#wanted to be classicist and failed

[uss-edsall]

See a short twitter thread about the Fallout series' architecture

"The real [Washington DC] is filled with neoclassical & brutalist architecture thats arranged in impenetrable walls of uniformly-tall buildings creating a uniquely imposing and sinister vibe among US cities"

first thought?

"what a coward, intimidated by the world's biggest poser of a city"

[cafeleningrad]

Ohtori is such a disorienting place. It's so emblematic that none of the actual needs of the people in it are met. In fact it gives answers but none actually are satisfying for anyone yet the answers are presented as only alternative. ("You have to revolutionize the world (by participating in the duels that ensure the world continues to run on the same old dynamic.)"

What system Ohtori, Akio by proxy, proposes is the idea of power over another. It's very gendered power as we learn later. Women's power exists either as extension's of a man (Nanami's high social status by virtue of being Touga's little sister), be inspired to have power by extension of a man (Wakaba), surrendering to a man (Kozue), or can be easily taken away power if a man decides that the woman had enough power (Juri,Utena). In the instance a woman has power it's also used to dominate others just like men do. (Nanami being cruel to others, to Tsuwabuki in particular, Utena treating Anthy her a puzzle piece to her princely identity.) In the end there is an idea how someone who should hold all the power should be like (the Prince), and they're given free reign. However that's not what the characters need.

Touga is entirely helpless to his paternal CSA. Akio's proposition is to become, for once, the one in charge of others so none can exploit him again. And Touga fails to see how Akio still exploits him by directing Touga, with quiet implicit imagery stressing that dynamic. What Touga would have needed was protection and a trusting family.

Nanami grew up so isolated and shamed for diverging from the norm, she is entirely dependent on external subjects and objects to define her. Either it's being defined by her relationship to Touga which is the entire basis of her social status, and her only hope for affection. Nanami can only define herself by traditional feminine and classicist means like her perceived ideal femininity, and brand-name jewelry which can easily turn on her, if external voices tell her that she should wear something. Nanami is so desperate for affection, being cared and loved for but the only language she is given is Ohtori's language of "men and women are only corresponding romantically". She can't express her need for familial proximity to Touga. The only other form of gaining adoration she knows is by violence, be it Touga's kitten, Tsuwabuki, or beating her three nameless underlings into submission.

It's not until the third arc that we learn about the Kaoru twins are in the middle of their parents separating. Their childhood is getting disrupted. Both of them are longing for time of connection and chance to hold onto each other. But Ohtori tells them that Miki can only adore Kozue as innocent and helpless. Kozue, like Nanami, gets told that her only chance to express affection to her male twin is by a sexualized, romanticized interaction. For two characters who're living through turbulent times, and need some stability in the other, twisting their chance of proximity is exactly the wrong answer.

Saionji really wants to remain friends with Touga he admires so much. (If not being in love with him.) Even more than Juri, he knows that the duel platform is just a set up, he swallows Touga's poison of "true friendship doesn't exist" again and again. The only chance of proximity to Touga is to disrespect others, demonstrate superiority over them, especially Anthy, as best proxy to a close male-male-dynamic. Saionji's only given path is to delude himself further and further.

Juri pushes so many people away because she's afraid her homosexuality will be revealed. Ohtori as a place does punish homosexuality severely, see Mikage's twisted memory, Ruka trying to converse Juri. This place convinces Juri over and over again that she's wrong for loving Shiori. But the truth is, Shiori is so much in love with Juri that she will resort to abuse her emotional power as long as it serves the purpose of Juri remaining close to her. What they would have needed is the chance to know that actually they're safe to be honest, at least to each other.

Utena is deeply grief-stricken by her parent's death. As a child the idea that everything will fade is terrifying. The only alternative she is shown is that Anthy's suffering is eternal. She wants to help. But the only path for being admired and adored is becoming a prince. The only agency to help and save others is by exercising the prince's power over someone. Akio becomes even crueler by trying to convince Utena that a girl's actual aspiration is romance (with a man). What else should she want? It also distract her from her genuine compassion for Anthy, and wishing for Anthy's happiness.

[trixierosewrites]

writeblr intro :3

Hi, everyone, I'm Trixie! I'm a young (but adult) writer and classicist, currently in the middle of publishing my novella, Memento Vivere. I also write short stories and am working on a couple novels! I go by shey/heir neopronouns but if that's too complicated she/they is tolerable too.

My favourite genre is the mystery-murder mystery-crime-thriller-horror area, but I dabble in a lot, including historical and fantasy! I love to write dialogue and I am a compulsive world builder for fantasy, including seven partially made conlangs.

Writing commissions are currently closed, but editing commissions are open.

I'd love to connect with more writers :3

my novella: memento vivere

horror/thriller

will be available as paperback, ebook, and deluxe edition

every single character is a horrible person

high stakes, little time, and a lot of character death >:3

Aidan Whitney, four times ex-prime minister, wakes up chained to a bed in a room with ten other people. The only way to escape? Making accusations that kill the accused, and, if incorrect, kill the accuser.

my short stories and novels below the cut!

my short stories

One Hundred Times, or a retelling of orpheus and eurydice in which orpheus looks back a hundred times for a hundred different reasons with a hundred different reactions

The Wasp, or three polyamorous women trying to make it work in between crime and betrayal

untitled fairy wip, or a first person POV of a somewhat stuck up researcher into the fair folk

"you can't protect her forever" AKA woman offers herself up to be tortured to protect her girlfriend

a crime solving gang of polyamorous women head undercover into a den of crime, magic, sex, drugs, and lies, and come out of it a little less unattached

a failing demon falls in love with a beautiful angel, only to find that things are not as they appear

Blood Dice, or where in a realm not quite real, millie learns to play for her life

For Want of a Ticket (complete), or a western girl runs elaborate scams on strangers, complete with an undertone of sadness (and loneliness)

my novels

my beautiful time travel catastrophe, featuring an obscenely large cast of characters all from different time periods that come together against their will to save the timeline

Trinity, AKA what attempts to be a neutral retelling of hades and persephone, told from three perspectives: hades, persephone, and demeter. the goal of this one is to write what is clearly the same narrative with different perspectives, and ultimately tries to not hold anyone at fault

"the lillian ainsworth murder" AKA a late victorian setting for a murder mystery, featuring repressed gays, mysterious marriages, financial debt, family feuds, and an unsettling promise for revenge

a very rough plan for what is essentially out of timeline parasites that overtake someone's body with the aim of assassinating targets

untitled bacchae-inspired wip, or where an unsuspecting oxford student gets a sinister boyfriend that likes drinks and all-female orgies, and then the murders begin

backwards murder mystery, where a seasoned detective is vindicated when the unsettling up-and-comer officer reveals himself as a serial killer - but why? what does he hope to gain?

untitled heist wip, where magic is rare and highly sought after, used for volatile healing and the most dangerous of weapons, except in england, where it makes the trains run on time. low fantasy featuring found family, crime, family secrets, and mutations that won't stay hidden - this one is in collaboration with my good friend @elizabeth-writes!

housekeeping

#twix srb - i reblog my own stuff! if you're tired of seeing my snippets and covers repeatedly, this is the tag to block :)

#other writer's works - this is for other people's writing that i've reblogged!

