#...the irony

[eri-pl]

wait was anyone (eg the guy doing the lecture series) going to tell me Boethius was proclaimed a saint or was I meant to learn that from Wikipedia

yea apparently I was meant to learn it from wikipedia

anyway now to the proper post that I intended to write

So I am having a quite niche problem (ok maybe it's not a problem. a question to ponder at least). So. "The consolation of philosophy". Is very cool. But Lady Philosophy has a particular vibe that … idk why but I feel a strong urge to assign this vibe to one of the Ainur, ideally one of the Valar and initially I thought Nienna, but no.

She (Philosophy) had this almost-agressive anti-despair "stop talking bs" attitude that reminds me of Gandalf. But also at some points she's like "You ask why bad things happen to good people? The answer is simple: they don't." and he would not say that. And yea, Nienna very much would not say that.

I can imagine Námo (esp with his relationship to time*) being like "No, I've never seen bad things happen to good people, you're simply mistaken" and generally going a similar route of argumentation. But I already have a strong HC for his personality. But also, it may fit together… I need to rotate it more in my brain.

(To be clear: she's not being cruel or very dismissive. There's some context. But she is being a little, how to call that, Gandalf-like. Snarky? A little bit.)

BTW I can absolutely see pre-Exile Finrod unironically claiming that suffering is an illusion etc (but in a very compassionate way) and driving his half-uncle into a rage by this.

(oh and ofc the text has soo much Númenorean vibes, I mean the Faithful in late Númenor. I'm surprised that I haven't thought of this earlier but... if we change Plato and similar guys to some Elves and change the geographical names and maaaybe some astronomical details (round earth) and make the personifications ambigiously "maybe I imagined it maybe it was a Maia" etc... without any change to the theology I can see it as a text originating in there. and I'm sure Tolkien would agree. Like… It removes exactly the right amount--- I know it was because he wanted it to make sense to the pagan Greeks--- anyway aaaargh I will simply HC it there it fits so very very well)

edit: I found the video that made me rant on the philosophers&Greeks, & probably on Boethius for choice of words. (It's in Polish)

[time-to-leave-machine]

people will say "why cant the eldritch gods just be nice to humans :((" and then kill a bug for existing near them

[madame-helen]

[illumerie]

all of humanity in his hands

[theaceofarrows]

Nightwing and Robin Jason: On your mark, get set g-

Batman: No

Nightwing: No? No, what? You don't even know what we're doing?!

Batman: You two were about to try and race across the rooftops

Nightwing: And? We do it all the time

Batman: And, they're covered in ice from freezing rain

Robin Jason: So? We fought Mr. Freeze last week, and we're still alive

Batman: [glares]

Dick: Ugh, fine. We won't have ANY fun

Batman: [turns around]

Nightwing:

Robin Jason:

Nightwing and Robin Jason: [glance at each other]

Nightwing and Robin Jason: [whispering] Go

[Both start running]

-

[Later]

Dick: [sitting on the couch with his ankle in a cast] Consequences, gotta be my top three least favorite parts of my actions

Jason: [sitting next to him with his arm in a cast] Big brothers, gotta be the top three worst people to listen to when they say they have a fun idea

Dick: You're just grumpy because YOU fell down first

Jason: [hits him with a pillow]

[dyleeart]

Epic x ATLA AU that nobody asked for

I know the politics does not make sense at all, I just wanted to see them as benders

[westerberg]

Okay and I’m gonna totally sound like my mom for a second here but it’s interesting that soooooooo many women in entertainment have careers based on “embracing their sexuality” but the vast majority of men in entertainment base their careers on like … being people…. and like maybe there’s a reason most men don’t seem to find going on stage in underwear “empowering”…? Bc it’s not…?

[syn0vial]

really cannot overstate that in the expanded universe, boba fett gets out of the sarlacc pit by 1) realizing the sarlacc pit has psychically connected itself to him for Torture reasons, 2) considering his circumstances and very deliberately deciding, "i am going to stop repressing my emotions for like, two minutes," and 3) consequently giving the sarlacc, a creature that literally feeds off suffering, a fucking seizure

[galaxymagitech]

Jason (Age 12): I’m not gonna die from inhaling cigarette smoke, quit worrying, B.

