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m0rninglatte · 5 days

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Monster from Epic and Icarus analysis because the thoughts do be real

“How did suffering become so endless?”

- Icarus thinking it should have been done by now, but it's not. It's still going

“Do I need to change?”

…

Moving on.

“I'm surrounded by the souls of those I've lost”

- Icarus talking about Aurelius, Enderian, *Centross*, Momboo, etc.

- The idea of everyone who has died is a sacrifice, and they will be brought back, but also Icarus ability to not grieve properly because of it

"What if the greatest threat we'll find across the sea, is me?

- Icarus wondering if they are failing and they are going to slip up to the point everything crashes because they made one wrong move.

“What if I'm the monster? What if i'm in the wrong”

- I like to think this line as Icarus beginning to think of each reset and all the "antagonistic" acts they've done and thinking if they are and have always been a monster because they in their own eyes can't seem to do anything to help people as they just end up hurting someone.

“What if i'm the problem that’s been hiding all along”

- Icarus in “Lady of the world” talking about how corruption has always been there, how whatever they did then was always there they just pushed it back of their mind until corruption made it the forefront of their mind.

“What if i'm the one who killed you”

- Icarus debating if it was Quixis that killed Momboo or themselves.

“What if I’ve been far too kind to foes but a monster to ourselves”

- Foes = Fable, ourselves = everyone else minus the co-workers

- Although Icarus currently wants to fix everything and stay with Fable, i like to see this as Icarus debating if they are on the right side.

The Polyphemus section is Centross, mainly the Violet Reaper

“Or does he end my men, to avenge his friend”

- S1 funeral.

-“Avenge his friend” is a line you could annotate “friend” to be Enderian

- If you wanted to, you could almost switch into "...,to serve his goddess"

The Circe section is Enderian

"When the witch turns men to pigs, to protect her nymphs"

- Corruption of Ominus Bane

- You could see this line in my opinion as either to protect her realm or to prove her point about Overworlders and how they are the same, for example, resorting to violent outcomes

The Poseidon section is Fable

- This section is a mix of things, I can see mixes of Fable during the war and Fable currently, and Icarus is like thinking of the similarities and differences between Fable and himself.

The Odysseus section about him during the Trojan War is Icarus and the Wack

“Does a soldier use a wooden horse to kill sleeping Trojans cause he is vile”

- Icarus using the wack to kill Momboo

"Or does he throw away his remorse and save more lives with guile"

- Icarus querying if he should just throw away his regret for any actions he has done and attempt to help people through sly and cunning intelligence (literally the definition of guile)

The section after the Odysseus section is Icarus wondering if they should just become the monster to everyone else but not the co-workers and yk Fable

“I lost my best friend, I lost my mentor, my mom, 500 men gone…”

- Best Friend is Centross.

- Mentor is a funky one because i could see it be switched into my brother, but at the same time, you could keep it as mentor and annotate it to be Quixis

- Mom is Isla -> "Like King like Prince" : Icarus finding her portrait and realising Fable hasn't told them where she is and that he can't remember her aswell as Rae

- 500 men gone = the people and gods who have died and or been husked

“I must get to see Penelope and Telemachus”

A) remove the context of the names, no wife, no son, none of that

B) This could be annotated into two different ways but i can mainly see it as Momboo and Centross and Icarus’ hope with all this they can come back

“I’ll go where Poseidon wont reach us”

- Poseidon could be annotated into Enderian, but one that I think works well is the faction, mainly Ocie.

“And if got to drop another infant from a wall in an instant so we all don't die”

- Icarus being like if i have to kill another person, fuck it, whatever it is I need to do to prove myself or help in anyway.

The end section with Odysseus choosing to become the monster I could see as Icarus state of mind of their not meant to be helping people as all they have done is hurt people, so that's what their meant to do, it's what they were ment to do from the beginning, so they will.

Thoughts and feelings go bonkers and bit of aaah and bit of RA

#I'm never done an analysis type post so this was a ride-#is this just the ground structure and my thought process of the animatic?#maybe whose to say #fsmp #fsmpblr #fable smp #fable smp icarus #icarus morningstar #i could sit here and code more of monster to other character aswell as the other songs in the saga but nah maybe one day i will maybe not

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that-one-english-nerd · 3 days

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The Outsiders x EPIC : The Musical -

so i was listening to the new EPIC saga yesterday and naturally, because i can’t listen to music w/o relating it to my hyperfixations, i started thinking about the outsiders. specifically, i was listening to luck runs out and my friend and i were talking… and we were like “this song is so soda talking to darry about going to war,” so this sparked this post!

so i got to re-listening to the entirety of epic and was thinking how much it fits if soda were to genuinely survive the war but come back only a shell of himself… so this is what were going with.

(i will say before we even begin, i have limited knowledge on the vietnam war so if some of this is vague or inaccurate, forgive me)

i think there two ways you could picture this, a greek mythology au and realistic, vietnam war au. i was thinking, if we’re talking in reality standpoint, all the gods or even monsters are visions in soda’s mind (due to ptsd, other mental illness gained from war or physical injuries) as he’s traveling and committing more and more violence. is some of this a strench…? yes but this is js for kicks and giggles, humor me here lolol

either way, these are my assignments of characters. i need you to HEAR ME OUT (there’s explanations of songs under the list of characters) on these -

odysseus : soda

polites : steve

eurylochus : tim

zeus : dally

polyphemus : ……..bob

athena : darry

aeolus : cherry

circe : marcia

hermes : two-bit

penelope & telemachus : ponyboy & darry (these can be switched, doesn’t matter rlly)

calypso: sandy (…get it, cause calypso lives on an island)

poseidon : dally

tiersus : johnny (cause i HAD to include him somewhere)

song and character explanations under cut ~

song explanations :

the horse and the infant - i like to think that, while it was awful and so much worst than soda could of ever imagined, because of his constant optimism and general skills, he was someone many of his fellow soldiers looked up to. i’ll get into details when i get to luck runs out, but if we’re relating this specifically to epic, making him apart of the navy would work best (being all the time they spend traveling and at seas). anyways, therefore, overtime, due to his higher morale and just general skills, he gets a higher rank and a crew to care for. soda is rallying his crew for an attack, and thinking of who he was fighting for, ponyboy and darry.

now this is where it would differ from a greek mythology au, but just for the sake of making it easier on myself, this is the more realistic possibility. i like to think that being how in epic, this is the end of the trojan war, this would be a kind of flash forward, after soda had already been dealing w all this trauma. but, as i’ve mentioned, i like to envision dally‘s ghost (a vision soda has of him at least) as zeus, specifically before soda has to do something terrible to the enemy. dally is like, “you’re in a war man, just *do it*.”

for a less interesting but more realistic answer, you could say zeus was one of soda’s commanding officer or something but that’s less fun lolol

anyways, this is the beginning, as it is for odysseus, of soda completely losing his innocence.

just a man - (tw for child-related violence and war crimes) so, as it is in epic, you could picture this as an enemy leader’s son, and how this boy reminds soda of ponyboy in a way. this song is kinda self explanatory tho, soda takes this blow, and this guilt plagues his mind for the rest of the first act.

full speed ahead - so, with the vietnam war, there was an insaneeee draft process. and in relation to the story, those who were poor were more likely to be drafted than those who were going to college and able to pay tutition, being how they got an exemption from the draft. so i think the idea as tim of all people getting drafted and getting put under soda’s command (which is a shock to both of them) really interesting, being how we never really got to see their dynamic in the outsiders. so having tim, whose more on the ruthless side, as soda’s right hand and being more quick to violence makes sense to me. on the other hand, my favorite character headcanon, steve as polities. i think the idea of steve not giving a second thought to following soda into war makes a lot of sense, and being how soda had more of a responsibility on his shoulders, steve keeps more of his naiveness and “innocence” than soda does.

open arms - my stevepop heart loves this so much. over the time of war, soda became less and less like his normal self and steve knows that. he could always tell. so once they finally have time to themselves, he tries to remind soda of how life used to be, how there’s still good. the roles switch from soda normally being the optimistic one, reassuring everyone else, to steve doing the same for him. they mean sm to your honor :((

warrior of the mind - now, from a plot standpoint, i can fs see this as what soda pictures how darry would think of him now, or even how ponyboy would. soda kinda flashes back to their childhood, how both darry and soda were really close when they were kids, being how they both balanced each other out. but after their parents died, darry became a parental figure instead, athena-like you could say.

but ignoring plot, i think song really fits darry and ponyboy, espically with the “don’t disappoint me” and “he’s a warrior of the mind” because of ponyboy’s academic achievements.

polyphemus - now do i know how this would fit into the plot to be honest.. i just think the idea of bob (bob’s ghost if you will) or some soc showing up in soda’s path makes sense.

butttt once again, if you want something more realistic, you could make it someone on the enemy side.

survive - soda just seems like he’d be hella good with battle morale and strategy, what can i say? …also, as much as it breaks my heart, steve following soda into war and dying an early death makes sense but is equally as heartbreaking ;(

remember them - i think the slow fade-in near the beginning of the song gives very big soda energy. disassociating but then switching right back into gear (masking emotions for the sake of others) is something that comes natural to him. i also commented on this earlier but for as much as soda calls himself dumb, i think his street smarts are really good and being able to talk his way out of things or tricking people into believing lies is something he’s great at (which makes sense in context of the cyclops plot). plus the stupid decision of having mercy on…bob, a soc, an enemy, idfk, and then telling them his name makes more sense in the context of just losing steve and therefore making rash decisions because of this sudden lose.

my goodbye - soda seeming to “lose” darry’s positive view of him, at least in soda’s mind, because of all he had done and lost. this, of course, is simply what soda thinks darry would say if he was there. because of this, he pushes the “what would darry do?” mindset out of his head.

storm - not much to highlight in this song except for how soda is a badass captain™️

luck runs out - now of course, i keep mentioning this song as the beginning of this war au because while s.e. hinton technically said soda was drafted, i think it’s very possible that soda and his optimism view on life would easily be more swayed to propaganda to enlist rather than be drafted. plus, with becoming a soldier, a certain amount of money is given to you monthly (at least i think-). this, i think, is another pro to the idea of enlisting in soda’s mind because he wants to help better provide for his brothers.

but generally plot wise, soda taking on this positive mindset of “i can just go and ask for help” is almost a tribute to steve and what he wanted. but on the other hand, you have tim, who knows that not everyone is as welcome to help, especially after dally died from police brutality.

keep your friends close - not much to say about this either but for the fact that aeolous being cherry is very fun to think about. while the meaning of this lyric means very different things in the context of the outsiders versus epic, the line “keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” does really fit with cherry. ponyboy being the “enemy” that she quickly befriends and keeping him close. but soon, she starts giving info to the greasers, the socs in her eyes almost becoming the real “enemy”. might be wrong though, interpret it however you like, i just think it fits cherry!

