#and Dante

[ishcliff]

something fun i noted out of curiosity...

heathcliff has more lines/screentime than many of the other sinners, yet he only refers to any other sinner by their name three times in the entire story script:

canto II

and both in canto V

(disclaimers: i don't know the original korean text, so i don't know if this remains true there. i also am intentionally not factoring in identities.)

the rest of the time, he refers to the other sinners by nicknames, either impersonal ("yellow-haired lass" for don, woman, bird, lad, mate, etc.) or dubiously-affectionately derogatory (bug guy, smartarse, clockhead).

but specifically, he refers to catherine by not only her name, but a personal nickname – "i call her cathy" is a statement with a lot of inherent power behind the intent. it shows he knows her, suggests that he is more familiar with her than anyone else.

what this means to me is how heathcliff refers to other people is important to him. vergilius gets referred to by name out of respect or fear (likely both). he takes great care in putting distance between himself and others, hence why he often is reflexively defensive and dismissive under scrutiny. so, he sums up their base traits and refers to them as such – dante has a clock for a head, gregor has a bug arm, etc. it's also a flippant way to deliberately bring someone down a peg. it's a message to send to others who may think they are better than him that they aren't the only ones who can judge (him) on a surface level.

heathcliff constantly puts others under his own scrutiny. he is hyperaware of people's general qualities in the context of risk assessment. this is a pretty common skill those raised in abusive environments develop as a survival mechanism. being able to readily assess someone's character and also their current emotional state is a necessity for those in an environment like heathcliff's – from the backstreets, to wuthering heights, to the city at large.

heathcliff is very straightforward and doesn't exactly hide who he is, but he also is very firm on putting up walls between himself and others. i think this is likely going to be a point of conflict during canto VI, especially as heathcliff is around the people (and especially person) who could claim to know him more than anyone else.

essentially, i am reading in between the lines of this interaction later in the christmas event (which i know i've discussed before):

it will be interesting to see how heathcliff does or doesn't open up and accept the other sinners as a part of his life going forward.

[toastedseavegetable]

it’s fratrocide o’clock

[royai]

I hate to be mean too because I genuinely love the series but it was some 03 fans saying the Roy vs Lust thing was sexist and I’m very confident I’ve never heard a good take from 03 fans regarding the manga. Like I’m kinda convinced none of them read it or watched BH tbh they just look at gifs and come up with shit

oh i personally think most 03 fans are overcompensating for liking 03 more & want to find anything & everything potentially “wrong” with the manga or bh to “prove” their point that 03 is the superior series. it’s usually just lazy chatter about things they haven’t thought more than 2 shits about. fma 03 is a beautiful take on fma and i do love it dearly but just objectively it is not a better series than bh or the manga. i wish people would stop trying to compare the 3 and instead just enjoy them as their own standalones. same with the movies & games & light novels etc. it’s all just more fma content which is <3

[marrowbaby]

your therapist’s office is a shitty place to conduct a craft workshop on life writing so you should go to hell instead, pt 1.

Thinking a lot about that bog of an intersection between the craft of autoficition and the introspective capacity that seems required to narrate the blindspots of trauma. wrestling with the chasm that exists between a life and a narrative. the cultural insistence that one be imposed upon the other (and vice versa) does not, as it turns out, make them the same thing. thinking then about how forms of life writing, memoir, autofiction, etc.. are always an imposition of form onto the dizzying formlessness of one’s life. by which I mean to say mine.

I’ve been pushing my rock up Mt. Autofiction for a few months now, and in this case I suppose the rock is the notion of plot as a formal constraint on lived experience. I admit a stubborn aversion to writing autofiction from the place of an I, though that may be because I truly do believe that all life writing is an exercise in POV not dissimilar from the kind of introspective self-objectification that happens in therapy.

That’s to say, you’ve got to find a way to look at yourself (but you only have one set of eyes and you don’t even like 3D movies because the goggles they give you at the theater don’t work with your glasses and everything gets fuzzy in the periphery, which gives you a headache). To write about yourself, your life, requires a kind of double vision.

