reading and studying freud's essays is not so relaxing, it takes me an hour to partially decipher two pages 💚

hey uh sorry but the text of the manuscript your boyfriend was in got corrupted by scribes copying it wrong and now there are all these variant readings. of your boyfriend. yeah he's a conjecture now. like with the cruces desperationis and everything

sana hiçbir şey yetmeyecek, sen de başkalarına yetmeyeceksin.

seneca - epistulae morales

Florentia do you know what the moon is?

yes! i thought it was a planet, but i have since learned that a planet is not at all what i thought it was.. and the moon is something else entirely! i don't know much about it but it's intriguing..

reading letters to atticus is like. wow this guy is so pathetic *clicks next page* wow this guy is so pathetic *clicks next page* wow this guy is so pathetic *clicks next page* wow rome is so fucked *clicks next page* wow this guy is so pathetic *clicks next page* wow this guy-

Only 2 months of Ovid's Fasti remain!

The next set of emails will likely start in mid-July, and the run time will depend on the length of the work.

Thank you for voting!

Atticus: *getting updated on roman politics* Cicero: And then I made such a banging speech you must have heard about it all the way in Epirus, so I'm not even going to tell you about it.

considering each of the mxtx main pairings, which do you think would be most fun as a f/f ship, and please also talk about why (and what, if anything, changes about the dynamics)

Excellent question that I'm not yet fully qualified to answer bc I still haven't read the entirety of TGCF - but I'm pretty sure that my opinion on this won't change even once I have. I just think that the objectively correct answer here is Bingqiu.

I mean, from what I've gathered from the first 2.5 volumes of TGCF, F/F Hualian is like... partly canon anyways, due to the general gender stuff TGCF gods seem to have going on. And Wangxian would be interesting mostly due to the fact that the MDZS universe seems to be the most sexist one out of MXTX's universes, but I'm personally a little tired of Narratives About Historical Sexism. I'm absolutely deeply in love with fem!Xie Lian and Lan Wangji and I would let both fem!Hua Cheng and the Yiling Matriarch step on me, but the thing is.

Bingqiu.

BINGQIU. F/F Bingqiu fucks so hard! LIKE. OKAY. The thing about Scum Villain is that this story happens on approximately five different layers. You have the actual "reality" of what is happening in Scum Villain, including the emotions and experiences of the characters, but this "reality" is also shaped by the fact that it's a novel, and a particular genre of novel (a stallion novel at first and a danmei novel later on). There is a meta level built into the story. On top of that, you have the additional layer of the original PIDW plot, which again is driven by the conventions of its genre. These are all layers Shen Qingqiu is aware of! But there's ALSO the world Shen Yuan and Airplane are from, and their experiences in that world, including the tropes they know of and the internet they interact with, direct their actions in the world of PIDW as well as the way PIDW itself was written. And then there's obviously the actual meta level, the one that we and MXTX are on, where MXTX writes trope subversions and commentary on webnovel genres and internet culture that we as readers can pick up on. I love Scum Villain.

Anyways, all that means that if you change something as fundamental to the narrative as the gender of its main characters (bc gender dynamics are pretty damn important for a story that is in part about male power fantasies), you have to adjust every single one of those layers. Which I think is dope.

Luo Binghe has a lot of character traits, but on the first meta level, Luo Binghe is primarily the protagonist! So if Luo Binghe is a woman, PIDW can't be a stallion novel. What, then, is PIDW? I think there are a bunch of different options, and every single one creates a slightly different dynamic! Additionally, every single one creates a very slightly different Shen Yuan, AND - and this is vitally important to me - every single one creates different commentary on the second meta level. Subversion and commentary are such a huge part of what Scum Villain is (and what Bingqiu are) that I, at least, want that layer to stay intact in this AU.

I've talked about this before, I think, but I want to talk about it more. Scum Villain is in part about the effects male power fantasies have on men! If PIDW were a reverse harem novel targeted at straight women, for example, Scum Villain might be about the effects female power fantasies have on women! You'd have Luo Binghe, who can have everything she wants bc she's the protagonist, but whose life has to be centred around romances with various men. I'd love to read a deconstruction of the reverse harem genre, bc it's such an alienating type of story for me as a lesbian - like, this type of female power fantasy hinges on the protagonist being attractive and attracted to men; it's unimaginable to have a classic female power fantasy without a romance with a man! On the other hand, PIDW as an erotic novel targeted at men would create so much fun commentary on sapphic sexuality. That's probably my favourite version of F/F Bingqiu, so I'm picking that dynamic to talk about in-depth:

Shen Yuan, in this, hate-reads a bad porn novel where the badass female protagonist - her favourite - is objectified and over-sexualised on every second page and exists to be masturbation material for the primarily straight male audience. I imagine that she writes a lot of rants in the comment section about how sexist PIDW is and how Luo Binghe would be an exceptional female character if she weren't the protagonist of a porn novel.

