#if you were a general born into a family of generals you probably wrote poetry

[homomenhommes]

THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

based on: The White Crane Institute's 'Gay Wisdom', Gay Birthdays, Gay For Today, Famous GLBT, glbt-Gay Encylopedia, Today in Gay History, Wikipedia, and more … May 25

1803 – On this date Ralph Waldo Emerson the poet and essayist was born (d.1882).

Emerson had a wild crush on a classmate at Harvard, about whom he wrote sexually charged poetry. Martin Gay, the subject of Emerson's growing infatuation, was the subject of numerous entries in Emerson's journals which modern editors have been able to reconstruct. As the scholar Martin Greif has written, "they provide a rare view of the future philosopher in the thrall of same-sex love." With an unembarrassed frankness he wrote in his journal about the disturbing power of the glances he and Gay exchanged. Emerson wrote of Martin Gay in his notebook, "Why do you look after me? I cannot help looking out as you pass." Emerson heavily crossed out the Martin Gay journal notes at some later time.

He would later tell Walt Whitman to cross out the homoerotic portions of the Calamus cluster of poems in Leaves of Grass. Fortunately for us and for posterity Whitman did not take the "advice." In Emerson's mature life "his craving for friendship and love seldom found adequate satisfaction," as his biographer Stephen Whicher put it.

1869 – (Robert Baldwin) Robbie Ross (d.1918) was a Canadian journalist and art critic. He is best known as the executor of the estate of Oscar Wilde, to whom he had been a lifelong friend. He was also responsible for bringing together several great literary figures, such as Siegfried Sassoon, and acting as their mentor. His open homosexuality in a time when homosexual acts were illegal brought him many hardships.

Ross was born in Tours, France. His father John Ross, though born in Ireland, spent most of his life in Upper Canada, where he became a lawyer and attorney-general in 1853 and was president of the Grand Trunk Railway from 1853 to 1862. His mother, Augusta Elizabeth Baldwin, was the daughter of Canadian Deputy Premier Robert Baldwin.

As a young man, Ross moved to England to go to university. He was accepted at King's College, Cambridge in 1888, but was the victim of bullying, probably due to his sexuality (of which he made no secret), and his perhaps outspoken journalism in the university paper. Ross caught pneumonia after a dunking in a fountain by a number of students with, according to Ross, the full support of a don. After recovering, he fought for an apology from his fellow students, which he received, but more fiercely, for the dismissal of the don who, he argued, had known about and supported the bullying. The college refused to punish the man and Ross dropped out of university. Soon after this event, Ross decided to 'come out' to his family, a serious matter in the 1880s. He gathered them to hear the announcement not long after he left university.

As a young Londoner, Ross is alleged to have been Oscar Wilde's first male lover. Ross found work as a journalist and critic, but he did not escape scandal. A few years before Wilde's imprisonment for homosexuality, Ross had a sexual relationship with a boy of fourteen, the son of friends, and the boy's best friend, aged fifteen. Both boys confessed to their parents that they had engaged in sexual activity with Ross, and the fourteen-year-old boy also admitted to a sexual encounter with Lord Alfred Douglas while he was a guest at Ross's house. After a good deal of panic and frantic meetings with solicitors, the parents were persuaded not to go to the police, since, at that time, their sons might be seen not as victims but as equally guilty and so face the possibility of going to prison.In 1895 Oscar Wilde, Lord Alfred Douglas and Ross approached solicitor Charles Octavius Humphreys with the intention of suing the Marquess of Queensberry, Douglas' father, for criminal libel. Humphreys asked Wilde directly whether there was any truth to Queensberry's allegations of homosexual activity between Wilde and Douglas, to which Wilde replied in the negative. The suit went to the courts, and Wilde incriminated himself.

Following Wilde's disgrace and imprisonment in 1895, Ross went abroad for safety's sake, but he returned to offer both financial and emotional support to Wilde during his last years. Ross remained loyal to Wilde and was with him when he died on 30 November 1900.

Ross became his mentor's literary executor. This was not an easy task. It meant tracking down and purchasing the rights to all of Wilde's texts, which had been sold off along with all of Wilde's possessions when the playwright was declared bankrupt. In 1908, some years after Wilde's death, Ross produced the definitive edition of his works. Ross was also responsible for commissioning Jacob Epstein to produce the tomb for Wilde. He even requested that Epstein design a small compartment into the tomb for Ross's own ashes.

As a result of his faithfulness to Wilde even in death, Ross was vindictively pursued by Lord Alfred Douglas, who repeatedly attempted to have him arrested and tried for homosexual conduct. During the First World War, Ross mentored a group of young, mostly same-sex-oriented poets and artists, including Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. He was also a close friend of Wilde's son Vyvyan Holland, and a friend of his other son Cyril until his death in the First World War.

In early 1918, during the German Spring Offensive, a right-wing Member of Parliament, published an article entitled The Cult of the Clitoris, in which he accused members of Ross's circle of being at the centre of 47,000 homosexual traitors who were betraying the nation to the Germans. Maud Allan, an actress who had played Wilde's Salome in a performance authorised by Ross, was identified as a member of the "cult". She unsuccessfully sued for libel, causing a national sensation in Britain. The incident brought much embarrassing attention to Ross and his associates.

Later in the same year, Ross was preparing to travel to Melbourne, Australia to open an exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria when he died suddenly. In 1950, on the 50th anniversary of Wilde's death, Ross's ashes were added to Wilde's tomb in the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

1895 – On this date the Irish playwright and poet Oscar Wilde was convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years of hard labor.

1937 – Victor J. Banis (d.2019) was an American author, often associated with the first wave of West Coast gay writing. For his contributions he has been called "the godfather of modern popular gay fiction." He was openly gay.

Born in 1937 in Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania, Banis was the tenth of eleven children born to William and Anna Banis. As a small child, Banis moved with his family to Eaton, Ohio, where he lived on a farm and finished high school in 1955. While still in grade school, he began writing Nancy Drew-inspired mysteries featuring his classmate Carol Peters, now the writer Carol Cail. In his memoirs, he writes about growing up in severe poverty.

On his own, he lived for a brief time in Birmingham, Alabama, before moving to Dayton, Ohio, where he worked in sales and floral design. In 1960 he moved to Los Angeles, where he lived for 20 years and had his first literary success. He rapidly turned out a number of important novels, and he and his partner, Sam Dodson, collaborated on a number of nonfictional gay works as well as a few, generally insignificant novels. They also published magazines and edited for DSI, a Minneapolis publisher.

Banis served as a tutor for various aspiring writers and acted as their de facto agent. He championed the early writing of mystery writer Joseph Hansen, among others. In 1980, he moved to Big Bear in the San Bernardino Mountains, and then in 1985 to San Francisco, where he worked as a property manager. In 2004, he retired and took up residence in Martinsburg, West Virginia. There he returned to writing full-time.

Banis's first published work was a short story, "Broken Record," that appeared in the Swiss gay publication Der Kreis in 1963. His first long work of fiction was The Affairs of Gloria, a romance with a few lesbian scenes inspired by the recent popularity of novels with lesbian themes. The novel was indicted by a federal grand jury in Sioux City, Iowa, for conspiracy to distribute obscene materials. Although some of his co-defendants were found guilty, Banis himself was acquitted.

He continued to write both straight and bisexual novels for Brandon House, buthe was increasingly drawn to depicting the struggling gay scene that was yet barely chronicled in American literature. His first significant work of fiction was the innovative novel The Why Not, 1966. A series of intertwining sketches of habitués of a Los Angeles gay bar.

Finding the novel sold well, Greenleaf Classics editor-in-chief Earl Kemp asked Banis to submit other gay novels. Thus was born The Man from C.A.M.P. (1966). The success of the original novel was so great that Banis went on to write eight sequels (1966-1968). The series is historically important for several reasons. It was the first gay mystery series, already five in number before George Baxt could follow up on his success with A Queer Kind of Death (also 1966), and the C.A.M.P. novels depicted what is probably the first openly out and joyfully unrestrained gay hero in American letters, the indomitable undercover agent Jackie Holmes.

But by 1980, the author of over 100 books, he was feeling burned out and ceased publishing.

At the beginning of this century, Banis began writing fiction once again. The 2007, Wildside Press published Avalon, a heterosexual romance set in the 1940s through the 1970s, and Carroll and Graf published the gay Western romance Longhorns, his first new novels in more than thirty years.

1939 – Today's the birthday of stage and screen actor and long time Gay rights advocate and hero Ian McKellen. Born in Burnley, England, he studied at St. Catharine's College, University of Cambridge.

McKellen was nominated for an Oscar for his role in "Gods and Monsters" becoming the first openly gay actor to be nominated. He had quite a career with roles in such classic plays (and films adaptations) of Macbeth, Richard III and Edward II to name just a few. These are all available on DVD and well worth the watching. Millions of fans the world over know him as the bearded wizard Gandalf or the helmeted mutant master of magnetism Magneto. He may be the best known out Gay actor in the world. He's been out for decades becoming one of the first to do so back in the 1980s. People told him it would mean the end of his career. It hasn't.

While McKellen had made his sexual orientation known to fellow actors early on in his stage career, it was not until 1988 that he came out to the general public, in a programme on BBC Radio. The context that prompted McKellen's decision – overriding any concerns about a possible negative effect on his career – was that the controversial Section 28 of the Local Government Bill, known simply as Section 28, was then under consideration in the British Parliament. Section 28 proposed prohibiting local authorities from promoting homosexuality "... as a kind of pretended family relationship". McKellen became active in fighting the proposed law, and, during a BBC Radio 3 programme where he debated Section 28 with the conservative journalist Peregrine Worsthorne, declared himself gay.

McKellen and his first partner, Brian Taylor, a history teacher from Bolton, began their relationship in 1964. Their relationship lasted for eight years, ending in 1972. They lived in London, where McKellen continued to pursue his career as an actor. For over a decade, he has lived in a five-storey Victorian conversion in Narrow Street, Limehouse.

In 1978 he met his second partner, Sean Mathias, at the Edinburgh Festival. This relationship lasted until 1988. According to Mathias, the ten-year love affair was tempestuous, with conflicts over McKellen's success in acting versus Mathias's somewhat less-successful career. Mathias later directed McKellen in Waiting For Godot at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in 2009. The pair entered into a business partnership with Evgeny Lebedev, purchasing the lease on The Grapes public house in Narrow Street.

In 2009 McKellen premiered a one-man show in Washington, DC as a benefit for the Washington Shakespeare Theater. He held an audience and this writer spellbound as he performed soliloquey after soliloquey from Shakespearean roles he's had over the years. He shared stories of the actors he has known and called friend.

Most moving of all was his telling the story of being in South Africa after the end of apartheid. He was there for a role but was asked by local Gay activists if he'd be willing to speak to Nelson Mandela about the need for Gay rights protections in the new country's constitution. He told them he would only agree if he were accompanied by South African Gay activist leaders. The three of them, all friends, met with Mandela and spoke of the need for the new country to place Gay rights protections into the constitution. Mandela agreed and it was his support that allowed for South Africa to become the first country to place direct rights for Gay and Lesbian people into its constitution. McKellen called it the proudest moment of his life.

1953 – Alexander Wilson (d.1993) was a writer, teacher, landscape designer, and community activist.

Born in Ottawa, Illinois, Wilson grew up in Oakland, California. In 1977, he moved to Canada, where he lived and worked in Toronto, Ontario.

Wilson advocated restoring indigenous plant species to the urban landscape, thereby promoting urban biodiversity and reconnecting urban dwellers with the natural history of the place in which they live. He believed that combining ecological restoration and community gardening could be a way to nurture and improve not only urban ecosystems, but also social and economic relations. In his book, The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez (1991), he dealt with the ways in which culture informs and constructs our understanding of “nature”, and he examined the colonization and appropriation of nature by the city (particularly via the automobile).

Wilson established the Garrison Creek Planting Company with artist Stephen Andrews (his life partner) and horticulturist Kim Delaney. He also designed the landscaping for the AIDS Memorial, Cawthra Park, itself designed by Patrick Fahn. Following Wilson's death from AIDS-related causes, his own memorial plaque was added to the others in the park.

On an urban lot near his house Wilson created a reclaimed garden that, after his death, friends tried to buy and preserve. Though they were unsuccessful in that project they did find another downtown lot on which a garden was created and named in his memory, the Alex Wilson Community Garden, which opened in June 1998 at 552 Richmond Street West in Toronto.

A plaque in the park includes a quoted passage from The Culture of Nature:

"We must build landscapes that heal and empower, that make intelligible our relations with each other and the natural world."

1965 – Bernard Baran, Jr. (d.2014) was wrongfully convicted in the day care sex abuse hysteria of the 1980s and 1990s that was spawned by the McMartin preschool trial. Unlike other day care cases, the Baran case garnered little national press coverage. The Baran case spanned almost 25 years from his arrest in October 1984 until all charges were dropped in June 2009. Baran maintained his innocence throughout his case, making him ineligible for parole. Baran was accused, tried and convicted within a three-month period and sentenced to three life sentences in January 1985.

In 2009, the Massachusetts Appeals Court vacated the convictions, deeming the case "notorious," and citing the behavior of the original prosecutor as "troubling." Along with its importance as the first successful conviction, the Baran case is notable amongst the day-care cases for the level of homophobia present in the court record of the prosecution. The Baran case is the subject of the documentary film Freeing Bernie Baran.

Bernard Baran took a job as a teacher's aide in 1983 at the Early Childhood Development Center in his hometown of Pittsfield, the county seat of Berkshire County in Western Massachusetts. Shortly before his employment, social workers placed a four-year-old boy at ECDC due to the child's home environment. Eventually the child ended up in the classroom where Baran worked. In September 1984 the Fells Acres Day Care Center preschool case broke and made news across Massachusetts. Shortly thereafter, the parents of the boy complained to the board of directors of ECDC that they "didn't want no homo" working with their child. The Board of Directors held a meeting on September 12, 1984 to specifically discuss Baran's homosexuality and the possibility of terminating his employment because of it. Baran retained his job after being questioned about his homosexuality by his superiors.

On October 1, 1984, the parents of the boy in question removed him from ECDC in protest of Baran's continued employment. The parents were drug addicts and police informants. On October 5, 1984 they called their connection at the Pittsfield police department drug control unit. They alleged that Bernard Baran molested their son at ECDC that day, three days after they had removed the child from the day care. The following day the police began an investigation at ECDC and validated this claim of sexual abuse.

Word of the first allegation broke shortly after the investigation began. Within days the day care center had sponsored a puppet show to facilitate other children's ability to talk about abuse. The day care also notified all the parents that a child at the day care had gonorrhea. After multiple children were interviewed with anatomically correct dolls at both of ECDC's locations, one where Baran worked and one where he did not, Baran was indicted on 3 counts of rape and 5 counts of indecent assault on November 5, 1984.

Baran's case went from arrest to trial in 105 days, convening in court on January 23, 1985, receiving significant local media attention. The court room was closed to the public and the press during the children's testimony without any hearing into the necessity for closing the court, which Baran claimed violated his 6th Amendment right to a public trial. Baran was positioned in the court room so that he could not even hear the testimony of the children. On January 30, 1985 he received three life sentences for three counts of rape of a child and five counts of indecent assault and battery. His conviction held up on appeal in 1986. The law firm that handled his appeal eventually destroyed his defense case file.

n 1999 a new legal team took Baran's case. In a series of hearings from 1999 to 2005, the original defense file was recreated from the contents of the civil suits filed against ECDC after the Baran conviction. The motion for a new trial contained over 300 flawed items in the original trial, including prosecutorial misconduct, ineffective assistance of counsel, and the use of suggestive interviewing techniques with the children. The motion rested in June 2005.

Baran was granted a new trial in 2006. The Berkshire County District Attorney's office appealed the granting of a new trial in 2008. In 2009 the Massachusetts Appeals Court affirmed the 2006 ruling and set aside the 1984 convictions.

In 2010, Baran's lawyers began the process of suing multiple parties in civil court on his behalf. Even though a $400,000.00 settlement was reached in 2010 the state has denied liability and thus has yet to expunge his record.

Baran died suddenly on September 1, 2014, at his home in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. He was survived by his partner, David Colarusso.

1978 – The first "Gay Day" at Disneyland is held. A group entity calling itself The Tavern Guild rented Disneyland for a private party. More than 15,000 people attended and it was the largest private party ever held at Disneyland.

2007 – Colorado & Iowa ban discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity in the private sector.

Gay Wisdom:

The Ballad of Reading Gaol By Oscar Wilde (First Canto) I. He did not wear his scarlet coat, For blood and wine are red, And blood and wine were on his hands When they found him with the dead, The poor dead woman whom he loved, And murdered in her bed. He walked amongst the Trial Men In a suit of shabby grey; A cricket cap was on his head, And his step seemed light and gay; But I never saw a man who looked So wistfully at the day. I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky, And at every drifting cloud that went With sails of silver by. I walked, with other souls in pain, Within another ring, And was wondering if the man had done A great or little thing, When a voice behind me whispered low, "That fellows got to swing." Dear Christ! the very prison walls Suddenly seemed to reel, And the sky above my head became Like a casque of scorching steel; And, though I was a soul in pain, My pain I could not feel. I only knew what hunted thought Quickened his step, and why He looked upon the garish day With such a wistful eye; The man had killed the thing he loved And so he had to die.           ___ Yet each man kills the thing he loves By each let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword! Some kill their love when they are young, And some when they are old; Some strangle with the hands of Lust, Some with the hands of Gold: The kindest use a knife, because The dead so soon grow cold. Some love too little, some too long, Some sell, and others buy; Some do the deed with many tears, And some without a sigh: For each man kills the thing he loves, Yet each man does not die.           ___ He does not die a death of shame On a day of dark disgrace, Nor have a noose about his neck, Nor a cloth upon his face, Nor drop feet foremost through the floor Into an empty place He does not sit with silent men Who watch him night and day; Who watch him when he tries to weep, And when he tries to pray; Who watch him lest himself should rob The prison of its prey. He does not wake at dawn to see Dread figures throng his room, The shivering Chaplain robed in white, The Sheriff stern with gloom, And the Governor all in shiny black, With the yellow face of Doom. He does not rise in piteous haste To put on convict-clothes, While some coarse-mouthed Doctor gloats, and notes Each new and nerve-twitched pose, Fingering a watch whose little ticks Are like horrible hammer-blows. He does not know that sickening thirst That sands one's throat, before The hangman with his gardener's gloves Slips through the padded door, And binds one with three leathern thongs, That the throat may thirst no more. He does not bend his head to hear The Burial Office read, Nor, while the terror of his soul Tells him he is not dead, Cross his own coffin, as he moves Into the hideous shed. He does not stare upon the air Through a little roof of glass; He does not pray with lips of clay For his agony to pass; Nor feel upon his shuddering cheek The kiss of Caiaphas.

[hunxi-guilai]

I was rereading your post about poetry in the show & I just wanted to remark that I felt like "今朝有酒今朝醉" has very similar vibes to the part in wwx's character song that goes "使我徒有身后名， 不如及时一杯酒" (I hope it's correct, it's how I remember it), I think he also says it in ep 30something, not sure if it's part of a poem though. Anyway, thank you for your posts, they're really amazing & you've made me more interested in Chinese poetry than both my mom and 中国诗词大会 have (oops)

...holy heck anON, YOUR MEMORY, it’s like, the opposite end of the spectrum from Wei Wuxian’s

okay! okay okay okay, so anon’s mind is a steel trap, and spotted the connection between this moment in episode 29, just after Wei Wuxian has drunk everyone in the Burial Mounds under the table but before it all goes to shit:

使我徒有身后名 shiwotuyoushenhouming / Even if my name were to live on in empty fame after my death

不如即时一杯酒 burujishiyibeijiu / that would be no match for a cup of wine right now.

This line also appears in Wei Wuxian’s character song, 曲尽陈情 Qu Jin Chen Qing, at this precise second.

Did a bit of digging, and it turns out, Wei Wuxian here is quoting some dialogue (whew I don’t have to revise the poetry post just yet) from a passage in the 《世说新语·任誕》Shishuoxinyu, “Ren Dan” about 张季鹰 Zhang Jiying, who famously gave up his government post because he was craving a dish from his hometown: 

或謂之曰：「卿乃可縱適一時，獨不為身後名邪？」答曰：「使我有身後名，不如即時一桮酒！」

Someone said to him [Zhang Jiying]: "You could conform for a while -- unless you alone do not act in hopes of leaving a name for yourself after your death?” To which Zhang Jiying responded, “Even if my name were to live on in empty fame after my death, that would be no match for a cup of wine right now!”

...honestly, at this point, I’ve pretty much accepted in my own brain that in the period of time between his parents’ death and Jiang Fengmian finding him on the streets, Wei Wuxian tagged along with a theatre troupe for a while, helping out with basic tasks and getting a bit of classical theatrical training while he’s at it. At the very least, that would explain 1) his way with language, 2) his effortless stage presence, 3) his ability to lie, and 4) his flair for dramatics. 

Alternatively, he’s actually a huge nerd and the reason why he’s so bored in the Lan Sect library is because he’s already read and memorized everything

[gemsofgreece]

Who was Mikis Theodorakis and why he is so important

As the three day popular pilgrimage in the memory of Mikis Theodorakis (1925 - 2021) has started, I am presenting a few of the most crucial facts about his life and legacy. There is no Greek who does not know who he is but there may be young Greeks who don’t completely understand what is so special about him save for his musical talent. He is well known to musicians, artists and political activists around the world as well but probably not to the younger generations. This is for them and all followers who would like to know more about Greek history and culture. 20th century Greek history and culture go hand in hand with Mikis’s life so this is where you begin.

Mikis Theodorakis was a composer, lyricist, visionary, activist, politician and author.

He was born in Chios island in 1925. His father was from Crete island and his mother was a Greek refugee from Asia Minor. His father worked in the public sector and as a family they constantly moved to new places in Greece. From a very young age, Mikis was influenced by and bonded deeply with the Greek landscape, folk music and Byzantine music.

He decided to become a composer when he was a child. He started writing songs before he had access to any musical instruments. He started composing at the age of 13 and he did his first concert when he was 17.

Mikis with his parents in the Acropolis of Athens.

He is credited with over 1,000 works.

He has composed music for almost all genres. His most notable works have been for chamber music, symphonic, cantatas and oratorios, hymns, ballets, operas, stage music for classical tragedies, modern plays and international theatre,  film scores, Greek popular music (not to be confused with pop) and, most significantly, his song cycles of poetry set to music.

He has written more than 17 books. His autobiography consists of 5 volumes. He wrote this autobiography in the 80s, so these five volumes do not include the last forty years of his life.

His most well known film scores are for the films Zorba the Greek (1964) starring Anthony Quinn, Z (1969), and Serpico (1973) starring Al Pacino.  The music theme for Zorba the Greek is the most well known Greek music piece worldwide.

With Anthony Quinn.

He composed the "Mauthausen Trilogy", also known as "The Ballad of Mauthausen", which has been described as the "most beautiful musical work ever written about the Holocaust" and possibly his best work.

He was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize. He was also a nominee for the Nobel Prize for Peace.

Accepting the Lenin Peace Prize.

During the Axis Occupation of Greece, he joined the right wing youth forces of Metaxas’ regime and fought against the Italian fascists. He was taken captive and tortured. Later, he went to Athens in 1943, and became a member of a Reserve Unit of ELAS (left wing). He led a troop in the fight against the British and the Greek right. During the Greek Civil War he was arrested, sent into exile on the island of Icaria and then deported to the island of Makronisos, where he was tortured and twice buried alive. 

His only and lifetime partner was Myrto Altinoglou. Theodorakis started dating her when they were young, however their relationship went through a lot of hardship as Myrto had to wait for Mikis who was repeatedly a fugitive, a prisoner or exiled. They got married in 1953 and they stayed together for life.

With his wife Myrto Altinoglou.

He developed his concept of "metasymphonic music" (symphonic compositions that go beyond the "classical" status and mix symphonic elements with popular songs, Western symphonic orchestra and Greek popular instruments). He contributed to a cultural revolution in his country. His most significant and influential works are based on Greek  and world poetry. He introduced poetry to the masses and made the love for poetry mainstream.

With great Greek poet Yannis Ritsos.

Songs of his have been performed by the likes of the Beatles, Edith Piaf, Shirley Bassey, Joan Baez and Dalida. 

With Edith Piaf. He was tol and she was smol.

After the assassination of Gregoris Lambrakis in May 1963 he founded the Lambrakis Democratic Youth and was elected its president. Under Theodorakis's impetus, it started a vast cultural renaissance movement and became the greatest political organisation in Greece with more than 50,000 members. Because of his political ideas, the composer was black-listed by the cultural establishment; at the time of his biggest artistic glory, a large number of his songs were censored-before-studio or were not allowed on the radio stations.

Reading a speech for the Lambrakis Democratic Youth.

Theodorakis was a symbol of resistance to the military regime of 1967. He went into hiding and founded the "Patriotic Front" (PAM). On 1 June, the Colonels  banned playing, and even listening to his music. Theodorakis was arrested on 21 August, jailed and tortured for five months. Following his release end of January 1968, he was banished in August to Zatouna with his wife and their two children, Margarita and Yorgos. Later he was interned in the concentration camp of Oropos.

Tribute to Theodorakis inside his old cell in the prison of Oropos.

An international solidarity movement, headed by such personalities as Dmitri Shostakovich, Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Miller, and Harry Belafonte demanded to get Theodorakis freed. On request of the French politician Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, Theodorakis was allowed to go into exile to Paris on 13 April 1970.

Due to his mistreatment in exile and imprisonment Theodorakis suffered for many years from recurring tuberculosis and was hospitalized several times.

Mikis Theodorakis was good friends with Fidel Castro, Pablo Neruda and Yasser Arafat. Dimitri Shostakovich was a fan of his.

With Fidel Castro.

While in exile, Theodorakis fought during four years for the overthrow of the colonels. He started his world tours and gave hundreds of concerts on all continents as part of his struggle for the restoration of democracy in Greece.

Returning to Greece after the fall of the regime of the colonels, 1974.

After the fall of the regime and his return to Greece, Mikis Theodorakis made some political choices that were considered controversial by some. He initially united all the Left wing parties and was elected three times in the Greek Parliament but later distanced himself from the Left (of which he was a symbol) and was elected once in the Greek Parliament as an independent candidate and then as a minister with the centre-right wing party Nea Dimokratia. Through his position, he worked for the progress of the arts and education and he contributed to the improvement of Greco-Turkish relations. Theodorakis soon resigned from political life though and was appointed General Musical Director of the Choir and the two Orchestras of the Hellenic State Radio, which he reorganised and with which he undertook successful concert tours abroad.  

As a sidenote from me because I have read his autobiography and several interviews of his, Mikis Theodorakis has explained his distancing from the Left and flirtation with the Right and Centre through some implications such as that his relationship with the leaders of the left parties started deteriorating for ideological reasons and in his mind the Left was taking a path he did not agree with. He also hinted at corruption and anti-Democratic beliefs in the Left of the time. He accepted to rally with the centre-right wing party, desperate to channel his fervor for political action. He soon grew disappointed by the right wing too and retreated, choosing to be an activist for peace, human rights, animal rights and environmental issues. He initiated the Greek–Turkish Friendship Society. In 2020, he stated that he lived his strongest and most mature years as a Communist and he wished to be remembered as such.

Theodorakis was Doctor honoris causa of several universities worldwide.

He was furiously opposed to the Israeli War against the Palestinians. He was against Israeli Government and state although he clarified he loved Jewish people, which is proven by his musical work in remembrance of the Holocaust. He was against the War in Iraq and the meddling of USA in foreign affairs and he was opposed to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia like most Greeks. On 31 May 2011, Theodorakis  gave a speech attended by approximately 10,000 people in the center of Athens, criticising the Greek government for the loan debt it has taken from the International Monetary Fund. In 2017, in the age of 92, he gave another speech, this time opposing to the Prespes agreement between Greece and North Macedonia.

After his speech in 2017.

His last set of songs was published in 2013, in the age of 88. Theodorakis achieved the distinction of producing one of the largest works by any composer of any time.

Mikis Theodorakis had embraced his mortality very early on. He had prepared for his death since 2009 and he had repeatedly said he was not afraid of dying. “I have danced with Death in the fields too many times...”

Many concerts were held in his honour during the last decade. The second to last tribute concert he attended took place in 2017, and he wished to conduct the ending of the show. So he did and in the end he was deeply emotional and wept, in one of the most memorable and moving moments of contemporary Greek music scene.

The last concert he conducted, 2017.

The last concert in his honour he attended was in 2019. With his health fast deteriorating, he showed up exactly on time in a wheelchair and with a butterfly needle in his hand.

Last public appearance, 2019.

Mikis Theodorakis once said that he wouldn’t be able to write the music he wrote, had he not lived this life. However, in another interview, he said he should have retreated from political action earlier because he didn’t have the time to compose more than the 10% of the music that was raging inside his mind.

Theodorakis once said: “I am not a hero. Heroes die young. I was just a citizen who was trying to do his duty”.

He died on September 2nd, 2021, aged 96, from a cardiovascular arrest.

If you want to narrow it down, Mikis Theodorakis was a musician, a communist, a pacifist and a patriot - all of his qualities were proven again and again with unalloyed eagerness, because above all he was a restless spirit. Another thing that made Theodorakis so important beside his musical genius or his political  activism was his intent to make music for the people and bring it to the people. He managed to bring everyday people closer to classical music and poetry, arts that are traditionally considered elitistic. He was adamant to always make music as accessible to everyone as possible. Despite his passionate nature, he was a man of soft and polite manners and he was always supportive and welcoming to young and new artists. Through his music and his life, he tried to capture the essence of Greece, the meaning of freedom and the celebration of all cultures, all unique and different, but as ever coming together to compose the Harmony of humanity, life and the world. 

Mikis Theodorakis was voted the 11th greatest Greek of all time by the Greek public in 2009.

[napoleondidthat]

The Battle of the Neys

Keeping on with the Ney theme, I thought I'd address some of the comments made:

1. I should say the book, Empire's Eagles, does NOT push any agenda that P.S. Ney was Marshal Ney. Mostly it just gives you the different perspectives, 40 eyewitness accounts, the things that point to the similarities and the ones that don't and let's you draw your own conclusions.

2. Thanks to qsy-complains-a -lot on the explanation of the ammunition. I admit, I am not good on the Napoleonic Warfare and what the weapons were and weren't. I thought too at the time that heavy ammunition wouldn't have the same meaning as we have today.

3. Josefavomjaaga brought up the point that why would Ney not return to France after pardons had been issued (as Lavalette did) This is brought up in the book too as a problem why P.S. Ney couldn't be Marshal Ney. Also, if Ney was so afraid of being found out and was sticking to backwater towns and counties as he did, why would he continue to use the name Ney at all? There is some theory that perhaps the pardons didn't technically cover Ney for various reasons as the language is somewhat ambigious. But that is merely a theory of maybe why he wouldn't have returned. There was also never any guarantee that Napoleon's son would regain the throne even if he hadn't died. So to have Ney waiting around on a possibility seems also not legit. Not to mention, P.S. Ney was a flaming Bonapartist (and a political Whig in the American political system at the time) and Marshal Ney never came across as a flaming Bonapartist.

What is even more intriguing (for me) is not whether Ney was executed but who is P.S. Ney? The book has done some more research after Hoydt (who wrote about this and declared P.S. Ney to be a con.) But Hoydt's findings now fall out when you do more in depth research. Hoydt had P.S. Ney as some man born in Scotland named Peter McNee (a Scottish variant of the name Ney). Even Hoydt had trouble with explaining away some of the eyewitness accounts.

Including a list found in Empire's Eages that shows the things in common and the differences between the two men:

"In conclusion, the eyewitness accounts show that P.S. Ney, among other things: --Bore a highly similar, if not exact, physical resemblance to Marshal Ney.

--Was of the same physical constitution and possibly the same approximate height as Marshal Ney.

--Had, with the exception of the head wound, what appeared to be the same wounds that Marshal Ney was known to have.

--Appeared to be the same age as Marshal Ney, although a handful of people judged him to be younger.

--Was an exceptional swordsman an equestrian.

--Had a knowledge of military affairs as well as a military bearing and approach.

--Had detailed knowledge of the Napoleonic campaigns in which Marshal Ney participated.

--Spoke German, French, and English (as did Marshal Ney), plus Latin and Greek (and possibly Hebrew as well as some Polish and Russian, none of which Marshal Ney was recorded knowing, although he likely knew at least some Latin from his school days).

--On multiple occasions was recognized as Marshal Ney by soldiers who fought under him visiting or living in America.

--Played the flute, as did Marshal Ney, but also composed poetry and acrostics and painted, none of which Marshal Ney was recorded as doing.

--Like Marshal Ney, drank (but unlike him to excess on occasion) and used tobacco in the form of chewing tobacco, while Marshal Ney is known to have smoked cigars.

--Variously claimed his mother was Scottish or Irish, which does not accord with the generally accepted origin of Ney's mother.

--On occasion described his wife and children in accord with Marshal Ney's family and (as will be seen) in detail such as probably only Marshal Ney would have known.

--Exhibited personality traits completely consistent with those of Marshal Ney, as summarized at the end of Chapter 8.

--Generally avoided commenting on his origins, but, especially when under the influence of alcohol, would freely state he was Marshal Ney and reminisce accurately about details in Marshal Ney's life.

--Was an ardent Bonapartist who hoped to return to France on the accession of Napoleon's son the Duke of Reichstadt.

--Made a deathbed confession that he was in fact Marshal Ney.

So who was P.S. Ney? Either he was (1) a calculating imposter, (2) a delusional imposter who truly believed he was Marshal Ney, or (3) Marshal Ney in fact."

(Empire's Eagles, Thomas Cockner, pages 292-293)

Maybe P.S. Ney was a man who served under Ney in the army? But with his intellect he would have probably been an officer. Maybe a family member? For awhile he said he was the nephew of Ney. A Ney super-stan? Some guy who just adored Ney and like a groupie knew everything about him. But...I don't know how much of historical record at the time would have been released.

It should also be noted, like Anastasia of Russia, impostering and impersonating known personages was a thing. There were other people who tried to say they were various people of Napoleon's court. In fact, there is also a story of a doctor in the United States by the name of Neyman who claimed he was the son of Marshal Ney. On his headstone it's even inscribed that he is the son of Marhsal Ney and there is no proof ever to be found that he was.

[joachimnapoleon]

Combining all my answers for the Favorite Historical Figure Ask Game into one big post.

I received 3 & 7 from @amypihcs, 4 & 5 from @josefavomjaaga (@tairin also requested 5), 10 & 11 from @clove-pinks, 4 & 15 from @kaxen, 18 & 20 from @pvt-llewellyn, (and @microcosme11 also asked for 20).

#3--Do you have a nickname for them?

I actually don't. While Napoleon loved coming up with nicknames for Murat--King Franconi, the Lazzarone, Fierabras, and Achilles (years before Murat's first son was born) all being ones I've come across--I can't say I have any for him myself, surprisingly.

#4--In your eyes, what is their biggest strength?

This question has been a lot harder to answer than I thought it would be, as a lot of Murat's strengths--his courage, optimism, self-belief, ambition, and drive--also led him to his greatest mistakes and, ultimate, to his unnecessary premature death. But I think he had incredible fortitude, demonstrated not just through numerous grueling military campaigns ranging from the deserts of Egypt to the Russian winter, but also the constant strain he labored under as a peacetime king in Naples. I think he had a lot of people fooled, as the number of memoirists who talk about him being constantly happy-go-lucky and naturally cheerful, really conflicts with the utter misery you encounter when you start to dig deep into his correspondence and see how tormented and stressed he was throughout most of his reign. And with some exceptions (like in 1811, when he was apparently on the brink of a total mental collapse as a result of political conflict with Napoleon), he managed to hold up reasonably well and keep moving forward.

#5--What is the most ridiculous statement on them you have ever read?