Over the last few months, I’ve been feverishly reading and re-reading The Divine Comedy, returning often to my favorite cantos from the Inferno. I have vivid memories of being 7 or 8 years old and lying on the couch that served as my bed at my dad’s newly-established bachelor pad while he read the fourth canto aloud to me. The one where Virgil introduces Dante to all the classical poets and great philosopher kings living in a dope penthouse on some prime real estate in the first circle of Hell. I don’t think my dad had gotten around to setting up the TV yet. Recalling that fact of my early bedside eduction in the classics makes me feel like slightly less of a narcissist when I wonder whether it’s inevitable for MFA students to at some point find themselves asking “wait, so am I like... basically Dante rn?”  

As I’ve been toiling away on this manuscript, I’ve found the greatest difficulty to be something like a confusion of actors.

Asking myself questions like: who, exactly, occupies the role of our Orpheus? And.. wait- was it even Orpheus, or was it Dante? (An actor of fated retrieval, the one who descends with a purpose.) And: what does plot know of the partial protagonist, the one who is two apart? (Here’s where I admit that I always preferred Stevenson’s Treasure Island to The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.)

I’ve been keeping notes as I go back through the Comedy. Ruminating on the the world of the Inferno. Thinking about the ways that Hell, too, is a world of double vision—there’s Dante the writer and Dante the Pilgrim, I and I — down below in the realm of shades. How poetry is itself is a thing in-two, a muse of Mercury.

And the shades that live in the underworld — those figures that drift about, sometimes speaking, sometimes wailing, telling the Pilgrim and his guide of their sins and explaining why they’re here, what they did—also get doubled. These figures made of anguish and shadow are that which block the very light the travelers seek. But they’re also the ones with the stories, the flickering television screens through which the full vision of Hell is relayed to Dante, fizzling up through the poem to be transmitted to the world above. They exist in-double: both static and transmission in one; shade and light; fact, and its forgetting.

But this is my blog and I get to be Dante now, looking at my life, looking at myself as I look at myself. A girl folded over a body, eyes crossing into twin vision.

***

I’ve more to say on this and a lot more ruminations on Dante, but I’ll stop here for now because Infinity Pool comes out on Friday and I can’t think about anything else.

[koitosoup]

Hunger

[fella-lovin-fella]

"there are only two sexes, it's literally third grade biology!" and pronouns are taught in kindergarten and you dont seem to understand those either

[alter-koker]

something ive noticed while reading dantes inferno is that there seems to be a lot of italians in hell

[nateconnolly]

The hardest I've ever been roasted is when I joking asked my friend what circle of Dante's Hell we'd be sent to, and then I said, "Oh, I'd go to the circle for homosexuals, right?" to which he immediately replied, "No, that's a mistranslation, it's a circle for the sodomites, not the homosexuals, meaning you'd have to actually have gay sex to go there."

[anthonysperkins]

Dante Foxx and Rick Hammersmith Playing Dirty (2001) dir. Paul Barresi

[brw]

My least favourite type of internet person is the person who claims fanfic is over thousands of years old or whatever. I understand we like to joke but fanfiction is fundamentally tied to fandom culture and is a very specific way of engaging with media. Religious texts based off other religious texts is not fanfiction and it is worrying the only way you can justify your interest is by comparing the two. I promise you you don't have to reinvent the wheel to write fanfic you can just do that but we don't have to say "Shakespeare wrote fanfiction about Richard III", there was not a Richard III fandom in 1592, that was called the divine right of kings.

[shmaba]

I can finally share these characters I got to make for the Critical Role Daggerheart one shot! What a colorful cast they are

[thecollectibles]

The Apple Tree by Dante Liu

[etruski]

Throwback to when I put my name as Dante Alighieri on Academia.edu and received this email

[orpheuslament]

a lot of you know me for the "my psychiatrist asks me about friendship & i tell him about distance" excerpt but its been almost a year since i wrote it & the whole piece still resonates so i thought id share (x)

[diioonysus]

objects in art: swords/daggers

[fella-lovin-fella]

i have not been able to get this out of my head since i first saw it

i have referenced it a thousand times. but i had to do something about it. so i made this

that's modern milk for ya. what a time to be alive.