Moved to the Greek thread, thanks tahra.
Looked at that French blog a little more closely, they offer an English version of the article but it's only slightly better than machine translation:
https://antiquipop.hypotheses.org/antiquipop-english/7254engThey don't even discuss whether the sets will be available elsewhere. Doesn't seem to be their line of interest.
They might be the source of the "first homosexual klickies" articles, as they write:
The Iliad also inspired a box… and we could almost say that Playmobil represents for the first time a same sex couple: Patrocle and Achilles. With its chariot, the set echoes a famous episode from the epic: Achilles’ anger after his lover Patrocle was killed by Hector.
"Could almost say" is sensible, unlike the clickbait pieces.
I dispute the following, about the set of gods that have already come out:
For this set, the brand selected the most popular and recognizable gods and godesses of Greek mythology, although one may be surprised by the presence of Hestia and the absence of Dionysus and Hades. The latter was perhaps considered too associated with the death and the rape of Persephone for children’s toys (which is not always a problem, see the children’s literature on this myth).
For a blog focussing on antiquity they should have known that the twelve gods selected are the Twelve Olympians, the classic pantheon (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Olympians) Hades doesn't live on Olympus and isn't part of the Twelve; the only choice made was between Dionysus and Hestia, both of whom are sometimes counted among the Divine Dozen. Hestia was probably chosen to keep the sex ratio even - six girl gods, six boy gods. And Dionysus appears to be appearing in the Olympus playset, as this same blog notes. However:
It seems that this set [the Olympus palace set] is notably intended to accommodate the 12 deities already on sale and that, in addition to the king of the gods, Dionysus, a muse and Pegasus are also included.
The lady klicky in the palace set is not a Muse! They helpfully provided a direct link to the Greek catalog (
https://www.playmobil.gr/content/katalogviewer/KatalogViewer.html) where the set is shown on page 43. The text is happily CTRL-C-able, so I popped it into translate and discovered she's one of the Χάριτες, which means Graces, a different but I am sure equally charming treble set of goddesses! Whether she's Aglaea, Euphrosyne, or Thalia is left to our imagination it seems! (Zeus of course shows up for a second time in this set, in a fetching dark outfit. I suppose they couldn't leave him out.)
Again, surprising that an antiquity blog wouldn't check this detail.
And this made me laugh:
For Greek myths, we identify above all a desire to give a place to women, through the selection of myths and divinities, but the skin colour of the characters remain quite uniform and white for Mediterranean people… Children are not yet ready to discover Greek Antiquity in all its nuances. Maybe next time?
Being concerned about the skin color of Greek gods is more than a little weird!
They need to go back to studying the basics of the mythology!
As for acquiring these sets, I will move heaven and earth to get them. Even if they are not released outside of Greece, I am confident that there will be many sets on the market - sadly the looming economic situation will see a lot of sellers.
Shipping might be awful, but I don't care. I must have these.