also the “everything’s changed since polities” line really fits into how i think soda would grieve for steve while still at war. he has to stay strong for his crew but they all sense, *know* something’s off with soda, and put the pieces together that this is because of steve. without steve, soda doesn’t have as high of a morale on life in general, and therefore the crew doesn’t. which fits in with them (kinda accidentally) turning on him.

ruthlessness - now HERE ME OUT HERE, if bob is the cyclops, rather than dally seeing him as a “son”, him being like “you had mercy on a SOC.” but the “you had mercy on the enemy?!” also works. just in general, i think dally’s memory coming back to haunt soda, espically paired with dally also being zeus, is fitting honestly. while dally wasn’t always ruthless, we gotta keep in mind in this au, this is in soda’s mind. these “gods” or visions of people he once knew, in my eyes, are people coming back to haunt him in his most shameful state. no matter what dally would’ve really said, i picture soda thinking how disappointed the people he loved most would be in him if they saw him in that very moment. also, “ruthlessness is mercy upon ourselves” is SO dally.

puppeteer - now again, being how circe is a witch, it’s a bit hard to fit this into a realistic setting but i js thought having marcia as her would be fun bc paired with…

wouldn’t you like - two-bit as hermes, i just think i’d be hilarious. i like to picture this as soda and two-bit on two ends of a phone, and for whatever reason, marcia is there distracting the crew from their goal. soda on one line would be like “so do you know of a soc named marcia” and two-bit on the other end like, “OMG WE WENT OUT ONE TIME, this is how to scare her off”

done for - self-explanatory, not much to say here tbh. marcia’s just iconic.

there are others ways - (with my stevepop heart) if like to think that *right after* steve’s death, it would be pretty much impossible for soda to be “seduced” as well as the idea of pony and darry waiting for him would keep him focused on the end goal in that moment.

the underworld - i kinda like the idea of the underworld not being the actual underworld but a very dark and dangerous place, with the visions of the dead and soda’s past traumas coming back to bite him in that moment. the line between reality and fiction is a hard line to draw in that very moment. ALSO STEVE AND SODA’S MOM😭😭

no longer you - you know i HAD to include him somewhere, so here’s johnny finallyyyyy. i don’t really have much of an explanation other than being johnny’s quieter personality, him seeing everything in a way, him being tierras just makes sense.

monster - soda losing his mind finally and willing to do anything to drive these ghosts of the past out of his mind and get home to his brothers. self-explanatory :)

being how all the songs aren’t out yet, i’m just gonna stop here. thanks for listening to my yapping my boredom has created :) enjoy listening!

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luminouslumity · 4 days

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Parts One and Two!

THE UNDERWORLD: JAY, YOU BASTARD!

Anyway, after Odysseus and his crew arrive in the Underworld, that not only does he see his fallen men—including one named ELPENOR (Ἐλπήνωρ), who'd actually died while at Kirke's after he'd fallen off the roof in a drunken state—as well as his mother, but many other famous mythological figures besides Teiresias as well; perhaps most notable among them is Agamemnon, who'd been killed by his own wife KLYTEMNESTRA (Κλυταιμνήστρα), Helen's sister and Penelope's cousin, as vengeance for the sacrifice of their daughter IPHIGENIA (Ἰφιγένεια) in exchange for a fair bit of wind (in some versions, she lives), which only happened either because Agamemnon had displeased the goddess ARTEMIS (Αρτεμις) in some way—be it by boasting he was more of a hunter than she after killing a stag or because that stag had been killed in her sacred grove—or because his own father ATREUS (Ατρέω) had failed to sacrifice a golden lamb to her after promising he would, so she cursed his son as punishment. In any case, Odysseus is horrified and says that both Helen and Klytemnestra have brought nothing but disaster, and Agamemnon then tells him not to treat Penelope too well, though he does praise her sensibilities.

As for Antikleia, I've mentioned before how she is a granddaughter of Hermes, and specifically, she is a granddaughter of Hermes through her father AUTOLYCOS (Αὐτόλυκος), who'd been a trickster in his own right, having had the power to change or make invisible whatever he stole. According to later sources, such as Suida's Sisyphus, the consequences of Autolycos' thievery eventually caught up with him when the titular king demanded his fellow trickster give him his daughter to bed as compensation for Autolycos having stolen his cattle. Odysseus was born not long after. Callimachus also tells us, Antiklieia had once been a companion of Artemis herself.

And because I'm feeling particularly evil today:

‘My child! How did you come here through the darkness while you were still alive? This place is hard for living men to see. There are great rivers and dreadful gulfs, including the great Ocean which none can cross on foot; one needs a ship. Have you come wandering here, so far from Troy, with ship and crew? Have you not yet arrived in Ithaca, nor seen your wife at home?’

I answered, ‘Mother, I was forced to come to Hades to consult the prophet spirit, Theban Tiresias. I have not yet come near to Greece, nor reached my own home country. I have been lost and wretchedly unhappy since I first followed mighty Agamemnon to Troy, the land of horses, to make war upon the people there. But tell me, how was sad death brought upon you? By long illness? Or did the archer Artemis destroy you with gentle arrows? Tell me too about my father and the son I left behind. Are they still honored as the kings? Or has another taken over, saying I will not return? And tell me what my wife is thinking, and her plans. Does she stay with our son and focus on his care, or has the best of the Achaeans married her?’

My mother answered, ‘She stays firm. Her heart is strong. She is still in your house. And all her nights are passed in misery, and days in tears. But no one has usurped your throne. Telemachus still tends the whole estate unharmed and feasts in style, as lords should do, and he is always asked to council meetings. Your father stays out in the countryside. He will not come to town. He does not sleep on a real bed with blankets and fresh sheets. In winter he sleeps inside, by the fire, just lying in the ashes with the slaves; his clothes are rags. In summer and at harvest, the piles of fallen leaves are beds for him. He lies there grieving, full of sorrow, longing for your return. His old age is not easy. And that is why I met my fate and died. The goddess did not shoot me in my home, aiming with gentle arrows. Nor did sickness suck all the strength out from my limbs, with long and cruel wasting. No, it was missing you, Odysseus, my sunshine; your sharp mind, and your kind heart. That took sweet life from me.’

Then in my heart I wanted to embrace the spirit of my mother. She was dead, and I did not know how. Three times I tried, longing to touch her. But three times her ghost flew from my arms, like shadows or like dreams. Sharp pain pierced deeper in me as I cried, ‘No, Mother! Why do you not stay for me, and let me hold you, even here in Hades? Let us wrap loving arms around each other and find a frigid comfort in shared tears! But is this really you? Or has the Queen sent me a phantom, to increase my grief?’

She answered, ‘Oh, my child! You are the most unlucky man alive. Persephone is not deceiving you. This is the rule for mortals when we die. Our muscles cease to hold the flesh and skeleton together; as soon as life departs from our white bones, the force of blazing fire destroys the corpse. The spirit flies away and soon is gone, just like a dream. Now hurry to the light; remember all these things, so you may tell your wife in times to come.’

NO LONGER YOU: According to one myth, Teiresias of Thebes came across two snakes in the middle of mating one day and hit them both with a rod. As a result, he was changed into a woman, until she saw the same pair of snakes again years later and was then changed back into a man. Zeus and Hera then asked him which gender enjoyed intercourse more, with Zeus favoring women and Hera men; when Teiresias said that women enjoyed it more, Hera blinded him and Zeus then gave him the power of prophecy afterwards.

Teiresias would go on to become a rather notable figure in myth, but to Odysseus specifically, the prophecy is described thusly:

‘Odysseus, you think of going home as honey-sweet, but gods will make it bitter. I think Poseidon will not cease to feel incensed because you blinded his dear son. You have to suffer, but you can get home, if you control your urges and your men. Turn from the purple depths and sail your ship towards the island of Thrinacia; there you will find grazing cows and fine fat sheep, belonging to the god who sees and hears all things—the Sun God. If you leave them be, keeping your mind fixed on your journey home, you may still get to Ithaca, despite great losses. But if you hurt those cows, I see disaster for your ship and for your men. If you yourself escape, you will come home late and exhausted, in a stranger’s boat, having destroyed your men. And you will find invaders eating your supplies at home, courting your wife with gifts. Then you will match the suitors’ violence and kill them all, inside your halls, through tricks or in the open, with sharp bronze weapons. When those men are dead, you have to go away and take an oar to people with no knowledge of the sea, who do not salt their food. They never saw a ship’s red prow, nor oars, the wings of boats. I prophesy the signs of things to come. When you meet somebody, a traveler, who calls the thing you carry on your back a winnowing fan, then fix that oar in earth and make fine sacrifices to Poseidon—a bull and stud-boar. Then you will go home and offer holy hecatombs to all the deathless gods who live in heaven, each in order. Gentle death will come to you, far from the sea, of comfortable old age, your people flourishing. So it will be.’

MONSTER: I really wanted to focus on this part here:

Does a soldier use a wooden horse to kill sleeping Trojans cause he is vile? Or does he throw away his remorse and save more lives with guile?

I went over the Trojan War pretty briefly in the first post of this series, but as for the horse specifically, though Odysseus is credited as the architect, the idea—according to Dictys Cretensis—came to him from the captured Prince HELENOS (Ἕλενος) of Troy, who'd been a seer like his twin sister KASSANDRA (Κασσάνδρα). From what we currently have available of The Sack of Troy:

The Greeks then sailed in from Tenedos, and those in the wooden horse came out and fell upon their enemies, killing many and storming the city. Neoptolemus kills Priam who had fled to the altar of Zeus Herceius; Menelaus finds Helen and takes her to the ships, after killing Deiphobus; and Aias [Ajax the Younger] the son of Ileus, while trying to drag Cassandra away by force, tears away with her the image of Athena. At this the Greeks are so enraged that they determine to stone Aias, who only escapes from the danger threatening him by taking refuge at the altar of Athena. The Greeks, after burning the city, sacrifice Polyxena at the tomb of Achilles: Odysseus murders Astyanax; Neoptolemus takes Andromache as his prize, and the remaining spoils are divided. Demophon and Acamas find Aethra and take her with them. Lastly the Greeks sail away and Athena plans to destroy them on the high seas.

Afterwards, it's said that only Nestor and Diomedes returned home straightaway, but Menelaos and Helen get stranded in Egypt for years after a storm blows them off course and destroys most of their ships, Ajax the Lesser gets thrown against rocks after also being caught in a storm while accompanying Agamemnon, who gets killed immediately after returning home even despite being warned by Akhilleus, some Greeks make it to the city of Colophon, and Neoptolemus is instructed by his grandmother THETIS (Θετις) to return home, during which he even ends up reuniting with Odysseus for a brief time.

#greek mythology #the odyssey #jorge rivera herrans #epic the musical #epic: the musical #epic the underworld saga #epic: the underworld saga #the underworld saga

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fandomsandfeminism · 2 years

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I apologize for falling down this rabbit hole about that "Lies We Sing to the Sea" book, and I'm trying to not get too rabid because it's like...not even out yet. So this is all speculative, I guess.