Honestly, probably everything that just takes snide little shots at his supposed lack of intelligence. At this point it's just a dead giveaway to me that the person hasn't studied him in any real depth. Murat could be very impetuous, but he was far from the empty-headed moron he's always been portrayed as.

#7-- Let us know three random facts about them!

He wrote poetry. Sadly, not much of it has survived (I've only seen two of his poems).

He liked to translate portions of the Aeneid, and occasionally sprinkled his correspondence with literary references.

His mother was forty-five years old when she gave birth to him, which is pretty amazing, especially for 1767. She ended up living to the age of 84.

#10--What is your favourite quote by / about them?

I love Constant's description of Murat as

a being apart, an object of terror and admiration. But what, so to speak, idealized him, was his truly chivalrous bravery, often carried to the point of recklessness, as though danger had no existence to him. [The entire passage is here.]

Another favorite is from Caroline, writing to her & Murat's mutual friend and former minister, the Count of Mosbourg, in 1838:

Fortunately for his historian, the character of the King is rich enough that there is no need to disguise his faults. Like all passionate beings, the King had his weaknesses, but these, as you say, were always generous ones.

#11--What is your favourite portrayal of them in fiction (e.g. movies, novels etc.)?

I can't really say I have one yet. The only fiction I've read Murat in so far is my own. :P I have a historical fiction novel he's featured in (The Retreat, by Patrick Rambaud), but I haven't gotten around to reading it yet.

#15--Describe them in one sentence.

A knight from a chanson de geste and a king from Greek tragedy rolled into one.

#18--What is a trait you share with your favourite historical figure?

A quick temper.

#20--What is your favourite possession that refers to your favourite historical figure (e.g. statue, book etc.)?

My copy of Louise Murat's memoirs of her childhood. Aside from being one of the oldest books I own, it's full of anecdotes and descriptions that have been invaluable to me in fleshing Murat out as a human being and a family man, plus a goldmine of his correspondence I haven't found published anywhere else.

[bellamyroselia]

Who could replace Hades as the new big bad? Overly long essay

Like pretty much everyone else in this fandom, I love Hades. Guy’s your typical pure evil villain with a personality larger than life itself and he’s having so much fun with it that it’s contagious. Every time he pops up, I’m delighted to see him. It’s so fun to see him do his shtick and have the time of his life with it, which also makes beating him feel so great. After all the crap he has put the main cast through, it’s so satisfying to blast him into the face because for a moment that confidence finally breaks and once it's all over, people cheer because they don’t have to live in horrible fear for a while at least. This characterization is mostly rooted on the sheer fear factor Hades had in the eyes of ancient people - even in civilizations which have rather chipper afterlife people tended to prefer living over dying, and this of course meant that they were absolutely terrified of the Underworld deities. Hades was mostly addressed by epithets in texts because people thought that if they called him by his name, they were drawing his attention and the last thing a sane person wants is the attention of an powerful god who has power over the dead. So if a god has this level of appeal, be it positive or negative, you may not even need excessive amount of mythological content to create a frame for a character!

This being said, I don’t believe his chances of coming back are as the big bad of a next game are high - that is unless we have to wait another 15-20 years to get a new game, but I’d like to be more hopeful than that. So if he isn’t coming back, who could possibly replace him as the new big bad of Kid Icarus? It’s not like the writers could ever run out of source material because there’s so many monsters to deal with and every god is more or less morally grey, meaning that there’s many possibilities for new bad guys regardless of the scale.

This took a lot longer than I originally expected and I’m sorry for that - there’s no worse idea than to jump into a rabbit hole and bringing a shovel with you because things will quickly spiral out of control into new interesting directions. The more info I gathered, the more interested I was on looking more into it and sometimes it even spiraled out of mythology into history and philosophy. If you’re interested on some specific reasons for why this took so long, here’s few: myths are long and there’s many different versions of them, epics are even longer, Peloponnese people couldn’t be bothered to write their own things down so I had to look what travelers wrote down, it takes Plato way too long to get into the point, Herodotus never gets into the point, someone translated the term metic as resident alien of all things which I thought was the funniest thing ever and Ludovisi Ares is really pretty.

This is the point where I give the obligatory warnings, so here - since I'm discussing mythology here, it's inevitable that there's some talk about violence and death. I'm not going to linger on the gruesome details, but know that it's there. At couple points this will spiral into a full-on history lesson because I thought that understanding the historical context was important regarding the topic I was discussing. Also this is a one long essay - and by long, I mean really, really long. If you want to read it all at one sitting, prepare some time for yourself. But with that all out of the way, let’s jump straight into the discussion on who could be the next possible big bad, shall we?

I’m limiting this mostly to the main 12 Olympians with the addition of some other big names to keep things simple - while some smaller mythological figures such as Arachne or Arke would work fantastically as villains, they don’t have that recognition or presentation the more well known characters have. We’re trying to speculate who could fill Hades’ shoes as the new main bad guy here after all, not who we could add on the list of great yet less significant antagonists like Medusa, Pandora and Thanatos. I’m excluding Zeus, Athena, Hephaestus and Demeter from this list for rather obvious reasons - Zeus because the the guy seems to be MIA for good so Palutena could rule the place, Athena and Hephaestus because Palutena and Dyntos practically are them and Demeter because Viridi pretty much is Mycenaean Demeter on steroids in a package way too small to contain all that anger within. I also don’t think her relationship with Pit and Palutena will change drastically, so she’s sitting comfortably on her friendenemy-zone.

As for already existing characters, I don’t think anyone of them could snatch the title of the big bad. Viridi is off the competition for already mentioned reasons and I don’t see anyone from Forces of Nature defecting to become the new main villain. Pyrrhon is either gone for good or went back to whatever is this world’s equivalent of Egypt to lick his wounds, so I don’t think he’s coming back anytime soon - and if he’s coming, I don’t think he’s coming back as a main bad guy since he really wasn’t one to begin with. Thanatos’ only major mythological appearance is the myth of Sisyphus capturing death which doesn’t exactly strike confidence on his abilities in general and if that version of Thanatos couldn’t do his job correctly when meeting one guy too stubborn to die, do you really think that I believe our Thanatos has any chances of becoming the new big bad? Bringing back Medusa would be beating a dead horse at this point unless they really twist the formula and I don’t think that’s going to happen, so Medusa is off the competition. Pandora wasn’t all that big of a threat to begin with, so if she comes back she most likely stays that way. So it’s definitely going to be a new character, but who could it be?

As for who for sure can’t replace Hades as the new main bad, it’s Hestia. She probably has the lowest chance of any big Greek god to even appear in a possible future Kid Icarus game simply because there’s next to no material of her and that’s for a good reason. She was the goddess of hearth, domesticity, family, home and state. Most of these were and still are considered private, so that explains why there’s very little material of Hestia actually doing anything - we don’t write epic poetry about cleaning the house, making a macaroni casserole for dinner or going to bathroom and so didn’t the ancient people. With Hestia, you’re dealing with the bare bones of a character because she’s so passive and non-confrontational figure. It would be hard to make her a central figure in any kind of plot, especially for a one centered around action, so she’s out.

Hermes is also a figure I don’t think would work as a big bad or as an antagonist in general and I don’t really have any concrete reasons for why I think so. I just feel that he would be unfit for the role. He’s a trickster who started his shenanigans on the day he was born and the rest is mythology - by cunning escapades and underdog tactics he became the messenger of gods and from that point onward he kept collecting even more jobs such as becoming the god of merchants, shepherds and thieves, being a psychopomp, guiding dreams and helping heroes whenever he felt like it. He has a lot of going on but he’s always regarded as someone who knows all the tricks and isn’t afraid to use them, not all bad for a guy whose name was derived from a word meaning a pile of rocks.

As for why I think Hermes would make an terrible antagonist is mostly because of his status as the god of thieves and how it’s pretty much the easiest way to turn him into an antagonist. The thing here is that I just can’t stand antagonists whose main thing is that they’re amazing thieves and/or tricksters in games. While I think they can be enjoyable in other forms of media if they’re written on a smart way, in games this is almost never the case because gameplay and story don’t always match perfectly and writers need to use cheap tactics to make the character work - and by cheap I mean either A.I stands for artificial incompetence and the character is simply bad at being a thief/trickster despite all the characters and lore saying otherwise or that the game just starts cheating against the player to make them feel dumb even though they did nothing wrong. Thieves and tricksters are just really hard to balance in a game when it’s not the player character doing the deceiving. That perfect sweet spot for a great character is too goddamn tiny and if the thief/trickster isn’t exactly in there, you have an annoying character either because they’re incompetent at their job or because computer is a cheating bastard. So while there’s many enjoyable antagonists who share traits with Hermes, combine them all into a one character with the problems I already mentioned and most of the time you have a figure everybody hates due to how infuriating they’re to deal with. We’re trying to make people interested of going on and seeing what happens next here, not trying to annoy them to the point where they can just drop the game and never pick it up again. As for another reason I don’t think Hermes would work all that well as an antagonist is because his whole shtick is that despite his incredible powers, he still manages to be an underdog. Needless to say, the way underdogs are represented in media is vastly different from the way major antagonists are and while it can work, it’s hard to pull off. And of course there’s the thing of Hermes being portrayed almost always as a positive figure in myths, meaning that I and many others have a hard time imagining him as a bad guy. At his most evil we imagine Hermes doing stuff such as saying to his nephew that grandpa equals target practice, not anything that could threaten the world. Though if Hermes is included into the cast of a future game, I can image him having a theme that sounds similar to the BW rival theme for some reason. It has that I’m a one chipper fella but I’m also extremely busy right now so goodbye for a moment, see you soon-energy in it that I associate with Hermes.

As for what kind of role Hermes could be playing, he could work rather well as a quick cameo like Poseidon was in KI:U, where he offers help in some form. If one wants to go deeper into it, he could possibly run some service since he was the god of merchants and trade as well - though if one want to involve the fact of him being the god of thieves in addition to previously mentioned things, make him an occasional scammer because that’s what one would expect from a trickster. Or have him as a boss in a training gauntlet. Works either way.

______

If Artemis was introduced into the series, I don’t think she would be antagonistic. I can totally see her having a cold personality and her being bit of a hard person to deal with, but I don’t see her being actively malicious character - only example of Artemis being overly cruel towards figures KI-characters seem to be based on would be her sending the Calydonian boar to cause chaos in Calydon. It’s interesting if you believe Magnus and Gaol are at least partially inspired by Meleager and Atalanta like I do, but I don’t think it’s enough to make Artemis an antagonist, much less the main villain so she’s off the competition. Not to say she isn't wrathful, I looked into it and her wrath far outnumbers her blessings, though it's rather messy at times and some of them even can't co-exist the ones about Orion and Callisto definitely can't but her wrath is divorced from the main KI-cast. You'd have to create new characters to excuse it and KI already has a rather large cast, so I don't think it would be all that wise to create new characters just for the sake of goddess cursing them for a plot line that's resolved in couple chapters. Maybe she’s just a cameo or possibly a boss in a training gauntlet.

Apollo would be an antagonist. I just don’t see any other way how he could be introduced into the series. He has potential to be a charismatic, funny and mostly harmless antagonist who isn’t there to cause any trouble, he just really hates Pit and only Pit. But why would he hate Pit? It’s not like the mythological Apollo dislikes Icarus or Perseus and that’s indeed true, but there’s one more thing. For a god who we associate with a celestial body mostly made out of hydrogen and helium, Apollo has extremely high levels of sodium chloride within him - which is to say that he has been salty starting from the moment Hermes robbed him that one time and that lake of salt inside him has only become larger ever since. That salt is directed at people he dislikes and while he doesn’t dislike Icarus or Perseus because he never met either of them, guess who he does dislike? Angel-like gods, or just Eros to be more specific.

The story goes that Apollo’s enormous ego took the better of him one day and so he started to mock his nephew for what he thought was mediocre use of the bow and arrow. Insulted Eros decided that Apollo had officially lost his uncle-license which led him to curse Apollo to have the worst love life imaginable, starting with Daphne. And as we all know Cupid is Roman version of Eros and Pit is named after Cupid, so this was hatred made in heaven and it would be disappointing to not use the opportunity when it has been given to us on a golden platter. And you don’t even have to come up with an detailed and intriguing story to explain why Apollo hates him - something could’ve very well happened during the three years Pit’s consciousness was in that ring. His body may have ruined Apollo’s chances to hit it off with people because it was destroying their cities or something similar. Or just leave it as a noodle incident that’s referenced multiple times, everyone wonders what the heck actually happened but only Apollo knows, refusing to tell the story because he just assumes that everyone already knows it and they’re just messing with him by pretending to not know. Either way, Apollo should be an antagonist if he’s featured in a sequel. Not a villain, definitely not the big bad but fun antagonist to deal with.

______

This is something that most of you probably already know or at least you would know if you’ve actually read something other than Ovid’s Metamorphoses, or as I like to call it Jaded man screams at Emperor Augustus because apparently telling the Roman citizens to go all out on every monument the prude ever built clearly wasn’t enough, please tell me you have but Medusa isn’t an only child. She’s in fact one of Phorcys and Ceto’s seven children, both of them being somewhat monstrous primordial ocean deities - Phorcys has been described as a merman with red skin and crab claws, Ceto’s name in the other hand just literally means sea monster. Besides Medusa and the two other gorgons Stheno and Euryale, the list of their children includes the graeae sisters, serpentine dragon Ladon and Echidna, which is quite a lot of snake monsters for two deities who themselves don’t have any snake traits. There’s a lot of potential in this group but ideas of any of them becoming the new big bad end up falling apart because just like Medusa, they’re all rather bland characters like you’d expect from a mythological monster. They’re less like characters and more like plot devices that the hero needs to deal with. The only two members of this family besides Medusa who actually get to do something of importance are Ladon and Echidna and even those acts aren’t all that interesting. Echidna gets to have her many monstrous children with Typhon and then she’s apparently is killed by Argus, Hera’s servant-giant while sleeping on a cave just like her sister. Ladon guarded the garden of Hesperides which was well known for its golden apples and he doesn’t get to die with much dignity either, since Heracles just shoots him in the back and literally the next day other Argonauts find nymphs looking at his still twitching body. Alternatively Heracles just tricks Titan Atlas to do all the apple picking, which leaves Ladon alive.

Possibly one of the biggest problems writers have to deal with is setting. Ladon is very strictly tied into the garden setting and Echidna was cave dweller who never left her home, so writers would have to come with rather specific situations for them to appear. Of course if one wants to be lazy, Underworld could possibly serve as their home. It could very well house caves big enough to house a snake monster and Greek Underworld does have Elysium, which is basically Paradise and it could very well also function as a garden. But honestly even with the right setting, I don’t think either of them would make all that interesting big bads. They would definitely work fantastically as large-scale villains, but they don’t really have that much intimidation factor all things considered - you can blame Argus and Heracles for that.

But I’m not done with this family yet as there’s one character connected to them who’s probably the most feared monster of all Greco-Roman mythology and that’s Typhon, Echidna’s mate. He’s essentially an ancient Greek equivalent of a kaiju, more a destructive force of nature than a monster and everyone fears him - and by everyone, I mean everyone. There’s couple of versions of what happens but the most popular one goes that when the gods saw him, their first instinct was to shapeshift into animals and flee into Egypt. Those who did stay behind such as Hades were said to cover in fear in their homes while Typhon ravaged the land. Zeus tried to fight him but when he went for the kill, Typhon caught him and cut off his sinews, then threw him into a cave under the watch of another snake monster Delphyne. This didn’t stop Hermes and Pan from getting the sinews back and saving Zeus, and once his strength has been restored he and Typhon fought once again. Zeus eventually wearied Typhon down and then either casted him down into Tartarus or dropped a mountain on top of him, that being Mount Etna.

He could work very well as a big bad, problem here are just how high the stakes need to be for him to work. He’d had to be the ultimate villain if that was the case, the stakes need to be higher than they were with Hades. And considering how Hades was pretty much your typical pure evil villain causing chaos, what separates Typhon from him? Just some more chaos and no wisecracking dialogue because everyone is too scared to talk? He comes off as way too similar to Hades without all the fun personality. Maybe if KI:U became a KI:U-trilogy he could work as the ultimate big bad of the last game, but I got to say no otherwise. The bar for making him work is already sky-high due to how destructive he is and we don’t want to repeat the plot of Uprising here. So while he definitely can work, maybe save him for later.

______

Hera and Poseidon both have potential to be serious antagonistic forces, but I don’t think they have it to be main villains. Hera simply fits the bill because most of the times she’s the antagonistic force actively trying to make people’s lives worse, all because she can’t direct her anger at correct people. Some times she’s just blatantly evil, like how she imprisoned her own daughter Eileithyia or you may better know her as Lucina to prevent the birth of Artemis and Apollo or how she tricked her pregnant great-granddaughter into disintegrating herself Semele is her great-granddaughter by the way. As for examples of Hera being wrathful which don’t involve Zeus being horny, she was said to be the one who sent Sphinx to Thebes, no reason given why or if there’s one, I couldn’t find it. Works either way.

Because she might as well be the personification of divine wrath, it’s pretty easy to see why one would think she would make a great villain. However that wrath also gives us a big problem, it being that her evil escapades are mostly rooted on anger and spite - while wrath is a good driving force for a villain, it needs more to work. With Hades, he does evil things for fun and is having a blast while doing it. Hera on the other hand just rages and most of the times it’s because of Zeus, who seems to be out of the picture. She’s not there to have fun and when you add her general lack of charisma on the top, you don’t end up with the most endearing character. While wrath can serve as a character motivation, it can become stale very quickly and this means that unless the story regarding villainy her is short (as in solved in 1-3 chapters) it starts to feel like dragging. I overall think that Hera does have very low chances to appear in general, but if she does appear as an antagonist she should preferably be a minor one in the same way Viridi was. You know the meme of what makes villain a supervillain and the answer is presentation? Hera doesn’t have that presentation. Writers can certainly just give her that which is what they did with Hades whose mythological counterpart was more or less a basement dweller, but why go trough all that trouble when there’s so many better candidates to work with?

On to Poseidon, who’s an important figure in the founding myth of Athens - it’s honestly quite odd how it’s never mentioned in any shape or form in KI:U despite Palutena being based on Athena. But then again, considering how much “care” this series put on the names of its cities and towns, this being ignored doesn’t really surprise me even if it does disappoint. He was a really big deal during the Mycenaean period, besides being the god of ocean he was also seen as the head god and the ruler of the Underworld. Then the Late Bronze Age collapse happened and Poseidon was nerfed in the lack of better words - during the Dark Age, Zeus became the new head god and Hades popped seemingly out of nowhere, taking over Poseidon’s role as the god ruling the Underworld. On the other news Poseidon’s antagonistic potential is somewhat dwarfed by the fact that most of his escapades involve banging and they don’t really feature any figures the main cast of KI seem to be based on. It’s annoying because he does so much but because it’s mostly banging people and either helping or bullying very specific heroes, it’s just not something that’s all that relevant in the context of KI. But there’s couple myths and stories that would make him an easy bad guy, first one is that of Atlantis - and we’re going to jump straight to the source material because on it’s core, it’s technically just another tale of Athena and Poseidon having a conflict. Fish people under the sea is fun as well, but by using the source directly it gives us the most potential.

So Plato tells in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias that when Athenian statesman Solon visited Egypt, he found some interesting records about certain events during 10th millennium BCE and translated them into Greek. Only thing here that’s true is Solon visiting Egypt, everything else was made up Plato - if you need more proof, know that 10th millennium BCE was during the stone age for context, Britain wasn’t sharing a land border with just France, but also with Belgium, Netherlands, Germany and Denmark during this time. It was that far into the past. As for the actual story, it begins by gods choosing lots of land for themselves and Poseidon chooses Atlantis. He then falls in love with a mortal woman Cleito, builds her a luxurious home, they have five sets of twin boys together and once the kids have all grown up, they divide Atlantis into ten parts and so is born ten different lineages of kings. But by each generation the kings become more and more human, meaning that it’s much more easier for their wealthy lifestyle to hit them in the head - compare that to Athenians in the story, who’re not tempted by luxuries and have quite Spartan lifestyle interestingly enough. This wealthy lifestyle of the Atlanteans quickly leads into colonialism and war mongering, leading into them trying to take over the Mediterranean but they’re are stopped by Athens because naval warfare was the only type of warfare Athenians actually excelled at. Zeus eventually looks down to see what the heck is going on and then tells Poseidon to do something because this racket is technically speaking all his fault. Poseidon agrees, causes an earthquake and then sweeps Atlantis under his rug, that being the ocean. So Atlantis is pretty much an antithesis of a perfect society, a concept that’s discussed more in Republic and the lesson here is that being consumed by hubris in the search of luxury leads to ruin - but since we’re not here for philosophy lessons, let’s forget all of that and think what kind of plot one could craft out of this mess.

Island nation in search of wealth is a good set-up for some action, so I don’t think there’s much that needs changing. Have Atlanteans attack some cities which alerts Palutena and that leads Pit into a mission in which he tries to tell Poseidon what’s going on. After 2-5 chapters of war against Atlanteans, Poseidon deals with the problem either willingly or by force - whether he just destroys the place or makes Atlanteans full on aquatic folk who can’t survive on land meaning that they have to give up the conquest is up to writers. It’s honestly quite refreshing to have the original tale working so well, because usually everything related to Atlantis in media is so divorced from what Plato told. Sure, a submerged city full of fish people could still work but by using the original tale as base we get a story with clear beginning and end which makes perfect sense in context of KI. Or maybe have the a plotline inspired by the original story first and then later have something related to the submerged city with the fish people. Best of both worlds, amazing!

Also orichalcum, the metal Atlanteans were said to have aplenty, is pretty much just copper. Reddish metal and only gold is more valuable than it, it couldn't be anything else but copper. The term even translates into mountain copper! So why is it never portrayed as copper in fiction?

Besides Atlantis, Poseidon has couple other myths I’d like to talk about too. The first one has him and Apollo losing their divine authority for a while and as punishment they have to serve Trojan king Laomedon father of king Priam and grandfather of Hector among some others if you’re wondering. The king makes them to build the legendary walls of Troy and he promises them great rewards, but once he doesn’t deliver them Apollo sends the plague upon Troy and then Poseidon sends a sea monster to terrorize the place Heracles kills it if you’re wondering. There’s also certain another situation which I’ve actually already talked about on a different post and how with little shaking it could work nicely on a future game - what I said was that Pit should do something Poseidon is going to hate to the point that the god is screaming for his head and that he wants to settle things on court.

The myth I used as reference was that of the supposed first trial in history, in which Ares kills Poseidon’s son Halirrhothius for assaulting his daughter and Poseidon loses his marbles over it. The gods gathered on Areopagus which is a real place in Athens, fun fact and I’ve heard two versions of how the trial goes. In the first version everyone agrees that Ares’ actions were justified and in the second one gods side with Poseidon, but goddesses side with Ares and since there was more goddesses present than gods, their words mattered more. Either way, Poseidon loses the trial and Ares gets away scot-free.

Were a future KI-game do their own twist with this myth, Pit would obviously take the role of Ares. Besides the fact that we’re trying to make Poseidon more antagonistic, Pit just being on a situation similar as Ares makes sense thematically speaking and I’m going to talk more about this later since it’s rather interesting. As for why the trial happens in the first place, it could very well be over anything. Maybe mix it with the one where Poseidon sends a sea monster to terrorize Troy just replace Troy with some unimportant city as this series always does and he’s so attached to it that seeing it getting slayed deeply saddens and angers him. You don’t even need to get rid of the idea that it was over a girl, even if the motive for killing the monster is changed along with what kind of relationship the girl could possibly have with the main cast. This is something I’ll get back into later because there’s in fact one other character who I’d like to talk about and how their most cruel and personal form of villainy happens to bound to a certain girl.

So back to Hera and Poseidon. There’s definitely potential for them to be antagonistic, but I’d say they would work much better as arc villains rather than as the main bad guy. There’s only so many things you can do with characters whose actions are rooted on anger or wrath, especially when they don’t have all that striking personalities.

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As for someone who could well work as the big bad, Dionysus is the first serious candidate. It’s partially due to how inconsistent his characterization has been, which I guess is something one should expect from a figure who has been around since the Mycenaean times and who happens to be the god of insanity, vegetation, orchards, fruit, grape-harvest, winemaking and wine. Does this sound like someone you’d expect to be a member of Forces of Nature? Because it sure does for me and I’d honestly be surprised if he wasn’t one if he was introduced to the franchise.

Symbolism behind Dionysus’ birth is pretty neat, my favorite version of it is the one written down by Diodorus of Sicily in Bibliotheca Historica and in that one Demeter is his mother. It starts the usual way in which the poor kid is killed shortly after his birth by Titans and Demeter comes back just in time to gather his remains to allow his rebirth shortly after. It references the harvest process and wine making - the god wine is born from the union of rain and earth just any plant is, he’s torn apart and boiled alive symbolizing the harvesting and wine-making process, his remains represent the fallen bare vines which become fertilizer for the earth and lastly wine itself is supposed symbolize the now reborn Dionysus. All of the versions of his birth myth do have this symbolism to a certain degree but I’d say this version has it the strongest because unlike his other the mother candidates, Demeter is a nature goddess first and foremost and also the goddess of agriculture.

This next point is somewhat tied to the previous one which is that he actually has valid reasons for his absence, that being his meanderings. Long story short - Hera’s angry over the fact that he exists, she injects him with madness and he wanders around like a madman for a while, then Rhea cures said madness and tells him to go on a journey so he could teach people how to make wine. So he goes and wanders around the world with the exception of Britain and Ethiopia for some reason teaching people the art of winemaking and does some other things in the meanwhile, such as apparently founding a city it’s told that on his campaign Alexander the Great came across a city that was supposedly founded by Dionysus. And this is a fun fact, apparently Dionysus’ popularity exploding around late 4th century BCE can be directly linked into Alexander, which is pretty neat. Once he comes back home he firmly establishes his place as a god and then he starts doing shenanigans much more familiar to us, such as giving king Midas his golden touch and marrying Ariadne.

So why do I think Dionysus is the first real contender for a possible new big bad? Well, do you know what’s the first thing he did once he came back to Greece? According to Bacchae, he brainwashed a city to worship him, caused an earthquake, set a palace on fire, gleefully watched when his worshipers teared a man into pieces and then turned some other people into serpents. Now that’s an entrance Viridi would be proud of!

Besides this, there’s also two similar stories in which Dionysus meets some pirates and they both show him as an unhinged god. They capture him and in the first one Dionysus shapeshifts into a lion and unleashes a bear against his captors, causing the scared pirates to abandon the ship and then Dionysus turns them into dolphins. In the other one he turns the mast and oars into snakes, fills the ship with ivy and the sound of flutes to make the pirates go mad and once again when they abandon the ship, Dionysus turns them into dolphins. The tale of him giving Midas his golden touch could also count as him being antagonistic since the act gives Midas nothing but suffering. So while he is much more friendly towards humans than your average god, Dionysus definitely has an antagonistic flare deep inside him and a place in the Forces of Nature and you can’t change my mind.

If Dionysus was a major antagonist or the big bad, I could see the plot going a lot like this - he comes home, causes some racket because he feels neglected, Viridi is happy about all of this and tries to control it while keeping him on this state of mind because who wants a happy party guy when you can have a chaotic deity, for a while she can do it but not for long before things snowball out of control and he becomes an unhinged god dead set on causing chaos. As for how he’s defeated, I can’t really come up with anything concrete on a fly but I don’t think Dionysus would be defeated the same way Hades was. And while he has the personality and presentation needed for a main antagonist, I just can’t see him as a pure evil villain like Hades was. He’s very much redeemable in my eyes and as for what happens to him after his defeat, I could see it leading to him mellowing down kind of like how Greek wine was watered down before it was used for anything - he’s still part of Forces of Nature and perfectly capable of doing all the same stuff he did as a major antagonist, but he would prefer partying with humans over destroying them. Viridi probably isn’t going to be all too happy about this, but it’s not like she’s going to be all that angry about it either.

Also fun fact at the end - in Dionysiaca, Ariadne laments if Eros and Anteros hate her because she had amazing dream about a wedding, only for Theseus to piss off and abandon her on Naxos. But as we all know, she would soon meet Dionysus who she does end up marrying so hey, the dream just wasn’t about the guy she thought she would marry. So if Dionysus isn’t going to be the big bad and the arc devoted to his villainy is relatively short, this could very well be used as a blueprint for a funny side story. Ariadne lamenting about Eros and Anteros would give Pit and Dark Pit valid reasons to be there.

This is not a joke, by the way. The part of Underworld which wasn't either Elysium or Tartarus was commonly referred as "the House of Hades" in ancient texts.

As for someone else who could also work quite well as the big bad, that would be Persephone. You all know the drill with her - Hades takes her, Demeter panics and goes to search her, she causes the Mediterranean summer on the meanwhile and does a thing which looks awful without context Demeter sets a baby on fire which is supposed to make him immortal if you’re wondering, everyone else decides that enough is enough because endless Mediterranean summer is a nightmare, they beg for Hades to give her back and he does that but not before the pomegranate trick. Demeter causes Mediterranean winter to come, the trouble is solved, we have a nice functional couple in our hands and they continue to appear together when Underworld is relevant to the plot - which surprisingly isn’t all that often as only Adonis, Heracles, Theseus who loses his arse and friend in the process, Orpheus who loses his wife and will to live in the process, Odysseys, Psyche and Aeneas managed to go to Underworld and back. That’s not really all that much all things considered.

And before anyone says anything about seasons here - Mediterranean climate is a thing and it’s best known for its hot, dry summers and mild, wet winters. One of these is much more preferable for plant life and in this case, it’s not summer. The more you know.

While there’s not much material of her when compared some other people in this list, I’d say there’s enough to create a frame for a character. In both Theogony and Iliad Persephone is described as dreaded and in Odyssey Odysseus assumes Persephone is the one sending ghosts to torture him while he’s visiting the Underworld. Just like Hades she has her fair share of vague epithets like Despoina (mistress) and Kore (maiden), presumably for the same reason as to avoid getting her attention. And while the etymology behind her actual name is rather muddied, the popular theories are that it means something in the vain of to destroy, to bring/cause death and she who brings destruction. And people have the gall to say she isn’t scary!

With this info and Hades’ characterization from KI:U in mind, you could very easily create a powerful pure evil villain who’s not going to be happy to learn what happened to her husband. As for why I believe she would be pure evil instead of redeemable one like Dionysus, it’s simply so she and Hades would match on their villainy. Considering how the big thing about Hades and Persephone is that they genuinely love each other to the point of possessiveness Pirithous and Minthe learned it the hard way, it would be weird if they hadn’t rubbed on each other during the time they were together. There’s an amazing chance for drama here and it would be dumb to ignore it when it has been given to us on a golden platter. And besides, unholy matrimonies are quite fun in fiction. Villains too have something they love.

As for attempts of villainy that don’t revolve around her being antsy at Pit about Hades, we interestingly need to look at the list of those she granted favors rather than those that had to deal with her wrath - or just one of them in particular, Psyche. As I’ve already mentioned she was one of those mortals who managed to go to Underworld and back and to make things better, she went to Underworld specifically so she could speak to Persephone. Persephone greets her with a nice cushion to sit on and a banquet, which Psyche declines because it’s a trap this is practically just the pomegranate trick on a larger scale. She tells why she came into the Underworld in the first place and Persephone fulfills her request, which is to say that she gives Psyche boxed death.

Coming to Underworld to speak to Persephone in particular definitely gives Psyche an edge compared to others when it comes to exploring Persephone’s potential villainy. But just why is Psyche such a big deal when compared to someone else like Orpheus, Adonis or Aeneas? Well, Psyche just happens to be the girl who would become the goddess of soul, a job that isn’t currently filled by anyone in KI-universe which Hades has kindly illustrated to us in KI:U by eating and repurposing souls for his own purposes. She’s also Eros’ wife with the addition of being the mother of his daughter and as we all know at this point, Pit is mostly inspired by Eros. While Persephone just being angry about her husband’s treatment makes a perfectly fine motivation, why not use the chance when it has been represented to us on a golden platter? Because while KI has a large cast of characters, most them are quite divorced from one another when it comes to their mythological counterparts interacting with each other. This subverts it since Persephone actually gets to interact with someone important to the figure Pit’s inspired of, which is more than almost anyone else in this list can say. The opportunity is there and there’s an open position for a new god, so why not take it?

Also if Persephone is going to be in a future game, I say I’m going to be so disappointed if there's not at least one pun about her epithet Kore. Like imagine if she was introduced on a chapter called Lost Kore or something similar and then the characters would just continue on making bad puns, annoying her. Wouldn’t be too out of line when it comes to this series humor.

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I know what I’m going to say next is probably going to be controversial, but anyway - if Ares ever makes an appearance, I don’t think he would be a bad guy and this is mostly due to how Pit has been characterized. I know that may sound weird at first but trust me, I do actually have a point with this.

So let’s start with something that may seem completely unrelated at first, these being a history lesson and some talk about over-demonization. We honestly don’t know much about how some city states worshiped gods and what specific versions of the myths they had because some people just couldn’t be bothered to write things down. Besides it being extremely annoying for me, this is also probably where the misconception of all of ancient Greece being either like Athens or Sparta came from, which just is completely false. However what is correct is that city states didn’t really like one another all that much and often engaged on stupid wars with each other, only uniting when there was a much bigger threat looming on the horizon - and with war comes propaganda and when only some people write things down, we’re usually left with really one-sided information when it comes to both good and bad. For one example of this coming off as hilariously hypocritical to me is Athena being worshiped under the epithet Areia in Athens. Areia is very obviously derived from Ares and means warlike, but Athenians had their heads so far in their arses that they came up with a reasoning that this version of the epithet is actually derived from areô or areskô, meaning to propriate or atone for. It’s most likely just some crap Athenians came up with to excuse the worship of Athena Areia, which I just can’t help but find pathetically funny - you can only blame your own propaganda for this, guys.

Historically speaking Ares most likely originates from Thrace since besides his popularity in there Herodotus notes in Histories that only gods from Olympian Pantheon that Thracians worshiped were Ares, Artemis and Dionysus, a really odd trio if I have to say so myself, it’s also said to be his birthplace in the myths. His name can be found on Linear B scripts, a writing system that goes as far back as 1450 BCE and which disappeared during the Late Bronze Age collapse around 1100 BCE. This informs us that he was part of the Mycenaean Pantheon in some way, most likely even then as a war god - it also informs us that he predates gods such as Apollo, Hades and Aphrodite who just don’t exist in Mycenaean texts at least in any recognizable forms. As for Ares during the Archaic, Classical and Hellenic period, especially when it came to places that weren’t either Athens/Attica or Sparta, I had to mostly rely on travelers who wrote things they saw down because some people just didn’t bother to write their own stuff down. Pausanias’ Description of Greece was especially helpful with the research, but what must be remembered is that he lived during 2nd century CE and that he was an outsider to these cultural aspects so how old some of this stuff here is and what the exact context behind it was, I don’t know and neither do others at least currently, one sure can hope so we know more in the future. Then again past is another country so maybe I'm setting my hopes way too high. When given anything in Linear A, people channel their best "I never learned how to read!"-impression.

As for how Ares’ Roman counterpart Mars came to be, it’s mostly due to syncretization. He probably was originally an agricultural god who was later associated with warfare once the Roman Republic started expanding. It’s possible that he was syncretized with an Etruscan deity called Maris, who was usually portrayed as a young boy whose caregiver was Menrva, a goddess who was later identified with Athena and Minerva. While this isn’t an universally agreed take, it’s still pretty interesting in context of Kid Icarus even if it wasn’t intentional or in the case of the take, true. Once Romans started to interact with Greek settlers from Magna Graecia Mars was syncretized with Ares, giving us the Roman god that looks familiar to us. One notable thing to keep in mind is that most of those Greek settlers in Magna Graecia originated from Peloponnese and what I’ve managed to find, they held Ares on much more higher regard than those originating from Attica did.

