#DO NOT THE WINDBAG!!!

[corrosive-star-system]

"please do not the windbag"

Stupid little doodle i made

Based of this stupid wikihow meme

[microvibing]

Hermes n Aeolus in vengeance saga

[taitavva]

the consequences of taking any wayward child with red eyes under your wing ....

(sequel to this + full text under cut)

[jimmydeantofu]

No one:

Odysseus in the Vengeance Saga:

[island-in-the-shadows]

Did I need to write Armand bending Daniel over the railing of their opera box at the Met opera and railing him while making the mortals ignore them during the intermission of La Boheme in the fall of 1977? No.

But it's where the story wanted to go, babes.

[thatpyroblogs]

Long 600 Strike Rant

Spoilers for the song 600 Strike below

Had a night to think over what I saw and man I am still so disappointed by that song and, mostly specifically, the animation. Now I want to clarify that I mean what the animation showed (and thus what Jorge asked the animator to do) not the quality of the animation (it was nicely made). I just really hated the windbag jetpack. I know Jorge has repeatedly talked about how anime is a big inspiration for him and also how he would like Epic to be turned into a videogame, but man that jetpack is just came out of nowhere to me.

Not a big fan of beating a god with what appears to be the strength of his 600 dead men (and I'm not sure how many of them would want to help him given how some of them die). I'm also wondering what is supposed to keep Poseidon from just flooding Ithaca after he heals back up. I can't imagine him actually being so scared of Odysseus that he won't try and get revenge. The man lives on a tiny island! Poseidon has destroyed bigger before!

I think part of what I'm really hating is I see a way it could have worked. If Jorge had had Athena met back up with Odysseus at some point before 600 strikes. She would still be weak and messed up from God Games, but her and Odysseus working together would even the playing field in the fight against Poseidon.

This would bring the musical story back on track with the actual story. In the story Athena calms Poseidon's storm for Odysseus allowing him to get to the safety of Phaecia. Epic could have continued with the plan to skip Phaeacia and just had Athena's Epic version of calming of the storm be her and Odysseus reconciling and working together to take down Poseidon.

My version of 600 Strike would have had Athena pulling the drowning Odysseus into quick time where they reconcile and agree to work together to defeat Poseidon. Odysseus still uses the windbag, but only to escape the water (no jetpack). If the whole flying still has to happen why not divine owl wings from Athena or something similar? Either way together they should be able to take on Poseidon as there is precedent for Athena giving mortals the ability to kick godly butt (looking at you Diomedes).

Then after that Odysseus can still end up stuck on the rock with a weakened Poseidon. Athena, who again still hasn't recovered from God Games, no longer has the energy to keep pumping divine energy into Odysseus, thus he returns to being a mortal man . Poseidon taunts the two just like in the song since Odysseus has no divine help now and he opened the windbag allowing Poseidon's storm to now trap him.

Odysseus would still pick up the trident and torture Poseidon. Now you can even have Poseidon begging Athena to call off her champion and her refusing to stop Odysseus as he gets his vengeance. Poseidon eventually agrees to let Odysseus go with the knowledge he is now protected once more by Athena.

Though I'm still not sure that solves the whole Poseidon being petty and drowning Ithaca or Odysseus at a later date issue. Maybe during the torture bit have Poseidon say something about how the other gods won't let Odysseus get away with what he is doing to him. Then you can have Athena reveal that Zeus has sanctioned what is happening to Poseidon. I feel like if Zeus is thrown in as supposedly having interest in Ithaca/Odysseus than Poseidon would be less likely to retaliate at a later date.

Of course maybe I'm overthinking something that won't turn out to be a plot hole. Maybe there will be some info given in one of the last songs that will reveal why Poseidon can't just come back later and ruin Odysseus's life. I'm really hoping that happens and 600 Strike can just become the one song where I ignore the official animation. I'm also hoping we get Athena back at some point before the end of the musical. I really don't want God Games to be her last appearance. I'm afraid how she is handled might end up being another disappointing bit to this musical.

