I once again urge you to use the critical thinking you’ve grown so fond of because no.
For all we know exactly one person and one god actually cared about Narcissus’s not reciprocating their affection - Echo, and Nemesis, and Nemesis only cared because Echo wanted revenge and well, that’s Nemesis’s thing after all.
(edit: oh and once again, referring to the wording of the curse, if Narcissus was asexual the curse would not even be a curse for him. The predisposition of said curse is falling in love, if he was ace/aro then that wouldn’t even apply)
Do not claim one intepretation to be above all else. “Can only be read” - it can be read as anything the reader reads it as. It can be read as Nemesis being a piece of shit or maybe bored, it can be read as Echo being a misguided victim and that rejection being the last straw for her, it can be read as Narcissus having a severe intellectual disability, it took him several paragraphs to realise the person in the water was his own reflection after all. It can be read as anything.
The only thing that matters is the value we attribute to a specific reading. And although the “Narcissus is asexual” take is an interesting perspective it’s incredibly foolish to think people will know that such reading even exists, let alone instinctively understand what you mean, it’s just not wildly taught and obscure to the point where when I first attempted to google it the only things I found were broken links. In fact when you first said that asexuality is narcissism I thought you were acephobic, and you implying that asexual people are selfish, it wouldn’t even be the first time I saw that argument.
There are many correct readings of Narcissus’ identity, but the Greek gods’ and people’s reaction to him can only be read as aphobia.
I once again urge you to use the critical thinking you’ve grown so fond of because no.
For all we know exactly one person and one god actually cared about Narcissus’s not reciprocating their affection - Echo, and Nemesis, and Nemesis only cared because Echo wanted revenge and well, that’s Nemesis’s thing after all.
(edit: oh and once again, referring to the wording of the curse, if Narcissus was asexual the curse would not even be a curse for him. The predisposition of said curse is falling in love, if he was ace/aro then that wouldn’t even apply)
Do not claim one intepretation to be above all else. “Can only be read” - it can be read as anything the reader reads it as. It can be read as Nemesis being a piece of shit or maybe bored, it can be read as Echo being a misguided victim and that rejection being the last straw for her, it can be read as Narcissus having a severe intellectual disability, it took him several paragraphs to realise the person in the water was his own reflection after all. It can be read as anything.
The only thing that matters is the value we attribute to a specific reading. And although the “Narcissus is asexual” take is an interesting perspective it’s incredibly foolish to think people will know that such reading even exists, let alone instinctively understand what you mean, it’s just not wildly taught and obscure to the point where when I first attempted to google it the only things I found were broken links. In fact when you first said that asexuality is narcissism I thought you were acephobic, and you implying that asexual people are selfish, it wouldn’t even be the first time I saw that argument.