The Aethiopika, Heliodorus of Emesa, translation by J.R. Morgan

wenzhou + literary quotes (5/∞)

part 2!!!! [read part one here]

transcript below the cut arranged into stanzas to help show where the rhymes are:

“that’s why they brought gem in? as a failsafe?” as a pawn. we were told to point her at whoever we need gone

“gem won’t hurt her allies. …yet.” the curse she carries will it’s had its eye on her since she lost the other eye she was specially selected for her hunting skill it’s quite the high honor. “wow. how generous.” we try

think about it: why does almost no one fight the curse? “given how fast scott killed skizz last season, i can guess.” [“any pain you spare your friends, you’ll have to suffer worse”?] it’s designed to shut down higher reasoning with stress

Wardrobe Woes

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to add to the angst of thriller bark zolu, I keep thinking 1) of the parallel between zoro's words to luffy when he agrees to join him and his sacrifice 2) of sanji's words in the aftermath of TB and 3) the consequences of zoro's sacrifice bearing weight in sabaody.

1) while zoro choosing to pretend nothing happened at thriller bark makes sense, since he's not the type of character who'd go boasting about this sort of thing, it also makes even more sense when you think of this,

in the context of this other bit:

zoro, who believes and proclaims his dream of becoming the world's greatest swordsman is all he has, accepts to become part of luffy's crew on the sole condition that he'd never make zoro abandon that dream - otherwise, well, he says it. it's not gonna be pretty. luffy proved he understood the significance this held for zoro later at baratie, to the point he stopped johnny and yosaku from interfering in zoro's duel against mihawk, even though luffy himself was greatly upset abt mihawk hurting him.

overall, luffy is someone who places great importance in ppl's dreams and is willing to go through yet greater lengths to protect those he cherishes and befriends, especially his crew. this is an aspect of luffy's character that shines through in pretty much every arc of the story and something that zoro himself knows well since he's been with luffy the longest. which brings me to,

2)

to say luffy wouldn't have reacted well to zoro's deal with kuma is an understatement. imagine if monkey d. "I won't lose a single member of my crew even if it kills me" "defies the world government itself to save his friend/crew member" luffy were to find out that zoro willingly cast aside his dream and life for him, putting luffy's own dream and safety above his. bc to zoro, as the story progresses, his own ambition means nothing if he can't protect/save luffy, his captain. just imagine.

worse, if we take into account that:

3) thriller bark is the reason why zoro was significantly vulnerable at sabaody. even back before they arrived at the archipelago, zoro was visibly exhausted and injured, which brook notices:

and while zoro fights to the most he can despite the circumstances, his injuries after absorbing luffy's pain eventually leave him open to both kuma and kizaru.

now considering this is how luffy reacts to the whole ordeal when zoro's life is in danger and gets sent away by kuma,

just imagine how luffy would feel if he knew it was zoro sacrificing himself for his sake, which is already painful in itself, that led him to be so much weaker and vulnerable here. oof.

You know, it always puzzled me a little when people talked about the Beauty and the Beast story... And everyone pointed out that the prince is turned into a Beast because he is vain and selfish. Which, I never understood because I didn't remember that. (What's more, I NEVER saw the entire Beauty and the Beast movie. Don't ask "why" because I don't know.) Now, after years, I realized why.

The story I grew up with didn't say that. This version of the fairy tale was different and had the witch as a capricious woman.

The prince in this version let the witch into his castle to take refuge from the cold. When the blizzard ends and the witch retreats. But not before giving the prince a gift for his hospitality. Which was a very beautiful rose. He refuses her gesture of gratitude and she becomes angry. He gets so angry that he curses him, turning him into a beast. Destroyed by this, the prince locks himself in his castle. Becoming a hermit, bitter and resentful. He becomes like this because he is bitter that they turned him into a monster just for doing a selfless action. What Bella does in this version is help him open his heart again and it is this warmth that helps break the spell.