Okay, now when that has been cleaned out of the way, let’s go to the slightly more interesting stuff which is cult titles and epithets. Just like any other god he has his fair share of both, some examples include Teichesipletes (stormer of cities/walls), Hippius (horseman, of the horses), Theritas (beastly/brutish), Enyalius (warlike), Obrimus (strong/mighty), Thurus (violent/furious), Chrysopelex (of the golden helm) and Chalcocorustes (armed with bronze). I’m using Latin spelling of these to make things easier for myself if you’re wondering. But there’s two titles I specifically want to talk about, both them originating from Arcadia around Tegea because apparently all the cool stuff happens in Arcadia.

Interestingly also in Tegea there was a temple of Athena under epithet Alea. Pausanias tells that her priest there was a boy who held the title until he reached puberty, meaning that her priest was a child. Now this has nothing to do with Ares, but it’s pretty interesting when thinking of Pit. It’s not exactly same for sure, but could this mean that he would leave Palutena if he ever grew up?

The first one is Gynaecothoenas, meaning “Feasted by women” - and no need to worry, it’s nowhere near as sexual as it sounds. The story goes that Tegeteans were at war with Sparta and what decided the victory was an ambush by Tegetean women. Because of this, they offered Ares a sacrifice and celebrated the victory alone. The king of the Spartans at the time was said to be Charilaus, meaning that this victory must have happened around early-to-mid 8th century BCE, making this rather old cult title by the time Pausanias was writing. If only the research for everything else here could’ve been as easy as this.

The other and much more interesting title was Aphneius, meaning “Abundant” and under this title he was worshiped as the giver of food or abundance. The story behind this title goes that Ares fell in love with Tegetean princess Aerope and they had a child together, but she died during childbirth. Ares, doing his damndest to keep his son alive, managed to find a way for the baby to still have milk. Once he grew up, his son Aeropus then managed to do the thing that’s near impossible for a demigod, which is to live a normal life as the lord of Tegea. Now this would make a great character backstory…

… What was I talking about again? Oh yeah, history lesson is over! Finally! Now into the fun stuff, which is Pit’s characterization. It’s pretty common knowledge at this point that that Pit’s inspirations are Icarus, Perseus and Eros but when it comes to his characterization, Eros definitely takes the cake as the main inspiration. He is a fully realized character with multiple myths under his wing, unlike Icarus or Perseus.

Starting with Icarus, he isn’t even a character but a plot device. He’s a tool for Daedalus’ character development and that’s where his importance ends. He’s a miniscule part on a much larger narrative in which the most important part is the Minotaur, as it drives the plot for everything else in it. Icarus’ death serves to drive Daedalus’ character to the point which eventually leads into him killing Minos. He exists for a metaphor that pop-culture has blown out to be way more important than it originally was and that’s it.

As for Perseus… The guy is just really bland. While all the other heroes have their flaws like hubris and wrath, Perseus doesn’t really have any flaws. He doesn’t have that many achievements in either bravery or stupidity due to his method of dealing with things being the quickest way possible. This makes all of his battles extremely boring and because he’s one of the first demigod heroes in the mythological timeline, he doesn’t even get to interact with anyone who could be interesting. How many of you even know that he’s supposed be the founding hero of Mycenae? Not many, I’m sure about that. The most interesting thing about the guy his that he’s an ancestor to people such as Tyndareus, Alcheme, Heracles, Penelope and Telemachus but this doesn’t save him from being any less boring. He's that famous ancestor nobody gives a damn, so to speak. Pit certainly doesn’t get any part of his personality from a plot device or a blank of wood, only a literary reference and an antagonist.

Also can I quickly rant about the Angels in art vs. Angels in Bible meme because I hate it? For some reason most of times when people show art of these supposed angels, they aren’t even showing biblical angels but Erotes/Amores or Nike/Victoria instead. Erotes/Amores and Nike/Victoria are winged Greco-Roman gods, not biblical angels and using art of them proves absolutely nothing. Also you may have forgotten that there’s in fact hierarchy of angels and not all of them look identical. In Christian faith angelic hierarchy is composed of three orders, there being nine different kinds of angels - Seraphim, Cherubim, Ophanim/Thrones, Dominions, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Archangels and Angels. Seraphim and Cherubim do indeed look terrifying and so do Ophanim, but Thrones are just bizarre because apparently they’re elderly carrying God’s throne, whatever that means also I’ve seen people use Ophanim and Thrones interchangeably which just makes the whole deal even bigger of a mess. And then there’s Dominions, who’re just really pretty winged people, proving that the idea of all biblical angels looking terrifying is completely false. I couldn’t find what Virtues looked like, but if they’re anything like Powers, Principalities, Archangels and Angels they’re most likely pretty winged humanoids. So yeah, surprising amount of biblical angels are indeed just pretty winged humanoids and only the highest order of them is clearly inhuman - so if you ever wondered why so many angels in art actually featuring Biblical angels have them looking so humanlike, now you know! It's not the highest rank's job to interact with the human world. Though in modern language, the term angel is simply used as an umbrella term which refers into a winged humanoid being regardless of which religion they originated from - so by using this as a frame, it would indeed make Erotes/Amores and Nike/Victoria angels along with some other winged gods such as Eos and Iris. This would also make Iris’ twin sister Arke a fallen angel because as punishment for siding with the Titans during Titanomachy, she was casted into Tartarus and her wings were ripped off so she could never escape from there. And then much later her wings are given as a wedding gift to Achilles’ parents, my god! You could actually a craft a plot out of this, hmmm. When it comes Pit and Dark Pit, I do think they’re angels only on this broad, modern way definition due to them being mostly inspired by the Greco-Roman Erotes/Amores and it’s possible that they’re only referred as angels because not only is the term Erotes/Amores is strictly associated with Aphrodite and only Aphrodite, it's also much more specialized term than just "angel". There has also been cases in art featuring multiple Nikes, but Nike's special role as the goddess of victory still prevents its use as a broad term. So I believe that in the case of KI, angel is just an useful umbrella term and nothing more.

So Pit’s mostly an Eros-expy when it comes to his personality and attributes, so what makes him so special when compared to many other Eros-expies in media? It’s actually a surprisingly small thing, but boy does it make a difference - on a thematic sense, Pit’s a total daddy’s boy and in this case the dad would be Ares. Most of the Eros-expies you see in media are completely divorced from anything related to Ares despite the guy being Eros’ dad but not in Kid Icarus, where we have a very blatant Eros-expy whose connections to his main mythological inspiration come almost exclusively from Ares. Just why is Pit doing Nike’s job? Because Nike happens to be Ares’ daughter according to some sources, like in the Homeric hymn dedicated to him. Why’s he a soldier in an army? Because Ares was a soldier and in some parts of Greece he was seen as a model of a perfect one who’s resilient and has physical strength that isn’t matched by anyone else. Apparently in Sparta they even had a statue of shacked Ares, supposedly as an attempt to keep the martial spirit and victory in Sparta I don’t know about you but for me this sounds like a very bad move, as if they were asking for the god’s wrath. Then again Athenians did the same thing with wingless Nike, so I guess it was fine in some twisted way. Why does Dark Pit exist? Because would you know it, there’s myth in which Ares and Aphrodite spot lonely little Eros and decide to create Anteros to be his brother, their only differences being hair, wings and weapons of choice Anteros has longer hair, plumed butterfly wings, golden club and lead arrows when compared to Eros' golden bow + both golden and lead arrows. Why does Magnus possibly being based on Meleager matter? Because would you know it, the dude’s sometimes a son of Ares. Why did he spend three years trapped inside a ring? It could parallel the tale of Ares and the giants, in which he spent a lunar year trapped inside a jar. Why does a dog help him during that section? It could still very well be reference Ares and the giants as Hermes and Artemis came to save him and one of Artemis’ sacred animals is a dog and Hermes is the god guard dogs. Also one of Ares’ sacred animals is dog as well, meaning that it could reference this as well. Honestly if Pit ends up having a divine parent and it’s not Ares, I call bullcrap.

So now when that has been made clear, what can writers do with Ares? Well if you take the myth of Poseidon wanting to settle things on court and give it to Pit, you end up losing one of his three major myths in which he’s wrathful towards someone odd I know, you’d probably expect a god of war to be much more wrathful but no, he’s not. The two ones that are left don’t really give all that great material either because in the first one, the target is Adonis and whether it even was Ares’ wrath that killed him is left open - in some versions it’s Artemis who wants him dead because she’s angry at Aphrodite for causing the situation which lead to the death of her hunter Hippolytus, sometimes it’s Apollo who still hasn’t forgiven Aphrodite for blinding his son Erymanthus, occasionally it’s Persephone of all people because she’s angry at Adonis for wanting so spend time with Aphrodite and at times it’s just an accident this all makes me think it was an elaborate coup. There’s always a reason for a divine being to be angry at Aphrodite because she just can’t help but cause trouble whenever she can. When it comes to the second one, it’s honestly pretty odd because not only does Ares forgive the man who originally was the target of his wrath, it illustrates how good of a parent he is on Olympian standards not that it’s a high bar but anyway - even better than the lady whose favorite boytoy he is, and she’s well known for being an overprotective parent.

The myth starts with this lad called Cadmus, who founds the city of Thebes, becomes its king and then kills a dragon residing on a nearby spring. Ares is furious about this since the dragon was sacred to him and apparently it’s sometimes his son, don't know how that works and as punishment, Cadmus has to serve Ares for eight years he got it easy when compared to Adonis and Halirrhothius. Once that service is over, Cadmus marries one of the two daughters of Ares and Aphrodite, this being Harmonia, the goddess of harmony. However not everything is all sunshine and rainbows because Hephaestus is still salty about how his marriage with Aphrodite went south and once he hears about a wedding, he prepares two gifts for the bride - first one was a beautiful necklace that could keep its wearer eternally youthful and the other one was a luxurious robe. But there was a catch, since both of these objects were cursed to bring bad luck to those who owned them. The bad luck eventually took its take on Cadmus’ mental state and one day he remarked that if gods fancied those serpents so much, maybe his life would be so much better as one. Gods fulfill this wish, he’s turned into a serpent and once Harmonia notices what has happened, she wishes the same. At one point Dionysus comes to the city, trashes the place and then gives them a propechy of this happening. Either way, Ares comes down to get the unlucky couple and then scoots them to safety in paradise-like Elysium, where they get to reside from now on.

You may already be familiar with this myth to a certain degree because Pokemon B/W could technically count as an adaptation of it. N is of course the most obvious parallel due to him getting his second name from Harmonia and Ghetsis takes a role comparable to Hephaestus. It all becomes even funnier because Harmonia hits some characteristics associated with yin - she’s passive, feminine figure who represents harmony which can only exist due to lack of action, an idea. It gains even more hilarity points thanks to existence of Adrestia, Harmonia’s sister and the goddess of revolt - she’s pretty much yang to Harmonia’s yin and to make things even more hilarious, she was often portrayed as a beautiful winged maiden. Now who would expect the goddess of revolt to be a lovely winged lady and the goddess of harmony to be at least momentarily a serpent?

While this is indeed an interesting myth, I don’t think it would make all great material for future KI-game, at least on its current form. The cast of KI doesn’t really get to interact with humans on a personal level, which is something this myth largely relies on. Honestly, I think the best way it could be referenced in game would be just Pit going to Elysium and meeting Harmonia still trapped on a draconic form. Considering the way Hades had been characterized in KI:U, it wouldn’t surprise me if he had just kept trapped Harmonia as a pet lizard in his garden. Maybe say something on the vain of him eating the husband’s soul or using it for something else to explain why she’s there all by herself. And if you want to make fun of the fact that the fourth wall might as well not exist, throw Adrestia in Elysium as well as a dragon as a nod to Pokemon. “The Twin Dragonesses of Elysium” sounds like it would make a very cool boss fight.

So a wrath or blessing, Ares gives us not much to work with either of those at least when it comes to him actually doing stuff - but that doesn’t mean we’re left with nothing because there’s three myths that I’ve glossed over quickly that could give us something, one just for comedy and two others actual plot. As for the one that’s just for comedy, it’s the one in which Sisyphus captures Thanatos. Ares is actually the one to save Thanatos from the tough situation since after it has continued for a month, he bursts into Sisyphus’ house, frees Thanatos and drags Sisyphus’ spirit to the Underworld… Only for him to come up with a sad story, which leads into Persephone letting him go only for it to backfire. Ares then disappears from the story, but it ends up with Sisyphus doing P.E for eternity in Tartarus once he dies for real as you all already know. This is pretty funny if a bit morbid myth, so it could be really easy to use it as a comedy goldmine if Ares ever interacted with Thanatos. Maybe have Thanatos trying to act like they’re friends, only for Ares to become more and more frustrated the longer Thanatos continues. Maybe once he mentions some of his escapades involving Pit, Ares finally decides that enough is enough and shows to Thanatos that mortals don’t call him by the name Thurus for nothing.

To the myths you could get some serious plot out of, the first one is very predictably the one in which he earns the title Aphneius. It just has everything a great character backstory needs on its original form, meaning that it could easily be inserted on the game with minimal changes and it could still work fantastically. It has a romance between a god and a mortal which ends up on a tragedy during a moment that was supposed to be joyous not because of any divine whim or I guess it could’ve been Aphrodite being salty because she has a habit of releasing her wrath upon Ares’ loved ones or relatives, usually grandchildren such as Hippolytus, but I think it would’ve been written down had the story actually said it was Aphrodite behind Aerope’s death, but because of something beyond their control. And instead of taking his frustrations on the baby like so many fathers in these stories do, he instead does everything to keep him alive and so Aeropus grows up to be fine ruler, if an unremarkable demigod. A writer could easily use Aeropus as a base for an interesting heroic character… And I guess you can already see where this is going. I already said that Ares would make the most sense as Pit’s divine parent if he indeed has one, so this would make an excellent backstory if that was the case.

I could see the timeline going something like this if this was true - Ares meets KI-universe’s equivalent of Aerope, the two have an adorable romance and are expecting a kid but something goes horribly wrong and Aerope dies, instead of letting Aerope’s family to take care of the kid Ares takes the baby with him because who knows what they would do to a winged baby so many myths have families abandoning their kids for dumber reasons than this so why wouldn’t he take the kid with him + this dude had 3-6 winged kids, one all by himself, so he definitely is the one hogging all the wing genes instead of Aphrodite, he tries single parenting but it’s hard when certain goddess is constantly shooting stinkeyes and paralyzing glares at his direction and it leads into him asking help from Palutena because a winged kid wouldn’t look too out of place among her angel minions. Considering how Palutena and Poseidon were capable of having a conversation in KI:U without any horrible atrocities being committed, I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to imagine her relationship with Ares being along your typical sibling-relationship rather than what Atheanians wrote down Ares and Athena were actually worshiped together in the town of Olympia under titles Hippius and Hippias, fun fact. You could also see it as a favor inspired by how Menrva took care of Maris. Anyway, this deal goes swimmingly for a while until the events of a certain other myth take place, which makes Palutena the sole caregiver of Pit - some unspecified amount of time later que the events of the original Kid Icarus and onward.

Fanfic time over, now to the other myth which could explain Ares’ absence - it’s the one about him and the giants. Long story short, there’s these two giants called Ephialtes (derived from the word meaning nightmare) and Otus (either derived from the word meaning insatiate, doom or horned owl) who’re sons of Poseidon because of course they are, goddammit Poseidon and a mortal woman Iphimedeia, they’re also called by the name Aloadae. They were planning to storm into Olympus to kidnap some wives for themselves, Otus wanting Artemis and Ephialtes wanting Hera what great choices, you complete imbeciles, absolutely amazing. So one day Olympians are surprised to find these two giants piling up mountains on top one another and as expected, there’s a big fight between them because no one comes to the Olympian home turf without facing the consequences. Once the two giants finally leave, the Olympians notice that someone is missing, that being Ares. Ephialtes and Otus probably realized way too late that kidnapping the god of war wasn’t the brightest idea and because letting him go wasn’t an option, they locked him inside bronze jar of which he tried to break out without success. It took around a lunar year for the giants stepmother to rat this out to Hermes, who went to save Ares with Artemis. While she distracted the giants and made them throw their spears at each other, Hermes lockpicked Ares out of the jar and so the three returned to Olympus.

So how could this myth be used while crafting a plot for a future game? I’d say it depends on whether writers want to use Ares as a full-blown good guy from the start or as an antagonist at first - and while I do still believe that Ares wouldn’t be a bad guy on his own free will, who said he’s going to burst out of that jar with that free will still intact? It’s not like we haven’t seen brainwashed antagonists in the series before, Gaol was a one.

So if we have Ares as an antagonist who’s brainwashed and crazy, how could the possible plot be handled? I could see it starting with the two giants resurfacing for something trivial but because they’re being destructive, it catches the attention of Palutena who sends Pit down to deal with them. The giants are dealt with in 1-3 chapters and one way or another Pit finds a large jar and breaks it, releasing the crazed Ares. Neither side recognizes each other and there’s possibly a boss fight which ends with Ares leaving and him becoming a wandering antagonist who causes racket when someone angers him. He most likely isn’t connected to any other antagonist or the main villain, but I could see them trying to recruit him without any success. As for how he was brainwashed in the first place, it could be the Aloadae wanting to get some use out of their prisoner and they decided to make him into an indestructible living weapon either to themselves or someone else - maybe it even was commissioned by the big bad because who wouldn’t want an powerful living weapon who’s loyal to you and only you. Either way it proves fruitless as Pit frees Ares from the mind control and slowly but surely he starts to establish himself as a good guy and an ally to Pit and Palutena.

This would actually go pretty well along with a certain another thing about Ares, that being helmet and symbolism connected to it - you see, mythological Ares was often portrayed to have something I like to call Meta Knight-syndrome. He was said to be a beautiful man with a lovely face, apparently much more prettier than any other male Olympian which could possibly explain why he’s Aphrodite’s favorite boytoy and he wasn’t particularly proud of it - just what kind of self-respecting enemy would take you seriously if you have a face of an angel? But that didn’t stop people from drawing or sculpting him without a helmet, and the result were indeed pretty my goodness is Ludovisi Ares a one beautiful sculpture. Just considering how the art we see of Ares can be categorized into him either with or without a helmet, writers could easily craft a narrative out of this - while wearing a helmet he’s under mind control and once freed he fights helmetless, allowing player to see him as who he really is. Helmet obscuring the face equals bad guy and once it cracks, we can have a very confused ally who cries over the fact that his baby is a big boy now, cries some more because there’s two of them now, may or may not join us to missions if there’s a two-player mode for story or just help with training and also maybe cracks dad jokes few times because humor is a valid coping mechanism. This all kind of reminds me how one other popular trend relating to Ares in art was to have him disarmed with young Eros playing with his armor. Cute!

Somewhat relating to the idea of Ares starting as a brainwashed antagonist turned ally once the helmet is smashed, I could see him having two different themes which illustrate the different natures of him. First one should be something brooding and terrifying, maybe something similar to Gustav Holst’s Mars, the Bringer of War which a really great piece of classical music that has inspired composers all around the world, even at Nintendo. If you haven’t heard it, you certainly have heard at least one song inspired by it metal genre can thank its existence on Mars, no kidding. As for the other theme, I think it should be a warm, calm and welcoming one with a hint of sadness, a complete opposite of the battle theme when it comes to the first expression. I’ve been recently listening a lot of TSFH and Hans Zimmer so if I had to say what kind of energy I’d want this possible theme to have, I’d probably say something between TSFH’s Friendship To Last from the demonstration album Nemesis, Final Days of Rome from album Unleashed and Now we are free from Gladiator. They all have this bittersweet yet beautiful feeling in them I love. Maybe there’s a shared leitmotif or something between the two themes connecting them into each other. Thurus and Aphneius were both titles for the same god after all, even if they were about wildly different aspects of him.

So just like with Apollo, I think there’s only one way to bring Ares into the franchise and in this case it would be making him Pit’s dad. It just makes way too much sense to me considering how Pit has been characterized that it would be odd if there wasn’t any connection between the two. And there’s even couple out-of-universe reasons why I don’t believe he would be the bad guy, the first and most notable being that the names Ares and Mars are already associated with morally righteous characters or at least characters we’re supposed to root for in Nintendo games. Sakurai certainly knows this, Marth has been in Super Smash Bros since Melee as a playable character and his name just blatantly is Mars in Japanese and his English name is just the Japanese way of saying Mars. You don’t bastardize the face of another franchise in your own one, especially if you’re both exclusives to the same company and the other franchise is much more bigger and important than yours is.

Since it would be hard to introduce Ares into the franchise, I would be completely fine with him not being featured in next game at all even though I would find it extremely disappointing. But if you’re not going to have him, at least have a reference to him in form of a weapon like Blade of Ares or Blade of Mars because would you know it, the legendary sword of Attila was also known as the sword of Mars. We’re probably never going to get actual swords in KI but blade has been used as a synonym for them, so there being a blade with said name could work just fine. That or finally add spear and shield combo into the game. But if you want to use the character who would work as the big bad the best into their fullest, maybe it would be a good idea to have Ares as well... All roads may lead to Rome, but not to the arms of Genetrix in this case.

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Call me crazy, but I think that Aphrodite would make the perfect big bad. Does she have that charisma and personality comparable to Hades? Yes she does, and unlike him she had all that in real life - one of her titles was Pandemos, quite literally meaning “of the people”. This made her extremely popular among people regardless who they were or where they lived, and how can you blame them since there’s not many people whom things such as beauty, love and sex don’t matter in some shape or form. Only Olympian who really matched her when it came to popularity was Zeus, but considering how he was the king of all gods it was to be expected that he’d outrank her on the popularity board. She was the most popular goddess in Greece by a longshot and that was also true for Venus in Rome, even if Mars took the place as the second most popular god after Jupiter. Due to her being the mother of Roman founding hero Aeneas, she was viewed as the mother of all Rome and it was used by people as a way to climb up the political ladder. The Julio-Claudian dynasty claimed to descend from her through Aeneas and it didn’t stop there - you can actually trace the ancestry of multiple mythological European figures all the way back to her! Some notable examples of this include Bladud/Blaiddyd, Leir of Britain, Goneril, Regan, Cordelia of Britain and supposedly even king Arthur himself last one is a bit iffy, but all the others are concrete, Aphrodite just flat out is their ancestor through Aeneas. She definitely has the charisma and presentation needed for a big bad because you simply couldn’t be able to pull of any of the previously mentioned things without them and if she could do it in real life, who says she couldn’t do it in a fictional world?

Pretty much only thing about Aphrodite that stays constant is her popularity because in the myths, her characterization is wildly inconsistent - I guess that something one should expect from a goddess who rules over matters such as beauty and love, two things one can never truly understand. However with that being said, there’s trends that stay with her regardless her ever-changing personality. She’s technically speaking an outsider to the Olympian family tree as her most popular and possibly the oldest one as well birth story has her as the motherless child of Ouranos, emerging fully formed from seafoam. Hestia, Hades, Demeter, Poseidon, Hera and Zeus form the first generation of Olympians and Ares, Athena, Hephaestus, Artemis, Apollo, Hermes and Dionysus are principal members of the second generation. By adding Eileithyia, Persephone and Hebe into the mix you get the main Olympian family, making Aphrodite feel like even more of an outsider. She only starts to fit among the family when the third generation is added and speaking of said generation, part of it forms her attendants. The two most important ones are her sons Eros and Anteros, love and love requited, whom she let’s to do pretty much all they want as long as they stay loyal to her. However once that loyalty shifts, she can be quite cruel towards them which is illustrated in the myth of Eros and Psyche quite well - and I’m going to let Aphrodite herself to do all the talking, so here’s a quote from from Apuleius’ The Golden Ass:

‘This is a fine state of affairs, just what one would expect from a child of mine, from a decent man like you! First of all you trampled underfoot the instructions of your mother--or I should say your employer--and you refused to humble my personal enemy with a vile love-liaison; and then, mark you, a mere boy of tender years, you hugged her close in your wanton, stunted embraces! You wanted me to have to cope with my enemy as a daughter-in-law! You take too much for granted, you good-for-nothing, loathsome seducer! You think of yourself as my only noble heir, and you imagine that I'm now too old to bear another. Just realize that I'll get another son, one far better than you. In fact I'll rub your nose in it further. I'll adopt one of my young slaves, and make him a present of these wings and torches of yours, the bow and arrows, and all the rest of my paraphernalia which I did not entrust to you to be misused like this. None of the cost of kitting you out came from your father's estate.’

Let’s file that under yikes. She’s saying this to her injured child and it’s about a girl he loves more than anything but she can’t stand her. And it’s not like Aphrodite dislikes her for any valid reasons, it’s all because Psyche is pretty and Aphrodite took it as a personal attack. This temperament is a stable with her, be the fuss she causes either positive or negative. It goes well in the line of the idea that she was never a child and was born fully formed, as it’s pretty hard to learn those important childhood life lessons as an adult. And do you want to know the best part about this mess? After this massive rant she’s confronted by Hera and Demeter, two goddesses who in all intents and purposes should understand what she’s feeling right now and guess what they do? They call Aphrodite a hypocrite in her face because that’s exactly what she is. Why is she so angry at her child for growing up and experiencing romantic love for the first time when she spends most of her time either being in love or making others fall in love?

Let’s leave the sad lovers behind for a while and talk about Aphrodite in some other myths. There’s not many myths about her that don’t feature romance or sex in some form, but those few are usually about her competitive nature. There’s a myth about Hermes and Aphrodite participating on funeral games yes, this was a real tradition organized by Apollo and she won, her prize being a zither which she later gave to Paris. There’s also a myth about her and Athena having a weaving competition which ended on her losing miserably because as one might expect, challenging the goddess of weaving into a weaving competition couldn’t possibly end well. But since these kind of myths are about things out of her assignments, there isn’t many of them. Most of them are about her helping people with their relationship problems, some examples could be her giving Galatea life on Pygmalion’s wishes and gifting Hippomenes the three golden apples so he could win the race for Atalanta’s heart. But it’s also really easy to earn her anger, some notable immortals who were victims of her wrath are the titan goddess of dawn Eos (she didn’t want to share Ares so she cursed Eos to feel uncontrollable desire towards a new man every day), the titan god of sun Helios (he ratted out her relationship with Ares so she cursed him to forget everyone he ever loved romantically and then made him fall in love with princess Leucothoe - it ends badly and that’s how we got heliotropes), the muse Calliope (Aphrodite saw Zeus asking her help for covering the whole deal about who gets to keep Adonis as a personal attack and so she cursed her son Orpheus to have a horrible death in the hands of Dionysus’ worshipers - interestingly enough this has nothing to do with the fact that Calliope did also sleep with Ares or that she married Oeagrus who’s sometimes said to be Ares’ son, which would make Orpheus his grandson), a minor ocean deity Nerites (he refused to follow her into the land so she turned him into a shrimp) and Pan (Aphrodite and this handsome lad Acheilus had a beauty competition and Pan was the judge - he said Acheilus was prettier so Aphrodite turned the poor lad into into a hideous shark-creature and then cursed Pan to be hopelessly in love with the nymph Echo, the very same Echo who had her eyes on Narcissus). It could even be said that her blessings aren’t going to last for long and by using Hippomenes as an example once again, we learn that in one version of the story she turned him into a lion all because he didn’t pay his respects back to her soon enough. Guileful Aphrodite indeed.

Due to her temperament and general lack of caring about the consequences of her actions, Aphrodite has earned the ire of many gods - just look no further than Adonis, there’s four possible culprits who could’ve caused his death. Because of their contradictory natures, she’s often portrayed as not getting along with Hestia, Athena and Artemis and while there’s not much material for Hestia there’s multiple myths of Aphrodite causing unpleasant situations for Artemis and her hunters, Hippolytus being the shining example of this. The judgement of Paris establishes her relationship with Hera and Athena as a rocky one and the Trojan war has them full-on enemies on opposite sides, Athena even telling the Greek Diomedes during the war that he should avoid fighting literally any god with the exception of Aphrodite - it leads into him throwing a spear at Aphrodite, piercing her wrist and this leads into Aphrodite cursing Diomedes in return. Also in some records such as Cypria Helen’s mother is stated to be the goddess Nemesis, so add her into the list of gods Aphrodite has angered so it turns out the goddess who truly was Nemesis’ enemy was never the one from Blue Sea Star but rather the one who represented Morning Star, how ironic. Her relationship with the male Olympians are a bit better but not always, in fact she has no meaningful one with Apollo at all. Her marriage with Hephaestus was an unhappy one and only after they divorced were they both allowed to be happy, Hephaestus by marrying Aglaea and having a family with her and Aphrodite by continuing her many affairs without any worries. She did scorn Zeus when he tried to get it on with her, but otherwise there’s not much either good or bad blood between them. Besides Ares, Aphrodite did find both Poseidon and Dionysus handsome and had affairs with them, but it’s unclear if they resulted any children - Rhodos has Telchine Halia and Amphitrite as her other mother candidates, Peitho is almost always said to be a child of Tethys and Oceanus instead, the Charites were more often said to be children of Zeus and Oceanid Eurynome rather than Aphrodite’s and Priapus just has no parents set in stone because no telling was seemingly more popular than others. The birth myth of Hermaphroditus starts with Aphrodite telling Hermes to piss off because he doesn’t come even close to her standards, so he asks little help from Zeus to get what he wants and therefore I can’t imagine them having a positive relationship because of this. And after reading so many myths in which Aphrodite targets Ares’ grandkids for whatever reasons, I’m starting to think that he should start running away and quickly. Maybe she really did kill Aerope.

Now returning to the love story with a happy ending which has the most famous victim of Aphrodite’s wrath, Eros and Psyche. It begins in a town with no name given oh, so this isn’t completely baseless in KI where princess Psyche (meaning either soul or breath of life) is having trouble socializing - the people have declared that she’s as if not more beautiful than Aphrodite and they have started worshiping her, denying normal human interaction from her. This obviously pisses off Aphrodite because it has been established that she has the self-control skills comparable to a toddler and so she orders her son Eros to make Psyche to fall in love with something hideous. While he agrees to do the deed, once he sees the beautiful Psyche he can’t help but to fall in love with her and then he chooses to defy his mother, crafting a plan on what to do next. In the meanwhile the loneliness is making Psyche miserable and that doesn’t go unnoticed by her parents, so they go to visit the oracle of Apollo for help. Considering how Apollo is still very much salty at Eros for cursing him to have the worst love life imaginable, his words aren’t all that comforting (another quote from The Golden Ass):

‘Adorn this girl, O king, for wedlock dread, and set her on a lofty mountain-rock. Renounce all hope that one of mortal stock can be your son-in-law, for she shall wed a fierce, barbaric, snake-like monster. He, flitting on wings aloft, makes all things smart, plaguing each moving thing with torch and dart. Why, Jupiter himself must fearful be. The other gods for him their terror show, and rivers shudder, and the dark realms below.’

She and her parents are obviously horrified by this, but they do as they were told to and Psyche is left alone on a cliffside where the god of west wind Zephyrus picks her up. He brings her into a lovely meadow where she takes a refreshing nap and after she wakes up, she sees a beautiful palace and goes in. She’s charmed by the looks of the place and then a disembodied voice tells her that she will be provided by many invisible servants while living in there. Once night falls she’s nervous to meet her husband, but after the first meeting she starts looking forward on their nights together. This continues for quite some time, but in the meanwhile Psyche’s family is starting to get worried about her and she’s in return worrying about them. Eros promises that her sisters can come to visit, but also tells her that she shouldn’t listen them if they sound jealous. Psyche agrees and Eros gets Zephyrus to scoot the sisters down to visit, but as expected the sisters get jealous really quickly and start to make her worry if what the oracle told about her husband was indeed true - what finally broke the camels back was the sisters suggesting that he’s planning to kill her and their unborn child. So when the next night falls, she has prepared herself a lamp and dagger to see if her husband really is a monster - once she draws the lamp near and sees that he’s in fact Eros himself, she’s awestruck and accidentally stabs herself with one of his arrows, making her fall for him even harder. But while admiring him some oil spills from the lamp on Eros, causing him to wake up and leave. Earlier in the story Psyche had said that she’d much rather die than throw this marriage away and she’s willing to live by that statement, so she goes to search Eros and atonement - meanwhile Aphrodite is beating her son in the head by talking how horrible child he is for daring to fall in love and then she imprisons him Genetrix knows nothing in this case. Hera and Demeter call her a hypocrite, which doesn’t ease her anger in the slightest.

Psyche eventually finds her way into a temple of Aphrodite and she calls her two servants to beat the poor girl to make herself feel better. After having a good laugh over Psyche’s suffering, she gives her another beating herself and then dumbs different kinds of grains on the ground, saying that she should sort them by night if she ever wants to see Eros again. Sometimes prompted by him, ants nearby take pity on Psyche and help her - predictably Aphrodite isn’t all too happy about this and she comes up with a much more deadlier task. By morning she tells her that she should get some golden fleece from the sheep living on a grove across nearby river. This disheartens Psyche because she knows gathering the fleas directly is a suicide mission, but she’s consulted by local river deity who tells her how the sheep behave and that instead of approaching the sheep at all she should just collect fleas caught on foliage. She does as was told and Aphrodite becomes even more enraged, telling her to go gather water from river Styx. While she finds her way to Styx without much hassle, she’s overwhelmed by the hopelessness of the situation - luckily for her everyone has come to the conclusion that Aphrodite is being horrible and Zeus sends one of his eagles to help Psyche to get the water.

At this point Aphrodite’s patience is running thin and she gives Psyche a box, tells her to go into Underworld to get a part of Persephone’s beauty and come back with it because this whole deal of torturing her little daughter-in-law has been so hard for her and she needs to look good while going to the divine theatre. After being consulted by a tower on how to actually get into the Underworld without dying, she does as was told and and it doesn’t take long for her to be greeted by Persephone. After refusing to fall into an obvious trap, Psyche told her why she was visiting her and Persephone agreed to help her without hassle - but after returning into the mortal world, Psyche’s curiosity took the better of her and she wanted to see that beauty herself. Turns out it was Stygian sleep fancy words for boxed death and Psyche drops on the ground like a rock, but at this point Eros has escaped his imprisonment goes straight to her. He draws the sleep back into the box, gently pricks her with an arrow to wake her up, the two have a heartfelt reunion and Eros brings Psyche to Olympus, asking Zeus if the two can now get properly married. Everyone agrees, Zeus tells Aphrodite to stfu and they give Psyche ambrosia, making her the goddess of soul. The two have a glorious wedding and some time after it Psyche gives birth to their daughter, either named Hedone or Volupta(s) depends if it’s a Greek or Roman telling the story, the personification of pleasure, joy and delight. I personally prefer the name Volupta, it rhymes much more nicer with rest of the family.

And since we’re at here, that gorgeous painting by John William Waterhouse that everyone thinks has Pandora wearing a pink dress? It’s actually Psyche opening the deathly beauty box. Don’t believe me? Just check Psyche opening the golden box and you see who’s right. He however did create an equally pretty painting about Pandora though.

