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I seriously need people to understand that Penelope didn't wait for Odysseus for twenty years because social expectations dictated it, or because she was expected to be a faithful wife even untill she died.

Actually it was exactly the opposite: her father wanted her to remarry, some of the women wanted her to remarry, her son made her understand that if she took another husband and left home he wouldn't stop her. And at a certain point she recounts that before leaving for war Odysseus had told her that if he were to die, she could remarry whoever she liked (making sure first that Telemachus would take the throne without problems).

I need people to understand that Penelope's choice was entirely personal. She didn't remarry because her love for Odysseus had never abandoned her, because she knew that with no one else could she find that complete identity of thought and mind, that homophrosyne that she had with him.

It was not the choice of a woman who was modest and trapped by the expectations of her time. It was the choice of a woman who was freer and more independent than others, who preferred to remain without the protection of a man rather than resign herself to not having HER man.

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Empty Chair

Prompt: Talk To Me @flashfictionfridayofficial

Fandom: Halo: Forward Unto Dawn

Summary: Chyler never answers.

Notes: Headcanon is that Tom's relationship with his mother has gotten so bad he just calls her the Colonel.

Lasky made it to his room in the pilots quarters, half-falling through as the door slid open. He managed to peel off his flight jacket before he fell face first onto his bed, booted feet hanging off the side.

"It was a bad day," Tom said as he rolled onto his side, dragging the pillow under his head.

Chyler sat in the desk chair turned toward his bed. She wore her dress whites, perfect as always. Hair braided away from her face. She inclined her head to one side for him to go on.

Tom sighed. "My squad lost two today. Nesbitt and Rascal. It was supposed to be an escort mission. Just getting some brass to their carrier, but Covenant showed up. How are they so much faster?" He pursed his lips as he ran a hand over his shorn hair. "Nesbitt and Rascal were gone before the LT could even start issuing orders. Healy and I peeled off to provide cover so the brass could get to the carrier. Carver went straight at a ship that had to be at least corvette class by its size."

Chyler watched him, nodding.

He scrubbed his hand over his face. "I swear, Carver's deathwish is the only thing keeping her alive." His chest hurt, but the medics had cleared him once he'd gotten back aboard the ship. "We weren't getting commands, so I started giving the squad orders. Turns out LT was injured on the way to the carrier. They're alive, but it's bad enough they're being put into cryo until we rendezvous with a medical ship or can make it to Reach. There's chatter I might get the position as squad lead. It should go to Carver by seniority, but..."

Chyler gave a sad smile as if to agree with the thought but Carver's deathwish.

Tom sighed. "Did I tell you the Colonel has been showing interest in me all of a sudden. She's advising me to change career paths. Thinks I should be on the bridge of a starship instead of flitting around in a glorified titanium canister. My astronavigation is good enough, I know I'd qualify. And Captain Jessup intimated I'd be a good fit for a warfare officer, if I wanted to retrain."

Chyler said nothing.

He dropped his hand away from his face. "I'd hate to give up my titanium canister and go where the Colonel wants, but... I could do more on a ship. The UNSC is hurting for officers, and I... There's a lot of young hot heads willing to train as marines and pilots. I'm willing to do more. I should do more. Right?"

Chyler blinked slowly at him.

Tom threw an arm over his face. "It would be selfish not to. I've seen so many, too many, planets fall like Circinius since the Academy was destroyed. We have to find a way to stop it. There has to be some way to win."

Chyler sat there in his room, forever seventeen and forever silent, as Tom lifted his arm again

"I wish you could talk to me," he said to the empty chair

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We never really talked about it but The Ugly Ducking that grew up to be a beautiful swan was still probably pretty fugly from a duck’s perspective

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CHARACTERS ARE ALLOWED TO BE SHITTY. THEY ARE ALLOWED TO BE BAD PEOPLE. THEY ARE ALLOWED TO HAVE BAD OPINIONS AND EVENTUALLY REALISE THAT THEY'RE WRONG AND TRY TO CORRECT THEMSELVES. CHARACTERS OPINIONS ARE NOT A REFLECTION OF THE WRITERS OPINIONS. I BEG OF YA'LL. LEARN BASIC STORY TELLING TECHNIQUES. CHARACTERS ARE ALLOWED TO BE FLAWED WITHOUT BEING 100% A TERRIBLE PERSON. BECAUSE. THATS JUST HOW PEOPLE ARE IN REAL LIFE.