But the point of "She just read the parts that were relevant/she didn't NEED to read the whole book to understand the part with the girls" I keep seeing people make.

When *yes you do.* the hanging of the girls is a culmination of one of the major conflicts of the poem, ESPECIALLY if you are analyzing it from a gender perspective.

The whole first half of the story is essentially the trials and tribulations of Odysseus being routinely shit on by the universe (sometimes because of his own hubris, but more often by the disloyalty of his crew) until he is completely emasculated. He loses his spoils of war, his ships, his crew. He ends up trapped with Calypso- where he essentially is held in sexual slavery for 7 years. And when he escapes, he washes up completely naked and helpless, only to be rescued by the kindness of Princess Nausicaa and Queen Arete. It's a story of how he is, bit by bit, brought low.

The second half- when he returns to Ithaca, he has to assess the loyalty of those around him in secret- his son, the swine herd, the suitors, and most importantly Penelope. His wife's choices here (especially her sexual choices) are his greatest threat- if she has taken a new lower (as Clytemnestra had)- Odysseus is screwed.

Those final chapters, when Odysseus regains his bow, slaughters the suitors as they beg for mercy, tortures the disloyal goatherd- that's Odysseus regaining his power, regaining his masculinity, reclaiming lordship over Ithaca. It's violent and bloody and if THIS is how manhood and masculinity is constructed in the text? Like, damn.

Hanging the girls is part of that. They are disloyal. Their sexual choices (to sleep with the suitors) make them dishonor Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus. His killing them is the final act in him retaking his throne. Being a powerful man again.

It's also a big moment for Telemachus- too young to take the throne himself and a cry baby up to then, Telemachus helps in the massacre. The only time he disagrees with his father is to suggest that the girls be hanged, not given a clean death by sword, and has it done. It's a moment for him to be seen as more of a man as well.

That's why the hanging of the girls has been so haunting for so long- it's a real sticking point for a modern reader. We can often excuse violence against men and monsters. But using the slaughter of the girls as a way to assert masculine dominance feels... thorny even with historical context.

You have to understand that Odysseus has *lost* his power and been emasculated in the first half in order to understand WHY the girls are hanged at the end. They are connected.

And if your whole FEMINIST book that is tackling the issue of the hanged girls is written without that context... what exactly is it trying to comment on? What is it trying to say if it is removed from that context?

I don't know! Maybe it will have something to say, maybe it will be fine. 🤷‍♀️

But... would it be meaningfully different if you changed all the names and it had no connection at all to the Odyssey? What conversation is it trying to have with that text? Or is it just using that name recognition as a marketing ploy to bring in readers?

Regardless, it is *mind boggling* to me that anyone thinks that they could read, what, just Book 22 out of 24? And think they have the context they need to say something interesting here.

And I've said it before, but this is a whole issue with Greek Mythology YA. These stories are compelling because they are thorny and complicated and whether it be the Romans, the Renaissance, or American writers, our own cultural lenses often butt up against these ancient texts in ways that ask fundamentally challenging questions about sex and gender and violence and power and love and fate. And that can be...not a great fit for someone writing YA unless they really want to push the bounds of those genre conventions pretty far.

#greek mythology #lies we sing to the sea

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j-morgan-fly · 2 months

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(Show)Daenerys and Odysseus

[ODYSSEUS] How has everything been turned against us? How did suffering become so endless? How am I to reunite with my estranged? Do I need to change?

(This makes me think of Daenerys after arriving in Westeros, and more specifically the cold welcome she receives in Winterfell)

I'm surrounded by the souls of those I've lost I'm the only whose line I haven't crossed What if the greatest threat we'll find across the sea Is me? (Losing Jorah, Missandei and Viserion being used against her)

What if I'm the monster? What if I'm in the wrong? What if I'm the problem that's been hiding all along? What if I'm the one who killed you Every time I caved to guilt? What if I've been far too kind to foes But a monster to ourselves? What if I'm the monster

(Again, Viserion being used by the Night King, the death of the Dothraki on the frontlines. Jorah dying protecting her.)

Is the cyclops struck with guilt when he kills? Is he up in the middle of the night? Or does he end my men to avenge his friend And then sleep knowing he has done him right?

When the witch turns men to pigs to protect her nymphs Is she going insane? Or did she learn to be colder when she got older and now she saves them the pain? When a god comes down and makes a fleet drown Is he scared that he's doing something wrong? Or does he keep us in check so we must respect him And now no one dares to piss him off? Does a soldier use a wooden horse to kill sleeping Trojans cause he is vile? Or does he throw away his remorse and save more lives with guile

(Sansa could be Cerce in this case, doing what she has to protect her family and people from the threat that Daenerys presents. The Trojan Horse. Now this made me think of Daenerys burning down Kings Landing. But this is where things are different between her and Odyseus in this narrative. Daenerys did what she did out of rage, not tactic, not to spare more lives than they take.)

If I became the monster, and threw that guilt away Would that make us stronger? Would it keep our foes at bay? If I became the monster to everyone but us And made sure we got home again Who would care if we're unjust If I became the

[SOLDIERS] Monster

[ODYSSEUS] Oh, ruthlessness is mercy upon ourselves (We once more can think about Daenerys burning her enemies in battle, the burning of Kings Landing. But my point in this break down is to delve into the difference in what motivates these characters. Daenerys actions can be seen as similiar, but are her motives?)

[SOLDIERS] Monster

[ODYSSEUS] And deep down I know this well I lost my best friend I lost my mentor, my mom 500 men gone, this can't go on I must get to see Penelope and Telemachus So if we must sail through dangerous oceans and beaches I'll go where Poseidon won't reach us And if I gotta drop another infant from a wall In an instant so we all don't die (She's lost Missandei, Jorah, Tyrion, Jon her Dothraki. She had to take the Iron Throne, it's all she has left. And she would burn the world to the ground to get it.)

[ODYSSEUS, ALL] Then I'll become the Monster I will deal the blow And I'll become the Monster Like none they've ever known So what if I'm the Monster Lurking deep below I must become the Monster And then we'll make it home

[SOLDIERS] Monster (She burns kings landing, she defeats the last enemy in her way, she finally makes it home, but in doing so she becomes what she said she wouldn't be. Queen of the ashes. Was it really worth it, alone, one dragon, no friends, just a throne and a city of bones and ash to make her kingdom on?)

#anti daenerys targaryen #for safety #character study #dont give me hate over this #asoiaf #game of thrones

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wellbelesbian · 2 years

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WIP Wednesday

thanks for the tag @forabeatofadrum!

i’m back with more non Carry On writing! seriously, i’ve been meaning to write more blow on the tinder but just haven’t had time, but i was suddenly inspired last night to write a scene from near the end of the novel i’m working on. i never just write chronologically.

anyway, why not share it? i’m actually thinking of focusing on this story for nanowrimo so i’ll be writing a lot more of it next month, if i do so should i post snippets here or on my main @nausikaaa? let me know!

Odysseus is short and stocky, but carries himself as though he weighs nothing, nimble as a fox. He is deeply tanned, with many scars and curly, greying hair. Penelope is taller than him, pale and silent behind a dark blue, semi-translucent veil. Her own dark hair is loose like an unmarried woman’s, and similarly shot through with grey, though it imbues her with a sense of elegance and the hard earned wisdom that comes with age, while on her husband it only serves to make him look wearier.

They couldn’t look more different, but it’s in their eyes that I see why they fit together. They never stop moving, taking in every little detail. Odysseus keeps his back to the wall and his gaze regularly flits to the only entrance. He sizes up each of the guards and us princes, almost as if he anticipates a fight, though his posture is relaxed and his hand nowhere near his weapon. Helenus looks on edge too, so maybe that’s just the way of kings making treaties.

Penelope’s gaze slips over the chips in the mosaics on the floor, the mark on a pillar which Pielus apparently embedded a spear in after he threw it too hard indoors, much to Andromache’s disapproval. She takes it all in, cataloguing it all away to do only Athena-knows-what with. When she looks at us, she too looks like she’s assessing each one of us. But her eyes finally stop moving as she fixes her gaze on me. I meet her eyes unflinchingly, challenging her to judge me, and the smallest smile touches her lips.

i have a lot of thoughts about post-Odyssey Odysseus. this is set 8 years after he returns home and he’s really going through it with PTSD and paranoia. Helenus, the king he is meeting here, can see the future and once told him his son would kill him, so he’s super distrustful of his son Telemachus. unbeknownst to him, he has another son with Circe, Telegonus, who will accidentally kill him in just under a year. rip. in the meantime, he and Helenus have a very fraught history. Helenus was a Trojan prince and priest of Apollo who Odysseus captured during the last year of the Trojan War. He tortured him for information on how to break Troy, which is when he told him about his son. however Helenus gave it up eventually and told them what they needed to do to win the war, and was allowed to live as a consequence. So he and Odysseus have a lot of baggage that will not make this diplomatic meeting go smoothly.

anyway, thanks for reading! this week i tag @martsonmars @confused-bi-queer @castawaypitch @bazzybelle @ivelovedhimthroughworse @erzbethluna @gekkoinapeartree @ileadacharmedlife @takitalks and @aroace-genderfluid-sheep

#wip wednesday

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theodysseyofhomer · 2 years

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i read an article last night (tw for rape) that got me thinking about how little odysseus talks about penelope to other people, and how the why of this usually comes down to someone feeling they must remind us that romance in marriage wasn’t invented yet. which is true, as far as it goes, but also sort of misses the point; because there are at least two textual reasons for odysseus’ reticence regarding penelope that aren’t “well, they don’t actually have to care about each, you know.”

the first is that, well, he doesn’t need to talk about wanting to see her. i still think the idea that penelope and odysseus have some kind of love and longing for one another in their marriage is demonstrated in the text (as well as attested by the narrator at times, if you buy that). in a similar way, he doesn’t need to say that he misses his mother if we know he tried and failed to embrace her in the underworld three times. the more complex political dynamics around the marriage (which undoubtedly exist; in particular, penelope’s faithfulness can’t be solely attributed to love for odysseus) also coexist with how the text matches them as like-minded people, who once knew each other intimately and no longer know exactly where they stand. odysseus doesn’t have to talk about that the way he talks about his son, because he and penelope share a history that he and telemachus do not.

and tied up with that is the second reason i see that odysseus doesn’t talk about penelope, which is that he’s a lot less sure of his welcome with her than with anyone else — she presents more danger to him than anyone else! — in light of how the whole poem is framed by What Went Down With Agamemnon.

when the odyssey starts, orestes has only recently avenged his father’s death by killing aegisthus and clytemnestra, and everyone is talking about it. the gods are talking about it on olympus when athena makes her argument for setting odysseus free. she invokes orestes’ name to telemachus to encourage him to stand up to the suitors. odysseus has already heard, and will soon tell the phaeacians, about clytemnestra’s hand in murdering agamemnon from the ghost himself — and agamemnon warns odysseus that he may find a similar reception in his own home.

agamemnon, aegisthus, clytemnestra, and orestes hang over telemachus’ quest to discover if his father is living or dead (and in need of avenging); over penelope as she staves off the suitors; over odysseus as he comes home in disguise, until he can see her faithfulness for himself. there’s danger hanging over both odysseus and penelope on his homecoming — not only that the suitors will try to murder him, but that penelope might plot with them to do it, or that odysseus or telemachus could murder her if they suspect she has.

neither of them are sure how the other will receive them. and so they test each other. i’m not going to go on about the tree-bed riddle here, but it’s famous for good reason. it’s not only odysseus who needs to test the waters before they can reunite. and throughout and after that testing, they still have surprising moments of tenderness and longing.

in comparison, the idea that there’s no feeling there, or that any feelings that odysseus and penelope appear to hold for one another can be attributed to other concerns, seems almost too simple. there are so many layers to this text and odysseus’ and penelope’s marriage, and i want to resist the impulse to strip it down to only whether they love each other in the way modern readers think of love.