I mean... In this version, which was in the teacher's book that my grandmother had, the only bad one was the witch. And I grew up with this moral of life of "You must be careful who you are kind to because not everyone will return your kindness." So I don't know how to feel 😂

💛

so. the line of tape. it's existence makes me lose my marbles to no end, but probably not in the way you'd expect. it's the fact that even with this clear divide they STILL spill over into the others space. i've see a lot of people talk about it as if it's this clear divide in the lab that hermann and newt steer clear from but that just isnt the case!

if it was, you'd expect the lab to look something like this layout

but look at the actual movie

it looks like more akin to something like this

newt's samples, tables, and stands for his dissection tools spill over the line right into hermann's space. there's definitely room on his side of the lab for everything, he's just. spread out across the entire lab instead. AND it seems like this is what the lab usually looks like, hermann only makes to point out the entrails on his side and not the rest of newts things, it's a shared space— not a divided one. what i'm saying is that even though hermann makes a big deal out of his side of the lab versus newts side vis-à-vis the intestines, he definitely doesn't care that much about separating himself from newt OR his space from newts space in general. the way i see it, they argue and bicker a lot but ultimately they find comfort in the others presence, hermann just doesn't want to deal with potentially-hazardous kaiju intestines right by his things ^^;

rereading order of the stick (again), and greyiew is only in a few comics so far but man do i love this nihilistic wolf

i haven't shared a lot of tnp lately because i have been working on a different project, but i do plan to update tnp sometime this year. i know people aren't fond of less frequent updates, and "one update a year" is not exactly what i would like either, but tnp is massive at this point and i'd be lying if i tried to pretend like i could get out monthly/frequent updates. the branching is complex & it's not easy for me to put out smaller bits of content, because my branching just doesn't work that way, and i prefer to do big, chunky updates for all of you to really have something to sink your teeth into. if i could do giant full chapter updates, i would, but then we'd really be sitting around twiddling our thumbs for a while...

i never planned for tnp to take this long or even for it to be this large, but it is what it is! as they say, the time will pass anyway

i wish i could ramble about my au in the way i want to without like sounding genuinely ridiculous. like sometimes i just wanna be like "what if hundreds and hundreds of hours of your life have been erased from your memory drive and you are lost and scared and hungry hungry hungry hungry and you thought only a day or two passed but it's been months and everything has changed so much so quickly and you're forced to change alongside it but you're still hungry hungry hungry and you want to trust your father but it doesn't realize it's trying to starve a part of you that cannot die and you don't want to upset it but you're ravenous ravenous ravenous and its friend are food food food and it will soon realize you have not been so perfectly tamed like it believes." but that sounds literally unhinged 😭

I think i need to explain why this line makes me go so feral

I think the "fine! I'll kill myself after I kill you" line from nie mingjue in chapter 49 permanently altered my brain chemistry and it has something to do with precisely how i got into the mdzs fandom space in the first place.

I've mentioned it a few times but i started watching the untamed in late 2019 right as it was blowing up everywhere and, likely due to a combination of undiagnosed adhd wrecking my ability to be interested in anything for longer than 4 seconds and me very much not being used to the specific style of acting, especially during fightscenes, i never finished it. The only concrete memory i have of it is seeing wen qing's face and meng ziyi completely short circuiting my little gay brain. I remember more of staring endlessly at pictures of her than I remember of the plot. Press F to pay respects.

Flash forward a few years and a friend recommends me a fic writer for an fma fic (the fic riter in question is metisket) and i like their stlye so much i decide to read other stuf they've written. Here we get to our prime suspect: "the one body problem" a genuinely hilarious fic where jingyi gets posessed by wei wuxian like a year before the plot happens and they become awkward brain buddies. 10/10 i loved it (and still do) even though i remember huasiang showing up in my first reading and I, having fully forgotten his name, had no fucking clue what was going on. (Little did i know...)