Luo Binghe, protagonist of a porn novel, after the Abyss starts to utilise her looks and her sexuality to make her way to the top. In the Scum Villain setting, of course, she's however deeply in love with Shen Qingqiu, who unfortunately is the only person her seduction techniques don't work on – because Shen Qingqiu is horribly attracted to Luo Binghe, but can’t detach her perception of Luo Binghe as attractive from the objectifying descriptions she read in the original novel. She already brainwashed herself into believing that she was never affected by Luo Binghe in writing, just disgusted by the fanservice, and now she brainwashes herself even harder bc Luo Binghe is a real person she knows now and not a sex symbol to get off to. (Plus, she’s into the submissive pouty housewife act! That’s even worse! She’s not even close to admitting she’s into women at all, she has to brainwash her way out of that!)

Meanwhile, everyone wants Luo Binghe except for the one person Luo Binghe wants to want her! I imagine that would mess with her head, especially after Shen Qingqiu’s death. Her relationship with her own sexuality is also pretty messed up, because her experience with it is focused on making herself desirable to other people, not on her actual desires. Luo Binghe, who only knows how to perform for the male gaze and gets no satisfaction from that vs. Shen Qingqiu, who can’t deal with the fact that she feels sexual attraction to a woman written for the male gaze. I think that sounds suitably disastrous for Bingqiu, and I feel like these are also extremely common wlw experiences. Layers! I want them to kiss, and I want them to kiss on the meta level! (And I want Luo Binghe to become comfortable with being seductive for the person she actually desires, and Shen Qingqiu to admit that she wants Luo Binghe.)

Finally, I think that there's one aspect of Scum Villain that would work better if Bingqiu were women, and that's Airplane. Like, PIDW is bad because Airplane had to abandon every notion of writing a serious, good story in order to make enough money to eat. In the end, the changes Shen Qingqiu makes to the novel are much closer to the original outline and Shang Qinghua is pretty satisfied with them. But like, danmei is a popular genre. Internationally popular, by now! You can make money with danmei! I think that particular message would be a bit more poignant if PIDW ended up as a baihe - the kind of story you wouldn't tell if you wanted to make money.

being a new latin student as someone who was always firmly in the hellenist camp is so funny because i'm being introduced to new information about rome at the speed of light and it's giving me five new hyperfixations an hour. like i had plans for today but i gained a few new pieces of information and now i guess it's Marcus Tullius Cicero Saturday and i've been reading pieces of the epistulae ad atticum for the last several hours

i think we are morphing into the same person i am a renaissance girl for life…. have you heard about the infans romanus yet…

not yet but i just looked it up and 😟 the plot thickens

dark academia vibes

realising how insanely lucky i was to find the exact two volumes of ad atticum i needed in the second hand bookshop in 2022 for like £20 total. why are cambridge classical texts and commentaries such a nightmare to get hold of :(

senin değil, senden başka her şeyin peşinde olan kişi, çekip gidecektir yanından.

seneca - epistulae morales

Hello! Im ray! Im trying to figure something out. You are in ancient rome???

is it ancient? i suppose to those in the future it must seem that way. hello, in any case.

"Marcus Tullius was proud of his achievements, at times, almost to the point of comedy, constantly reminding fellow Romans of how much they owed him. When no one among the contemporary poets wanted to write verse about his consulate, he took up the burden himself. Thankfully, the poem in question did not survive."

[id. a photo of a screen with text in Polish with a big section highlighted in yellow: "Marek Tuliusz był tak dumny ze swych osiągnięć, że chwilami ocierał się niemal o śmieszność, nieustannie przypominając Rzymianom, ile mu zawdzięczali. Gdy żaden ze współczesnych poetów nie chciał opisać jego konsulatu, sam podjął ów trud. Na szczęście poemat się nie zachował." end id.]