Osiris agrees and helps them make a child, a child which is technically Nephthys and Osiris's, but used with Seth's semen (?). There is also the hint by Osiris that Nephthys is not as in love with Seth as Seth is in love with her, and his love for her is really him being lonely and finding meaning in being a husband and father. Anyway, Seth still feels cheated out of fatherhood, cuckolded and humiliated. He hates that he was used like that and he wavers between loving Anubis and hating what he represents--not Anubis himself, but the means of his conception. He wishes for Anubis to never grow old, perhaps because all the adults around him have proven to be unreliable and untrustworthy? Because he wasn't innocent, but something broke in him the day Osiris raped him? He was not naive to sexual assault, but it being experienced by anyone, especially your brother and so painfully on top of the realization that your family might not actually be yours, knocked something out of place in his head. From then on, Seth has used violence and a cavalier attitude to hide that he's a deeply wounded god. Basically "If I keep moving and fucking around, the bad thoughts won't get me!" Except that his behavior is a direct result of those bad feelings.

Isis hates Seth for being the object of Osiris's affection despite knowing that Seth didn't seduce him or anything. It's irrational victim-blaming borne out of rage and grief. And later that hate is compounded when Seth kills Osiris because that's still her husband and their shared brother, and kin-slaying has always been one of the most major taboos in these ancient societies. Not to mention this makes Seth an usurper. Her anger and hatred is also exacerbated by the fact that Seth decides to do self-care by being a tyrant over Egypt because there is no one he can turn to to talk out his feelings of being raped, lied to, betrayed, etc.

Isis vows to get revenge on Seth for killing her husband and yadda yadda. With Horus being her only object of love left alive, she pours all of her desires, dreams, worries, and pain onto Horus. It is a neurotic, uncomfortable "love" that Horus never felt comfortable with. It was a love borne out of desperation and utility, an emotional crutch that needed to live by her whims because she had big plans. When Horus met Seth, he saw a god that simply wanted something to love. He wanted to be someone who could give love without being dismissed. He told Anubis "You can hate or love me, but don't cast me away." It is also emotionally codependent, but the difference between Isis's love for Horus and Seth's love for Anubis is that Horus is meant to be poetic justice in a grand scheme by Isis--he is meant to represent the downfall of Seth, the unlawful usurper and murderer of Osiris. Seth's love for Anubis is to me at its core "I (Seth) feel like I am fully realized as a person when you acknowledge the love I have for you". A child doesn't use love for their own twisted ends. They accept it without question. That was what Seth wants -- a child that can receive his love and do nothing unsavory with it, but he is willing to compromise with "A son who acknowledges me as his father, a scoundrel, anything that will make him look at me."

Horus saw that love Seth accidentally showed to him (thinking he was Anubis) and wanted it for himself. It was a love that had no prerequisites or expectations, unlike the love Isis had for Horus which can be likened to an uptight mother wanting her son to get in all the best schools without considering what he might want for himself.

So Horus is sort of like his father Osiris with his fixation on Seth--both of them see Seth as beautiful and powerful. I say beautiful because it is gendered toward feminine. It is very interesting because Seth seems to exist in the middle of the spectrum of masculine and feminine. When put up beside the gods, he is portrayed more masculine than the goddesses (and Thoth of course lol), in the presence of Horus he is roughly equal, and in the presence of Osiris he is...not feminized exactly, because he still has the body of a toned man, but his status and presentation as a man becomes much shakier because of what we as readers know about his sexual assault. Osiris feminizes him by raping him and in turn we the readers feminize him because of the association with rape (domination) and masculinity. This is admittedly difficult to articulate...Seth isn't a "pretty boy uke", not at all, but there is a certain fragility that is lent to him because of our association with emotional oppenness (he is very expressive. Cocky, angry, prideful, smug, distraught) and androgynous looks with femininity. Powerful, because he literally is the desert, and the potential of that power is limitless. He is destruction, he is chaos. In Osiris's twisted lovestruck mind, he is something to be tamed and cultivated--a wild stallion to be broken in. For Horus, Seth is a fountain of endless love with which he wishes to quench his thirst.

Yep, those are my thoughts.