HORSE DISTURBER

Francis. 18+ please

[taraxippos]

Personal and reblogs blog. 18+. I'm 28. They/them or anything I don't care.

-likes/follows from @serpentface (main art blog)

-I like wildlife biology and ancient history

-I don't tag triggers by default so tread carefully (no judgment I just don't). If you have something major feel free to ask and I will try to accommodate.

[creditednature]

Coyote's Turkey lunch that got away, Coyote Hills Regional Park Fremont, CA - Description and photos by Rudy578

[taraxippos]

I was hooked enough by The Awesome Internet Carnival to want to see the finale but I’m not like a Fan nor is anyone I follow and I wasn’t paying close attention to release dates, so the only way I could have known that the feature length finale was just released a few days ago is, in retrospect, an unusual uptick of posts on my dashboard going like “she amazing digital suck me” and etc

[s-nnoh]

someone made a website where you can declare your favorite pokemon & why. let's all see if every pokemon is someone's favorite... Together

[sonicxshadowgenerations]

:) every pokemon is someone's favorite

[taraxippos]

Books I've read since May 18th reviews

Firebringer: "wait didn't this happen in Watership Down"

Watership Down: Watership Down

The Last Unicorn: still my favorite book

The Winter King: Solid, really engaging, might qualify as my favorite historical fiction book I've read in recent years if it can be counted as 'historical fiction' but that's a stretch. Whole series is hit and miss and there's a lot of aspects that I have major gripes with, but levels out on 'I like it'. Confused at the postulated minuscule size of armies in post-Roman Britain.

Enemy of God: Good

Excalibur: Not as good as the other two but still preddy solid

Clan of the Cave Bear: please write a formal apology to Homo neanderthalensis

Shaman: Didn't know how to feel about this the first time and still don't, I'm gonna say "enjoyed it"/"preddy good"'/"leaps high above the low bar of 'better fiction taking place in ice age Europe than the Earth's Children series'", you did not have to make these people call semen 'spurtmilk' especially since the word was going to be used so often but you did and that's jsut how it is. Really like the depiction of neanderthals in this one, it rings true to me personally as to what homo sapiens/homo neanderthalensis interactions might have actually been like (meaning "varied").

The Song of Achilles: If this book was a person I would kill them on sight. I wouldn't be able to control myself. I would black out and then wake up 48 hours later covered in blood and dirt with bits of human flesh stuck under my fingernails and lodged in between my teeth. I'd go to take a shower and scrub myself off, watching blood curl its way down the drain, and I would know exactly what I'd done. And I would feel nothing.

The last quarter or so of the Iliad (not pictured): 2.5/10 similes too long

The King Must Die: I like the approach and a lot of the concepts but I was never hooked on anything Beyond the conceptual. That cover art is cool.

[taraxippos]

Thank you for the very long answer to my prev ask :) It now brought to mind another, far nicher Greek Myth Retelling in a Historically Grounded (kind of) Way before it was cool which is Mary Renault's work - the mask of apollo, the king must die, the bull from the sea, the persian boy ... I really, really liked her books about Theseus and Minoan culture and I'm curious if you've ever picked them up

I KNOW Mary Renault is a familiar name to me in more than just an "I heard this author exists" way, I wonder if I read anything from her in highschool or something but I don't remember. I just read "The King Must Die" to check it out.

I did really like the general approach, IK a lot of things postulated in this book about Cretan society are informed by Sir Arthur Evans' Uh "Imaginative" interpretations of the palace at Knossos and are thus outdated, but it was still fun to see how the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur was reconfigured into something grounded. I think a lot of other books I've read who take that same general approach kinda feel like they're just checking off boxes of 'here's how this and that facet of the myth could be Real' in a way that feels I guess very perfunctory? just going down a list trying to find the most realistic point of comparison, as if mythology is just history after going through a couple rounds of telephone game, no imagination involved, no other purpose to the storytellers besides being a fully literal description of the past. Which also has a way of making the "real" story feel disjointed. And most of the main points didn't feel like that to me. "7 boys and 7 girls from Athens taken to feed the minotaur" being interpreted as "boys and girls from kingdoms throughout Crete's sphere of influence given as tribute and enslaved as ceremonial bullfighters at Knossos" was really cool, I love that concept. The way we're presented the "reality" and made to connect the dots to how it translated to myth over the course of centuries mostly feels very graceful. There were still bits that had the "checking off the box" quality for me (like I don't think we need a clean replacement for Pasiphae and the white bull, we don't really need the whole nine yards of "Minos spared a bull fighter because he was unwilling to sacrifice him and Pasiphae had an affair with him that involved hiding in a model of a bovine" when we could just say Pasiphae was thought to have had an affair with her husband's favorite bull fighter and Asterion was a bastard, and imagine how and why the gaps between that and the myth filled themselves) but on the whole it didn't feel like you were getting beat over the head with "HERE'S HOW IT COULD BE REAL".

