#ENTIRELY UNRELATEDLY I PROMISE

[elainemorisi]

on the one hand, I am really good at this being my own wife deal. on the other, sure, would be nice to be someone else's. on the other other, I don't actually want that in the abstract is the problem

[purplephloxpress]

Worked on some fics instead of just notebooks today, which brings me to 6 textblocks sewn so far for binderary! Somehow the one where I was using the last of a spool of thread was NOT the time I almost ran out of thread on the very last signature. What is my life.

Had a sad sad time realizing after printing an entire 260 page fic that I had accidentally deleted half the page numbers (honestly I would've preferred to have just deleted them entirely at that point) but now I have lots of misprints for glue paper? (thankfully it's only 65 sheets of paper but still) Problem has been fixed and I'll get it reprinted later this week. Could I have made it work? Sure. But this is the fic that I input sheet music by hand for the title pages so. Nah. We'll reprint it. I don't have the cover paper or end pages I want for this one yet, so it won't hurt me to wait a few more days.

ON THAT NOTE if you don't want to be encouraged to make every single possible purchase of fun paper or cloth that you come across, the Renegade server is NOT the place to be. Totally completely unrelatedly I have a huge stash of cool paper coming in the mail later this week. Totally unrelated to that first fact. Promise.

[doofnoof]

Dw geggy sort of scares me too-

YEAH. Gregory is a FANTASTIC character and I wonder what his motivations and backstory are like to make him that way but there are certain characters that make me feel like a bird got into the house and is flying around erratically above my head. Gregory is one of them.

LUFFY IS GENUINELY SCARY BECAUSE HE'S A SUPERPOWERED 14 YEAR OLD AND HE'S GOING TO KICK YOUR ASS (AND WILL ANNOUNCE AS MUCH BEFOREHAND!!) IF HE JUST DOESN'T LIKE YOUR VIBES OR PERHAPS YOU ARE IN THE WAY OF HIM KICKING SOMEONE ELSE'S ASS. HE'S BATSHIT CRAZY BUT DOESN'T MEAN ANY HARM. HE'S LIKE GOKU, HE HAS A GOAL HE'S GONNA REACH AND IT DOESN'T MATTER IF YOU'RE IN THE WAY BECAUSE HE'LL EITHER BEFRIEND OR FIGHT YOU TO GET THERE. I DON'T LIKE THAT HIS MOUTH OPENS SO WIDE AND, UNRELATEDLY, THAT HIS GUMS ARE VISIBLE MOST OF THE TIME. HE'S SPOOKY.

GREGGY BOYE WON AGAINST SIX ADVANCED ANIMATRONICS, ONE OF WHICH IS AN ABSOLUTELY GIGANTIC SPIDER, ALL OF WHICH ARE SMARTER THAN YOUR'S TRULY YES EVEN MONTY. YES EVEN MINI MUSIC MAN. We're NOT counting Sun because he wasn't ACTIVELY trying to kill Gregory he's just a bad babysitter. Gregory is also very small and scrawny for his age. AND HE STILL WON AGAINST PROLIFIC CHILD MURDERER PEEPAW WILLY AND HIS SCARY APPRENTICE VANNY/VANESSA WHO IS A TRAINED NIGHTGUARD AND HAS SCARY GLITCH SUPERPOWERS. And did I mention he's even younger than Luffy???? I don't actively fear Gregory but I acknowledge that he's BY DEFINITION a very scary kid. Less Scary than Luffy and Venti, mind you, because he's mostly just scared and trying to survive but his relationship with Freddy is very sweet and I love that in one of the endings he kept Freddy's head and freed Vanessa AND THEY ALL HAD SOME ICE CREAM TOGETHER AND WATCHED THE SUN RISE. I LOVE FOUND FAMILY. HE JUST NEEDS ENRICHMENT IN HIS ENCLOSURE AND THEN HE'LL STOP DISMEMBERING THE GLAMROCKS I PROMISE.

