Mechanic (Demeas)- Demeas, son of Democrates, was born and raised in Syracuse. He comes from a long line of intellectuals and inventors. He sawed off his arm and replaced it with a complicated prosthetic to prove a point. Demeas is a hard worker and often loses track of time while working on his projects. He is friendly when around people and likes to cook for his teammates. He, Taran, and Haribert work together a lot and bond over a shared love of science. He wears light, loose-fitting clothing since his role has little combat. He wears a sundial that was passed down through the generations. When I drew him with a beard, I did not intend for him to look like Socrates, but here we are.
Spear bearer (Menecreates)- Menecreates left his mother and sisters in Mytilene to earn some money and kill people. His spears are heavy, and he takes care of (and names) each one. He is soft spoken and intelligent, but also violent. His shield serves as decoration more than protection. He works well with most of the other mercs and tolerates Ireneus. He spends his free time polishing his spears or talking with Haribert. His father was killed in the Mytilenean revolt, and he feels a sense of responsibility to protect his family. His dialect is very different from the more "central" ones the others have, which causes some language barrier.
Observer- The observer is an Athenian spy. He does not share personal information. He is one of the more isolated group members, and he has no problem with that. He wears fine linen and soft leather sandals that allow him to move quietly. He used to wear lots of oils and perfumes, but had to stop because enemies could smell him before he could backstab them. He relies on a small dagger to get the job done. In terms of relationships, he has more enemies than friends. He has a little in common with Haribert and Demeas, and sometimes fraternizes with them. He butts heads with Ireneus a lot.
Chemist (Taran)- As a chemist, Taran uses his knowledge to create various combustible substances and brew beer. He lost his eye in an explosion, but he is still just as dangerous without depth perception. He wears bronze armor, a tunic, and a cape, which is a lot for the Mediterranean, but he looks cool, and that's all that really matters. He is friendly with the enemy hoplite and often sneaks out to hang out with him.
Surgeon (Haribert Hludwig)- Haribert came from Germania to study Greek forms of medicine, and also to flee the penalties for medical malpractice. He wears a cloak and chiton, which he dries his hands on, but in the cases where he goes on the battlefield, he wears more protective armor. Since this is taking place (very roughly) around the 400 bcs and Archimedes (the person) lived around 200 years later, Archimedes (the dove) is not named after him. It's just a coincidence. Medic's prescription is pretty low, so he doesn't wear glasses, even though Demeas offered. He is happy just to experiment in his iatreion, tend to the doves, or chat with Menecreates.
Archer (Milon)- Milon was abandoned by his Cretan parents and found and raised by a Spartan couple. They tried their best to raise him as a hoplite, but his Cretan aim prevailed. He is patient and cautious in battle, which translates to his behavior out of battle. He and Ireneus "hang out" often, which basically constitutes Ireneus running around while Milon whittles. He is polite with the rest of the team. He and his parents exchange letters often. They don't agree with his lifestyle, but they love him nonetheless. He usually wears light linen and leather boots, given that he is a ranged fighter and there is less of a need for heavy armor. He has a water bladder for various liquids.
Foot soldier (Irene)- Irene is a Spartan hoplite. He was actually born underweight, and his parents abandoned him. Despite that, he somehow survived and became a Spartan hoplite. He has brain damage from past head trauma and other psychological issues, which have a huge impact on his personal relationships. He also has ear damage. He surprisingly gets along well with the other mercs, so long as they keep telling him that they are Spartans. He wears heavy armor, which is both protection and a symbol of honor. He rarely takes his helmet off, and he even sleeps in it sometimes.
Courier (Ireneus)- Ireneus has an Athenian father and a Corcyrean mother. He doesn't know his father's identity, only that he is Athenian, which he resents. He prides himself on his "λαγνεία βόμβος" tattoo, which he bears in honor of his idol Timaeus Jonas. He wears two small sticks with unique notches as a form of identification, aka dog tags. He doesn't wear shoes (against the Observer's demands) since footwear gives him blisters.
Fire-bearer- The fire-bearer wears a Greek chorus mask and bandages, either to hide nasty burn scars or their identity. No one on the team knows where they came from or their name. They (mis)use an incense burner by swinging it in a way to oxygenate the flames. They stick close to Irene and Ireneus, but are not at all opposed to playing with the other mercs or bothering the Observer.
I pumped this out pretty quickly, but I'm happy to answer questions/just talk about the au!! I understand that there are some inaccuracies, some of those are intentional. I'm really excited about this...
I should finish the side characters' designs today or tomorrow.
Every day I handle more money than I will ever make. Every day.
At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.
At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.
“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.
The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.
I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.
I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.