#snippet - this is my snippet tag for all my snippets, regardless of wip :)

#[name] snippet - snippets for a particular wip!

#[wip name] - everything for the wip is under this

#oc: [name] - how to track down every post i've made about a particular oc

#character intro - standard character intro tag

#twix personal - mostly just stuff like "i won't be on for a while because of x" and so forth - if you want to reblog these posts for whatever reason, that's absolutely fine!

[wisdom-devotee]

Hi!! I was wondering how you would interpret the myth of Apollo and Hyacinthus?

I also was wondering what Epithets i should use for Apollo! I dont really trust a lot of online resources 🫶

That is fair but honestly theoi.com is actually a really good resource that cites its sources and has a lot of info. Now, I can list for you the epithets Apollo has in the Iliad (my translation is E.V Rieu revised by Peter Jones, the Penguins Classics edition) but the issue is that I don’t know what the Greek words are for these since I don’t worship Apollo myself and I personally prefer using Greek words for epithets. But!

Phoebus (relating to Prophecy, as he was given the gift of prophecy by Phoebe)

Archer God

Lycian-born

He’s also sarcastically referred to as “Most benevolent of the gods” by Achilles

Those are all the Apollo epithets from the Iliad i have written in my notes for my classics course, but there’s probably more

You could also check the Homeric hymn to Apollo? And I’m sure people who worship Apollo may be able to help more with this

Anyway, my interpretation of Apollo and Hyacinthus! Thank you so much for this ask!

So as a classicist I do need to talk about what homosexual relationships between men in the ancient world looked like because that’s really important for this myth. But for this I need to say that there’s a bit of a content warning in regards to discussions of things that would have been considered consensual in the ancient world, but by modern standards, no.

The Ancient Greeks had this thing called paiderastia, where you’d have an ‘erastes’ (usually translated as ‘lover’) and an ‘eromenos’ (usually translated as ‘beloved’). People usually simplify this by saying it’s the ‘top and bottom’ in the relationship but things go a bit deeper than that because in paiderastia, the erastes acts as a mentor as well as a lover. The eromenos was usually younger, I don’t want to say always because you never know but that is a large part of this social custom. By modern standards the eromenos would be considered underage (I believe the youngest they’d be is 14)

As far as I’m aware, Hyacinthus is not underage, but he is described in the myths as being very beautiful and he is the youngest of the Spartan princes at this time, AND the festival at Amyclae based on him and Apollo is a coming of age ritual which is also suggestive of paiderastia. And Apollo himself, while being a depiction of ideal beauty in a young man, has a mentoring role over him. So symbolically, yeah. Pretty similar.

Now, Plutarch writes in Life of Lycurgus that paiderastia “was not competitive: instead it became the basis for genuine friendship between those who had the same object of their affections, and helped to sustain a long-term shared determination to mould the character of their beloved to the highest level of perfection.”

Which is where we get into the actual myth interpretation I have. Because I think Apollo and Hyacinthus is a depiction of this kind of relationship going… very tragically wrong. Not because of any abuse, of course, but still wrong.

Apollo and Zephyr both have the same ‘object of their affections’ — this being Hyacinthus, but instead of forming a ‘genuine friendship’ over their love for him, but instead Zephyr let his jealousy get the best of him and this resulted in Hyacinthus dying tragically. It’s interesting that Apollo is not always presented as being a completely innocent party. While it is always maintained that it was an accident, it is suggested that the fact the accident was able to occur at all was due to Apollo being careless. Both of Hyacinthus’s lovers absolutely failed him. The end result was devastating for Apollo.

Paiderastia is kind of uncomfortable to talk about but it’s necessary when discussing the social and cultural context that these myths were trying to explain and describe. I think in a modern day the myth can be taken to a wider interpretation of just the fact that jealousy and recklessness have no place in a relationship and only lead to suffering for all involved parties. Apollo and Zephyr truly loved Hyacinthus. They still managed to hurt him.

Hyacinthus is also one of a few mortal lovers of gods who are turned into flowers upon their deaths (another example being Adonis with Aphrodite) and I don’t remember who said it but I’ve heard someone mention how it could be in relation to flowers being seen as very delicate, as mortal lives are to the gods. However they’re also beautiful, as Apollo saw Hyacinthus and Aphrodite saw Adonis.

Additionally it has similarities to the myth of Hades and Persephone and the myth of Zeus and Ganymedes (that one specifically being another paiderastic relationship) in that it’s a death myth, supposed to represent the tragedy of a youth dying before they reasonably should have. Grief is as central to it as love is.

I hope this makes sense, it’s late here lol

[gemsofgreece]

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGejUxD5k/

The comment of making a song in Ancient greek just to piss of Greeks what's the purpose of it? As a Greek i wouldn't mind someone foreigner trying to learn Greek, so just making this comment a video provokes a negative behaviour.

My problem with this is that I am so annoyed at the person who made the request like this ("make the Greek mad") but it gets worse because there are Greeks getting mad at the comments in a wrong way so that person is proven right :////// That person makes a reference to the long standing animosity between modern Greek speakers and western classicists obsessed with the Erasmian pronunciation. Or the reconstructed one. The TikToker has had beef with Modern Greek speakers in an older video. That's what was referenced there.

Anyway, the tiktoker himself is not wrong in his recitement when it comes to the technical aspects of it. The problem with it is that - who knows how - even though he employs the prosody in the recitation, he still sounds incredibly monotonous. And incredibly English lol. If I had to listen to all that by a rhapsodos as an Ancient Greek I'd rather kill myself. Imagine 15,693 lines of verse like that. Listen to it and tell me I am wrong.

And not to be that person, but the TikToker kinda looks like he's torn between being the most English person ever and the descendant of Brad Pitt's Achilles.

I am so mad at Greeks because the radical western classicists (new term I just invented!) lack so much self-awareness that it would be easy for Greeks to argue, and yet Greeks are divided between "GREEK PRONUNCIATION SAME ALL THE WAY BACK TO 1000000000 BC" and "a blondie said it therefore it is the unquestionable truth and I dare not develop an insight on it by myself". There's no in between. I hate us.

And I say they lack self-awareness because even though they obsess so much over the textbook, (which is western theories mixed with western interpretations of scarce ancient Greek sources, without questioning even for a second the accuracy of said interpretations and even the ability of the ancient texts to convey in script the sound and the oral delivery of the language accurately and easily enough for foreign people to understand it perfectly many centuries later and with no exposure whatsoever to said language), they fail so much at removing the inherent elements of their own language.

