Warrior goddess sketch

I tried a new pose because the original wasn’t working. The context is a powerful warrior goddess as envisioned by mortals.

Edited to add:
I was looking at my blog’s stats and saw that someone found it with the search string “warrior goddess.”

So I googled that up to see where my blog ranked and found a blog by Medusa coils complaining about the warrior goddess fetish as if war gods were fitted in a skirt.

So I posted the following comment there:

Sorry for posting this so late, but I believe there’s a general misconception about “warrior goddess” as if there was only one type of a war god to emulate.

In the mythology of Ancient Greece the cleverest immortal was the goddess Metis. Zeus was worried about her outsmarting them all so he married her, only to swallow her whole and absorb her wisdom in the process.

But Metis was already pregnant with Athena at the time, and she was born from his head. Like her parents she was as crafty as Metis and had the warlike nature of Zeus.

However, this mix meant she was the goddess of strategic warfare according to the Greeks, and her favorite mortal was the clever Odysseus.

Ares is the classical war god in its direct and brutal aspect. The Greeks hated Ares and worshipped Athena instead, because she fought with intellect and subtlety.It is not the violence or brutality or the waste of lives/resources, but the rationality and pragmatism that demands us to win wars without bloodshed.

Ares is always depicted as easily misled. The wisdom of Athena turns the violence and aggression of classic male type A against them and use brutality as the cause of their downfall. Athena was always a step ahead by making her moves indirect.

Thus the goddess of war was equal parts philosophy & war, wisdom and battle.