I'M NOT SURE WHY I FEAR VENTI FROM GENSHIN. PROBABLY BECAUSE VENTI IS BASICALLY JOHN CARPENTER'S THE THING™ AND I JUST. DON'T LIKE VENTI. ANCIENT GOD-THING LIVING IN IT'S FAVORITE BLORBO'S BODY. ABSOLUTELY NOT. NO THANK YOU. NO HATE TOWARDS PEOPLE WHO DO LIKE VENTI, ONE OF MY BEST FRIENDS LOVES VENTI, BUT I JUST DON'T LIKE THEM. I CHECK UNDER THE BED BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP TO MAKE SURE VENTI ISN'T THERE AND CAN'T GET ME. SCARIEST CHARACTER IN THIS WHOLE LIST.

I don't know if anyone here watches Dimension 20, but if you do, you may have seen the Sugarplum Fairy from A Crown Of Candy, Dungeon Mastered by Brennan Lee Mulligan. He plays this character very well, and her whole thing is that she's a fairy, but she's incredibly powerful and wise, a very very old creature and her true form seems a little further beyond the average human's capabilites of understanding something larger than them, verging into Cosmic Horror/Biblically Accurate Angel territory. But she smiles and flutters around and pretends to be a very cute harmless fairy, she's ethereally beautiful and wants to help the main cast achieve their goal and is going to help them, thank The Bulb for that.

There's also Baron from The Baronies from the same show, during the Fantasy High campaign. Baron feeds off of one of the character's fears and insecurities, they want to be real but are made entirely from lies, and it torments Rizz Gukgak with Rizz's own words in its odd ethereal way. Baron is clearly something that is not human/real/worldly but is doing everything in it's power to seem real and part of Rizz's world, but is also doing it all wrong. Baron, unlike the Sugarplum Fairy, is not kind and in fact drags Rizz into the mirror world by his neck using strength he should not have in his tiny skeletal frame.

The reason I bring this up is because both of these characters remind me of Venti. Venti is otherworldly and is trying SO HARD to appear human, and while I respect that and understand Venti's struggles on a personal level, I still find him deeply scary as a concept. I would say the same for Zhongli, but Zhongli doesn't seem to be trying to appear human either. He reminds me of Paarthurnax, truth be told. He is a very old and tired dragon man, and wants the current strife he's in to be over so he can go sit on his giant dragon porch and drink some tea. Venti is that "Hello Fellow Kids" meme but Venti is just as ancient as Zhongli and still has Sickly Victorian Era Orphan energy at the same time?? Fascinating character, 10/10 makes my skin crawl.

[theajaheira]

jenny/giles kissing by a campfire for a bet? unrelatedly, i'd like you to know i almost wrote jelly instead of jenny

this got a bit longer than intended. whoops.

“Listen,” said Ms. Calendar, weaving her way through the group of teachers and sitting down on the log next to Giles, who had been staring at the bonfire and resenting Snyder for making the faculty picnic a mandatory event. “I need to kiss you and I need you to not ask any questions.”

Giles’s first and very terrifying reaction was that Ms. Calendar had somehow found out about the seven to ten amorous dreams of his she had featured in, and that she was now attempting to reenact one of them. It occurred to him that this concept was ridiculous, but then he remembered that last week all his nightmares had come to life, so why on earth wouldn’t his more outlandish dreams start coming true as well--

“Ms. Whitaker just bet Mr. Shaw five hundred dollars on us kissing within the next hour,” said Ms. Calendar, “because everyone on staff knows we hate each other--”

“I don’t hate you,” Giles objected. After the incident with Moloch, this statement was startlingly true. He wasn’t entirely sure whether he liked her, but he figured that he should probably leave that bit out.

