#;;paradise lost

[redlegend-a]

The desert at night, tonight, was calm.

The sky was clear, glittering with a blanket of stars, and soft bouts of wind over standing Cacturne broke the silence with white noise.

Tonight Red kept away from his desert camp, finding a low spot between the dunes under a sheer cliff face, and striking a fire to crackle beside him.

When working like this he had Pikachu nearby, but not beside him.The mouse stood atop a rock formation, a shadow against the slowly rotating starscape.

The bones of the late Professor Sada?They’re old bones, but they’re rotten with the smell of stagnant grease that only sodium carbonate and peroxide had a chance at getting out.

Over the fire, he boiled a large, new pot of clean water, and broke the seal on both powdered products, stirring the cleaning solution to life while it began to bubble.

Red’s hands were clammy under the heavy rubber gloves, and careful as they lifted each bone up and into the boiling pot and put them in.

The skull he saved for last, tucking the shredded remnants of her hair back while he set her head atop the rest of her body. It’s slow, considerate, and meticulous.

The pot boiled, and he smelled death. Unclean, stagnant death had a specific smell to it, pungent and sour. What a painful death (so much blood and pain), but a death nonetheless.

Her clothes he wrapped in a bundle of cloth and set at the foot of the wooden base he had started to build.

When there was nothing to do but wait, he shed the rubber gloves, and sat beside the fire, watching the pot boil, and watching each bubble of oil rise to the foam of the surface.

People didn’t like the thought of mortality. It was an abject fear, to end one thing and transition to another. It was an ending to memory, sensation, and existence as this cognizant being.

Red watched the flames lick up the pot. Charizard swung lower in the night, and Red saw his faraway shadow cross the moon.

Are you still here, Sada?

He slowed his breathing, and closed his eyes. He reached outside himself, and crossed his legs.

Each hand of his, he turned, palm up. He breathed, the smell of boiling bone collecting in the back of his throat.

Are you still trapped, Sada?

[weirdlookindog]

John Martin (1789-1854) - Pandemonium, 1841

[msue0027]

Ah yes, my favourite Bible fanfics, in no particular order

"Paradise Lost", John Milton

"Divine Comedy", Dante Alighieri

"Good Omens", Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

[centipest]

Get this wet rat man OUT of my brainfolds, plEAse

Ilhsm

[illustratus]

Chaos watches as the Rebel Angels are thrown into Hell (Milton's Paradise Lost)

by Gustave Doré

[lostsoulsparadise]

Lost Souls Paradise | Instagram

[marypickfords]

Survey Map of a Paradise Lost (Hisayasu Satô, 1988)

[lillithdeluna]

In Praise of the Stygian. The twisted world of Lilith de Luna. As darkness settles in, ask yourself: Do you run from it, or do you hide?

[sictransitgloriamvndi]

[cr33py-crawli3]

HOW TO END THE CYCLE

[eelhound]

"I think Homer outwits most writers who have written on the War [fantasy archetype], by not taking sides.

The Trojan war is not and you cannot make it be the War of Good vs. Evil. It’s just a war, a wasteful, useless, needless, stupid, protracted, cruel mess full of individual acts of courage, cowardice, nobility, betrayal, limb-hacking-off, and disembowelment. Homer was a Greek and might have been partial to the Greek side, but he had a sense of justice or balance that seems characteristically Greek — maybe his people learned a good deal of it from him? His impartiality is far from dispassionate; the story is a torrent of passionate actions, generous, despicable, magnificent, trivial. But it is unprejudiced. It isn’t Satan vs. Angels. It isn’t Holy Warriors vs. Infidels. It isn’t hobbits vs. orcs. It’s just people vs. people.

Of course you can take sides, and almost everybody does. I try not to, but it’s no use; I just like the Trojans better than the Greeks. But Homer truly doesn’t take sides, and so he permits the story to be tragic. By tragedy, mind and soul are grieved, enlarged, and exalted.

Whether war itself can rise to tragedy, can enlarge and exalt the soul, I leave to those who have been more immediately part of a war than I have. I think some believe that it can, and might say that the opportunity for heroism and tragedy justifies war. I don’t know; all I know is what a poem about a war can do. In any case, war is something human beings do and show no signs of stopping doing, and so it may be less important to condemn it or to justify it than to be able to perceive it as tragic.