Like, when Ancient Greek was said to be a very beautiful and unique sounding language, and you end up sounding like the blandest English gibberish poem ever, something must not be quite right. This is not evident just in Greek. He speaks a lot of languages (and kudos to him) but he said Mahabharata and it was like "Muh- hub- arr - atttah... and a cup of tea, please". Come on. I was petty enough to pronounce Mahabharata loudly and then went to GoogleTranslate and listened to the pronunciation in Hindi (no pronunciation option available for Sanskrit). I am closer to it than he is. (3,2,1 until some wild Brit classicist claims the English version is closer to Sanskrit than Hindi is XD). But okay it was petty and not all that scientific on my part, I admit.

Whoever wants a GOOD recitation of Ancient Greek, try Ioannis Stratakis - Podium Arts on YouTube. He sticks to the "textbook" and so far he is the best I have heard.

P.S. I saw somewhere in the comments under his posts the explanation / excuse that some words have to be pitched / stressed incorrectly in prosody because otherwise they won't fit in the hexameter.... while this indeed has to happen sometimes, if it happens too often you are doing something wrong, Greek is one of the best languages to modify and switch the placements of words in order to fit in the meter or rhyme just right and if memory serves me, “having to be incorrect” not as a frequent occurence as stated.

PS2: the more I listen to it the more need for such excuses I notice….

[neerdowellnarrator]

hi hi hello, my love for greek mythos is being ignited SO strongly and you are a VISIONARY, so this is an open invitation to talk about jace and jaceclones as the women of mycenea! please share any and all thoughts and reasoning you wish 👀

Obligatory disclaimer, I am not a classicist and haven't read the Illiad or the Oresteia trilogy in a hot minute. I do however have a bachelors degree in Jace Stardiamond studies and am working on my vibes-based PhD thesis so actually I'm an expert and everything I say is correct. Now let's talk about the jaceclones:

J2 as Iphigenia:

J2 the innocent, J2 the acolyte, J2 the sacrificial lamb. Iphigenia was a priestess of Artemis, you know, before that same goddess ordered her death. She spent her life in service to her god only to be murdered for her father's fuck-up. What justice.

Iphigenia does not know she is going to her death. She thinks she is going to her wedding. She does not know until the last moment that the alter she stands before is for sacrifice, not matrimony. She's so busy looking into the eyes of her "fiance" that she does not see the knife.

I'll say this for J2. He sees the knife. He saw the knife a mile away and still put on the veil (obscuring his view) and went to the alter. His god has decreed it. Maybe he will get to die a married man. Maybe his blood staining holy stones is the closest he'll get to divinity.

In the kind versions, Iphigenia is spirited away by Artemis at the last second. God says to Iphigenia, to Isaac, to Bluejay: "I was only kidding. I don't want you dead. I just ordered your murder as a test and you passed. I love you."

We tell a lot of stories in our little circle. Very few of them are kind.

J3 as Helen:

J3 wishes his face would launch a thousand ships. He wants to be so desirable he starts a war and so empty that no one asks what he thinks about it. He wants a goddess of lust to declare him her favorite. He wants to be wanted so much that men swear to kill and die for the chance to have him.

He wants to stare at the bodies of soldiers who died for him and say "oh what a whore am I." He wants lustful men to put words in his mouth to degrade him. He wants to be mistranslated in a way that makes him sexier, more alluring. He wants to be so lost in translation he ceases to be a person and becomes only an hourglass silhouette on a much-fingered page.

He wants everyone to want him so badly they hate him for it. He wants them to never forgive him.

J3 wants to be Helen so badly and fails to realize that he is already her in every way that matters: trapped and miserable, with no agency over his own life.

J4 as Electra:

Electra's sister's blood starts her story. She sees her sister, Iphigenia, die with a trusting smile, she sees her aunt, Helen, be stolen and locked away. She sees that the only way out is through. She sees red.

Red as in anger, certainly, but also red as in blood as she murders her mother, who murdered her father, who murdered her sister, who murdered nobody at all and died first anyway. Is this justice? This is the justice the gods will give her.

Electra's brother will suffer for their crime. Electra herself, however, walks away. She washes the blood off her hands. She tries to build a life.

J4 would murder her creator and walk away. She wants to. She wants to kill her god and save herselves. In the good ending, she does. In the bad ending...

J4 as Cassandra:

J4 knows what's coming. She knows they're doomed. She can do nothing. She rages, she screams, she refuses to fall into Porter's bed, she tries to save the others from doing the same. It's not enough.

Cassandra is captured and ensalved by Iphigenia's murderer, and she herself is murdered by Electra's murder victim. An alternate version of herself trying to save her, but, like J4 being too late to save herself.

[littlefankingdom]

Gege's writing of Gojo Satoru is lazy and bad

Here, I said it.

And I'm of the opinion that "lazy" is an ableist and classicist term thrown around to shame people of their situation, so if I'm using it, I mean it and I'm pissed.

I have been angry since chapter 236 and I fell on an Instagram post, by a fan page, full of the normies fan (aka allocishet boys/men) earlier, which just made me lose it. So, I'm finally going full rant.

I'm using they/them pronouns for Gege, as they use non-gendered pronouns in Japanese. They didn't want their gender to influence the publication (which is a huge problem in the art world, in manga but also in comics and bd (the French-Belgium comics), and I can salute that.

"The Strongest" is not a bad character trait

It is totally possible to tell an interesting story with a character describes as "the strongest in the world", and the idea that Gojo is immediately boring and needed to die for the story to progress is wrong. Superman is an example of this "strongest in the world" character, and he has been thriving for decades. And in manga/anime, we have the great One, who has given us One Punch Man and Mob Psycho. In those two, TWO, stories, One tell us the tale of "the strongest in the world", and One is known to be far from the best artist. So, to sell and have people publish (One Punch Man was originally a webcomic, and the manga isn't drawn by One, but still) and read those manga, it means that One's writing is fucking good. If you have never seen/read Mob Psycho, go do it immediately, it's, imo, the best anime ever. I am still certain that if Reigen was in the jjk's world, everything would be fine, and yes, he still would be a con. One was able to write not one, but two stories about a strongest where you are still sitting at the hedge of your seat during the fights and are so invested, where the other characters still shine and develop their capacities. How? Well, one might be the strongest in a fight, but what about mentally? Emotionally? One explores his characters' flaws and feelings. And the thing is, Gojo has a LOT of flaws that could be exploited to make the story more thrilling. How about how careless he is when fighting, which lead him to be super destructive or letting someone WAY weaker than him get away (Gojo never won a fight perfectly if you look at it)? How he barely shows emotions to others or let himself affected? How he is lonely because of the pedestal the jujutsu society has put him on, and if he got off of it and opened up, he would be way less? A lot of flaws, of "weaknesses", that could be exploited to work on Gojo. That's literally what they did when Gojo got pokeballed, exploited how Gojo does not know how to deal with his emotions because of his upbringing and status, and so, is so deeply affected by the ghost of his one best friend. But it was only to get rid of Gojo, instead of dissecting him. Because, no, we can have that, because it would make him interesting, and Gege hates Gojo.