“Yeah, but that’s a recent development,” Ms. Calendar pointed out. “And right now, Mr. Shaw thinks he’s about to make five hundred bucks, and Ms. Whitaker and I don’t want that to happen, especially since she promised half that money to me.” She gave Giles a beseeching look. “Look, I really want some extra textbooks for my classroom,” she said, “and Snyder cracking down on the budget means that I’ll have to pay out-of-pocket--”

“Are you attempting to seduce me by appealing to my love of books?” said Giles, doing his best to pretend that it wasn’t working for him.

“It’s a kiss,” said Ms. Calendar, rolling her eyes a little. “No tongue.” She considered. “Maybe tongue.”

Giles looked around. No vampires, no demons, no indication that this was anything other than a very confusing reality.

Ms. Calendar let out a soft, annoyed breath. “This was a ridiculous idea,” she said, more to herself than to Giles, and he noticed (with a warm flutter of surprise) that she was blushing. “I should just--”

Without thinking, Giles grabbed her by the waist, pulling her clumsily into his lap. Realizing belatedly what he had just done, he overbalanced, falling backwards off the log and landing rather hard on the ground.

Ms. Calendar was still in his arms, her hands braced against his chest.

Behind them, all conversations stopped. The entire faculty of Sunnydale High was staring at the both of them with utter disbelief.

“Wow, you are bad at this,” said Ms. Calendar.

"Considering this was my attempt to do you a favor, I would think I deserve a bit moremmf,” said Giles, and then forgot how to say anything at all.

“FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS, TOM, PAY UP!” shouted Ms. Whitaker in the background.

"Absolutely indecent,” Snyder was saying, “this is a public barbecue--”

Ms. Calendar pulled back, looking extremely pleased with herself. After a moment, she leaned back down and kissed Giles again. “You’re an okay kisser,” she informed him, but Giles noticed with satisfaction that her blush had deepened.

“So are you,” said Giles; his head was spinning, and he felt at least relatively certain that it wasn’t to do with the tumble he’d taken.

(“Did you kiss Ms. Calendar at the faculty barbecue?” Buffy demanded the next day, sounding utterly horrified by the concept. “With tongue? And on the ground?”

“Buffy, be reasonable,” said Giles mildly, attention focused on the book he was filing. “Does that really sound like something I would do?”)

[aeide-thea]

miserable resigned inadequate alienated feelings tonight/lately abt… well, a whole constellation of stuff really, roughly centered on Womanhood/embodiment/sexualization/pregnancy/progeny […whatever the fuck Womanhood even means, like, more and more i kind of think anyone who pretends to know what it means is full of shit] anyway i mean none of those general topics/struggles is anything new but like i feel like, what the fuck am i doing, probably i should just sit back down in my girlbox and quit whining, never mind that the idea feels instinctively wrongbadtrapped as all hell and makes me want to kick out desperately and unrelatedly i keep thinking lately—how much girlfriend delights me, and how much children sometimes do, when you get to meet them where they are and lead them out towards the fullness of their becoming, and a part of me knows how enchanting/inquisitive/sensitive/bright/lovely a child of ours would have to be, and feels so strangely sorrowful that such a child is never going to exist, that i am unequipped to provide for it either materially or emotionally and the responsibility of parenting sounds like mostly not a thing i want and also a thing i should know better than to think myself fit for ever, and also i don't really think she'd be comfortable with any aspect of this fantasy, nebulous and half-hearted though it is (although of course one should never decide one knows things about a partner's feelings for sure without explicitly discussing them, i've learned that much…) anyway i feel sad and stupid talking about this for so many reasons but not least because i worry it makes me seem likely to angle for e.g. impregnation in untrustworthy ways, which is probably not an idea that anyone else would actually get but is definitely an idea with edges sharp enough to cut myself on, sigh yikes &c so like, all of that, and feeling like, if i have to go back to accepting that this is my body then it just feels like a body i'm trapped in, wide-hipped and fleshy with ugly breasts that has nothing to do with the heart of me, and of course that's no unique tragedy, people inhabit bodies that misrepresent them all the time in so many ways, but this is mine—my body? my tragedy? both? anyway either it's mine to redefine or mine to disassociate from but i don't think there's any world where my relationship to it isn't one of alienated misery, though maybe i'm fooling myself to think that's important, maybe that's just the truest experience of womanhood in the end, is being a woman and hating it or yourself or both… plus of course i am failing entirely to convey to my mother and sister anything about my beachwear/embodiment feelings that would get them to respond in ways that aren't just a fundamental misunderstanding/ridiculing of my whole approach/sentiments, like, yes, i get that wearing swim trunks without a top would be illegal and most compromises short of femme are going to strike you as weird and awkward and stupid! i promise, if there's anyone who understands that this is a fundamentally insoluble problem—that my body is a fundamentally insoluble problem—it's me! there is no way to render the signifiers of my body sexually neutral without sartorial or surgical intervention! this will forever be a body i have to spend time and energy figuring out how to manage/stave off other people's interpretations of! that's exactly what i'm fucked up about! i dunno, i'm miserable and exhausted and i'm trying real hard on a bunch of fronts and getting mostly no credit for any of it, and like, i'll start again tomorrow but i just needed to set down somewhere how frustrated and alienated and hopeless i'm feeling—