So now when the story time finally over, what can we do with all of this info? Well, it does tell how perfect of an antagonist Aphrodite makes for an Eros-expy. She has power over him and isn’t afraid of abusing it when she feels betrayed. Compare this to the tales of Icarus and Perseus which really don’t have a main antagonists - Icarus has no personal stakes in the story because he’s a plot device rather than a character and from Daedalus’ point of view, the main antagonist is Minos but mythology doesn’t really treat him as all that horrible person. After he died he became one of the judges of the Underworld and probably sent Daedalus to Tartarus once he died, which illustrates a one seriously big missed opportunity which should’ve been used if Icarus truly was that important inspiration for Pit. Instead it just makes it even more clear how irrelevant Icarus and the narrative about the Minotaur are to KI. As for Perseus, I already talked about how Medusa is a mcguffin while alive and the other ones aren’t much better. Polydectes, Phineus and Acrisius are all dealt with so quickly that they don’t really matter - his only fight that isn’t solved by a handwave is against Cetus and it’s just a sea monster sent to kill Andromeda by Poseidon. Poseidon’s antagonistic potential is a topic I’ve already discussed and the already mentioned possible fusion of the myths of Poseidon sending a sea monster to harass Troy and Ares’ trial covers the idea of Pit saving a girl from a sea monster which is bit funny because in the former one, oracle tells that king Laomedon should let it eat his daughter Hesione to get rid of the monster, so that doesn’t really add anything new here. But with Aphrodite as the big bad it could be rather easy to craft two different but overlapping plotlines, one with a main goal and the other with a personal one. Aphrodite always was Eros’ biggest personal antagonist who treated him as a trophy child and didn’t take it well when he stepped out of the line - how dare her little doll grow up, behave like a man and then decide that he wants to move on to build a family of his own, which now takes the priority over her? Him choosing Psyche over his mother is his defining myth, with the addition of it being the myth in which he finally gains the respect of the other gods. Besides having its message about heart and soul being capable feeling and creating joy while together, it also functions as a coming of age story for its main couple - and when those stories have an antagonist, things tend get really personal.

So going back to those possible two plotlines and goals, what could they possibly be about? I’d say that the main plot line shouldn’t really be based on any myth but instead it should take advantage of her popularity among ancient people, more so when it comes to Venus and Rome. Even as a city, Rome was massive - by the time of 1st century CE it had reached the population of million people, being the first city in history to do that. And this was only the capital of the empire! Rome wasn’t build in a day indeed. Venus wasn’t worshiped by the thousands, her popularity was in the millions during this time period. That’s a lot of power for one goddess and as we all know, too much power can easily hit one in the head - especially when remembering that we’re dealing with a Pantheon composed entirely of manchildren. Give Aphrodite an empire that looks up to her, doesn’t do anything without a last world from her and you’re set with a supervillain who has it all from power to personality. In this case, the reason why Aphrodite should be stopped is that she’s a conqueror who rules by fear, saying that if she was ever abandoned she would curse them and take away all the blessings she has ever granted, leading her empire to ruin. If you want to make her feel even more villainous, don’t even give her an army of her own like Hades and Viridi had but make her use the people of the empire she rules over. There’s nothing more evil than using people who look up to you for protection for your own selfish goals. What those selfish goals may be, writers can be creative with them - maybe she wants to be viewed as the supreme goddess above everyone else, maybe she wants everyone to worship her and isn’t afraid to use extreme measures to get what she wants, maybe she wants to wipe out everyone who could be a threat to her, everything goes. Considering her role on the judgement of Paris, her causing a war or chaos for selfish reasons isn’t out of character. But whatever her reasons may be, there’s going to sparks in the air and fights of massive proportions. Ares may be Pit’s father but Aphrodite definitely isn’t his mother, so she’s not going to show him any sympathy or kindness if he gets in the way of her plans.

This would be the plotline that’s more on the background and focused on Aphrodite’s relationships with Palutena, possibly Ares and the other gods, the main goal is their goal. It’s why they want her defeated. If Palutena is anything like Athena, she can’t get along with her and she understands that allowing Aphrodite to do whatever she wants will have catastrophic consequences even if she herself couldn’t care less about those. If Ares was featured on a future game along with Aphrodite, their relationship would probably be focused on how they feel betrayed by each other. The myth of her cursing Eos illustrates how she sees their relationship open only from her end so she’s very likely still angry at him for leaving her, be it for Aerope or something else entirely. If you want to go with the depressing idea of her being the one who ordered Aloadae to kidnap him, she probably feels even more betrayed because even under mind control he didn’t come back to her like she had anticipated. And if it’s indeed her favorite ex-boytoy’s son with some other lady who has been foiling her plans, her blood quite possibly starts to boil. Ares’ feelings of betrayal would likely stem from Aphrodite trying to kill his child for no other reason than sheer pettiness, along with orchestrating his kidnapping and torture just so she could get her boytoy back. Other gods probably want her stopped for similar reasons as Palutena, maybe with some selfishness rippled in - the consequences of her actions are hurting them and because she doesn’t care, something must be done to stop her. For example, Viridi could possibly oppose Aphrodite because she doesn’t care about how she’s hurting nature on her attempts to viewed as the supreme goddess. Not to say that Pit doesn’t also care about this goal since he’s an empathetic youngster, but I think that the more personal plotline should be his and it’s goal his main motivator during the story.

As for the plotline with the more personal goal, the myth of Eros and Psyche makes the perfect outline for it. Aphrodite is already the main antagonist of the tale, so there’s no need for any massive changes when it comes to her jealousy and want to dispose Psyche. The tasks she gives to her could also be mostly unchanged, if adjusted with something that makes gameplay more immersive assuming we would get to play as her like we got to play as Dark Pit in chapter 22 in KI:U. However what needs to changed is Aphrodite’s relationship with Pit, how he and Psyche first meet and how their relationship is evolves from that point onward since following the myth to a T isn’t an option in this case. I could see Pit and Psyche’s first meeting being a result of Aphrodite’s wrath manifesting on a relatively harmless way, meaning that she already knows about this new, pretty princess that challenges her status as the supreme goddess and she’s not having any of it. As for how her wrath could manifest, it could be a your garden-variety monster attack in the first chapter disguised as someone else’s troops so no one would suspect it was her behind it. The sheer weirdness of it could catch Palutena’s attention so she sends Pit down to investigate it and to get rid of the monsters. While getting rid of them, he meets Psyche in one way or another - maybe she’s trying to escape from them or she’s trying to fight against them, either way Pit comes to her aid and they befriend each other. Maybe she’s featured on a few following chapters as minor character doing something on the background, giving them more possibilities to interact and become better friends - in these chapters Apollo could possibly be introduced along with reintroducing Poseidon, to foreshadow the roles they would play later on. What side plots would these chapters have, it could anything - maybe Pit meets Ares for the first time at this point of the story, but he’s not freed from mind control just yet.

At this point Aphrodite could be getting more angrier but she doesn’t want to out herself as the main villain yet, so she crafts a plan that would eventually lead into Poseidon hating Pit into the point of him wanting to take things into the court. Maybe she tricks Poseidon and Apollo into becoming mad at Psyche’s home city for whatever reason, like how they got angry at Troy in mythology proper. If this was the case, I think that she would keep Poseidon in the dark while letting Apollo fully know what’s going on - if Poseidon doesn’t know the true reason why Aphrodite wanted his sea monster to terrorize the city and why it was killed, he would be much more enraged when it happens. I’ve already established reasons as for why Apollo would dislike Pit, so he probably wouldn’t really need any prompting to cause Pit suffering since he’d still want some payback from that embarrassing noodle incident. So Poseidon sends his sea monster to terrorize the coastline and once citizens start asking help from the gods, Apollo lets the hate flow through him and offers nothing useful - instead he tells them to take the Hesione/Andromeda-approach and let it eat someone to calm it down oh look, it’s a reference to Perseus that’s not about Medusa for once, nice. In this case, it would be Psyche and Pit’s of course not going to let his friend die so he goes to save her, be it with or without Palutena’s approval. In my head I did imagine this as a chapter that would work amazingly with multiplayer, starting with Pit and Dark Pit distracting the monster, then Pit freeing Psyche and them setting out to kill the monster before it causes more harm. Player 2 would have to deal with changing characters on the fly but if Pittoo and Psyche had similar weapons, I don’t think it would be too distracting since they’d be playable on different parts of the chapter. But once the monster has finally been defeated, the joy is cut short by Poseidon interrupting and wanting vengeance for what happened to his monster, ending the chapter. The plot would immediately catch on the next one and what I could see happening on this chapter is that Pit’s taken into the court by Poseidon and he’s not allowed to have anyone defending him, but Dark Pit and Psyche go into his defense anyway Pittoo being the playable character. After a long and treacherous journey they find they way to the divine courthouse and tell their point of view on the events, which gives Pit the sympathy of the court and he gets away scot-free. Poseidon and Apollo may face on consequences at this point and they may even rat Aphrodite out on a subtle way, but the main group doesn’t catch it.

The following few chapters would be breathers before the plot kicks in again, Aphrodite ousting herself as the big bad in one way or another. Maybe she has sent her troops to attack some place, possibly in search for Ares since he would make a great ally on this brainwashed state. Much to her dismay he declines her offers, he and Pit fight and the helmet is smashed, but Palutena recalls Pit before anything can come out of it. The fight continues for couple following chapters, Palutena and Aphrodite are gradually getting more and more mad at each other and maybe she comes down to face Pit herself because the little brat getting on her way is starting to be really annoying now this would make a pretty cool unwinnable boss fight, but Ares comes just in time save him - que silent, cold anger between them, confusion from Pit and Palutena’s end with some extremely awkward reunions and explanations.

What could follow from here is another set more lighter chapters focused less on Aphrodite’s plans to become the supreme goddess and more of the cast getting to know each other better - Palutena and Ares reconnecting, Ares trying to form a meaningful relationship with Pit and Dark Pit, Pit and Psyche becoming better friends, etc etc. Not to say Aphrodite has given up on her plans - she’s still doing things on the background, but it’s implied that what little chaos she currently causes is serving as distraction to hide her bigger plans. Persephone could possibly be introduced at this point of the story, making it clear that she knows about the events of KI:U and that she’s going to get her payback on what happened to Hades in one way or another, possibly drop an implication that she’s working together with Aphrodite. But since everything good comes to an end and so do the breather episodes, plot would go on with Aphrodite kidnapping Pit and getting Persephone to throw him into some dark part of the Underworld, maybe even to Tartarus. And now we get into the fun part of the myth, Psyche’s four tasks!

I could see the plot separating into two directions from here on, first one being Pit’s great prison escape from wherever Persephone threw him into and the second one being the titular four tasks. The prison escape is more focused on traversing the Underworld and Pit trying get out of there while Persephone throws all kinds of obstacles at him - maybe it ends with a ghost gauntlet, since Odyssey illustrated that she can summon ghosts. Arke would make a pretty great boss fight here as well, since she could be classified as a fallen angel. Maybe her motive for going after Pit is to get his wings for herself as a mean to escape, since her own ones were ripped off as punishment for siding with the Titans. But since Pit’s a brave boy, this isn’t enough to stop him and he eventually finds his way out so there could be reunion and a final battle against Persephone.

While Pit’s great prison break is going on, Aphrodite makes an empty promise to rest of the cast that she can give Pit back, with some conditions - but just like in the myth, all she actually wants is Psyche’s death so the danger factor is amped up to eleven. I honestly don’t know how the one about sorting grains could be handled I guess it could work as a puzzle chapter, but the rest work rather well without massive changes. The one about gathering te golden fleas could now take a more direct approach, the one about getting Styx’s water is now missing the helpful eagle and the Underworld trip is largely same with the exception of Persephone not being cooperative. This would be the point where the two plotlines merge together and they take Persephone down together before leaving from the Underworld. Psyche falling for Stygian sleep in this version is up to debate, I say it could work either way. It mostly depends on when she’s going to wake up - if it’s too early it might as well not matter, if it’s after the final battle I’d say that’s too late.

As one might expect Pit’s escape makes Aphrodite furious and she challenges him into a one final battle - that brat has stolen her favorite boytoy from her, satisfaction of getting rid of the annoying princess and also her chances to become the supreme goddess way too many times, she has reached her third-act breakdown and at this point she has nothing left to lose anymore. Ares isn’t going to come back to her, Psyche is not going to die and the people under her empire have started to become less dependent of her, the last thing she can do is get rid the troublesome kid that brought her into this situation. Of course Pit ends up winning, sending the goddess to Aether to hang with Hades where they can now together sulk over the fact that they got defeated by an angel. Pit triumphantly returns to Skyworld where Palutena and others have been waiting, there’s a joyful reunion between all of them and if one wants to follow the original myth at this point, Psyche could gain divinity or immortality for her bravery for standing against Aphrodite as a mere mortal. People have become immortals for dumber reasons in Greco-Roman mythology, so at least Psyche doesn’t become immortal merely because one god thought she was pretty. Have some little banter at the end between the cast and then credits can finally roll in.

When thinking of some nice bonus content, maybe there could be a secret ending player can unlock after beating all the chapters on a certain difficulty, which confirms that everyone is doing well. If we have to deal with another long hiatus that could last for decade or two or eternity, best the game can offer is closure. Pit doesn’t have to a married man with a daughter, but at least show that he’s doing well and ready for a new adventure or that he has had many of those under his belt at this point. All one can do is hope at this point that there will be a new adventure or a happy ending that ties all the loose ends together. Praise Volupta, maybe one day dreams can come true.

______

Welp, this turned out to be much more longer and heavier than I originally expected! If nothing else, that would make an interesting fanfic. Anyway, I think I made my point clear - Aphrodite has everything a big bad needs from power to personality and motives to harass the already existing KI-cast. Even if you don’t want to go with the ideas I came up with, there’s so many myths to use and modify in which she could fill the role of the main villain. And just because there’s heavy themes it doesn’t mean it has to be without humor - I mean, there’s a lot of heavy implications in KI:U yet the game still manages to be a comedy gold mine despite those heavy implications. Writers just need to know when to be serious and when levity is needed, good pacing is something that every great story needs. For some reason I could definitely see there being a gag in which Pandora has regained her true form, only for Aphrodite to snatch it away because Pandora was living on borrowed beauty anyway and she’d like to have it back.

Though I must say that I’m proud of all of these plot bunnies I came up with. It was a fun journey to me to research, overthink, adapt and mix myths while trying to imagine who could be the next possible big bad and what the plotline relating to their villainy could be. And I came out wiser from it, so I really can’t be angry over it even if it took so me so much longer than I originally planned. I never thought that me wanting to write about a Nintendo game would make me read this much about history and philosophy yet here I am. Also now when I’m thinking of it, that last one would tie a lot of threads nicely together if they had a plotline like it on a future game - Poseidon gets to be an antagonist, Apollo gets to be an antagonist, Persephone gets to be an antagonist and Aphrodite gets to be the villain. It’s so nice when things work out this well together! Dionysus is left out though, but I guess it’s not all that bad because having too many antagonists would make the plot feel overly complicated.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed my thoughts of who could replace Hades as the big bad. You can’t change my mind on Aphrodite being the best possible candidate but if you disagree with me, who do you think it could be? I’m always open for discussion so feel free to talk with me. Now there’s only one question remaining on my head - if a future Kid Icarus game had Arachne, would she be a jorōgumo?

[scotianostra]

The Poet  William Soutar was born on 28 April 1898 in Perth, the only son of a close and loving family.

Probably the finest poet that Perth has ever produced and certainly one of the finest Scottish poets of this century. He wrote both in English and Scots but it is his Scottish poetry for which he will be chiefly remembered. In addition he kept a journal from an early age and selections were published after his death under the title ‘Diaries of a Dying Man’.

He was educated at Perth Academy. ��That was my eighteenth year while yet the shadow of war was unacknowledged. Then I was one of the fleetest at the Academy; one of the strongest; first in my year at most things; I was writing poetry; I was in love; I was popular both in the classroom and the playing field. I never reached this condition of living fullness again except in brief moments.”  This was written in 1937 when he was already permanently confined to bed. He served in the Navy during the first World War and it was here that he suffered a form of food poisoning which affected his spine. By the time the illness had been properly diagnosed it was too late for a cure and from 1930 he took to his bed at 27 Wilson Street, Perth, lovingly cared for by his parents until his death on October 15th 1943.

During these thirteen years he continued to write, to meet friends and to remember the neighbourhood and the old worthies that he could no longer visit. Some of the most evocative poems are those concerning the town of Perth and the surrounding countryside, grouped together under the general title of Yon Toun; The Deuchny Wuds, Was the hert mair kind? The Bogle Brig and Whan Gowdan are the Carse-lands.

Perhaps Soutars most famous works are his  Bairnrhymes, a collection of poems in the Scots language, it was his  intention that Bairnryhmes would be used in schools in years to come as a way of introducing children to the language and ultimately maintaining it as a living medium. Too much emphasis is put on what is called “proper” English and not enough emphasis put on preserving our unique “Scots Tongue” if it was good enough for the likes of Soutar and indeed Robert Burns it should be encouraged and never frowned upon.

Here are two of Soutars poems in the Bairnryhmes collection.

Bed Time

Cuddle-doun my bairnie The dargie day is dune: Yon’s a siller sternie Ablow the siller mune. Like a wabster body Hingin on a threed Far abune my laddie In his wee creepie-bed.

Black Day

A skelp frae his teacher For a’ he cudna spell: A skelp frae his mither For cowpin owre the kale. A skelp frae his brither For clourin his braw bat: And a skelp frae his faither For the Lord kens what.

It is good to know that interest in William Soutar has revived in recent years and both his poems and The Diary of a Dying Man are back in print. His house in William Street Perth has been renovated and is now the abode of a writer in residence. The William Soutar Perth Walks were also established around Perth in 2007. 

You can find more of him, and his poems on Poemhunter, and here on The Scottish Poetry Library  website  https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poet/william-soutar/

[butterflies-dragons]

ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE

Art credit: Kinuko Y. Craft

Eleanor of Aquitaine, also called Eleanor of Guyenne, French Éléonore or Aliénor, d’Aquitaine or de Guyenne, (born c. 1122—died April 1, 1204, Fontevrault, Anjou, France), queen consort of both Louis VII of France (1137–52) and Henry II of England (1152–1204) and mother of Richard I (the Lion-Heart) and John of England. She was perhaps the most powerful woman in 12th-century Europe.

—Britannica

Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204) was one of the most powerful and influential figures of the Middle Ages. Inheriting a vast estate at the age of 15 made her the most sought-after bride of her generation. She would eventually become the queen of France, the queen of England and lead a crusade to the Holy Land. She is also credited with establishing and preserving many of the courtly rituals of chivalry.

—History

This mighty medieval woman outwitted and outlasted her rivals. Ruler of two nations, mother to kings and queens, leader of a crusade: Eleanor of Aquitaine was a savvy power player in medieval France and England.

When reviewing the history of medieval Europe, no woman stands out as much as Eleanor of Aquitaine. Once the most eligible woman in Europe, she became queen of two nations, leader of a crusade, mother of kings, and patron of the arts. Her power and prestige earned her enemies in the 12th century, and her critics authored a black legend founded on gossip and rumor that has fueled ideas about her until the present time.

—National Geographic

Eleanor of Aquitaine [...] she was one of the most kick-ass women of the Middle Ages and, you know, she had her own crusade, or she went on crusade rather and she married two kings and then was the mother of several more, she was a great character.

—GRRM

***

The past April I wrote a very long post about the parallels between Good Queen Alysanne and Sansa Stark.  Consider this post its continuation, so I highly recommend you to read that post first before continuing reading this one. 

As I said before, I discovered that GRRM not only took inspiration from Katharine Hepburn playing Eleanor of Aquitaine in the film ´The Lion in Winter´ for Alysanne’s looks, he also took a lot from Eleanor’s life to write Alysanne, like Eleanor’s second marriage with her cousin Henry II of England with whom she had 8 children (Alysanne/Jaehaerys & their 13 children) and Eleanor’s Court of Love (Alysanne Women’s Courts).

But not only that, I also discovered that Eleanor of Aquitaine shares a lot of similarities with no other than SANSA STARK.

Join me in this new adventure, I assure you, it’s gonna be a blast!

ELEANOR, ALYSANNE AND SANSA

HIGHBORN

Eleanor was born to William X, Duke of Aquitaine and Count of Poitiers, and Aénor, Viscountess of Châtellerault, around 1122, in what is now southwestern France.  Eleanor was the oldest of the couple’s three children; she had a younger sister, Petronilla, and a younger brother, William Aigret. Various biographers also report that Eleanor had two bastard half-brothers, William and Joscelin. 

Alysanne was born to Aenys Targaryen and Lady Alyssa Velaryon in 36 AC, at King's Landing.  Alysanne was the fifth of the couple’s six children; she had four older siblings, Rhaena, Aegon, Viserys and Jaehaerys, and a younger sister, Vaella.  Alysanne also had two younger highborn half-siblings, Boremund and Jocelyn Baratheon.

Sansa was born to Eddard Stark, Lord of Winterfell, and Lady Catellyn Tully of Riverrun in 286 AC, at Winterfell.  Sansa was the second of the couple’s five children; she had an older brother, Robb, and three younger siblings, Arya, Bran and Rickon. Sansa also had a bastard half-brother, Jon Snow. 

Take note of how similar these ladies’ half-siblings names are: Joscelin, Jocelyn & Jon.

APPEARANCE

Back in 2006, many years before Fire & Blood, GRRM gave us this description of Good Queen Alysanne Targaryen:

You might consider Alysanne as the Eleanor of Aquitaine of Westeros, and model her on Katharine Hepburn’s portrayal of Eleanor in the film THE LION IN WINTER. Tall and straight, unbowed by time, she had high cheekbones, clear blue eyes. Age left crow’s feet around her eyes and laugh lines about her mouth, but her face never lost its strength. She was a fine archer and hunter in her youth, and loved to fly atop her dragon to all the distant parts of the realm. Alysanne was slim of waist and small of breast, with a long neck, a fair complexion, a high forehead. In old age her hair turned white as snow. She wore it in a bun, pulled back and pinned behind her hear.  [Source] 

There is not a reliable description of Eleanor of Aquitaine true appearance, just various interpretations of her physical features based on old paintings and medieval illuminations that are presumed, by writers and historians, to be of her.  Sometimes she is described and/or depicted as black of ayes and hair, others says she was blonde with blue or grey eyes, and in other cases she had auburn hair with green or grey eyes.  For more details about Eleanor’s appearance, you can read:

Elizabeth Chadwick’s blog entry: “Eleanor of Aquitaine’s Appearance or not”; and,

Michael R. Evans’ book “Inventing Eleanor: The Medieval and Post-Medieval Image of Eleanor of Aquitaine”  

The beautiful art pieces of Eleanor of Aquitaine that I chose to illustrate this post, created by the extraordinaire artist Kinuko Y. Craft, depict a redhead and blue eyed Eleanor. About this choice of the artist, Michael R. Evans tells us this:

Works of fiction are more likely to use modern images of Eleanor, such as Margaret Ball’s ‘Duchess of Aquitaine’, which employs a dynamic painting of Eleanor by the Japanese-American artist Kinuko Y. Craft. The Queen appears on horseback, crowned, with a falcon on her left wrist and long red hair floating behind her. This image matches the modern perception of Eleanor as an active, confident female authority figure. The falcon and the appearance of Eleanor on horseback both recall the Sainte-Radegonde fresco, although Craft states that she was not influenced by it.       

As you can see, we can’t make a true parallel between the physical features of Eleanor, Alysanne and Sansa. But what is a certainty is that GRRM took inspiration from Katharine Hepburn playing Eleanor of Aquitaine in the film ´The Lion in Winter´ for Alysanne’s looks:

So, for the ASOIAF universe created by GRRM:

Eleanor (Katharine Hepburn): Reddish brown hair + blue eyes  

Alysanne: Honey-colored curls + blue eyes

Sansa: Auburn hair + blue eyes

I see a patter here, auburn is by definition a reddish brown color, and if you googled ‘honey colored hair’ you would see a vast variety of reddish brown or reddish blonde hair colors. Enough said.

NAME

Eleanor is said to have been named for her mother Aénor, Viscountess of Châtellerault, and called Aliénor from the Latin ‘Alia Aenor’, which means ‘the other Aénor’. It became Eléanor in the langues d'oïl of northern France and Eleanor in English. 

It’s probable that George played with the Aénor/Aliénor pattern when he created Alysanne’s name, that is very similar to his mother’s name: Alyssa Velaryon. 

There is not this pattern in Sansa and Catelyn, Sansa was probably named after the other one Sansa in the whole ASOIAF universe: Sansa Stark, daughter of Rickon Stark, heir to Lord Cregan Stark of Winterfell, and his wife, Jeyne Manderly. She had an older sister, Serena Stark. She married his half uncle Lord Jonnel Stark.  

But the name Alayne it’s a different story. Alayne is certainly closer to Catelyn than Sansa, but most relevant to this post, Alayne is very similar to Alysanne. 

In summary:

Aénor/Aliénor

Alyssa/Alysanne

Catelyn/Alayne (Sansa) + Alysanne/Alayne (Sansa)

EDUCATION

Look at these reports about Eleanor’s education:

Their ducal court had a fine reputation as a patron of the arts. Eleanor’s grandfather, William IX, was known as the “troubadour duke,” famous for his poetry and songs about heroism and courtly love. Poets of the time, especially the famous Marcabru, found hospitality at the court of Aquitaine.

Culture and learning were a family tradition for Eleanor, who received the best possible education of the time. She was taught mathematics, astronomy, history, literature, Latin, and music. She also learned arts and crafts: embroidery, needlepoint, sewing, and spinning. Like any daughter of nobility, she danced and sang, as well as rode horses and went hunting. Like many noble daughters, Eleanor would have been raised to be a nobleman’s wife and was probably not expected to play any role in governing.  

—National Geographic

By all accounts, Eleanor's father ensured that she had the best possible education. Eleanor came to learn arithmetic, the constellations, and history. She also learned domestic skills such as household management and the needle arts of embroidery, needlepoint, sewing, spinning, and weaving. Eleanor developed skills in conversation, dancing, games such as backgammon, checkers, and chess, playing the harp, and singing. Although her native tongue was Poitevin, she was taught to read and speak Latin, was well versed in music and literature, and schooled in riding, hawking, and hunting. 

—Wikipedia

She was well educated by her cultured father, William X, Duke of Aquitaine, thoroughly versed in literature, philosophy, and languages and trained to the rigors of court life when she became her father’s heir presumptive at the age 5. An avid horsewoman, she led an active life until she inherited her father’s title and extensive lands upon his death when she was 15. 

—History

Sounds familiar?

No man ever questioned her wits. Later, it would be said of her that she learned to read before she was weaned, and the court fool would make japes about little Alysanne dribbling mother’s milk on Valyrian scrolls as she tried to read whilst suckling at her wet nurse’s teat. Had she been a boy she would surely have been sent to the Citadel to forge a maester’s chain. —Fire & Blood

It is written that the young king and queen were seldom apart during that time, sharing every meal, talking late into the night of the green days of their childhood and the challenges ahead, fishing and hawking together, mingling with the island's smallfolk in dockside inns, reading to one another from dusty leatherbound tomes they found in the castle library, taking lessons together from Dragonstone's maesters (“for we still have much to learn,” Alysanne is said to have reminded her husband). —Fire & Blood

“If I had not become a queen, I might have liked to be a teacher,” she told the Conclave. “I read, I write, I think, I am not afraid of ravens… or a bit of blood. There are other highborn girls who feel the same. Why not admit them to your Citadel? —Fire & Blood 

For three days she lost herself in the Citadel’s great library, emerging only to attend lectures on the Valyrian dragon wars, leechcraft, and the gods of the Summer Isles. —Fire & Blood

Once the initial frost had thawed, his lordship took the queen hunting after elk and wild boar in the wolfswood, showed her the bones of a giant, and allowed her to rummage as she pleased through his modest castle library. —Fire & Blood

And here is Sansa:

Sansa could sew and dance and sing. She wrote poetry. She knew how to dress. She played the high harp and the bells. […] It hurt that the one thing Arya could do better than her sister was ride a horse. Well, that and manage a household. Sansa had never had much of a head for figures. If she did marry Prince Joff, Arya hoped for his sake that he had a good steward. —AGOT  - Arya I

Sansa was a lady at three, always so courteous and eager to please. She loved nothing so well as tales of knightly valor. —A Clash of Kings - Catelyn VII

Sansa Stark, he mused. Soft-spoken sweet-smelling Sansa, who loved silks, songs, chivalry and tall gallant knights with handsome faces. —A Storm of Swords - Tyrion III

So the singer played for her, so soft and sad that Arya only heard snatches of the words, though the tune was half-familiar. Sansa would know it, I bet. Her sister had known all the songs, and she could even play a little, and sing so sweetly. All I could ever do was shout the words.—A Storm of Swords - Arya IV

The queen took Sansa’s hand in both of hers. “Child, do you know your letters Sansa nodded nervously. She could read and write better than any of her brothers, although she was hopeless at sums. —AGOT - Sansa IV

She pulled a chair close to the hearth, took down one of her favorite books, and lost herself in the stories of Florian and Jonquil, of Lady Shella and the Rainbow Knight, of valiant Prince Aemon and his doomed love for his brother’s queen. —AGOT - Sansa IV

“Do you read well, Alayne?” “Septa Mordane was good enough to say so.” —A Storm of Swords - Sansa VI

No one ransomed the northmen, though. One fat lordling haunted the kitchens [...] and the clasp that held his cloak was a silver-and-sapphire trident. He belonged to Lord Tywin, but the fierce, bearded young man [...] in a black cloak patterned with white suns had been taken by some hedge knight who meant to get rich off him. Sansa would have known who he was, and the fat one too, but Arya had never taken much interest in titles and sigils. Whenever Septa Mordane had gone on about the history of this house and that house, she was inclined to drift and dream and wonder when the lesson would be done. —A Clash of Kings - Arya VII

Later, while Sansa was off listening to a troupe of singers perform the complex round of interwoven ballads called the “Dance of the Dragons,” [sung in High Valyrian] Ned inspected the bruise himself. “I hope Forel is not being too hard on you,” he said. —AGOT - Eddard VII

Do you hawk, Sansa?" "A little," she admitted. —A Storm of Swords - Sansa I

The day before last she'd taken Sansa hawking. [...] Sansa's merlin brought down three ducks while Margaery's peregrine took a heron in full flight. —A Storm of Swords - Sansa II

Sansa can ride despite not enjoying the physical exertion of the activity.

Despite it is said that Sansa is bad with numbers and can’t manage a household, Alayne Stone is doing pretty well as de facto Lady of the Eyrie.

As final note on this section, Eleanor’s grandfather Willian IX being called “the troubadour duke” reminds me of Bael the Bard, being kin with the Starks. The Aquitaine court sounds as magical and cultured as what Sansa once thought the Red Keep court would be, full of musicians and poets and courtly love.  

HEIRESS 

Eleanor inherited the largest and richest lands of France at a very young age:

Eleanor’s four-year-old brother William Aigret and their mother died at the castle of Talmont on Aquitaine's Atlantic coast in the spring of 1130. Eleanor became the heir presumptive to her father's domains. The Duchy of Aquitaine was the largest and richest province of France. Poitou, where Eleanor spent most of her childhood, and Aquitaine together was almost one-third the size of modern France. (...)

Eleanor, aged 12 to 15, then became the duchess of Aquitaine, and thus the most eligible heiress in Europe. (...)

The death of William, one of the king's most powerful vassals, made available the most desirable duchy in France. While presenting a solemn and dignified face to the grieving Aquitainian messengers, Louis exulted when they departed. Rather than act as guardian to the duchess and duchy, he decided to marry the duchess to his 17-year-old heir and bring Aquitaine under the control of the French crown, thereby greatly increasing the power and prominence of France and its ruling family, the House of Capet. Within hours, the king had arranged for his son Louis to be married to Eleanor. 

—Wikipedia

Eleanor was the daughter and heiress of William X, duke of Aquitaine and count of Poitiers, who possessed one of the largest domains in France—larger, in fact, than those held by the French king. Upon William’s death in 1137 she inherited the duchy of Aquitaine. [Source]

Eleanor inherited her father’s title and extensive lands upon his death when she was 15, becoming in one stroke duchess of Aquitaine and by far the most eligible single young woman in Europe. She was placed under the guardianship of the king of France, and within hours was betrothed to his son and heir, Louis. The king sent an escort of 500 men to convey the news to Eleanor and transport her to her new home. 

—Britannica

Eleanor inherited her father’s title and extensive lands upon his death when she was 15, becoming in one stroke duchess of Aquitaine and by far the most eligible single young woman in Europe. She was placed under the guardianship of the king of France, and within hours was betrothed to his son and heir, Louis. The king sent an escort of 500 men to convey the news to Eleanor and transport her to her new home. 

—History

William X [Eleanor’s father] controlled many territories in west and central France including Aquitaine, Poitiers, Gascony, Limousin, and Auvergne. (...)

During the 12th century, monarchies were gaining power and expanding across Europe as alliances formed and linked them together. Powerful aristocracies that fell within their kingdoms still held great influence and needed to be respected. In France the Capetian dynasty ruled a slice of north-central France, the so-called Île-de-France, between the Seine and the Loire. The royal house of France, the Capets, when Eleanor was born, was led by King Louis VI (also known as Louis the Fat).

Much of what is now France was divided up into powerful dukedoms—Normandy, Brittany, and Aquitaine—and large counties—Flanders, Anjou, Lorraine, Champagne, Bourgogne, and Toulouse, some of which were larger and richer than the possessions of the Capetian dynasty. Of the dukedoms, the duchy of Aquitaine was one of the largest, wealthiest, and most influential.

To complicate matters, in 1066 William, Duke of Normandy (also known as William the Conqueror), became king of England. While William was technically a vassal of France on the French side of the English channel, when he was on the other side, he was king of England—the French king’s equal in rank. Who controlled the lands of England and France would lead to many bloody conflicts over the coming centuries as different houses vied for control.

Eleanor played a vital role in these power struggles. Her destiny took a radical turn when her younger brother died in 1130, leaving her the new heiress to her father’s dominions. When her father died unexpectedly in April 1137, while on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, Eleanor was thrust into the world of medieval politics in her early teens. 

Shortly before his death, Eleanor’s father had dictated his will and officially named Eleanor as his heir. He appointed King Louis VI as her guardian, and the Capetian king shrewdly saw a way to bring the lands of Aquitaine under his control. He quickly announced the betrothal of Duchess Eleanor to his 17-year-old son, the future Louis VII.

—National Geographic

We can hardly draw a parallel between Eleanor and Alysanne in this regard. Alysanne was never the heir of her father. Alysanne became Queen consort of Westeros due to her marriage with her older brother Jaehaerys.  But this is certainly a strong parallel between Eleanor and Sansa. 

Sansa Stark, despite the many discussions about the legitimacy of her claim to the North and the secret will of Robb Stark, is considered the heir of the ancestral lands and domains of House Stark, she is called ‘the key to the north’ by Tywin Lannister, the man behind his royals grandsons, King Joffrey and King Tommen Baratheon.  The North is the largest region of Westeros, and Sansa Stark’s claim to Winterfell and the Wardenship of the North is coveted by many lords in order to gain political power and influence.  

If Eleanor of Aquitaine was the most eligible single young heiress in Europe, we can say the same about Sansa Stark in Westeros.  The same way Eleanor played a vital role in Middle Ages European power struggles, Sansa Stark plays a vital role in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros power struggles.  If Eleanor was thrust into the world of medieval politics in her early teens, the same is happening to Sansa Starks in the ASOIAF Books.

As I wrote in an unpublished meta:

It is also very interesting that while Sansa is in the south, we witnessed her objectification numerous times, by every character she interacted with. She’s not only being valued in golden dragons, she has been practically transformed into a stone castle, Winterfell, and the North itself, since the one controlling her would obtain all her lands and power. Or, to use the euphemism used in the Books, she is “the key to the north.”

Sansa reflects about this particular objectification in ASOS and elaborates inside her mind one of the saddest lines in ASOIAF, especially for a girl who yearns to be loved and always dreamed of getting married: “No one will ever marry me for love” (because everyone only wants her claim to Winterfell).

I think Sansa Stark being the most eligible single young heiress in Westeros has been explained in the Books twice already, during the development of Sansa’s arc, and in a more subtle and romantic way in “The Hedge Knight” tale.  

As I explain in yet another unpublished meta of mine about the Ashford Tourney:

(…) I think the repetition of this pattern in the list of men [Ashford Tourney Champions / Sansa’s Suitors] is accentuating the importance of Sansa and her claim to the North in the political scene of Westeros. After all, all of Sansa’s betrothals were arranged to gain political power through her claim to the North, which is the largest region of Westeros. 

