#tragedies

[illustratus]

La Belle Dame sans Merci by Paul Julien Meylan

[nocternalrandomness]

Crew members of the ill-fated Space Shuttle Challenger mission STS-51 who tragically lost their lives when the shuttle exploded 73 seconds after launch on January 28, 1986

Front Row (left to right):: Pilot Michael J. Smith:, CommanderFrancis R. "Dick" Scobee, Mission SpecialistRonald E. McNair:

Back Row (left to right): Mission Specialist Ellison S. Onizuka, Payload Specialist Christina McAuliffe, Payload Specialist Gregory B. Jarvis, Mission Specialist Judith A. Resnik

[mervynbunter]

Much of our modern theater seems rooted in the Shakespearean discovery of the modern mind. We’re stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct—the Greeks—lifting [The Wire’s] thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality. The modern mind—particularly those of us in the West—finds such fatalism ancient and discomfiting, I think. We are a pretty self-actualized, self-worshipping crowd of postmoderns and the idea that for all of our wherewithal and discretionary income and leisure, we’re still fated by indifferent gods, feels to us antiquated and superstitious. We don’t accept our gods on such terms anymore; by and large, with the exception of the fundamentalists among us, we don’t even grant Yahweh himself that kind of unbridled, interventionist authority.

But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason. In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak. Because so much of television is about providing catharsis and redemption and the triumph of character, a drama in which postmodern institutions trump individuality and morality and justice seems different in some ways, I think.

An interview with David Simon

[darkcrowprincess]

I think the best part about tragedies is the internal ticking clock that you have in your head when you watch a tragedy. Counting down every single second till the event happens that makes it a tragedy. Where a part of you unconsciously hopes that things will be different this time, you can picture and think of all the millions of ways it is different and ends happy. But of course, it doesn't end that way because you've seen this a million times. Because it's a tragedy and tragedies end like this. And than the moment happens and it makes you want to go back to the beginning and start the internal ticking clock again for more time. If a tragedy doesn't have you imagine a ticking clock in your head, than I'm sorry that's not a good tragedy.

[specificpollsaboutbooks]

Favorite BOOK Antagonists and Villains

Final

Lady Macbeth (Macbeth) VS Cytherea Loveday (The Locked Tomb series: Gideon the Ninth)

Lady Macbeth

Cytherea

Show results

Voting ended onApr 4

NO ANTIPROPAGANDA PLEASE

[iphysalian]

Quick list of tragedy tropes in no particular order for no particular reason other than that they get me every time:

Characters discuss running from what they refuse to admit is inevitable, and then don’t run, and then one of them dies to fate

Character dies right before help finds them

Character driven to a mad rage was right all along about everything, but has no one left to share in the bitter irony with

Character is the only one with the truth, and can’t reach a phone in time

Character pushes a would-be friend/lover/confidant away out of fear, and as they’re about to take it all back, they’re too late

Character with Good Intentions paves their way straight to Hell

Character is the last loyal minion tossed aside by a desperate villain at the 11th hour

“Last night on earth” parties, with many things left unsaid

[asoftepiloguemylove]

Cynthia Cruz Diagnosis // David Foster Wallace // Olivia Rodrigo lacy // pinterest // Jamie Varon Does The Universe Fight For Souls To Be Together? // Ethel Cain Inbred // Chen Chen Popular Street // Meggie C. Royer Tragedies // Olivia Rodrigo making the bed // @ely-n // Mary Oliver "The Return," What Do We Know: Poems and Prose Poems // Meg Day "There's Snow in the West," Last Psalm at Sea Level