[nandysparadox]

im kind of an apologist for the crew when it comes to epic tbh.. justice for them gone too soon 🕊️

[chaos-bringer-13]

@void-of-unparalled-chaos did you see me going through Epic the musical tag on your blog? It's because you infected me. I am no longer sane. Because of you posting about Epic I went and watched both streams recordings on youtube and am currently making my way through literally every video about Epic on Jay's channel. I am obsessed. I ranted to my parents for an hour and then started sending memes to my friend who barely has any context. I am vibrating through walls. There is something fundamentally changed in me now. I am losing my sense of humanity. Please if you ever want to infodump and have someone to share your freaking out - message or tag me. I need to know every single detail and I'm too bad at noticing the motifs and instruments myself. Someone save me

[gayamulet]

I'm reaching that point of crabby old bitch where I'm beginning to think skinny-girl-in-witch-hat art is a psy-op

[prideprejudce]

otto wouldn't have been able to start SHIT if viserys had been able to see through his clearly self-interested motivations to almost everything that he did. there are hundreds of ottos in westeros that would have done the same thing if given the slightest chance, but a good ruler needs to know when they're getting obviously manipulated. and not only did rhaenyra clearly see this and ask for otto to be removed from court for his scheming, but even daemon could see that having him as the hand was a terrible idea. but what did viserys do? let him come right back as hand and run the kingdom while he snoozed in bed

people will always blame alicent and rhaenyra or even daemon for sparking the start of the civil war but at the end of the day it will always come back to viserys and his cowardly decisions. as soon as he allowed himself to be bullied to remarry and to have more kids again, he officially sewed the seeds together for future conflict after his death no matter who he married. like if he had married laena instead of alicent and had sons with her, would the outcome have been so different? do you think rhaenys and corlys would have stood on the sidelines and watched their grandson get passed over? especially after rhaenyra had illegitimate sons that weren't even laenors? that they wouldn't have petitioned their own dance? the snake will always eat its own tail for power, and viserys doomed rhaenyra to her death with his own

[ladysophiebeckett]

the worst thing about the cow thing is that eurylochus didn't even get to eat it. he killed it and then immediately zeus appeared. if the crew is already doomed (which is why eurylochus did it, bc he was like 'we're never going home be serious') let them have a last meal. they're literally gonna die going hungry?? fucked up.

[briny]

does anyone have recs for theory on it/its pronouns written by nonwhite people. I want to understand but I have yet to find a single scrap of convincing literature largely bc no one ever critically addresses the dynamics between racialization and dehumanization

[viwifey]

You know, my father taught me about trust. He told me if I wanted it, there were three things I needed to do: Be honest, even if it means telling a self-righteous windbag that her breath smells like a cesspool. Be patient. Mm, still haven't cracked that one, but being tied up still helps.

And the third?

[superyoshisisland64]

I know these are minor compared to what others are talking about, but the two things that come to mind are 1.her Pokemon video and 2. Her problems with genres.

The Pokemon vid made me so mad when I watched Ant's streams. There were so many points that I had to pause and yell at my phone bc of her terrible takes 😅. I think the thing that annoyed me the most was her hacking in a Ralts, a very weak pokemon and constant whining about the difficulty when they keeps getting KO'd. Maybe Lily, if you played the game as intended, you wouldn't be having this problem.

The fact that she's hacking in a Gardevoir in the first place is also so annoying. Like I get that its your favorite pokemon, but like, c'mon. This is supposed to be a retrospective, shouldn't you play the games as close to intended as possible, so there's no bias? I love Giratina and Wooper, but I'm not hacking them into every game, let alone replacing my starter. I think the most egregious example is in Pokemon X, where Ralts actually is in the game, and pretty early on too. Literally right after the first gym, you can catch a Ralts literally in the first patch of grass you see. It takes, what, 30-45 minutes to get to Route 4. Maybe if she had waited a little bit and actually kept her starter Pokemon and had a Ralts, maybe then she wouldn't have complained about X being difficult. (Side Note: XY are considered one of, if not the easiest mainline game)

It really feels like so many of her complaints in the video come down to two things, 1. the fact that she just mashes through dialogue and thereby misses important context, to which she then complains about not knowing what's going on, and 2. I think she's just bad at Pokemon. Like watching her gameplay was painful. I'm no MLG Smogon Pro-Gamer™ or anything similar, but it really looks like a lot of her complaints about difficulty could be dealt with if she just played better.

