#revenge against god

[hauntedbythenarrative]

Heaven is here, Florence + The Machine//Adonis, from Death (tr. by Samuel Hazo)//Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003), Quentin Tarantino//Girls against God, Florence + The Machine//Heaven is here//Blasphemies at the 5th street station, S. Osborn//Cassandra, Florence + The Machine

[wordstome]

*batman voice* computer. write me an ex-husband John Price story where he comes to rescue you even after years of not speaking to each other, reenacting the "You came?" "You called." scene from Sandman season 1 episode 11. quickest route. no freeways.

[orgasming-caterpillar]

The world would be a higher plane of existence if @musaafir-hun-yaaron and @chandu-photowala picked up my calls

[fortune-maiden]

Random TGCF AU of the day:

Space-time shenanigans result in main canon He Xuan wandering into an AU where the fate swap didn’t happen.

He ascends as a civil god, and is doing quite well for himself, only his presence has unexpected ramifications for a few people

SWD can no longer save his brother via fate swap. He is not giving up obviously and will find another way no matter who he has to screw over (though HX would really really like it if he didn’t screw someone else over thank you very much), but in the meantime he is very much devoted to keeping his little brother safe and under control.

A necessity probably given that this little brother is an anxious mess afraid of his own shadow, with only shades of the bright determined Shi Qingxuan of the main timeline. He’s got all the comfort and wealth he could ever need and zero sense of confidence or independence.

Also different is the new civil god Ling Wen. She’s closed off and unpopular and may or may not be responsible for some sabotage He Xuan keeps encountering. Oh well it’s nothing to worry about. With dwindling followers she’s well on her way out anyway…

[moondal514]

so has anyone written a shl-based wenzhou tgcf au were wen kexing is a ghost and gifts his ashes (in the form of his hairpin) as an unspoken romantic gesture to voluntarily banished heavenly official zhou zishu yet or am i gonna have to write it myself

[bigeloo]

Did I show him here before? who fucking knows anyways look at him now, at least

[obessivedork]

I LOVE doing a "Was always planning on betraying The Brotherhood" Fallout 4 run, it's so funny. Like why yes I did take the collect technical documents quest specifically to hoard them away from TBoS, why yes mister "Elder" Sir I will definitely, totally, inform you when I find a way into the Institute. Lol. Thanks for the power armour and energy weapons, losers 🤪🤙

[thegoldenavenger]

Here's a quick. Thing. They're All God's (except LBH) AU. This is like, the ending. no i dont explain anything. i just wanted lqg to get melted down and rebuilt. you know, as gods do. this does have an open/unsatisfactory endind just fyi haha

When he loses the first time, Liu Qingge refuses to acknowledge it. It doesn't matter, after all, as long as he tries again he can change something. He returns the second, third, fourth, fifth times.

He has lost count when he realizes that the something he has changed is in him. With the same heaving blood soaked breaths he coughs up at Luo Binghe's figure, something has been changed in him.

Of course. He cannot be the God of Breakthroughs if he cannot break through.

He keeps losing.

Each battle he marches into is another dig at his once spotless reputation. He feels his divinity and grace slough away from him like dried mud. Still he faces Luo Binghe every day.

It forges him into something else.

When Shen Yuan reawakens, not dead but Ascended, Liu Qingge stops his fruitless battles. 

Shen Jiu is with him. At some point the God had shed the title of Qingqiu as trees lose their autumn leaves. Still the God of Bitter Fall and Uneven Ground, of Unfair Advantages, but now also of Cunning Thought and Persistence. He hasn't changed, Liu Qingge realizes. He's just revealed more of who he is.

Shen Yuan is, as always, Shen Jiu's compliment: God of Bountiful Harvest and Smooth Travels, and of Cutting Words and Sloth.

Shen Yuan has, thoroughly, molded himself into the perfect God for his precious demonic pet. Luo Binghe will never want for a single thing ever again with the God of Easy Living walking by his side.

Liu Qingge wants to avoid them both. Everyone else is already aware, but from these two he wishes to hide his failures for just a little longer. However, the core of him is settled in such a way that he cannot find it in himself to pull away.

They want to see him.

It's no surprise that when Yue Qingyuan invites him to a banquet, Shen Jiu and Shen Yuan are there as well. As ever, Yue Qingyuan's bias shines through.

"What did you do?" Shen Jiu snarls from across the banquet hall.

"Who— oh Qingge!" Shen Yuan turns and catches sight of him as well.

Tension rises in Liu Qingge's body but—they've already seen. And if, somehow, they are too dense to understand, any one of their God siblings will explain it. Poorly. So Liu Qingge stays.