I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht.
i wrote this while i was working at orlando’s walt disney world parks.
i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.
as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.
disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.
at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.
i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.
i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.
was thinking abt the difference in how (some) people view women's products as "things companies are trying to sell to women" while men's products are "things men want as consumers" and like. men's desires are constructed by the patriarchy. this is the problem w engaging w the concept of the patriarchy as like, the culmination of every single individual man's active desires instead of a system inherently intertwined with other systems of power. like men are constructed manhood is sold to you! if you think that everything the patriarchy says about women is a lie but you take it at it's word on The Ways Men Naturally Are. I simply need you to rethink things
The Article About Internalized Transmisogny literally ends by making a point about manhood and masculinity and misandry in queer/feminist spaces:
I hate that the only effective response I can give to “boys are shit” is “well I’m not a boy.” I feel like I am selling out the boy in baseball pajamas that sat with me on the bed while I tried to figure out which one I was supposed to be, and the boys who I have met and loved from inside my boy suit—who believed they were talking to a boy. I feel like I am burning the history of the naked body that sits on the floor of my shower. The body that went to prom in a boxy tuxedo and coveted the dresses.
Because I am not a boy, but I had a boyhood. I was, and am, made to live as a boy and I cannot suspend the perspective that gave me and join in when it’s time to fluster one of those clueless fuckers into anger by calling him a fuckboi and then tell him his anger proves he’s a fuckboi, or to humiliate one with an OKCupid screenshot because we’ve willfully conflated the clumsy ones with the threatening ones so we can grab those solidarity faves. It’s fucked up. It has metastasized.
More than a few out transwomen have told me, privately, they they are uncomfortable with these things, but are afraid that speaking up about it would cause ciswomen to like and trust them less. “I play along,” one of them told me, “because in the queer community the only people who defend cisboys are cisboys. I don’t want to give up finally being read as a girl.”
Another says “I do the misandry stuff because it’s an easy way to earn queer cred points, but when I think about it it makes me uncomfortable.”
Another: “It’s a coping habit I’m not proud of. If I agree ‘girls rule boys drool’ it makes me feel more like a girl.”
Have you noticed, when a product is marketed in an unnecessarily gendered way, that the blame shifts depending on the gender? That a pink pen made “for women” is (and this is, of course, true) the work of idiotic cynical marketing people trying insultingly to pander to what they imagine women want? But when they make yogurt “for men” it is suddenly about how hilarious and fragile masculinity is — how men can’t eat yogurt unless their poor widdle bwains can be sure it doesn’t make them gay? #MasculinitySoFragile is aimed, with smug malice, at men—not marketers.
This conclusion—widely shared—is a product of insulated discourse. What I am NOT saying is: “open the floodgates, let in the shitty male trolls!” I know the trolls—they have tried to be my friends, they have tried to sneak into feminist spaces with no desire to learn or listen. I understand not trusting men who loudly and constantly hold forth on women’s issues and refuse to accept when they are mistaken. I’m not encouraging anyone to trust blindly. I am pleading to the discoursers: consider that this insulation has effects and try to mitigate them, if your priority really is finding truth amid a muck of concealed patriarchal lies. Check to see if maybe you are saying things and reproducing things mostly because it sounds good and feels good and nobody is challenging them.
These are not discursive problems that only apply to an “undercover” transwoman, these are discursive problems that are seemingly only visible to an “undercover” transwoman forced to carry multiple perspectives like bactrian humps.
Because I am interested in complicating your definition of maleness and of boyhood. I was born into that shitty town, maleness, in the remains of outdated ideals and misplaced machismo and repression and there are some good people stuck living there. They are not in charge. They did not build it. And I don’t feel okay just moving out and saying “fuck y’all — bootstrap your way out or die out, I was never one of you.” I want to make it a better, healthier place—not spend all my time talking about how shitty it is and how anyone who would choose to live there deserves it. And to me that means considering them with charity, even when they make it difficult to. [...]
Because it’s not a small deal that the words “not all men” have become entwined inextricably with male fragility and whininess. It makes it awfully easy to insulate the (largely cis-)female perspective on what males are. To begin a statement with those words—“Not All Men”—is to give grounds to anyone who wants to laugh at the rest of it. But here is the truth: not all men are what you think they are. Man does not mean what you think it means. Generalizing harshly and broadly but implying “you know which ones I mean” is an intellectual and rhetorical laziness that is not allowed to pass anywhere else in these communities. Because we don’t get to choose who our words and behavior affect, we are obligated to choose them carefully.
'women's products as "things companies are trying to sell to women" while men's products are "things men want as consumers"' — The 'active male / passive female' schtick appearing for the thousandth time. That's the core of patriarchal gender and it's everywhere once you start looking.
Also, yeah, while it's cool that I get to stop cosplaying as a man, the things I thought sucked about masculinity were not only gender dysphoria. A lot of it was gender dysphoria. Some of it wasn't. I don't actually think most men are benefiting from the patriarchy, they're just being told they benefit while people are shitty to them.
you tell a guy to use a coaster ONE TIME and it pisses him off so badly he snaps, has a mental breakdown, concocts a double dealing scheme to win back his agency, stays a willing captive of a megalomaniac ex-weatherman he loathes for weeks, manipulates said ex-weatherman into gaining so much power he loses his fucking mind and tries to nuke the entire known universe for the sake of some wordplay, reclaims his status as the strongest sinner in hell, power-plays the former holder of his deal to get what he wants, and then comes back to the scene of the crime as a free soul at full strength just so he can devote the remainder of his free time in eternal damnation to FUCKING WITH YOU
andulkaphoto
ellievsbear
amandla
tangentwithtanner
prguitarman
baratheonpilled
dailybridgerton
vaporwave
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
gummygunk