I understand Lily brushes this criticism off as "her playing the game her way" which is perfectly fine, I have no problem with that. However, she the turns around and talks about the difficulty being unbalanced and the devs doing a bad job a the difficulty curve. Lily, you can't blame the devs for poor difficulty balancing bc they didn't think that someone would hack in a Pokemon with the defense stat of tissue paper. I know tons of people who do pokemon challenge runs where they only use one type or just one pokemon, but when ever they face difficult moments, they're not blaming the game designers for not being balanced for a Magikarp only run.

The other thing being her problem with Genres. Lily notoriously despises Shonen, claiming that the genre is just dumb fight scenes (or something similar to that). When someone pointed out that an anime she really likes, Spy X Family, is Shonen she went full denial mode, instead claiming it's a "thriller" instead. Here's the thing, Shonen does not refer to a genre like action or comedy, Shonen describes the age group being targeted by these manga, in Shonen's case 8-18 year old boys. Meaning any genre could be Shonen, action, comedy, romance, etc. So Spy X Family may be a Thriller, but it's still aimed at teenage boys , ergo it's still Shonen. I don't know why she could be like, "I hate Shonen, but Spy X Family is the one exception." Like I dislike strategy games, but I love Project X Zone.

There was also the time she claimed that Pokemon didn't start out as a JRPG, and those elements were added later. I have no idea what she means by this, under the two most common definitions of JRPG is : RPG with turned based combat and/or an RPG coming from Japan, definitions that Pokemon has always fit. She didn't clarify what genre she thinks Pokemon was before the JRPG elements were "added in," the closest thing I was able to come up with was at the beginning of her Pokemon video, she called it an "open-world RPG" which it's hasn't been open world until Scarlett and Violet, (Maybe Legends if we're being generous). The only reason I could think of why she would consider all of Pokemon open world is bc in gen 1 and 2 , there is some slight choice in gym order, but it's like in the mid game, and only 3 of them. And even then, it's still pretty linear. Not to mention, a game can be both open world and a JRPG.

What has Lily said out of everything that's made you irrationally angry?

For me it's this

I'm a writer and it activated my fight or flight, I won't lie, and I'm a flightless bird.

[teaandspite]

The Great Goodreads Diss List (Part 1)

Context: For many years now, I have been collecting funny lines from Goodreads reviews to share with my coworkers. (I do collection development, reader's advisory, and weeding at a public library, so I read a LOT of reviews)

Are some of these, perhaps, rather mean? Yes, but they are also very funny, and come from a place of honest frustration. In the tradition of Bargepole threads and lists everywhere, names and titles have been censored.

"First, I want to say that I understand how hard it is to write a book and how amazing it is when it is actually published. Congrats to the author for that accomplishment. That said--"

"Warning: This review will be lengthy due to pure hatred."

"I found myself feeling really, really annoyed with the world that this book is allowed to exist. We live in a universe where the passenger pigeon is extinct but this book goes along merrily being read by unsuspecting lovers of words and ideas and stories? It just seems like too much, you know?"

"Don't do it. Don't spring the cash for the hardcover. Instead, eat an entire bag of Twizzlers, spend some money you don't have at a high-end department store, look up on Facebook the shady college boyfriend that made you cry, research the current value of your home or 401K and then read all about how the big hedge fund managers are faring during the economic crisis. You'll feel about the same stomach pain if you waste your time reading this book."

"This wretched novel begins with the mugging of an old lady and it appears I may be in the process of repeating that loathsome crime as [author] was 78 when she wrote it. It is not nice to put the boot into such a poor defenseless old creature lying there with only a damehood, a Booker Prize and a few million quid. It’s a nasty job but somebody has to do it."

"I think this is the way dead people would write, if they could."

"I am considering setting up SPABB: Society for the Protection of Accurate Book Blurb. This blurb appears to have been written by someone from the publishers who met [the author] the night before, got very drunk, lost his notes and then constructed something in a fug of hangover the next morning."

"I congratulate [the author] on the early half of his book, which was thoroughly fun and made me laugh and think. I congratulate [the author] on the second half of his book, for finishing it. It reads like that was difficult."

"…a woman whose taste in contemporary literature has roughly the same batting average as a pitcher in the National League."

"The author is a pompous windbag."

"Recommends it for: No one. Recommended to me by: A friend who apparently wished to cause me great suffering."

"Makes me wonder: is it possible to obtain similes at a volume discount?"

