#kallistoi

[palms-upturned]

au where nanami leaves ohtori at the same time as anthy and they have to go an an oops! we're narrative foils road trip together

(im legally obligated to plug the old fic i wrote w a plot exactly like this but for anthy and wakaba)

Send me a random AU of your choosing and a fandom and I’ll write a plot summary for it

after utena disappears, nanami can’t leave things alone, she has to find out what happened to her. something something seeing too much of herself in utena to be able to cope with never knowing if she made it out okay

nanami leaves ohtori to find her… only to run into anthy at the nearest train station at the same time. spiderman pointing meme

nanami was going to take the train home to pack up some things from her house, but now she’s like where are YOU going?! and anthy is like why do you care? ^_^ cue nanami trying to bicker and anthy just being a master of passive aggression

nanami gets angry and tells her SHE’S looking for utena, and anthy may as well just admit to whatever she and the chairman did to make her disappear and where she went. anthy drops the passive aggression and just sort of shuts down for a while until she says she only vaguely knows where utena might be but isn’t sure

nanami sort of falters at anthy’s reaction, but she’s like ok well now you have to tell me where she is and anthy is reluctantly like only if you’ll agree to take me there, it’s far away and i don’t think i’ll be able to afford a plane ticket. nanami is like ohoho, i can even charter a private jet (cue anthy internally being like teehee i know, i remember the time touga and i pranked you into flying to india ^_^)

anthy is like ok well. i think she’s in amsterdam. “AMSTERDAM?!” “amsterdam.” she explains about utena’s aunt yurika and is like “it’s our sister city, after all ^_^” however neither of them know wtf that means

nanami is p sure she’s getting pranked but charters the jet anyway in hopes that even if anthy’s lying, she’ll have a chance at getting the truth out of her so long as they’re together. so they fly off toward amsterdam. a 20 or so hour flight. they’re gonna be stuck together in a confined space for 20 hours. what could possibly go wrong

at first they both are seemingly having a passive aggressive fake-friendly competition until it devolves into nanami just getting pissed off while anthy is like 😌

nanami starts to sulk and they end up in silence for a while until that gets too unbearable for nanami and she lashes out like “why are you even looking for utena, you honestly think she’ll want to see you?”

anthy is like 😐 bc on the one hand she really is afraid that utena won’t be happy to see her again, on the other hand, fuck you nanami what the hell do you know

so she’s just like well if you hate me so much, you didn’t have to come with me ^_^ and nanami is like shut up YOU came with ME this is MY jet you know

back to silence for a while. horrible awful silence

nanami is like “if she’s really all right, why won’t you tell me what happened”

anthy is quiet for a while and then finally says, “because you’re right. i hurt her. i hurt her and she left and i believe she’s waiting for me but i don’t know. you already know everything that matters, so i don’t know what you want me to say.”

nanami is like i want you to say you’re sorry!! and anthy is like what about you? and nanami is like 😶

nanami thinks back on everything she did and tried to do to anthy (she actually thinks about this all the time, she just hates to) and remembering all of it now knowing what she knows hurts real bad. she’s like “if i say sorry, will you answer some questions?”

anthy is like. maybe. and nanami is like well maybe im sorry then. and anthy is like fair enough

nanami seems almost afraid to ask her first question, but finally says, “was my brother also… were you both…” [pregnant pause]

anthy’s like …yeah. him too.

nanami gets too upset to talk for a while. she could say, “your brother made my brother who he is” but that feels wrong, because then she could also say “my brother made me who i am,” and she would be too ashamed of herself to pin everything she did on touga. it’s just not true. and so she can’t blame the chairman for everything touga did to her, either. touga hurt her intentionally, full stop. and nanami hurt a lot of people, including anthy

nanami also asks if anthy loves utena (she asks this very awkwardly lmfao) and anthy has to think about that for a while, and whether or not she has the right to say yes. but she absolutely does. so she says it and nanami is like …ok. idgi after everything that happened with u two but ok

anthy asks if she can ask nanami a question. nanami cautiously says yes. anthy asks “do you really hate me?”

nanami starts getting really emotional— angry, sad, ashamed, lots of things. and she’s like “i think i do, but i think i hate me more than you.”

