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@blueberry-ink-93
welcome dear reader
i havent the foggiest idea what im doing lol but writing has been on my bucket list for who knows how long so here i am! please help yourself to a mug of something nice and warm and feel free to join me as i attempt to weave words into something baby me would be proud of :>
hi stupid qustion sorry but is there an epithet to the effect of person with a thousand faces and who is it associated with? all i can think of is helen launching 1000 ships but odysseus has the shape shifting?? also polytropos hades polyxenos etc. its on the tip of my tongue dammit
Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: The Oresteia - Aeschylus, Iphigenia in Aulis - Euripides, Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, The Iliad - Homer Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Agamemnon/Clytemnestra (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Agamemnon & Iphigenia (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore) Characters: Agamemnon (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Clytemnestra (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Iphigenia (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Electra daughter of Agamemnon (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore) Additional Tags: Prose Poem, kind of sort of. playing it kind of loose, POV Second Person, POV Agamemnon (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Dead Agamemnon (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Clytemnestra Kills Agamemnon (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Agamemnon Being an Asshole (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Agamemnon is Not a Villain (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), tagging it with both because of my #nuance, Dead Iphigenia (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Mentioned Iphigenia (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Haunting, Surreal, Grief/Mourning, Guilt, House of Atreus (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Agamemnon has C-PTSD (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Mental Breakdown, the c-ptsd isnt the main part of the fic, but it is there, Psychological Horror, vaugely - Freeform Series: Part 3 of A Thousand Ways To Turn Yourself To Stone Summary:
Agamemnon comes home. The ground is crimson-soaked. There is nowhere else to go.
People are saying that Emily Wilson went too far in her criticism of N0lan's Odyssey but if it had been me in her shoes, and that man had adapted my favorite text into a story about how Sometimes War Atrocities Make The Perpetrators Feel Bad, and turned my favorite character into some generic straight white dude while the women in the story are tortured to make him Feel Feelings, and that man then cited *my* translation as inspiration, I would be on the news.
Correcting the Historical Bias Against Domestic Materials
Archaeology has traditionally had a fundamental bias against fabric. Fabrics are after all highly perishable, withering away within months or years, and only rarely leaving traces behind for those coming millennia later to find. Archaeologists—predominantly male—gave ancient ages names like “Iron” and “Bronze,” rather than “Pottery” or “Flax.” This implies that metal objects were the principal features of these times, when they are simply often the most visible and long-lasting remnants. Technologies using perishable materials, such as wood and textiles, may well have been more pivotal in the daily lives of the people who lived through them, but evidence of their existence has, for the most part, been absorbed back into the earth.
There are exceptions, of course, and traces can and do survive, usually thanks to an unusual climate: freezing, damp anaerobic conditions or extremely dry ones. The climate in Egypt, for example, is ideal for preserving all manner of usually perishable things and we subsequently know far more about ancient Egyptian textiles than those from most other regions. As archaeology has matured and diversified, scholars have increasingly looked for—and found—evidence of fine, complex textiles stretching farther back than anyone would have guessed. Their beauty and the skill needed to make them suggest a very different image of our earliest forebears than the club-wielding, simpleminded thugs of popular imagination.
reading a historical romance novel and reflecting on the way these stories often present woke nobility for the contemporary reader. a big thing is servants. you can’t not have servants in those times but many modern readers think “but I would never have servants. it would be so weird to have servants” and in order to make the protagonists of the story more relatable they are actually friends with the servants. but flip your perspective and think of it from the side of the servants. wouldn’t it be so awful if your boss was always trying to be friends with you. a really common thing you’ll see is the woke baronet having tea in the kitchen with the servants bc he’s not like other baronets. but what if your boss wanted to hang out and talk during your lunch break every day. not so charming when you think about it that way
#okay but now what is the optimal way to be a good boss in this situation i genuinely wanna know#its easy to guess what makes a bad boss or a mid boss. but what is a good boss#specifically in such a highly structured hierarchal situation (via @rainbowroach)
HELLO you are asking questions that literature and poetry THROUGHOUT the middle ages has asked, and it is from this questioning that we derive things like the Codes of Chivalry (which is not "how to treat a noble lady really nice" but is actually "how to be an ethical person when you're rich and you own a horse" and includes such things as "don't run people over with your horse")
In fact I daresay you already know instinctively just from cultural osmosis what a good boss -- a good liege lord -- is and does based on the tropes that have survived to the current day and the kinds of things that get Hugely Praised in things like legends of King Arthur.
A good boss (liege lord) is:
Merciful. He is not having his peasants killed for things like poaching rabbits during a famine. In fact, he is working to mitigate famine. During times of individual hardship, he might negotiate with a peasant for a payment plan on their annual rent.
Patient. He is not impulsive, he does not lose his temper.
