#and tbh i might write up a more in depth argument abt how i think vulcans would have the wrong takes on the stoics

[splendidemendax]

Classical reception projects I'd do if Star Trek were real and I was living in the 24th century:*

*In this version of reality, everyone in the whole galaxy reads ancient Greco-Roman lit and is ready to talk about it at a moment's notice bc I say so.

Vulcan reception of the Iliad

So like, the most obvious project would be to see how the Vulcans read the Stoics, since Stoic ethics is remarkably similar to Surakian philosophy. But I don't think they'd go for the Stoics I like (mostly Epictetus, who is excellent); I have the feeling they'd be more into, like, Seneca.*

*tl;dr: Epictetus was a freedman and his Stoicism is about keeping your head and preserving your identity and moral core at any cost when everything is really, really hard. Seneca is more, like, high-academic, theoretical Stoicism. I find Epictetus' approach both much more interesting and much more useful; I also personally find Seneca very annoying.

But the Iliad is so emotive and emotion is so explicitly tied to loss and destruction, specifically loss and desctruction through war. If you've never read it, these are the first few lines:

Anger be now your song, immortal one, Akhilleus' anger, doomed and ruinous, that caused the Akhaians loss on bitter loss and crowded brave souls into the undergloom, leaving so many dead men-carrion for dogs and birds; and the will of Zeus was done. —Iliad, 1.1–6, trans. Robert Fitzgerald

I also had a prof in college who studied emotions in Homer and her favorite way of reading the Iliad was to reframe the narrative as being about longing (ποθή) rather than rage (μῆνις), which is a take I'll never forget.

All in all: I think it would remind Vulcans of their own history and make them super uncomfy and I love to see how people deal with texts that make them uncomfy.

Cardassian reception of the Aeneid

So the obvious bits here are the focus on the family and the state and the sacrifice involved in preserving/creating/honoring them.

What's particularly fun is Vergil's ambivalence about the Augustan project.* The classic (ha) argument about the Aeneid is whether it's pro- or anti-Augustan, but it doesn't have to be entirely one or the other and I personally think the ambivalence is the point. When you're living in a state coming off, like, a century of on-and-off civil war, you might have some complicated feelings about an authoritarian's peace. It would be super cool to see whether or not Vergil's ambivalence would come through.

*tl;dr: Augustus wins a civil war and takes control of the Roman government. He plays a delicate balancing game during his lifetime, but will later be recognized as the first Roman emperor. The year he is granted the title Augustus ("venerable, noble; sacred"; his actual name is Octavian) by the Roman Senate is the standard date for Rome's transition from republic to empire.

The Aeneid is also interesting because of how simultaneously hopeful and hopeless it is. Case in point: book six, where Aeneas goes to the underworld to talk to his dead father and he sees the entire future of Rome down there. The future is good, but it's got this awful shadow hanging over it because Aeneas, founder of the Roman people, is seeing this glorious future in the land of the dead.

The person who is described in the most depth is Marcellus, who gets a good thirty lines (note that I've omitted some lines):

                                      At which point Aeneas saw A young man in step with Marcellus, arrayed In glittering arms, exceedingly handsome But with lowered eyes, unhappy looking, so he asked, “Who, father, is that companion at his side? A son, or another of his great descendants? What crowds and clamour follow him! What presence He has! But black night wreathes his brow With dolorous shadow.”                                            Choking back his tears, Anchises answered, “Do not, O my son, Seek foreknowledge of the heavy sorrow Your people will endure. Fate will allow the world Only to glimpse him, then rob it of him quickly... O son of pity! Alas that you cannot strike Fate’s cruel fetters off! For you are to be Marcellus... —Aeneid, 6.1169–1198, trans. Seamus Heaney*

*Seamus Heaney's translation of Aen. VI is the best translation I've ever read of any Latin text. I paid a truly stupid amount of money for it (like $20 or smthg for a 100-ish page book) and it was entirely, 100% worth it. Cannot recommend highly enough.