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[ID: an illustration labeled “Iconic fauna of Hawai’i”, depicting animals - an i’iwi bird, a monk seal, a humpback whale, an Oahu tree snail, a yellow-faced bee, a nēnē goose, a Hawaiian hawk, a hoary bat, and a reef triggerfish. Teal leaves adorn the background and there is a red, yellow, and blue patterned border. Animals are labeled with their Hawaiian and English names. End.]

The theme for Creature Mail this month is endemic island creatures! This design will be a postcard. :-)

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✨ Please reblog the polls to make them reach out to as many people as possible, but KEEP IT SPOILER-FREE to make people listen to the music with an open mind 💖 Artists and titles will be revealed after the poll's conclusion, check the original post for an update! ✨

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Yes, very important to be aware that it is a wiki and therefore that you can fix things that are wrong. And very satisfying to the English Degree part of my brain to get to go, in a friendly factual way, "Training Accident* is a trope about the characters thinking they're in a real emergency and then finding out it was a test, therefore this example where they know it's a test from the beginning/it was a real accident from the beginning does not fit and I am removing it".

*(to name a trope I love which tends to get incorrect "examples")

thinking again about TvTropes and how it’s genuinely such an amazing resource for learning the mechanics of storytelling, honestly more so than a lot of formally taught literature classes

reasons for this:

basically TvTropes breaks down stories mechanically, using a perspective that’s not…ABOUT mechanics. Another way I like to put it, is that it’s an inductive, instead of deductive, approach to analyzing storytelling.

like in a literature or writing class you’re learning the elements that are part of the basic functioning of a story, so, character, plot, setting, et cetera. You’re learning the things that make a story a story, and why. Like, you learn what setting is, what defines it, and work from there to what makes it effective, and the range of ways it can be effective.

here’s the thing, though: everyone has some intuitive understanding of how stories work. if we didn’t, we couldn’t…understand stories.

TvTropes’s approach is bottom-up instead of top-down: instead of trying to exhaustively explore the broad, general elements of story, it identifies very small, specific elements, and explores the absolute shit out of how they fit, what they do, where they go, how they work.

Every TvTropes article is basically, “Here is a piece of a story that is part of many different stories. You have probably seen it before, but if not, here is a list of stories that use it, where it is, and what it’s doing in those stories. Here are some things it does. Here is why it is functionally different than other, similar story pieces. Here is some background on its origins and how audiences respond to it.”

all of this is BRILLIANT for a lot of reasons. one of the major ones is that the site has long lists of media that utilizes any given trope, ranging from classic literature to cartoons to video games to advertisements. the Iliad and Adventure Time ARE different things, but they are MADE OF the same stuff. And being able to study dozens of examples of a trope in action teaches you to see the common thread in what the trope does and why its specific characteristics let it do that

I love TvTropes because a great, renowned work of literature and a shitty, derivative YA novel will appear on the same list, because they’re Made Of The Same Stuff. And breaking down that mental barrier between them is good on its own for developing a mechanical understanding of storytelling.

But also? I think one of the biggest blessings of TvTropes’s commitment to cataloguing examples of tropes regardless of their “merit” or literary value or whatever…is that we get to see the full range of effectiveness or ineffectiveness of storytelling tools. Like, this is how you see what makes one book good and another book crappy. Tropes are Tools, and when you observe how a master craftsman uses a tool vs. a novice, you can break down not only what the tool is most effective for but how it is best used.

In fact? There are trope pages devoted to what happens when storytelling tools just unilaterally fail. e.g. Narm is when creators intend something to be frightening, but audiences find it hilarious instead.

