Something that finally clicked for me when watching Hadestown live,
Hades gives Orpheus the test that he himself goes through every spring.
This really solidified in my brain when I noticed that Hades gets the red flower and is connected more solidly to the other couple. While I always understood they were mirrors, somehow the trial itself and the significance of what Hades is asking Orpheus to do never really hit me until I watched it.
But I realized that what Hades might be thinking here is, well- you may judge me for losing faith in my wife over the long course of our relationship, missing her for months at a time with few others to talk to or support me. Let's see if this romantic, bleeding heart can do that, can feel the absence of his love and his community and still keep trusting her, himself, and the system.
And he can't- one of the major themes of Hadestown is that working together and building community rather than isolating yourself and hoarding wealth is better for the heart, mind, and soul. So taking away the walls and shades and Eurydice who were supporting Orpheus leads to him doubting himself and those people and ultimately looking back.
hadestown really does convince you that maybe it’ll turn out different this time. maybe eurydice wont go. maybe hades will let them go. maybe, just maybe, orpheus wont turn around early.
and then she does go. and hades makes them take a test. and doubt creeps in.
Hey btw, to new writers who want to write angst: Nothing illustrates darkness as well as sparse and brilliant highlights.
If you want to write a character with an unspeakably awful past, there’s no need to go into deep and gory details about how horrible it was. Readers who can’t relate to it won’t relate to that, and the readers who have been there generally don’t want to see that. Instead, highlight some of their happiest moments but make them unsettlingly small.
Sprinkles in some realism, too. Having a character go “my parents were abusive monsters and I’ve literally never had a happy moment in my life” isn’t realistic, and both the people who haven’t witnessed that kind of thing outside of fiction, and the people who have personally lived it will just go “yeah, yeah, tragic childhood, misery, darkness, we’ve all seen it”, and being nothing but negative makes the character both uninteresting and unlikeable.
Now, having someone casually think or say shit like “I think my happiest childhood memory was that christmas when dad was in prison. Nobody was yelling or throwing anything and mom was sober the whole time”, and be genuinely surprised by other peoples’ concerned reactions - now jesus christ that’s bleak.
to me the funniest CR retcon is that matt made it explicitly clear when they first met him that you could hear, and if you looked closely enough see, essek's footfalls but he just walked with such grace that he seemed to float but then just decided that through the power of the players thinking of him as always floating that actually he was perpetually hovering as a way to make himself seem cool
I first read “if you were lazy you would be having fun” on your blog and it has genuinely been a life-changing piece of advice for me and my friends - I’ve said it to like four of my other executive dysfunction judies and without fail it earns a ten second silence followed by a single revelatory “fuck”
My dad and I actually ran into the speech language pathologist who told me that over 20 years ago at a town hall a few months back—she is retired now, but still advocating for disabled students at IEP meetings and being a nuisance to school administrators. I thanked her for everything, and she was delighted to hear that I was passing her words along to other people who needed to hear them!
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