Shen Jiu is, of course disgusted. Shen Yuan intrigued.

"I thought once gods Ascend they do not change." He comments curiously.

"They don't." Shen Jiu hisses. "They can adapt perhaps. Split. Acquire or shed new epithets or old ones as we have. But they do not change. If they stop being what they are, then that God simply ceases to be."

"It's as it is." Liu Qingge shrugs. "I'm still a God—"

"Of cycles." Shen Jiu accuses.

"Reliability!" Shen Yuan insists. "Qingge is always dependable."

"It is no great thing if you can only depend on him to lose." Shen Jiu's dark gaze is calculating and Liu Qingge understands that, somehow, Shen Jiu knows the whole story already. That he simply needed to see Liu Qingge to fit the pieces together.

"He doesn't lose!" Shen Yuan defends, loyally. "Qingge has always been there when we needed him!"

Silence descends on the banquet hall like an awkward blanket.

"What, did—have I missed something?" Shen Yuan asks, glancing sharply around.

Yue Qingyuan, belatedly, ushers the rest of his guests out. Liu Qingge supposes he must be grateful that Luo Binghe isn't here to enjoy rubbing Liu Qingge's nose in it. Shen Jiu will, assuredly, have no problems doing it instead.

"It's exactly as Shen Jiu says." Liu Qingge starts. "Fighting Luo Binghe has irrevocably changed me." He says.

What he doesn't say: I cannot win against him now even if he deigned to throw the fight.

Perhaps, to Shen Yuan, the change isn't so dramatic. Shen Yuan had never wanted Liu Qingge to win that battle anyway, and Liu Qingge has ever been Shen Yuan's most reliable God-Brother.

Once upon a time, Liu Qingge was a War God. There were and still are many gods of war: strategy and prowess, blood and conquering, weapons and trade.

Liu Qingge was the breakthrough. The final push. The turning of tides. The culmination. He had never failed to turn a lost cause into victory, there had never been a battle lost to him if he meant to win it.

But then Shen Qingqiu became two, and then Luo Binghe built a shrine and Shen Yuan wasn't prepared for his tribulations and then—

Well.

Liu Qingge is a War God. Of Cycles, Shen Jiu says. Of Reliability, Shen Yuan insists. He is the God of forlorn hope, of having only one spear and one sword, of hunting phoenixes in mirrors. The same battle retread for the same reasons.

[jeannereames]

Hello Dr. Reames!

Like many of us who follow you on this Hell-site we call home, I started watching Netflix's Alexander: The Making of a God. I'm an awfully shy person, and have been meaning to say hello, but a deadly concoction of anxiety and imposter syndrome has kept me away until a part of the docuseries lit a burning fire of a question.

I'm an Early Modern historian (18th century France), and although I have an obsession with Alexander the Great (going as far as begging my parents from around age 10 to 18 to legally change my name to Alexander) I never took a deep academic dive into the ancient Mediterranean world.

I think it was episode 2 where Alexander and Darius finally face each other at Issus, and after the battle Alexander has the captured "Greeks" (I can't remember now if he said Greeks or Macedonians) from Darius' army killed for fighting on the "wrong side." This kind of rubbed me the wrong way, especially when they switch to the talking heads and they kind of touch on it being known that people from the Greek poleis were mercenaries and were throughout the known Mediterranean world. That scene had a sort of 'Alexander as a Macedonian Nationalist' feel, and I assumed that Alexander was more open to the blending of cultures or at least there wasn't a single correct way to live and rule. That whole sequence of scenes felt contradictory: the mercenary system is well known yet a betrayal against "blood brothers"? Would Alexander actually have mercenaries executed for being hired by Persia?

Thank you for your time!

I'm glad you decided to finally step forward and ask a question! Nice to "meet" you.

Ah, yes, this is a matter of Real Politik.

After Granikos, a number of Greek mercenaries were captured, although their commander, Memnon, got away himself as he’d have been on horseback. Alexander had the men executed.

Greeks had served as mercenaries in Asia as far back as the Assyrian Sargonids. In fact, arguably, the archaic full hoplite panoply developed to fight on the broad plains of the middle east, not in Greece. (See John Hale’s chapter “Not Patriots, Not Farmers, Not Amateurs” in Men of Bronze, Kagan and Viggiano, eds., from Princeton; I find his argument convincing.) And, of course, Xenophon’s famous Anabasis told about the flight west of Greek mercenaries who’d served under Cyrus the Younger in his disastrous clash with his brother Artaxerxes for the throne.

