Lale F. Baran

they/them • deep in the oedicasta brainrot https://lalebaranbooks.carrd.co/

[lalebaranbooks]

Oedipus Retelling

a retelling of the myth of oedipus, from the moment he first heard of the prophecy, to the very day on which he finds out that it has become reality:

“You shall never return to your native land, for once you do, great misery awaits you. The one who birthed you will be taken by you as a wife, and the man who gave you life shall die at the hands of the one he once called his child.”

it is about oedipus' life, on the run from his own fate, and it is about his relationship to jocasta, neither of them aware of who they are truly are

there is romance, and there is deep and genuine love, and there is agony and despair, and a god that constantly lingers somewhere inbetween, watching his prophecy unfold

a wip that only exists in my drafts right now (finished at 227,000 words) and is going through edits to become its best possible version <3

i'm hoping to self-publish this in spring of 2027, and will give regular updates about the journey and the story itself on here!

[lalebaranbooks]

going through my manuscript right now (because i printed it out for edits and still need to change all those edits in my digital file as well) and i am only now spotting some moments that are a bit too Vegan

as in, me describing dead animals as "fat and flesh that cannot be preserved" rather than "fat and meat"

or this moment where oedipus talks about how the land is dying, how animals are dying, only to realize that the emphasis should probably be on the land more so than on the animals. and that he'd probably refer to them as cattle rather than animals...

some other things as well but like. i have grown so used to my micro-veganism and talking about "meat" as "animal corpses/flesh" and so on, that i genuinely struggle now with not talking and thinking like that and that i have to put real effort into thinking about how to phrase some things in a non-vegan way (because it all sounds odd to me)

i genuinely thought i did a good job at describing things in a non-vegan way but apparently i still failed in some regards 🤡

[lalebaranbooks]

sometimes i think about my oedipus x jocasta manuscript floating around in my drafts and get a little weirded out by the fact that i wrote about a heterosexual relationship... not that there's anything wrong with being straight, you guys are cool or whatever. but me? the gender queer person who is asexual and on the aromantic spectrum and would rather die than imagine being a relationship with a man? who crashes out when people don't see me and immediately think i'm queer? who barely even reads het couples because they just don't feel as good as queer couples do? i wrote 220k words about a heterosexual relationship? ... i think i need to go lie down

[lalebaranbooks]

you guys should also know that i started writing when i was like seven years old and that i realized i wasn't straight when i was like ten and only wrote about non-straight couples after that... i have never written a single story about a non-queer couple in my entire life. literally. just the thought of it feels very out-of-character for me. and now think about how deep the oedicasta brainrot has to be for me to write about a man and a woman being in love

[lalebaranbooks]

sometimes i think about my oedipus x jocasta manuscript floating around in my drafts and get a little weirded out by the fact that i wrote about a heterosexual relationship... not that there's anything wrong with being straight, you guys are cool or whatever. but me? the gender queer person who is asexual and on the aromantic spectrum and would rather die than imagine being a relationship with a man? who crashes out when people don't see me and immediately think i'm queer? who barely even reads het couples because they just don't feel as good as queer couples do? i wrote 220k words about a heterosexual relationship? ... i think i need to go lie down

[lalebaranbooks]

i know i said i'd take a break from my manuscript until september (because i strongly believe that some distance is always good and necessary and that it helps you look at your own writing more through the eyes of a reader than a writer) but i'm so tempted to just go back to reading and editing already because i miss oedipus and jocasta so much

[maximumqueer]

Man, I know that the majority of the "why didn't Oedipus do xyz thing instead" are mostly jokes, but god the angry tragedy enjoyer part of me always just wants to grab and shake the people saying that.

Because the entire fucking point is that he could not have escaped that fate. He, regardless of what he fucking did, was always going to kill his father and marry his mother. No suggestion would stand up to that, because the *point* of the story of Oedipus was that the only way for him to not have committed those heinous acts was for him to not to have been born! And then! And *then* where the tragedy gets truly delicious, is that the part he did have control over, the finding out, was always going to happen too, because of who Oedipus was fundamentally as a character. For him to not make the decision to keep digging, he would have had to either be a different character, or go through such a major character arc the he would be unrecognizable as the Oedipus we know!

Just. The inevitability is the point! The inability to escape fate is the point! The trying so desperately to only to realize you have been trapped by your character, by things so far beyond your control you can barely fathom them is the point!

[lalebaranbooks]

first tumblr post but like i just need to take a moment to scream about how feral i feel about oedipus and jocasta being in love and how the brainrot runs so deep that i genuinely fear it has consumed me whole