Hating your characters is an issue

Gege hating on Gojo is funny, until it impacts the writing. And it does, A LOT. Just like loving your character too much can lead you to fail to see the issue in your writings (Catra in She-Ra), hating a character as the same effect. Gege's hate for Gojo led them to be unable to develop him, and to contradict their own writing. For example: Gojo is said to not care about anyone multiple times, Gege even mentioned, outside the manga, that he didn't care about Yuuta or Yuji's lives, he just saw the potential. However, they also wrote Gojo being annoyed at the fact that a teenager was on the death row in jjk 0, Gojo mad that they killed Yuji, Gojo getting angry that civilians are getting killed, Gojo being shaken STILL 10 YEARS LATER by his best friend's betrayal (He cares sooooo much about a man that betrayed him 10 years ago, it's borderline impossible. Like, it's been 10 years, time to stop being soft about this genocidal man, dude. I'm pretty certain that people, after 10 years, either don't care anymore or are pissed at their traitor ex-friend). There's a part of Gege, who is writing an interesting story, that started to develop Gojo, and then, there's the part of Gege that hates Gojo and need to go against this development. When Gojo dies, his dead classmates affirmed he never really cared and was only doing all of this for fun, and it's the final nail in the coffin for me. Gege has a constant need to diminish Gojo's character, that was the issue with Gojo's writing. Gojo couldn't become an interesting "strongest in the world" character because Gege couldn't let him shine. Gege sees Gojo has this uncaring asshole that people only like for his looks (they said that Gojo won the popularity vote only because female readers voted for him, which is so sexist, like women and girls only like a character's looks and cannot appreciate a character's personality and values, but also really diminishing toward his own character, as it would imply nobody could see something interesting in Gojo apart from his looks, but boy, if your character is that popular, it's not just for his looks.) but they could have made it different, a part of them clearly wanted it to be different and knew it was the way to do it. But no! Gege always comes back to hating Gojo and must make him emotionless suddenly. He is never shown to care about the two children HE RAISED for more than 10 years, while still being attached to the man that was is bestie for 3 years more than 10 years ago. That doesn't make sense at all. And he lost the two children he raised while he was pokeballed, after he got distracted. Being distrated by his ex bestie ghost cost him his surrogate family, and we are supposed to believe he is heartless enough to not care??? Gege hates Gojo, and so they keep taking away anything that could make him more interesting. Damn, Gojo wanted to make his students as strong as himself and to change the jujutsu society for the better, and he FAILED. His students are dead (Megumi was at least gone when he was alive) and he never build the new society, so him being fine with his death is so annoying. The strongest actually didn't get what he wanted, he just had "fun" and that was enough, apparently. Yeah, no, fuck you.

YOU WROTE HIM

I'm scared for the futur of jjk

Gege is the creator, the writer, the artist, the mangaka behind Jujutsu Kaisen and so, Gojo Satoru. They are their god. They had the power to make Gojo's interesting, to develop him more, to make him more weak in other aspect, to use his flaws against him, but they didn't. And that's why Gege is lazy to me. Because they refused to do the work to make things better, they chose the easy way to deal with a strong character: killing them. They kept on complaining about Gojo, like they had no power over the writing. And look, they hated Gojo for being "too strong" so they killed him, but now Sukuna and Kenjiro are too strong. Gege just keeps shooting themself in the foot.

This is my personal opinion, and you can disagree completely (don't try to change my mind, tho)

Gege has also mentioned not liking my son, my sun, my boy, Yuji, so what now? Will he also hurt his character because of that? And he has already killed like half of the characters we have been following since the beginning, which is disappointing. Like, I was invested in them, and now I'm supposed to watch some new guys, I have no interested in, fight the big bad? I'm not saying they're bad characters or boring, but it's not the fucking same. It feels like it has just become a "Who is the strongest?! Fight! Fight! Fight!" story, and sorry, but I can watch sports for that little connections or interests in the personal stories or goals (fr, I feel more connection to Teddy Riner, French Judoka, and the strongest in the world. Damn, another strongest interesting guy. He actually lost at the last Olympic Games, we were shocked). I love One Piece (and this is why it is a success) because the characters are following their dreams. They have been going into fights for more than 1000 chapters, and I read them all MULTIPLE TIMES because there's a deep connection to the characters. I love watching Luffy fights because I want him to be the King of the Pirates, because I want the people who have been wronged to get justice, because I want the pos in front of him to get their ass beat. And, as he fights to become King of the Pirates, it has a butterfly effect on the whole world and the oppressive system is crumbling. It's not just a fight. And Jujutsu Kaisen is becoming "just a fight", which seem to be enough to most male reader, but I personally find it boring.

[snowstories]

Thinking about the Orpheus and Eurydice myth and specifically a lot of modern interpretations of it. Because the thing that everyone always focuses on is Orpheus' grief, and that's understandable: it is a story about grief, and it is is grief, above all else, that transcends time, that we as a modern audience can still relate to. Who has lost a loved one and hasn't wanted to go down to the underworld to drag them up? We get it.

But it isn't just a story of love or grief; it's a story of necromancy. It is a story of looking at the laws of the world and deciding they shouldn't apply to you because they hurt to much. It is a story about defying the gods.

And a lot of modern audiences are inherently sympathetic to this, if only because every other jrpg ends with you fistfighting a god or two. Gonna take a gamble and say this read differently for ancient audiences, but I'm no classicist and feel like comparison between modern and ancient audience readings of the myth is wildly outside of my purview. I'm talking about it because I feel like this is an aspect that gets overlooked in the modern retellings and interpretations of the myth.

Because imagine you are Hades, in charge of the Underworld, a vital if extremely gloomy part of this world. Hundreds of thousands of souls stream in every day, most ordinary as they come, most mourned deeply by someone or another. Then this boy comes to you begging for his beloved. And who hasn't begged for their beloved? Sure, they don't usually come to your door, but it's not as if you haven't heard them. Most everyone down here is mourned, or was at some point. This boy is not special, except for the fact that he can sing well enough to capture your wife's attention. And it touches your heart too, if you're honest. So you'll grant his wish, on one condition: he doesn't look back.

Why do you set that condition? Is it a cruel trap? An uncaring god tricking a poor mortal, helpless against his own love? Maybe.

Or maybe it's a god asking as a mortal: do you respect me? You have come down here to plead your case, and plead it well you have, but you are asking to break the laws of the world, to bring the dead to life. If I let you do it, will you do it again? Will you tell everyone else you did it, will I have other beggars at my door, each with stories just as bad or worse than yours? Do you understand why the world can't function that way, why these laws exist, why I exist? Do you respect me?

You are asking me to break the laws of the world: do you respect them even so? Can you adhere to them when asked to? Or will you always break them, again and again, in the face of your own pain?

