Athenais?unmask

I'll come right out and say it: Athena is Mulan. The Greek goddess of Wisdom and Strategic Warfare, matched to the Disney princess of intelligent warfare. But here are two lesser known aspects of Athena:

Athena is the patron of craft and weaving.¹ In the original "Ballad of Mulan", a classic Chinese folk poem dating back to the Northern Wei Dynasty (386–535 AD), this is hinted in the first line:

唧唧复唧唧，木兰当户织。

Tsiek tsiek and again tsiek tsiek, Mulan weaves, facing the door.

Mulan is weaving a loom before she goes off to war — Athena the weaver becoming Athena the warrior.

Athena was closely associated with the city of Athens. She was known as Polias and Poliouchos (both derived from polis, meaning "city-state"). In the founding myth of Athens, Athena bested Poseidon in a competition over patronage of the city by creating the first olive tree. Mulan's name translates as "Flower of the magnolia tree", The magnolia is the official flower of Shanghai, the most important maritime city in China.

And now, all the obvious parallels in rapid succession:

• Athena is a virgin goddess, untouchable by Aphrodite. Mulan is one of the Disney princesses with no explicit romance arc.²
• Athena preferentially disguises herself as men: Mentes, Mentor, Deiphobus and a young shepherd. Disguising herself as a man is Mulan's whole schtick.
• Athena is the only other God who can wield Zeus's thunderbolts. She has also borrowed Zeus's aegis for so long that if Zeus needs it, he has to borrow it back. Similarly, Mulan has gotten more mileage out of her dad's sword and armor than her dad has.

Finally, Athena is the goddess of strategic warfare. Mulan brings an avalanche down upon the Hun army. Because of this feat Mulan is the undisputedly the most lethal Disney princess with a tally of 1,994 kills³ and one assist.⁴

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Extra-diegetic. Athena's most famous plot is the Trojan Horse — conceived by Odysseus, built by Epeius with Athena's own craftsmanship, and left at the great walled city of Troy as a gift. In 1998, the wall Disney needed to breach was the one around China.

Relations had soured after the release of Kundun, the Disney-funded biography of the Dalai Lama that Beijing considered politically provocative. Disney was looking to smooth things over and the plan they came up with was to present Beijing with a movie. A movie about a girl whose name translates as "Flower Wood-Orchid", depicted in both ancient texts and modern marketing material as riding a horse. A literal gift wooden horse.⁵

Footnotes

1. When a talented mortal weaver named Arachne beat Athena at weaving, the enraged goddess turned Arachne into a spider to weave for eternity. ↩

2. Aside: Mulan's comrades had no idea how close they flirted with disaster during the bathing scene. The canonical punishment for seeing Athena naked is instant blindness. Just ask Tiresias. ↩

3. We know this because Disney animators used 2,000 Huns in that scene, of which exactly 6 survived. ↩

4. Mulan's assist is that of the Hun leader, Shan Yu, as the kill rightfully goes to Mushu. ↩

5. Unfortunately for Disney, Athena failed to send two giant sea serpents to strangle the Chinese equivalent of Laocoön and China did not accept the offering. The Chinese government did allow the film a limited Chinese release, but only after the Chinese New Year, so as to ensure that local films dominated the more lucrative holiday market. Critical and audience reception in China was negative overall, as they found its contents too foreign. ↩