#it's a well-written article #there are lot of things in it i liked just for offering more nuanced food for thought than i usually find online #but i felt like the development of thought on this point was.... incomplete #(says the non-professor)#and on some other points... maybe another time #anna.txt #a tag for bitching #*updated with archived link

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darkpastazonksoul · 3 years

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circe

so i recently read circe and hey, why not make a post about it at 2am.

⚠️ spoiler warning: circe ⚠️

going into the story, i had high hopes. i had read the song of achilles, also by madeline miller before this and it might be the best book i’ve ever read.

i like how circe was portrayed in the beginning as the black sheep of the family, everyone kind of hated her and she did not fit in, at all. her character in the beginning was really like “i’m a sheep who follows my father around and kinda sits on his feet and listen.”

what i like about the book is that, when circe is exiled she develops her own personage and is kinda this badass who walks around with her lion and brews her potions. when the men arrive she turns them into pigs, and i think this really portrays the character development of how she went from “i follow people around and am not really my own person” to “i tame animals, brew potions and turn men into pigs who try to rape me.” at the point where she was called to help her sister deliver the baby, i really loved the conversation between circe and her. she finally understands who she was in the past, and how much she has grown. later on in the book she reflects back on it multiple times. when she delivers her son, she is once again portrayed as this badass who raises her, hard to deal with, son all on her own. which in my opinion gives it the finishing touch to her growth.

until this point, i loved the character growth and her personage. when odysseus died and Penelope and Telemachus arrive, i like how them and circe and Telegonus bound and kind of become a family. what i dislike is that until this point, circe was portrayed as this independent woman who didn’t really need a man in her life. although when her and Penelope talk, it’s almost always about odysseys, which kind of takes away the character growth of her that we’ve seen in the past chapters.

overall, i liked the book. i loved how circe was one of the few female characters in greek mythology that did not depend on another man. for me it was kind of disappointing seeing how they, in my view, talked about odysseus so much and how they needed them in the last chapters. i also found it hard to relate to the book, which made it more difficult for me to get through it. overall it was a well constructed, well written book, i guess just not really my cup of tea. 3,9/5

#circe #madeline miller #greek gods #greek mythology #greek books #bookstack #books & libraries #book rating #patrochilles

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dootznbootz · 2 months

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There's something really fascinating about how Athena treats Diomedes so differently from how treats Penelope and Odysseus (even Telemachus but that's a lil different too)

Athena has basically known Diomedes since he was born (some even say that she had a say in naming him) because of Tydeus. I don't think it's far-fetched to say that in a way, she possibly "molded" him. And Diomedes is kind of known for being the "perfect warrior king". He's respectful of the gods and most of his comrades, an incredibly skilled soldier, and has already achieved so many things despite being one of the youngest kings in the war.

I sadly think that's why Athena treats him so differently than Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus.

She cares for him, but it's still "distant" in a way. Or almost in an "I molded you. You will react the way I would want you to therefore I will not be surprised."

When it seems like she's known her other favored mortals for less long, she didn't get to "mold" them. They surprise and bring something "new" for her. She sees her little tricksters' scheme and plot and watches with intrigue but watching the perfect warrior is a "Yes, perfect form. That's what I'd do."

I mean even how her favored mortals pray to her tells you a lot about the relationships they have.

For example, in the Iliad, Odysseus doesn't need to really give as much reverence to her to "earn her favor" during book 10's Night Raid.

Odysseus rejoiced, and prayed to Pallas Athene: ‘Hear me, daughter of aegis-bearing Zeus, you who are with me in all my adventures, protecting me wherever I go. Show me your love, Athene, now, more than ever, and grant we return to the ships having won renown, with some brave act that will grieve the Trojans greatly.’ And Diomedes of the loud war-cry followed him in prayer: ‘Hear me also, Atrytone, daughter of Zeus. Be with me as you were with my father Tydeus in Thebes, when he went there as ambassador for the bronze-greaved Achaeans, camped there by the Asopus. A friendly offer was what he made them, but on his way back he was forced to take deadly reprisal for their ambush, and you fair goddess, readily stood by him. Stand by me now, and watch over me, and in return I will offer a broad-browed yearling heifer, unused to the yoke. I will tip her horns with gold and sacrifice her to you.’

(Book 10, A.S. Kline)

Diomedes brings up his dad and offers a young heifer (granted that could just be how Diomedes is with every immortal) while Odysseus doesn't and is basically like "Yo, help me out like you always do!". Odysseus is much more casual and personal with Athena. And with Penelope, Athena takes the form of one of her sisters to comfort her!

While Athena also most likely has known Telemachus since he was a baby, she's still closer to him than Diomedes.

Imagine that. You're basically molded by a goddess since birth, listen to her and other immortals dutifully, basically become her perfect warrior, and yet you can't seem to reach that familiarity with her. The same warmth she has for her other favored mortals.

#idk I'm eepy and this came to me and I felt bad for Diomedes.#Athena has a extreme soft spot for her tricksters.#Penelope is favored by Athena as well. I will fight you on that. (she should be favored by everyone in general but you know)#I wrote this very quick :P you get the idea #I've been working on my fic a lot so I haven't been making many analysis' so I'm sorry for that :'D #diomedes #iliad #the iliad #this probably means nothing but I wanted to talk abou tit #shot by odysseus #athena #When you're still Athena's Blorbo but not the most blorbo😞#Mad rambles #tagamemnon #greek mythology #fuck it. I'll put it in all tags for folks to see.

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bluewatsons · 4 years

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Anna E. Clark, Twilight of the Mentors: Or how I learned to stop worrying and love my gatekeeper, The New Inquiry (May 19, 2020)

Mentors have a dubious lineage. Since the 1980s, when the corporate world co-opted the concept, mentoring — long a synonym for teaching — has come to stand for almost any kind of professional guidance, and especially that which rank-and-file employees provide to one another. As mentoring has become increasingly linked to workplace diversity initiatives, a mentor is more likely to be the person sitting next to you than a CEO, a shift that echoes the economic devaluation of historically male-dominated jobs now occupied by women. As Helen Colley, a professor at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Education and Social Research Institute has argued, mentoring is no longer a system in which powerful people support other structurally powerful people but a burden passed on to the masses. Though presented as an unalloyed good, mentoring is an additional encumbrance, a way of shifting what should be the responsibility of the institution to the individual.

It might be tempting to view this now ubiquitous corporate mentoring model as further evidence of capitalism’s capacity to extort our emotional labor, but it’s more accurate to say that corporate culture’s embrace of mentorship surfaces the extractive, obfuscating qualities that have always been integral to the concept. Mentors enable and thrive in systems of obstruction and privilege. By embracing them now as vehicles of ostensible inclusivity, companies, nonprofits, and schools gesture to diversity while shoring up the opaque gatekeeping structures that keep power consolidated. Meanwhile, as mentorship becomes increasingly inseparable from its corporate repurposing, the term itself has come to subsume other forms of teaching and caregiving, blurring the lines between labor coerced and labor freely given. Now, we are all the conscripts of mentorship.

Mentorship has become so pervasive, such a taken-for-granted value, that the shallow history of its contemporary meaning has gone strikingly unremarked. Though articles about mentors like to say that they started with Homer’s Odyssey, where Athena disguises herself as someone named Mentor in order to tell Odysseus’s son, Telemachus, to kick Penelope’s deadbeat suitors out of the house, the mentor as it exists today is a uniquely late-capitalist construction. Mentors start popping up with frequency in 18th century literature, where the term means something like “stern but well-intentioned teacher.” In The Task, William Cowper’s charmingly meandering 1785 epic on, among other things, nature, sofas, and God, the speaker describes a thin board frequently strapped to aged backs in the service of posture as “a Mentor worthy of his charge.” By the 19th century, a mentor is as likely to be a piece of instructional literature as a person. The Bible is a “mentor.” So too are didactic texts on everything from fashion to marriage to living a moral life. In the early 20th century, the Mentor is the title of a popular American magazine charged with giving its readers “knowledge that they all want and ought to have.” Here, ��mentor” suggests a kind of anonymous trustworthiness and authority, like a particularly salutary encyclopedia.

Something changes, however, in the 1970s. A search for “mentor” in the Google Books Ngram Viewer — a convenient tool for charting broad shifts in printed English — shows a modestly steady increase in the word’s usage from 1800 to the earliest years of the Reagan era, when the graph starts to mimic a textbook illustration of exponential growth. “Mentoring” is almost nonexistent until the mid-eighties or so, when it too sees a similar spike. For comparison, a search for “adviser” (a common synonym) in the same period yields a graph that looks like a mountain range.

What shifts in these years? One clue exists in a 1980 installment of William Safire’s On Language column in the New York Times, where Safire, a former Nixon speechwriter, practiced his layman lexicography for nearly three decades. In a characteristically tongue-in-cheek piece titled “Perils of the Fast Track,” Safire codifies the new meaning of “mentor” by close reading a recent exposé of what was arguably the first corporate sex scandal: A 29-year-old VP, Mary Cunningham, was accused of a “romantic liaison” with her mentor, William Agee, who also happened to be her CEO. She was forced to resign; Agee stayed on.

“Today,” Safire begins, a mentor is “a senior management figure who takes a younger person under his wing, risking rumor and innuendo if the protégée, or mentee, is an attractive woman.” Safire goes on to explain that though the word comes from Homer, it’s been “adopted” by the corporate world to signify “‘career guide and executive nurturer.’” Safire’s point is that, despite mentor’s new status as business-world lingo, its fundamental meaning hasn’t changed. “Here’s the beauty part,” he writes in the column’s kicker. In the Odyssey, Athena uses Mentor’s identity as a disguise. Thus, Safire concludes, “It was all a trick. . . . As Mary Cunningham learned, at the start of her own odyssey to CEO, mentors can be trouble; even Homer shook his head.”