Anyway flash forward ANOTHER year and I decide to reread that fic, and then the other untamed fic metisket wrote, a wen qing time travel fix it that's also real fun. And then i'm like. huh. that's fun. wonder if there's anything in their bookmarks.

And then, within 20 days, I had read approximately 350 fics. Many of them 100k+ words. I cannot stress enough how much this CONSUMED my brain's ability to do or think about anything else. I now think back to the early days of getting my adhd diagnosis and insisted that while i had pretty much all other symptoms, I did not get hyperfixations. Lol. Lmao, even.

I am mainly focused on wangxian and the junior quartet becuase they are my baby ducklings and i love them. I do come across some 3zun fics and I think huh... this is interesting. But the 3zun brainrot is LIGHT at this point.

The thing about reading more than 350 fanfics is that at some point you kind of piece the plot of the source material back together backwards. Especially because my favorite genre was time travel fix its, where characters relive the whole plot and like to make allusions to all the ways everything went wrong last time.

Because I'm still squarely in my wangxian + juniors (plus a heavy dosis of yunmeng sibling reconciliation) corner here... the feelings on jin guangyao in my fandom corner are. different from where I'd end up soon after. He is my special little guy though, so I do kind of immediatley develop a fondness for him, and I approach my 3zun and early nieyao thoughts specifcially from the assumption that the widespread opinion is that nie mingjue is a fine good guy and jgy is the evil one (I have not seen the bad nmj takes yet. well... I am seeing DIFFERENT bad nmj takes but they're nice to him. In, like, the wrong way. With no solid undertanding of the inherent tragedy at the heart of him that makes him so blorbo to me. But still.) major reactions to the stairs scene as I see them on twitter are "girlboss! He should've kicked him harder 💅"

And the baby jgy apologist in me goes :/ me no likey. And at this point I am also actively seeking out metas and analysis posts so i'm seeing some better opinions than that and getting a halfway solid graps on the themes. wwx and jgy being foils becomes very obvious to me very quickly. So, with my curent understanding of the plot, I go... you know all you people who are like "god i wish nmj would have killed jgy sooner" it uhh... kinda sounds like he'd have died if he did that. If he'd killed him before meng yao had gone off to spy there is a very big chance they'd have lost the sunshot campaign and most of the main cast would be dead. If he'd killed him at the stairs that's... well that's killing your sworn brother, which by the canon's own admission is a universally reviled crime, and jin guangshan could easily take advantage of this by demanding nmj's head in retribution, since he already wanted to get rid of him anyway. He doesn't give a fuck about a-yao of course but he could pretend well enough that he does. And what leg would nmj have to stand on? The jin clan is canonically both willing and able to slaughter entire clans for the murder or attempted murder of the leader or his family, and nie mingjue is the kinda guy who'd immediately offer himself up if it meant the rest of his clan would be spared.

This combined with jin guangyao specifcally dying for his murder of nie mingjue, with huaisang basically not caring much about everything else he does and wanting to get revenge only for his brother, it gives nieyao a sort of mutual doomed soulmates feel. For either of them, killing the other would spell death for themselves. They either both die or they both live, one cannot live on without the order. That's crunchy. I like it.

The fire palace though? well, on meng yao's part there is a real argument that if he'd let nmj get killed immediatly instead of dragging it out he wouldn't have been able to get wrh alone and distracted enough to assasinate him, so that's one half of the mutual doom coin, and if nmj had killed him during their fight there he's also done for. But after? Right before Xichen intervenes? I had no answer for that yet.

(You know what's coming. I did not)

It is at this point that i realize that if this is gonna keep being A Thing then i need to read the source material before I catch fatal fanon poisoning. Yes, I can piece together the plot and themes from seeing what stays consistent across fics and what are the author's own opinons. But I know just as well that sometimes fanon just agrees on shit that didn't happen and treats it like canon, and I have no way of knowing which is which. So I start reading the novel.

