Sold My Soul to Fanfic

edamamefiend

greelin

yeah yeah the dream where we’re hitting our dad with a baseball bat & he’s screaming and crying for help. We all have it.

greelin

does it have it more to do with killing him than protecting ourselves? who can say!

specialagentartemis

in middle school during my Intense Greek Mythology Phase, Artemis was, as you can likely guess, my best girl. Iphigenia was my OTHER best girl. Yes at the same time.

The story of Iphigenia always gets to me when it's not presented as a story of Artemis being capricious and having arbitrary rules about where you can and can't hunt, but instead, making a point about war.

Artemis was, among other things--patron of hunting, wild places, the moon, singlehood--the protector of young girls. That's a really important aspect she was worshipped as: she protected girls and young women. But she was the one who demanded Agamemnon sacrifice his daughter in order for his fleet to be able to sail on for Troy.

There's no contradiction, though, when it's framed as, Artemis making Agamemnon face what he’s doing to the women and children of Troy. His children are not in danger. His son will not be thrown off the ramparts, his daughters will not be taken captive as sex slaves and dragged off to foreign lands, his wife will not have to watch her husband and brothers and children killed. Yet this is what he’s sailing off to Troy to inevitably do. That’s what happens in war. He’s going to go kill other people’s daughters; can he stand to do that to his own? As long as the answer is no—he can kill other people’s children, but not his own—he can’t sail off to war.

Which casts Artemis is a fascinating light, compared to the other gods of the Trojan War. The Trojan War is really a squabble of pride and insults within the Olympian family; Eris decided to cause problems on purpose, leaving Aphrodite smug and Hera and Athena snubbed, and all of this was kinda Zeus’s fault in the first place for not being able to keep it in his pants. And out of this fight mortal men were their game pieces and mortal cities their prizes in restoring their pride. And if hundreds of people die and hundred more lives are ruined, well, that’s what happens when gods fight. Mortals pay the price for gods’ whims and the gods move on in time and the mortals don’t and that’s how it is.

And women especially—Zeus wanted Leda, so he took her. Paris wanted Helen, so he took her. There’s a reason “the Trojan women” even since ancient times were the emblems of victims of a war they never wanted, never asked for, and never had a say in choosing, but was brought down on their heads anyway.

Artemis, in the way of gods, is still acting through human proxies. But it seems notable to me to cast her as the one god to look at the destruction the war is about to wreak on people, and challenge Agamemnon: are you ready to kill innocents? Kill children? Destroy families, leave grieving wives and mothers? Are you? Prove it.

It reminds me of that idea about nuclear codes, the concept of implanting the key in the heart of one of the Oval Office staffers who holds the briefcase, so the president would have to stab a man with a knife to get the key to launch the nukes. “That’s horrible!,” it’s said the response was. “If he had to do that, he might never press the button!” And it’s interesting to see Artemis offering Agamemnon the same choice. You want to burn Troy? Kill your own daughter first. Show me you understand what it means that you’re about to do.

lurkinglurkerwholurks

catmask

i deserve a gold star for being so sweet and nice and not killing

lurkinglurkerwholurks

in which I am Dick Grayson and Dick Grayson is me

friendofthefellowshipsnerdblog

Reblog if reading someone else’s fanfiction has helped you get through a hard day

evadneares

Henry Scott Holland

The remaining writing at the bottom of the page reads:

"All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost. One brief moment and all will be as it was before. How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!"

writing this made me smile this made me cry

fabula-unica

transgenderer

i have to carefully avoid thinking too hard about any time period before like the 1900s because i start thinking about all the dead babies and i fucking lose it

like!!!! i trully cannot countenance any argument that the past was better when nearly HALF of all young children died.

argumate

whenever I wonder about why humanity started getting so much nicer in the second half of the 20th century I conclude that it may be related to the fact that we weren’t constantly surrounded by tiny skeletons.

neriad13

yeah.

the messed up thing is that I’ve heard literal history teachers (and my own parents) say that the people of the past were used to it and that it didn’t have as big an effect on them as it would have had on us…which is absolutely untrue and so, so freaking dehumanizing - see the 14th century poem ‘Pearl’, in which a father mourns the loss of his infant daughter, with palpable pain

Since in that spot it slipped from me
I wait, and wish, and oft complain;
Once it would bid my sorrow flee,
And my fair fortune turn again;
It wounds my heart now ceaselessly,
And burns my breast with bitter pain.
Yet never so sweet a song may be
As, this still hour, steals through my brain,
While verity I muse in vain
How clay should her bright beauty clot;
O Earth! a brave gem thou dost stain,
My own pearl, precious, without spot!

I think…that some people have difficulty comprehending the sheer scale of death in the past and so, choose to believe that the ones experiencing it were different from them

tanadrin

oh man, Pearl fucked me up so bad when I first read it in university. We know nothing about the Pearl poet (who also wrote Gawain and the Green Knight, plus two other poems, called Patience and Cleanness), though we have four of their poems, and based on the vivid language and the subjects of the poems it’s tempting to infer things about the poet’s life. and I have a really really hard time imagning the Pearl poet was not a parent, bc Pearl is this beautifully wrought poem, with intricate alliteration and repetition and a really thoughtful exploration of the theology that is supposed to comfort us (was supposed to comfort them) when contemplating the death of someone beloved–and at the end of the poem, in this vision where the father is beholding his dead daughter in the paradise of the New Jerusalem in heaven, when she turns to go he can’t help but dive into the stream that separates them, whereupon he suddenly wakes and finds himself alone.

