A World Well Lost

＝Natsuko | intp5w4 | she/her | Takarazuka | ⭐️83-01❄️17-24 | Gustavian era | X-Men 01-18 (more in the pinned post) | Do not reupload my commissions.

[andromache-hectoris]

Things you might want to know about me:

– I like Emma Frost, Scott Summers, Jean Grey, Madelyne Pryor and Hope Summers as a set.

– Scott & Emma are inseparable to me, even when they’re not written romantically.

– I don’t ship Jean with anyone (please don’t tag me in Scott/Jean or Jean/Emma content).

– Jean Grey is not the Phoenix — she’s something bigger than that.

– Hope Summers matters on her own; you don’t need to “pick Jean first” to care about her.

– I’m most interested in X-Men from roughly 2001 to 2018, especially Grant Morrison’s run.

– Krakoa is not my era.

[andromache-hectoris]

I have always loved you... even before you were born

commission 🪦 art by 墨鱼不加meow

a tribute to La Douleur, the statue on Robert Didsbury's grave, Montmartre

[andromache-hectoris]

According to Laurence Harf-Lancner, a medieval woman might be called a "fairy" simply because of her beauty, not supernatural powers. This makes me think the medieval "fairy" is closer to today’s femme fatale — both literally sharing the exact same root from Latin fatum (fate).

[andromache-hectoris]

The Völsunga saga is an iconic case showing that heroicity and domesticity do not go together. When Sigurd was staying at the Burgundian court, married to Gudrun and sheltered from his fateful end (hinted at the saga, with a more detailed version in Grípisspá from the Poetic Edda), he wasn't even Sigurd the hero.

​Brynhild is the true companion to the hero because she was willing to send him to his death if necessary.

[andromache-hectoris]

emma is the custodian of mutant leadership without being the leader herself. she's the spirit of genosha rising from its grave, dumping magneto for a new centre of power while esme represents a more "nostalgic" aspect of it

while she could have chosen someone else after ivx she didn't. not magneto again, not xorn not havok questionably not young scott and not even storm

while new tian is beautiful yet horrifying, it really marks an end of an era. krakoa is just a blunt nationalist lie because a multitude does not automatically become a people, and a people does not automatically become a nation

this misconception first emerged with avx and the "revolution" era as if mutants were destined to be mutants, even if they were not mutants. what kind of calvinism is this

since when can juridical discourses directly create identification. being minors does not make a people. being banned from social media does not make a people. where is the process of symbolisation. where is the process of subjectivation

the mutants are either a metaphor, which can never become a people ― in danger's words, "becoming everything but being nothing"― or they become a people and no longer a metaphor that can be interpreted at will. for which kind of minority identity can be more urgent than biological differences

how krakoa stole the community formation of the 2000s and framed itself as historical inevitability is simply horrifying. that's why apocalypse became a part of mutant history. also sinister. also selene. we are all too familiar with this reorganisation of linear history

[andromache-hectoris]

no one starts debates bc readcomiconline isn't available is sending me 😭

[andromache-hectoris]

like the only thing matters in avx is not even the "recovery" (sarcastic tone) of mutant population but hope's renunciation of phoenix

[andromache-hectoris]

The White Goddess is anti-domestic; she is the perpetual ‘other woman’, and her part is difficult indeed for a woman of sensibility to play for more than a few years, because the temptation to commit suicide in simple domesticity lurks in every maenad’s and muse’s heart.

― Robert Graves, The White Goddess (1999 [1948])

[heaveninawildflower]

Women’s Dress - 1948M36.1 by Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery on Flickr.

Mrs W G Crum wore the dress and matching shoes when she and her daughter were presented to Queen Victoria in the Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace on 9th May 1893. The ‘Flower Garden’ pattern was designed by William Morris in 1879. On 4th March 1879 he wrote to Georgiana Burne-Jones, 'I am writing in a whirlwind of dyeing and weaving, and even to the latter rather excited by a new piece just off the loom, which looks beautiful, like a flower garden.’. The dressmaker was Sarah Fullerton Monteith Young, from London.

[andromache-hectoris]

The new What If...? is just as bad as I thought. Apparently, no one is capable of properly understanding Here Comes Tomorrow, even today.

[andromache-hectoris]

I always wanted to say that DPS is a disastrous representation of feminine desire that instead made Jean sexless.

But that’s all history now, and fictional characters need not be “real women.” Making Jean fallible and relatable would only make Emma unreasonable and inexcusable.

[andromache-hectoris]

in me ys no truste for to truste in

[andromache-hectoris]

sometimes I just wish the fandom read Carl Schmitt

[andromache-hectoris]

Decision within the state of exception was functionalised, personalised, psychologised, and eventually pathologised.

[andromache-hectoris]

What's interesting is that the more moderners paint about the misery of leadership, it sounds more like tyranny.

[andromache-hectoris]

As a history student, I am very uncomfortable with continuity. That does not mean I disregard it, but I do believe certain moments within a continuity ultimately become more significant — or more elevated — than others. (This does not necessarily depend on the quality of writing, or sales.) And you cannot always infer what a character will evolve into from their earlier arcs; retrospect does not necessarily provide insight.

Sometimes continuity has been butchered so severely that treating a character’s mental evolution as fully coherent already feels disrespectful to the character.

[andromache-hectoris]

Jacques Lacan once said, “Love is giving what you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.”

Scott tried to act entirely without self-interest. He believed Emma was better than him because she seemed to possess that gift naturally, doing everything for mutantkind and the children. (The desire for self-worth is already a form of self-interest.)

But Scott also possessed a form of self-surveillance that attracted Emma. He did not collapse into manipulation or overreach. He was capable of practicing heroism without pragmatic reward. And she was still learning how to do that.

What you possess always implies what you lack.

Admiration does not equal completion. There is no self-sufficient subject.

This is fxxking love.

[andromache-hectoris]

The need to turn everything into an ideology feels so strange to me... “Paris is well worth a Mass” was no ideology; it was not even truly religious. Yet Henri IV still brought the civil wars to an end. Where has that “Paris” gone now?