Character/Fandom: Melpomene, Greek mythology

Prompt: What is your given name? Are you named after someone? Is the name you go by different? What does your name mean to you? What does it say about you?


Melpomene.

The chanting one, one who sings… she of the melodious voice. To celebrate with dance and song. These were the different meanings the world had attributed to her name, and once upon a time, it had made sense. She could remember the days when Olympus was filled with song, and her name invoked when melody was desired.

She couldn’t really remember when the change happened… she wasn’t the first deity to be given new purview, nor the last, and tragedy had become her domain. It worked well for her, really… tragedy wasn’t always ruin, but it was always change. Tragedies still had songs originally, but even after they did not, tragedy, she had found, had its own song. No matter what the medium, tragedy sang out, not to be understood or accepted, not to be fixed, but simply to be acknowledged. Great men fell, fortunes were turned, death and grief and misery and heartache befell everyone from the simplest man to the greatest giant. It was celebrated in what she inspired.

The world had come full circle though it seemed… once all tragedies were composed of songs… then slowly the theatre grew too serious for music, then opera was born, then fell out of fashion, and now music stood on its own, song itself the most common performance method of expressing one’s soul. The blues, rock, power ballads, rockabilly, rap, emo, country, everything in between. No matter the genre, she’d found that tragedy had found its voice, and made itself be heard.

No one seemed to call her Melpomene these days, instead going with a nickname. It was Mel, or P’mene, or more recently Melly. She still had a melodious voice, but she was no longer the one who sang, at least not where others could hear. For so long she’d kept it all inside her. For one whose purpose in life was to inspire tragedy and song, whose very work with artists involved showing the world their soul through whatever medium worked best for them, her own soul was something she was reluctant to bare to the world, for no reason better than fear... the fear of being found wanting.

She couldn’t remember when she’d stopped, but she wondered often, more often these days. A new millenium, a new year, a new world. A chance for new beginnings, or at least a chance to ignore old baggage, shed old cliché's, however self-induced they were, break free from the shackles of old stereotypes thrust upon oneself. Maybe it was time to be the one who sings again.

Or maybe... things were best the way they were.