#I think this would've been really cool

[moldymutt]

average kid ?

[gingermintpepper]

I would love to hear you talk about Kassandra???

So, what can I say about Kassandra.

Well, firstly, I've been thinking about how I want to answer this question since I got it however many months ago and I figured I wanted to speak about my own interpretation of things rather than formal stuff - half because I don't want to cite anything since going through Iliad based papers brings me little joy and half because I figure I could treat it a bit more casually this way. So here's like, a very brief selection of thoughts I have about Kassandra, Saintess of Troy.

I view her tale as a microcosm of the wider tale of the Fall of Troy from Apollo's perspective. A human is given a choice and, of their own free-will, they make the most destructive decision ignorant of the way they're sealing their own fate and no matter how much their patron will want to save and help them, they will be unable to so much as lift a meaningful finger because the choice made is one that is sealed in Fate and powers far beyond any one god. The themes of doomed love are also shared; Kassandra loved Apollo just as Apollo loved her but she couldn't be what he wanted of her. She couldn't accept what it was he was offering, no matter how much power, honour and love he tried to tempt her with and in a lot of ways, I think of her devastating visions of doom and death(tm) as a physical parallel to the feelings Helen must be tormented with knowing that she will be cited as the reason of such mass death, destruction and violence. Likewise, I see Apollo's inability to save Kassandra up until the end as representative of his wider inability to save Troy. All his love and blessing were not enough, even though all she had to do was take his hand, it simply wasn't meant to be and so I imagine that must be a fresh hurt for him with each beloved mortal he loses during the campaign.

Kassandra is genuinely so interesting? Both as a character and as a narrative idea; she sits almost in the center of so many fascinating parallels and foils that it gets me so excited whenever she comes up in conversation! I've mentioned it briefly before but she forms a very neat triad with Iphigenia and Troilus which runs parallel to the three dominant male powers in Iliad - Agamemnon, Achilles and Apollo. They're what I somewhat refer to as the sacrifice trio, innocents who must ultimately be abandoned and stripped away for the sake of the desire of their sacrificer, in turn revealing something intrinsic about the nature of the man. For Iphigenia, she reveals that Agamemnon truly values his ambition over all, that his image and status as a leader is more meaningful to him than the love of his family (which, of course, dooms him in the end). Likewise, for Achilles, Troilus' sacrifice reveals that no matter the glamour or glory that crowns Achilles' head, his rage is ultimately his most powerful feeling and it burns bright and hot no matter the circumstance, opponent or arena. For Apollo, Kassandra's sacrifice (which is much more symbolic as he is a god and therefore need not actually physically kill her) reveals his position as the 'loser', one who will be scorned and reviled and lose all the things he loves no matter how closely he cherishes or adorns them. He can't protect the mortals he's blessed, he can't protect his children - he can't even save one woman. She also has that aforementioned triad with Helen and Andromache - the sequestered women; doomed to wait and pray but each, in their own ways working to save and support their own in the conflict. They're all haunted by the promise of what awaits them - Andromache's hopes and future lies with Hector and with her son yet she is the embodiment of a war-wife, solid and stoic in her support when Hector returns but suffering deeply knowing each fight could be his last. Helen, of course, carries with her both the suffering of the greek women and the hatred of their men - if Andromache fears death taking the breath from her beloved fighters then Helen bears the weight of death upon her shoulders, all grief and scorn is bore like a crown upon her head and she must bear it. It is her duty to bear it. Kassandra then becomes the suffering of the young women - they who are surrounding on all sides by throngs of death and do not know why it has come, they whose screams intermix with that of the dead upon them. There is no avatar for Kassandra to experience the war through, no reason for her to be stoic or strong or upright. She tears her hair, hysterical at the suffering that is poured into her mind day in and day out, wild and unrestrained where her elders must hold their grief and tame it. In this way, she gives voice to the voiceless, she screams for those who cannot and is reviled for it - a young woman surrounded by death yet ordered not to speak a word of its stench or horror. There's many more things I can talk about too such as the whole Kassandra as Apollo's living Palladium thing or the Kassandra-Electra-Clytemnestra trio or even Chryseis as a reflection of Kassandra and how the taking of a priest's daughter could be seen as tantamount to trying to steal away Kassandra (and how this eventually wraps back around to the actual incident of Kassandra being stolen away and ending up right back under Agamemnon's care just as Chryseis before her) but like, we would be here all day.

