I hate dating apps I need to meet the love of my life more organically*

*in hand-to-hand combat before the great walls of the City of Troy

So the banner ad didn’t scale down for the mobile browser and it took me multiple minutes to realize that this stock photo of people in business suits was not, in fact, an illustration of what oathbreaker paladins in service to an evil power are supposed to look like

-A Passing Storm-

Breaking News Alert: our gracious prince has found the beautiful young woman who came thrice to his ball—once in a dress shimmering like starlight, once in a dress luminous as the moon, and once in a dress as golden and radiant as the sun on a summer day—only to discover that she was a scullery maid working in his own kitchen! needless to say she has been executed

leela being badass

Now, as we have Les Misérables musical covering the plot, why don’t we have another one, covering all the digressions?

One more joke hate: You may claim to be a woman but biologically you are a featherless biped and thus a man.

Finally a good argument for why I'm actually a man

Haddon Hall, Derbyshire, England

Over The Waves by Setsuko Matsushima

art quilt

odin is like “when thor was born the sun shone bright upon his beautiful face. i found loki on the sidewalk outside a taco bell”

Christopher Logue, from “War Music”

call-out post

@Lattimore, it’s not okay to translate ‘οὐλόμενος’ (destructive, ruinous; used of wrath, madness, drugs, the hungry stomach) as ‘sluttish’ just because it’s applied to a woman

I know I already said this in the tags, but it really is striking that Shakespeare takes these two teenaged protagonists and makes their stories so intensely and explicitly about being victims of their parents’ greed and desire AND being victims of the narrative of tragedy itself (and thus victims of Shakespeare’s own negligence of them, as their creator)…and he names them after his OWN TWO TWIN CHILDREN. With one of them - Hamnet - having died only a few months before he started writing Hamlet???

And the absolute ANGUISH that each of the plays have for its characters is so insane: Hamlet and Juliet are both dead from nearly the first words of the play, and yet the narratives explicitly, almost bizarrely remind us over and over that we ourselves are killing them. Our consumption is their doom - just as Shakespeare’s continued creation of them dooms them. And by the time they die, the very stage itself seems to weep for the injustice of their too-young deaths because we were right there. We could have done something. Why didn’t we pay more attention? Why didn’t we help save them? Let’s try it again and maybe this time we’ll get it right…

Shakespeare: I will create two teenage characters who are explicitly proto-postmodern examinations of the nature of character and fate within fictional narrative. I am their creator and - like their parents within the narrative - I exercise complete control over their fates, no matter how much they struggle against it. They are born like Athena from my mind and doomed to die by my pen, by my complicity in the narrative negligence of them, by my own actions and wishes-

Actor: cool, what's their names?

Shakespeare, father of twins named Judith and Hamnet: uhh…. Juliet and Hamlet.

Happy Shakespeare Day!!

I’m having. A moment.

No but really. Tolkien obviously wasn’t building off of the modern fantasy genre, but it’s very much not a coincidences that he decided to deconstruct the same tropes that would later come to define paperback fantasy.

Like if you think about it, he was a writer taught in the old Victorian style of rote memorization of a canon of classics. However, he - like the rest of the Modernist authors of his era - clearly became disenchanted and even horrified by those kind of stories after barely surviving what was the most brutal war in human history to date.

That’s proven in his (to my mind, deliberate) rejection of the tropes and values of those older stories: it would indeed be hard to stomach a story of King Arthur taking the sword from the stone to wield its power for good and save Britain when you’ve seen such meaningless destruction by men who thought they were doing what’s right. It would be hard to blame Achilles’ raging apathy when the thing they’re asking him to leave his tent and do is kill and kill and kill. The Greeks felt justified in slaughtering their own men to wage a war built on questionable ideas of loyalty and alliance without cause. The British felt justified in slaughtering their own children based on questionable alliances and loyalty. I’m sure Boromir would have found some justification too with that kind of power in his hands.

Obviously, we know that 20th and 21st century fantasy tropes didn’t spring out of the ground one day seventy years ago, but sometimes it’s surprising just how little of modern fantasy actually came from Tolkien. Arguably, the book Once and Future King, as well as classics like the Iliad, the Aeneid, and Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies all had MUCH more influence over the development of Dungeons and Dragons, Highlander, Game of Thrones, Skyrim, etc etc etc than Tolkien ever had. Tolkien undoubtedly popularized the genre and contributed to it greatly, but he certainly wasn’t building off of nothing and there’s a reason the tropes he criticized still exist in fantasy fiction today: they’re much, much older than The Lord of the Rings.

Rereading the Lord of the Rings series recently, and it's so fascinating to me how much the series is a denial of the typical juvenile power-fantasy that is associated with the fantasy genre.

Like, the power-fantasy is the temptation the Ring uses against people It tempts Boromir with becoming the "one true king" that could save his people with fantastic power. It tempts Sam with being the savior of Middle Earth and turning the ruin that is Mordor into a great garden. It tempts Gandalf and Galadriel with being the messianic figure of legend who brings salvation to Middle Earth and great glory to herself.

The things the Ring tempts people with are becoming the typical protagonists of fantasy stories that we expect to see. and over and over we see that accepting that role, that fantasy of being the benevolent all-powerful hero, is a bad thing. LotR is about how power, even power wielded with benevolent intent, is corrupting.

And its so fascinating how so much of modern fantasy buys into the very fantasy LotR denies. Most modern fantasy is about being that Heroic power-fantasy. About good amassing power to rival evil. But LotR dares not to. It dares to be honest that there is no world where anyone amasses that power and remains good.

I guess that's one of the reasons its so compelling.

Maybe Odysseus takes so long to come home to Ithaka because Penelope keeps unraveling the shroud…