But once you take sides, you have lost that ability.

Is it our dominant religion that makes us want war to be between the good guys and the bad guys?

In the War of Good vs. Evil there can be divine or supernal justice but not human tragedy. It is by definition, technically, comic (as in The Divine Comedy): the good guys win. It has a happy ending. If the bad guys beat the good guys, unhappy ending, that’s mere reversal, flip side of the same coin. The author is not impartial. Dystopia is not tragedy.

Milton, a Christian, had to take sides, and couldn’t avoid comedy. He could approach tragedy only by making Evil, in the person of Lucifer, grand, heroic, and even sympathetic — which is faking it. He faked it very well.

Maybe it’s not only Christian habits of thought but the difficulty we all have in growing up that makes us insist justice must favor the good.

After all, 'Let the best man win' doesn’t mean the good man will win. It means, 'This will be a fair fight, no prejudice, no interference — so the best fighter will win it.' If the treacherous bully fairly defeats the nice guy, the treacherous bully is declared champion. This is justice. But it’s the kind of justice that children can’t bear. They rage against it. It’s not fair!

But if children never learn to bear it, they can’t go on to learn that a victory or a defeat in battle, or in any competition other than a purely moral one (whatever that might be), has nothing to do with who is morally better.

Might does not make right — right?

Therefore right does not make might. Right?

But we want it to. 'My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure.'

If we insist that in the real world the ultimate victor must be the good guy, we’ve sacrificed right to might. (That’s what History does after most wars, when it applauds the victors for their superior virtue as well as their superior firepower.) If we falsify the terms of the competition, handicapping it, so that the good guys may lose the battle but always win the war, we’ve left the real world, we’re in fantasy land — wishful thinking country.

Homer didn’t do wishful thinking.

Homer’s Achilles is a disobedient officer, a sulky, self-pitying teenager who gets his nose out of joint and won’t fight for his own side. A sign that Achilles might grow up someday, if given time, is his love for his friend Patroclus. But his big snit is over a girl he was given to rape but has to give back to his superior officer, which to me rather dims the love story. To me Achilles is not a good guy. But he is a good warrior, a great fighter — even better than the Trojan prime warrior, Hector. Hector is a good guy on any terms — kind husband, kind father, responsible on all counts — a mensch. But right does not make might. Achilles kills him.

The famous Helen plays a quite small part in The Iliad. Because I know that she’ll come through the whole war with not a hair in her blond blow-dry out of place, I see her as opportunistic, immoral, emotionally about as deep as a cookie sheet. But if I believed that the good guys win, that the reward goes to the virtuous, I’d have to see her as an innocent beauty wronged by Fate and saved by the Greeks.

And people do see her that way. Homer lets us each make our own Helen; and so she is immortal.

I don’t know if such nobility of mind (in the sense of the impartial 'noble' gases) is possible to a modern writer of fantasy. Since we have worked so hard to separate History from Fiction, our fantasies are dire warnings, or mere nightmares, or else they are wish fulfillments."

- Ursula K. Le Guin, from No Time to Spare, 2013.

[churchwizard]

That's unsanitary...

[nor3gertz]

dude's smoke break + lookin at his picture w champ

[weirdlookindog]

John Martin (1789-1854) - Satan viewing the Ascent to Heaven, 1824

from 'The Paradise Lost of John Milton with illustrations by John Martin', 1846

[odysseus-crewmate-number38]

IT JUST ENDED OH MY GOD I CANT PROCESS ANYTHING

I WAS SCREENSHOTTING RAPIDLY OHHH

the theories on apollos level were crazy we thought he’d talk about troy or the cows but he just went “i knoww the sirens tried killing his men butttt, i really liked their singy songys :(“ ALSO HIM HAVING DARK HAIR EYYY

i LOVEE @anniflamma’s animatic for hera the disco vibes were SHFHBSB

all of the animators were so good 😭😭😭

ZEUS’S BEAST MODE?! ATHENA GETTING STRUCK?! WHAT THE TOA?! THAT FINAL SHOT!?.?););!

IM GOING INSNABR BFF

[box-off]

Omggg he's so quirky and radoooom!! O_o