Numaios floating

Today's Daily Haiku tells a story of my favorite cartoon series when I was a kid, and how revealing it was for me when I understood I had a crush on one of the characters I wasn't supposed to have a crush on.

Numaios floating

The Daily Haiku for Feb 21. Numaios floating.

Starships and greek gods,
Future and past colliding,
Numaios floating...

My favorite cartoon series when I was a kid was Ulyses 31. I loved it. It had everything I could wish for. A modern science-fiction plot based on the old Greek mythology, a funny robot (Nono) always messing up things, the brave Ulyses fighting against the evil whims of the gods... And of course Numaios.

I think I was only 5 when I watched this series, but I remember having a crush on Numaios. He was the brother of one of the main characters, Thais, but he had been cursed by the gods (alongside most other people in the starship) to float in a consciousless hybernating status. The goal of Ulyses was escaping the evil fate decided by the gods and liberating the ship's crew from this standstill.

The fact that he was a "boy" (or even that he was an alien from the planet Zotra) did not strike me as something bad when I was a kid. It didn't feel wrong until years later, when I reached my teens and I understood the significance of that platonic attraction. By then, the weight of society, of what was acceptable and was not, the family, the opinions of others, and the preconceived notions of who you are supposed to love, made it look completely different in my eyes.

It goes to show that evil is in the eyes of the adults, and more specifically in the dogmas and assumptions of our societies.