Safire sounds authoritative — his prose tends to have the air of someone with a comment rather than a question. But his closing “gotcha” nod to Homer is an empty rhetorical flourish. While it’s true that Athena disguises herself as Mentor, the aim isn’t mischief. Taking on his appearance allows her to overlap her identity (all-powerful goddess of wisdom and strategy) with his (a nobleman and guest), which is capable of setting the young Telemachus at ease. When Athena/Mentor takes leave of Telemachus, now buoyed on praise for his bravery and manhood, he has himself become “godlike.” Mentorship here looks not like a “trick” but like a subtle, enlivening transfer of power.

Why does Safire mention the Odyssey at all? Because aligning the fundamentally new meaning of corporate mentorship with Homer is an ideological move, part of the larger linguistic project of Safire and other conservative commentators such as William F. Buckley and George Will, who seek to revive the conservatism that had fallen out of favor since the 1960s by linking it to free market economics, reframing American identity as a matter of Christian faith, “Western Civilization,” and capitalism. In this context, classical learning serves as a form of arbitrary clout, a way of invoking time-honored authority for extant power structures. Things have always been so, says the reference. Who are you to think they could be otherwise? It’s certainly true that men in positions of power have long cultivated the careers of their successors, entrenching their own control by choosing their likenesses to carry it on. But calling this practice mentorship is, in 1980, a new evolution, a way to elide the less savory aspects of business-world patronage by associating it with the term’s blandly benevolent connotations, articulating a vision of corporate life that is not profit hungry but humane, generous, and invested in individual success. At the same time, portraying mentorship as part of a timeless tradition makes it easier for Safire to blame Mary Cunningham for her own termination. The fault lies not with her boss, or the board of trustees who forced her out, but in her own naive assumption that mentorship at work might mean anything other than the same old patriarchy.

It’s tempting to read Safire’s casual endorsement of mentorship’s worst impulses as quaint anachronism, but the Janus-faced definition he helps to shape continues to inform the concept today, overwriting things we used to call teaching, counseling, advising, and friendship. We talk easily of Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Jesus as mentors and the solidarity practiced by people of color, women, and LGBTQ communities as mentorship; at the same time, official mentorship programs syphon up the language and labor of these informal networks, turning their aims not to structural change but to objectives such as employee retention and professional success. Or, as a 2019 Forbes article puts it, “Employees are happy, engaged, and productive when their individual needs and the needs of the organization are in sync.” Like company softball leagues and team-building retreats, mentoring has become another cheap substitute for the structural transformations needed to upend entrenched injustices, superseding tangible forms of support such as money, time, health care, and job security. Even in government and philanthropy, mentoring’s primary aim is economic advancement. In 2002, George W. Bush endorsed January as “National Mentoring Month” in an effort to bolster the professional prospects of youth from underprivileged backgrounds, a cause later taken up by Barack Obama. Granted, when we talk of community and social-justice leaders as mentors, we don’t usually mean “executive nurturers.” We use the term to capture a sense of an affective heritage, in which the meaningful work of social change gets carried forward. And yet, that we turn to “mentor” at all is largely thanks to the term’s Reagan-era reclamation. However much we might want to claim “mentor” for other uses, its every application to the labor of solidarity, caregiving, and comradeship refracts back on its corporate context. Like so much of what was formerly grassroots organizing and activism, it too has become professionalized.

There is one additional feature of the Odyssey’s mentor scene that Safire leaves unremarked. There, as Athena guides Telemachus, preparing him to fight alongside his father, the mentee looks less like an apprentice or a novice than like someone ready to assume the mantle of responsibility, a sharp difference from contemporary corporate mentorship. This is the torch-passing version of the mentor-mentee relationship still common in Hollywood blockbusters and video games, where it’s so frequent that it gets its own mention on the pop-culture wiki TVTropes.com — think of the Jedi masters of Star Wars, or Morpheus tutoring Neo in The Matrix. It’s an archetype that still informs how we often think of the relationships between teachers and students, raising up the young to take over from the old. But it’s an anachronistic fantasy in an era when the structural forces that enabled older generations’ well-being no longer exist — when, in fact, the material comforts of past generations bear responsibility for a climate crisis that will be borne largely by generations to come. In these circumstances, a meaningful transfer of power between mentor and mentee might look less like a torch passing — a replication and renewal of extant practices and beliefs — than like a wholesale rethinking of what power meant and entailed.

Academia, a system with its own long mentorship history, is especially useful for thinking about how conditions of scarcity and upheaval have changed the concept’s meaning. Here too, “mentor” has typically bled into other offices — those of teacher and advisor, which recall the mentor archetype. It’s common for academics to refer to their “mentors” with reverence, as if the term connoted a specific kind of guidance and personal instruction. The term speaks to the idea of intellectual legacy, the way that advanced graduate study was, in a less precarious era, an induction into a genealogy of thought that one would eventually pass on to one’s own mentees.

But academic mentorship has never been perfect, often replicating the same inequalities present outside its walls, and its contemporary application has only heightened its propensity for exploitation. In an era in which the gulf between well- and underresourced institutions has become increasingly stark, mentorship is often uncompensated labor, a trait that compounds the arbitrary ways it has long been dispersed. Mentorship is something many professors can fail at or excel in, disperse with equity or bias, wield as a cudgel or dole out as a gift, often with little penalty or risk to themselves. Students and colleagues rely on such support for their advancement, yet they are often without recourse if they don’t receive it. While some schools and programs might assign mentors, others leave it up to the student to find their own support, whether by networking, charm, or nepotism. The fuzziness of mentorship as a category of academic labor perpetuates this inequality. How do you measure it? What does it involve? What kind of training does it require? What does it even mean? Though the academy has become increasingly willing to use the same productivity quotas honed in the business world, it has remained stubbornly resistant to quantifying the work of mentorship in meaningful ways.

At the same time, mentors bear the weight of institutional efforts to increase diversity. Here, perhaps even more than in the corporate world, it’s often treated as a form of charity, a service obligation one can assume or disregard, reserved mostly for those who see inclusion as an ethical and political obligation as much as a professional one. While universities may pay lip service to its virtue and form committees to facilitate its practice, it usually counts for little in the tenure process. The labor and value of mentoring is a dominant theme in Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure, English professor Patricia A. Matthew’s indispensable collection of interviews and essays on the experiences of the “diverse” faculty academia claims to celebrate. Here, as sociologist Andreana Clay suggests, being a mentor is often “inextricably linked to the position of the educator,” encompassing mutuality, allyship, friendship, activism, and role modeling. But ambivalence and frustration are equally part of the job, the consequence of institutional unwillingness to give time or recognition to work disproportionately performed by faculty of identities historically marginalized in academic life. Meanwhile, academia largely excludes the ever growing number of contingent instructors — the majority of teaching faculty at colleges today — from formal and informal support. This doesn’t prevent their students, who see no difference between them and tenure-track professors, from seeking their time and care. If, at some point, for some people, academic mentorship offered an archetype of the concept, as close as anyone outside a Homeric epic might get to godlike guidance, that day is long past.

And yet. The ideal of the good mentor persists. We reify the term even as it grows increasingly imprecise. Much like the 20th century ideal of the perfect spouse, the mentor in 2020 houses a seemingly endless and incompatible cluster of desires, everything from understanding to support, friendship, motivation, protection, advocacy, leadership, deference, generosity, power, nurturing, care, and collaboration. The mentor stands for the best version of who we want to be, while promising to see us as the best version of ourselves. As in the Odyssey passage Safire references, we might as well ask for a divine protector. Even in its originating appearance, the mentor is an impossible hybrid, as much a fantasy as a source of guidance.

Such desire speaks to another aspect of the mentor ideal: the potential for mutual fascination, as mentor and mentee find in one another both a reflection and an exemplar, sharing the charged pleasure of mutual recognition. Affect theorist Eve Sedgwick gets at this kind of exchange best in her description of the teacher-student relationship in Western appropriations of Tibetan Buddhism. Reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, a popularization of The Tibetan Book of the Dead written largely for American readers by Sogyal Rinpoche, a charismatic Buddhist teacher, Sedgwick considers the distinctive phenomenology of reincarnation in descriptions of the teacher-student bond. As a young child, Rinpoche was identified as the reincarnation of a renowned Buddhist teacher by the man who would become his own “master,” Jamyang Khyentse. He was raised and taught by Khyentse, in the same way Khyentse had been raised and taught by him, in his prior life. In Rinpoche’s description, it’s a kind of teaching that, as Sedgwick suggests, “thrives on personality and intimate emotional relation,” even as it also “functions as a mysteriously powerful solvent of individual identity.” Here, temporal and interpersonal boundaries blur: One is always both teacher and student to an intimately connected other, who is also always one’s own teacher and student. A version of this interchange exists in the transactional language of mentoring today. Mentoring, we are often told, is a two-way street: The mentor stands to gain as much as the mentee, who should in turn consider themselves a mentor in training. Sedgwick reminds us of the emotional intimacy of such work. The will to mentor and to be mentored often comes from a sense of identification: This is who I was; this is who I want to be. It’s a relationship engaged with obligation and care, even as it’s not so much selfless as deeply, disorientingly self-entranced.

There is a coda to Sogyal Rinpoche’s story. In 2017, a quarter century after The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying became an international phenomenon, and nearly 15 years after Sedgwick wrote about it, decades of abuse suffered under Rinpoche came to light in Rigpa, the international Buddhist network he founded, along with evidence of a longstanding cover-up. In a public letter written by his former students, they describe physical, psychological, and sexual manipulation explained away as instruction, concealed by Rinpoche’s “public face” of “wisdom, kindness, humor, warmth and compassion.”

It’s a conclusion that today feels almost expected. Post #MeToo, the ability of powerful men who claimed to be mentors to exploit the trust that came with that role appears unnervingly commonplace. Looking back to Safire’s deeply sexist telling of Mary Cunningham’s experience, or to the many similar stories found in academia, there’s another account of mentorship to be told, one in which the role’s queasy combination of benevolence and power excuses manipulation and abuse. In this version of mentorship’s history, we might see its current association with inclusion and diversity as a kind of sea change, a way of shifting power away from those who have wielded it for too long. Here, the identificatory ideal of mentorship becomes relevant again, promising a way of retelling history, making wisdom from suffering, celebrating those who broke the paths we tread.

Or we could imagine different kinds of solidarity. As much as we might want to, it’s impossible to unwind contemporary mentorship from a worldview that blames individuals for their own subjugation and absolves the company and the state of the burdens of meaningful social change. Before the mentor’s rise, we had language for this. Maybe it’s time to reclaim it.