On that note, TvTropes is also great in that its analysis of stories is very grounded in authors, audiences, and culture; it’s not solely focused on in-story elements. A lot of the trope pages are categories for audience responses to tropes, or for real-world occurrences that affected the storytelling, or just the human failings that creep into storytelling and affect it, like Early Installment Weirdness. There are categories for censorship-driven storytelling decisions. There are “lineages” of tropes that show how storytelling has changed over time, and how audience responses change as culture changes. Tropes like Draco in Leather Pants or Narm are catalogued because the audience reaction to a story is as much a part of that story—the story of that story?—as the “canon.”

like, storytelling is inextricable from context. it’s inextricable from how big the writers’ budget was, and how accepting of homophobia the audience was, and what was acceptable to be shown on film at the time. Tropes beget other tropes, one trope is exchanged for another, they are all linked. A Dead Horse Trope becomes an Undead Horse Trope, and sometimes it was a Dead Unicorn Trope all along. What was this work responding to? And all works are responding to something, whether they know it or not

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No but sometimes this is how you get yourself to leave early (thus giving yourself a buffer if getting there takes longer if you thought:) "It's fine if I get there early, I'll have something to read!"

realistically there is no chance i will have time to read, imma still bring a book though

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Never Saying Goodbye

@flashfictionfridayofficial I've been sitting on this prompt for a while.

Corey’s phone went off and he checked it automatically. It was from Levi. A text. A long text.

If you’re reading this, that means I’m gone. I’m so sorry to have to tell you this way. You’ve been the best friend I could have asked for, the best friend I’ve ever had. Thank you.

It felt so sincere he expected Levi to actually be gone when he looked up.

But someone was still standing next to him, and when he looked up it was still Levi, leaning slightly on the railing, one hand wrapped loosely around the glass sitting on the thin strip of table. “What’s up?” said Levi. Then, reacting to whatever expression was on Corey’s face, “What? You look like you saw a ghost.”

“…are you a ghost?” said Corey.

“What?”

Corey moved closer to show him the phone, their shoulders overlapping as Levi leaned in.

“Shit,” Levi said in a slow whisper.

He did not sound confused. He did not sound surprised. He sounded dismayed.

He knew what this was. He was only sorry Corey had seen it now.

Corey looked at him, kept looking at him even though Levi wouldn’t meet his eyes. “What do you mean, gone?”

Levi’s mouth opened but no words came out.

“Talk to me!” said Corey. “What does this mean?”

Presumably, eventually, realizing Corey was just going to keep staring at him until he said something, Levi said in a tight whisper, “You weren’t supposed to get it yet.”

“Obviously.”

“My dumb ass set it for 3PM instead of 3AM.”

“You were going to text me at 3AM to tell me that you were gone? The fuck?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Levi mumbled.

“I’m the best friend you’ve ever had and you were going to do who knows what in the dead of night and I would never see you again and you don’t even want to talk about it?”

“Ssh!” Levi threw a frightened glance at the patio below.

Corey hadn’t realized his voice had risen so much. He lowered it. “What am I supposed to think?”

“You’re not supposed to know about it,” said Levi.

“Until you…”

“It’s not what you think. At least, what I think you think.”

“Well, are you going to tell me what it is? Or are you not the friend you thought you were?” If he’d thought a second longer he might not have worded that so harshly, but it was out and it was how he felt. He took a long drink and tried to think of what to do if Levi didn’t answer him. Thought about walking away, and tried to decide if he could really do it.

Levi leaned in again, just a little. “You cannot tell anyone, understand? I’m not supposed to tell anyone. No one is supposed to know. If you know, it will be obvious who told you.”

“Tell anyone what?”

“I’m not who you think I am.” Levi winced. “Entirely. I haven’t been acting different and I’ve never lied—just not told you things—but my name is not what you think it is.”

Now that Corey thought about it, he could think of more than a couple times that Levi had dodged away from telling him things. Like where he was from and where he’d worked before here. Why he’d moved here when he didn’t know anybody around here.

“And now I have to go. And I can’t tell you why.”

“Not when you’ve told me this much?”

Levi laughed weakly. “I haven’t told you much.”

Corey looked up, thinking. “Could you tell me if I came with you?”

Levi looked at him so hard that Corey looked him in the eye, and Levi’s eyes held his, deeply serious. “Do you really want to do that? Have no one know where you went? Never say goodbye, or say it and not tell them why?”

There was a spark of something in his eyes. Corey was pretty sure it was hope.

“If you do—and I’m not saying you should.” Levi looked away as he said that. “Then meet me here tonight. Late. Bring some clothes and be ready to go.”

Corey didn’t say he would do it. He couldn’t really imagine just leaving like that.

But then, he couldn’t imagine letting Levi go, never knowing where, never knowing why.