anthy also looks a little emotional and is like yeah. i get that.

eventually nanami just cries and is like where are we supposed to go from here, what place in the world is there for girls like us

anthy also gets teary eyed and says she doesn’t know, but she has to believe that there is one, because she has to believe that there’s a place for utena in this world and that she didn’t really disappear

idk what else happens on the plane ride, i forgot to mention chuchu is there and has been tormenting nanami im sure, probably his thematically relevant antics were what made her have her angry outbursts SJSHDJDJ

they eventually land and anthy tells nanami the rest of what she knows about utena’s aunt yurika, which is not much but it’s a start

they disembark from the plane and nanami starts getting overwhelmed like oh my god, what am i doing rn. this is really scary.

anthy also is scared, but she offers nanami her hand. nanami gets choked up again and takes it and it ends there probably HSBSNDND

THIS WAS A RLLY FUN ONE THANK U IZZY

[finelythreadedsky]

how do you feel abt bonny light horseman as an andromache song just asking for a friend

andromache playlist: folk ballads where a woman laments the futility of the war that’s taken away and killed her boyfriend/husband/lover

siuil a run

lowlands away

bonny light horseman

johnny has gone for a soldier

lowlands of holland

there is a pretty powerful overlap between homeric conceptions of war as this machine that eats men alive and makes them think it matters and these songs where a man's been sent to die in the name of some cause that his girlfriend/wife/lover recognizes as empty (also a whole other set of songs where the 'cause' is just straight up capitalism, which is why west virginia mine disaster is also an andromache song)

[samarashoot]

3, 10, 25

3. What were your top five books of the year? oh this is Hard but i think i'm gonna go with: pedagogy of the oppressed by paulo friere, angels in america by tony kushner, pet by akwaeke emezi, the amazing adventures of kavalier & clay by michael chabon, the faggots and their friends between revolutions by larry mitchell & ned asta. whoever's reading this you yes you should read all of them at once and then talk to me about them

10. What was your favorite new release of the year? already discussed my feelings about mx. impossible but i also read and loved grievers by adrienne maree brown, the first release from my beloved pal [redacted for internet privacy]'s new radical spec fic imprint!

25. What reading goals do you have for next year? answered this too but i'll give u another!! ummm i want to finish (or at least attempt) all of the books that are currently on my shelf without buying more. some of them have been there untouched for years it is truly so sad

[lichfucker]

martha dobie, karen wright, and lily mortar for literally any of those numbers

sfkdljslkdfjksdlkjf

okay I'll do all of them but no explanations otherwise I'll be here for three years

1. stab, shoot or drown

stab karen, shoot martha, drown lily

2. fist fight, get drunk with, share a flat with

fight karen, get drunk with lily, live with martha

3. fight aliens with, fight zombies with, fight capitalism with

fight aliens with lily, fight zombies with martha, fight capitalism with karen

4. write a book with, read a book to, hit with a book

write a book with karen, read a book to martha, hit lily with a book

5. go on a six hour road trip with (no car radio, you choose who drives), sit next to on a six hour plane flight, sit across from on a six hour train journey

road trip with martha (she drives), flight with lily, train with karen

6. go clothes shopping with, go to ikea with, go grocery shopping with

clothes shopping with lily, ikea with martha, grocery shopping with karen

7. go to a wedding with, go to a party with, go to a museum with

wedding with lily, party with martha, museum with karen

8. share a car with, share a bank account with, share a cake with

car with martha, bank account with karen, cake with lily

9. watch a soap opera with, go to a play with, watch your favourite movie with

soap opera with lily (you can't take her to the theatre she'd be so insufferable), play with karen, movie with martha

10. netflix and chill with, go ice-skating with, play dodgeball against

netflix and chill with martha, ice skating with karen, dodgeball against lily bc that's the funniest thing I can possibly imagine

[endetithei]

reverse unpopular opinions achilles but it can't be about any objects he might own

okay, I WON'T mention the shield of achilles, or any of his other glorious and homoerotically intimately exchanged/borrowed/stolen armor. (Is that Ciceronian enough for ya?)