#mentoring #The Way We Live Now #metoo #professional culture #workplace culture #health care industry #career building #sociology #employment #corporate culture #labor

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clodiuspulcher · 5 years

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Heroides I: Penelope to Ulysses/Ulixes/Ὀδυσσεύς/𐌄T𐌔OV

Penelope sends you this, long-suffering Ulysses,

but don’t write back to me: come yourself! Troy lies in ruins, hated by us Greek girls; Priam and all of Troy were hardly worth so high a price. O would that when Paris with his Spartan fleet sought Helen, That womanizer had been buried by the wild waves! Then I wouldn’t lay here, cold in our empty bed , Nor mourn, abandoned, the days slowly passing, Nor would my heavy web exhaust my widowed hands, weaving deception all night. When have I not feared imagined dangers, greater than the truth? Love is a thing full of anxious fear. I imagined Trojan soldiers marching against you; I grow pale, always, at the mention of Hector. And if anyone told a story about, say, Antilochus conquered by the enemy, Antilochus made me afraid; Or if they said Patroclus had fallen in his false arms, I wept that such tricks could lack success. Tlepolemus made the Lycian spear warm with blood, Now I worry again that he might die. And further, whoever of the Greek camp had been killed, The heart of their lover turned cold as ice. But the fair-minded god looked after my chaste love. Troy was overturned, incinerated, with my man safe and sound. Our generals return, our altars smoke; barbarian treasure is placed before the gods of our fathers. Women give thanks for the gift of their husbands safe; Their men sing of the doomed Troy they conquered. Upright old men and fearful girls marvel; A wife hangs on every word of her husband’s tale. And someone at the table re-enacts the fierce battles, He paints all of Troy with a little wine: “Here ran the Simois; Here was Sigean earth; Here stood the high palace of old Priam. Here Achilles camped, here Ulysses; Here the mangled Hector terrified the horses urged to gallop.” Indeed, old Nestor told all this to your son, sent to ask about you, and he relayed it to me. And he told of Rhesus and Dolon cut down by your sword, One of whom was betrayed by sleep, the other by deceit. You dared - Oh, you so very, astoundingly forgetful of us at home! - to attack the Thracian camp with nocturnal trickery, And so many men you slaughtered, aided only by one! You were sure careful then, thinking of me first! And how my heart shook with fear, while you, my dear hero, were said to have ridden through the battle lines on Ismarus’s horses. But how does it help me if Troy falls to your arms, and its great walls fall to earth, If I remain alone, as I was when Troy once stood And my man is absent, stolen from me, by this forever war? To others, Troy might have fallen, but to me alone it stands, Where now the victor lives, and plows with captive oxen, Already a field where once was Troy seeks the scythe’s harvest, the earth grows rich with Phrygian blood; The half-buried bones of men are struck by the curving plow, grass occupies ruined homes. You, oh victor, are absent, and I’m not allowed to know what killed you or in what world you’re cruelly hiding! Anyone who turns his wandering ship towards this shore leaves only after I’ve drilled him about you. And what he will give you, if he ever sees you, are the letters written by my hand, handed over to him. I sent to Pylos, to the Nelean fields of ancient Nestor; half-truths and rumors came back form Pylos. I sent to Sparta, nothing of truth from Sparta either. Which lands are you living in now, or with whom do you delay? Apollo’s walls standing even now would be of more use to me, I grow angry, alas, at my useless prayers! I might have known where you were fighting, and feared the great war, And my complaints would’ve been joined to those of many. But I don’t even know what to be afraid of now - so I fear all things, out of my mind with worry, And the wide plain of my worry stretches out, out. Whatever dangers the sea holds, or the earth, such long delays make me fear both. And- stupidly- I fear this, which is to say, your will- You could be captured by a foreign love. And perhaps you will tell them, how your wife is a simply country woman, Only fit to work raw wool Let me be deceived, and let this crime vanish into thin air, Please, let it not be that you, with the freedom to return, would rather be away! My father Icarius compels me to leave my widowed bed and chides my long delays. He can chide as long as he wants - I am yours, I should be called yours. Penelope will ALWAYS be the wife of Ulysses. My father is broken by my piety and faithful prayers and he tempers his will. A luxurious, excessive crowd of suitors rush me into ruin, of Dulichium and Samos and those who high Zacynthos holds, And with no reservations, they rule YOUR palace; My heart, your riches are torn to pieces. What should I say to you about how Pisander, Polybus, cruel Medon, the greedy hands of Eurymachus and Antinous, and others, those who you, shamefully absent, nourish with riches won by your blood? Destitute Irus and Melanthius the driver of your flock - for eating - are the final shame heaped upon your ruin. Us unwarlike number only three: Your unarmed wife, old Laertes, and young Telemachus. My son was almost stolen from me recently, through deceit, When he was preparing to go to Pylos, with all opposed. I pray that the gods order that, with the will of the fates, he will close my eyes in death, and yours! To make this happen: the guardian of your cows, the aged nurse, the third the faithful watchman of the filthy pigsty; But Laertes, as he is unable now to bear arms, is now unable to hold the palace with so many enemies. Age will make Telemachus a stronger man, if only he lives; Now he must be guarded, with his father’s help- I don’t have the strength to drive away these enemies from our home. Swiftly, you, come, a safe harbor and altar for your own! You have a son (I pray he’ll still be alive) who needed to be taught the skills of his father in his more tender years. Consider Laertes: who, so that you might close his eyes, holds back death to the very last day. And I, but a girl when you left, as fast as you may arrive, will seem to have become an old woman.

#tagamemnon #my translations #ah... i love this one. thank u ovid #and he destroys so many bad odyssey takes!

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didanawisgi · 6 years

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The Odyssey is about a man. It says so right at the beginning — in Robert Fagles’s 1996 translation, for example, the poem opens with the line, “Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns.”

In the course of the poem, that man plots his return home after fighting the Trojan War, slaughters the suitors vying to marry his wife Penelope, and reestablishes himself as the head of his household.

But the Odyssey is also about other people: Penelope, the nymph Calypso, the witch Circe, the princess Nausicaa; Odysseus’s many shipmates who died before they could make it home; the countless slaves in Odysseus’s house, many of whom are never named.

Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English, is as concerned with these surrounding characters as she is with Odysseus himself. Written in plain, contemporary language and released earlier this month to much fanfare, her translationlays bare some of the inequalities between characters that other translations have elided. It offers not just a new version of the poem, but a new way of thinking about it in the context of gender and power relationships today. As Wilson puts it, “the question of who matters is actually central to what the text is about.”

Why it matters for a woman to translate the Odyssey

Composed around the 8th century BC, the Odyssey is one of the oldest works of literature typically read by an American audience; for comparison, it’s almost 2,000 years older than Beowulf. While the Iliad tells the story of the Trojan War, the Odyssey picks up after the war is over, when Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, is trying to make his way home.

Both poems are traditionally attributed to the Greek poet Homer, but since they almost certainly originated as oral performances and not written texts, it’s hard to tell whether a single person composed them, or whether they are the result of many different creators and performers refining and contributing to a story over a period of time. (The introduction to Wilson’s translation includes a longer discussion of the question of who “Homer” was.)

Wilson, a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, has also translated plays by the ancient Greek playwright Euripides and the Roman philosopher Seneca. Her translation of the Odyssey is one of many in English (though the others have been by men), including versions by Fagles, Robert Fitzgerald, Richmond Lattimore, and more. Translating the long-dead language Homer used — a variant of ancient Greek called Homeric Greek — into contemporary English is no easy task, and translators bring their own skills, opinions, and stylistic sensibilities to the text. The result is that every translation is different, almost a new poem in itself.

A battlefield epic, the Iliad has very few major female characters. The Odyssey, however, devotes significant time to the life (and even the dreams) of Penelope. Circe, Calypso, and the goddess Athena all play important roles. This was one of the reasons I was drawn to the Odyssey as a teenager, and why I’ve returned to it many times over the years.

But the Odyssey is hardly a feminist text. Odysseus may have trouble getting home, but at least he gets to travel the world and have sex with beautiful women like Calypso and Circe. Penelope, meanwhile, has to wait around while boorish suitors drink and carouse in her family’s home, pressuring her to marry one of them. To buy time, she says she can’t marry until she finishes weaving a funeral shroud for her father-in-law, but every night she undoes the day’s work, making the task last as long as she can. “His work always gets him somewhere,” Wilson told me. “Her work is all about undoing. It’s all about hiding herself, hiding her desires, and creating something whose only purpose is to get nowhere.”

Some feminist readings of the Odyssey have tried to cast Penelope as heroic in her own way, sometimes by comparing her to Odysseus. “I think there’s so many things wrong with that,” Wilson said. “She’s constantly still being judged by, is she like him.” What’s more, the heroic-Penelope reading focuses on a wealthy woman at the expense of the many enslaved women in the poem, some of whom meet an untimely and brutal end. When Odysseus returns home and kills all the suitors, he also tells his son Telemachus to kill the slave women who had sex with (or were raped by) the suitors. “Hack at them with long swords, eradicate / all life from them,” Odysseus says in Wilson’s translation. “They will forget the things / the suitors made them do with them in secret.”

As a woman, Wilson believes she comes to the Odyssey with a different perspective than translators who have gone before her. “Female translators often stand at a critical distance when approaching authors who are not only male, but also deeply embedded in a canon that has for many centuries been imagined as belonging to men,” she wrote in a recent essay at the Guardian. She called translating Homer as a woman an experience of “intimate alienation.”

“Earlier translators are not as uncomfortable with the text as I am,” she explained to me, “and I like that I’m uncomfortable.” Part of her goal with the translation was to make readers uncomfortable too — with the fact that Odysseus owns slaves, and with the inequities in his marriage to Penelope. Making these aspects of the poem visible, rather than glossing over them, “makes it a more interesting text,” she said.

Wilson’s translation is different from its predecessors in subtle — and not so subtle — ways

Part of the way Wilson challenges previous readings of the Odyssey is with style. Her translation made a splash months before it was published, when an excerpt ran in the summer 2017 issue of the Paris Review. I and other Odyssey fans were excited by Wilson’s opening line: “Tell me about a complicated man.” In its matter-of-fact language, it’s worlds different from Fagles’s “Sing to me of the man, Muse,” or Robert Fitzgerald’s 1961 version, “Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story / of that man skilled in all ways of contending.” Wilson chose to use plain, relatively contemporary language in part to “invite readers to respond more actively with the text,” she writes in a translator’s note. “Impressive displays of rhetoric and linguistic force are a good way to seem important and invite a particular kind of admiration, but they tend to silence dissent and discourage deeper modes of engagement.”

“There’s an idea that Homer has to sound heroic and ancient,” Wilson told me, but that idea comes with a value system attached, one that includes “endorsing this very hierarchical kind of society as if that’s what heroism is.” Telling the story in plainer language allows readers to see Odysseus and his society in another light.

There are flashes of beauty in Wilson’s Odyssey. “The early Dawn was born,” she writes in Book 2; “her fingers bloomed.” Of the forest on Calypso’s island, where many birds nest, she writes, “It was full of wings.” But throughout the book, there’s a frankness to Wilson’s language around work and the people who do it. Of Eurymedusa, a slave in the house of princess Nausicaa, she writes, “She used to babysit young Nausicaa / and now she lit her fire and cooked her meal.”