Tyrion Lannister, married Sansa following his father’s orders to take control over the North: "The girl's happiness is not my purpose, nor should it be yours. Our alliances in the south may be as solid as Casterly Rock, but there remains the north to win, and the key to the north is Sansa Stark." (…) “When you bring Eddard Stark's grandson home to claim his birthright, lords and little folk alike will rise as one to place him on the high seat of his ancestors. You are capable of getting a woman with child, I hope?"

Joffrey Baratheon, when King Robert proposed Joffrey and Sansa’s betrothal, he was trying to reenact his own betrothal to Lyanna Stark, that was part of the so called Southron Ambitions Theory.

Willas Tyrell, his grandmother Olenna Tyrell secretly arranged his betrothal with Sansa in order to expand their power over another great region of Westeros: “Jonquil, Jonquil, open your sweet eyes, these Tyrells care nothing for you. It’s your claim they mean to wed.” The Lannisters discovered this secret betrothal (thanks to Dontos and Littlefinger) and Sansa ended up married to Tyrion and Cersei betrothed to Willas.

Harrold Hardyng, when Petyr Baelish proposed Harry and Alayne/Sansa betrothal, he was trying to gain more political power to further his own agenda. “When Robert dies, Harry the Heir becomes Lord Harrold, Defender of the Vale and Lord of the Eyrie. Jon Arryn's bannermen will never love me, nor our silly, shaking Robert, but they will love their Young Falcon... and when they come together for his wedding, and you come out with your long auburn hair, clad in a maiden's cloak of white and grey with a direwolf emblazoned on the back... why, every knight in the Vale will pledge his sword to win you back your birthright. So those are your gifts from me, my sweet Sansa... Harry, the Eyrie, and Winterfell”.

See? Tywin Lannister and Petyr Baelish, and even Olenna Tyrell, were acting exactly like Eleanor’s guardian, King Louis VI of France, betrothing her with his son and heir, the future Louis VII, as a way to bring the lands of Aquitaine under his control.

FIRST MARRIAGE

Eleanor became Queen consort of France due to her first marriage to his cousin Louis VII.  This marriage lasted 15 years and only produced two daughters:    

Louis and Eleanor were married in July 1137, but had little time to get to know one another before Louis’ father the king fell ill and died. Within weeks of her wedding, Eleanor found herself taking possession of the drafty and unwelcoming Cîté Palace in Paris that would be her new home. On Christmas Day of the same year, Louis and Eleanor were crowned king and queen of France. 

—History

The wedding was celebrated in Bordeaux on July 25, 1137. Seven days later, Louis the Fat was dead, leaving the teenagers Louis and Eleanor to rule as king and queen. The two were coronated at Bourges Cathedral later that year on Christmas Day. Despite the marriage, the lands of Eleanor’s family would not come under the control of the Capetian dynasty. According to the terms of her father’s will, Queen Eleanor first had to give birth to a son, who then had to reach the age of majority and become the new duke of Aquitaine before the lands would officially pass to Louis’s family. (…)

The marriage was not a fruitful one. The couple did not have many children. Eleanor only gave birth to two daughters: Marie, countess of Champagne, in 1145, and Alice (or Alix), countess of Blois, around 1150. By most accounts, the marriage’s failure to produce a male heir led to greater tensions between husband and wife. 

—National Geographic

The marriage was not a bed of roses:

Louis and Eleanor’s first years as rulers were fraught with power struggles with their own vassals – the powerful Count Theobald of Champagne for one – and with the Pope in Rome. Louis, still young and intemperate, made a series of military and diplomatic blunders that set him at odds with the Pope and several of his more powerful lords. The conflict that ensued culminated in the massacre of hundreds of innocents in the town of Vitry — during a siege of the town, a great number of the populace took refuge in a church, which was set aflame by Louis’s troops. Dogged by guilt over his role in the tragedy for years, Louis responded eagerly to the Pope’s call for a crusade in 1145. Eleanor joined him on the dangerous – and ill fated – journey west. The crusade did not go well, and Eleanor and Louis grew increasingly estranged. 

—History

In 1142 Petronilla, Eleanor’s sister, fell in love with the married count of Vermandois, who was married to Eleanor of Champagne, daughter of a powerful French family. The count set aside his wife and married Petronilla. Critics saw Eleanor’s hand in the affair, which may have been a love match, but could have served a strategic purpose of strengthening the bonds between the Capetian crown and the House of Aquitaine.

Petronilla’s marriage led to a war between Louis and the count of Champagne in 1142. In 1143 Louis ordered the burning of the small town of Vitry-en-Perthois, killing as many as 1,500 people. The church condemned the actions of the French crown, which caused the pious Louis deep shame. He vowed to mount a crusade to atone for it. (…)

A series of disastrous military decisions resulted in the failure of the Second Crusade. In 1149 Louis and Eleanor boarded ships to sail back to France in defeat. For Louis VII, the Crusade was a twofold disaster: He had been away from his kingdom for two years, involved in expensive military campaigns the results of which were humiliating, and his marriage had completely broken down.

—National Geographic

As you can see Eleanor’s first marriage was not a successful one, it produce not male heir and it was full of political and religious conflicts.  All of that resulted in Eleanor’s decision to seek an annulment.     Alysanne only married one man, her older brother Jaehaerys, but she married him twice.  The first time Alysanne and Jaehaerys eloped to Dragonstone and the marriage remained unconsummated.  That period was the happiest time of her romantic relationship with her husband; she called that time, and Idyll:

“Queen Alysanne, for her part, was in no haste to return to court. “Here I have you to myself, day and night,” she told Jaehaerys. “When we go back, I shall be fortunate to snatch an hour with you, for every man in Westeros will want a piece of you.” For her, these days on Dragonstone were an idyll. “Many years from now when we are old and grey, we shall look back upon these days and smile, remembering how happy we were.” 

—Fire & Blood

The period after their second wedding and coronation as King and Queen of Westeros were not as happy as their days at Dragonstone.  

Alysanne’s older siblings, Aegon and Rhaena, incestuous marriage originated several problems and conflicts with the Faith of the Seven and their more fervent followers, because the Faith condemned the Targaryen’s brother and sister incest customs.  That’s why Alysanne and Jaehareys’ mother, Queen Alyssa, originally planned other betrothals for them.  But Alysanne and Jaehaerys eloped and kept their first wedding in secret until Jaehaerys came of age and they were crowned as King and Queen of Westeros.  Later the Doctrine of Exceptionalism was invented as justification of the Targaryen’s incest customs.  Jaehaerys and Alysanne kept the Great Septon and the Faith’s followers in line thanks to a huge propaganda campaign and their dragons.      

Sansa Stark first marriage involved no love between bride and groom. Sansa was forced to marry Tyrion Lannister as a way to give her new husbands’s family, control and power over the North.  The marriage was unconsummated and of course produced no male heir or any children, the bride ran away, and Tyrion Lannister was accused of regicide, ruining Tywin Lannister original plans for northern domination.

Sansa’s first marriage caused no problems with the Faith of the Seven, but she is in need of the High Septon’s help to gain the annulment of her marriage with Tyrion Lannister.  

MARRIAGE ANNULMENT

Eleanor requested the annulment of her first marriage with her cousin Louis VII of France more than once:

After several fraught years during which Eleanor sought an annulment and Louis faced increasing public criticism, they were eventually granted an annulment on the grounds of consanguinity (being related by blood) in 1152 and separated, their two daughters left in the custody of the king.

—History

From 1147 to 1149 Eleanor accompanied Louis on the Second Crusade to protect the fragile Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, founded after the First Crusade only 50 years before, from Turkish assault. Eleanor’s conduct during this expedition, especially at the court of her uncle Raymond of Poitiers at Antioch, aroused Louis’s jealousy and marked the beginning of their estrangement. After their return to France and a short-lived reconciliation, their marriage was annulled in March 1152.

According to feudal customs, Eleanor then regained possession of Aquitaine. 

—Britannica

After the couple returned to Europe, they met with Pope Eugene III who tried to reconcile them—even threatening excommunication. It was no use, the union was doomed: On March 21, 1152, a group of bishops at Beaugency declared Eleanor’s marriage void for reasons of consanguinity. In line with tradition, the daughters remained with their father, and Eleanor retained her duchy in Aquitaine. 

—National Geographic 

On 21 March, the four archbishops, with the approval of Pope Eugene, granted an annulment on grounds of consanguinity within the fourth degree; Eleanor was Louis' third cousin once removed, and shared common ancestry with Robert II of France. Their two daughters were, however, declared legitimate. […] Custody of them was awarded to King Louis. Archbishop Samson received assurances from Louis that Eleanor's lands would be restored to her.  

—Wikipedia

Alysanne never pursued the annulment of her marriage, but she had a lot of tensions and problems with her husband King Jaehaerys, especially because their different views on matters of succession and the sexist and severe treatment that Jaehaerys gave to her daughters.

Sansa Stark is in need of a marriage annulment.  The fact that Eleanor obtained the annulment of her first marriage gives me hope that Sansa will get an annulment for herself and then marry another cousin of hers, willingly this time.  

Sansa won’t be able to plead consanguinity, as Eleanor did, as a ground for her marriage annulment, but she can allege the no consummation of her first marriage with Tyrion Lannister as the ground for the termination of that forced marriage.

GRRM has discussed with a fan the possibilities for Sansa’s first marriage annulment here.

INCEST

Eleanor married two of her cousins: King Louis VII of France and King Henry II of England.  She obtained the annulment of her first marriage with King Louis VII of France on the grounds of consanguinity.  Ironically enough, Eleanor was more closely related to her second husband, Henry Plantagenet, Count of Anjou and Duke of Normandy, future Henry II of England, than she had been to her first husband Louis VII of France. Rumours of sexual affairs with two uncles surrounded Eleanor, first with Raymond of Poitiers, Prince of Antioch, and brother of Eleanor’s father; and later with Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou, and father of Eleanor’s second husband.

Alysanne married her older brother Jaehaerys Targaryen.  When Alysanne was pregnant for the first time, she suffered an attempt of murder at Maidenpool, perpetuated by three women, followers of the Faith of the Seven that reject incest:

“Doctrine of Exceptionalism had won over most of the pious in the realm, but not all. Some of the women who tended Jonquil's Pool believed that the pool's sacred waters would become polluted if the queen, pregnant with the king's "abomination", were to enter the waters. While she was inside, Alysanne was attacked by three of these women with daggers.” 

[Source]

Sansa Stark was not directly involved with incest.  As it was mentioned before, the first Sansa Stark married her half uncle Lord Jonnel Stark.  Sansa’s paternal grandparents were cousins: Lord Rickard and Lady Lyarra Stark.  

Sansa also have two cousins, Robert Arryn and Jon Snow, which are subtly and not so subtly linked with her with romantic undertones:

Robert Arryn was named after Robert Baratheon and Jon Snow is the secret son of Rhaegar Targaryen.  Robert and Rhaegar fought to death for the love of a Stark girl, Lyanna, the mother of Jon.

Robert Arryn and Jon Snow are surrounded by bird imagery. Robert with Falcons (Arryn sigil) and Robins (Sweetrobin), also with Winged Knights; and Jon with Crows (Night’s Watch/Black Knights) and dragons (winged creatures).

Robert Arryn idolizes Artys Arryn, The Falconknight (usually mixed with the Winged Knight); and Jon Snow idolizes Aemon Targaryen, The Dragonknight.

Sansa thinks about Jon in the Wall and recalled that in the songs the men of the Night’s Watch are called the Black Knights of the Wall.

Alayne is organizing a Tourney to elect the members of Robert Arryn personal guard, named the Brotherhood of the Winged Knights.  

Robert Arryn and Jon Snow are surrounded by weirwood imagery.  Robert and his weirwood throne and Jon with the Old Gods (literally weirwoods) and Ghost (weirwood’s coloring).

Robert Arryn and Jon Snow are the last males of their respective paternal houses. And both of them will face blonde threats to their claims.

Lysa Arryn intended to betroth Sansa with her son Robert Arryn.

Robert Arryn is infatuated with Alayne Stone (Sansa Stark in disguise) and constantly expressed his desire to marry her.  Alayne rejects him every time alleging her bastard status.

Sansa modeled her bastard persona on her bastard half-brother (cousin) Jon Snow. And she is acting as a foster mother for her cousin Robert Arryn.

Sansa’s first crush was a young knight of the Vale of Arryn, Waymar Royce, whose physical features are pretty similar to Jon Snow’s (grey eyes, brown hair, slender bodies, also both Brothers of the Night’s Watch).

The Pact of Ice and Fire could be fulfilled with the marriage of two cousins with Stark Blood. Like Jon and Sansa.

The original outline planned a romance between two cousins with Stark Blood. Like Jon and Sansa (Originally Arya, discarded by GRRM at Balticon 2016).

SECOND MARRIAGE

Eleanor became Queen consort of England due to her second marriage to his cousin Henry Plantagenet, Count of Anjou and Duke of Normandy.

This marriage with the future Henry II of England was way more fruitful than Eleanor’s first marriage.  The couple had 8 children, five sons and three daughters.

As Eleanor travelled to Poitiers, two lords —Theobald V, Count of Blois, and Geoffrey, Count of Nantes, brother of Henry II, Duke of Normandy —tried to kidnap and marry her to claim her lands. As soon as she arrived in Poitiers, Eleanor sent envoys to Henry, Duke of Normandy and future king of England, asking him to come at once to marry her. On 18 May 1152 (Whit Sunday), eight weeks after her annulment, Eleanor married Henry "without the pomp and ceremony that befitted their rank."

Eleanor was related to Henry even more closely than she had been to Louis: they were cousins to the third degree through their common ancestor Ermengarde of Anjou, wife of Robert I, Duke of Burgundy and Geoffrey, Count of Gâtinais, and they were also descended from King Robert II of France. A marriage between Henry and Eleanor's daughter Marie had earlier been declared impossible due to their status as third cousins once removed. 

—Wikipedia

Duchess Eleanor was only 28, and it did not take long for suitors to begin to pursue her—for her lands and her mind. Theobald V of Blois, six years Eleanor’s junior, tried to kidnap her (he would later marry her daughter, Alice). Eleanor had her eye on a different suitor. From her court at Poitiers, she sent for him in secret. His name was Henry Plantagenet, Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou. (…)

Less than three months after her divorce from Louis, Eleanor married Henry Plantagenet, nine years her junior, on May 18, 1152. Genealogy shows that the pair were more closely related than Eleanor and Louis, but that did not stand in the way of the union. Henry and Eleanor were masters of Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, and the Aquitaine, and serious rivals to Louis.  

In 1153 Henry crossed the English Channel and was able to secure his position on the throne from the sitting king of England. By the time he and Eleanor were coronated in December 1154, she had already given birth to their first son, William, in August 1153—and was pregnant with their second child. In one bold stroke, the lands of Normandy, Aquitaine, Anjou, and other important French territories came under the control of the English king and queen. Eleanor’s children, as well as her lands, gave her much security. 

—National Geographic

Within two months of her annulment, after fighting off attempts to marry her off to various other high-ranking French noblemen, Eleanor married Henry, Count of Anjou and Duke of Normandy. She had been rumored to have had an affair with her new husband’s father, and was more closely related to her new husband than she had been to Louis, but the marriage went ahead and within two years Henry and Eleanor were crowned king and queen of England after Henry’s accession to the English throne upon the death of King Stephen.

Eleanor’s marriage to Henry was more successful than her first, although not lacking in drama and discord. Henry and Eleanor argued often, but they produced eight children together between 1152 and 1166. The extent of Eleanor’s role in Henry’s rule is largely unknown, although it seems unlikely that a woman of her reputed energy and education would have been wholly without influence. Nonetheless, she does not emerge again into a publicly active role until separating from Henry in 1167 and moving her household to her own lands in Poitiers. While the reasons for the breakdown of her marriage to Henry remain unclear, it can likely be traced to Henry’s increasingly visible infidelities. 

—History

Two months later she married the grandson of Henry I of England, Henry Plantagenet, Count of Anjou and Duke of Normandy. In 1154 he became, as Henry II, king of England, with the result that England, Normandy, and the west of France were united under his rule. Eleanor had only two daughters by Louis VII, but to her new husband she bore five sons and three daughters. The sons were William, who died at the age of three; Henry; Richard, the Lion-Heart; Geoffrey, duke of Brittany; and John, surnamed Lackland until, having outlived all his brothers, he inherited, in 1199, the crown of England. The daughters were Matilda, who married Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony and Bavaria; Eleanor, who married Alfonso VIII, king of Castile; and Joan, who married successively William II, king of Sicily, and Raymond VI, count of Toulouse. Eleanor would well have deserved to be named the “grandmother of Europe.”  

—Britannica

Take note that even as a “divorced” woman, Eleanor still was the most eligible heiress in Europe, and suffered various attempts to kidnap as a way to marry her.  This kidnap/marriage attempts against Eleanor reminds me of the Wildling beyond the Wall marriage customs.  

The period that started with Alysanne’s second wedding to her older brother Jaehaerys was very similar to Eleanor’s second marriage with Henry II of England:

Henry was in conflict with his uncle Stephen of Blois for the Throne of England.  Jaehaerys was in conflict with his uncle Maegor I for the Iron Throne.  

Henry and Eleanor had 8 children. Jaehaerys and Alysanne had 13 children.

Henry often traveled to different parts of his realm, and while he was away, Eleanor assumed the role of regent and other political duties.  Alysanne’s relationship with Jaehaerys was always very close. She was his most trusted counselor and his right hand: Alysanne remained in the Red Keep, presiding over council meetings in the king’s absence, and holding audience from a velvet seat at the base of the Iron Throne. —Fire & Blood

Eleanor outlived most of her children.  Alysanne outlived most of her children.

Eleanor arranged marriages for her children and grandchildren.  Alysanne arranged marriages for her children, especially her daughters.

Henry was an unfaithful husband. Jaehaerys was not unfaithful but he was very sexist and constantly wronged her daughters, granddaughter and children from his granddaughter in favor of his male children and grandchildren.  

Henry and Eleanor got estranged with time and lived separated for long periods after their quarrels. Jaehareys and Alysanne got estranged with the time and lived separated for long periods after their quarrels.

Eleanor supported her sons’ rebellions against her husband Henry II, and got imprisoned for it.  She would remain a prisoner until Henry II’s death in 1189. Jaehaerys and Alysanne’s quarrels happened mostly because their different views on matters of succession and the sexist and severe treatment that Jaehaerys gave to her daughters.

Eleanor died around age 80; she outlived Henry.  Alysanne died at 64, leaving Jaehaerys a widower.

Sansa Stark has not married a second time yet.  She is betrothed, as Alayne Stone, to Harrold Hardyng, often called Harry the Heir, cousin and heir presumptive of Lord Robert Arryn and would ascend to rule of the Vale as "Harrold Arryn" should Lord Robert die without issue.

Sansa Stark is not a mother yet neither.  But GRRM has planted seeds about her fertility and future motherhood, as I earlier speculated in this post. There I talked about Alayne’s location: “The Vale of Arryn was famously fertile and had gone untouched during the fighting”;  and Sansa being a half-Tully girl. Tully members are famously fertile; Cat, Lysa and Edmure manage to conceive at the first attempt with Ned, Petyr and Roslin.

CONTRIBUTIONS

Some of Eleanor’s greatest contributions were:

Eleanor of Aquitaine is said to be responsible for the introduction of built-in fireplaces, first used when she renovated the palace of her first husband Louis in Paris. Shocked by the frigid north after her upbringing in southern France, Eleanor’s innovation spread quickly, transforming the domestic arrangements of the time. 

—Britannica

While in the eastern Mediterranean, Eleanor learned about maritime conventions developing there, which were the beginnings of what would become admiralty law. She introduced those conventions in her own lands on the island of Oléron in 1160 (with the "Rolls of Oléron") and later in England as well. She was also instrumental in developing trade agreements with Constantinople and ports of trade in the Holy Lands.

—Wikipedia

Eleanor was also an excellent diplomat envoy and a magnificent patron of arts, as it will be explained later.

Some of Alysanne’s contributions to the politics and the welfare of the people of Westeros were:  

She helped Jaehaerys to create Westeros’ first unified code of laws.

Alysanne procured clean water for the people of Kingslanding: Queen Alysanne served each of them a tankard of river water at the next council meeting, and dared them to drink of it. The water went undrunk, but the wells and pipes were soon approved. Construction would require more than a dozen years, but in the end “the queen’s fountains” provided clean water for Kingslanders for many generations to come. —Fire & BloodQueen

Alysanne proposed a “New Gift” for the Night’s Watch: The notion did not please Lord Alaric; though a strong friend to the Night’s Watch, he knew that the lords who presently held the lands in question would object to them being given away without their leave. “I have no doubt that you can persuade them, Lord Alaric,” the queen said. And finally, charmed by her as ever, Alaric Stark agreed that, aye, he could. And so it came to pass that the size of the Gift was doubled with a stroke. —Fire & Blood

Alysanne aprocured the promulgation of the Widow’s Law: To rectify these ills, King Jaehaerys in 52 AC promulgated the Widow’s Law, reaffirming the right of the eldest son (or eldest daughter, where there was no son) to inherit, but requiring said heirs to maintain surviving widows in the same condition they had enjoyed before their husband’s death. A lord’s widow, be she a second, third, or later wife, could no longer be driven from his castle, nor deprived of her servants, clothing, and income. The same law, however, also forbade men from disinheriting their children by a first wife in order to bestow their lands, seat, or property upon a later wife or her own children. —Fire & Blood

Alysanne also procured the abolition of the lord’s ancient right to the first night: And so it came to pass that the second of what the smallfolk named Queen Alysanne’s Laws was enacted: the abolition of the lord’s ancient right to the first night. Henceforth, it was decreed, a bride’s maidenhead would belong only to her husband, whether joined before a septon or a heart tree, and any man, be he lord or peasant, who took her on her wedding night or any other night would be guilty of the crime of rape. —Fire & Blood

Sansa is not in a Queen position yet, but the possibilities for her ending the books as a monarch are big. We have books evidence and foreshadowing here and here. We also have the Sansa’s TV adaptation endgame as Queen in the North to support this hypothesis, and GRRM counting Sansa as a major character and also saying the endgame for the major characters would be the same in the Books.

Sansa was already betrothed with the heir to the Iron Throne once, but Joffrey Baratheon was a bastard disguised as a prince; so every time I remember that GRRM wrote a passage when someone called the Red Comet a sign of glory for Sansa’s betrothed, the dragon’s heir, I can’t stop thinking about Sansa being betrothed to the true dragon’s heir, and that that person is a prince disguised as a bastard.    

But let’s talk about how good Sansa could be as a Queen.  Tyrion Lannister, always praised by GRRM himself for his wits, has something to tell us about the matter:  

Tyrion led Sansa around the yard, to perform the necessary courtesies. She is good at this, he thought, as he watched her tell Lord Gyles that his cough was sounding better, compliment Elinor Tyrell on her gown, and question Jalabhar Xho about wedding customs in the Summer Isles. His cousin Ser Lancel had been brought down by Ser Kevan, the first time he’d left his sickbed since the battle. He looks ghastly. Lancel’s hair had turned white and brittle, and he was thin as a stick. Without his father beside him holding him up, he would surely have collapsed. Yet when Sansa praised his valor and said how good it was to see him getting strong again, both Lancel and Ser Kevan beamed. She would have made Joffrey a good queen and a better wife if he’d had the sense to love her. He wondered if his nephew was capable of loving anyone.

—A Storm of Swords - Tyrion VIII

Despite the popular belief, Sansa Stark actually thinks about the welfare of the smallfolk:

Halfway along the route, a wailing woman forced her way between two watchmen and ran out into the street in front of the king and his companions, holding the corpse of her dead baby above her head. It was blue and swollen, grotesque, but the real horror was the mother’s eyes. Joffrey looked for a moment as if he meant to ride her down, but Sansa Stark leaned over and said something to him. The king fumbled in his purse, and flung the woman a silver stag. The coin bounced off the child and rolled away, under the legs of the gold cloaks and into the crowd, where a dozen men began to fight for it. The mother never once blinked. Her skinny arms were trembling from the dead weight of her son. (…)

From both sides of the street, the crowd surged against the spear shafts while the gold cloaks struggled to hold the line. Stones and dung and fouler things whistled overhead. “Feed us!” a woman shrieked. “Bread!” boomed a man behind her. “We want bread, bastard!” (…)

Tyrion called to her. “Are you hurt, Lady Sansa?” Blood was trickling down Sansa’s brow from a deep gash on her scalp. “They … they were throwing things … rocks and filth, eggs … I tried to tell them, I had no bread to give them”. 

—A Clash of Kings - Tyrion IX

In the Show they translated this Sansa’s line of dialogue to this one: “I would have given them bread if I had it.”  

But I think the most telling evidence of how good Sansa could be as a queen is this one:

“The night’s first traitors,” the queen said, “but not the last, I fear. Have Ser Ilyn see to them, and put their heads on pikes outside the stables as a warning.” As they left, she turned to Sansa. “Another lesson you should learn, if you hope to sit beside my son. Be gentle on a night like this and you’ll have treasons popping up all about you like mushrooms after a hard rain. The only way to keep your people loyal is to make certain they fear you more than they do the enemy.”

“I will remember, Your Grace,” said Sansa, though she had always heard that love was a surer route to the people’s loyalty than fear. If I am ever a queen, I’ll make them love me.

—A Clash of Kings - Sansa VI

This is a stark contrast (pun intended) between ruling by fear and violence and ruling by kindness and protection.  And we all know that Sansa’s true nature will lead her to choose love over fear.  

WIDOWHOOD, REGENCY AND DEATH

When Eleanor became a widow, she not only regained her freedom after 16 years of imprisonment, she also got independency and power over England. She acted as regent in the absent of her son, King Richard I, she also acted as diplomat envoy for England and remained a huge influence in the political scene of Europe:

Upon the death of her husband Henry II on 6 July 1189, Richard I was the undisputed heir. One of his first acts as king was to send William Marshal to England with orders to release Eleanor from prison; he found upon his arrival that her custodians had already released her. Eleanor rode to Westminster and received the oaths of fealty from many lords and prelates on behalf of the king. She ruled England in Richard's name, signing herself "Eleanor, by the grace of God, Queen of England." On 13 August 1189, Richard sailed from Barfleur to Portsmouth and was received with enthusiasm. Between 1190 and 1194, Richard was absent from England, engaged in the Third Crusade from 1190 to 1192 and then held in captivity by Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor. During Richard's absence, royal authority in England was represented by a Council of Regency in conjunction with a succession of chief justiciars – William de Longchamp (1190–1191), Walter de Coutances (1191–1193), and finally Hubert Walter. Although Eleanor held no formal office in England during this period, she arrived in England in the company of Coutances in June 1191, and for the remainder of Richard's absence, she exercised a considerable degree of influence over the affairs of England as well as the conduct of Prince John. Eleanor played a key role in raising the ransom demanded from England by Henry VI and in the negotiations with the Holy Roman Emperor that eventually secured Richard's release.  

—Wikipedia

After Henry’s death in July 1189, Richard the Lion-Hearted became king, and Eleanor gained her complete freedom. Her son restored her lands that had been seized after the 1173 rebellion. Richard appointed her to a government position, and Eleanor traveled the English countryside securing loyalty oaths to her son and his kingdom.

Even in her late 60s, Eleanor continued to follow and often direct the political events of her lands. In 1191 she arranged a marriage for Richard to Berengaria of Navarre. While Richard was crusading in the Holy Land, Eleanor wielded influence over the men ruling in Richard’s absence, including his younger brother, Prince John. Moreover, accused of having ordered the murder of Conrad of Montferrat in the Holy Land, Richard was imprisoned by Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI. Eleanor turned to the pope, Celestine III, to help arrange her son’s release and also secured funds for his ransom.

In her 70s, Eleanor sought to strengthen the bonds between the Plantagenets and the Capets. In 1200 she traveled to the Pyrenees to escort her granddaughter Blanche to marry the son of the French king in a continuing effort to maintain the power of her family.

—National Geographic

On her release, Eleanor played a greater political role than ever before. She actively prepared for Richard’s coronation as king, was administrator of the realm during his Crusade to the Holy Land, and, after his capture by the duke of Austria on Richard’s return from the east, collected his ransom and went in person to escort him to England. During Richard’s absence, she succeeded in keeping his kingdom intact and in thwarting the intrigues of his brother John Lackland and Philip II Augustus, king of France, against him.

In 1199 Richard died without leaving an heir to the throne, and John was crowned king. Eleanor, nearly 80 years old, fearing the disintegration of the Plantagenet domain, crossed the Pyrenees in 1200 in order to fetch her granddaughter Blanche from the court of Castile and marry her to the son of the French king. By this marriage she hoped to ensure peace between the Plantagenets of England and the Capetian kings of France. In the same year she helped to defend Anjou and Aquitaine against her grandson Arthur of Brittany, thus securing John’s French possessions. In 1202 John was again in her debt for holding Mirebeau against Arthur, until John, coming to her relief, was able to take him prisoner. John’s only victories on the Continent, therefore, were due to Eleanor.

She died in 1204 at the monastery at Fontevrault, Anjou, where she had retired after the campaign at Mirebeau. Her contribution to England extended beyond her own lifetime; after the loss of Normandy (1204), it was her own ancestral lands and not the old Norman territories that remained loyal to England. 

—Britannica

Henry II died in July 1189 and their son Richard succeeded him; one of his first acts was to free his mother from prison and restore her to full freedom. Eleanor ruled as regent in Richard’s name while he took over for his father in leading the Third Crusade, which had barely begun when Henry II died. On the conclusion of the crusade, Richard (known as Richard the Lionheart) returned to England and ruled until his death in 1199. Eleanor lived to see her youngest son, John, crowned king after Richard’s death, and was employed by John as an envoy to France. She would later support John’s rule against the rebellion of her grandson Arthur, and eventually retire as a nun to the abbey at Fontevraud, where she was buried upon her death in 1204. 

—History

Alysanne died before Jaehaerys, but, as it was said before, during their life together she helped him to codified the laws of Westeros, she procured the promulgation of important laws in favor of women rights and gave fresh water to the people of Kings landing.

Alysanne also acted as Jaehaerys representative in an important royal progress through the north, charming all the northern houses, specially the warden of the north, Lord Alaric Stark, and the men of the Night’s Watch, procuring the “New Gift” for them.

Alysanne, in open disagreement with her husband, was in favor of her daughter Daenerys and her granddaughter Rhaenys to be Jaehaerys’ heir to the Iron Throne, following the order of birth, not their sex.  

Again, Sansa is not in a Queen position yet, but she has the education and charms to become a great monarch. Her knowledge of history, heraldry and courtesies would also make her a great diplomat and negotiator.    

THE COURT OF LOVE

And we finally arrived to the section that will make you realize how much of Eleanor we can find in Sansa. After reading this part of Eleanor's story, I decided to write this post as a continuation of my Alysanne/Sansa post. And after doing some more research on GRRM's words on how much Eleanor has influenced their ASOIAF women, I think I made a good decision.

Eleanor was born in the South of France, in a court that was exactly like the Southern courts that Sansa read in her beloved songs and that she wished to live in:  

Their ducal court had a fine reputation as a patron of the arts. Eleanor’s grandfather, William IX, was known as the “troubadour duke,” famous for his poetry and songs about heroism and courtly love. Poets of the time, especially the famous Marcabru, found hospitality at the court of Aquitaine. 

—National Geographic

Now, lets read one of my favorite Sansa’s passages, one that tell us about her innocent dreams and wishes for a young and handsome singer that would make the walls of Winterfell alive with romantic music:

Once, when she was just a little girl, a wandering singer had stayed with them at Winterfell for half a year. An old man he was, with white hair and windburnt cheeks, but he sang of knights and quests and ladies fair, and Sansa had cried bitter tears when he left them, and begged her father not to let him go. "The man has played us every song he knows thrice over," Lord Eddard told her gently. "I cannot keep him here against his will. You need not weep, though. I promise you, other singers will come."

They hadn't, though, not for a year or more. Sansa had prayed to the Seven in their sept and old gods of the heart tree, asking them to bring the old man back, or better still to send another singer, young and handsome. But the gods never answered, and the halls of Winterfell stayed silent.

But that was when she was a little girl, and foolish. She was a maiden now, three-and-ten and flowered. All her nights were full of song, and by day she prayed for silence.

—A Feast for Crows - Sansa I

Somehow, Eleanor’s story is in reverse, because when she married Louis VII of France and moved to Paris, in the North, she found her new home staid and cold:    

Possessing a high-spirited nature, Eleanor was not popular with the staid northerners. […] Much money went into making the austere Cité Palace in Paris more comfortable for Eleanor's sake.

—Wikipedia

Within weeks of her wedding, Eleanor found herself taking possession of the drafty and unwelcoming Cîté Palace in Paris that would be her new home.

—History

By many accounts, Eleanor was a bright and vivacious woman. Life at the Capetian court did not entirely meet the expectations and tastes of the young bride who was used to the court of Aquitaine’s embrace of troubadour poetry, sophistication, extravagance, and a greater freedom of manners. The Parisian court and northern France were more reserved. 

—National Geographic

Years later, when Eleanor was Queen of England, she decided to return to her own lands and stablished her own court in Poitiers, when she became a magnificent patron of arts:

In The Art of Courtly Love, Andreas Capellanus, Andrew the chaplain, refers to the court of Poitiers. He claims that Eleanor, her daughter Marie, Ermengarde, Viscountess of Narbonne, and Isabelle of Flanders would sit and listen to the quarrels of lovers and act as a jury to the questions of the court that revolved around acts of romantic love. He records some twenty-one cases, the most famous of them being a problem posed to the women about whether true love can exist in marriage. According to Capellanus, the women decided that it was not at all likely. 

—Wikipedia

In this marriage, Eleanor was also able to become a patron of the arts, and at least four writers dedicated their work to her. She famously established the so-called Court of Love at Poitiers between 1168 and 1173. Along with her daughter Marie (from her first marriage), popular accounts describe Eleanor’s court as a flowering of culture where music, poetry, and chivalry took center stage. 

—National Geographic

During her childbearing years, she participated actively in the administration of the realm and even more actively in the management of her own domains. She was instrumental in turning the court of Poitiers, then frequented by the most famous troubadours of the time, into a centre of poetry and a model of courtly life and manners. She was the great patron of the two dominant poetic movements of the time: the courtly love tradition, conveyed in the romantic songs of the troubadours, and the historical matière de Bretagne, or “legends of Brittany,” which originated in Celtic traditions and in the Historia regum Britanniae, written by the chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth sometime between 1135 and 1138. 

—Britannica

Eleanor’s time as mistress of her own lands in Poitiers (1168-1173) established the legend of the Court of Love, where she is reputed to have encouraged a culture of chivalry among her courtiers that had far-reaching influence on literature, poetry, music and folklore. Although some facts about the court remain in dispute amidst centuries of accumulated legend and myth, it seems that Eleanor, possibly accompanied by her daughter Marie, established a court that was largely focused on courtly love and symbolic ritual that was eagerly taken up by the troubadours and writers of the day and promulgated through poetry and song. This court was reported to have attracted artists and poets, and to have contributed to a flowering of culture and the arts. But to whatever extent such a court existed, it appears not to have survived Eleanor’s later capture and imprisonment, which effectively removed her from any position of power and influence for the next 16 years. 

—History

Now, after reading about Eleanor’s Court of Love, tell if she doesn’t sound exactly like Sansa?  And this give me hope about Sansa, once in a position of power and in her own lands, establishing a similar court full of poets and singers to promote chivalry and courtly love, just like in her little girl’s dreams and wishes.

Another customs from the Middle Ages that GRRM introduced in the Books, in line with themes of chivalry courtly love, are the jousting tourneys and the title for the queen of love and beauty.  The subject was discussed in this post:

That being said, what they did have in the twelfth century was the idea of the Court of Love, which developed under the aegis of one of my personal favourite medieval figures, Eleanor of Aquitaine, first queen of France, and then queen of England. Eleanor was the daughter and heiress of the duke of Aquitaine, whose court was known as a centre of arts and culture, particularly music and poetry. When she was in charge, she patronized many poets, musicians, and artists, and they of course reciprocated by referring to her as the queen of love. Her daughter, Marie, Countess of Champagne, followed suit, and is best known for having commissioned Chrétien de Troyes to write a romance about Queen Guinevere and thereby introducing the world to Sir Lancelot of the Lake.