"The repeated phrases made me want to mail a thesaurus to the author."

"I'm disappointed in myself for finishing this book."

"if the author described [character's] eyes as "obsidian" one more time I was tempted to write her and ask if her thesaurus broke."

"They say that an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters would, if given infinite time, eventually produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. [This book], on the other hand, would probably take the average monkey just under two hours."

"I can't imagine what the author had to do to get this nadir of Western literature printed on innocent trees, but he does seem to know a LOT about being well-connected in New York."

"This book is so bad it is almost worth reading just to make you appreciate the other books you are reading."

"Reads like it was written by a brilliant author, the night before it was due."

"raises interesting questions, like: can a book be so bad as to constitute an act of terrorism"

"has this author ever spoken to a human woman"

"This acorn has fallen so far from the tree that it can’t even see the forest."

"I’m guessing they are touted as ‘beach reads’ because no one will care if they get dropped into the ocean."

"This book begins with all the energy of a hand vacuum near the end of its battery life, and the pace doesn't quicken much from there."

"At least everybody’s eyes stayed the same color this time around.”

Part 2

Part 3

[sniffle-bird]

so many people hate eurylochus to like. an insane degree. because they think everything he does are acts of self preservation and it’s NOT it’s preservation of the CREW because he’s the voice of the crew RRRASWRRRR

odysseus, polities and eurylochus were such good buddies and worked so well together because odysseus lead them, polities kept high spirits (this makes him sound like a cheerleader. but like idk how else to describe it? he like encourages whimsy. idk.) and eurylochus kept both of them grounded so they wouldn’t do anything stupid. and it was perfect until polities died.

without polities, the crew couldn’t find the positives in odysseus going up to the island to meet with aeolus. it was only eurylochus arguing his opinion, which is, “don’t go, it’s stupid,” literally, physically grounding him. obviously this was going to sway the crew in his favour immensely. eurylochus is like 10x more approachable than odysseus to the crew. eury’s their buddy. ody is the champion of a goddess and their king. so not only does ody then not have that extra polities voice in the argument to help lead ody to a logical conclusion which benefits everyone, he is instead clashing with eurylochus and subsequently the rest of his crew. this pretty much goes the same way for most of the other disagreements they have for the rest of the journey.

eurylochus is also forced to fill in the space that polities left in supporting odysseus as he’s their captain, but he struggles with bridging the gap between seeing him as his captain/king and seeing him as his friend. which is why he switches between calling him, “captain/sir,” to “odysseus,” to “ody,” during mutiny, and then back to “captain.” it’s a verbalisation of his view on odysseus.

so when it comes to opening the windbag, the crew is already on edge about it. he went up alone after fighting with the closest friend he has left in the crew, refuses to open the bag, the winions are all telling them it’s treasure. and there is such a blatant lack of trust between them that likely wasn’t present before; ody would rather stay awake for nine days straight than trust eury not to open the bag. and eurylochus, being naturally mistrusting of gods and mythical creatures in general, would not trust the origins of this bag. he would not trust his friend’s behaviour to be true. he would likely make the connection that the wind bag is making him act like this, so he takes it from him and opens it. not mentioning the insane pressure from the crew he’s likely been put under.

so yeah. people love to paint him as this evil-doer that was trying to usurp odysseus from the beginning but the mutiny only happened because everyone could tell ody was losing himself to this whole “monster” thing, which is what they needed to get home with as many men as possible, but nobody else is likely going to fully realise that unless you sit them down and explain to them the whole process of the journey and explain every little detail in everything that happened. much less eurylochus who is, as established, very stubborn, and very mistrusting of things he does not understand. he didn’t think ody was fit to lead anymore; it wasn’t that he sacrificed six men to scylla, it’s that he just did it and didn’t think of any alternative plan. he didn’t consult anyone else, he just did it. eurylochus could see he was driving himself a little crazy over getting home to his wife. like i’m sure there would’ve been some people who would have volunteered to hold the torches if they all held a big meeting.

and then the cow. how does nobody realise killing helios’s cows is a suicide attempt? eurylochus knew they were going to die, he did not believe they were going to make it home, at least with the cows he can control it and at least his crew won’t die hungry.

anyways. this is a huge wall of text. i know eurylochus haters HATE to see me coming, i’m his no. 1 defender and apologist he does no wrong.