Prudent. He makes choices that are thoughtful, considered, conservative (in the sense of not needlessly risky--he's not investing his entire fortune in having everyone plant an unproven crop). He is making sure local infrastructure like roads and public buildings are maintained and kept in good nick.
Gentle. He doesn't haul off and slap a servant or a tenant for breaking a dish or making a mistake. He doesn't abuse animals, his wife or children, or his employees. He doesn't rape the servants.
Generous (both in money and in spirit). He is not extorting the peasants for an amount of rent that is beyond their means, he is not raising taxes every year to cover his own lavish lifestyle. He is paying his servants a living wage (or, if wages are low, he's giving them room/board/clothing to make up the difference). If someone in a tenant's family dies, the lord is sending a gift of condolence, or helping to pay for the funeral, or possibly even ATTENDING the funeral and speaking a few kind words about the deceased, ESPECIALLY if they were a really upstanding and important member of the community. If one of his tenants is gravely sick, the lord is sending a basket of food or paying for a doctor. He is giving charitably (generally this will be, like, a bequest to the church so that they can run a hospital or an orphanage or a school for the local village children).
Pious. This classically means "goes to church, submits with humility to God" but to me this quality is subtextually standing in for "maintaining an ongoing sense of Perspective that HE'S not god, that there are higher powers he is Accountable to, that he too can be Judged, etc, so that he doesn't end up going on a weird fucked up power trip"
Humble. One of the most admiring things you hear about a lord doing in literature and epic poetry is, "He ate off of wooden plates while his followers ate off of gold and silver." Humility isn't about being meek, it's just about not thinking so much of yourself that you turn your nose up and sneer at what "lesser" people do. In other words: Don't be a fucking diva. If your carriage gets stuck in the mud, climb out and help everybody else push, you're not gonna die from getting mud on your shoes.
Condescending. This word has changed wildly in meaning/tone over the last couple centuries -- it's now a rude thing to do (because we've done away with legal social hierarchies, so someone acting like they're lowering themselves to your level IS insulting), but in older times, a high-ranking person "condescending" to a servant was worthy of praise and admiration: it means they were setting aside rank and privilege to speak to them with the easygoing, friendly respect and compassion they'd give a peer. This is things like... Treats those beneath him with courtesy and respect (ie: listens soberly and attentively when one of his servants or tenants comes to complain about a problem). Having a sense of humor and kindness about it when the lord and a servant both come around a corner at the same time and run into each other and the servant gets knocked to the ground and starts babbling apologies--the condescending (positive) lord helps them to their feet with his own hands and cracks a joke to show them that it's ok (as opposed to just walking off without a word or insulting/scolding them). This is also things like trusting a farmer, woodcutter, or artisan to speak with expertise about their own livelihood and taking their advice into consideration if they tell the lord that one of his ideas won't work.
Good boundaries. The ethical liege lord knows that it's normal for the staff to probably be softly bitching about him in private (even with a really good boss, we all grumble from time to time). He's not eavesdropping on them, he's not going into the staff areas where they should reasonably expect to have a degree of privacy, etc.
Righteous and protective of "the weak". The "weak" here doesn't necessarily mean physically weak, this is often used in the sense of someone politically or socially weak, aka The Marginalized -- the poor, the disabled, women, children, the elderly, etc. If a lord sees someone like this being mistreated or abused, he's supposed to step in and put a stop to that.
Committed to reciprocity. In a highly hierarchical system like feudalism, every person (from the lowest peasant all the way up to the crown prince) legally OWES their liege lord certain things (taxes, labor, service, loyalty, etc). A good liege remembers and takes very seriously the idea that this should be a balanced and reciprocal relationship -- in other words, he owes something BACK. Feudalism is modeled very strongly on the family system: If children owe their parents obedience and service, then parents owe their children care and protection. This still applies when the "child" is a farmer and the "parent" is a local baron. Or when the "child" is a duke and the "parent" is the king.
Basically, we get so caught up in the aesthetics of nobility that we forget that it literally is a managerial position that comes with responsibilities that were... very similar back in the day to the same ones we have now. Humans have not changed all that much. At the end of the day, a really good boss in the 1400s versus in one from the 2020s displays most of the same qualities of personality, even if the details of execution are different.
The next question is, of course, "well, but this theoretical liege lord is HIGHLY idealized -- how often did that actually HAPPEN? Wasn't it more likely that everyone was exploited all the time?" and to that I say: Well, maybe. But again, I don't think humans have changed all that much. Just like the bosses of today, there's a SPECTRUM: A really really good boss is rare and precious and one that you tell stories about for years after you've left that job, but a truly, genuinely, homicidally nightmarish boss is also pretty rare. Most bosses are sort of meh -- they have their good moments, they have their shitty moments, but they're tolerable and you can get along with them well enough to do your job, and then you roll your eyes at them behind their back. Generally, humans don't take outright exploitation lying down. Being a bad boss in the historical period is how you get peasant uprisings and revolts, and you know that to be true because your parents raised you with that knowledge, so unless you are very stupid or inbred or an egomaniac, there is literal personal incentive to at minimum be a Tolerable liege lord. And that means hitting at least SOME of the above bullet points.
