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Grocery Shopping is a Dangerous Job tells the story of Perrenette “Peri” Phelan, Juliet “Jules” Lilly, Virgo Ball, and Jamie Fern, friends brought together by the inescapable bonds of magic school and teenage hormones. One cold day in January 2003, they go grocery shopping as an excuse for a double date, and accidentally end up saving the tri-county area while doing battle with a giant squid and drinking cold process soap to achieve flight.

If you like queer teen adventure stories, Animorphs, urban fantasy, dramatic kisses, pulling an Erika Mitchell on deserving authors, or reminiscing about a point in your life before works you love became irrevocably stained, consider giving this a try! Especially because it is on-purpose available for $0.00, and will always be that price!

This is an edited and prettied-up version of the story already available on Tumblr, with chapters and cool ePub formatting. Maybe think about giving it a click?

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The combination of 'unnervingly flawless self-control' with 'occasional tendency to engage in reckless, dangerous, and borderline self-destructive or death-seeking behaviour' in a character is SUCH catnip to me

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because the other piece of this is that absolutely no adaptation of the Iliad is ONLY adapting the Iliad. they’re drawing from other sources. and I must ask why those other sources excise the history of sexual violence and the cycle of abuse that’s seen from the Trojan (Troian, I’m stuck there after The Iron Age) side when from a literary perspective -

make Laodemon Ganymede’s father. Zeus pays him in horses for the kidnapping of his son.

Laodemon refuses to appease Apollo and Poseidon, they demand that he feed his daughter Hesione to Cetus if Troy is to be spared from divine wrath. Laodemon calls on Heracles for help.

Heracles takes Hesione because Laodemon won’t pay him in horses for the removal of Cetus. Laodemon blames the Greeks for his daughter’s situation. everyone’s fault but yours, right?

Paris comes home dramatically with the story of three goddesses giving him a boon, the most beautiful woman in the world. shoutout to The Iron Age again here because it has Priam and Hector explicitly sign off on Helen’s kidnapping (which Paris is enacting because he believes he’s moving under divine blessing) due to Helen’s acquisition being seen as “revenge” for Hesione’s kidnapping and that needs to be used more

we all know Agamemnon’s fate. killing your daughter to go to war. it continues.

Cassandra and Chryseis are left to suffer by the same Apollo who demanded Hesione’s life. [cuts my IRL beef with Apollo out of this section with a hacksaw]

Helen wants to go home. Aphrodite won’t let her go home.

I just. come on, guys, all of this matters

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look -

it’s impossible to engage with the epic cycle as the original audience would.

there’s a delicate balance between cultural relativism (acknowledging that the characters in this very old story are from a society with a system of morals and an understanding of morality that are very different from our own) and contemporary understanding (adding our own morals into our dialogue with the cycle so that how we perceive the characters is going to be informed by who we are now and what our society feels now)

and I’m not out here simping for conventional 21st century morals, because we don’t have everything right, but (very important ‘but’ here) - we are capable of recognizing that Helen is a victim of sexual violence. we as a society that is ostensibly obsessed with feminist retellings of Greek and Roman stories are capable of calling it like it is. it doesn’t actually matter that Paris and Hector and all the rest wouldn’t have seen kidnapping Helen and forcing her into marriage with Paris as a bad thing! we can see it as a bad thing right now and judge them by what they did in the text! and holy shit, it doesn’t actually matter how “good” and “noble” and “kind” and “princely” someone is if he’s also on the side of his piece of shit kidnapper brother! it doesn’t make you tragic and doomed if your loyalty to your home city-state overrules your personal objection to its politics and your family’s actions! that’s Gods and Generals garbage, that’s “I’m not fighting for the Confederacy I’m fighting for Virginia!” bullshit, and I’m sick and tired of people acting like it makes Hector a noble victim of the gods’ whims for him to go “oh look at me I’m such a good and great and incredible guy whose brother is sooooo bad, but I’m not gonna free Helen!!!”

because none of them are freeing Helen. the Achaeans are a lot of morally dubious weirdos with deep deep flaws but they are at least here to free Helen. we cannot help bringing our morals with us! mine say “if what the Achaeans do to Briseis and Chryseis is wrong, if what Odysseus does to his slave women is wrong, if Calypso’s rape of Odysseus is just as wrong as Zeus’s rapes and Apollo’s rapes, then what happened to Helen is wrong too.”

and I’m just not comfortable with the idea that I’m gonna have to sit through YET ANOTHER RENDITION of “oh those poor innocent victimized Trojans who were brutally slaughtered despite never doing anything wrong!”

it’s sexual violence all the way down. they are not innocent. there aren’t any innocents.

saw that there’s gonna be an Iliad musical by Jorge-who-did-Epic and I’m Dreading This please fuck no keep your hands off that story

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I’m gonna have to deal with more people liking Hector. fml. fuck fuck fuck.

saw that there’s gonna be an Iliad musical by Jorge-who-did-Epic and I’m Dreading This please fuck no keep your hands off that story

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saw that there’s gonna be an Iliad musical by Jorge-who-did-Epic and I’m Dreading This please fuck no keep your hands off that story

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the costumes in The Buccaneers cause me psychic damage but simultaneously they’re really good inspiration for the kind of vaguely anachronistic urban fantasy aesthetics I keep around for the Lillys and the Balls

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TOP 5 MOST PRESSING QUESTIONS ABOUT CAPTAIN PICARD:

Is he GAY? Is he ALIVE? Is he GAY? Is he DEAD? Is he GAY?

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too bitter we cried       abused nature  we loved too fiercely                          our lovers shamed  too many poems we wrote                          disregarding poets  they'll not let us die in Paris  and the alluring water                          under the Pont Mirabeau  will be encircled with barricades  (Natalka Bilotserkivets's poem "We'll Not Die in Paris")

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THE WORLD TO COME (2020) dir. Mona Fastvold

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this post is so funny to me because Academy Award winner Richard Taylor’s face is burned into my brain (guy above in glasses) and like

yeah I’d say he knows a thing or two about giant bugs

today's bug thing is this giant beetle sculpture!

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NAOMIE HARRIS as TIA DALMA / CALYPSO in PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END (2007)

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Grocery Shopping is a Dangerous Job tells the story of Perrenette “Peri” Phelan, Juliet “Jules” Lilly, Virgo Ball, and Jamie Fern, friends brought together by the inescapable bonds of magic school and teenage hormones. One cold day in January 2003, they go grocery shopping as an excuse for a double date, and accidentally end up saving the tri-county area while doing battle with a giant squid and drinking cold process soap to achieve flight.

If you like queer teen adventure stories, Animorphs, urban fantasy, dramatic kisses, pulling an Erika Mitchell on deserving authors, or reminiscing about a point in your life before works you love became irrevocably stained, consider giving this a try! Especially because it is on-purpose available for $0.00, and will always be that price!

This is an edited and prettied-up version of the story already available on Tumblr, with chapters and cool ePub formatting. Maybe think about giving it a click?

[lucillewalterblack]

Hi, I noticed your story has conflict in it, and I was wondering why you didn't just write people who are right doing everything correctly with a note saying "I enthusiastically co-sign everything in this story"? Must be some kind of mistake haha