Jason (Age 15): *dies from smoke inhalation*

Jason (Age 19): Well, it wasn’t the cigarettes.

[motherofplatypus]

[madame-helen]

[dufrau]

thinking about shauna listening to jackie talk about jeff like he never even mattered when shauna is pregnant with his baby because she just wanted something jackie had and wanted to be wanted by someone who wanted jackie and now jackie doesnt even care anymore and shauna is stuck with this forever. and then jackie dies and then the baby dies but not before shauna has to give birth to him in the wilderness in winter surrounded by people who eat the dead and now fucking jeff sadecki is the last thing she has of either of them and what the hell is she supposed to do with that? she's stuck with him forever.

thinking about shauna beating lottie almost all the way to death to get all of that rage out of her and then when that rage is out of her they give her a knife and tell her to slit natalie's throat, and then when natalie runs and shauna is let off the hook for one thing for once they give her the knife again and tell her to cut up javi, the closest thing to a baby, so they can eat him, and now she's stuck with this, too. and all that rage she burned off didn't go anywhere, really. it's still right there.

and then im thinking about shauna watching lottie and everybody else crown natalie the queen for virtue of not dying, which is the same thing everybody has been doing, except for jackie and the baby and javi who all took chunks of shauna with them and left her with nothing but a knife.

im thinking about shauna who watches everybody gossip and laugh through the springtime knowing that when winter comes she will be the person who will have to cut them all up one by one so the rest of them can live and its very easy to see why she isnt friends with any of them anymore by then. she looks at them and she sees cuts of meat and how is she supposed to look at anybody normally ever again after that?

and its cruel, of course it is, everything she does to coach ben. it's not his fault, it's not about him at all, really, except that he is exactly the problem. he's innocent. he judges them. he sees what they have had to do to survive and pretends he never profited from any of it. pretends to be above it, uninvolved. he judges them. he judges her.

and shauna needs complicity from these people. she needs somebody else to know what it feels like to hold the knife. she needs people to be stuck with those guilty votes forever. tai with the gun and melissa with the knife and natalie at the butcher's table so that she's not the only one. and so ben is the sacrifice.

i saw somebody say that shauna doesnt want natalie to have to feel the pain of butchering a person, thats why she puts the cloth over his face. but that's not true. she *needs* natalie to know the pain of it, the guilt of it, the weight. The cloth is a lie she told herself would make it easier but she knows that Natalie is about to know what the inside of this man's joints look like either way and that she's going to be stuck knowing that forever.

they are going to be rescued someday and everybody will say "we did what we had to do to survive" and shauna needs to not be the only one who really has to mean that when she says it. and i guess she has that now. or she's about to.

[lgbtlunaverse]

To me the most fun part about fix-its is placing dominoes.

Tragedies often consist of escalating series of actions and circumstances which, in isolation, were not clearly leading to the tragic end but form a chain of cause-and-effect directly towards it in hindsight. In equal but opposite fashion, I love starting with small inoccuous changes to canon that in themselves do not obviously fix everything but start a new chain that leads to a better ending.

It's kind of impossible for fix-its to feel fully natural– the reader by definition knows what the original ending was and that this ending will be happier because the writer wants it to be– but it is possible for them to not feel contrived. A big deus-ex-machina, or a character breaking with their pre-established tragic flaws to suddenly make all the "correct" decisions almost always feels unsatisfying to me.

But a few carefully placed small domino pieces slowly knocking over bigger and bigger tiles until the entire story has radically changed? That's a lot more fun.

It recquires the author to both correctly identify the original chain of cause-and-effect and understand the characters well enough to know how they'd react to different circumstances. Because if the story feels like it's fixing the wrong problem or the characters don't act like themselves the magic is lost. But when it works? When it clicks and the reader sees the domino chain laid out in front of them? It's beautiful.

[robinsversion]

How I sleep knowing I always cite my sources:

(First image from the film Drip Dippy Donald (1948); second image from season 4, episode 3 of the Simpsons, “Homer the Heretic” (1992).)

[luthienne]

Anne Carson, from Glass, Irony and God

[Text ID: I felt as if the sky was torn off my life.]