this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2026
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A depictionnof Helen of troy from Pompeii, looks as white as me, a Chilean.
Your picture is a few centuries after the Trojan War and from a different culture.
I think the lesson is that cultures always adapt modern and local standards to cast into their historical tales. Beauty especially can change with time and place. You know all those round-faced women from the days of early film? It's not that women got hotter over the century--those women were hot. Guys from the 1920 would probably think our hot women to be poorly-fed vagrant farm workers.
Another data point: Mar-Al-Lago face. Hideous to us, but extremely attractive to the guillotine class.
That said, the blonde, blue-eyed nordic beauty standard is perhaps the most durable beauty standard we have in the West; it absolutely dominated at least between 1950-2000, so it makes cultural sense to make Helen look like that.
Edit: Another data point this Jewish guy from 30 CE Palestine:
Late 4th century (very Jewish looking cuz you know, he was Jewish)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depiction_of_Jesus
I don't agree there is a lesson here. But I do disagree that that might be it. It is an observation that a lot of cultures have had standards of beauty and also have depicted fictional figures alike themselves, but the reasons are as varied as they come. I do agree that trying to break from that is not accidental and it's a deliberate choice made by some artists today. And that's ok and no civilization will die because of that haha. (To kinda paraphrase some of the criticisms I've read about nolan). And my goal was to counter a bit the narrative here that the cultures white supremacists (be that true believers or regular old people who don't think much about it) enjoy, have always been diverse. And wanting a white washed version of an epic is at the very least, influenced by contemporary racism. As a teacher used to say. Racism was invented in the middle ages haha.
Seems like a person who could be from troy (aka wilusa, in modern turkey) to me 🤷♂️