—poorshadowspaintedqueens

Eleanor being called the queen of love and beauty by poets and musicians gives me hope about Sansa being crowned queen of love and beauty sometime in the Books. 

Alysanne also favored arts and introduced them again in the Red Keep:

Queen Alysanne looked back on the short-lived glories of her father’s court fondly, however, and made it her purpose to make the Red Keep glitter as it never had before, buying tapestries and carpets from Free Cities and commissioning murals, statuary, and tilework to decorate the castle’s halls and chambers. At her command, men from the City Watch combed Flea Bottom until they found Tom the Strummer, whose mocking songs had amused king and commons alike during the War for the White Cloaks. Alysanne made him the court singer, the first of many who would hold that office in the decades to come. She brought in a harpist from Oldtown, a company of mummers from Braavos, dancers from Lys, and gave the Red Keep its first fool, a fat man called the Goodwife who dressed as a woman and was never seen without his wooden “children,” a pair of cleverly carved puppets who said ribald, shocking things.

—Fire & Blood

But I think that GRRM took inspiration from Eleanor’s Court of Love to create Alysanne’s Women Courts:

Since holding the first of her women's courts during the first royal progress Alysanne and Jaehaerys made, the women's courts became an important part of every subsequent royal progress. Only women and girls were allowed to join Alysanne during these courts, regardless of their status of birth. Alysanne encouraged them to speak freely and openly about their fears, concerns, and hopes.

The first of Alysanne's women's courts was held in 51 AC at the town of Duskendale, when King Jaehaerys I Targaryen and Queen Alysanne made their first royal progress. In 52 AC, during Jaehaerys's second royal progress, Alysanne held a women's court at Gulltown, and another at the Gates of the Moon. The things she heard from the women during these two women's courts resulted in her plea to Jaehaerys to protect the widows of the Seven Kingdoms from being cast aside by the children of their late husbands from earlier marriages. In response, Jaehaerys promulgated the Widow's Law.

In 53 AC, when Alysanne was unwilling to join Jaehaerys on his royal progress due to her pregnancy, Lady Jennis Templeton accompanied the king's retinue in order to hold women's courts at Riverrun and Stoney Sept.

In 58 AC while visiting the North, Alysanne held a women's court at White Harbour, where more than two hundred women and girls came before her. When she eventually arrived at the Wall to visit the Night's Watch, she held a women's court in a brothel at Mole's Town. Following their return to King's Landing, Alysanne brought to Jaehaerys's attention the stories she had heard in her women's court at Mole's Town, concerning the right to the first night. As a result, Jaehaerys abolished the lord's right to the first night. These policies, influenced by Alysanne, came to be called Queen Alysanne's laws by the smallfolk. 

[Source]

As you can see, these women’s meeting with Alysanne resulted in the promulgation of laws to protect women’s rights against sexual abuse and domestic violence.  And let’s also remember that Alysanne, in open disagreement with her husband, was in favor of her daughter Daenerys and her granddaughter Rhaenys to be Jaehaerys’ heir to the Iron Throne, following the order of birth, not their sex.  

The most prominent dissenter was Good Queen Alysanne, who had helped her husband rule the Seven Kingdoms for many years, and now saw her son’s daughter being passed over because of her sex. “A ruler needs a good head and a true heart,” she famously told the king. “A cock is not essential. If Your Grace truly believes that women lack the wit to rule, plainly you have no further need of me.” 

—Fire & Blood

Now tell if this not sound pretty similar to:

The only way to keep your people loyal is to make certain they fear you more than they do the enemy.”

“I will remember, Your Grace,” said Sansa, though she had always heard that love was a surer route to the people’s loyalty than fear. If I am ever a queen, I’ll make them love me.

—A Clash of Kings - Sansa VI

Sansa Stark is Good Queen material. Tyrion Lannister And GRRM agrees.

Queen Alysanne was also fond of singers and gallant knights:

Three of the brothers had been singers before taking the black, and they took turns playing for Her Grace at night, regaling her with ballads, war songs, and bawdy barracks tunes. 

—Fire & Blood

Though his castle was small and modest compared to the great halls of the realm, Lord Dondarrion was a splendid host and his son Simon played the high harp as well as he jousted, and entertained the royal couple by night with sad songs of star-crossed lovers and the fall of kings. So taken with him was the queen that the party lingered longer at Blackhaven than they had intended.

—Fire & Blood

One of the Knights of Legends that Sansa idolizes, Ser Ryam Redwyne, crowned Queen Alysanne as the queen of love and beauty:

On the field, the highlight of the competition was the brilliance of Ser Ryam Redwyne, the youngest son of Lord Manfryd Redwyne of the Arbor, Jaehaerys’s lord admiral and master of ships. In successive tilts, Ser Ryam unhorsed Ronnal Baratheon, Arthor Oakheart, Simon Dondarrion, Harys Hogg (Harry the Ham, to the commons), and two Kingsguard knights, Lorence Roxton and Lucamore Strong. When the young gallant trotted up to the royal box and crowned Good Queen Alysanne as his queen of love and beauty, the commons roared their approval.

—Fire & Blood

Back to Sansa, let’s read one of my favorite pieces from last year, written a month before the Show final episode, an interview to GRRM to talk exclusively about the Stark Sisters, Arya and Sansa Stark:

I wanted to read you one of the earliest passages that you wrote about the two of them, if that’s okay.

Sure.

“It wasn’t fair. Sansa had everything. Sansa was two years older; maybe by the time Arya had been born, there had been nothing left. Often it felt that way. Sansa could sew and dance and sing. She wrote poetry. She knew how to dress. She played the high harp and the bells. Worse, she was beautiful. Sansa had gotten their mother’s fine high cheekbones and the thick auburn hair of the Tullys. Arya took after their lord father. Her hair was a lusterless brown, and her face was long and solemn.”

So what was the glimmer of an idea for these two sisters?

Well you’re taking me back a long, long way. That’s a pretty early chapter …  I first began in 1991. I wrote about a hundred pages of it before I got distracted by Hollywood stuff, and then I put it aside for like two years before I got back to it. Those words you read were actually part of the first hundred pages that I was doing there. When I was writing these, and I was creating a family for Lord Eddard Stark … I knew I wanted it to be a fairly large family, with a number of children. I suppose I cheated a little by not having three children who died in infancy in there, which was true of the actual Middle Ages. They had a terrible time with kids who died very young.

So I created Bran and in the very first chapter, I wrote where they find the direwolf pups in the snow. Bran is the viewpoint chapter there, and Robb and Jon and Theon are all with him, they’re the boys who rode out with their father to see the man beheaded. The fact that the boys went out was a reflection of what a patriarchal society it was, as medieval societies often were. I was following history in that regard … But I wanted some girls, too.

And when I actually got to Winterfell in the later chapter, I knew I wanted to deal with the role that women and young girls had in this kind of society. So to show the contrast, [we] have two sisters who were very, very different from each other. The Middle Ages was very patriarchal. I’m a little weary of over-generalizing, since that makes me seem like an idiot — but generally, women didn’t have a lot of rights. They were used to make marriage-alliances; I’m talking high-born women now, of course. Peasant women had even less rights. But I was focusing on a noble family here as the center of the book.

At the same time, this is also the era where courtly romance was born: the gallant Knight, the fair lady, the princess, all of that stuff. That became very big, initially in the courts of France and Burgundy, but it spread all over Europe, including England and Germany.  And it still has its roots in a lot of stuff that we follow today. I mean, in some sense the Disney Princess archetype — the whole princess mythos — that we’re all familiar with is a legacy of the troubadours of the romance era of medieval France.

Sansa completely bought into that, loved everything about that. She dreamed of jousts, bards singing of her beauty, fair knights, being the mistress of a castle and perhaps a princess and queen. The whole romantic thing.

And then to have Arya, a girl who did not fit that — and who, from the very beginning, was uncomfortable and chafes at the roles that she was being pushed into. You know, who didn’t wanna sew but wanted to fight with a sword, who liked riding and hunting and wrestling in the mud. A “tomboy” we would call it, I guess. But that phrase, of course, didn’t exist in the Middle Ages, so I don’t think I ever use it in the books, but you know what I mean. So that was the roots to create these two characters who were very different from each other, and who then necessarily chafed against each other in the context of the books.

—GRRM - RollingStone - 2019

Do I need to tell more? It seems to me very obvious that GRRM has translated Eleanor’s Court of Love into Sansa’s love for songs and stories, courtesies and profound beliefs on chivalry and courtly love:

Sansa was a lady at three, always so courteous and eager to please. She loved nothing so well as tales of knightly valor. 

—A Clash of Kings - Catelyn VII

Sansa Stark, he mused. Soft-spoken sweet-smelling Sansa, who loved silks, songs, chivalry and tall gallant knights with handsome faces. 

—A Storm of Swords - Tyrion III

Also, take note that Sansa loves her courtesies, they are her armor.

But there is more to say about Eleanor of Aquitaine and her influence in the creation of ASOIAF women, especially women profoundly linked and similar to Sansa Stark. Let’s see:

While promoting Fire & Blood, GRRM told us this about Eleanor of Aquitaine:

Question: A lot of your female characters are very empowered and motivated, which other fictional or historical female characters did you drawn inspiration from, if any?    

GRRM: Ahhh, well, there was a lot of them, Eleanor of Aquitaine of course was a major one, she was one of the most kick-ass women of the Middle Ages and, you know, she had her own crusade, or she went on crusade rather and she married two kings and then was the mother of several more, she was a great character. There’s also a lot of the... If you read the Italian History, a lot of the... During the Italian Middle Ages and Renaissance period, there were a lot of very powerful and bloody women who controlled various city-states in Italy, and did some amazing things.     

—In conversation: George R.R. Martin with Dan Jones FULL EVENT

We already know that Alysanne was called by GRRM, the “Eleanor of Aquitaine of Westeros”:

Alysanne was the queen, consort, and sister of King Jaehaerys I, the Old King, and like him she lived a long life. Since you pictured him as an old man at the end of his reign, I figure it would be most appropriate to do her the same way, rather than as the young woman she was when Jaehaerys first ascended the Iron Throne.

You might consider Alysanne as the Eleanor of Aquitaine of Westeros, and model her on Katharine Hepburn’s portrayal of Eleanor in the film THE LION IN WINTER. Tall and straight, unbowed by time, she had high cheekbones, clear blue eyes. Age left crow’s feet around her eyes and laugh lines about her mouth, but her face never lost its strength. She was a fine archer and hunter in her youth, and loved to fly atop her dragon to all the distant parts of the realm. Alysanne was slim of waist and small of breast, with a long neck, a fair complexion, a high forehead. In old age her hair turned white as snow. She wore it in a bun, pulled back and pinned behind her hear.

Her relationship with King Jaehaerys was always very close. She was his most trusted counselor and his right hand, and often wore a slimmer, more feminine version of his crown at court. Beloved by the common people of Westeros, she loved them in return, and was renowned for her charities. [Source] 

But Alysanne is not the only woman linked and similar to Sansa that was modeled from Eleanor.  GRRM has also said that he took inspiration from Eleanor of Aquitaine to create Catelyn Stark and Brienne of Tarth:  

Interviewer: One of the strongest female characters is Catelyn Stark, in my point of view.

GRRM: Well, I wanted to make a strong mother character. The portrayal women in epic fantasy have been problematical for a long time. These books are largely written by men but women also read them in great, great numbers. And the women in fantasy tend to be very atypical women… They tend to be the woman warrior or the spunky princess who wouldn’t accept what her father lays down, and I have those archetypes in my books as well.

However, with Catelyn there is something reset for the Eleanor of Aquitaine, the figure of the woman who accepted her role and functions with a narrow society and, nonetheless, achieves considerable influence and power and authority despite accepting the risks and limitations of this society. She is also a mother… Then, a tendency you can see in a lot of other fantasies is to kill the mother or to get her off the stage. She’s usually dead before the story opens… Nobody wants to hear about King Arthur’s mother and what she thought or what she was doing, so they get her off the stage and I wanted it too. And that’s Catelyn.

—Adrias News - 2012

So Catelyn Stark is “the figure of the woman who accepted her role and functions with a narrow society and, nonetheless, achieves considerable influence and power and authority despite accepting the risks and limitations of this society”.

Catelyn Stark, Sansa’s lady mother and role model, the symbol of strength she turned to when she pleaded for her father's life:

Sansa quailed. Now, she told herself, I must do it now. Gods give me courage. She took one step, then another. Lords and knights stepped aside silently to let her pass, and she felt the weight of their eyes on her. I must be as strong as my lady mother. "Your Grace," she called out in a soft, tremulous voice.

—A Game of Thrones - Sansa V    

Catelyn Stark, the woman whose name Sansa wanted to take as her new identity:

What should you be called?" "I . . . I could call myself after my mother . . ." "Catelyn? A bit too obvious . . . but after my mother, that would serve. Alayne. Do you like it?" "Alayne is pretty." Sansa hoped she would remember. 

—A Storm of Swords - Sansa VI

Catelyn Stark, the mother that Sansa didn’t forget and that reminds inside her to preserve her true identity:

I am not your daughter, she thought. I am Sansa Stark, Lord Eddard's daughter and Lady Catelyn's, the blood of Winterfell. 

—A Feast for Crows - Sansa I

That Catelyn Stark is the kind of woman that Sansa Stark will become and surpass in the future. To quote GRRM: “one of the most kick-ass women of the Middle Ages Westeros”.

Here you can read more about Catelyn Stark and Eleanor of Aquitaine parallels.

And this is what GRRM said about who inspired Brienne of Tarth:

“I enjoyed Xena the Warrior Princess a lot but I did not think it was an accurate portrayal of what a women warrior was or would be like, and I sort of created Brienne of Tarth as an answer to that.

I was inspired by people like Eleanor of Aquitaine and not so much Joan of Arc, but the queens of Scottish history, from Lady Macbeth on down - strong women who didn’t put on chain-mail bikinis to go forth into battle, but exercised immense powers by other ways.” 

—Pajiba - 2014

That quote was from the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2014.  During that event, and even before, there were reports about GRRM saying that: “Brienne is Sansa with a sword”.     

Since there was no primary source for this quote (I just found a broken link not longer available), just the fan reports we found in reddit and westeros.org, with the help of some friends, we decided to ask the man himself. We contacted him via email. 

And he answered us. 

More or less the question was this:

I recently came across a quotation that’s been attributed to you, but unfortunately the original source is no longer available, and I wanted to confirm it’s something you’ve actually said in the past. In 2014 at the Edinburgh Book Festival, multiple fans quoted you as saying that Brienne of Tarth is “Sansa with a sword,” with regards to certain personality traits. Is that an accurate quotation?

And George’s answer was this:

I don’t remember saying that, but it could be. It has been six years. GRRM

¡My friends and I are still ecstatic!

And as I said before, this beautiful quote “Brienne is Sansa with a sword”, also reminds me of this interview:

Game of Thrones Season 4 Premiere: 

Interviewer: Is there any character who is morally beyond reproach?      

GRRM: Beyon reproach? You mean like good, so good? Probably not.

Interviewer: I was thinking Brienne.    

GRRM: Maybe, yes, certainly. She’s up there. She’s very idealistic. At least in the beginning, but you know her journey still has a way to go, and my world has a way of testing one’s ideals, so we’ll see by the end.

That Brienne description sounds pretty much like Sansa, right?

So there you have it, I just love that Catelyn, Brienne and Sansa belong to the Eleanor of Aquitaine’s kick-ass women club.

BAD REPUTATION ¡KICK-ASS REPUTATION!

As you can imagine, through all these years, Eleanor of Aquitaine, for being the woman she was, had also gotten a bad reputation:

At times portrayed as a frivolous young woman or a manipulative schemer, Eleanor was a savvy player on the political stage—unafraid to exercise the power she held; her reputation may have been damaged by her boldness, but her influence on the political and cultural events of the 12th century remains undiminished. 

—National Geographic

She has been misjudged by many French historians who have noted only her youthful frivolity, ignoring the tenacity, political wisdom, and energy that characterized the years of her maturity. “She was beautiful and just, imposing and modest, humble and elegant”; and, as the nuns of Fontevrault wrote in their necrology, a queen “who surpassed almost all the queens of the world.” 

—Britannica

Indeed, while researching for this post I found awful reports about Eleanor, trying to disqualified her and her achievements, and trying also to demystify her figure calling most of the facts attributed to her, fantasies and fiction.  In a state where we don’t even have a reliable source about Eleanor’s true physical features, I think it is more probable that we only knew a few things about her, and knowing so little, she still is “one of the most kick-ass women of the Middle Ages”.

Thanks the Gods, Alysanne never suffered of this bad reputation “phenomenon”, the way other women from Fire and Blood had.  You just have to read the things that were told about the first Rhaenys and Rhaena to know that they were the subjects of misogyny and bad propaganda as a way to diminished them and exalt other characters.

I’m not saying that Alysanne didn’t deserve to be called the “Good Queen”, but Jaehaerys used her for his Targaryen supremacy propaganda campaign, and, as you may have already realized, most of the time Alysanne was the real author of the best initiatives and laws of Jaehaerys’ rule:

“Words are wind,” he told his council, “but wind can fan a fire. My father and my uncle fought words with steel and flame. We shall fight words with words, and put out the fires before they start.” And so saying, His Grace sent forth not knights and men-at-arms, but preachers. “Tell every man you meet of Alysanne’s kindness, her sweet and gentle nature, and her love for all the people of our kingdom, great and small,” the king charged them. 

—Fire & Blood

But Catelyn and Sansa were not freed of this bad reputation “phenomenon”. Catelyn and Sansa are two of the most hated and insulted characters of ASOIAF, no matter how many times the author himself has defended them of unjust critics and baseless judgments. Just like Eleanor, Catelyn and Sansa are called frivolous, manipulative, schemers; but also, and at the same time, useless and whiny.  It’s ridiculous.

Following the "Creating Characters" panel, Linda and I mentioned to George that some people gave Sansa and Catelyn a lot of grief, claiming they "whined" too much.

George was quite adamant that he disagreed with those readers. He pointed out that the problem is that readers often don't seem to make a distinction between internal thought and external speech in a way that an author might prefer. Specifically, in terms of "whining", to him whining is a verbal act -- you actually have to speak to whine. Cat doesn't do that, though -- all her dark, depressed thoughts are kept to herself. Yes, the reader is aware of them, because they read her POV, but she absolutely does not burden other characters with them. Basically, everyone has bad times among the good times, and they think negatively then but just having negative thoughts isn't whining.

[Source]

There you have it haters, GRRM wants for you to know that you can’t read.

So, let’s just change this bad reputation tag for a better one: ¡KICK-ASS REPUTATION!

And to finish this really long post, I will leave you with what I wrote about the l’Armure necklace that Louis Vuitton gave to Sophie Turner for the 71st annual Emmy Awards:

The dazzling piece in question is titled the l’Armure necklace, from Louis Vuitton’s “Riders of the Knights” collection. Made with white gold, 640 diamonds and 305 baguette-cut diamonds, it took over 1,175 hours of work to complete. “The design is inspired by medieval armor,” Louis Vuitton’s jewelry designer Francesca Amfitheatrof told Vogue. [Source]

The Riders of the Knights collection achieves an immersive aesthetic drawn from medieval codes of chivalry and heraldic crests. (…)

With this new collection, the House pays tribute to the powerful vision that impelled so many medieval heroines to transcend their limitations and forge their own destiny. These women made a lasting mark on the man’s world they inhabited, shaping their fate. They are the very embodiment of determination and independence, values that reflect the Louis Vuitton woman. [Source]

Louis Vuitton literally gave Sophie her own armor in the form of a white gold and diamonds necklace, in a very similar fashion to Michele Clapton giving Sansa her Needle necklace and her armor belt and dress, that armored her against all the claimers of her body and ancestral lands.  

A beautiful and symbolic way to honor the character Sophie played for about 10 years, Sansa Stark, a medieval heroine that prevailed against the patriarchal Westerosi society, never abandoning her feminine strength and courage, while still believing in chivalry and inspiring true knights along her path. 

¡The Queen in the North!    

¡The Queen in the North!    

¡The Queen in the North!    

¡The Queen in the North!    

[cecilspeaks]

162 - “Alpha”

Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Fear makes the heart grow louder. And death makes the heart grow flowers. Welcome to Night Vale.

Amelia Anna Alfaro was always the best at everything. On the day she was born, she was named the healthiest baby at Night Vale General Hospital. The doctors had never seen a healthier baby. “What a healthy baby,” they said from behind a bullet proof two-way mirror, as they operated the robotic arms that carefully held the infant aloft. The doctors high-fived each other, missing slightly. The trick, by the way, is to keep your eye on the other person’s elbow. That or glue high-powered magnets to each person’s hand. And all of the nurses cheered from dozens of feet down the hallway, where they were playing with a standard Tarot deck, common in most neonatal units. This cheering was unrelated to Amelia’s birth. The nurses had drawn the ten of swords, which is everyone’s favorite card. It features a relaxed man receiving acupuncture by a river.

Amelia learned to walk at 4 months, and to talk at 6 months. She read Plato’s “Republic” for the first time at age 4. She taught herself German and began to write sonnets in that language at age 7. At age 10, she won her first engineering competition after designing a concrete canoe that could float even on the most turbulent water. There is no body of water in Night Vale, so she had to prove her work using a software she wrote that generated three-dimensional models to corroborate her advanced mechanical physics formulas. She even won the state spelling bee five years in a row, from ages 9 to 13. Her streak was only broken when the spelling bee was canceled, after the sponsors lost their dictionary.

Amelia was always the best, and her mother knew it. Her mother was proud of her daughter, or rather, her mother was proud of herself for producing such a daughter. Or rather, she was proud of both, in a way that was difficult for them to untangle. Amelia’s mother was named Yvette. Yvette could not afford much for her daughter. She worked long hours to earn the respect of her bosses, which (-) [0:04:32] her promotions and larger paychecks, but Yvette had hit the glass ceiling. She did not want this limitation for her daughter. Her daughter would need to be smarter, more talented, and more driven than she. Yvette wanted Amelia’s value to the world to be so great that no one could deny her success.

Yvette recognized Amelia’s specialness and pushed hard to make her even more special, signing Amelia up for athletics and adult learning classes and piano lessons. Amelia sometimes pushed against this. “Mother, I don’t want to” was met with, “But you will, Amelia.” “Why?” was met with, “Because I said so.” “I hate you for this” was met with, “You will love me for it later.”

Begrudgingly, Amelia fulfilled her mother’s wishes. It wasn’t because she understood her mother’s motivation to secure her child a better life, nor was it because Amelia did not have the stomach to fight back. No, Amelia did it because it all came so easy. She was a black belt, a sharp shooter, an academic decathlon champion. She wrote her first novel at age 12, it was called “A Golden Age for Parachuting”, in which an all-Jewish female parachute team wins Olympic gold in 1936 Berlin in front of Adolf Hitler. In the publisher’s rejection letter, the editor said the novel was “immaculately written, however parachuting stories are out of vogue. Do you have anything about magical baseball players?” Amelia did. It was a novel called “One Last Swing for the Tuesday Boys”, but she had written it in German and did not have time to translate the “Dienstag Jungen” manuscript, because she was currently taking a course on bird husbandry.

Yvette enrolled the teenage Amelia in night classes at the community college, where she took English 113, “Sonnets are for lovers”; structural engineering 212, “Buttress is a funny word”; and meteorology 301, “Clouds y’all, amirite?” She earned all As and scores for college credit before she even graduated high school. None of these challenges were difficult for Amelia. She was the best at everything.

But her life was not perfect. Because of the voices. It was the voices that made life hard for Amelia. From birth, she heard the constant chatter of dozens of people. None of the voices spoke directly to  Amelia, they just talked and talked about their lives, and Amelia was afraid of the voices and what the voices might imply about herself. She found solace in puzzles, crosswords, nonograms, acrostics, cryptics, Sudoku, which I think is the one where you have to catch a bunch of marbles with a lever operated hippopotamus. Her mother hated Amelia’s puzzle vice. If she caught Amelia doing puzzles, Yvette would make Amelia go practice archery or write poetry or at least listen to classical music. Amelia’s favorite was Van Cliburn’s masterful 1961 record of Rachmaninoff’s “Piano Concerto nr 13: Knuckles on the Black Keys”. When she was thinking through the solution of a puzzle, the voices did not speak to her. All was silent. It was her only time of peace. It was the only time her body could rest and curl up comfortably into her own thoughts. Anything that took her away from her logic problems including music, no matter how soothing, invited the voices back into Amelia’s thoughts.

Amelia was accepted to several top colleges across the country, including MIT, Stanford, Rice and The University of What It Is, but she wanted to stay near her home town and her family, so she went to State. Hey, that’s where my brother-in-law went! Go State! [chuckles] Ahem. She was elected the youngest president of the student body ever at age 17, and graduated valedictorian two years later. Her friends, her professors, her mother all knew the world was Amelia’s. She could become poet laureate or a senator or a supreme court justice or a quantum physicist. But she became none of those. This is not to say Amelia was not successful or that she amounted to nothing. It is to say, the semantics of success were her own and no one else’s. Amelia became an air traffic controller. The voices never told Amelia to become an air traffic controller, they were never that specific. The voices did not tell her to do anything, they simply talked about first dates, about  apartment hunting, about their grandmothers’ improved health, about a bad movie they sort of loved. None of the voices talked directly to her, it was simply as though she overheard conversations from lives lived somewhere else. Other people and their quotidian hopes and worries and interests. She tried seeing therapists and psychiatrists. She tried medication to stop the voices, but nothing worked. Eventually she decided they were not harmful voices and that she was not dealing with schizophrenia. She simply heard people talking at all hours about all things, having nothing to do with her. And they never told her to become an air traffic controller. Amelia chose her own career, her own path. Others though the reason was that it was the fist job opportunity to present itself for her. Maybe it was her admiration of aircraft, maybe a moral sense of serving humanity through public safety and comfort. In fact, it was none of these reasons. But it should not be surprising to know that Amelia was very good at air traffic control. She was calm, clear, and efficient. The Night Vale international airport, although when Amelia started it was just a commuter hub, has never had a high volume of plane traffic and almost all of those are departures. There are very few arrivals. My husband Carlos, he’s a scientist and he is also very good at his job, tells me that it’s impossible to have far more departures than arrivals, but I told him, not everything has to make sense all the time.

So, in some ways, air traffic control in Night Vale was easier for Amelia than just about any other class or job or task she’d ever attempted. It appeared from the outside to be far below her capabilities. She held that job for 20 years, even taking over as president of the Night Vale chapter of air traffic controllers’ union. In 2004, she was featured in the cover of “Afformative”, a monthly trade magazine for air traffic controllers. The headline of the article was “You’re cleared for success”. In 2006, she was asked to deliver the keynote speech at the annual Roger Con, a conventional for air traffic controllers and fans of air traffic control. It’s a huge deal, held every year in Orlando. People dress like their favorite airline pilots and wait in long lines for autographs from top flight attendants. There are even panel discussions about everything from the best textiles for seat cushions to secret first class meal offerings. Amelia was the best at what she did. She probably would have been the best poet laureate or senator, but this was the path she chose. She chose this path because of the voices, not from what they said, but what they didn’t say. When Amelia was in the control tower, when she was communicating with captains and co-pilots and navigators, her head was clear. All was silent. It was like those many nights, sneaking a copy of the crossword from the newspaper on the kitchenette and solving it by flashlight under her covers. She became an air traffic controller to be by herself, to become her own person. Her mother was disappointed, but loved her in spite of it. Her professors were let down, but still had many fabulous of their greatest student. Her friends were just happy she was happy.

Things changed on June 15, 2012, when Delta flight 18713 made radio contact. In her tall tower, at her tiny airport, in the middle of a vast desert, in the middle of the American Southwest, an airplane appeared on Amelia’s radar. It was carrying 143 passengers and 6 crew members and was flying from Detroit to Albany over the great lakes of the American Northeast. It appeared briefly, the green dot blinking in and out of existence like the sun glinting off a water ripple. It was almost unnoticeable. But everyone noticed it. Later, Amelia was the only one who admitted to noticing it. The radio transmission was equally brief, a surge of static and only one word, difficult to discern but she heard it. “Alpha” was the single word. The letter A in the Nato alphabet. It was garbled, so maybe it wasn’t that word, maybe it was some more adult variation of “Oh fudge”. Alpha. Oh fudge. It was unclear. Amelia requested identification of the aircraft. She requested further communication, but nothing came. As soon as it had squawked, it had gone silent. But while the radio communication was silent, the voices were not. On June 15, 2012, upon hearing a word that sounded like “alpha”, these myriad conversations returned. No one else in the tower could hear them, but Amelia Anna Alfaro could. And for the first time in her life, she began to speak back to them. Everyone else in the tower could hear that. The voices did not cease. The voices continued for days and days and Amelia tried to talk back with them. As one voice said: “I have an interview on Monday,” Amelia would ask “for what job” or if a voice said, “We went to Palm Springs on vacation,” Amelia would say, “Did you also travel out to the Salton Sea?” But over and over, no response. The voices did not affect the quality of Amelia’s work, but it did affect the perceived quality of her work, and her colleagues became uncomfortable with and distrusting of Amelia.

A month later, Amelia heard that word again from one of the voices. “Alpha”. The same voice that radioed in June. But upon hearing it again, she realizes that they didn’t say “alpha” at all. What they said, coming up.

But first The weather.

[“Skinchanger” by Skeptic skepticdeath.bandcamp.com]

The voices said “Alfaro”. The word had been truncated just as the airplane’s appearance in Night Vale had been truncated. The voice saying the word was the captain of the aircraft, and he had been trying to tell Amelia something. The pilot was trying to tell Amelia that he knew her, had always known her since her birth. He didn’t know how he knew her, just that he did, and he wanted to tell her he had found her. And she should find him. “Where are you,” Amelia asked the captain. “No Where,” the voice said. “Did you land?” Amelia asked. “Yes,” the voice said. “Were there injuries?” Amelia asked. “Minor,” the voice said. “Do you hear the other voices too?” Amelia asked. “Yes,” the captain said. “I’m with them right now. Find us, Amelia.” “Where are you?” Amelia asked again, louder, more scared than before. “No Where,” the voice said, not like the vague concept of in no place but No Where, two words capitalized like the name of a specific place. Amelia felt a tap on her shoulder. It was another air traffic controller. “Uh, boss wants to see you, Amelia,” they said. But Amelia did not go to see the boss. She knew. She knew her time in the tower was done. She grabbed her belongings and walked to the elevator, out across the tarmac to a shuttle to a parking lot and into her car, and no one saw her again. Her friends said she always talked about going back to school to get an advanced degree. Maybe she went to Stanford. Or Rice, or The University of What It Is. Other friends said she had lost all touch with reality, talking to people who were not there, and maybe her mother checked Amelia into the Night Vale asylum.

Yvette says Amelia knew too much, that agents from a vague yet menacing government agency had been to their house and that Amelia must have been taken to a secret location. Representatives from the National Safety and Transportation Bureau in Washington, DC, came to Night Vale two months ago to investigate the disappearance of flight 18713. They are on an undercover mission inside the Night Vale asylum right now, on a tip from Sheriff Sam, to discover more clues into this mystery. Perhaps Amelia is in there too. But I don’t think so. I think she went to find the plane. I think the voices were the passengers on Delta 18713. I think she set out looking for them. Perhaps wandering the desert, the great No Where, to find the people who had been a part of her life since birth.

Amelia. Anna. Alfaro. was always the best at everything. And if anyone will find the plane, she will.

Stay tuned next for our new investment advice show “Billionaire Roulette”.

And as always, Good night, Night Vale, Good night.

Today’s proverb: Love means never having to say “you’re a werewolf”.