[somepoorsod]

Akhilleus & Patroklos; or, this post won’t be very popular

One of those vague posts I make every so often where I know I have a reaction to something, and have clues as to why, but haven’t actually explored then. So I start typing and hopefully find out, my thoughts being forced to organise themselves by being written down and by me looking things up which I only recollect in the general sense. This is for catharsis and self-exploration, and is necessarily opinionated and subjective. It is directed at me, not anyone who happens to post about this topic, so please don’t feel called out. (That said, you are absolutely and entirely free to not enjoy it, to disagree, and to argue with me, and it may well be that you do so). I have no doubt that by the time I’m finished it will have raised the spectre of elitism thoroughly. I will promise no homophobia, though, at least consciously.

So, why does something twitch within me, causing the screeching sound of nails on a blackboard, when I see yet another ‘Akhilleus and Patroklos were the truest bestest love ever’ and ‘The Iliad is being CENSORED’ post go crawling across my dash?

A) The Song of Achilles. This was neatly described (by someone who has since deleted the post, so I shan’t name them) as turning a ‘morally complex war story into twee teen porno fanfic’ and, my word, does it grate on me when people mistake the story and characterisation of the second for what goes on in the first. I am a fervent admirer of the Iliad in all its depth, and while TSOA is perfectly good as twee teen porn and has at least some merits in the re-interpretation arena, it really isn’t reflective of the epic.

B) Fundamentally, in the Iliad, both Patroklos and Akhilleus sleep with women and don’t sleep with each other.1 They don’t kiss each other. Frankly, until he’s dead, Akhilleus barely manages to show any affection for Patroklos at all, platonic or otherwise. The last conversation they have begins as a shouting match in which Akhilleus calls Patroklos a cowering girl and is told he’s a psychopath in return,2 and then goes on to demand Patroklos not actually defeat the Trojans because Akhilleus is still waiting until the Greeks are even more screwed to intervene and to be hailed as the glorious saviour.3 It is absolutely true that other Greek writers and artists (re-)interpreted their relationship as romantic, but reading that into the Iliad itself gets my goat up. I won’t go so far as to say it’s indefensibly wrong, but I think it is indubitably subjective, and would even say you have to stretch for it. Therefore, absolute statements which specifically invoke the Iliad (clashing with my own subjective interpretation of the epic) irk me. Furthermore, we have the Iliad, in which the two characters are actually explored to this extent, and we don’t have Aiskhylos’ trilogy which actually made an explicit romantic relationship out of their bond, nor really any other full work of literature which took that tack. It bothers me when so much actual text is brushed aside in favour of what people just want to happen. It feels terribly ... lazy.

