The Lady Doth Protest Too Much, Methinks

Zoe - she/her - 19 Undergraduate Student English - Creative Writing - Classics

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Oh my god I’ve been pronouncing agalma as “amalga” for a whole-ass semester. I thought it was “amalga” as in an AMALGAmation of votive offerings.

This is a reminder to read your textbooks carefully.

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you sound insufferable to be around irl

How to Block Someone on Tumblr

To prevent someone from being able to interact with you on Tumblr, use the Tumblr "block" feature. Blocking someone on Tumblr removes that p

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I am so sick and fucking tired of seeing those "classical aesthetic" moodboards all muted and monochrome and austere as if ancient Greek and Roman sculpture was not BRIGHTLY polychromatic. It's not just inaccurate: it's one of the ways that white supremacists have co-opted classical studies by insisting that this aesthetic was demonstrative of Western "superior rationality."

Obviously, your aesthetic doesn't have to be rooted in historical accuracy, but it's important to know that it isn't accurate, and to know that misinterpretations of ancient sculpture have contributed to harmful misinterpretations of classical studies as a whole. Classics is an awesome and important discipline, and it doesn't deserve to get banned in universities because racists decided to steal it for their own means.

[arabellachant]

too many young boys watched the movie troy when they were little and decided they wanted to be like achilles when in fact they should want to be like hector. the world would be a better place.

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Where’s the lie, though

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Being queer is really good for my self-esteem because it seems statistically unlikely that I would be the ONLY ugly girl

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Not all men? You're right, Hector Priamides of the shining helm would never

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Academics will gatekeep the living hell out of an interest and then complain that more people aren’t into it, like yea I wonder why buddy

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Ladies, be sure to conform to gender roles by dying tragically but tastefully offstage so a minor character can interrupt a fraught scene to announce your death to the gathered men.

[themalhambird]

Alternativley, threaten to eat a man's heart in the marketplace for slandering your cousin who's basically a sister!

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Shakespeare tragedies vs. comedies really be that way

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If you identify as a Desdemona, I would like to formally offer my services as an Emilia on hire: for only zero dollars an hour, I can cradle your corpse, sing your praises with vaguely homoerotic passion, and die almost immediately. 20+ years of experience, thousands of five-star reviews

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Me: Hmm, maybe I should buy myself a sandwich for lunch

The tiny Peter Singer that lives in my head: You shambling pile of moral destitution. You noxious garbage fire. You pokey little flab-biscuit. Those five dollars and thirty-seven cents could be saving starving children in Africa.

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Does anyone else remember reading Harry Potter as a kid and being deeply upset that wizards could duplicate food but didn’t feed the destitute? I thought, “If they had the resources to solve world hunger, why wouldn’t they do it?? There must be something wrong with their societal priorities!”

Anyway, this was never applicable again in any circumstance. Just a funny anecdote.

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Immanuel Kant: Utilitarianism is wrong because it uses human lives as a means to an end! We should treat each human life as an end in its own right, as something that has inherent value and should be appreciated in and of itself! :)

Also Immanuel Kant: look bro if the two options are telling a lie or letting twenty people die, the Rule is still not to lie and you gotta follow the Rule. My hands are tied man it would be wrong to break the Rule.

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Tag Yourself: Classic Lit Gay-Coded Best Friend Edition

Horatio

mom friend

“let’s all calm down”

in a constant, quiet state of crisis

Emilia

will throw hands

acts of service

loves people too much, too late

Henry Clerval

sunshine smile

casually affectionate

"I promise it's all going to be okay"

Basil Hallward

has not slept in days

buried in the closet

too attached to the idea of someone

Patroclus

strict moral code

physically comforting

bad at setting personal boundaries

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Since Simba in The Lion King is brave, decisive, empathetic to women, and capable of avenging his father's death without killing an abundance of innocent people, he is in fact analogous to Laertes and not Hamlet. In this essay I will

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You know, when you grow up hearing that Hamlet is like The Lion King, you're just getting set up for disappointment, because then you read that shit as a starry-eyed ninth-grader expecting to care about the protagonist. Like just, just fucking imagine a version of The Lion King where Simba slut-shames Sarabi for the circumstances of her forced marriage or has Timon and Pumba killed in a fit of paranoid cruelty. Where's the Elton John, Shakespeare?? Why would you do this??

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Honestly gotta say that I think one of the reasons I hate the "enemies to X" tropes is that I don't have any narratively compelling enemies. Like, what, I'm going to genuinely love Donald Trump? The finance bro who stole my TA job? My friend's awful SO? The creepy guy who had a crush on me in high school? FFS

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Me, in middle school: I’m not going to be a boring college student, I’m going to be HIP and COOL and I’m going to PARTY AND DRINK AND -

Me, now: Look, if I stay out late tonight I’m going to miss my Existentialist Queer Theory Book Club meeting, so everyone needs to get in the car this second.