pixies992

[pixies992]

thanks dave

I met Dave Malloy (again) tonight after ghost quartet and showed him my great comet tattoo and he said “oh wow! I’ll try not to do anything fucked up that gets me canceled so you don’t have to hide that in the future”

[pixies992]

[pixies992]

the most important characters in war and peace are not andrei, pierre, and natasha. they sure as hell aren't napoleon and kutuzov, either. the most important characters in war and peace are general mack, ivanushka the transmasc pilgrim, julie karagina, and count rostov's weird friend dmitri

[pixies992]

AHHHHH this is a preview of my animated short film “Ashes of Conviction” and it will be available on YouTube soon!!!

Thanks to everyone who had helped and supported me!! Further information will be provided later in the official release🥹( probably this weekend)

[pixies992]

i get so insane about hélène's appearance, etc. because so much of her appearance is so tied to her character like... for one thing it is so insanely important that she adheres wholly and completely to the beauty standards of the time period. like tolstoy barely describes her actual features and instead just refers to her as "beautiful" because there isn't anything unique about her beauty, she is the picture perfect girl of 1800s russia. she has to have this overwhelmingly youthful beauty — the doe eyes, the red lips, the round cheeks. not only is this exactly what society wants, but it also just emphasizes everything irt her relationship with her mother.

aline kuragina, someone who considers her youth and beauty stolen from her by time and by her children and by her husband, who is highly suggested in the drafts to have had her own childhood stolen by abuse, looking at her red-cheeked, beautiful, young daughter and just feeling Envy and Rage at everything she lost that she now assumes hélène to have. the way aline's anger at hélène informs so much of hélène's behavior — the "i'm not such a fool as to want children," the abortion attempt, the paranoia and the breakdown at the end of her life. aline raised her to believe that there is nothing more terrible than growing old, than having children.

when people wave off hélène's suicide as out of character or bad writing i'm like... i honestly can't think of anything more fitting than a woman who has been made to feel her entire life that success within society was more important than anything and that having children would signify the ultimate loss of freedom and beauty losing her mind when she gets pregnant out of wedlock. i've seen people hc her as having had abortions before her botched one, but i really can't imagine a pregnancy for her ending in anything BUT death, because i can't imagine her ever being able to have a rational reaction to that.

it's especially evident in the way she starts dressing in white dresses with ribbons again when she gets pregnant/attempts to annul her marriage, mirroring the dress she wears in the first scene of the novel before she's married — she is trying to claw her way back to innocence, to youth, to purity, to reclaim her freedom. in getting pregnant out of wedlock she immediately loses the only two things she has: the adoration of society and her youth/beauty. i don't think that hélène necessarily meant to kill herself when she downed that medicine, but i absolutely do think that she wanted more than anything a way to return to her youth and was delusional and terrified enough to believe that taking enough would bring her that — and would have rather died than not achieve that.

[pixies992]

put your clothes back on were going to talk about how musicals are the best media to adapt books in cause its the only one that allows the characters to express their feelings and internal monologue as they do on page

[pixies992]

so basically i’m better than you

[pixies992]

similar… think about it

[pixies992]

Little moons, little candles Little snowflakes, little glows Little bits of stardust

(It is my headcanon that Lady Usher wears a veil and sunglasses to deal with her "family evil". Tucking Roxie in for bed is one of the few moments that the light is low enough to take them off.

Below is how I imagine she looks most days)

Ft. a baby Brent playing one the few sounds she can bear to listen to. He practices a lot.

[pixies992]

I've been thinking a lot about the really blatant parallels between natasha and helene, that I'm not even sure tolstoy meant to employ but they're so obvious when you put the pieces together and it fascinates me. they have similar important families, anatole uses them both for similar reasons of satisfaction and manipulation, they court the same men at times, they even tried to kill themselves in the exact same way. the difference is in the presentation of these things.

the most glaring is obviously their attempts and how they're treated in the book. natasha is fawned after and taken care of, and pierre even visits her at bedside. when helene dies it's almost like a punishment from the narrative. she dies alone and in pain and it's like tolstoy is saying this is what she deserves for her behaviors and I find that so. Interesting in a devastating way. I suppose for the kuragins family actions yes, both siblings die but helenes is in such a cruel way it has to be examined under separate pretenses.

does helene die because she's a slut? natasha didn't die and she courted around a similar number of men, some of them the same people. is it because of natasha's innocence and helenes maturity in relationships despite their similar age? is it because natasha simply kisses anatole instead of sleeping with him? is it because helene doesn't love dolokhov when she sleeps with him, but natasha loves truly?

helene dies because she doesn't want to bear a child, something stated in the text multiple times previous to this, but natasha is willing to have pierre's. is that the tipping point for him? that helene is 'selfish' enough to abort her child but natasha is able to forgive pierre being abusive and love him beyond that? I don't really have an answer for any of this but just comparing the treatment even the other characters give the two women makes me so wildly interested and kind of crazed. Because it's kind of realistic in it's depiction of women being outcasted for sleeping with what society especially higher up society deems too many men, but the men themselves like anatole can have as much as they please. Even Malloy in great comet kind of succeeds tolstoys idea of women's sexuality. Anatole is hot, but Helene is the slut. Natasha is simply young and doesn't understand how to act Properly yet. Helene is a lesson in discipline

[pixies992]

​made my best NYT mini time to date (usually my fastest times are around 20 seconds) and immediately I thought of Preludes lmao

[pixies992]

rose red from ghost quartet is an avatar of the end!

[pixies992]

Severance (2022-) War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, tr. Louise and Aylmer Maude

[pixies992]

this post single-handedly got me to watch house

this is the same scene to me

[pixies992]

what if I were to redesign the costuming of great comet based on the actual comet + russian mythology

jk I've already started doing that lol

[pixies992]

NATASHA, PIERRE & THE GREAT COMET OF 1812 Donmar Playhouse | 31-12-24

Cast: Chumisa Dornford-May (Natasha), Declan Bennett (Pierre), Jamie Muscato (Anatole), Maimuna Memon (Sonya), Annatte McLaughlin (Marya D.), Cat Simmons (Hélène), Daniel Krikler (Dolokhov), Eugene McCoy (Bolkonsky/Andrei), Chloe Saracco (Mary), Cedric Neal (Balaga), Kimberly Blake, Ali Goldsmith, Chihiro Kawasaki, Nitai Levi, Annie Majin

Notes: do not publicly upload. enjoy !!!

[pixies992]

hey! just wanted to let you know in case you hadn't that your three houses link isn't working for some reason :(

desperate times call for desperate measures