Reading and Rambling

"I always have a quotation for everything—it saves original thinking" - Peter Wimsey

[venndaai]

I thought about Jerott and Marthe in Checkmate for a bit too long today. send help.

[venndaai]

aspocko

ok but marthe is the saionji, yes? jerott can fit so many swords inside of him!

@aspocko I see where you're coming from and you have a point, but let me explain. My interpretation of the Swords of Human Hatred that exist inside Anthy constantly stabbing her is that they represent the human need to scapegoat the Other. The swords originally go after Dios for failing to 'rescue' the princesses of the world from the pain of living, and when Anthy stands between them and him they blame her instead.

Jerott, like Saionji, is in love with his emotionally withholding male best friend, and in denial about it. He is constantly stabbed by his own sword of self hatred and internalized homophobia, but he does not generally have to deal with other people's hatred of the Other being wielded against him. In this way he matches Saionji, who suffers internally due to his toxic masculinity and love for Touga, but takes this pain out externally on women (Anthy). He would definitely be Lymond's Bride and Lymond would be able to draw his heart sword, but he's not a Rose Bride type.

Marthe, as a woman, a bastard and an abuse survivor, who is intensely aware of her position as all of these things, has much more experience being a scapegoated Other. And while both Marthe and Jerott are sacrificed in CM for Lymond and Philippa's happiness, Marthe is the one who is physically sacrificed, to a hatred aimed at her brother .

I'll say Marthe is really somewhere in between Anthy and Nanami, actually, because she's not as subtle as Anthy and her unrequited quasi-incestuous jealousy over Lymond is closer to Nanami's situation.

[amazoogle]

it's Tuesday all day today and there's no known way to prevent this

[hereforthehurts]

if harrow can make up delusional aus in her head so can i . au where harrow is adopted by magnus and abigail at 17 after a prolonged multiple bpd cptsd attachment issues shenanigans . she was placed under abigail's ward when she attends university as a minor and it went downhill from there (abigail is a history professor) . magnus owns a cafe and gideon works there . jeannemary and harrow's main sibling rivalry is comically fighting over gideon and jeanne was inconsolable when griddlehark started dating . they all lived happily ever after and no bone monsters or 10000 yr old evil god-woman killed them . hows that

[hereforthehurts]

FUCK THIS GOT ME THINKING . GODDAMIT . imagine its a normal day in the quinn-pents household and everything is going as normal. Right. hurried breakfasts and magnus rushing the teens to school . abigail drives with harrow to the university and does her daily "make harrow sing along challenge" which is her just blasting abba music and annoying harrow to death (which she pretends to hate) . harrow has lunch with her besties (she calls them Colleagues, though) cam & pal and tries not to flirt with the cute butch redhead barista that works at her dad's cafe . she picks up jeanne & isaac from school, tries not to burn the house down while heating up pizza rolls in the oven . helps isaac with homework . jeanne has a little girl crush and talks about it to harrow while she uses harrow as her guinea pig for doing her nails (black polish, matching) . magnus and abigail arrives at home, family dinner hijinks ensues . abigail comes in to tuck harrow to bed even though she keeps arguing I'm Seventeen, capital S, but abigail is always like "my children stays babies. Forever" and who is harrow to argue with that ? She's brushing her fingers through harrow's hair and when harrow looks up she's surprised to find her crying. And harrow's obviously alarmed like "What's wrong? Did i do something wrong?" and abigail shakes her head like "no, no, you're perfect. But I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, darling girl. This isn't how it happens."

[peniswizard69]

Oh so when your mom puts a little bit of her heart in every meal that's fine, but when I, Harrowhark the First,

[hardwrench]

to me, correctly using 5+ commas in a single sentence is like perfectly executing a combo in a fighting game. to me.

[little-theatre-fairy]

if you think a sentence needs 5+ commas it should be two sentences

[hardwrench]

it’s not about what the sentence needs, i’m afraid, nor is it about economy, clarity, or style. it’s about winning, little-theatre-fairy.

[startedwellthatsentence]

Comment on my MA thesis:

[earhartsease]

on it boss

[the-boring-distopia]

The description of Mercymorn doing surgery on Judith in As Yet Unsent is so funny to me because it does not read like she's doing a surgery.

It reads like she's an upset IT/repair specialist who got tired of driving 6 hours to look at servers that were not turned on, and she's going to make everyone suffer for daring to involve her in this mess. She ripped stuff out and casually put her hands into Judith's stomach, she was one bad moment away from trying to factory reset her with a hammer.

Blood of Eden really invited Dr. Eight House to punch Judith in her pancreas until she got better.

[memecucker]

I still think it’s funny how the Exagoge a Hellenistic Jewish play about the Exodus story written in the Ptolemaic period had to include a line where God tells Moses “it is impossible for a mortal to see my face, but it is possible to hear my words”bc Greek attendees would’ve been really confused about getting to the exciting scene where a god appears and would’ve been expecting Yahweh’s actor to be lowered from the ceiling astride a chariot and would’ve been scratching their head wondering if there was technical issues with the crane or something bc like where’s the god i was expecting a cool exciting entrance of a god they clearly got the burning bush effect to work like maybe that did happen during the opening run and they had to quickly insert that line

[animatedamerican]

How is this the first I have heard of the Exagoge in my slightly-over-half-century of life. HOW.