Marcellus will be Rome's great hope and he'll die before he gets to do anything; he hasn't been born yet and he's already in the underworld. His ancestors grieve the bright future he's already doomed never to have, centuries before he's even born.

I'd love to see what Cardassians would make of all the ambivalence, especially if I could compare approaches before and after the Dominion War.

[ranboo5]

Dropping the Ranboo mixtape

Anyway at time of starting to write this post I had two likes and two affirmative replies, which is Good Enough For Me, so here I am :D I was gonna link the YT but on second thought my YT channel is a mess so this is gonna be one of the annoying ones that doesn’t link to one you can actually listen to but 

This is also a running list and currently organized roughly by increasingly hotter takes and it’s under a cut bc it’s 13 songs and I justified all of them 

Everybody Likes You (Lemon Demon) - LISTEN THE ANIMATION MEMES WEREN’T LYING THAT EVERYBODY LIKES YOU CAN RANBOOCORE. The increasingly distorted, incredibly bright repetition of EVERYBODY LIKES YOU EVERYBODY LIKES YOU EVERYBODY LIKES YOU until you can hear it morphing in and out of EVERYBODY LIED TO YOU? Tell Me That’s Not Him In The Spiral Depths 

Tall (Naps the Block on YT) - This is a) literally a theme for the End, b) sounds stumbling and anxious/high-strung, and c) echoes the Pigstep melody in the middle while still very much doing its own thing this is self explanatory 

Dance of Thorns/Old Secret mashup (Tensei and James Roach respectively, feat. woodfur00 on YT) (yes this is Homestuck music) - It’s just the vibes. The energy. The way the elegance of the violin lines of Dance of Thorns sounds almost nervous especially against the almost noir mystery vibes of Old Secret, and the guitar lines of Dance of Thorns add like. Initiative/urgency especially when they underlay the other music it’s so good I don’t think either song alone is Ranboo vibes but this remix definitely is. Just the mix of perseverance and desperation and melancholy and mystery and Class 

Touch-Tone Telephone (Lemon Demon) - This one is old news but tbh it just works. Man decides he’s the correct one in this situation and he’s losing his entire mind that no one is listening to him because he just is not 

2012 (Will Wood) - This one isn’t really clever it’s just about memory loss, derealization, identity, and often self-hatred (“A miserable fuck, but a loud Tao mystical” is a lot). “Did you lose yourself?/It’s always in the last place that you check” sounds so mocking in ways internal monologues like Droice have been and “I might find myself/By retracing my steps” is literally just Ranboo dealing with the Enderwalk; “And not until lobotomy abolished my monotony/Did I applaud autonomy, and modify a lot of me!” works so much for him Dealing With Himself generally, and also “I heard the world would turn to hell/Compared to that, I’m doing well!” is a Him sentiment 

Hand Me My Shovel, I’m Going In! (Will Wood) - Jokes about the three hour mining/grinding streams aside. Not only is the chorus so heavily a spiral/self-evaluation mood, but literally consider his thought processes abt the things he’s done/allegedly done and then consider “My dreams were shattered like a stained-glass window/Jesus in pieces! I believe I through a brick right through Him/But my memory could not be saved!/It just seems unlikely that it’s me who was to blame/So I bookmark my DSM, ‘cause I need to remember my place.” And now with the advent of the “experiments” the second verse’s “Take the road on higher ground, and tell me ‘don’t look down! You’ll fall and break your back’/But that just reminds me how there’s more to be found beneath the black!” is more relevant than ever 