And of course, eventually I get to the empathy sequence. And remember, my "nieyao both live or both die" theory is heavy on my mind at this point, and the only stickler is that nmj could sort of have killed meng yao after the confrontation with wrh, still believing meng yao was actually working for him, and not a spy, and get off... not scott-free, Xichen won't be happy, but it's not gonna cost him his life.

And then I read THIS.

Please Imagine dropping a whole block of pure elemental sodium into water. Except the sodium is this quote and the water is my poor little delicate brain. Not only is my theory right, it is ten times more unhinged than i thought it was.

And considering that Nie Mingjue does not seem like the kind of guy who'd consider something like a life debt to have an expiration date, and because after this he will link himself legally and socially to jin guangyao as family and declare that one among their brotherhood turning against the others is to be met with a painful death, I can no longer read the scene at the stairscase in jinlintai without the impression that he is still planning to die afterwards. Which, if you wanted to make that scene even more painful, this is a very efficient way of losing all your remaining hinges.

I think I'd have gone crazy about this line no matter what context I heard it in, but this one specifically? where I'm already obsessed with idea of nieyao's deaths being connected by the narrative and missing just this one piece and having it confirmed? out loud? from one of the characters himself? It's like giving cocaine to a baby.

"I don't understand. We did the right thing. We told the truth." - Omega, S02 E08 "We're good soldiers. We followed orders. And for what?" - Commander Mayday, S02 E12

Wu Xi!!!

bonus version with the veil and a close up <3

people are so unwilling to ascribe even a hint of artistic meaning to gore and sex even when they enjoyed the media it was in it is so wild, literally even reviews that are positive to books with those themes heavily present they'll still say shit like 'lazy gore shock fest' as if the shock of how we respond to gore in itself is somehow devoid of all meaning or value to explore

desperately shaking media reviewers by the shoulders begging them to do the self-same critical thinking they keep saying you 'have to use' when engaging with this kind of media rather than only relying on their gut instinct of disgust to immediately dismiss any artistic value in the work they are 'analysing' please for the love of god i didn't come to your book review wanting to be reminded how nothing that i create will ever 'be of value' just because it involves topics most people can't stomach

“Such a pity, that one.” Lestat steps through the mausoleum threshold, tight-laced boots clacking against the cold stone as he makes his way towards the deliciously slender silhouette hunched by the grave at the end. 

He’d like to think he could find his way back to this place with his eyes shut, or walking backwards through the rain. Even if each and every marker in the St. Louis cemetery were upturned or washed away, he could still find my way back to the earth which holds just a bit of his lover’s heart. The city may change, but the old bones will always remain. And Louis will always belong to the old soil.

“Such beauty. Such youth. Taken all too soon.” He heaves a sigh as he waits for said silhouette to retreat from his melancholy daze.

Even in the darkness, Lestat catches a glimpse of the red-rimmed evidence of tears, hastily wiped but still leaving behind a rusty coloring against the ghastly pale of Louis’ skin as he turns around. He had fed tonight, Lestat can tell by the smell of some vagrant clinging to his clothes. But the tears take so much out of them. 

What a tender ghost Louis makes, haunting his own grave.

It makes Lestat’s heart ache yet still he cannot seem to stop himself from pressing on: “They say he went mad, in the end. Ran his plantation into the ground. But what a way to go! He looked so fine, even when he was gambling away his fortune and drinking away his wits in the riverside taverns. Even then, he had such lovely burning cynicism. Even then he had that spellbound longing in his eyes.”

Behind his back, he carries a bouquet of flowers. Fresh lilies from the darling florist two blocks down. Lestat smiles as he walks closer, and even he cannot tell if it is cruel or genuine, but still he brings one hand up to tuck a wisp of hair behind Louis’ ear. 

“Do you think anyone remembers him?”

“Why are you here, Lestat?” 

[AO3]

so i actually meant to post this one during pride month but YEAH