C) Briseis. Oh, you poor woman. Her role gets annihilated by almost any discussion which has the hots for the Akhilleus/Patroklos pair. She’s intrusive and threatening to the ship, and therefore has to be ignored or dismissed. And that sucks. Homer writes some great female characters in the Iliad - Helen probably above all, but also Andromakhe, Hera, Athene, and others. Briseis doesn’t match them, I think, but she deserves some bloody consideration, deserves a chance. I have no desire to co-operate with the longstanding patriarchal erasure of women from mythos and the simplification of epic to MANLY MEN FIGHT MANLYLYLY. Ovid did not write the Heroides for this. It also makes the emotional milieu for Akhilleus’ decisions in 1, 9, 16, 19, and 24 significantly less complex if you immediately deride the idea that he actually cares for Briseis. Working that out, and how much it dominates him - compared to e.g. his offended pride, or his dissatisfaction with the whole timē/geras culture - is a really interesting question, which deserves attention. Akhilleus gives a powerful little speech about how Briseis is his “heart’s beloved” 4 - in spite of all that conspires against it - like Helen is to Menelaus, which one should not just disregard because it fails to fit the headcanon.

D) The stupid, cursed arguments we’ve inherited from the ancients about the erastes and eromenos. Partly because it’s such a hideous projection of classical Athenian cultural mores and sterotypes onto a text that doesn’t fit it. Akhilleus may be younger5 (*cough*, TSOA) but he’s also old enough to have a shaggy chest.6 He doesn’t fit the eromenos role either, and jamming him into that pigeonhole is, I think, just another part of how Phaedros is portrayed as a bit of an idiot in the Symposion. Partly, because it’s also a hideous projection of modern cultural sterotypes on a text that doesn’t fit it - and far too often I feel like I’m seeing this from people who were introduced to gay men via the artificial, exaggerated idea of uke and seme in Japanese porn and continue to see things, even want to see things, through that particular lens.

E) Not unrelatedly - and this also goes back to the TSOA point - the fulfilling of the impulsive human categorisation demand. The manifestation here being one that always frustrates me in media: a requirement that people with a strong emotional bond must be romantically related if they’re of anything like a similar age and aren’t blood related. (Patroklos and Akhilleus are, of course, pretty close blood relations, being first cousins once removed, but this is swept under the rug most of the time). To me, this cheapens how strong bonds of actual friendship are, and diminishes the emotional range and depth available to be portrayed and found in a work. Do you know how bloody pleased I was that Mako and Raleigh didn’t kiss at the end of Pacific Rim when all my expectations were that it was coming with an absolute inevitability? (There is a similar syndrome afflicting Hektor and Akhilleus whereby, because they’re rivals, the Trojan hero must be the next best fighter on the battlefield - despite the fact that Homer is actually doing all sorts of interesting things with Telamonian Aias as an Akhilleus cipher that get completely rolled over by that wretchedly simplistic idea).7

F) English. In more depth, there are (unavoidable) problems with people working from translation. For example, Lattimore’s 18.81-2 renders ‘τὸν ἐγὼ περὶ πάντων τῖον ἑταίρων, ἶσον ἐμῇ κεφαλῇ’ as ‘whom I loved beyond all other companions, as well as my own life’. Which I think is reasonably fair in that emotional context, though there is perhaps needless ambiguity in making ‘ ἶσον’ ‘as well as’. Yet the number of people who jump on this as a declaration of confirmed romantic intent, when the Greek τίω is fundamentally ‘I value’ being translated in a powerful way, frustrates me deeply. τίω is so frequently mercantile in the Iliad,8 to the extent that I think it’s even fair for someone uncharitable to continue to read an unconscious self-centredness into Akhilleus here and take it as Patroklos being more beneficial for Akhilleus than anyone else was. And yet this act of sensitive translation has led people to assume we have steaming eros and nightly rogering sessions going on. It can’t be helped, but it’s still wrong. 