Sometimes the values of the past are a bit strange to us and we have trouble imagining ourselves caring about the things they care about, and sometimes the common bond of humanity shines through in medieval or ancient literature so bright that it astounds you. Pearl definitely belongs in the latter category for me.

crazy-pages

By the way, if you’re ever wondering why subsistence farmers of the past tended to be conservative and resist revolutions even though they were getting the worst possible end of the stick, it’s related to this.

Because a bad harvest or a famine didn’t typically look like people starving. That happened when things were apocalyptic, but it was much more common to simply have bad years where there was enough for everyone to survive, but not quite enough to be healthy about it. And do you want to know what that looked like, for subsistence farmers who had to do hard farm labor to grow their food?

It looked like the adults in their prime having to eat their fill while they watched their children and elderly parents not get enough. It meant watching your parents nobly turn away half of their portion, and eating a full hearty meal while you watched your three year old kid beg for more food. Because if you were an adult in your prime and you didn’t eat your fill, you would not have the strength to work the fields, come planting and next harvest and grain preparation. And your entire family would surely die the next year.

But eating that much less typically would not kill your parents or your kids. Typically. It didn’t cause them to keel over and die of starvation directly. What it did was make them more vulnerable to disease. So every year your town had a bad harvest, every year war meant you lost food to the army, whether your own or a hostile one? You were rolling dice. Was this the year your youngest kid would get a winter cold and not have the strength to fight it off? Was this the year your mother finally caught a fever and didn’t wake up in the morning? Maybe, who knew.

So when some revolutionary came around asking you to risk disruption and chaos and possibly war to improve things … what’s going through your head? Trauma. You’re thinking of the two kids you already lost, the bad winter where your father passed, and this fucker is asking you to roll those dice again.

And tradition was so important for the same reason. These subsistence farmers relied heavily on horizontal social ties to get them through individual bad harvests. If you had a good year, you contributed to festival feasts and feted your neighbors, so they would do the same for you if you had a bad year. You did everything you could to ensure that a bad harvest had to occur to the entire town to make you roll the dice. And that meant participating in all of the local traditions, and being on good social terms with your neighbors, and it often meant being in good standing with the local religious organization. Tradition wasn’t just a set of obscure actions, it was a necessary component of not rolling the dice on withholding food from your suffering kid while you rolled dice in your head about whether or not they would die.

elfwreck

There’s a line in the Two Towers movie that wasn’t in the original: Theoden saying “No parent should have to bury their child.”

It wasn’t in the book. It couldn’t be. Because Tolkien wrote the books between 1937 and 1949. And while parents grieved horribly for their lost children… everyone just knew that parents buried their children. A lot. That women bore three or six or eleven children, from when they were 16 or 18 or 20, until they were about 40, and buried almost half of them.

The line wouldn’t have been in the book, not because parents didn’t grieve, not because 1/3 of all people’s children died (of course, wealthy families were much less prone to infant mortality), but because at the time, nobody could imagine a world where it was unnatural for parents to see their children die.

By the time LotR was written, infant mortality had improved greatly. But that’s not the world he grew up in, and he wrote LotR after serving in WWI. As far as he could tell, “more children are living through their first few years” could just mean “there’s been a war so fewer children are being born.”

It’s not that Tolkien couldn’t write about a deeply grieving parent. It’s not that Middle Earth is so directly based on European middle ages that he designed that same level of child mortality into the background of his worldbuilding. It’s just that, he wouldn’t have that parent even imply, “it’s against the natural order of things,” because such a concept was outside of his experience. (It’s not against nature. The natural order of things, for a couple million years, has been that about 1/3 to ½ of all human children will not live through puberty.)

Grief was constant.

So was callousness developed to stave off grief.

So was mourning so deep it was almost catatonia; people got lost in their thoughts and just… stopped interacting with the world around them.

Part of the industry and productivity changes in latter half of the 20th century was due to communities not spending so much time either grieving or panicking about who would be gone tomorrow.

internerdionality

Fathers mourning their sons is, in fact, a big part of Tolkien’s work.

But not in shock; In despair

the-haiku-bot

Fathers mourning their

sons is, in fact, a big part

of Tolkien’s work.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

saga-news-and-fandom

We missed the Tonka. That last line is too important to lose to a haiku.

Fathers morning their

sons is, in fact, a big part

of Tolkien’s work.

But not in shock; in despair.

Death knew every child’s name.

fabula-unica

gffa

Dick Grayson: "Relax, I've got sixty hours in the simulator!"

SMASH CUT TO: DICK HAVING PLAYED 60 HOURS OF A RACING GAME IN THE CIRCUS

I cannot express how hard I lost my shit at this, because they are currently in the middle of trying to outrun an actual firestorm being rained down on them by Firefly, Dick just broke his promise to save himself if things went down, he dragged his 280lb mentor into the Batmobile and probably barely reaches the pedals because he's still like eleven years old and Batman is FULL FORCE YELLING AT HIM for disobeying direct orders and this CHAOS GREMLIN CHILD

HAS THE ABSOLUTE NERVES OF STEEL

TO SAY RIGHT TO BATMAN'S FACE

"Relax, I've got sixty hours in the simulator!" when he knows Batman knows Batman doesn't have a simulator and HE MEANT THAT HE'D PLAYED A BUNCH OF RACING GAMES.

Let's be real, Bruce didn't put that kid on a dangerous path, Bruce put a fucking leash on that kid so he was maybe 5% less dangerous and likely to get himself killed and HE WORKED A MIRACLE TO GET THIS FAR.