[pavcrti]

chicago’s very own pavarti kumari has been spotted on madison avenue driving a rose gold model x , welcome ! your resemblance to mishti rahman is unreal . according to tmz , you just had your twenty fifth  birthday bash .  your chance of surviving new york is uncertain because you’re fiery , but being eloquent might help you . i think being a pieces explains that .  3 things that would paint a better picture of you would be fresh fields of lavender that expand into a cotton candy sky , the reflection of the sun caught in the glimmer of a crystal , rhyming couplets professing deep - seeded emotion . ( i ghost write songs for artists who like to claim they write their own work . ) & ( cis female + she / her  ) +  ( emily , 25 , sher / her , pst )

holy shit , it’s ya girl . i’m back after needing a bit of a break from being in a group . and bc i honestly adored this place sm and i made so many great friends here i am back . . . 👀 i expect plots with each and every one of u btw so u best deliver . i desperately wanna get this finished before i pass the fuck out . i’ll be joining the server in the morning , but in the meantime if u wanna be my friend  👀 👀 titsiana praises satan#7989

    biography .

name : pavarti kumari 

age : twenty five

gender : cisfemale

zodiac : pieces 

sexuality : bisexual 

profession : singer / songwriter 

hair color : black

eye color : brown

piercings : both lobes , nose 

tattoos : none

voice claim : jhene aiko

released albums : sail out ( ep ) , trip 

miss pavarti was born in bangladesh . her parents are both 100% bangladeshi and immigrated to chicago when pavarti was four years old . she had an older brother who was five years older than her . his name was siva .her family traveled back every summer so she is very immersed in the culture of her homeland and is a very spiritual person as a result . from a young age , pavarti had a fascination with the english language . not only was it so complex , but there was so much that could be done with it as well . she loved poetry and different types of prose . she also developed an absolute adoration for hip hop as a result . she’s been able to work several of her lyrical inspirations in her albums , something she would’ve never anticipated growing up as an immigrant child . when she entered middle school , she joined the school choir as an extra curricular activity which is what inspired her love for music and introduced her to her vocal talents . within time , she began combining her inclination for poetry with her voice . she wrote her first song at thirteen and began to freestyle for her friends . unfortunately , she was never taken too seriously by her peers . she was a female , hardly the usual suspect for the rnb , soul vibe that her voice conveys . before she graduated high school , her brother siva was killed in a car crash . the unexpected death of her best friend and protector sent pavarti into a spiral . this begun her tendency to alter her reality to escape from her pain with the help of drugs . she frequently writes about her brother in her music . when she was eighteen , she was discovered , ironically , by a manager of a local rapper at a poetry slam she was performing at . she impressed him and he introduced her to his client . this is how pavarti entered the hip hop scene , albeit , in secret . in hip hop , it’s very custom for performers to write the tracks that they put out themselves . pavarti learned that she could learn the skills of the trade whilst making her own connections and making pretty good cash , as well . as the years progressed , the notoriety of her clients rose . she’s written bars for multiple big names and by harvesting these friendships , she was able to get signed to a record label and put out her first ep at age twenty one . it was well received by critics and pavarti was thrilled to be taken seriously as an artist doing what she loves . she kept working , kept her nose in her business and released her first full album , trip , just last year . she feels like she is constantly growing artistically and finds herself inspired everywhere she turns . she’s currently working on her second full album and just dropped a new single , p*$$y fairy . other than that , there’s not too much else to note in her history . she did not grow up rich , rather she’s only recently come into wealth . her money is very new and she’s not too skilled at spending it wisely .

    personality . 

okay , so this will probably just be a long winded explanation that no one really asked for / needed but here we go ! first and foremost . . . pavarti is a dreamer in every sense of the word . she’s whimsical , she’s connected to the earth around her . she drifts off into elaborate day dreams and tells herself stories in her head as she falls to sleep . she is very spiritual . she meditates twice a day . her house always smells of incense . she has an affinity for weed and hallucinogenics . she really enjoys writing under the influence . her album trip is literally inspired by several drug experiences she had that had a profound impact in her life . pavarti’s general demeanor is borderline wall - flower . you wouldn’t expect her to be so shy , but she is . she’s the giggly girl who’ll hang back and let someone else come to her first . in the meantime , she’s taking in every single detail . she’s incredibly observant . sometimes she thinks in poetry . she realizes that she isn’t the typical visual for a female hip hop , rnb artist but it’s truly her passion in life and her art flows through her . she says more in her songs than she does to the people she needs to and that can definitely be problematic . with that said , pavarti is very well spoken . girl knows how to sweet talk her way through just about anything . but she also has the temper of a devil . she does not tolerate being fucked around with . she has that attitude about her where she will go and key your car if you hurt her or one of her best friends . people typically wouldn’t expect such an explosion from someone so outwardly sanguine and easy going but she’s the type to scratch someone’s eyes out if she has to . her music is her spouse . this fucks her up relationship wise a lot because she tends to let chances pass her by because she would rather stay undistracted . she has an ego , but not really in the outward way that one would anticipate when ego is involved . she knows she’s talented . she knows she’s attractive . but she also knows that she’s fucking lucky to be where she is and she’s grateful . pavarti is the type who wakes up with a smile because she has another twenty four hours to be alive . she doesn’t take things for granted --- she used to , until she lost her older brother and she realized just how quickly things can change . pavarti is a fiercely loyal individual to her friends . she will stand up for them , no matter what . the thing is , she expects it back . she is very much aware of her self worth and does not react kindly to a one sided vibe . 

    plots . 

ok , ok , ok . . . so how i am going to do this is offer up some songs / song pairings for songs that i believe pavarti has written for specific people with certain plots in mind for at least her side of things . and then i will also list some basic plots that aren’t based on anything in particular , but are still plots that i would like very much to have ! the links go to lyrics ! all plots are gender neutral , so ignore any pronouns that are in the songs .

bed peace / stay ready / while we’re young --- fwbs with feelings : pavarti and your muse have been friends for a while . somewhere along the line things crossed the line and they began hooking up . it’s obvious that they feel something intense for each other but something is always in the way of them being together --- plus , neither are really sure if the friendship could withstand a romantic relationship crashing and burning . so here they are , stuck in this awkward limbo . they hook up , hang out , awkwardly third wheel when the other is dating someone else . it’s an interesting dynamic and pavarti wouldn’t deal with drama with anyone else but your muse . they have a really compelling bond and neither can think of life without the other but things have been like this for a long time and there is only so long a relationship as complicated as this one could actually function .

the worst / comfort inn ending / moments / when we love --- exes that ended badly with lingering feelings : this was . . . just a crazy hot and cold relationship . when it was hot , it was fucking hot . when it was cold ? damn . hell itself could freeze over . they probably have done and said a lot of nasty , nasty shit to each other . at the same time , they could’ve been literally planning their wedding at some point because they both were incredibly serious about each other . in comfort inn ending , pavarti suggests their relationship was a result of her cheating on another boyfriend to be with your muse and your muse ultimately cheated on her as well . we can discuss that but i would high key kill for the extra drama . around the time pavarti was writing her first full album , they had a rekindling that inspired her to write moments and when we love . i don’t envision this relationship having ended in a decent way from there , though . more cheating ? fighting ? they were definitely toxic . she’s definitely planning on dragging their ass some more in her tracks .

lsd / sativa --- platonic soulmates : omg so this plot is . . . so fucking cute . but these two would basically die for each other . there is zero sexual attraction , just genuine , pure love . they do everything together . but what really sealed their bond ? well . . . many different intense acid trips , of course ! they love to get high together and forget about the world . they both feel like they can trust the other because they have been present for so many life - changing moments . they rarely go a day without seeing each other and absolutely never go a day without talking in some capacity . sometimes they fight like siblings . but pavarti would honestly kill for your muse . there is nothing she wouldn’t do for them . 

new balance / newer balance / you are here / clear my mind --- the romantic bad influence : this plot is another messy piece of trash . from the beginning , when they first met , pavarti always thought your muse was too good to be true . they reminded her so much of her brother . she felt this sense of peace with your muse . she fell in love quickly but at the same time , felt like there was something looming over their relationship . like it wasn’t permanent . like it’s all just a dream . the bad influence part isn’t portrayed too much in the lyrics other than stressing pavarti’s fear that your muse isn’t exactly who they say they are and this relationship is doomed to fail somehow . she knows that when this explodes in her face that it’s going to destroy her . i see your muse bringing out edgier sides of pavarti’s personality . they party a lot , they influence pavarti to do crazy things with them and she does and she feels so alive with your muse . that is , until , it all crumbles . the facade is destroyed and whatever it was that your muse wasn’t being upfront about shatters the way she feels for your muse entirely . she feels betrayed . clear my mind is pavarti’s way of trying to hype herself up to be stronger than she really is . 

never call me / --- best friends turned enemies : this is my last long one i promise , wtf , why did i decide to do this . anyways --- this plot is again , a shit ton of angst so enjoy that . your muse and pavarti used to be the best of friends . inseparable . that is until things went south . fast . we can discuss what it was that happened between our muses but it was something huge and preferably something where they both could stubbornly blame each other . pavarti feels slighted because she thinks that your muse should be the one who reaches out and perhaps your muses could be thinking the same about her . 

romantic plots : crushes , unrequited love , hateship , party hookup , friends with benefits , secret fling , summer romance 

platonic plots : give me close friends ! and tons of them please ! thanks . roommates , drug buddies , confidants , unlikely friendship , travel friends , only friends in the dms , enemies turned friend

[weavingthetapestry]

Plague Projects, 1568: George Bannatyne and His Books

“The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley” seems like a phrase which really sums up this past month, and also says something about my altered plans for this blog this year. After all, with the 700th anniversary of the Declaration of Arbroath coming up, I had hoped that the next time I’d be posting, it would be about nation-defining fourteenth century documents, not sixteenth century cultural treasures. Indeed, I should probably apologise to those of you particularly interested in earlier periods for publishing what I believe is my fourth or fifth lengthy sixteenth century post in a row- and it IS horrendously lengthy. But as many of us will be keeping to our homes for the foreseeable future, it seemed apt instead to consider taking a leaf out of George Bannatyne’s book. 

In autumn and winter 1568, plague once again raged in Edinburgh. Confined to the family home “in tyme of pest, / Quhen we fra labor was compeld to rest”, 22-year old George Bannatyne whiled away the hours compiling a massive collection of Old Scots poetry. His book, containing works from such famous names as Chaucer, Dunbar, Henryson, Lindsay and others, is now known as the Bannatyne MS (or, to give it its less snappy title, Adv. MS. 1.1.6). It is widely acknowledged as one of the most significant books in the history of Old Scots literature, preserving some of the very best works of the age for later generations. So, since I have the time and the ink (metaphorically at least), I thought it might be a good opportunity to explore the history of this vital manuscript, the life of its author, and the circumstances in which it was created. 

George Bannatyne was neither the son of a great noble nor some powerful churchman, but he did come from a reasonably well-off family with an important network of acquaintances. Thanks to the survival of a ‘Memoriall Buik’ which he began compiling around 1582, we are able to trace some of his background with more ease than might otherwise be the case. In it, we find that George was the son of James Bannatyne of the Kirktoun of Newtyle (born 1512) and Katherine Taillefeir (or Telfer or any number of variant spellings; she seems to have been born c.1523). James Bannatyne belonged to the legal profession and played a not insignificant role in public life, acting as a Writer to the Signet and Deputy Justice Clerk among other things. He also had mercantile interests and, despite originally hailing from Angus (a region he would maintain links with for the rest of his life), he was admitted as a burgess and guild brother of Edinburgh in 1538. It may have been around the same time that he married Katherine, who appears to have hailed from a prominent Edinburgh merchant family herself, and their first child, Laurence, was born in September 1539. The couple would go onto have twenty-three children between 1539 and 1565, of whom eleven were still alive at the time of their mother’s death in 1570, and eight were still living in their father’s house, “unput to proffeit”.

George was the seventh child, born on 22nd December 1545, and his memorial book notes that his uncles, George Taillefeir and William Fisher* acted as his godfathers, and Mavis Fisher as his godmother. Not much is known about his early life, but he does appear to have attended the University of St Andrews for a time, being incorporated at St Mary’s College in 1558 (aged about twelve) and listed as ‘baccalaurei’ in 1561. Unlike some of his brothers, however, there isn’t much evidence that he followed his father into the legal profession and we can ascertain little about his early career (beyond the basic details) before the age of forty.

(Bannatyne house near Newtyle, Angus. This property was purchased by George’s father James Bannatyne and the house built by Thomas Bannatyne in the late sixteenth century. Despite their Angus roots however, the family’s main business was in Edinburgh. Not my picture.)

The year 1568, when he was 22 years of age, would later serve as a major landmark in the young George Bannatyne’s life. Indeed, it was to be an eventful year for the kingdom of Scotland as a whole. In May, the deposed queen Mary I had escaped from captivity in the Kinross-shire castle of Lochleven, and soon raised an army to challenge the men who governed Scotland in the name of her infant son James VI. Defeated by the forces of her half-brother, the Earl of Moray, at the Battle of Langside, she then fled across the border to England, seeking the help of their cousin Elizabeth I. With the plight of the ex-Queen of Scots now an international incident, the affair would rumble on throughout the autumn and winter of 1568 and the publication of the notorious Casket Letters did nothing to diminish the scandal. Back in Scotland, meanwhile, the events of 1568 precipitated a major civil war between the supporters of the exiled Mary and the ‘King’s Men’ who fought in the name of her son. Even in August, Edinburgh had a scare when it was rumoured that the lords of ”the south and north and west countries” might attack before the next parliament, and as a result the burgh’s defences were reinforced. 

And then, just to make things worse, that same autumn a vicious bout of plague broke out in the merry town. The Diurnal of Occurrents claims that ‘the pest’ was initially brought to Edinburgh by a merchant named James Dalgleish on 8th September 1568. Whether or not this very precise account can be taken at face value, by the end of the month the situation was so concerning that, on 26th September, the Regent Moray wrote to the burgh council from Tantallon, requesting that the election of new magistrates be delayed. This was due to concern for “the publict ordour to be observit anent the plaige”, and in case the new officials, “throw laik of experience may omyt the maist necessar thingis that in sa strait ane tyme ar requisit to be done”. On 13th October the burgh council made further proclamations that nobody was to pass to the Burgh Muir (where the sick were quarantined in huts) without an official escort, and, a couple of days later, officers were appointed to clean the victims’ houses and take charge of burying the dead. Meanwhile it was ordained:

“that how sone any maner of persoun fallis seik within this burgh, in quhatsumeuir kynde of seiknes that ever it be, the awneris of the hous inclose thame selffis and cum nocht furth of thair houssis, nowther suffer ony to resort to thame unto the tyme thai aduertice the baillie of the quarter and ordour be taiken be him, under the pane of deid.”

[“that as soon as any manner of person falls sick within this burgh, whatever kind of sickness it may be, the owners of the house should enclose themselves and not come forth of their houses, nor suffer anyone to resort to them, until such time as they inform the baillie of the quarter and order is taken by him, under pain of death.”]

Plague was hardly unknown in the capital and a particularly serious outbreak had ravaged much of Britain, including Edinburgh, as recently as 1563. The burgh was therefore used to the strict measures which had to be taken (even though this didn’t stop the unfortunate William Smith and his wife Black Meg from breaking the rules, an offence for which they paid dearly). Nevertheless the periodic recurrence of the the disease struck terror into the hearts of the people, and with good reason, since the 1568 outbreak alone is estimated to have decimated a fifth of Edinburgh’s population. There were major economic consequences too, not least because of the stoppage of trade, and the Diurnal of Occurrents claims that, due to the outbreak in the burghs of Edinburgh, Leith, and Canongate, there were severe shortages in the country over the course of the following year. Little wonder then that the earliest known medical treatise to be printed in Scotland- “Ane Breve Descriptioun of the Pest” by the Aberdonian physician Gilbert Skene- rolled off the press in this year. 

[read more under cut]

(Edinburgh in the late 16th and early 17th century, according to the ‘Civitates Orbis Terrarum’. Not my picture.)

This was the wider context in which George Bannatyne compiled his famous manuscript, in the last three months of the year (according to his own explicit). But the entire MS runs to almost 800 pages and shows signs of careful organisation and so some modern commentators have naturally raised doubts about the claim that such a large project was completed in only three months, no matter how much Bannatyne may have been climbing the walls during a time of isolation. We also have to account for the 54 pages which make up the so-called Draft or Duplicate MS- draft pages which do not form part of the main Bannatyne MS but have been tacked onto the front of the surviving copy. This draft MS, currently made up of at least two gatherings, may have been larger at some point, as leaves which seem to have been part of the Draft are to be found slotted in at various points of the Bannatyne MS proper (the two MS use different styles of page number, and it may be possible to identify some of the Draft MS leaves from their Roman foliation). 

Meanwhile it was observed by J.T.T. Brown back in 1903 that one of the dates written into the manuscript as ‘1568′, on folio 290v., had originally been 1565, the last number having been altered at a later stage. Subsequently it was noticed that the year written as ‘1568′ on folio 298r. had initially been 1566, and it has been argued that the altered dates, as well as the obvious effort involved in organising and transcribing such a tome, suggest that the Bannatyne MS was the result of a much longer period of compilation than its author claimed. Not every commentator has been convinced by this- William, A. Ringler, for one, argued in 1980 that it was not impossible for George Bannatyne to have completed the work in three months, pointing out that he would only have had to spend about three hours a day on his project, and characterising the altered dates as mere slips of the pen. However most of the recent writers I’ve consulted seem to acknowledge that the MS was probably compiled in several stage, with the book only taking its final form in December 1568 after some months- possibly years- of intermittent work. The exact process of compilation is a matter of great interest to those attempting to establish a political and social context for the work. For example, Alastair A. MacDonald, asking the pertinent question of why Bannatyne might have wished to conceal an earlier start date (and assuming that the 1565 date was not a mistake), has argued that the Bannatyne MS could be seen as a Marian anthology. He has characterised it as a book which grew out of a collection of love poems associated with the poets of Mary I’s court (especially Alexander Scott), the nature of which had to be discreetly altered when the political winds changed. Whatever the case, the precise dating of the Bannatyne MS. and the manner in which it was compiled raises some fascinating possibilities and will probably continue to stimulate debate in the future.** 

(A reproduction of a page from George Bannatyne’s ‘Memoriall Buik’. Not my picture, digitisation by internet archive)

The Bannatyne manuscript itself is an impressive piece of work and Evelyn S. Newlyn is certainly justified in describing its author as, “neither a mere collector nor a passive scribe”. On top of copying out around 400 poems and other literary works (some of them quite lengthy), it is clear that George Bannatyne put thought into the organisation of the MS and its overarching purpose and literary nature. The results of his endeavours hugely impressed some later readers, not least Sir Walter Scott, but modern scholars have rightly cautioned against viewing the MS as the product solely of one young man’s ‘genius’. Bannatyne’s broad social and family networks were likely crucial to the success of his project. Several other members of his immediate family had literary and scholarly interests- his father James and possibly also his brother Thomas owned (and in the latter case compiled) notable legal collections, while a copy of the “Regiam Majestatam” owned by George’s grandfather John Bannatyne has poems copied into its pages. George’s father James was probably also the figure of that name who was referred to in Robert Sempill’s “Defence of Crissel Sandelandis” in the line, “Auld James Bannatyne wes anis a  man of skill”, and another lawyer Bannatyne, Patrick, appears elsewhere in the poem. On his mother’s side, George seems to have been related to Laurence Taillefeir, treasurer of Dunkeld, and proud owner of printed copies of Pleny and Seneca, who was also godfather to George’s eldest brother Laurence Bannatyne in 1539. Serving as the other godfather on that occasion was Henry Balnaves of Halhill, then a senator of the College of Justice, and perhaps already holding the strong Protestant views which would shape much of his career; he may be the ‘Balnevis’ listed as the author of a poem in the Bannatyne MS (“O Gallandis all, I cry and call”). 

These details regarding the godparents of the numerous Bannatyne siblings may be found in George’s “Memoriall Buik” and among the other family acquaintances listed there we also find John Bellenden of Auchnoule and his father Master Thomas Bellenden. Bellenden of Auchnoule was justice clerk (and James Bannatyne served under him for a time as deputy) but even more interest are their connections as nephew and brother respectively to John Bellenden, archdeacon of Moray. That John Bellenden was a poet at the court of James V and translator of the prose Scots version of Hector Boece’s ‘Historia Gentis Scotorum’, and the close social (and perhaps family) relationship between the Bellendens and Bannatynes may explain the prominent position given to his work in the Bannatyne MS. Meanwhile, if Balnaves of Halhill and others provided the Bannatynes with Protestant connections, there were also members of the Catholic clergy to match them, such as George Clapperton, provost of Trinity Collegiate Church, and a member of the Chapel Royal at the same time as the poet Alexander Scott (who features prominently among the love poets featured in the MS). The court connections of the above men may have proved a major asset to George Bannatyne during the compilation of his MS, although it may be going too far to describe the book, as some writers have, as a direct record of Stewart court culture. The Bannatynes also had connections to Henry Foulis of Colinton and his father James, the notable neo-Latin poet, as well as to the poet William Stewart through the Foulis family (it is also worth noting that George Bannatyne’s daughter would later marry Henry Foulis’ grandson). 

From documentary sources other than the memorial book, scholars have further traced the Bannatynes’ links to notable figures in Edinburgh’s printing trade, including King’s printer Thomas Davidson (who undertook work for the government in James Bannatyne’s company), and one of the city’s first printers Walter Chepman (both Walter and James were public notaries who witnessed some of the same transactions, and it might have been Chepman’s widow who stood godmother to George’s brother Thomas). The Bannatyne family’s connections to these notable individuals- and indeed many others whose histories we unfortunately don’t have space to trace- formed a hugely important social network of prominent lawyers, clergy, lairds, merchants, and courtiers, which must have proved immensely useful to George Bannatyne when he was gathering pieces for his MS.

(The arms of the Bannatynes of Corehouse in the Bannatyne MS, set beneath part of the story of Cokelbie’s Sow. Not my picture, property of N.L.S.)

The manuscript itself reflects this background and, although Bannatyne complained that he had to draw on sources preserved in “copeis awld, mankit, and mutillait”, he also seems to have used printed sources. Equally the high number of poems that Bannatyne was able to pull together does seem to indicate that the situation wasn’t always so dire and, as Sebestian Verweij points out:

“Bannatyne’s access to enormous numbers of manuscript and print exemplars is the best available testament to the extremely rich literary and scribal cultures in the Scottish capital.”

The list of authors whose works appear in the MS is a long one, but the most important should be singled out, if only to further demonstrate the scale of the work. The works of some of Scotland’s greatest writers before Burns are included, including pieces by William Dunbar (including the “The Thistle and Rose”, “The Golden Targe”, “The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy, “The Lament for the Makars”, and many more); Robert Henryson (especially worth noting are his “Morall Fabillis” and the apposite  “Ane Prayer for the Pest”); Gavin Douglas (including several prologues from his “Eneados”), and Sir David Lindsay (of particular interest is an abbreviated early copy of his play “Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis”). As already mentioned the works of John Bellenden, Alexander Scott and William Stewart are well represented, while other authors include Richard Holland, John Rowll, Robert Sempill, and Richard Maitland of Lethington (who also compiled major literary collections contemporary to the Bannatyne MS). “The noble Chaucer, of makaris flour”, is also named ias the author of eight poems in the MS, though seven of these are inaccurately attributed (the other is the ‘Song of Troilus’ from “Troilus and Criseyde”). George Bannatyne seems to have included several poems of his own composition in his MS, although Theo van Heijnsbergen has suggested that two of the poems attributed to a Bannatyne which appear “more competent” than the others, might have been written by one of George’s family members instead. Numerous anonymous poems feature in the MS (and some have been given authors in annotations made by later hands), including some well-known titles such as “The Friars of Berwick, “Christ’s Kirk on the Green”, “Kynd Kittock”, and “Cokelbie’s Sow”. Bannatyne’s collection thus opens a window onto an impressive body of late mediaeval and sixteenth century Scots literature- and his achievement is all the more impressive in that around half of the 400 poems included in the MS are not known from any other source and would otherwise have been lost to us. 

Bannatyne also put a good deal of thought into the construction of the MS, beyond simply copying out as many poems as he could find. The main part of the book is divided into five parts: firstly, poems about “Godis gloir and ouir saluation” and other Christian religious subjects; secondly, poems with serious moral or philosophical content; thirdly, ‘mirry’ and comic works (some verging on bawdy), including political and social satire; fourth supposedly poems about love, but also including works criticising love and poems against the evils of both men and women (but mostly women); and lastly tales that have some kind of allegorical significance, from Robert Henryson’s animal fables to dream allegories like “The Golden Targe”. This level of editorial awareness has been said to demonstrate Bannatyne’s care and attention in compiling the MS. But some of his editing choices have been less popular with modern scholars, not least his discreet censorship of some the more obviously Catholic aspects of the pre-Reformation poetry, to suit contemporary political circumstances. His decision to include a hefty number of overtly misogynistic poems at a late stage in the compilation of the MS has also been seen as indicative of both the wider political context and also his own personal views. Most interesting though is the evidence that Bannatyne modernised- or perhaps a more exact term would be ‘anglicised- much of the spelling in the poems he transcribed, giving them a more ‘neutral’ language that might have been meant to render the work more accessible to readers of his own day in both Scotland and England. Despite these (sometimes quite major) alterations to the texts of some of the most famous works of Old Scots literature, Bannatyne’s versions of the poems of Dunbar, Henryson, and others have often been used as the basis of modern scholarly editions even sometimes when better alternatives might have been available. Regardless of accuracy, a lot of energy was clearly spent on the organisation and editing of the MS, and many authors have argued that Bannatyne intended that the book should be printed and published. As Alastair A. MacDonald wrote:

“It nonetheless remains that the only credible explanation for the care lavished on the MS and in particular for the concern with the formal appearance of the collection, is that Bannatyne had indeed entertained the hope of seeing the volume in print. It was doubtless with this purpose in mind that he made all the subtle accommodations to Protestant feelings which have been detected in manuscript.”

There is some debate over this however and others have suggested that the work could instead have been intended for circulation in manuscript form among Bannatyne’s social network. Whatever the case the result of George Bannatyne’s labours is a very impressive collection of great significance for the history of Scottish literature- and certainly worth the three months or more he is supposed to have spent working on it.

On 22nd December 1568- George Bannatyne’s 23rd birthday- the burgh council of Edinburgh noted with some relief that it finally seemed as if “God of his mercye and gudnes hes metigait the raige of the pest within this toun”. So the officers who had been appointed to keep the regulations enacted during the time of the plaque were discharged. Unfortunately, their relief was somewhat premature: the disease would return by late spring 1569 and continued to menace the city for much of the year. We have little further indication of how the Bannatyne family coped during this difficult time, but we do know that our protagonist survived and would live to a good age. Strangely though, other than his memorial book (which he began compiling around 1582), we have no evidence of any further literary activity on George Bannatyne’s part. Instead we must follow the rest of his career in his role as a prominent merchant active in family life. 

(The grave of George Foulis of Ravelston and Janet Bannatyne in Greyfriars Kirkyard. Picture from wikimedia commons.)

Until the death of James Bannatyne in 1583, aged 71, George was closely associated with his father’s activities. He was granted his first piece of property- a tenement in Leith- in 1572, and acquired others over the years. He also developed his career as a merchant (though we do not know what he dealt in) and was admitted to the merchants guild of Edinburgh in 1587, being described as a “merchand burgess of Edinburgh” the following year. Some time before this he had married Isobel Mawchan, the widow of an Edinburgh baillie, and the couple would go on to have three children- Janet, who was born on 3rd May 1587 (sharing her birthday with her late grandfather James), James who died aged eight in 1597, and a stillborn daughter. George was also stepfather to two children from his wife’s first marriage, Edward (b.1571) and Isobel Nisbet. George’s only surviving child Janet Bannatyne later married George Foulis, laird of Ravelston near Colinton (both now suburbs of Edinburgh) and later Master of the King’s Mint in Scotland- their gravestone can still be seen in Greyfriars kirkyard. Isobel Mawchan died in 1603, and her husband wrote of her that she “levit ane godly, honorable, and vertewis lyf all hir dayis. Scho wes ane wyis, honest, and trew matrone.” In his twilight years, George Bannatyne appears to have spent some time residing with his daughter and son-in-law at Dreghorn. We do not know the exact date of his death, although it has been determined that he must have died before December 1608. The last entry in his memorial book is for 24th August 1606, when he recorded another visitation of the plague:

“George Foulis, Jonet Bannatyne, his spous, my dochter, and I, George Bannatyne, thair fader, being dwelland in Dreghorne, besyde Colingtoun, the nureise infectit in the pest, being upoun ane Sounday and the secound day of the change of the mone, and Sanct Bartilmo his day; and scho deceissit upoun the Tysday nixt thaireftir, the 26 day of the same moneth. And efter ane clenging na forder truble come to our houshold, blissit be the Almichty God, off his Majesteis miracouluse and mercifull deliuerance.”

[“George Fowlis, Janet Bannatyne, his spouse [and] my daughter, and I, George Bannatyne, their father, being then resident in Dreghorn, beside Colinton, the nurse [was] infected of the plague, being upon a Sunday and the second day of the change of the moon, and St Bartholomew’s Day; and she died upon the Tuesday next thereafter, the 26th day of the same month. And after one cleansing no further trouble came to our household, blessed be the Almighty God, of his Majesty’s miraculous and merciful deliverance.”]

George Bannatyne’s two books survived their author, and both passed into the hands of his Foulis descendants. The Bannatyne MS remained in the hands of that family until 1712 (and several members of the family signed their names on the spare leaves of the book) and was donated to the Advocates Library in 1772. Over the centuries several notable figures have come into contact with the MS, not least Thomas Percy, Bishop of Dromore (author of ‘Reliques of Ancient English Poetry’) and Allan Ramsay (who used some of the contents in his ‘Evergreen’ anthology of 1724). Both men (Ramsay certainly) appear to have left their own marks on the MS, as have several anonymous hands, some of them adding extra poems on spare leaves. By the early nineteenth century, the fame of George Bannatyne’s compilation had secured for its author an eminent place in the eyes of Scotland’s literati, and the Bannatyne Club, which was founded in 1823 by Walter Scott and others to print works of Scottish historical and literary interest, was named for George. Strangely, though, at the time of the Club’s foundation, not much was known about George Bannatyne himself. It wasn’t until a few years later, when his “Memoriall Buik” was rediscovered among the papers of his descendant Sir James Foulis of Woodhall and published under the auspices of the Bannatyne Club in 1829, that historians were able to trace the story of Bannatyne and his manuscripts in any depth. The first printing of the Bannatyne MS in its entirety came quite late, with the Hunterian Club’s edition of 1896, but there have been other printings since, and the MS has lost none of its fascination for historians and literary scholars. For all its idiosyncrasies, the Bannatyne MS remains, along with the contemporary Maitland MSS, one of the most valuable literary compilations in Scotland’s history. Without the efforts of George Bannatyne and his circle of friends and family during those uncertain plague-ridden months in 1568, our knowledge of the state of literature in Britain during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries would be much darker.

“Heir endis this buik, writtin in tyme of pest, 

Quhen we fra labor was compeld to rest

Into the thre last monethis of the year,

Frome oure Redimaris birth, to knaw it heir,

Ane thowsand is, fyve hundreth, threscoir awcht;

Off this purpoiss namair it neiddis be tawcht,

Swa till conclude, God grant ws all gude end,

And eftir deth eternall lyfe ws send.”

National Library of Scotland Digitisation

Hunterian Club Edition (x) (x) (x) (x)

Scottish Texts Society Edition

 ‘Memorials of George Bannatyne’ (includes extracts from the Memorial Book)

Notes and References:

* The actual word used for William Fisher is ‘eme’, in contrast to the word ‘uncle’ which is used for George Taillefeir. I may have to do some more digging to establish the exact relationship, but as ‘eme’ usually (though not always) meant uncle I had to go with that for now.

** Without wanting to bore the reader TOO much (and I am aware of how long the above post is) I also wanted to raise a question of my own about where the MS. might have been written in the hopes that someone might be able to help. This question may be the result of a gap in my reading but try as I might I can find no textual reference to the MS. having been compiled in a ‘country retreat’, as the N.L.S., Evelyn S. Newlyn, and others state. All I can find is William Tod Ritchie’s comment that a ‘local tradition’ in Angus claims that the book was written in the north-eastern turret of Bannatyne House, Newtyle. This property was obtained by George’s father James in 1562, but it’s not clear that the tower in question was actually in existence in 1568. Otherwise I’ve not been able to find a source for the statement that Bannatyne left Edinburgh for the country during the plague of 1568, though certainly this was something which those inhabitants of medieval and early modern towns who had the means did do (as in Boccacio’s ‘Decameron’). This did occur in Edinburgh in 1568/9 as well, as evidenced by a letter which the Bishop of Orkney sent to his brother-in-law Sir Archibald Napier of Merchiston (father of the famous mathematician John Napier) in the same year. In it he recommends that due to Merchiston’s proximity to the Burgh Muir where plague victims were then quarantined, Napier should send his children north or west of the city into the southern Highlands:

“for, be the nummer of seik folk that gais out of the toun, the muir is abill to be ouirspred, and it can not be bot throw the nearness of your place, and the indigence of thame that ar put out, thai sall continewallie repair aboutte your roume, and throu thair conversatioun, infect sum of your servandis, quhairby thai sall precipitat yourself and your children in maist extreme danger; and as I se ye hef foirsene the same for the young folk, quhais bluid is in maist perrell to be infectit first, and therefoir purpois to send thame away to Menteith quhair I wald wiss at God that ye war yourself, without offence of authoritie, or of your band, sua that your housss gat na skaith. Bot yit, Schir, thair is ane midway quhilk ye suld not omit, quhilk is to withdraw you fra that syid of the toun to sum houss upon the north syid of the samin, quairof ye may hef  in borrowing quhen ye sall hef to do, to wit, the Gray-cruik, Innerlethis self, Weirdle, or sic uther placis as ye culd chose within ane myle; quhairinto I wald suppois ye wald be in les danger than in Merchanstoun; and close up your houssis, your grangeis, your barnis and all, and suffer na man cum therin, quhll it plesit God to put ane stay to this grete plage, and in the mean tyme, maid you to live upoun your penny, or on sic thing as comis to you out of the Lennos or Menteith; quhilk, gif ye do not, I se ye will ruine yourself”

In the absence of any evidence of the Bannatynes taking such measures, I would argue that it might still be possible that the MS was written in Edinburgh (in which case one has to wonder if Bannatyne ever witnessed a tenement’s inhabitants singing that popular hit ‘Ane Ballat Maid off the Tyme the Chefe put the Sunne schyne on Leith”). In any case, whether it was written in Angus or Edinburgh or somewhere else entirely, Bannatyne himself testifies that they were unable to go about their business as usual and so he may have found himself stuck in the house with parents, servants, and at least seven siblings- it is unclear whether this was conducive to his work on the manuscript!

Selected References:

- Obviously I consulted all three versions of the MS linked to above, as well as “Memorials of George Bannatyne”, printed by the Bannatyne Club (for the Memorial Book) and also linked above. 

- “Extracts from the Records of the Burgh of Edinburgh, 1528-1557″, edited by J.D. Marwick

- “Memoirs of John Napier of Merchistoun”, by Mark Napier

- “An Urban History of the Plague: Socio-Economic, Political and Medical Impacts in a Scottish Community, 1500-1650″, by Karen Jillings

- “The Bannatyne Manuscript: A Sixteenth Century Poetical Miscellany”, J.T.T. Brown, in the Scottish Historical Review (link)

- “The Bannatyne Manuscript: A Marian Anthology”, A.A. MacDonald in the Innes Review

- “The Literary Culture of Early Modern Scotland”, Sebastian Verweij

- “The Interaction Between Literature and History in Queen Mary’s Edinburgh: The Bannatyne Manuscript and its Prosopographical Context”, by Theo van Heijnsbergen in “The Renaissance in Scotland: Studies in Literature, Religion, History, and Culture Offered to John Durkan”, edited by A.A. MacDonald, Michael Lynch, and Ian B. Cowan.

“The Wryttar to the Reidaris: Editing Practices and Politics in the Bannatyne Manuscript”, by Evelyn S. Newlyn

[richincolor]

Author Interview with Mayra Cuevas

Today we will get to know CNN producer and debut author Mayra Cuevas. Her book SALTY, BITTER, SWEET releases today.

Seventeen-year-old aspiring chef Isabella Fields’ family life has fallen apart after the death of her Cuban abuela and the divorce of her parents. She moves in with her dad and his new wife in France, where Isabella feels like an outsider in her father’s new life, studiously avoiding the awkward, “Why did you cheat on Mom?” conversation.

The upside of Isabella’s world being turned upside down? Her father’s house is located only 30 minutes away from the restaurant of world-famous Chef Pascal Grattard, who runs a prestigious and competitive international kitchen apprenticeship. The prize job at Chef Grattard’s renowned restaurant also represents a transformative opportunity for Isabella, who is desperate to get her life back in order.

But how can Isabella expect to hold it together when she’s at the bottom of her class at the apprenticeship, her new stepmom is pregnant, she misses her abuela dearly, and a mysterious new guy and his albino dog fall into her life?

Crystal: Mayra, thanks so much for taking the time to answer a few questions about your writing life and your debut novel SALTY, BITTER, SWEET. What does writing mean to you and when did you begin to consider yourself a writer?

Mayra: It was in the eighth grade. I was really into Julia de Burgos’ poetry back then and only beginning to understand the healing power of the written word. Julia’s work inspired me to write my own poems, as a way to cope with some difficulties at home. After many tries, I wrote a poem that I thought was pretty good — about how your feelings can be like a storm. My English teacher at the time, Mr. Antonio Colorado, was this super encouraging person. He knew I loved books and always lent me new titles to read and pushed me to work harder on my poetry. I gave him a copy of the poem I had written and he asked me if he could read it in class. I agreed, under the condition that he did not reveal my name. I mean, it was eighth grade, I didn’t want this to be the end of my social life. But when he read it, everyone went quiet and listened. And something magical happened, I felt connected to everyone in the room. In that moment, my words mattered and I felt seen for probably the first time. And what was even more amazing, after he read the poem, there was a discussion and people were talking about my words and how it affected them. I’ll never forget it.

Crystal: How has your career as a journalist prepared you for writing young adult novels? Was it a fairly smooth transition?

Mayra: No! (laughs hysterically) I *thought* it would be a smooth transition! But boy was I wrong. When I started writing fiction back in 2012 I remember thinking, ‘Oh I’ve been a professional journalist for over ten years, how hard can it be to write a novel?’ Well, as it turns out, writing a novel is very hard. And getting published is even harder. But there are two skills that transferred from journalism into publishing: 1) resilience and 2) working with editors.

Years of getting my story pitches rejected prepared me for the soul-crushing rejection I faced in the publishing world. My first manuscript was rejected by 200 agents! And somehow I managed to keep going.    

My news background also prepared me to work with editors. I had lots of practice getting my news stories edited, nitpicked and pulled apart — that’s just the nature of the news business. And it’s no different in publishing.

Crystal: I’m guessing you’ve spent quite a bit of time in kitchens. What are some of your most interesting cooking experiences or other memorable moments around food?

Mayra: I’m a total foodie so when it came time to research Salty, Bitter, Sweet I went all out!

I reached out to the amazing Carla Tomasko, the pastry chef at Bacchanalia, one of Atlanta’s top restaurants. She agreed to serve as my guide through the workings of a real high-end kitchen. She also shared her story of working as a woman in a male-dominated environment and as an immigrant from Ecuador. She also recounted how her Latin roots helped shape her craft.