I've read (much pulpier) prehistory historical fiction books from like the 80s, which came in the wake of the 2nd wave feminist movement and the pop archeology notion of "peaceful matriarchal earth goddess-worshipping culture overthrown by warlike patriarchal sky god-worshipping culture" as the grand arc of prehistory (read: European history) and it was really interesting to see the same idea in its gestation (albeit more grounded and not mythologized as a primordial fall from the Eden of peaceful goddess matriarchy; both groups share deities and cultural features and neither is peaceful) in a book from 1952 before later feminist movement-influenced authors ran with it and got silly about it in other ways. Also seeing this basic concept from the patriarchal sky god-worshipping culture POV (with intent that it is such, rather than this happening purely by default) was new to me.

There was this thing where like, plot significant events would either happen with little to no build up, or breeze by so fucking fast while being described with the most circumlocutory phrasing (or not at all) that I'd repeatedly be like "wait what" and have to go back and reread a passage several times to be sure what happened. Which I'm at least not used to having to do? I think the bit at the end where Theseus is startled by Something in Ariadne's hand was the worst offender. IDK if I'm just stupid or what, like I could put two and two together based on the scene/chapter and the entire book that she had participated in the Dionysian rites and that the King was probably killed by the maenads specifically, so it was probably something or other from him, but MAN is it vague to the point of not hitting for me, and it was like that a lot throughout the book. I wasn't that compelled by this Theseus or the story in general, but it kept me reading.

I also found the bit with the proto-Christian anticipating the arrival of proto-Jesus really funny, Yahweh wasn't even the subject of monolatry (much less exclusive monotheism) until a good ways into the iron age iirc? I'm pretty sure the timeline doesn't match up with the beginnings of Jewish messianism either, or the actual Philistines existing as a discrete group, much less as an exonym for ethnoreligious outgroups. I have no idea where the research on the history of the Abrahamic deity stood in 1952 and how much of a leap this was, it's just funny like what the fuck is this guy up to. Time traveler.

[taraxippos]

HE SHRINKS HIS ORGANS

[taraxippos]

Kindof insane what we did to strawberries

[shithowdy]

it's 1pm at the marsh! come on down, we've got

𝓃𝑜𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝒷𝓊𝓉 𝒷𝓁𝒶𝒸𝓀𝒷𝒾𝓇𝒹𝓈!!!

[caesarsaladinn]

if you're ever wondering what popular media is getting wrong about basically any premodern society, the answer is that there are never enough lawsuits

[caesarsaladinn]

there's a common idea that in the olden days all disputes were resolved through violence, but even in settings where that was true, people would still sue each other about it.

[systlin]

Like 80% of Icelandic sagas involve lawsuits. Sometimes against ghosts.

This worked to get rid of the ghosts, incidentally.

[dogpuppy]

[slam-ancient]

Helmet, Greek, South Italian, 525–500 BC, Saint Louis Art Museum: Ancient Art

https://www.slam.org/collection/objects/37601/

[minmos]

i hope tumblr users never stop talking about punk music i think we deserve this

[slam-ancient]

Thoth as Ibis with Maat, Egyptian, 332–30 BC, Saint Louis Art Museum: Ancient Art

https://www.slam.org/collection/objects/35016/

[cma-greek-roman-art]

Stater: Free Horse (reverse), 389-369 BC, Cleveland Museum of Art: Greek and Roman Art

Size: Diameter: 2.1 cm (13/16 in.) Medium: silver

https://clevelandart.org/art/1916.990.b

[taraxippos]

Have you also read Circe by Madeline Miller? Because I've read Circe but not SOA, and I can definitely recognise some of the things that you were criticising in SOA that I noticed in Circe.

The characterisation of Thetis lines up with how pretty much every woman in Circe is treated with contempt by the text. They're all vindictive bitches who hate our protagonist on principle. There's like no sympathetic female characters besides Circe (and Pasiphaë maybe a lil bit after having the Minotaur). Also the gratuitous fauning at how beautiful and grizzled the *good men* Odysseus and Daedalus are.