I love that Achilles, like Helen (and in other respects like Heracles) occupies this space where he's a paradigm/paragon, but also an impossible paradox. He's the exemplar of rage, what it means to be a warrior, and heroism-- but he's also between the worlds of mortals and immortals, of stillness and action, thought and feeling. But it goes beyond these binaries, which are really artificial anyway. He occupies liminal spaces both metaphorical and literal, and he drives the story because he is unlike anyone else in it (except Helen). The story works because he and Helen are unlike anyone else. They have specific roles; they fill those roles, but in filling those roles they utterly change what those roles mean and do. He is a full person. Book 9 shows this to us, but we see it elsewhere (even already in Book 1.) He is an enigma but he is undeniably real. He is aware, but not in the smarmy, self-satisfied way that Odysseus is. He can't manipulate it like that. He just understands it. I love Achilles.

[lamentablequeen]

oh i would LOVE to know ur take on a tma entity for ianthe!! i myself go back and forth between flesh, stranger (not-coronabeth??), spiral, and corruption, what with all the being fully consumed by what loves you

oh this is a good one!! i want to say she would be corruption, because of her whole “acquisitive love” thing. that and the fact that her room on the mithraeum is full of slowly rotting apples... i am coming to the realization that i can do so much more with ianthe in this au because she deserves to be a little creepy! she deserves some worm friends! but i think her whole deal is VERY corruption, especially like what jane said about being a “toxic person”... I Am Looking Directly At It

[chthonic-cassandra]

any more thoughts about yorgos lanthimos? have you seen the killing of a sacred deer? it's not my absolute favorite of his, but it's one that haunts me for some reason, i'm always curious to know what effect it had on others.

kallistoi said:  have you seen yorgos lanthimos’ the killing of a sacred deer? it’s apparently a loose take on iphigenia at aulis. i have some reservations abt it i guess, but u might find it interesting if ur going through his work and haven’t seen it already!

Yes, I have seen Killing of a Sacred Deer! It’s not my favorite of his either - like The Lobster, it feels a little too uneasily balanced between the experimentation of Lanthimos’ early work and the Hollywood conventions that come along with his later success and larger budgets. I think by the time he made The Favourite he had found that balance better. I found it pretty viscerally unpleasant to watch, without the emotional honesty that made Dogtooth watchable, if intense.

It’s an interesting Iphigenia retelling, and I agree that there’s something haunting about it - particularly the way that bodies are shown, this sense of the creeping horror of degenerative illness and the uncanny sense of causality and fate which is, I think, the most effective part of the movie, even if the disability politics of that are really contorted. There are some moments, particularly with the daughter, Kim, that linger with me.

I guess we can understand it as an exploration of what human sacrifice means without divinity, and the engagement with that question is the movie’s strength but probably also its greatest weakness. There’s a hollowness at its heart where the gods should be, and that of course centers around the (well-acted but problematically conceived) character of Martin.

The movie reminds me somewhat of Pasolini’s Teorema, which also never entirely clicked for me, though it’s been a long time and I should give it another shot. There’s this same focus on an enigmatic young male figure entering into a bourgeois family and wreaking chaos, but where the effect of the Visitor’s presence in Teorema is revelatory and cathartic (he’s something of a Dionysus figure), Martin’s intervention is bleakly destructive, as if all he can illuminate within the characters is the shallowness and limitations of their bonds with one another; it’s rather too nihilistic for me, and Martin’s characterization as ‘psychopathic’ (as many reviewers seem to call him) is boring.

It also seemed to me that class dynamics were crucial to what was happening in Killing of a Sacred Deer, but yet that was submerged in a way that seemed off; the movie might have landed for me better if that was foregrounded.

[elucubrare]

20, 21 for the writing ask meme

20. Tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes?)

I've done a lot of worldbuilding that hasn't quite made it onto the page yet in an effort not to infodump too much - there's a lot of intricate guild and family politics that I've discussed with R to really hammer out the consistency, but I'm trying to get it in only as necessary for the plot. Like, ducal inheritance is elective, and most of the familial drama is about that, and there's a whole bunch of intricate power positioning between the Mage's Guild and the noble families, because neither will admit that the other is more important.