Your best friend has left their last message for you, lamenting that they are no longer in this world should you receive that last message. It would have been emotional and tragic, had said friend not standing next to you, alive and in good health.

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✨ Please reblog the polls to make them reach out to as many people as possible, but KEEP IT SPOILER-FREE to make people listen to the music with an open mind 💖 Artists and titles will be revealed after the poll's conclusion, check the original post for an update! ✨

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This just inspired me to defrost a pumpkin chocolate chip muffin! They're so dense they freeze beautifully, so you can make three batches (using up a whole large can of pumpkin) and store them in the freezer for months.

1 2/3 cup flour

¾ cup sugar

¼ t baking soda

Pumpkin pie spice (2 t cinnamon, 1 t ginger, ½ t nutmeg, ¼ t cloves, or if you don't have most of those I'd just buy pumpkin pie spice and do 3 heaping teaspoons)

2 eggs

1 c canned pumpkin

½ c butter or margarine

¾ c chocolate chips

In a large-ish bowl, melt butter in the microwave. In a larger bowl, stir together the flour, sugar, baking soda, and spices. To the melted butter add the pumpkin and eggs and beat until smooth. Add the wet ingredients to the dry and mix until all combined, then add the chocolate chips and stir to evenly mix them in. Grease a muffin tin, spoon in the batter, and bake for 20-25 minutes. (And if you're doing more than one batch, use that time to mix up the next one!)

okay so if you need more veggies/fruit, protein or fibre (bc most people do NOT eat enough) in your diet but you struggle to do so, hear me out:

look up recipes (especially snack recipes) that are child/toddler/baby-friendly

i can guarantee there is a woman with a cooking blog out there who has found away to pack a bunch of vegetables into a surprisingly delicious little snack for her kids. this process has never failed me when i feel like i am not eating enough fruits and veggies. my entire flat is eating spinach muffins at the moment, which doesn’t sounding particularly appealing to most people and yet somehow. they’re delicious.

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This website has a list of cities by latitude that you can search if you're not sure; alternatively, google "[place] latitude."

We ask your questions anonymously so you don’t have to! Submissions are open on the 1st and 15th of the month.

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This website has a list of cities by latitude that you can search if you're not sure; alternatively, google "[place] latitude."

We ask your questions anonymously so you don’t have to! Submissions are open on the 1st and 15th of the month.

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Rowan shifted from foot to foot, waiting. He had no idea how long the public, official marriage discussions were going to take. He had to be here, ready, when it was time for the private one.

Finally he heard voices. Through the wall he couldn’t make out the words. Then the wall opened into the library and there was Callia, greeting him with a nervous smile.

She stepped back to let him into the library. His eyes searched, and found, and took his first look at Callia’s prospective wife.

“This is Rowan,” Callia said, her back straight, her voice level. “We’re together.”

Minerva showed perhaps a small flicker of surprise. Practiced in facing the public, just like Callia. “Then you don’t want the match,” she said.

“I’m interested in the match,” said Callia. “I’m looking for marriage. But not for love.”

Minerva tilted her head. “Interesting.”

“Do you want to know why?”

“Do you want to tell me?”

Callia laughed, and it felt like a real laugh. “You should know, shouldn’t you? It’s only fair. And you want to know, I’m sure you do. I’m cursed,” she explained, stepping closer. “My first husband will die.”

“Husband, specifically.”

“Specifically.”

“And you’d want a husband.”

“Meaning do I like men and not women? Yes. But also the man that I like would not be a match politically. And you certainly are.”

Minerva sat back in the chair. She looked at Rowan. “What do you think about it?”

Rowan did not know how to phrase these things diplomatically. He didn’t even try. “Well, I’d like to marry her, but I don’t want to die.”

Callia threw him a look of withering disbelief. But Minerva laughed, and the laugh felt real. “So you wouldn’t mind her being married to someone else?”

Maybe a bit of diplomacy here because he couldn’t honestly say he wouldn’t mind. “I want the best we can have and that seems to be the best we can have. She says you’re a good political match and I trust her, so I support it."

There was silence for a moment. “What do you think?” said Callia, a hint of nervousness in her voice that Minerva probably didn’t hear.

Minerva narrowed her eyes and looked back at the bookshelves behind Rowan. “Where did you come from?”

“Oh, there’s a passageway behind the shelves. To the kitchens. I’m a cook.”