And Orpheus would. He would break them again and again. He does not understand them, or worse, he believes they do not apply to him because he is special.

That's why he looks back. The laws of the universe are nothing in the face of his pain. It's also why he goes back after he fails and tries to persuade Hades all over again; it's why he keeps roaming the world in mourning until he's ripped apart and dies, reuniting with Eurydice in the Underworld, finally happy (in Ovid, at least, that's where I read the myth, dunno if it appears in other ancient sources or how it's played there). In my opinion, the tragedy of Orpheus wasn't his grief or his loss; it was that he could not live with them.

I'm not here to argue for One True Interpretation of the myth, I'm perfectly aware that's not how these things work and I don't want them to work like that. I just think it's worth taking into consideration that Orpheus' quest wasn't just about grief; it was about hubris too.

[haggishlyhagging]

It is an interesting but limited exercise to show that psychologists and psychiatrists embrace these sexist norms of our culture, that they do not see beyond the most superficial and stultifying media conceptions of female nature, and that their ideas of female nature serve industry and commerce so well. Just because it's good for business doesn't mean it's wrong. What I will show is that it is wrong; that there isn't the tiniest shred of evidence that these fantasies of servitude and childish dependence have anything to do with women's true potential; that the idea of the nature of human possibility which rests on the accidents of individual development of genitalia, on what is possible today because of what happened yesterday, on the fundamentalist myth of sex organ causality, has strangled and deflected psychology so that it is relatively useless in describing, explaining or predicting humans and their behavior. It then goes without saying that present psychology is less than worthless in contributing to a vision which could truly liberate—men as well as women.

The central argument of my paper, then, is this. Psychology has nothing to say about what women are really like, what they need and what they want, essentially because psychology does not know. I want to stress that this failure is not limited to women; rather, the kind of psychology which has addressed itself to how people act and who they are has failed to understand, in the first place, why people act the way they do, and certainly failed to understand what might make them act differently.

The kind of psychology which has addressed itself to these questions divides into two professional areas: academic personality research, and clinical psychology and psychiatry. The basic reason for failure is the same in both these areas: the central assumption for most psychologists of human personality has been that human behavior rests on an individual and inner dynamic, perhaps fixed in infancy, perhaps fixed by genitalia, perhaps simply arranged in a rather immovable cognitive network. But this assumption is rapidly losing ground as personality psychologists fail again and again to get consistency in the assumed personalities of their subjects (Block, 1968). Meanwhile, the evidence is collecting that what a person does and who she believes herself to be, will in general be a function of what people around her expect her to be, and what the overall situation in which she is acting implies that she is. Compared to the influence of the social context within which a person lives, his or her history and 'traits', as well as biological make-up, may simply be random variations, 'noise' superimposed on the true signal which can predict behavior.

Some academic personality psychologists are at least looking at the counter evidence and questioning their theories; no such corrective is occurring in clinical psychology and psychiatry: Freudians and neo-Freudians, Nudic-marathonists and Touchy-feelies, classicists and swingers, clinicians and psychiatrists, simply refuse to look at the evidence against their theory and practice. And they supply their theory and practice with stuff so transparently biased as to have absolutely no standing as empirical evidence.

To summarize: the first reason for psychology's failure to understand what people are and how they act is that psychology has looked for inner traits when it should have been looking for social context; the second reason for psychology's failure is that the theoreticians of personality have generally been clinicians and psychiatrists, and they have never considered it necessary to have evidence in support of their theories.

-Naomi Weisstein, ‘Psychology Constructs the Female’ in Radical Feminism, Koedt et al (eds.)

[amalagam]

every time i see someone go off on “um ackshually ovid isn’t the real mythology he’s not even greek and he made gods into symbols of authorities that he hated so it’s invalid. and also he hated women” i feel just so deeply tired in my bones and have to rant about the same things again.

like first of all. fellas. that is Not how reception of mythology and reinterpretation through different authorial lenses works. there’s no One True Version Of The Story quite nearly Ever in orally transmitted lore and most of the time ancient religion/mythology didn’t have a set canon as we think of it today. and also metamorphoses is nearly as old as the greek versions of the myths And had a very real impact on how they were transmitted through culture up to today so you cannot just dismiss it out of hand.

second of all if he Did use stories about gods being terrible as a way to criticize irl authority i think that’s based actually. down with the gods of empire are they not just the biggest imperials of all etc etc etc.

finally despite not being a classicist i’ve read enough classicists’ wildly different takes on gender in ovid to know that it was Definitely more complicated than “he hated women.” like i’m not gonna defend this man i don’t know that much about him and i am not a classicist and also he was an ancient roman so he probably did hate women to some extent. but i do know about the reinterpretation of the same transmitted stories and i like to sit and listen to different people’s analyses of history and art.

so basically that’s why i have a very hard time swallowing this rhetoric. every story comes from everywhere and can exist in multiple forms especially if they’re that old and especially if multiple forms are that old and had equal impact. maybe instead of dismissing it you can analyze what the different versions Say and how each might be interesting to reinterpret in some way.

i’m just saying there’s a reason people seize onto wanting to retell the version of medusa who was a rape survivor and not the version of her who was just a monster without anything else. it’s because in the current day the former version resonates with people who see a reflection of many survivors’ trauma in her story of being abused and then blamed for her own abuse and failed by the powers that be. the authorities who she believed were supposed to protect her. it’s not hard to see why people’s imaginations are sparked by it and i think looking at that is more interesting than harping on about “yeah but the oldest version” and ignoring all of the reasons why people chose This version. and i bring this up because this whole post Was prompted by seeing someone be like Um But The Real Medusa WAS Just A Monster. like ok but that’s not the version the retellers you’re talking about chose to retell

(ofc i’m not saying that classical myth retellings aren’t ass a lot of the time though LMAO there Is a big problem where a lot of the ones that claim to be Feminist are somehow less feminist than the ancient versions and also definitely overdone and boring as hell. but that’s not what this post is about)

[onewomancitadel]

It is so much easier to identify flaws than it is to identify why something is successful, not because it can be subjective but because it is so contingent on the intentions of the author and what they set out to specifically do (whether this is interesting to the reader can be a different question altogether). The reason why I am interested in commenting on the YA point of debate is because never have I so clearly seen the success of works within a genre working against its genre, which is more than simply an established body of tradition but something which follows a pretty exacting formula of acceptable things for a seventeen year old girl-protagonist to do.

It's very interesting for this reason, and even more interesting because it seems to have captured an audience beyond its intended one - and underlying Young Adult is the implication that there should be an established genre for ostensible young adults - twelve year olds, thirteen year old girls - a highly gendered issue as well, though there are some aimed at teenage boys.

I enjoy studying what makes a text successful more than studying its flaws, to be sure, because it is so much harder a task and because I know how difficult writing is. That's also why I think that struggles writers have as a consequence of these genres are so interesting, especially within the realm of fanfic, which often gets conflated with the YA/romance sphere - partially for good reason since it seems like there is crossover in hyperpalatable genres, and because the fanfic subculture is where popular culture naturally will borrow from.