From the Wikipedia article on the play's author, Ezekiel the Tragedian:

Exagōgē is a five-act drama written in iambic trimeter, retelling of the biblical story of The Exodus from Egypt. Moses is the main character of the play, and parts of the biblical story have been altered to suit the narrative's needs. These changes probably point to Ezekiel's intention to stage the play, since certain scenes that are impossible to stage were converted into monologue. This drama is unique in blending the biblical story with the Hellenistic tragic drama; Erich S. Gruen writes that "the choice itself of that tale suggests an appeal to pride in national history and tradition produced in a quintessentially Hellenic mode."

... So you're telling me this was Alexandria's Prince of Egypt? That's what you're telling me?

I can't remember the last time I went so quickly from complete ignorance of a thing to a passionate need to experience it.

[grand-theft-carbohydrates]

Hanziyu: The (cursed) Language of Characters

[its-not-a-pen]

lmao i stumbled upon this forgotten vid in the sideblog and i’ve decided that it has to go on main. it must be inflicted upon as many people as possible.

[c-rowlesdraws]

I badly want to start saying “this is my Swarovski Shrek” to refer to any outrageously expensive yet ridiculous object I start coveting. If anyone says “what the fuck” and asks what I mean, well. It’s their lucky day to learn about Swarovski Shrek

[wagyusaichi]

Guess who I saw today

[c-rowlesdraws]

WHAT THE HELL THERE'S SO MANY??

[romanceyourdemons]

whenever i look into a historical monarch who doesn’t get talked about much and is just kind of a blank spot in my understanding of the historical narrative, 95% of the time what i find is pure white hot blistering capability. a pencil pusher for the ages. a 39 year reign with no more than three hours of sleep a night. there aren’t any good stories from his reign because he systematically caught and stopped all catastrophic good stories before they could start. you shrimply must respect it

[romanceyourdemons]

semi-related but it’s ironic that game of thrones famously neglects to worldbuild textiles when (for me at least) textile history has proven one of the best lenses for an “aragorn’s tax policy” grounded view of history, especially for a late medieval-early modern english setting. yes henry vii of england reinstated the court of the star chamber, but you’ll get a better sense for the character of his reign by looking at how and why and with what result he disrupted the trans-european alum trade. yes elizabeth i of england loved essex and killed him, but you’ll get a better sense for her reign by looking at her sumptuary laws, why she passed them and how they were obeyed. the history of european pin manufacturing sheds more light on spanish-english relationships than any anecdote of walter raleigh could

[tired-biscuit]

you know that trope where it’s princess + knight, but they’ve both been captured by the bad guys and the princess is now gripped by the jaw by the villain, receiving a thin cut to her cheek while remaining completely still with a defiant look in her eyes even as a droplet of blood begins to trickle out of the wound, all while 3 people AT THE VERY LEAST need to have their hands locked on the knight because he’s thrashing around like a wild animal, trying so so so desperately, violently, to get to her?

yeah, that’s porn to me.

[janmisali]

oh I know how to make a poll's results look like the letter E watch this

what is the rightmost digit of the number of responses this poll has right now? (it should be visible before you vote.)

0, 1, or 2

3

4 or 5

6

7, 8, or 9

Voting ended onJun 13

[elamarth-calmagol]

Confused by the numbering choices here

[janmisali]

that's the order numbers go in.

[jabberding0]

a lot of machine use

[runasulienadanika]

Harrow is like: this is my Powerful Genius Rival Master Warden of the Sixth. we may Collaborate on occasion, but he just waits to show his Alleged Superiority-

and Pal's like: look Harrow, i made us friendship bracelets!

[oh-jod-dammit]

Listen listen listennn. Yes of course it would have been hard to keep any real memories of Palamedes or Camilla without involving Gideon, and harder to maintain false ones in her bubble without their ghosts being available to call. (Not that the bubble seems to line up one to one with what she believes consciously in HtN, never explaining how she thought Cyth came into the picture etc.)

But she / her brain still substituted constructs for all the people she couldn't call, and while she didn't spend much time around those, some of the ghosts did. Marta could tell something was wrong with Judith, Silas figured out what was up via Corona (if not sooner, likely from Colum). The Isaac and Jeanne constructs in the coffee shop AU showed they could have at least short passable interactions without real ghosts. But Cam and Pal only seem to exist to make a cameo at the arrival and then die; even Dulcie doesn't seem to have met up with them at all in the bubble, only seeing them to confirm it's their corpses.

What I'm saying is you could absolutely read it as Harrow super-extra erasing them / especially Pal from her mind—turning him into not even "someone I bumped into a few times in the library and understood was brilliant, I saw him as threatening competition but it's still a shame he died" or anything that might leave the door open to have any feelings about him, but into wholly "a stranger I never met directly even once"—because it would hurt. Because maybe it wouldn't be as dangerous as remembering Gideon, but as long as she's here excising her grief, why not get rid of all of it? :)

She didn't lose anything important at Canaan. Ortus was unfortunate but that was his duty after all, most of the tragedy there is just that she didn't do it right, it wasn't like they were ever close. She Had No Friends She Has Only Her Duty She's Fine.

Like given all the circumstances, "she barely thought about him" could absolutely be a sign of how much she cared... :(

[alboardman]

Unsubscribe.

[txttletale]

about 60% of the way through utena and i love how every couple episodes the show will take a total break from the main plot of the show for the Nanami Kiryuu Epic Fail Hour

[txttletale]

the black rose arc is also really fucking funny to me because it must be so baffling from utena's point of view. at first all the duels were with a specific set of people who all explained very clearly their psychosexual reasons for duelling which like it must have been weird for her but at least she understood what's going on. now every week some motherfucker she's barely talked to shows up with a brand new tailored outfit ranting about how they're going to kill her for what, to her, appears to be absolutely no reason