TL;DR: In the words of Honore de Balzac, "Everything I have just told you can be summarized by an old word: noblesse oblige!"
(for more discussions of the ethics of fealty and what it means to be a good boss when you are an exquisitely beautiful twink of a prince with a hot beefy bodyguard.... [fingerguns] read A Taste of Gold and Iron)
I know a lot of people think they would be, but I just can't see Electra and Iphigenia being close once Iphigenia returned back to Greece with Orestes.
Thyone, the ressurected, goddess of frenzy form of Semele. Design notes: -I am not 100% satisfied with this but I had to get the general idea out of my head. I'll rework her eventually I think. -Her hands have golden scarring from where dionysus grabbed her to pull her out of the underworld. -She has a drum that plays itself just by moving it around, and a thyrsus that alternates from just a stick to having way more foliage than this, depending on her mental state. -She shifts erratically between her original personality and something very agressive and wild. -She spends most of her time with maenad groups, looking after them when her son isn't around. She doesn't try to socialise with other gods, and specifically avoids both Zeus and Hera whenever possible. -Her hair floats in the air in various shapes. - She retained her human height (she was never very tall)
Helen and Helen meeting Menelaus when they were young.
Medea commission!
People are saying that Emily Wilson went too far in her criticism of N0lan's Odyssey but if it had been me in her shoes, and that man had adapted my favorite text into a story about how Sometimes War Atrocities Make The Perpetrators Feel Bad, and turned my favorite character into some generic straight white dude while the women in the story are tortured to make him Feel Feelings, and that man then cited *my* translation as inspiration, I would be on the news.
guy who is normal about philoctetes for normal reasons
me and this random couple are going to see sinners this friday
Everyone wish me luck on my date today I’m so nervous what if they don’t like me…
You show up and Michael B Jordan is sitting in both seats.
i don't really like it when western mythological terms are applied haphazardly to essentially unrelated ideas. this is a completely lost battle but a lóng is really not a dragon, it is its own thing with only surface level similarities
i especially dislike many works that try to fold all sorts of different mythologies into a single consistent schema because they tend to heavily privilege western conceptions in doing so- see 'dragonology' books twisting basically every mythical reptilian under the sun into the mould of 'a species of dragon', implicitly centring the beowulf-style firebreather as the default from which all other mythologies derive, or basically anything that does worldwide vampire bloodlines
relatedly a qílín is not a unicorn, a fènghuáng is not a phoenix, and a jiāngshī is not a vampire, and it can impede understanding when they're approached from the standpoint of being the 'chinese version' of these concepts from western myth
Not to take away but to relate: I've been bothered by very similar treatment of Slavic zmijs, upirs, and rusalkas. They're not really dragons and vampires and mermaids. Zmijs are closer to winged serpents possessing great wisdom. Upir lore has nothing to do with the elegant and longing western vampire. Upirs are more so about burial customs being broken and the general impurity tied to that; they remind me of Greek unrest shades more than anything from the western vampire lore. Rusalkas don't even have tails and function completely unlike mermaids.
It also bothers me when non-western deity communions are 1:1 expected to fit into — usually — Nordic or Greek frameworks. No, a Slavic deity is not [Greek deity] but in Slavic fashion. I wouldn't even say that of Roman gods and those communities had the most exchange; there's always cultural context. Whether purposefully or not, it does establish a certain hierarchy of beliefs where some, western or westernized, folklore is handled as the primary one and everything else as derivative. It's frustrating and deeply incurious.
jf i was vladimir nabokov and i was writing lolita i would make her an adult becaude then it would t be dark problematic media and instead a sweet romabce between two adults (woke and pure)
Fascinating to me when people writing new versions of greek tales (Nolan's recent Odyssey movie, for example, or Lore Olympus) cut out some acts of violence, finding them deplorable, (Sexual assault, specific killings, the kidnapping and rape of persephone) which can be deeply uncomfortable but serve to move along things in the story and set the tone, only to add in new acts of violence (Menelaus permanently scars his wife's face and degrades her with cruel remarks about her beauty being lessened now, Apollo rapes persephone). What have we achieved by doing this, story wise or morally?
You can't translate the joke where odysseus tells the cyclops "I'm nobody" and later when the cyclops gets asked who is hurting him he answers "nobody is hurting me" into modern english. It just can't be done