When he thought to look at Callia, her expression was a wry smile.

Minerva leaned on her hand. Her expression was thoughtful. “So you’re here. That’s easy. Did you build the passage? Have it built for the two of you?”

Rowan looked at Callia this time, let her decide how much they should share. She said, “No, it was here. We wonder if someone else was in the same position, once.”

“Or there was a ruler who liked to cook.”

“Or a cook who liked to read,” said Rowan.

“Maybe.” Minerva went silent, thinking.

Rowan’s fingers drifted into a hopeful gesture at his side.

“So we’d be relying on no one noticing anything between the two of you. Which they haven’t so far? How long has it been?”

“Years,” said Rowan. Callia said it at the same time.

“I don’t even talk about liking his cooking.”

“I try not to tell her what I cook.”

“Oh, true—I do say a lot that the cooking is good but that’s because it is all very good.” Callia really felt that way, Rowan knew, but she said it like it was a selling point. Which it was, he supposed. He almost wished it wasn’t.

No, he wouldn’t think that. He had already said it—everything he had said was true. He wished he could marry her, but he didn’t want to die. If the best he could have was what he had now, and Callia married to a good political match who knew a good political match was all it was, then he needed to take the best he could have when it was in front of him.

 Eyes narrowed a bit, Minerva said, “And you’d support me looking for love elsewhere?”

“Of course. And hope you’d be lucky enough to find someone so understanding.” Callia gave Rowan a smile, her eyes shining.

Some people who were married, Rowan knew, didn’t have what he had.

The princess was cursed that her first husband will die a tragic death. The princess decided to have a wife instead.the person who put the curse on her did not check this would happen

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Broken Up and Brought Together

@flashfictionfridayofficial Tell me I can write more than 1,000 words and you don't have to tell me twice! Sort of disappointed I only got in 2/6 prompts (maybe 2.5 if you count the fire) compared to 3/5 for #100, but on the other hand I got this one posted on time

Addy had stayed in her room that first night. She was going out tomorrow—she was not going to sit in her room the whole time. She was going to have fun. But tonight she hadn’t felt like going out by herself, so she hadn’t forced it. She’d ordered a pizza from a place that had a lot of fun pizzas, choosing one with peach barbecue sauce because Troy would have hated it because he was ‘fundamentally opposed’ to fruit in condiments that were not for breakfast foods, and she’d gone downstairs to pick it up and eaten it on her bed with her laptop playing reality dating shows.

She’d finished the pizza but was in the middle of an episode when the power went out.

At first she thought it was just the lightbulb, but when she opened the door to go look for the manager she saw the whole hallway was dark.

A door opened across the hall. It was a woman about Addy’s mom’s age. When she spotted Addy she gave her a small smile.

“I am so sorry!” said a voice from the direction of the stairs. It was the manager. “This has never happened before. I have no idea what happened. I feel like we should definitely have a generator, and I will definitely look into getting one, but it honestly never occurred to me the power would go out because this never happens.” By now she had reached them and was standing in the middle of the hall, scratching her head with a pained smile.

Addy heard a door open behind her and glanced back to see a woman a few years older than her. She thought. She wasn’t great at telling if someone was older or younger than her when it was close.

“Obviously that doesn’t help you,” the manager went on. “I guess I should offer you all refunds if you want to go somewhere else—if there’s power elsewhere, I don’t know. Maybe it’s a brown-out or something.”

“You haven’t seen this as long as you’ve managed here?” the woman across the hall from Addy asked.

“I don’t think it happened the whole time my parents owned the place.”

“Your parents owned the place?”

“Yeah, for decades,” said Addy, then added a bit sheepishly because clearly not everybody read the website, “I read the website.”

“I’m okay staying here,” said the woman further down the hall. “The power went out a bunch at my parents’ house when I was growing up. And I travel with a flashlight.”

“Yeah, I don’t need to leave,” said Addy. “I understand. And who knows, it might come back on any time.”

“Wish I’d brought a book,” said the woman across the hall.

“Yeah. I probably can’t get enough light to sketch.”

“Come out to the fire pit if you want,” said the manager. “I can get a fire going. I should have smore supplies and probably toast tite supplies too.”

“What’s a toast tite?” said the artist.

“Toasty bread with some kind of fruit filling. I like cherry pie. Mom always used chunky applesauce.”