I read it a few years back so my memory isn't perfect, but I also remember being mildly put off by the ending, but I know people who liked it.

I read Circe not too long after reading SOA and SOTG for the first time but it was the kind of book that just slipped frictionlessly over my brain and left only the thinnest trail of grease in its wake. Just kinda nothing.

The main thing I remember about it was thinking that it was better than SOA in a technical sense and that maybe this was because there wasn't one singular detailed epic poem that the majority of the plot and characterization had to struggle against (I also thought the meandering first half of SOA is ultimately more cohesive than the parts that span the Iliad, upon rereading it yesterday there was a hot minute early on where I was like 'okay this isn't quite as bad as I remember it'), and being disappointed by it feeling vapid/weightless/aimless after being intrigued by the opening act (I think the bit with her cursing Scylla had me hooked for a minute?). I remember feeling Something about Pasiphaë's handling but I could not tell you what with any confidence, and I might be mistaking this for the book Ariadne, which to my memory was kind of the diluted backwash of a Miller book and nearly devoid of substance. With you saying that about Daedalus and Odysseus, I THINK I had mentally classified this book as one of several gutless Feminist Retellings that are saying Big Important Things about women's suffering under patriarchy, and then there's a good man and the problems are gone by virtue of the man being real niceys. Not sure if that's accurate to Circe's contents or if I'm mixing it up with something else though. That's pretty much it.

[taraxippos]

With your strong opinions on Song of Achilles I'm wondering if you've read the silence of the girls / the Women of Troy series by Pat Barker? I liked its approach to depicting Bronze age culture and norms much better than SOA personally

I briefly mentioned it in that post but there’s a lot in that post. Yeah I read Song of Achilles and Silence of the Girls for the first time back to back, with the latter being infinitely better in every conceivable way and the contrast being so stark that I developed an overblown opinion of how good it is. Every single thing that bothered me about SOA was aggressively Not An Issue in SOTG and it was like a glorious ray of sunshine in my life. But upon my second reading it was like, okay I like this book's Approach to its content and there's a lot of things I like about it, but this isn’t very good. I'm going off memory here so apologies if anything is off-base.

Obviously just about every main complaint I had about SOA is a nonissue in SOTG. Silence of the Girls is the anti-Song of Achilles. I like that the text acknowledges that Briseis, as an aristocrat, was also a slaveowner and is now in the same situation as her former slaves, no trying to smooth that over besides her remarking something like "I thought I was a kind enough master", which in context didn't read to me as trying to exonerate her. I DEEPLY respect Barker's confidence in Not making Briseis the most perfect victim imaginable, or only flawed in easily sympathetic or Cool ways, which I think is unfortunately rare. I liked the informal speech which makes use of contemporary slang, I find that to actually ground me in a setting (especially one such as this which is Hard fantasy and very down to earth with even its explicitly supernatural elements) because the people talk like people talk and not in constant hyper formality because it's ye olden tymes. I remember really liking how Patroclus and his interactions with Briseis were handled, the details are leaving me now (besides the bit I mentioned in the SOA post) but it was like, I can Believe this is what the 'kindest' of her captors was like. Like someone who comes off as a nice enough guy interpersonally and who even tries to relate to her and 'help' her, but within the bounds of completely and utterly Not questioning the morality of her being his comrade's slave or his cultural worldview in general. Just in terms of its overall approach it's pretty much exactly what I look for in a Mythology Retelling.

BUT I think it fails at its intended premise because Barker simply Could Not stick to this being Briseis’ story. I’m not saying that as Only a conceptual and thematic failure (though I think it is) but also a structural one. l actually Liked the Achilles POV sections in of themselves because I REALLY liked what was done with that character (except the mommy issues being kind of cartoonish, at least as I remember them. Like as if Barker didn't trust that the reader could put together that Achilles was projecting Thetis onto Briseis in an extremely fucked up way, and so was trying to shove it into your face as hard as possible) but the shift in focus to Achilles to the point of changing POV made the story feel incoherent.