Friends With You (The Scary Jokes) - Oh my god. Oh my fucking god man. This could be on here for “I put myself to bed just halfway through the party/I love all my friends, but I hate when their eyes are on me” alone but the general almost empty saccharine vibe of the song is immensely his vibe; the humorlessly-smiling vocal fry on “don’t know” in “Why do you pretend/You don’t know who’s to blame?” is probably responsible for 80% of this read. Not to mention the first lyrics are literally “How long do I have to wait/’Til my lonely days are over?” which is really the. The waiting it out man the So When Do I Get To Be Okay of it all. Shoutouts also to “And the crumbling infrastructure no one else can see,” the self hatred of “I miss being friends with you/But what can I do/What can I do/But leave you alone?” and to “And I can tell you really love me/Can you tell I’m really sorry?” Just. The mix of hope+affection and dejected cynicism and self-hatred in the lyrics

Saline Solution (none other than Mr Wilbur Soot) - Remember what I said about waiting it out until you get to be okay? Anyway that’s crystallized in “If I could just break one more night/Maybe I could wake up and feel alright” and also this is literally a song about catastrophizing and self-evaluation just,, in general and I will not be highlighting all the lyrics about this but I will highlight the fact that he literally calls himself pragmatic and also the lyric “blurring the facts and the fiction.” Also, the sheer desperate anger-concealing-breakdown vibes of “I think I’ve made my choice” to “I think I’ve found my voice” deserves a mention, as does the culminating end of “saline solution to all your problems” with the tears+now splash water motifs of it all with Ranboo I am going to die 

Funny (The Scary Jokes) - This is actually a softer take but not only does it literally start with the singer pleading with the addressee to look away, it  continues with “I went up in the middle of the night and I climbed right onto the stage/And I raged/And I cried/Oh, what a funny joke am I” disregarding everything as performance, reemphasizes the opening demand with the qualifier “it’s not that I hate you, it’s just that I’m funny these days,” and then kills you with the last couple lines which. Yeah he does care and it does,,, just,,,,, a

Chemical Overreaction (Will Wood) - This is where the mood VIOLENTLY whiplashes because this is where we get unhinged. Anyway “I won’t stop to drop to draw a line in the sand/’Cause I’ll be picked apart to pieces by coyotes!” is LITERALLY the whole “I don’t do well with ‘peer pressure’” thing. “Where the sentimental value of the city around ya/Is deleted obsolete, but still completely will stun ya” is the single most L’Manberg lyric I’ve ever heard, especially from the perspective of a character whom I will repeatedly insist is narratively in the role of someone who’s shown up and seen the status quo as an outsider after it’s been established (hence the eternal New Kid vibes). Chorus very much has vibes of Ranboo Is Seized By The Urge To Do Something, and like. The entire dramatic end part. The last two lines especially (be very careful if you look up the vieo for this by the way it is NOT pretty; cws in the video for flashing, blood, suicide imagery) 

A Mannequin Adrift (The Scary Jokes) - The Bitterness. This song is just fully The Bitterness at the environment he’s stuck in; the saccharine comes back as does the “peer pressure” thematic and just the Having An Awful Time; the sarcastic saccharine comes back too, which is always good I love passive aggression. Honestly the first verse is just everything like just listen to it it immediately makes sense

Poison Ivy Grows (The Scary Jokes) - This is overall a song about having bad brain and not knowing what the hell to do about it; it’s so faintly bitter and distant and melancholy and also so zoned out. Also, it’s not the only lyric that matters here but it is enough to be a full argument on its own: “I used to spend so much time/Wandering around outside/Now I’ve got too much on my mind/Now I’ve got too much on my mind” 

Spring Haze (Tori Amos) - Listen. Do I know what Spring Haze is about? No. Is that gonna stop me from saying it’s about Ranboo? Also no. I just think “You say we’ll never make it there/So all we do is circle it” is so much, the fact that the bridge at the end is just “Why does it always end up like this?” repeated, and that it just feels so much like overall the song feels like a desperate attempt to figure Something out, and the chorus is just inexplicably him? It might be partially influenced by the fact that “Uh-oh, let go, off on my way” and, to a lesser extent, “Uh-oh, way to go” is not only in accordance with character vibes but also vaguely evocative of Ranboo’s speech pattern

[ssaalexblake]

Ooh, what's your opinion on S8 of DW?