For Alexander, the problem was that he—or really his father—had positioned this campaign as retribution against Persia for Persia’s earlier invasion of Greece, especially that under Xerxes. The invasion was, officially, under the aegis of the Corinthian League, with the Macedonian king just the hegemon. That made it a “Greek” campaign. This was all propaganda of course, but important for Philip, then Alexander, to maintain as it gave a patina of acceptability, not a naked power grab for more territory. While conquest wasn’t looked on then nearly as badly as it is now, it helped to have at least a plausible excuse.

His own troops included a number of Greek allies. After Chaironeia, they didn’t really have a choice. But a lot of Greeks were not happy to be in the Corinthian League. Sparta outright refused and would later be the center of an anti-Macedonian revolt.

At Granikos, the Persians had more Greek mercenaries than Alexander had Greek allies! (If one doesn’t count the Thessalian horse.) The optics were really bad. Ergo, as I think it was Carolyn who pointed out, Alexander had to send a clear message that fighting for the Persians against “the Greeks” wasn’t an option. In the Greek mind, mercenaries had always occupied a liminal status: not fully trusted because they fought for pay, but typically better than citizen troops, so used extensively post-Peloponnesian War. It was easy for Alexander to cast them as “just in it for the money” and as traitors to the Greek Cause. Like Thebes in the earlier Greco-Persian Wars, they’d “Medized,” which had a similar force to calling an American a “commie” in the 1950s.

The executions weren’t well-received in the rest of Greece, and resistance continued until it came to a head a couple years later with Agis’s Revolt (Agis III was the Spartan king who led it.). But Alexander was never afraid to send a harsh message when he needed to: Thebes, Tyre, Persepolis…. Philip did too. He could be just as brutal (Potidaia, Amphipolis, Stagiera), and Alexander learned well from him how to use carrot and stick.

So that’s what was going on there. Alexander was trying to turn Darius’ Greek mercenaries (who were some of the best troops in Asia Minor), and to send a message back HOME not to unite behind him and cut his supply lines. This was not successful; in fact, if Curtius can be believed, the Greek mercenaries were more loyal to Darius after Gaugamela than Bessus and friends. They figured they couldn’t go over to ATG, so they stuck with Darius who’d treated them well. Ironically, these same guys later did surrender after Darius’ death and were pardoned because, by then, showing clemency worked better for him than punishment.

Due to time constraints, and the desire of the showrunner to focus on Alexander and Darius, a lot of the details behind the campaign weren’t explored. So to the average reader, it looks like it was just Macedonians deciding to invade Persia because Persia killed Philip, although Philip says before he’s murdered that he wanted Alexander back for the Persian expedition. Not sure the casual viewer caught that. But this isn’t entirely wrong, as it really WAS a Macedonian campaign covered in the sheep’s skin of “Greek revenge.” Nothing is shown of ATG’s Greek campaigns, not even the infamous siege of Thebes because, again, the creators wanted it to be a clash of Macedon and Persia.

Alexander’s career is just so sprawling it’s really impossible to cover everything in limited time. But I hope that helps to contextualize why the Greek mercenaries were killed, and why it was presented as being traitors to the cause.

[quietwingsinthesky]

thinks about child-but-growing-fast amara and lucifer in the same room and gets ill.

[mmxstrangers]

so maybe it’s just Past-Midnight Silly Hours for me but, on one hand I like to play serious and (to varying extents) goodhearted characters with a bit of goofiness to them.

On the other hand I want to play hammy villains that are a little cheesy while also actually being irredeemably evil.

[rowrowronnie]

HE RAISES HER AS HIS OWN AND SHE BECOMES HIS PURPOSE IN LIFE AND HE LEARNS TO KEEP HIS HEART OPEN AND TO LOVE AGAIN

[impossible-rat-babies]

Sjdjdjdnd I love estinien so much he’s just some dude. like legit he’s just A Guy that got roped into a club full of neurotic PhD people and two children w master’s degrees and their friend that can kill god. God’s most specialist Normal Dude who vibes 24/7

[hellgivenhasmoved]

dsfsdf most of yall voting " reputation" on that poll lmao.

[constantvariations]

I'd be far more impressed with Wonderland if instead of a fairytale recreation, it was the dimension of the gods

It would've been far more interesting if Salem had actually grown strong enough to oppose the brothers, perhaps left one of them near fatally wounded. They would retreat into a pocket dimension close to their precious shared world and fall into a healing slumber. The land around them shifts and twists into their dreams

And their nightmares