And it is not hyperpalatability per se something I have an issue with - not at all - in fact I think something can be hyperpalatable and literarily aspirational. Many classic works of literature are very palatable. Being difficult to read is not award-worthy, and that is, for some reason, an unjust reputation that classic literature has. It is hard to think of Homer's Iliad as being once-popular culture - so famous it spread through an established oral tradition before it made its way into being preserved in a literary tradition - now perceived as some grossly inaccessible text only for the most academic elite of classicists. There is a contradiction there.

But the question of the difficulty of writing - the common defense is 'you try to write something like this' - is actually, well, why I am interested in it, because I know it is hard, I want to know how or why authors fail or succeed with these works and these genres and I want to know what readers are enjoying and why. It is hard. So why make your life harder with something that stymies your abilities as an author to write something colourful and bodied? On the other hand, its highly formulaic nature can be a crutch - nearly every step the protagonist takes is so structured you don't have to worry, every character has been seen before.

I also wonder at what level of success are you allowed to criticise works - but that is neither here nor there. Right now I am quite troubled looking back at my own writing, so I do understand it - and this is why I prefer trying to aim towards things I am interested in and things I find rewarding, because it's so easy to notice flaws, so much harder to write something interesting. There's not an equidistribution of such abilities.

[transbutchblues]

i have not listened to anything in my roman history class this semester because my disabilities were having fun being disabling, so i’m extremely ignorant on roman/latin stuff. but classicists on tumblr make me want to study it intensely… it suddenly sounds much more interesting than in our lectures about provinces and economy and battles with too many dates and too many names. maybe this (the urge to understand online memes) will give me enough motivation to not fail my end of term exam in this class

[dukeofriven]

As a Classicist I point out that OP is working from a fallacy: a lot of what survived from Antiquity is in some sense random, and what was 'intentionally' preserved by its contemporaries often failed to be. We didn't end up with the libraries: those were all burnt. That much of what we have comes from Ancient Egypt and other desert places via dried-out midden heaps tells you much of what we have wasn't thought worth keeping. So too with palimpsests, those works we have where text was scrapped off valuable parchment and overwritten as a form of recycling (modern tech can often recover the original words.) Sometimes what we have survives is just due to volume: Cicero was one of the most prolific authors of his time, so Cicero's work survives because there was so much of it, but frustratingly often not the stuff you actually wanted. Most of the greatest Greek playwrights exist as fragments and paraphrases. There's a very, very, very bad belief that lingers on Tumblr that Sappho wasn't preserved because of misogyny and those perfidious Christian medievals not wanting to preserve the words of a sinful woman... which conveniently ignores the fact that none of Sappho's male contemporaries' works survive either: heck, at the peak of Classical cultural most Greeks struggled to even understand Sappho because she wrote in Æolic, not Attic: she was in decline at the peak of being crowned one of the greats. Sappho is one of nine poet the Hellenes called the 'canon nine', the greatest poets of the ancient Greek world: only one, Pindar, had his work survive in any quantity: we have four of his 17 compiled volumes. Like Sappho most of the rest survive as fragments in other people's commentaries and critiques: you ever even heard of Ibycus or Alcman? Livy wrote 142 volumes of his critically acclaimed History of Rome, one of the most influential work of Ancient Rome. There are 35 still extant. We have a inexplicably large amount of Valerius Maximus, which perplexes everyone because everyone agrees he sucks ass. We know Julius Cæsar himself wrote poems an a well-regarded funeral oration: only two of his fairly dull books on military campaigns endure.

A good historian will tell you that what is considered good or important in literature has historically rarely survived. What is given that honour is preserved in places that tend to be powder kegs in times of conflict. German academics spent centuries compiling all that was good and great and rare in their libraries: we bombed them flat in World War II. What survives is rarely what is good and great: what survives is traditionally what was lucky, nothing more, nothing less.

i do think theres something sad about how largely only the literature that's considered especially good or important is intentionally preserved. i want to read stuff that ancient people thought sucked enormous balls

[crystalmaiden77real]

" Creativity in Sonic is Bad, unless the Games Have it! " Game Purism: Adaptational Decay is Creativity, just care whether it's done right or not

As someone who grew up on just the games and liked the Sonic Sunday Strips which were heavily based on the games, and was fine with two of the episodes of Sonic Mania Adventures, and loved STC which started out like the games; if a continuity of Sonic was 100% like the games the only way it could stay that way would be if it was never allowed to have new ideas, because one could say about any new idea that it’s not like the games because it wasn’t done there, and eventually the amount of new ideas would be astronomical. Nobody wants a show/comic that’s nothing but Sonic fighting the same badniks and mechas he already fought and collecting Emeralds. What'd be the point if there's no new experiences in a new story besides dialogue?

Old badniks and mechas reappearing were called out as nostalgia pandering even by the average casual Classicist who never read the comics as soon as it started happening. So the ” creativity is bad crowd ” is a minority. The way other continuities are not like the games is greatly exaggerated, almost every other continuity has nearly all the fundamentals of the games and are still called nothing like the games for merely adding a few things to a universe like the games, and things in this case can mean characters or settings as well.

The Sonic games are about magical non-adult animal people fighting robots and machines in general and collecting magical gems. The only major continuity that doesn’t do all three of those is SatAM, and I can forgive that happening once in over 20 continuities. And it was still a financial and critical success, for its creativity. The only ones that JUST don’t do the magical gem collecting thing are the ones that didn’t last long enough to, like the Sonic 1991 promotional comic I bought.

I hopefully don’t have to literally list every single continuity and confirm that it does have all of those major game elements. The only other fundamental aspect of the games I didn’t mention is, the exact characterizations of the main cast. Those characterizations shouldn’t be objectively downgraded. A lot of times they are changed, but sometimes it’s just debatable whether it’s a downgrade or not, like with Sonic.

If a character’s made a massive idiot, that’s an objective downgrade. Making him more incompetent is the only way a character would count as objectively without a shadow of a doubt mischaracterized, because some people find a less nice Sonic more interesting. I’d also include “ game settings “ as a fundamental of the game universe, but I never see game purists get mad because there even are original settings at all. That’d be dumb since nearly every game introduces original settings. If anyone does hate Knothole for example, it'd make as much sense as hating a new town in a Sonic game like Empire City...

though Knothole staying hidden IS really forced so I do hate that. But that's one aspect of Knothole, it's still just a village and one that the heroes live in and that's what's supposed to be important. I can see the big picture, not fail to see the forest for the trees and just see stuff for its adaptational " decay. " It's part of why I insist on finding the good in everything in this series.

And that’s without saying the obvious fact that it’d be uncreative to only use game settings. If even Mania got criticized for having mostly old levels, imagine an alternate continuity. The only reason any ideas are called not-Sonic-like is that it just happens that they haven’t appeared in old Sonic games.