1 αὐτὰρ Ἀχιλλεὺς εὗδε μυχῷ κλισίης εὐπήκτου: τῷ δ᾽ ἄρα παρκατέλεκτο γυνή, τὴν Λεσβόθεν ἦγε, Φόρβαντος θυγάτηρ Διομήδη καλλιπάρῃος. Πάτροκλος δ᾽ ἑτέρωθεν ἐλέξατο: πὰρ δ᾽ ἄρα καὶ τῷ ��φις ἐΰζωνος, τήν οἱ πόρε δῖος Ἀχιλλεὺς Σκῦρον ἑλὼν αἰπεῖαν Ἐνυῆος πτολίεθρον.

But Akhilleus slept in the farthest corner of the well-built hut; and a woman laid down there with him, one he had brought from Lesbos - Diomede with her beautiful cheeks, daughter of Phorbas. And on its opposite side, Patroklos laid down; and another slept with him - Iphis of the lovely girdle, one whom godlike Akhilleus provided him after he conquered steep Skyros, the citadel of Enyeus. (Il. 9.663-669) ↩

2 16.1-35, which I translated here. ↩

3 μὴ σύ γ᾽ ἄνευθεν ἐμεῖο λιλαίεσθαι πολεμίζειν Τρωσὶ φιλοπτολέμοισιν: ἀτιμότερον δέ με θήσεις:

Don't be eager to fight without me against the warloving Trojans: you will make me less honoured. (Il. 16.89-90) ↩

4 … τί δὲ λαὸν ἀνήγαγεν ἐνθάδ᾽ ἀγείρας Ἀτρεΐδης; ἦ οὐχ Ἑλένης ἕνεκ᾽ ἠϋκόμοιο; ἦ μοῦνοι φιλέουσ᾽ ἀλόχους μερόπων ἀνθρώπων Ἀτρεΐδαι; ἐπεὶ ὅς τις ἀνὴρ ἀγαθὸς καὶ ἐχέφρων τὴν αὐτοῦ φιλέει καὶ κήδεται, ὡς καὶ ἐγὼ τὴν ἐκ θυμοῦ φίλεον δουρικτητήν περ ἐοῦσαν.

… Why has he lead his summoned warhost here, that son of Atreus? Was it not for the sake of Helen and her fair hair? Or do they alone among mortal men love their wives, these sons of Atreus? Hardly: any good and sensible man loves his woman and cares for her, as I too did for her, my heart’s beloved, though she had been merely the slave won by my spear. (Il. 9.338-343) ↩

5 τέκνον ἐμὸν γενεῇ μὲν ὑπέρτερός ἐστιν Ἀχιλλεύς, πρεσβύτερος δὲ σύ ἐσσι

“My child, it may be that Akhilleus is your better, but you are the elder." (Il. 9.586-7) ↩

6  στήθεσσιν λασίοισι e.g. as in 1.189. ↩

7 Seriously, this is practically the entire point of Book 7. ↩

8 It most frequently appears in 23, to equate all the prizes Akhilleus is giving out with their equivalent in cattle. See, e.g., 23.702-5:

τῷ μὲν νικήσαντι μέγαν τρίποδ᾽ ἐμπυριβήτην, τὸν δὲ δυωδεκάβοιον ἐνὶ σφίσι τῖον Ἀχαιοί: ἀνδρὶ δὲ νικηθέντι γυναῖκ᾽ ἐς μέσσον ἔθηκε, πολλὰ δ᾽ ἐπίστατο ἔργα, τίον δέ ἑ τεσσαράβοιον.

For the victor, a great tripod made to put over the fire, which the Akhaians valued among themselves at twelve oxen; for the defeated man, he put up as a prize a woman, skilled in many kinds of work, whom they valued at four oxen. ↩