have you ever spent the day with a very volatile and toxic person who you used to be extremely close with and you try everything in your power to make the day like the way things used to be and they just aren’t able to meet you there anymore and they end up breaking your heart more than you thought it could break and you only get further apart and later on you look back on that day as the beginning of the end of your relationship and maybe even the beginning of the end of their life
spoiler warning! my take on 2x08 with Chris and Clarisse:
In the finale, the writers make a deliberate change to Chris’s storyline that alters the emotional math of Clarisse’s arc. In the books, Chris’s betrayal is real but abstracted. He defects. He chooses the wrong side and we can make the assumption that he’s maybe killed. And his forgiveness doesn’t happen until book 4 after time, madness, and distance have softened the edges of what he did. In the show, that distance is erased. Betrayal is no longer ideological. It is embodied. It has a body. It has a name.
By having Chris kill Katie, the series changes betrayal into something irreversible. Katie isnt a faceless casualty of war; she is a camper, a living part of Camp Half-Blood. Her death anchors Chris’s choice in finality. This isnt a mistake he can outgrow or a side he can quietly leave behind. It is an act that permanently alters the moral landscape of the story. Where the books allow betrayal to exist in the realm of allegiance, the show drags it into the realm of blood.
This change makes Clarisse’s arc way harsher. In the novels, Clarisse’s forgiveness is still difficult, but it’s narratively possible. In the show, forgiveness is no longer about reconciling with a traitor, it’s about deciding whether she can coexist with someone who has killed another camper. The distinction matters. Forgiving betrayal tests loyalty. Forgiving murder tests morality.
Clarisse is placed in an impossible position. If she forgives Chris, she isnt just choosing love over anger; she’s choosing to live with the knowledge that the person she cared for took a life that can’t be restored. Forgiveness no longer offers emotional release. It becomes a form of self-inflicted harm. Forgiving him is to accept that love didn’t prevent violence, that closeness did not guarantee safety, and that her strength could not protect the people around her.
This is where the show’s thematic intent is genius. In the books forgiveness is treated as a pathway to healing, the series interrogates forgiveness as an act that may leave the forgiver permanently wounded. Clarisse is not asked whether Chris deserves forgiveness. She is asked whether she can bear the weight of giving it. The writers deny her the moral clarity that redemption arcs usually give. There is no clean choice, just choices that hurt in different ways.
Clarisse is thrown into emotional labor that war didn’t prepare her for.
By shifting Chris’s betrayal from defection to murder, the show ensures that Clarisse’s forgiveness can’t function as redemption traditionally. It’s an act of survival rather than absolution. She isnt forgiving him because it is right or healing or noble. She’s forgiving him because learning how to carry the unbearable may be the only way she does not lose herself entirely.
Thats what makes this change so brutal and so effective. It sets up Clarisse’s arc into one of the most emotionally uncompromising later in the series, where forgiveness is not a reward at the end of suffering, but another form of suffering she must decide whether she can endure.
something that kind of bothers me about modern feelings toward the epic of gilgamesh is how it's been COMPLETELY watered down to being "gay". Bear with me as I explain.
this is more of an extreme example, but I see this take all the time (not the yaoi part. the gay lover part). it's boiled down to the fact that it's gay over literally anything else in the epic. Gilgamesh's lament to Urshanabi about Enkidu's loss is overshadowed by the fact that Gilgamesh is mourning his gay lover. Gilgamesh is on a journey because he lost his gay lover. Gilgamesh and Enkidu were gay.
Now I understand that with a modern lens, people tend to lock on to how unabashedly Gilgamesh mourns Enkidu, because it's gay and because it's the oldest written epic in human history. People feel deeply connected to the idea that people like them have been around since the dawn of literature. But placing exclusive focus on the nature of the relationship as gay, rather than why the relationship or its loss was important, erases the story the epic is trying to tell.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is a story about love, yes, but it is not a love story. It's about the fear of death, coping with loss, and desperation to stave off the inevitable. It's about the bonds of friendship, about hardship, coming to terms personal change and losing pieces of yourself as you learn and grow. It is about consequences, arrogance, death, second chances, mourning, yearning, loving and LIVING. The Epic of Gilgamesh is about the entire human experience and one man's struggle to accept it. What does it mean to have lived? What does it mean to have loved, and lost? What does it mean to die, and to be remembered? What does it mean to be human?
It is perfectly okay to find appreciation for the Epic because of Gilgamesh and Enkidu's relationship. But also understand that the world's oldest story is not about two gay men who loved each other. It is a story about being alive.
honestly thank goodness for 'situationship'. after centuries of effort we finally have an english language word capable of describing whatever the fuck was going on between gilgamesh and enkidu
From Gilgamesh and Enkidu to Achilles and Patroclus and then David and Jonathan the most prevalent thing in human history we have been warned about are homoerotic codependent friendships and yet you keep talking to the guy you met at 19
The thing about the Epic of Gilgamesh is that it's one of the oldest stories we still know about, and there's strong evidence that it's meant to exist in conversation with an even earlier story or set of stories that we don't have anymore. It's queer, features marathon fucking as a major plot point, has a sexy wild man, vilifies the heck out of a goddess who is mad that the main character won't sleep with her, and it gets pretty angsty the longer it goes on. It's also eternally unfinished and we don't know who wrote it, only who compiled and edited later versions.
Anyways. On another topic, you should definitely take steps to archive and preserve your favorite fanfics.
One of the things that I really enjoyed about the "Epic of Gilgamesh" is that Gilgamesh is a shitty person. Like, he's a king and two-thirds divine and all that, a warrior among warriors, his experiences could not be more different from the average person, and yet none of that saves him. I think the messages about grief and mortality hit as hard as they do because he's so selfish and privileged and awful at the beginning, before being irreversibly changed by friendship and love and loss and regret. He has all of this classical "greatness" and that does not spare him. He has been changed and chooses to change, and there's no miraculous reward for that. None of the widespread pain he's caused and is still capable of causing his subjects spares him either. There's something striking and even cathartic in seeing this greedy, cruel, mythologically "heroic" figure be so deeply humbled by a universal tragedy; to see him essentially crying out, "Not even me?" and receiving the firm answer of, "No, not even you."
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