The only reason any ideas are called not like the games is that they haven’t been used in a game YET, which is what’s to be said about most ideas because the games usually have the same few plots over and over with a different coat of paint, being either “ Eggman captured living beings “ formula or “ Monster of the Week formula. “ I like the games universe, I grew up with just it but everyone knows story’s not its strong suit. Any identical adaptation would carry over that “ story’s not its strong suit “ part. I did the calculations and I like most of its stories but it’s too formulaic.

Just because something hasn’t been seen in the games doesn’t mean it doesn’t belong in or will never be in it, let alone that it doesn’t exist in the games universe, when you could make a list of everything that was introduced to the games universe by subsequent games, so something doesn’t not exist in the games universe just because it hasn’t appeared in it yet. Shadow still came to exist despite not being in Sonic Adventure, whose first cutscene had cops tell Chaos to surrender, but an IDW writer really insisted that law enforcement doesn’t exist in the Sonic games as an excuse for Clutch not being arrested yet.

Even if we’re pretending they didn’t exist or saying it’s just the human world, cops could be in a Sonic game again any day now. And this really goes to show you how meaningless it is to say a concept suits a Sonic game or doesn’t when even the people in charge of the series can change their minds about it on a dime.

Also, what about Chaos? Why not argue that god monsters in general aren’t Sonic-like because they were never in the Classic games? I doubt anyone says that. Any idea will become seen as belonging in the games if it’s done enough times. Usually an idea gets used for the games and after a while nobody’s saying it doesn’t belong in Sonic anymore even if it appeared beyond the games first. The Chaos Emeralds were revealed to be from another world in Frontiers. That happened in Fleetway first.

I wouldn’t be surprised if that idea was mocked when STC did it just for being something the games didn’t do yet. The only reason it receives any criticism in Frontiers is that it waited too long to do it. Did anyone expect there to be a 3D Sonic game plot where the planet got shattered and filled with monsters, or Eggman captured aliens? Is any new idea for a Sonic game plot Sonic-like? We should stop using Sonic-like as an objective measure of quality then because it’s unquantifiable and arbitrary.

Mediums that aren’t the games have far more story potential because they don’t have to be restricted to plots that have to have a huge variety in setting because they’re video games. But again the only way a continuity could stay 100% like the games would be by not being allowed to take advantage of said greater story potential, forcing them to miss the point of other continuities for most audiences. That’s the only way you could be fully faithful. How else do you write like the games?

That’d get canned quick. Even fanfiction has more interesting plots and it’s free. You don’t want that competing with your brand. There was already an adaptation that had the plots be almost nothing but the characters fighting enemies from the games and collecting Chaos Emeralds, and it was the Archie Sonic reboot. Game purists hate that too, and it got cancelled because it started losing sales consistently thanks to Worlds Unite and I doubt the lack of creativity did anything to retain its readership when it was cancelled in the Genesis arc, long after any problems from Worlds Unite would’ve not been in the writing anymore.

It wouldn’t have gotten canned at its most game-like if it/Sonic being like the games helped. I think it was also cancelled because Riverdale and the new gritty Archie Andrews comics were getting a lot of attention causing Archie to cancel Sonic to make room for more Archie, but if Sonic sold better it wouldn’t have done that. Anyways game purists hate the reboot because Sonic’s too much of a jerk for them in it, albeit less of one than in the preboot.

Cream being kept away from the action doesn’t help either, and of course the mere presence of the SatAM characters makes them roll their eyes. So it’s still not enough like the games. They will never be satisfied, because what they want is expecting way too much of Sega and the writers; Sega’s not competent or interested enough to make an adaptation be 100% faithful and the writers from Archie aren’t interested enough in writing exactly like them instead of Archie, and none of the writers know every detail of the games. Being like the games completely requires far too many details gotten right with decades of continuity to memorize.

Even Sonic fans can not know a thing or forget a detail, and most writers aren't fans. So you could hire any Sonic fan for a continuity just like the games, and it would inevitably get something wrong and be hated by purists no matter what. The non-purists can be trusted to still like something despite that, so who makes more sense to market towards? Everyone knows the Sonic comics are more obscure than the games because the games get more marketing and the average person's gonna look at a Sonic show and assume that you have to play the games to understand and enjoy it. So nearly no one just buys the comics and not also the games, and most people who don't already buy the games won't watch a Sonic show.

Sonic customers who only buy the games aren’t nearly as profitable. So no one should blame Sega for not pandering to game purists at the expense of everyone else, which would require not having OCs in their other continuities at all. For no reason OCs alone annoy them. Because you can totally write new towns and cities into your story with no new characters in them at all, without anyone finding it weird, and they totally wouldn’t get sick of the same few villains over and over. Here’s an instance where OCs would be better, they should’ve made OC technomages instead of bringing back the Deadly Six for the Metal Virus arc.

I wouldn’t have made it through all of Archie if I let OCs bother me. So I never kept thinking of any of its OCs as OCs the entire time I saw them. It wasn’t in the back of my mind every time I saw them. I saw them as people. Game purists talk as if there’s no good well-intentioned reason for adding new ideas to Sonic as long as it’s alternate continuity instead of a new game. They talk as if the presence of any creativity proves that it’s made by people who hate Sonic and only see the game canon as a ball and chain with rules to write around.

“ Creativity is good “ should be obvious. New continuities have original hooks to them to give them an identity to make them memorable because it’s common sense to do that for marketing them. They made Tangle and Whisper for IDW for a reason, to personify IDW. Even Sega knows it can’t sell a comic on just being an advertisement for the games. Why else did it have Sonic Mania Adventures be just Youtube videos for free instead of a TV show with a ton of episodes? They must have known most people wouldn't watch enough of that. IDW needed an OC to create hype.

What else was it supposed to do, expect a new setting no one has any reason to care about to create hype? But even the presence of OCs make game purists say it’s not like the games. They unironically say Sonic X isn’t a straight adaptation of the games. Yes it's not 100% like them but it's clearly 90% like them. They’ll talk as if there was never a show that was faithful to the games, just because Chris and the like happened to be in Sonic X as side characters that were usually not the focus anyways. Sonic X was based on SA1. For game purists.

The only reason it got the characters wrong was Sega of Japan; we see X characterization in the games at the same time, like Knuckles being dumber. That means those mischaracterizations were the Sega standard at the time. Their ingratitude for Sonic X is proof that Sonic should never try to have a show heavily based on the games again because it’s not profitable when the only people who would stay interested in it would disown it on the first sign of OCs, even though every main game introduces a character. The Ring power-up thing was also not like the games but only because we didn't see that in the games and who's to say Tails is too stupid to invent a Ring that could power up Sonic? He made a fake Emerald.