I’m in a weird place with this book because I dislike a lot of things about it, but some of its detractors criticize how ugly and brutal it is, and how Briseis has no agency, and it’s like That’s The Fucking Point, she’s a slave at a war camp, of course she has no agency and can’t control anything about her life and is subjected to horrific shit, that’s the POINT. People calling it torture porn have not encountered much torture porn, I think the scenes that actually describe rape and other violence in detail are done with tact and accomplish what they need to accomplish. I've seen people talking about it as if it’s a failing that the story is not about Sisterhood Through Adversity and Woman Banding Together To Overcome its like THEY'RE SLAVES IN A WAR CAMP WHAT ARE YOU EXPECTING. She's already been depersoned and she's Specifically enslaved in a context where there's not even the thinnest semblance of security. When the war ends she and every other woman is going to be taken by their foreign captors and distributed all over Greece, and any relationships or sense of routine they build now will be Gone and there will be nothing they can do about it. I’m sorry that the story about the Iliad’s central enslaved woman being fought over as a war trophy is unpleasant and not empowering lol, maybe you should have read something different. I wonder if the physical copy's summary blurb is misleading and tries to sell this as being another girlpower Greek mythology retelling or something.

BUUUUUUUUUUUT the premise is degraded by the fixation on Achilles and Patroclus. I like what Barker did with them as characters, but this shit is not supposed to be about them, it is a weaker novel for being heavily about them, and it is about them wayyyyyyy beyond what could be expected from Briseis paying careful attention to the men who have her life in their hands. It kneecaps the story both structurally and thematically, if there was an intentional idea of ‘Briseis trapped in Achilles story as a meta lack of agency’ it doesn’t work. It feels more like Barker just grew too attached to her version of Achilles and couldn’t bear not to utilize him, and those sections really should’ve been a Kill Your Darlings victim before the final drafts imo. Or like ultimately I think Barker should have just tried for a broader scope Iliad retelling that privileges the perspective of Briseis and the other enslaved women but doesn’t have to flip flop over whether it’s Briseis’ story or ‘tee hee it turns out I was trapped in Achilles’ story this whole time!!!!!” (not claiming that this is what actually happened, but that bit struck me as if like, Barker's editor left a note questioning the Achilles POV sections and she was like OHHHH IF I MAKE IT SO BRISEIS IS 'TRAPPED IN HIS STORY' I CAN KEEP THOSE PARTS AND IT'S META and then added that line to bandaid it together). I haven't read the other book(s?) in the series, but at least at the time of writing SOTG, Barker’s real calling was writing Song of Achilles Except It’s Not The Worst Garbage Imaginable and that might have been a better book than SOTG. Unfortunately.

It also kind of lacked restraint and subtlety to me. The mommy issues is an example. Briseis becomes an author mouthpiece to say The Point the readers a little much, in a way I remember being jarring sometimes where she otherwise feels like a person of her era but then suddenly she's Very much speaking to the 21st century reader. I remember reading the part where Briseis engages in one quiet, futile act of rebellion via taking the gag out of the sacrificed girl’s mouth. It gives her fellow a semblance of dignity in death and gives Briseis one little way to express her autonomy and personhood, but it's also too late, the girl is dead, Briseis is still a slave. And I was like wow this is really a good, heartbreaking moment that encapsulates the themes of the novel BUT THEN IN ITALICS the quote silence befits a woman is there and it’s like. OHHHHHHH thank you I wouldn’t have gotten it otherwise. That’s why it’s called Silence of the Girls okay. Thanks. It's. The girl is a metaphor about the enslaved women's suffering as a whole, I thought the gag was only there to stopped her from screaming while being sacrificed and it meant nothing else, but thanks to your assistance I only now realize this is also Symbolism and the motif of silencing being used to express the core themes, wow thank you for explaining it to me.

And while I think anyone complaining about the lack of focus on 'sisterhood' is, in my opinion, insane, there's some elements to that I agree with which is that I remember there being very little time spent on the other enslaved women in General. I remember? feeling like there was some characterizing intent to Briseis in how she's largely distant from her fellows, but it still left a bad taste in my mouth given how Briseis' story largely focuses on Achilles. It would be dishonest for this novel to be about women in a terrible situation banding together in an epic found family sisterhood but like, shit, they would at least Interact much more than we get to see and have their own interpersonal stuff going on between them. You could probably at least have subplots for Briseis that exist semi-independently of Achilles' plotline and supplement the arc of the Iliad.

I think it still stands as my favorite Greek Mythology Retelling Novel, but that's not the highest of bars because I still can't name one that I feel unambiguously positive towards. I do think my feelings on it qualify as 'liking it', it frustrates me because there's so much good to it and it brings aspects of the Iliad to life so well, but it's also sloppy and can't stick to its own premise.