“I’d try it,” said the mom-ish woman.

They all went out to the patio and the manager, whose name was Emma, got the fire going and opened up a can of cherry pie filling and made toast tites for her and Lori. The woman about Emma’s age introduced herself as Britt and asked if Addy was any better than her at roasting marshmallows—she always burned hers and she hated eating burned ones—so Addy stuck three on a stick and was extra careful not to hold them too close to the fire.

“So why are we all here alone?” Lori asked, her toast tite on a plate Emma had run inside to get when she realized that fresh-cooked it was too hot to hold. “I’m guessing the rest of you have stories, because I have one.”

“If you want to tell it,” said Britt, “go for it.”

“Divorce,” said Lori. “That’s the short version.”

“What’s the longer version?” said Emma.

“The classic ‘left me for a younger woman’. Who he met through work. They’d hang out together on business trips. She was just so much more exciting, and he hadn’t felt that excited with me in a long time.”

“It had nothing to do with the fact that they were in new exciting places and didn’t have to worry about kids,” said Britt, carefully taking a marshmallow when Addy offered them. “Perfect,” she said, and popped it into her mouth.

“We’ll see,” said Lori, a gleam in her eye. “When I said I was going on vacation by myself, they said they were going on vacation too. But his parents are a plane flight away so they couldn’t take the kids. And my parents wouldn’t take the kids.”

“Because they wanted to see what would happen?” Addy deduced. She’d finished her marshmallows and was toasting more.

“You bet.” Lori was eating her toast tite by now. “This is pretty good,” she said to Emma.

“I asked,” Britt said, “because divorce is the short version for me too.”

“The long version is presumably different, or it would be illegal. Or bordering on.”

Britt snorted. “Nah. He just decided we got married too young.”

“How old are you?” said Addy, assuming that was okay to ask when they were about the same age.

“Twenty-four. We got married right out of college. We’d been together since high school. Suddenly he starts talking about how we missed out on having fun and we should do an open relationship so we can experience being with other people. I said I didn’t want to experience being with other people and he acted like that was the most bizarre thing he’d ever heard.”

“Like, I think being monogamous is pretty common?” said Addy.

“I said something like that, and he said but it’s not that common to only ever be with one person.”

“He didn’t think about that before getting married?” said Emma.

Britt threw her hands in the air. “You’d think!”

“And if you’re divorced…” Lori said to Addy.

She laughed, dryly. “Yeah, we weren’t married. I wasn’t even really thinking about it yet. But a breakup, yes.” She hadn’t thought to get out the rest of the smore ingredients and it was hard to do one-handed. Emma and Lori both jumped to help her. “There’s this group of us that have been friends since freshman year—I’m in college, I’ll be a senior next year—and I started dating one of the guys sophomore year, and he broke up with me near the end of last year, which was awkward, but what was really awkward was that he obviously liked one of the other girls in the group. And she told me he liked her but they weren’t going to date for a while because it wouldn’t be fair to me.”

“But it was fair to tell you,” said Britt, reaching for the toasting stick.

Addy handed it over, two marshmallows still on it. “I will say she was drunk at the time. Anyway, the group is doing a summer trip and I decided to spare myself and do something on my own.” She capped off her smore and took a bite. “Kind of nice that it ended up not being totally on my own.”

“Yeah, what are the odds everyone here is getting over a guy?”

“Um,” said Emma. When everyone looked at her she said, “Not exactly. I mean, I don’t think. There’s a fourth guest here and it’s a guy.”

“Oh,” said Lori.

“You didn’t invite him down?” said Addy.

Emma shifted in her seat. “Well, at first I didn’t think of it, because he didn’t come out when you all did, and then… the conversation was not exactly one that would be super fun for him, I think.”

They all looked at each other.

“We should probably invite him,” said Lori.

“As much as I would love to keep dunking on guys,” said Britt, her eyes trailing up to the upstairs window, “the room is right up there and if I saw this happening and wasn’t invited, that would suck.”

“He might not be up,” said Addy, “and he might not be interested. But yeah. If he like… overheard this and thinks we all hate him, he should know we don’t hate him.”

“I’ll go knock on his door,” said Emma.

As she went inside, Lori said with a hint of a laugh, “Maybe he got broken up with too. This does seem to be the heartbreak hotel.”