It’s fine to merely be indifferent to non-game material, or dislike it for actually good reasons, but the game purists are the ones that hate it all specifically because their ideology that creativity is bad makes appreciating what’s good about adaptations impossible, when the very concept that Archie was special for having its own ideas is impossible for them to understand. They won’t believe you. These blind haters always spend most of the time they talk about Sonic insulting Sonic, for what it’s doing new, while lacking the self-awareness needed to realize that they aren’t Sonic fans.

Only on the internet are you believed about being a fan when you hate the vast majority of something, just because you said so. Wanting a franchise to succeed and be good isn’t enough, basically everyone wants nearly every franchise to be good and successful. If talking about something a lot made you a fan, Game Grumps would be Sonic Adventure fans for doing a Let’s Play of it where they trashed it. If barely experiencing something made you a fan, everyone who played Ms. Pac Man would count as a Pac Man fan even if they aren’t fans of most of its series.

I fall into that group, I find Pac Man World 2 to be too complicated and hard to get into based on its tutorial level. Am I a Pac Man fan? I only like the first couple of issues of Superman from the Golden Age. I won’t say I’m a Superman fan, I won’t even talk about its recent stuff. If you try to quantify what makes someone a fan with actual logic, it’s so easy to see that people use the term fan too lightly.

While it’s frustrating enough that someone would have such a colossally bad take as ” adaptations should always be 100% redundant with main canon, ” it’s their pretentiousness and snobby attitude towards actual fans that irritates me. There’s a word for people who hate the vast majority of a series but still claim to be fans, it’s ” anti-fan. ” I just wish they all admitted that they hate Sonic and that most of it isn’t meant for them instead of seeing and presenting themselves as authorities Sega should be exclusively listening to, instead of thinking, ” Just say you hate the games ” to everyone simply paying a compliment to Archie.

I’d like if all of the game purists made a list of the Sonic games they didn’t hate because with all of the controversial Sonic games I doubt even they could like more than 50% of them, meaning that we could say they hate the games too, because if hating most of something doesn’t mean you hate it, how IS it defined? Cherry-picking a few games/stories and saying that only they count for some reason? Sega wants you to say that everything it made counts so they’ll get more customers. That’s part of why it tweeted, ” everything is canon. ”

Liking the concepts of a series doesn't mean you're a fan of the series, everyone likes Superman but not everyone is a fan of most Superman stories.

Of course it’s fine to hate most of the alternate continuities for legitimate reasons, that’s not what this is about, but the argument that merely adding new things to the source material is bad is silly and embarrassing. Almost none of them change the source material, just add to it, so there’s a lot less faithful adaptations.

Everyone knows that TMNT did the right thing by giving unique personalities to the Turtles in the 80s cartoon and not having one of its most famous villains killed off in his first story past the first TMNT comic. I doubt anyone would demonize these things as Adaptational Decay. So why is it okay for TMNT to not be loyal to the source material but not Sonic? TMNT proved it can be a great idea to be creative and it became a lot more popular because of it.

So they don't think all adaptational change is bad, at least I doubt it because that'd be crazy, they just have personal preferences with how Sonic should be, so they shouldn't be talking as if the very concept of not being 100% faithful to the original continuity is sacrilegious heresy. Because anyone who likes any of the unique personalities of the Turtles, anything TMNT that started in the 80s cartoon first isn't consistent with that belief.

Poor articulation can make any argument look stupid and cause it to get " strawmanned " I'm not intentionally doing that, it being about creativity is bad rhetoric is honestly the impression that game purism gives to me when you have someone who always finds an excuse to hate an adaptational change no matter how obviously petty and no matter how obvious it is that the change is good. Some changes are bad and some are good, it depends. It's mature to take things on a case by case basis instead of going Bias Steamroller and seeing things in black and white.

[a-mythologynerd]

Reid is so right and sorry to butt in here but as someone with a ma in classical archaeology, Ancient Greek is so hard!!! I know very few people who just “get it.” I just wanted to say emotionally, lots and lots and lots of classicists before you have failed Greek or come close to failing Greek or have had to try it again and again and still have trouble with it. That’s not unusual, you are not alone, and it is not a measure of you. Taking a really hard subject matter and having it be hard is not a moral failing and you will get through it. It took me years before I felt like I barely understood it and immediately after I wasn’t doing it every day I was back to where I began. There is a reason the phrase “it’s all Greek to me!” exists in the English language. My prof always used to say a part of the Ancient Greek identity was the fact that they were born speaking it in their dialect and that was notoriously hard to learn as an outsider marking anyone else as a barbarian. There is literally a still ancient version of Greek called Koine Greek that was purposely standardized and more accessible because the ancienter varieties and dialects are so much more difficult. All that to say is, Ancient Greek is really hard and you shouldn’t feel humiliated for having trouble with something the vast overwhelming majority of people have trouble with. Just keep trying and doing what’s right for you.

Hi! I’m sorry if you’re not open to receiving these kinds of asks, but i figured i would try anyways since i’m having a difficult time and want an outside perspective.

I’m doing a classics degree and i’m about to drop my (non obligatory) advanced ancient greek class for the second time because i’m not at all on track to pass it once again. I did a bit better the second time around, but not better enough. I know this class is notoriously hard. I know that not everyone in my program even tries to do the advanced language classes , and i know that the way i learn puts me at a disadvantage with the way that this class is structured, and i know i can learn it on my own time or try again during my masters. But man. It feels really bad and humiliating! I’m really passionate about this stuff and it hurts to be having a hard time with it!

Ig i’m not really looking for academic advice, I know what I have to do, but do you have any advice on how to deal with something like this emotionally/mentally?

Hey there,

I hear you: struggling with something, especially when it's important to you, is hard. I think you should give yourself credit for doing the right thing for your situation even when that thing is hard.

You said you weren't looking for advice, but if I could give you one little tidbit anyway:

Try reframing this situation by coming at it with kindness and compassion for 1) your present self, and 2) your future self. This is not a failing— by your own description, this is an advanced, optional extra that, in this form, is uniquely challenging for you.

Your present self does not deserve being put down because you tried (really hard, from the sound of it!) to make the best of an unconducive learning environment. Instead, mark the significance of that effort, even if it didn't end in the results you wanted. Do you know how many people wouldn't take this class at all, or would have given up after the first try? Honor the effort and determination you brought to bear.

Second, in the present, think about your future self as you decide what steps to take next. You could keep grinding away at this specific course, but perhaps it's time to start thinking about different paths for the future. Honor the effort and determination your future self will contribute by setting up a learning experience that will be (ideally) both helpful and enjoyable.

How do you learn and are there any formats that work better for your learning style? Could you take an independent study with this professor or find a course somewhere else? What would learning this look like on your own? Keep these things in mind for the future.

This is an important lesson for the rest of your life, even outside of an academic setting. Depending on what you do before applying to master's programs, this could also be a very powerful thing to include in your personal statement. Programs want to hear how you pick yourself up after you stumble (because everyone stumbles) and your persistence here speaks highly towards your dedication to the field.

-Reid

[persefoneshalott]

the “secret history” kids really are nerds huh