the avengers as greek mythological figures: natasha romanoff as aphrodite/helen of troy

a woman so beautiful and so flexible in her beauty that she becomes a goddess on earth, becoming the pinnacle of these men’s dreams, the woman on to which everyone else projects their desire so that she becomes a figure of iconography. and that’s what natasha does, this is how she tricks loki and this is how she tricks the men in the beginning - she gives them what they want to see, she plays into the misogyny of these men. she’s the fragile hypocritical weak mewling woman that loki thinks he’s dealing with and she lets the men think that she’s in over her head, she knows what they want and she gives it to them. she’s willing to play the part of the passive victim, but beneath that she is aphrodite - the architect of beauty, the maker of love. and love and beauty is a dangerous weapon, because you can deflect ares’s sword and you can even outwit athena (but careful of the aftermath) but you can’t cut down your own desires in the best of cases. you want to want, and natasha romanoff, like aphrodite with helen and paris, will deliver that to you, and watch you kill yourself from the inside out.

an anon asked me long ago