one of the reasons why "what if people went on a road trip and it was weird" is one of the oldest story types is that a lot of sense of personhood has been, historically, tied to place. the weird road trip says "what if we went somewhere else, where no one knows us, and tried out being a different person".

Odysseus, the famous liar, goes on a weird road trip & over the course of it becomes several different people, and then comes home & is all those people as well as himself, wearing the echoes of those other people

*daintily twitches the legs of my too-long baggy jeans up on a dirty street like a victorian upper-class lady walking through the rough parts of london

- its an old, historically charged name, which is why it’s appealing for kings and pretentious gay students

- it sounds very british, like a used teacup, or a trenchcoat

- it is ofter shortened to dick, rick, richie or others, meaning you can analyse each character’s nickname usage for the respective Richard™

- it means “strong in rule” in proto-germanic, so you can use that either ironically (papen, cameron) or unironically (stirling)

What is it with dark academia and the name Richard?

!! spoiler for if we were villains !!

you KILL richard?? you kill richard like the shakespearean tragedy character? oh! oh! trauma for the depressed thespians! trauma and gay thoughts for the depressed thespians for One Thousand Years!!!!

my favorite genre of book is "inverted mystery in which a group of students in a pretentious-sounding college participate in murdering their friend. the narrator tells the story by recalling his past, and is supposedly mediocre in his major compared to his friends. also featuring queer/queer-coded main cast, the asshole friend™️, and a man named richard"

very tired of people portraying aphrodite as some pale asf skinny lady. ofc women who look that way are wonderful but it’s simply.. not accurate??? first of all, she’s a GREEK godess. Girlie probably has a big ass nose and olive skin and that’s fckin beautiful. secondly, have you ever looked at a statue of aphrodite from the actual ancient greek period? body standards have changed IMMENSELY over the past, oh, 3000 years. ancient greeks thought women with stomach rolls were attractive, so they gave aphrodite stomach rolls. stop pushing modern standards on ancient, primordial depictions of beauty.

hey (with the intention of building a deep friendship with you where we spend our evenings stargazing together and our hugs always linger just a little too long)

Francis: Richard ... what are you on 

Richard, smelling colors and seeing sounds, giggling: a bit of coke and maybe 4 sleeping pills of various ages and strengths. oh and a random purple capsule i found inside mr corcorans sofa. why do you ask?

take a break while watching this little bunny cross your dash

unpopular opinion: francis being campy and pretentious and dramatic to the point that we can’t really take him seriously isn’t an excuse to overlook the central part he had in bunny’s murder. i’ve seen way too many people dumb his character down to “the prancy gay ginger” when he was objectively just as bad a person as the others

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one of the things that haunts the most from the secret history is the fact that.... for like half the book, the whole “messy chaotic academia smoking and eating cherries and drinking scotch and flirting in latin” thing was just that. just a vibe, an aesthetic... and then gradually, charles starts overdrinking, the drugs become more and more out of control, and then as readers, we start to realise... that line? the one they crossed that went from vibey to dangerous? it’s invisible. you can’t identify where exactly it all went wrong (although granted, murdering someone definitely is a turning point). and i guess that could be a reflection about what it’s like for ordinary people as well !! when did the drinking, for example, become excessive? when did it start being needed instead of wanted? when did you stop controlling the habit, and when did it start controlling you?

richard papen: i love camilla’s boyish ankles and boyish hair and masculine energy and the way she looks like her twin brother, whose handsomeness i have described in excruciating detail over several pages

me, sobbing: Richard you. you are A Gay Man. richard Please its been three hundred pages just Kiss A Man Already

donna tartt: literally writes an entire 600 page book about how it can be dangerous to do things just for the aesthetic

us, already making pinterest boards: oh to be a classics student in vermont in the 80s drinking whiskey from a teacup and occasionally murdering people