hold your hands upon my head, til I breathe my last breath
So especially since reading The Song of Achilles Iâve been thinking a lot about Captain Americaâs Steve Rogers and James Buchanan Barnes and how they fit into this archetypal pattern of companions-maybe-lovers who fought and died in the epic sagas of their day.
Because honestly, the hero who headed to battle, witnessed the fall of his beloved best friend-rumored-lover, went half mad with grief and then followed them into death shortly after? Thatâs Achilles and Patroclus, thatâs Alexander the Great and Hephaestion, and stretching even farther back you could make a connection to Hercules and his lovers, to Gilgamesh and Enkidu, to probably a dozen others Iâm not well-read enough to know - mythic or historical figures whose stories have since become the stuff of legend.
Like I basically made this image half a decade ago as part of a half-joking Reverse Big Bang Prompt but -
Achilles, the golden warrior who chose glory over long life, who withdrew from the war to nurse his injured pride and whose armor and weapons Patroclus bore to bring their men to victory in his stead. Patroclus dies doing this, and Achilles loses himself in grief - crying, tearing his hair, keeping his belovedâs body beside him until he re-enters the war in a fury to slay Hector and mutilate the manâs body in revenge, eventually laying the manâs body at Patroclusâs feet.
And Steve Rogers, aside from the golden hair and famed leadership and godly physique, is nothing like Achilles - kinder, not glory-obsessed, never a fraction as selfish. But, while you could follow these threads through plenty of modern action stories, thereâs something properly myth making about Bucky picking up Steveâs shield moments before his own death, and about Steve I donât want to kill anyone Rogers saying I wonât stop until all of Hydra is dead or captured and how many paid the price before you [noticed]? SHIELD, HYDRA, it all goes.
And Alexander, one of the greatest generals time has ever seen, and one of its youngest conquerors, who held much of the known world under his thumb before he was thirty, couldnât ever be a direct parallel to Steve in personality. It would be ludicrous to imagine Steve Rogers as conquering the world for conqueringâs sake or being a willing symbol of imperialism, prone to rages and fancying himself part-Godly.
But they were both of them charismatic commanders beloved by their men, who flourished in war until their childhood friend perished, and then mourned horribly until they died themselves shortly after.
And Iâm not saying that fucking comic books about World War II are the modern version of the Illiad - Homer would roll in his grave, and I can imagine my classics-and-history-loving grandma covering her eyes in pain at the mere thought, but - arenât they, sort of? The heroes that kids grow up reading about, idolizing, trying to mimic? The stories about childhood friends who marched east to war and died there, who became immortalized on paper for the next generation to look up to?
I guess where Iâm trying to go with this is that thereâs a thousand reasons certain pairings become popular, but âhero and best friendâ is a classic archetype of history and literature that people have been reading homoromantic subtext into for the last four thousand years.
So like @marvelentertainment just #makethembiyoucowards?