The slaves in older translations of the Odyssey do not “babysit” — often, they’re not identified as slaves at all. Fagles, for instance, calls Eurymedusa a “chambermaid.” Fitzgerald calls her a “nurse.” “It sort of stuns me when I look at other translations,” Wilson said, “how much work seems to go into making slavery invisible.”

Wilson, by contrast, uses the word “slave” for Eurymedusa and many other enslaved characters, even when the original uses a more specific term. The Homeric Greek dmoe, or “female-house-slave,” Wilson writes in her translator’s note, could be translated as “maid” or “domestic servant,” but those terms would imply that the woman was free. “The need to acknowledge the fact and the horror of slavery,” she writes, “and to mark the fact that the idealized society depicted in the poem is one where slavery is shockingly taken for granted, seems to me to outweigh the need to specify, in every instance, the type of slave.”

While Wilson’s language is often plain, it’s also carefully chosen. She told Wyatt Mason at the New York Times magazine she could have begun the poem with the line “Tell me about a straying husband,” an even more radical choice that would still have been “a viable translation.” But, she said, “it would give an entirely different perspective and an entirely different setup for the poem.” She spoke, Mason noted, with “the firmness of someone making hard choices she believes in.”

Those choices show up clearly in her treatment of Penelope. Penelope is a frustrating character — it’s not entirely clear why she doesn’t simply send the suitors away or marry one of them, and the poem offers limited access to her thoughts and feelings. Wilson didn’t try to make Penelope easier to understand — “the opacity of Penelope,” as she puts it, is one of the aspects of the poem she wants to trouble readers and make them uncomfortable.

But small details can tell us something about even the most frustrating of characters. At one point in Book 21, Penelope unlocks the storeroom where Odysseus keeps his weapons — as Wilson writes in her translator’s note, this act sets in motion the slaughter of the suitors and the resolution of the poem. As she picks up the key, Homer describes her hand as pachus, or “thick.” “There is a problem here,” Wilson writes, “since in our culture, women are not supposed to have big, thick, or fat hands.” Translators have usually solved the problem by skipping the adjective, or putting in something more traditional — Fagles mentions Penelope’s “steady hand.” Wilson, however, renders the moment this way: “Her muscular, firm hand/ picked up the ivory handle of the key.”

“Weaving does in fact make a person’s hands more muscular,” she writes. “I wanted to ensure that my translation, like the original, underlines Penelope’s physical competence, which marks her as a character who plays a crucial part in the action — whether or not she knows what she is doing.”

Wilson does not give Penelope more agency or power than she has in the original poem, but she also does not take any of the queen’s original power away by making descriptions of her conform to modern gender stereotypes.

“Part of fighting misogyny in the current world is having a really clear sense of what the structures of thought and the structures of society are that have enabled androcentrism in different cultures, including our own,” Wilson said, and the Odyssey, looked at in the right way, can help readers understand those structures more clearly. The poem offers a “defense of a male dominant society, a defense of its own hero and his triumph over everybody else,” she said, “but it also seems to provide these avenues for realizing what’s so horrible about this narrative, what’s missing about this narrative.”

Recent events have led to a widespread debate over how audiences should consume the work of people we know to be abusers of women. This is intertwined with the question of how we should consume art that has racist, sexist, or otherwise bigoted elements. Often elided from this conversation is the fact that people of color and women of all races have been consuming racist and sexist art in America for generations (in many classes on Western literature, for instance, they have had little choice), and developing their own responses to it, responses that are often deeply nuanced.

Conservative talk of “special snowflakes” demanding trigger warnings ignores the fact that people marginalized in the Western canon have long read literature from it in exactly the way Wilson describes: both as an endorsement of its author’s values, and as evidence of how horrible those values can be, and whom they leave out.

Wilson’s translation, then, is not a feminist version of the Odyssey. It is a version of the Odyssey that lays bare the morals of its time and place, and invites us to consider how different they are from our own, and how similar.

#emily wilson #odyssey #Greek Mythology #linguistics #ancient greece #mythology #poetry

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pariswrites-blog · 7 years

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So I decided to make a large list of plots / faces / ships that I want, which you can find below the cut. It’s long. Check it out and message me/like this if you’re interested in any of them!

MOST WANTED

So I’ve got 3 ships that I want most of all: Niels Schneider x Xavier Dolan, Daniel Sharman x Frank Dillane, and Niels Schneider x Daniel Sharman. I’m completely open plot wise for any of these though for the Niels x Daniel one, I did make this post earlier and still 100% stand by it. I will love you forever if you do one of these with me.

CANONS

TEEN WOLF

I love this show too much and am so sad to see it go so why not do some 1x1s for it?

I love playing Isaac tbh and would love to have some ships for him. Allison x Isaac is like my OTP so if someone did that with me I would scream? I’ve also always been intrigued with the idea of Lydia x Isaac so I would totally love it if someone did that one too (and I’m cool with changing Holland’s face if you’re uncomfortable with her). Scott x Isaac, Stiles x Isaac, Jackson x Isaac are all some other suggestions. I’m intrigued with Boyd x Isaac as well so that’s a suggestion there too.

Also, sorry Thiam shippers, but I’m 100% forever on the Briam train so if someone would play Liam against my Brett, I’d be in heaven.

IN THE FLESH

Okay so, fun fact, this blog was re-purposed from an rp blog for a group that sadly died. It was an ITF inspired rp and I loved the character I played there and would love to bring him back. There was also a wanted connection I had for him that never got filled but that would be really great as a 1x1. You can read about my character Apollo Bellerose (Niels Schneider fc) here but here’s also a summary of the idea.

(Muse A is Apollo, Muse B would be your character.)

M/M -- Muse A was a wild child, a feral animal of fire and rule-breaking. Hopes for him were dashed at an early age as he set himself up as the trouble-maker. Muse B was the opposite -- tempered and popular. The only reason their paths crossed was because they grew up in the same small town, in the same class. But that should’ve been it. It was a surprise to everyone when Muse B and Muse A started hanging out together, soon becoming inseparable. They were just children but they were attached at the hip, growing into adolescence and teenagers. Muse A was still wild, Muse B was still calm -- fire and water, red and blue. When they were sixteen, their friendship evolved into something more intimate. Though the relationship could be fraught at time -- Muse A to blame in almost every case -- their bond ran deep. Or it did, until Muse B died suddenly. It was an accident or heart failure or something similar, sudden and unexpected. Too soon. One might’ve expected Muse A to go off the deep-end but, rather, he was numb, going through the motions. That was until the Rising happened and the dead came back. The world ground to a halt but with the PDS sufferers in treatment centers, the world is returning to normal and Muse A is getting back on his self-destructive track. He refuses to acknowledge that overwhelming possibility that Muse B would be one of those PDS sufferers, going so far as to avoid Muse B’s grave. With the PDS sufferers returning to Roarton though, it’s only a matter of time before Muse A wouldn’t be able to deny to it. But will an apocalypse be enough to sever their bond? Probably not.

My main suggestion for B was Xavier Dolan though I also originally suggested Daniel Sharman and Keith Powers. Matt Daddario, Bob Morley, and Dominic Sherwood would also work though Xavier and Daniel would be preferred. This is, like, one I really, really want to do still.

XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS

Campy 90s shows for the win (oh, and fuck you Looper -- it’s still perfectly watchable now). Anyways. I really want a Xena x Gabrielle plot, two bad-ass women travelling through the ancient world, kicking godly asses. As much as I love Lucy Lawless and Renee O’Connor, I realize that they’re not really usable so I’m totally down for changing the faces. Just... Please. Badass women and a canon that totally allows for AUs in all time periods -- it’d be awesome.

THE ORIGINALS

So um... I don’t want like a really super canon 1x1 here but like, after Koleb died, I got in my head this idea of what if, when Davina brought back Kol, Kaleb hitched a ride back. Kaleb’s bitter af but he was always kind of the way in my mind. The pairing would be Davina x Kaleb and we could also make this an OT3 if there was someone who’d like to play Kol as well but that’s not necessary for me.

LES AMOURS IMAGINAIRES

Uh... Indie French cinema for the win? Yeah, I know this won’t get any bites but I’m gonna try anyways. Basically a few years after the end of the movie, Francis and Nicolas meet again. There’s been some maturing, maybe Francis isn’t as close to Marie anymore (or maybe she got married or something). It’s slow-burn reconnecting and falling in love.

FEAR THE WALKING DEAD

So... I know Troy’s a POS person but I think there was potential for evolution in his character. He was isolated from a young age with an abusive father and alcoholic mother which didn’t give him much of a fighting chance in becoming a better person. Off the ranch though, I think he could have evolved. He also had a ton of useful information about walkers. Anyways, I’d like to give him that arc. Also I want to explore that mad chemistry between Nick and Troy so yeah. This masterlist might be good for some general plot ideas and tbh the “Who’s baby is this?” one just screams Trick to me.

GREEK MYTH

This can be like modern or actual myth -- either’s cool.

Zeus x Ganymede. Either historical like Zeus kidnaps him to be the wine-pourer and Zeus wants him but Ganymede is just perpetually pissed with him for KIDNAPPING him and Zeus has to win him over. Or maybe something modern that’s more sugary daddy/baby-ish?

Telemachus. I really love my baby Telemachus? Or Telemaque as the French would say. But, basically, there’s this suitor and he’s one of the younger ones, probably 25 or less, and not really in the running to win Penelope’s hand but eh. He doesn’t really care. He likes to tease Telemachus but as things get worse in Ithaca, he realizes he’s worried about Telemachus and starts teaching him how to fight and defending him and they start falling in love. He be all like ‘I’ll go with you’ when Telemachus goes to find his father (even though he doesn’t) and, when Odysseus returns, Telemachus has to defend him because he was technically one of the suitors and just... Please. (I’d play Telemachus.)

Odysseus x Penelope. Clever Odysseus and clever Penelope, dominating and tricking the world with their superior minds. A modern!AU.

HARRY POTTER

I love this universe so I’m super down for anything. I won’t do anything set at Hogwarts because I can never remain interested in that tbh but other stuff is cool. I highkey ship Remus x Sirius and would love to write them as long as the faces aren’t Andrew Garfield or Ben Barnes. I also love all the potential in the fucked up dynamic between Fenrir and Remus. I usually end up playing Fenrir but if someone wanted to let me play Remus in that, I’d adore you forever. A Regulus x Remus one would be awesome too. A Nymphadora x Remus ship would be cool too, as would a James x Lily or Lily x Marlene. Outside the Marauders era, someone needs to give me a Ginny x Cho ship. I also wrote a next gen son of Greyback (Lycus Greyback) once that I’d love to bring back. Maybe with Teddy? Or OCs -- OCs in the HP universe are totally okay with me.