I think what it intended to be and what it turned out to be are two very different things, and i am never sure how to judge it because i can see what it is trying to be and respect that, but i also see perfectly what it Actually turned out to be and kind of openly hate it. 

I will give it a high grade for aspiration but a very low one for execution. 

I’m not going to go into total depth here because i’ve tried before and it was... Long. But I think the main problems can be summed up with a writers room trying to write somebody putting on no airs, somebody being a bit of an asshole but not Irredeemably so, but not having a damn clue where the line lays between lovable asshole and, well... Just a shit head tbh. They hop onto the bad side of that line too often. Sometimes 12 is meant to cross a line, and the stories let us Know the intention was to display him going too far (like that time Clara socked him), and that’s fine, but it’s the unintentional that are the problem. There is a lot of unintentional. 

Also, the casting is fucked up. I don’t mean that anybody is bad at acting, but not One person thought of the implications of their story lines and how that intersected with the way they cast the roles. If we take the main players of the season (as in, influencing events narratively on a season wide scale) we have 12, Clara and Missy. Now, narratively these three are Meant to be a hot mess and that’s fine, watching 12 and Clara kind of devolve into an outright mess and finding out Missy is behind it all and was deliberately stirring up trouble is the intended plot and there’s nothing wrong with that. The problem comes in when you have your main cast of white people fucking over everybody else around them. The everybody else around them being all the characters who aren’t white, are 90% of the time this season black, who are being fucked over by a narrative that always intended to have these side characters be ultimately disposable and props for the leads. 

(i mean, on more levels, i could make solid arguments as to why Clara and Missy are Also kind of just functioning as props to the lead white man in this season, but it’s not that that’s the main issue here bc A) this was as much if not More of a problem with Clara in season 7 and Missy Does develop later.) 

Is Clara and 12 having an unhealthy relationship a bad narrative choice? No. Is their poor behavior effecting those around them negatively a bad narrative, unrealistic or poor story choice? No, it’s not. It is the casting that breaks this season, which is why i said i wouldn’t hate it if they’d just put more thought into who they cast as who. 

to be fair, this is a long standing issue in dw not limited to s8 or the show runners of that era, it was the same back when rtd was in charge and it’s still there today (Mickey is also treated like shit, and just the other week i was complaining abt Praxeus having a huge guest cast but only caring about the two white men...The show’s current propensity for one off characters to be gay but them then dying immediately... Though, to be Slightly fair on that part, didn’t i read that somebody pointed this out to chibnall and that he then has since stopped the gay thing, at least? Which i kind of assumed was why the two white guys in praxeus even existed, tbh, gays who Don’t die. That was still a mess though). 

But, yes, The way the narrative treats Danny may be innocuous on a sheet of paper with no faces attached, but the way it plays out on screen has very different connotations. It has further bad ones when 12 is immediately cruel and verbally abusive to another black man who likes Clara, or whom Clara might like in that ep with the two dimensional aliens. I mean, 12 is jealous, that’s Why he’s acting this way, but once more another innocuous plot point on paper and kind of insidious on screen because of casting creating a terrible pattern. 

 In case we thought this was limited to men, Courtney! An innocent 15 year old black girl whom was treated so badly by 12 that it was affecting her mental health, was basically kidnapped by him (clara. Clara you should not have allowed this you were that girl’s legal protector strictly speaking) and then among other things is used as a human shield by 12 to avoid being shot, and that was awful when it aired and with age it’s gotten Worse. This isn’t even going into kill the moon’s aggressive anti abortion stance and it’s damn Gall to be smug about that ‘woman kind’ crack and basically use an old white man and again, a Fifteen year old girl to make its point on what is an unplanned pregnancy metaphor (to be clear, not a Normal pregnancy, but one with likely potential to kill the mother, congrats this is Worse). Did. Did none of you think this was messed up? Did none of you realise? .. no? Okay. 