The time I spent in Bacchanalia’s kitchen was amazing! I got to see how the executive chefs prepared the day’s menu, how they selected ingredients and crafted the most exquisite dishes. All the while, I was taking copious notes of every detail I could use to make Isa’s journey as authentic as possible. I think it paid off because it seems to be everyone’s favorite part of the book!

Crystal: What do you love most about your characters Isa and Diego?

Mayra: They are two young people who are going through their own private pain — as we all do. At first, Isa sees him as a threat to the delicate balance of her new life. And in a way she is right to feel threatened, because Diego has arrived to upend everything she thought she wanted. In turn, Isa will help Diego make peace with his own life decisions.  

Yes, there are some romantic moments, but it’s mostly about meeting someone who sees you for the first time and loves you in spite of all the broken bits.

Crystal: Though some things in Isa’s life seem to have some relationship to parts of your own life, were there things you needed to research as you wrote your way through this story?

Mayra: There were two main veins of research: the world of haute cuisine and the multiple locations where the book is set — six cities in total.

For the kitchen research, I interviewed and spent time with two amazing female chefs: Carla Tomasko, the pastry chef at Bacchanalia, one of Atlanta’s top restaurants, and Daniella Fitzgerald, who spends her days cooking for rich folks in yachts. She had some hilarious stories!

I also read memoirs like 32 Yolks: From My Mother’s Table to Working the Line by Veronica Chambers and Eric Ripert, and watched documentaries like Pressure Cooker and Three Stars.  

For the travel research I watched a million YouTube videos and read as many travel blogs. I also engaged an all-things-France expert to make sure every detail of Isa’s journey through Lyon was authentic.

Crystal: Are any of your favorite foods mentioned in the story? Can you tell us about one or two?

Mayra: Like Isa and her abuela Lala I enjoy bridging my two worlds by making Spanish flan and All-American apple pie — my husband’s favorite.

The flan recipe belongs to my Venezuelan friend Paula. I love that recipe because it’s been handed down through generations and it survived a political revolution.

Crystal: Have there been any big surprises along the road to publication?

Mayra: The most amazing surprise was being invited to join Las Musas, a Latina authors collective. These women are incredibly talented, supportive and generous. The founders did a wonderful job of creating a space where we can uplift each other and our work, share important news, and have each other’s back. I love these women and I’m humbled and proud to be part of this community.  

Crystal: Are there any current YA books that you wish had existed when you were younger?

Mayra: All of the books from Las Musas!

Crystal: *Hurries off to visit the webpage for Las Musas* That looks like a wonderful group! Can you tell us anything about your current projects or your writing plans for the future?

Mayra: My short story Resilient will be published as part of the anthology FORESHADOW: The Magic of Reading & Writing YA (Algonquin Young Readers). I’m also co-writing a novel with Atlanta author Marie Marquardt, which can be best described as a feminist unicorn.

Crystal: Thanks again for your willingness to share your time and even your recipe with us! We wish you all the best with your debut.

Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Mayra Cuevas is a professional journalist and fiction writer who prefers love stories with a happy ending. Her debut novel, SALTY, BITTER, SWEET, launched March 3 with HarperCollins/Blink. Her debut fiction short story was selected by best-selling author Becky Albertalli to appear in the Foreshadow serial anthology Issue 04 in April 2019. She is currently a special projects producer and writer for CNN. She keeps her sanity by practicing Buddhist meditation and serving on the Board of Directors of Kadampa Meditation Center Georgia. She lives with her husband, also a CNN journalist, and their cat, in the charming town of Norcross, Georgia. She is also the step-mom to two amazing young men who provide plenty of inspiration for her stories. You can visit her online at mayracuevas.com.

[citylightsbooks]

5 Questions with Megan Fernandes, Author of Good Boys

Megan Fernandes is a writer and academic living in New York City. She is the author of The Kingdom and After (Tightrope Books 2015) and the new book of poems, Good Boys (published by Tin House). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the New Yorker, Tin House, Ploughshares, Denver Quarterly, Chicago Review, Boston Review, Rattle, Pank, the Common, Guernica, the Academy of American Poets, and McSweeney's Internet Tendency, among others. She is a poetry reader for The Rumpus and an Assistant Professor of English at Lafayette College. She holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an MFA in poetry from Boston University. She reads from her new book Good Boys with special guests at City Lights Bookstore on Tuesday, February 25th.

***

City Lights: If you’ve been to City Lights before, what’s your memory of the visit? If you haven’t been here before, what are you expecting?

Megan Fernandes: Of all the places I’m reading this Spring (and it’s probably not politic to say this), I am most excited to read at City Lights. I’ve never been, but I understood at a very young age that the bookstore symbolized possibility, spontaneity, digression, lostness, community, etc. As a teenager, I read a lot of Beat literature, my favorites being Dharma Bums, In the Night Café, and everything Ginsberg. I was compelled by their portraits of America’s expansiveness. And I also just think as an immigrant kid not born in the USA, the Beats gave me some sense of American geography. I went to Colorado for the first time last year and I had this memory of my first impression of Colorado as a place described in On the Road. When traveling across the country, I often have Ferlinghetti’s feverish, twitchy, carnivalesque poetics in my head. I also think in this indirect way, Beat literature shaped some of my thoughts around feminist thinking as I was conscious of my orientation as outside certain privileges of the “male, womanizing adventurer” often romanticized in Beat lit. I had to interrogate what it meant to feel intimacies with Ginsberg and Duncan who were destabilizing masculinities and cultural logics of hate. 

And so what I learned from City Lights and Beat lit is really something about the relationship between myth-making and counter-culture communities. I’m understanding the truly expansive network of the movement in so much more detail right now while reading an advanced copy of a fabulous new book called The Beats: A Literary History by Steven Belletto. 

What are you reading right now?

I’m reading a book called Dapper Dan: Made in Harlem, co-written by Dapper Dan himself and my good friend, Mikael Awake. It’s a history of Dapper Dan’s iconic work in fashion, of course, while being really intimate. And it’s just as much a history of his family’s internal dynamics and, through his family, New York City at large. In particular, 1970’s NYC is so vividly, brilliantly wrought in this book.

There’s this one section where Dap is at Iona College at a lecture on protohistory and the professor, a Czech immigrant, tells the class that “In order for man to have survived during those ancient times… he must have had powers that he doesn’t have now. The only people that could possibly still have these powers today are the black and brown people on the planet” and when Dap hears this, he is transfixed. He says: “This is one of the most esteemed scholars at Iona College telling a packed lecture hall that black and brown people were the only ones on the planet who still had spiritual powers. How come this was my first time hearing about that? I looked around. I was the only black student in the class. I wasn’t tired anymore. He had my full attention… I said to myself, This is what I need to know. This is how I need to formulate myself.” I’m loving how the book captures these intense moments of transformation. I love that word choice: formulate. What poetic agency is modeled in that word? I needed that word the moment I read it. 

Recently, I’ve also read Samiya Bashir’s Field Theories and Edgar Kunz’s Tap Out. Samiya wrote this legitimately weird and imaginative book that feels like it’s made out of the time-space continuum. Some cosmic materiality is really showing up in that book. I remember this line: “A body. A zoo. A lovely savannah. Walls of clear, clean glass” and I’m just on a ride with the musicality of her shifting assonance. Plus, I know that writers like June Jordan and Toni Cade Bambara are operating influences/specters of the book and you can feel that energy. Edgar’s book is more narrative and quieter, but so devastating. I sort of get what makes his speakers tenderize if that makes sense. I think it’s the same phenomena that tenderizes me, too.

Some of my favorite novels of recent years includes A Questionable Shape by Bennett Sims, The Small Backs of Children by Lidia Yuknavitch, Sonora by Hannah Lillith Assadi, and very recently, The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead.

What book or writer do you always find yourself recommending?

I think Jean Toomer’s Cane is the most beautiful book of the 20th century. I remember just being blown away by its call and response, the repeating imagery of sun and smoke and pines. That book is so stunning. Other astounding work that I always recommend includes Mebvh McGuckian’s Captain Lavender, Anne Carson’s The Autobiography of Red, Evie Shockley’s The New Black, Franz Wright’s Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, Eleni Sikelianos’ Body Clock, Jorie Graham’s The Errancy, Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, and Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann’s translations of Rilke. Those are my hard-hitters. Those books are why I became a poet. 

What writers/artists/people do you find the most influential to the writing of this book and/or your writing in general?

You know, I collected poems while I was writing and editing this book. And I think those specific poems created a kind of constellation around me, almost protective, that kept me writing. Some of those poems include “The Long Recovery” by Ellen Bass, “A Matter of Balance,” by Evie Shockley, “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, “I am Not Seaworthy” by Toni Morrison, “Becoming Regardless” by Jack Spicer, “A New Bride Almost Visible in Latin” by Jack Gilbert, “To the Young Who Want to Die” by Gwendolyn Brooks and many, many others. Definitely O’Hara as well. He never leaves me. The most important poem of that little self-curated archive is Frank Bidart’s “Visions at 74” where he writes: “To love existence / is to love what is indifferent to you.” I remember reading that line and just losing it. I have been guided by so much of Bidart. And maybe my book is a little bit about how to sustain rage in the face of that which is indifferent to you, what cannot love you (both personally and abstractly). How do you sustain rage so as to not fall into despair?

I also listened to a variety of music while writing and editing. A mix between contemporary sad kid hip-hop, old school jazz and blues, gospel, 80’s bands, pop culture queens, 1970’s hypnotic modal vamp, classical Spanish guitar, electronic pop, really pretty varied. A few names that come to mind: KOTA the Friend, NoName, Vince Staples, Travis Scott, Miles Davis Quintet, Bessie Smith, Sam Cooke, The Knocks, Solange, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane, Big Mama Thornton, Miriam Makeba, Kamasi Washington, Thompson Twins, Misfits, Bowie, Talking Heads, Tears for Fears, Cher, Whitney Houston, Portishead, Goldfrapp, Memphis Slim, Dinah Washington, Alberto Iglesias, Gustavo Santaolalla, Holychild, Blood Orange, etc.

If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?

My grandpa played violin on a ship that sailed between Tanga, Tanzania and Goa, India. I never had the chance to meet him. He died when my dad was sixteen, but I always thought about what that journey might have looked and felt like, its many hardships, but also the wonder of gazing out at the sea playing strings. For that reason, I’d love to open a bookstore that focused specifically on Indian Ocean diaspora and sold books exclusively by authors working, uncovering, or investigating the literature of that oceanic rim. I think there is something rich in thinking about books not necessarily focused on nation-statehood but thinking more about a kind of social-imaginary with a literature that is messy in its conceptualization and crosses, migrates, misses, and mythologizes across many cultures over generations. You could have sections on food, underwater exploration, piracy, long-distance intimacy, trade routes, empire, transnational feminism. I like the idea of a bookstore that is anti-genre and instead, organized by associative thinking and imagination. It would be a logistical nightmare. You would never find what you were looking for, but you might find something you didn’t know existed.

So yes, I’d vote for a little homegrown network of bookstores in India, East Africa, and actually, maybe one of them in Lisbon which is a city that has a long (and problematic) history with the Indian Ocean. I’ve spent a lot of time in Lisbon the past eight years of my life, spending time visiting family and researching the history of the Portuguese empire especially as it relates to my family history (my folks are third generation East African Portuguese colonized Indians). I have a lot of conflicting homelands which is a way of saying that there are times when I feel like I have nothing but a rootless present. That’s something I investigate in my work, that weird (a)temporality. And I’m drawn to the particular light of Lisbon which is quite unusual. I’d call the bookstore “Malaika” which means “Angel” in Swahili and is the favorite folk song of my parents who grew up in Tanzania. I like the idea of a bookstore in Lisbon with the name in Swahili run by a Goan-Canadian-American woman. That’s the world I grew up in… one of multiplicities. 

[fortescq]

* ╰   SYDNEY PARK  ;  21 ;  SHE / HER  ——  wow,  ALICE  FORTESCUE  sure  has  grown  !  it’s  almost  hard  to  believe  they  actually  passed  recruitment  …  i  still  remember  them  being  so  SELF-RELIANT  &  AMBITIOUS,  now  they  just  seem   CYNICAL  &  SELF-RIGHTEOUS.  guess  they’re  special  if  they  made  it  this  far.  word  in  the  halls  is  they’re  training  to  be  an  AUROR  but  i  don’t  think  they’ll  make  it  out  alive.  after  all,  they’ve  shown  signs  of  being  AGAINST  BLOOD  PURITY  IN  THE  WAR.

PINTEREST  !

alice  eve  fortescue  lived  a  very  different  childhood  than  she  could  have.  she  was  born  alice  eve  selwyn,  the  only  child  of  leopold  selwyn  &  estelle  selwyn  (  née  fortescue  ).  leopold  was  high  up  in  the  department  of  magical  law  enforcement.  estelle  came  from  a  rich  lineage  of  kneazle  breeding.  they  were  well  known  and  respected  in  wizarding  society.

when  alice  was  two  years  old,  leopold  and  estelle  were  killed  by  a  werewolf  while  on  an  evening  out.  the  werewolf  was  never  caught.

this  drew  a  lot  of  media  attention.  some  say  the  attack  was  a  major  trigger  in  the  shift  of  the  public’s  attitude  towards  lycanthropy.  and,  unfortunately,  heavily  influenced  alice’s  attitude  towards  lycanthropy  as  well.

and  what  to  do  with  young  alice  ?  though  forgotten  by  most,  estelle  had  a  brother,  younger,  shabbier.  florean.  opting  out  of  the  family  kneazle-breeding  business,  he  instead  ran  a  small  ice  cream  shop  in  diagon  alley  with  his  partner,  silas.  the  ice  cream  shop  didn’t  make  them  much  money,  but  they  welcomed  young  alice  with  open  arms.

this  is  where  alice  spent  her  childhood:  the  sun-baked  streets  of  diagon  alley,  the  ebb  and  flow  of  wizarding  london,  a  cramped  but  cozy  flat  above  the  ice  cream  shop,  air  thick  with  steam  and  spices,  mismatched  chairs  and  loveseats  spilling  from  the  living  room  into  the  kitchen.  this  is  how  alice  spent  her  childhood:  trips  into  muggle  london  with  uncle  flo  and  silas,  bare  feet  on  the  cobblestone,  the  clatter  and  clang  of  counting  sickles  and  knuts  after  a  long  day’s  work.

thursday  nights  were  potlucks  with  the  other  diagon  alley  shopkeepers  and  some  other  of  her  uncles’  friends,  crammed  knee  to  knee  on  their  living  room  couches,  mismatched  chairs  cluttering  the  room  haphazardly,  the  room  full  of  laughter  and  conversation  about  politics  and  current  events  alice  didn’t  quite  understand.

growing  up,  alice  spent  much  more  time  around  adults  than  children  her  own  age.  she  loved  spending  time  with  her  uncles  and  their  friends,  and  if  you  asked  her,  she  wouldn’t  say  she  missed  out  on  anything  by  not  having  friends  her  own  age.  but  it  did  result  in  a  child  far  more  serious  and  mature  than  her  age  would  suggest.

sometimes  on  weekends  her  uncles  would  take  her  into  muggle  london  on  the  tube,  visiting  places  like  the  british  museum,  and  hyde  park,  and  the  cinema.  and  memorably,  london’s  first  pride  march  when  alice  was  thirteen.

silas  was  a  muggleborn,  and  he  wanted  alice  to  experience  the  culture  he  grew  up  with.  alice  enjoyed  their  trips,  but  she  never  really  understood  their  importance  until  she  started  at  hogwarts.  (  where,  by  the  way,  she  was  very  nearly  a  hatstall  as  the  hat  debated  between  hufflepuff  and  slytherin,  but  ultimately  chose  hufflepuff.  )

that’s  when  she  realized  for  the  first  time  how  different  her  parents  had  been  than  her  loving  uncle  flo.  they  had  been  part  of  an  elite  pureblood  society,  who  looked  down  their  noses  at  muggles  and  muggleborns,  who  were  for  everything  uncle  flo  was  against,  and  against  everything  uncle  flo  was  for.  alice  didn’t  know  what  to  think.  she  had  always  imagined  her  parents  to  be  kind,  wonderful  people.

strangers  looked  at  her  with  pity  (  poor  little  orphaned  alice  fortescue,  living  with  her  disgraced  uncle  with  barely  enough  to  get  by  )  and  oh  boy,  it  made  alice’s  blood  boil.  she’s  faced  a  lot  of  judgement  and  prejudice  in  her  life  —  against  her,  against  her  uncles,  about  their  living  situation  —  can  you  blame  her  for  that  chip  on  her  shoulder  ?

she  was  proud,  and  she  was  stubborn,  and  she  was  determined  to  prove  them  wrong.  so  she  threw  herself  into  classes,  and  extracurriculars,  and  spoke  loudly  about  her  belief  systems.  she  excelled  in  hogwarts,  and  made  head  girl  for  her  year  (  the  year  above  the  marauders  ).  when  the  opportunity  presented  itself  to  be  recruited  to  edin,  alice  knew  this  was  where  she  belonged.  if  she  was  accepted  to  edin,  she  would’ve  proven  herself  beyond  any  argument.

she  made  a  mistake  in  the  potion  identification  portion  of  the  testing  period.  alice  was  not  accepted  to  edin.

she  received  her  rejection.  she  had  all  sensitive  information  wiped  from  her  mind.  she  was  humbled.  but  like  a  true  hufflepuff,  she  didn’t  give  up,  even  though  she  knew  ‘  receiving  a  second  invitation  is  RARE  ’.  

alice  is  the  rare  exception.

after  her  potion  slip-up,  she  devoted  herself  to  fixing  her  mistake.  she  checked  out  books  on  potions  from  the  wizarding  library.  she  argued  her  way  into  a  potioneer  apprenticeship.  she  eat,  slept,  and  breathed  potions.

and  she  received  a  second  invitation.  this  time,  she  passed.

you’d  think  being  one  of  only  a  very  select  few  to  be  re-invited  to  edin  would  finally  satisfy  alice’s  need  to  prove  herself,  but  you  would  be  wrong.  alice  only  saw  her  initial  failure,  instead  of  her  eventual  triumph.  if  she  was  competitive  before,  she’s  even  worse  now.  

she  doesn’t  only  hold  herself  to  high  standards  —  she  holds  the  people  around  her  to  high  standards  as  well.  she  does  her  best  to  practice  the  values  her  uncles  taught  her,  kindness and  honesty  and  loyalty,  but  she  also  expects  very  little  from  people.  

she’s  fiercely  independent  and  insists  on  doing  everything  herself,  since  she  thinks  other  people  will  disappoint  her.  but  just  because  she  expects  disappointment  doesn’t  mean  she’ll  forgive  it  —  this  girl  is  self-righteous  and  holds  grudges.  always  honest,  sometimes  to  a  fault.

can  take  herself  seriously  sometimes  if  you  couldn’t  already  tell.  not  very  good  at  taking  constructive  criticism.

some  other  things: 

BIG  aquarius  sun  &  capricorn  moon:

in  addition,  you  are  inventive  and  fearless  about  expressing  your  beliefs  and  views.  you  believe  the  individual  is  completely  accountable  for  himself  and  the  flaws  of  others  can  consequently  make  you  impatient.  nevertheless,  you  do  have  deep  humanitarian  persuasions.  you  are  not  mean  or  heartless.  because  you  are  so  independent  and  secure  it  is  hard  for  you  to  comprehend  individuals  who  have  psychological  problems.  tolerance  is  something  you  must  learn.  more  compassion  is  needed  toward  those  who  do  not  share  your  gifts.  ( x )

bit  of  a  muggle  nerd  thanks  to  silas

has  a  bad  habit  of  biting  her  nails,  so  she  chews  gum  to  stop  herself  from  biting  her  nails

a  good  cook

probably  wrote  for  the  hogwarts  newspaper.  also  does  slam  poetry  but  very  lowkey,  ONLY  for  her  uncles  &  the  thursday  night  potlucks.  takes  inspiration  from  the  beat  generation

on  the  shorter  side  –  all  of  five  foot  four  inches

someone  help  her  calm  down  :/

[mcveriicks]

have you seen [ MAVERICK ST. JAMES ] since the storm? some say they look like [ HERMAN TOMMERAAS ] but they’re [ TWENTY-TWO ]  & go by [ THE PARADOX ].  [ HE ] lived in halloway for [ THREE YEARS ] & they are originally from [ WASHINGTON, D.C. ]. before the town vanished they were studying [ PHILOSOPHY ] and lived at [ UNI BLVD ]. most people knew the [ CISMALE ] as [ +CLEVER ] but i’ve heard they can also be [ -APATHETIC ]. for some reason, they feel [ UNEASY ] about the town’s disappearance. ( riley, 20, she/her, est )

hello !!! my name is riley and i’m ????? so so extremely very much excited to get the ball rollin, down n dirty, into this rp !! i’m a sucker for angst and sadness, so … expect MUCH of that w me !! mav is a new muse of mine but i’m SUPER excited to get to dev him with all of you guys !! below the cut is a … long-ass intro post bc i have no chill !! if, per chance, you’d like to plot w me and my know-it-all, assholey but suprisingly soft child, please feel free to GIVE THIS POST A LIKE or to DM ME ( either tumblr or discord i check both, i promise i don’t bite ) !!!

tw: drugs.

* / BACKGROUND.

maverick hobbes st. james was born into a life filled to the absolute brim of expectation. his mother and father met at halloway’s law school, and both went on to become highly respectable lawyers who dealt with constitutional law in washington d.c.; they work highly demanding jobs, which often left maverick, who is an only child, alone at their impressively decorated family townhouse, staring at family photos and wondering how his definition of family had become so different to his friends’ growing up.

growing up in middle and high school, maverick assumed that getting good grades and excelling at school would make his parents proud, would get them to turn their attention to his successes –– but surprise, surprise, they didn’t. they’d pat him on the back as they headed out the door to tend to their daily schedules –– that is, if he was lucky enough to see them in the morning.

he studied. hard. trying to understand the ins and outs of what his parents did, trying to see if following in their footsteps by studying law would warrant a smile or beam of pride. it didn’t. but it still got him an acceptance to his parents’ alma mater, halloway university. he made friends quickly –– he always did. always the charismatic friend, he’s learned to rely more on his friends than his family in his life.

when maverick was a senior in high school, he finally reached an age to realize some of the shady deals his parents would make on the regular, the random bonuses his parents whispered about finally making sense to him. one case in particular had apparently caused one of his classmates’ parents to be publicly humiliated for a scandal and an incident that was apparently unrelated to their careers –– but ruined them in the process.

he felt guilt, himself, knowing that his parents could be making deals like that every day. it made him shake his head, made him cry into his pillow, made him absolutely disgusted to call people like his mother and father his own parents. he wrote so many fucking speeches that he’d recite to them once he got the chance, berating them for their practices and lack of morals in their workplace. but they never came home –– and hypocritical as he was, he still enjoyed the fruits of his parents’ work. they gave him unlimited checks with his name on them, as if it was some sort of sick version of love.

while maverick was fulfilling some of his general requirements, he fell in love with philosophy, with questioning life and ethical choices that mankind has made in the past, and would make in the future. he ended up pivoting his studies, moving from pre-law to philosophy at the end of his freshman year of his undergraduate studies.

and of course –– with this twist in the system, maverick is about to make this world his playground, living in his very own simulation of how a fresh new world reacts to infinite freedoms. he’s partially excited to see what will unfold, partially scared that things will fall to absolute shit ( ever the pessimist, maverick st. james ! ) because he has little faith that his company will collectively make the right decisions.

* / PERSONALITY.

maverick st. james is quite the paradox ( hence, the label ! ). he’s charismatic, funny, and has a witty sense of humor –– and is generally appreciated by his peers because he’s able to move conversation and discussion without making topics seem dry. and generally, he’s only like this in classes that he’s passionate about –– otherwise, you’d see him in the very back corner, doodling amongst his haphazardly written notes. what’s funny is he used to always be like this –– happy, smiley, obviously intelligent and driven. but it all sort of changed when he had this big epiphany that some people aren’t what they seem like on the outside ( re: his parents ).

he’s certainly a bit arrogant, given that he’s intelligent, innovative, and clever, and knows it –– however, even if he might not show it on the outside, he appreciates a good challenger. he thinks it keeps his wit sharp, and of course, his ego would never show it, but he does appreciate learning from people. after all, his passion in philosophy makes him certainly interested in how minds work.

at social events, you can probably see him flirting his ass off, but always having a good time, too. he’s definitely the type to sleep around, but he likes to pick at people’s brains, too. probably the most deep-ass pillow-talker halloway has ever seen. it probably borders on the line of being too romantic with flings –– the way he asks questions, but also borders on being annoying.

those who happen to get to know maverick outside of the surface-level stuff, outside the initial cockiness and flirtatious front he puts on will know that he’s actually quite thoughtful. his lonely childhood has made him extremely loyal to those who have shown him similar trust and friendship –– he would never turn his back on them. he asks probing questions, is a good listener –– perhaps because he’s interested in human decision making, but is also because he doesn’t quite know what it’s like to be loved unconditionally –– though he wants to. he’ll hold back hair and rub a friend’s back while they yak, walk his friends home, maybe throw a few punches or two –– but spicy comebacks are really more his speed.

deep down, what almost no one knows is that he’s really quite soft. he passes his curiosity off as wanting to understand people, when really it’s a mechanism for hoping someone asks him questions in return, to give him the time of day he wished his parents had given him. 

* / AESTHETICS.

coffee-stained mugs, walking with headphones in, untied shoelaces, black hoodies, a cheeky smirk, small books in his back pocket, writing in the margins, quoting old authors on a daily basis, incessant eye-rolling, pen ink stains, unmade bed, mismatched socks, floral ties, empty bottles of liquor, rose thorn pricks, old worn poetry books, polished dress shoes, calloused fingers, unlit cigarettes between teeth.

* / HEADCANONS.

funnily enough, maverick’s name means ‘independent, a noncomformist’, which is exactly the path that he has taken to stray away from his family’s expectations of practicing law, specifically constitutional law as a career. he’s like. nah. fuck that.

maverick has some form of synesthesia, which allows him to remember a lot more than the average person. he associates colors, smells, sounds, to words –– and allows him to efficiently study any subjects he doesn’t have immediate passion for.

in the privacy of his own bedroom, he sometimes writes poetry and sketches his thoughts and muses –– when he knows he’s in complete privacy. faces and features that appear in his sketchbooks are often those he’s thinking of often, those who intrigue him. he’s actually quite good a sketching, maybe not quite as good at writing poetry.

tw drugs. he more than dabbles in drug use, smoking marijuana maybe every other day, while partaking in harder drugs like cocaine and adderall and others probably once a week. he feels like he’s in control of his use, but it may start to get the best of him. end tw.

maverick is left-handed. he hates that he gets pen ink stains when he draws, writes poetry, takes notes. his left palm is probably perennially covered with ink.

though he’s often wearing headphones ( airpods, of course, the nerve of this rich kid ), half the time, nothing’s playing. sometimes he forgets to press play on his phone, sometimes he purposely likes listening to decision-making and conversations of strangers. it lets him think about the nature of mankind.

maverick’s favorite philosopher is albert camus, known for his work that heavily developed the idea of absurdism ( much to do with the meaning of life, and human inability to discern an answer ). 

* / WANTED PLOTS. 

CHECK OUT MY WANTED PLOTS PAGE HERE !

childhood friends: again, someone who would have known him from pre-cynical, arrogant asshole days. they could be friends now still, 

ex-friends: perhaps maverick went a bit too far with the questions, about trying to probe into someone’s mind. maybe for this reason, or for others, these two fell out of touch / argued and might be forced into new places due to the disappearance of the other townspeople.

unlikely friends: maverick’s reputation isn’t exactly favorable to some crowds. maybe they became friends in one of their shared classes or through mutual friends, and actually get along well, despite coming from different backgrounds / having different values. they probably see a bit of a deeper side to mav than most people !!

good influence (?!): maverick gets into his shit, has probably a less-than-favorable reputation, but he still cares about people, deep deep down. maybe your muse is a bit lost, and maverick is worried about them and wants to help them get back on track –– especially with all the changes happening in the society !! we can plot lil details about this, esp bc it’s a v unique side of mav i’d love to explore !! ( insp: x, x, x )

bad influences: those who partake in the sins that maverick just loves to lap up. they feed off of each others’ energy, often encouraging more drinking, more drugs, more sex. it’s a bit of a never-ending circle, but one that maverick keeps coming back to, for some reason. ( insp: x )

frenemies: this could be some sort of intellectual challenger kind of deal ? someone mav actually appreciates having in his life, though they butt heads a lot maybe for some reason !! ( insp: x )

disliked: they probably find maverick’s personality appalling or annoying, they probably find him pretentious af and super hypocritical for preaching so much about morals, when he drinks and uses drugs and just fucks around half the time. they could call him out for his flaws, or we could go down a completely different route of them having some weird history of mutual plots ??? so so much room for possibility here !!

+ have a couple more in my wanted plots tag here ! but literally, as a self-proclaimed angst and plot ho, please hmu with any and all ideas you might have !! i can’t wait to get started w all of u !!!

[afterjosephine-blog1]

victoria pedretti, she/her, cis female ✧*:･ﾟdid you see josephine “jo” walker the twenty-seven (104) year old ghost walking around halloweentown? they’re known as the romantic, makes sense since they tend be quite sentimental & mystical. they work as a florist & (failed) poet and spend a lot of time at halloweentown cemetery listening to what are you doing new year’s eve? by ella fitzgerald. they’ve always reminded me of new flowers on a decaying gravestone, a fallen chandelier in the middle of a mansion. wonder how they’re taking all the disruption in the town. ( may, 19, she/her, est )

triggers: death (she is a ghost), (mass?) murder, suicide

disclaimer: i’m bad at math and figuring out years and ages required a lot more math than i was ready for, so i’m hoping i get my timeline right ! pray for me !

born in 1915 (march 5, 1915 to be more exact - gotta get that chart), josephine’s family (the ‘nickname’ didn’t come in until later) came from generations of money earned and establishment garnered. also i have no clue what i just wrote i’m writing this first bullet last asdfhjl

when she was six, she had her first encounter with the dead or dying. she’d come across a baby bird who’d been pushed out of his nest too early and, unable to find the nest itself, decided she would pick it up and cradle it in her hands until it evidently passed on. it looked at peace. 

this is unnecessary information, but it’s good to note.

anyway, if you have the money, why not spend it? when josephine was seven, the walkers moved into a victorian mansion. the patriarch was fully under the belief that he would be the next nathaniel hawthorne –– he wasn’t worried about the family going broke while he forced them to let him focus on his writing, what considering all of the money they had at the time had been simple inheritance from generations of walkers.

(kind of important to note that the victorian era was actually... pretty recent? it ended in 1901 and this is all going down in 1922 so!)

within the mansion, they also has some much needed help –– it came with two butlers, two nannies, two maids, and two groundskeepers. they seldom had any use for the nannies.

there was definitely something off, though, and that ‘off’-ness just kept increasing over time. her mother claimed to hear things. she and her siblings claimed to see things. her father began retreating into himself... 

which is why they couldn’t move! he still had work to be done! a great novel doesn’t write itself in one year, silly! they couldn’t leave! he still needed advice!

i don’t want this intro to get super long so we’ll skip ahead about a year. suffice it to say that everyone was still on their bullshit. 

in 1925, when josephine and her twin brother were 10, her older sister was 12, and her older brother was 14, her dad full-on “heeeere’s JOHNNY”d them, then killed himself.

josephine and her twin brother (who’ll just be referred to as ‘her brother’ from this point forward) were the lone survivors of the walker family. as 10y/os, they both still fit in plenty of places that their father could never.

that being said, one of the maids had also made it unscathed. an agreement was made: they helped clean up the mess – she just couldn’t handle messes! – she would act as their guardian. josephine knew they were probably doing something wrong by cleaning it all up – cleaning up a whole-ass crime scene that included their family members – before any authorities arrived, but was she in too much shock to argue? maybe so.

after that, there were zero buyers. it was already expensive, but now there’d been a mass murder? who. 

considering the maid never left the grounds, this did put her out of work. they still had the walker inheritance to fall back on, something that had been unlocked to josephine and her brother five years later, but that was it.

we’re gonna skip ahead a little bit because this is getting long. all that’s happened of note between now and the next bullet: the maid literally never left the grounds. jo began getting called jo. she tried to go to college using some of the inheritance then dropped out. she trained to become a florist.

throughout the next many years of her life, jo began trying her hand at poetry. she ultimately failed at it, but... some people just really don’t know how to market themselves. even past attempting to truly become one, she continued writing in the hope that she might finally –– after over ten years –– make peace with the massacre.

by the time she was 25, she’d gotten married. by the time she was 25, she’d pushed everything to the back-burner. by the time she was 25, she hadn’t seen or thought of the maid in years. by the time she was 25, she was discussing starting a life with her new husband.

by the tail end of her life at 25, her brother had died.

because this is a wanted connection on the main, i’m going to leave the cause unclear.

just when she thought she’d gotten over everything, as emeril would say, ‘bam!’

her husband and friends tried to be of help, but it got to the ‘beyond’ point when she started seeing her brother

another note: on the wanted connection blurb, i made it utp whether he was ~haunting~ her or if she was just hallucinating, so we also gonna make that unclear!

two years, a divorce, and multiple burned bridges later –– jo thought she finally knew what had to be done to get it to stop. she had ‘rationalized’ it as best as she could. in a lot of lore, ghosts couldn’t move on to the next plane of existence until they’d made peace with something or other. maybe there was something integral about her?

so she greeted the maid who hadn’t aged a day in the past 27 years, then proceeded to hang herself.

 this would be kind of bittersweet tragic if it’d actually worked.

 instead, this bitch was suddenly just looking at her own body like “FUCK. I REALLY DID THAT FOR NOTHING.” and gained this sick scar that wrung around her neck like the noose had.

the maid was like “i mean ur never gonna have to worry about aging now tho so??”

as it turned out, they were just in the middle of plenty of families who’d gone mad and died in that house... as she had only figured out after she killed herself.

boy, was she mad!

all of this partial humor out of the way, for the next decades upon decades, she was at a loss. the maid said that, yes, she was physically capable of leaving, but why would she when it felt so magnetic anyway?

with this in mind... jo left. it took an extremely long time to understand how to turn visible, and then even longer to understand how to turn invisible again. apparently she didn’t need doors – like, that was new.

anyway. once she had gained an understanding of what she could and could not do (rest in peace, salt), she began just... doing everything she’d been doing while she was alive... over and over again...

every morning, she made bouquets that she wasn’t paid for. every afternoon, she visited the cemetery to lay them on the most derelict graves. every night, she went back to the mansion.

did she need to find a purpose in her ‘life’ in order to move on? was there something she needed to make peace with? or was she doomed to ‘live’ forever, doing the same things, feeling trapped by the same place?

and that, my friends, is where we leave off.

personality, we’re just going to use various tests/ideas: i knew she was a pisces, kae said she sounded like a scorpio moon – so pisces sun, scorpio moon, capricorn rising (i have a birth chart now) ; total and complete enneagram type 4 ; i honestly don’t use mbti that much anymore but probs infp ; i’m undecided between hufflepuff and gryffindor... then again, i never read the books i just know she isn’t a slytherin and ppl always forget about ravenclaw ; i think melancholic? possibly phlegmatic? j definitely not choleric or sanguine

my mind! it’s so powerful!

connection ideas:

twin brother wc is on the main !

her ex-husband... but make him some immortal or undead being that, therefore, would still be alive.

other writers she’s met through the years, be they in ‘recent’ years ( any time after 1942 adhsjfl ) or in what she’d consider to be ‘her’ years.

idk just. friends. some pretty loose stuff!

any type of connection can be w/ any gender btw!

i’m. not great at wcs, but i’ll keep them coming!

i’m also so open to brainstorming or checking yours out!

like this or hmu to plot !

*my discord is also @ john donne’s whore#5590 if you prefer discord! psa that it literally won’t let me use the mobile version tho which makes plotting there! harder!