PLOTS

So this tag has the plots I want but some I particularly want.

X. I’d like to be Muse B and maybe like have Tom Ellis as A? Or Jason Momoa? Idk. I’m open but I think it’d be super fun.

X. I’d be cool with playing either in this plot; I’d love to see Troye Sivan as A but again open but fun sounding.

“you’re supposed to be on a blind date with someone but you sat down at the wrong table and i haven’t been able to get a word in edgewise to tell you that and it’s been thirty minutes” from this post. I’ve no preferences on genders or faces just I think this could be cool.

Yo I’ve mentioned this multiple times not but THIS PLOT with Daniel Sharman as A and Niels Schneider as B -- let me play B and love. me.

“what is the ONE thing i asked you NOT to do tonight?” “raise the dead…” “AND WHAT DID YOU DO?!” “…raised the dead…” from this post. I really want to play a necromancer? Maybe we could do a Trick!AU where the walkers are because of necromancers and Troy has had to repress the fact he’s one his entire life and then Jeremiah and Jake are dead and yeah. But we could also do this as entirely OC. I’d still love it be necromancer-caused zombie apocalypse but I’m cool with other stuff.

“i’m a ghost and i’m trapped in the graveyard and i don’t normally talk to mortals but bro i have to ask wtf are you doing hanging around a graveyard is your life really this sad” from this post. open and fun again!

X. PLEASE. Any sort of serial killer plot would be awesome. Which is a weird fucking thing to say but okay.

“you and your friend always sit at the table a couple down from mine and gossip in [insert language here], which happens to be a language i’m currently learning. i’ve been eavesdropping to try and improve my listening comprehension and oh my god are you actually talking about how hot i am???” -- this please, from this post. maybe like a daniel sharman x tyler posey? or idk.

literally anything from this post but like i mention “who’s baby is this? au” for Trick in a canon divergent plot (ie. after they leave the ranch, before they get to the dam)

also this could also work for xavier dolan x niels schneider.

SHIPS

So how about a Xavier Dolan x Daniel Sharman? Or Jenna Thiam x Niels Schneider? Also Jack Falahee, Crystal Reed, Kat McNamara, Conrad Ricamora x Daniel Sharman. Other ones that don’t include Daniel, Xavier, or Niels: Eva Green x Caitlin Stasey (I’d also be cool with playing Eva if we used them for Xena and Gabrielle), Riz Ahmed x Fawad Khan (Fawad as a multi-billionaire playboy and Riz as a devoted grad student, maybe?), Charlie Hunnam x Jason Momoa, Marlon Teixeira x Willy Cartier, Andreja Pejic x Hari Nef, Andrew Garfield x Ben Barnes (but not as Remus and Sirius), Sofia Boutella x Charlize Theron.

FACES

It’s very clear that I love Daniel Sharman and Niels Schneider so they will always be most wanted, with Xavier Dolan as a close third. I feel most comfortable with them tbh and have the most muse for them (also I’ve made like 400 gifs of Niels). If you want to make me happy, let me play one of them and play one of the others against me. I would like to branch out at some point though so some others. There are honestly too many for me to list in their entirety so I’ll list only ones I have mentioned already. Bold are ones I want to play, italics I want used against me, plain are the ones I have no preference about (though I’d be open on most of the bold ones too).

Alycia Debnam-Carey, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Samuel Larsen, Adrianne Palicki, Laith Ashley, Elliot Fletcher, Iskra Lawrence, Lisa Teige, Iman Meskini, Hale Appleman, Tarjei Sandvik Moe, Adelaide Kane, Alexandra Daddario, Amber Heard, Josh Holloway, Angelina Jolie, Arden Cho, Barbara Palvin, Alex Saxon, Alexander Koch, Bianca Santos, Caity Lotz, Camila Quieroz, Cara Delevigne, Blake Michael, Avan Jogia, Austin Butler, Diego Barrueco, Bill Skarsgard, Booboo Stewart, Chloe Bridges, Byun Baek-Hyun, Diane Guerrero, Carlos Valdes, Josh Thomas, Dichen Lachman, Christopher Larkin, Eddie Redmayne, Ezra Miller, Gaspard Ulliel, Emeraude Toubia, Emilia Clarke, Famke Janssen, Gabriella Wilde, Halston Sage, Dev Patel, Douglas Booth, Godfrey Gao, Harry Shum Jr., Karen Fukuhara, Kiowa Gordon, Landon Liboiron, Matt Hitt, Matthew Gray Gubler, Keira Knightley, Kiana Lede, Lana Condor, Liza Soberano, Maira Walsh, Jamie Blackley, Jordan Fisher, Jamie Campbell-Bower, Megan Fox, Naomi Scott, Max Irons, Reece King, Richard Harmon, Natalia Dyer, Phoebe Tonkin, Priyanka Chopra, Madelaine Petsch, Seo Kang-Joon, Steven R. McQueen, Steven Yeun, Seychelle Gabriel, Shelley Hennig, Skyler Samuels, Haruma Miura, Lee Hyun-Jae, Thomas McDonell, Toby Regbo, Tom Holland, Tyler Blackburn, Joe Manganiello, Tyler Hoechlin, Cengiz Al, Froy Gutierrez, Tanya Beatty, Victoria Moroles, Zoe Kravtiz, Yoon Jeonghan.

This is not all-encompassing. There are plenty more faces. In fact, I’d love to use model faces without any resources -- just some old-fashioned writing, maybe some static icons if we feel like it.

#rpt #1x1 rp #1x1 #1x1 plot #rpc

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nonnybusiness-blog · 7 years

Text

Dear Nonconathon Author,

My AO3 name is nonnymouse. It was already taken on Tumblr, so I chose something else.

When it comes to noncon, I prefer dark or unhappy or bad endings. It doesn’t have to be everything is awful forever, but I don’t want much happier than the rapist deciding they’re bored/through/have gotten what they wanted and leaving the victim alone. I definitely don’t want the victim getting revenge (or even planning it at the end) or the rapist ending up caught and/or punished.

If the rapist and victim end up together, it can be a kidnapping or slavery or Stockholm Syndrome situation. The victim can think it is love, but no actual rape turns to love.

Some general kinks that I enjoy as a flavoring with everything:

- Watersports (holding it, peeing in/on people, bladder control, the full umbrella)

- Spanking (including genital spanking, and hands or implements)

- Boot licking

- Corruption of innocence

- Public use (consensual and nonconsensual)

- Lingerie

- Exhibitionism

- Humiliation

- Body writing

- Piercings, tattoos, brands, and other markings of ownership

- Body modification (including amputation and fantastical modifications)

For noncon in particular, I enjoy bodily betrayal (when they physically enjoy it despite their horror/pain/etc). I am open to many kinds of rapist, from those who only view the victim as an object/toy to those who are condescendingly praising the victim for being so good to those who are calculating the rape to hurt the victim as much as personally possible.

I’m not really into plain torture, but sexualized torture is fine. I’d rather a focus on violation and noncon than torture of whatever type, but the noncon can be violent. Punching, slapping, painful holds or bondage, whatever the rapist needs to subdue the victim or helps them get their rocks off.

Also, if I requested a kink twice or more, you can assume I quite like that kink and don’t mind it showing up with a different request. You can look at my Smut Swap letter for more ideas.

If you’re inspired to write something with a plot, I will be very impressed and excited, but my prompts below focus on PWP situations. Mostly because that’s all I’m coming up with.

Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate

Relationships:

Original Male Character(s) noncons Tobias

Yeerk!Tom Berenson noncons Jake Berenson

Warnings:

Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage, Rape/Non-Con

Tags:

Betrayal/Abuse of trust

Enduring rape to distract an enemy

Family Fucktoy

Forced to Drink Piss

Victim Trying to Pretend They're Having Sex Consensually

Rapist Praising the Victim

Prompts:

For OMCs nonconning Tobias, I want Tobias put through the wringer. He’s the first woobie I remember loving, and I reveled in just how terrible his life was. This could be set precanon (but no more than a few years) in an AU where he’s in foster care (instead of neglected by family) and his foster family betrays and abuses him, or turns him into a fucktoy. Anytime it could work with bullying classmates. Adult or peer assailants are both fine. I don’t want postcanon; I don’t want any grief for Rachel mixed into the bad emotions.

For both, enduring rape to distract an enemy works well during a mission. Perhaps it could be done to convince the rapist they aren’t an Animorph?

For Yeerk!Tom noncons Jake, I’d like more focus on the emotions than the violence (although it can still be violent, of course). Perhaps the Yeerk thinks the reason Jake started acting so weird around his brother is a crush, and fucking Jake will bring him back into line? Or the whole family gets converted to Yeerks and they start fucking Jake to get him to beg to be infested, or because they see an uninfested human as just a toy? Anything with Jake being conflicted about it being his brother’s body but not his brother and knowing that he could morph into a tiger and just eat his rapist, but not doing it because that would kill his brother and reveal his identity.

Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis

Warnings:

Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage, Rape/Non-Con

Relationship:

Bern noncons Caspian

Tags:

Slave Training

Castration

Forced Feminization

forced bestiality

Humiliation

piss enema

Forced to Drink Piss

Sex Toys Locked on and in Their Body 24/7

Used as Fuck Furniture

Prompts:

Essentially, an AU where after the slave auction Caspian is actually stuck as Bern’s slave. Lots of degrading sex ensues where Bern muses on how sweet Caspian looks. Caspian tries to keep his composure and it only makes Bern want to push him farther and break him of his haughty bearing since he’s now a slave. It’s for his own good if he learns to accept his place. Perhaps he even makes Caspian his footstool or lamp (tied and holding a dripping candle). Or just Bern having fun with his pretty new acquisition. And I know Narnia doesn’t have modern tech, but I am fine with fantasy vibes as well as more low tech toys like cock cages and dildoes or gags or whatever.

For bestiality in Narnia, I do imagine it being with a talking animal.

Greek and Roman Mythology

Warnings:

Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage, Rape/Non-Con

Relationships:

The Suitors noncon Telemachus

108 Suitors noncon Penelope

Tags:

Character Forced to Watch Other Character Getting Gang Raped

Forced Exhibitionism

Public Use

Genital Mutilation

Castration

Stocks and Pillory

Objectification/Dehumanization

Prompts:

I saw this in the tagset and realized it was a thing i never knew I wanted. I imagine it as the suitors getting fed up with their wait and using Telemachus, Penelope, or both for their pleasure. If it is suitors nonconning Telemachus, perhaps they are hiding their use of her son from Penelope and she thinks she is still successfully holding them off?

I requested most of the tags I did because I imagine the suitors being very (sexually) frustrated and angry and going wild once they have a target.

I did not request the character death warning on this one; however, I am fine with the suitors snuffing Telemachus (not Penelope).

Mulan (1998)

Warnings:

Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage, Rape/Non-Con

Relationship:

Matchmaker noncons Mulan