this was always going to happen.

matthew stover, david levithan, margarita karapanou, aeschylus, karese burrows, richard siken

Dante Émile, On Tragedy // Grouper, Headache

Descartes who

Gavin Hamilton, Achilles Lamenting the Death of Patroclus | The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath | @utopians | "Me and my husband", Mitski | "Brand New City", Mitski | The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Tragedy happens only when you are trying to live well. Because for a heedless person who doesn’t have deep commitments to others, Agamemnon’s conflict isn’t a tragedy. Somebody who’s a bad person would, could go in and slaughter that child with equanimity, or could desert all the men and let them die. But it’s when you are trying to live well, and you deeply care about the things you’re trying to do, that the world enters in in a particularly painful way. And it’s in that struggle with recalcitrant circumstances that a lot of the value of the moral life comes in.

Martha Nussbaum: Applying the Lessons of Ancient Greece

It’s Friday afternoon, there goes Antigone to be buried alive.

the most important thing about vax's character is that he's a BROTHER!!!! the second most important thing is that he's a tragic hero however he can only be a hero if he's a brother first. i hope this helps ❤

the hero is born, the hero loves, the hero stumbles into his own myth, the hero dies because there's nothing else left for the hero to do. because he was always supposed to die. because a hero is only a hero through self sacrifice. and, most importantly, because he's a brother. because there's no version of this story where he wouldn't give up his life for vex over and over again.

vex: thank you. for everything. thank you. you always have my back and i know it. / vax: i pull my sister in close and i say: take me instead, you raven bitch! / keyleth: he offered up his life for you. he seems to do that quite a lot. / vax: i don't know what this means. i know that the raven queen is not a force for evil. neither are funeral homes. i don't want to bed down in one. but it doesn't matter. and i'd do it again, because i did it for you.

his biggest strength is his endless love for his sister and it is also his downfall.

heroes are, in the end, just what they swear to love and protect. so of course his fate is already written. of course he's already dead since the beginning of the story. he's a twin brother. which is to say his own heart resides outside of his body, in someone else's chest. which is to say he was already born with love in his soul.

he knew her before he even knew what it felt like to have air in his lungs. he learned to love her before he even learned how to speak. he felt her presence beside him before he felt the sun in his skin. he was born with half of him already belonging to someone else. he knows love.

vax & vex are born. vax loves his sister. his sister dies. what is he to do but die with her? what can he do besides sell his soul, his heart, his life? it already belongs to her anyways.

he is a brother so he loves. he loves so he's a hero. he's a hero so he's already doomed by the narrative. he cannot escape his fate as much as he cannot stop loving his sister.

I am horribly in love. When we take shelter under a balcony, I say, We could be each other's great tragedies had the world not slaked us already:

—Elisa Gonzalez, from "Notes on a Divided Island" (Grand Tour: Poems, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023)

"For man to reveal himself in the end, he has to die, but he will have to do so while alive—by looking at himself ceasing to exist." -- Georges Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes p. 336.

In a tragedy, nothing is in doubt and everyone’s destiny is known... he who kills is as innocent as he who gets killed: it’s all a matter of what part you are playing

Jean Anouilh, Antigone

Sophocles' Ajax (commentary, & notes: P. J. Finglass)

ginsberg // julia vinograd

“Hegel is right to insist that tragedy is the collision between opposed yet mutually justified claims to what is right.”

-Tragedy, The Greeks, and Us, Simon Critchley

Phantoms is going to end happily, it has to after all this, but I’m not sure I have happy endings in me right now.

That’s why I’m thinking hard about some of my unwritten concepts: I think Like a Tattoo has to end happily too, but Shattered Oz doesn’t, not necessarily.

My Oz is a love story, but it might be a tragedy too. It’s a story of guilt and grief and expectations and failing to reach understanding with loved ones. We get all of that with our protagonist, Dorothy, she spends the story grieving the Oz and Ozma she knew for half her life, guilty that she didn’t see it splintering around her, guilty she couldn’t save anyone before the shatter. And crumbling too, under everyone’s expectations that she save them all, what else could they all expect? She’s Dorothy the Witchslayer, closest confidant of Princess Ozma, if anyone could cut through the corruption it has to be her, right? But that’s a heavy burden to bear, especially compounded, especially when you’re ten and twenty simultaneously and you’ve never been grown but here you’ve never been treated like a child either, you exist in a flux state.

I don’t know if there’s a happy ending here, part of me wants to end it with a reversal: Dorothy finally gets to Ozma, connects with her and for a moment everything seems like it will be alright, and then the panel shatters, reality seeps through with Dorothy’s shocked tears and Ozma’s broken doll face finally falling away to reveal the terrified girl underneath, horrified at what she’s done, the blood on her hands.

I imagine her trying to backtrack, trying to use her magic and make everything right again, but ten years of corruption can not be dispelled in an instant and by the time her magic is clean enough to help it’s too late for Dorothy. Guilt and grief transferred from one to the other. There is no saving now, only preservation, memorial, mourning.

Ozma grieving the Oz she broke, the friend she killed, guilty because it was her own doing, crumbling under the expectation that now she wears her own face again, now she’s Ozma the Good again, everything is fine. But how can she trust herself to rule, to protect when she fell so hard already? When there’s no one to catch her and pull her back to herself?

I’m not sure yet if it’s a tragedy, but I don’t think I have happy endings in me right now.

Hi :)