 Like, everybody involved with the making of that utter disgrace of an ep can kindly fuck off. And for clarity’s sake, when Clara and 12 fight at the end of the episode you can clearly identify what parts of the episode are written as 12 Intentionally being written as awful and what was just accidental b/c Clara calls him on what he did badly and she barely mentions anything on the long list of bs in that episode. Go figure. And to top it off, after all of this 12 smugly proclaims Courtney will have a great future and be special now just because of him. I can honestly say i’ve never wanted to sock the doctor more than i did in that episode. I can honestly say i’ve found episodes of the show from 50 years previous less egregiously offensive, which is a hell of a low bar. 

But i digress, S8 is proof you need to Pay Attention to your stories and how that relates to the casting you choose, because they Basically managed to write a doctor who only really ever took to white people and fuck anybody else. And i mean, 12′s Not nice but this just, isn’t great. This entirely changes what was, on paper, pretty innocuous (i imagine). You can’t Not consider story implications when casting!!!! 

12 didn’t just dislike Danny, he Degraded him. It was so far over a line of moderation and i still can’t work out if that was on purpose or just the writers not getting where the line is. Doesn’t matter in a broader sense but i still wonder. Clara Also treats Danny like dirt, she lies to Danny repeatedly and then casts him as some kind of bad guy who is stopping her from going off with the doctor because it’s seemingly easier for her this way, lying to both 12 and Danny to avoid judgment from either party. Telling Danny she’d stopped travelling, telling 12 Danny was Fine with it once Danny Approved it which was A) her calling danny controlling to 12 which is both untrue and also probably contributed to 12′s disdain for him and B) when 12 did work out she was lying it Still makes Danny look bad because Clara seemingly Had to hide this from danny to get away with it, which also makes him look controlling, when in reality it was just her not being able to deal with adult conflict in a mature way. 

Missy also like, murders him. I don’t think it’s said in the show but if i recall eu content does say so. Either way, he dies. 

In the end Danny was created to be walked all over, be a Nice Guy who gets screwed over by these other people, be a good man who has a chance to live and gives it up for a kid he doesn’t know. And is just treated like shit the whole time. 

The casting is bad. The lack of critical thought is obvious and Bad. To be clear, the solution here is not to make everybody white (just as bad, different way) but to uh, actually put thought into the implications of your casting and cast characters in ways to Avoid terrible messages. If there is No way to avoid something crappy, is the plot Really worth having? Is it? Really? 

And like, there are other things. Clara’s bad writing from s7 catches up some, here, in Deep Breath we’re Told clara has all the negative qualities that have suddenly emerged after she’s fulfilled her life’s function of Saving The Doctor (some more primo bs) and they seemingly realised without the Mystery(tm) she needed to be a more round character. The Presence of the negative traits is fine, them suddenly appearing in an ep and that kind of managing to demonize clara when she’s scared and freaked out Is Not Great. A lot of her reaction is written off on her being Shallow because the doctor ain’t hot anymore and yes i could still kick something about all this. 

I’m not fond of the joke they made where 12 thought Clara’s boyfriend was a matt smith look alike, har har the doctor is arrogant... Except after the whole Shallow thing you could viably read this as 12 not considering his Behavior as the reason Clara’s freaked out by him lately but because he isn’t in a younger body anymore. 12 has been awful on many an occasion already, in deep breath Clara had resigned herself to a life in the past with Jenny and Vastra because she had No expectations that he’d actually even just take her home. She ended up hitting him in into the dalek. She honestly was not sure he’d save her from a robot who was going to dismantle her for parts and was Terrified. Maybe your behaviour is a factor here, buddy. 

It’s a damn mess, basically. And for all the potential in 12′s identity crisis and self hatred, like, it was a good idea imo! They fucked it up so badly i just hate the season and have to treat it like an analytics exercise to rewatch it because i don’t enjoy it but kind of need to wath for future stuff to make sense. 

also... asshole older white man genius treats people around him badly till they teach him to be a better person is the oldest and least groundbreaking plot idea nowadays. It was boring decades ago. Just stop.