Y'all maybe this is a hot take but scorned woman Kassandra is like, the most boring interpretation of her ever. She has so much life and passion in her, so much joy, so much despair, so much love - making her jaded and cynical towards both her fate and her god is such a slap in the face to me of what her character could and generally does seem to stand for. Kassandra never stopped loving Apollo - likewise, Apollo (at least to me) never abandoned her. All in Troy suffer heavy, cursed fates - Kassandra is one of the few who at least had some awareness of how hers would turn out. I like that she's a fighter. I like that she screams and cries and spits and is expressive and ugly in her torment and grief when so many of the women around her cannot afford to be. I like that she said no and despite how much she suffered for it, she never begged for her yolk to be taken from her because she knew that the choice she made was the right one for her. She's raw, she's vivid, she's human and more than anything, that's what I love so much about her.

[sjonni33]

final night / mike schmidt fanart

{support me on ko-fi☕️} {prints & stickers}

[riddlerosehearts]

i'm so casually/vaguely interested in good omens that i was sad about "season 3" basically just being a movie for about 10 minutes before i moved on. but i can't stop thinking that if people really cared that much about terry pratchett and his legacy, they might wonder if he would've even wanted a good omens seasons 2 or season 3... considering the book did not have a sequel and he literally had his hard drives destroyed with a steamroller as one of his last wishes when he died because he didn't want other people to capitalize on trying to complete and publish his unfinished novels... or they might also be more upset on terry's behalf that neil gaiman spent decades of friendship with him hiding what a rotten person he really was, and that if anyone or anything is damaging terry's legacy it's entirely neil's fault. also, terry's legacy consists of dozens upon dozens of other books that have nothing to do with that guy anyway!

[flovey-dovey]

Kung Fu Panda 4 is largely kinda mid at best and lame and bad at worst but I think Tai Lung and Po kissing at the end made it kinda worth it.

[transingthoseformers]

It's kind felt off that I thought Shockwave was mauled by Undead Predacons and somehow and He was never mentioned in RID2015

No he lived at the end of the tfp epilogue, but he DID fuck off into the unknown after that tbh

[psychomusic]

so. I've been reading some posts on the jedi order tag AND i won't talk about my opinion on "are jedi good or bad discourse" BUT i wanna point out some lore to everyone who's complaining about the jedi taking kids into their order: (in the EU) it wasn't always like this.

if you take swtor era (more than 3000 years before the prequels) there were many jedi who joined at an older age. like, for example there was a guy who broke his engagement to become one. most jedi remember their families because they were old enough when they decided to go.

THEN in darth bane's book trilogy (circa 1000 yesrs before the prequels) there is a passage where two sith lords are talking about taking bane, already an adult, to study at korriban. one doubted him because he was too old, ans the other told him he sounded like a jedi, and that ONE DAY jedi will have to accept only kids into their ranks if they really want to find "pure" people that can learn their lessons quicker.

one day!! so it wasn't always like that!! the ongoing wars with the sith, who corrupted and killed many of them, had pressured them into taking always younger people into their ranks.

also, consider a thing that this video explains super well: training to become a jedi is not like exercising, because there is a transformative lesson at the end of the training that changes everything. you can't just do as much as you can, but not finish.

the transformative lesson, as the video explains, is that through the force, everything is the same - from rocks and ships to life and death. at the end of the training you have to understand this fundamental truth.

yoda says "you have to unlearn what you have learned". during times where they were constantly killed off or corrupted by the dark side (and if you haven't learned this lesson you are more susceptible to this corrupting), younger people were taken in to actually finish their training (a training that was ultimately about being a good person AND that you could leave at any point if you weren't sold on that, too)

(remember that for the sith failure = death. like. that was the alternative for force sensitive kids. it's not like sith had any moral problem with taking kids away without consent. sith don't have moral problems: they believe that them being stronger in the force means they can do whatever they want as long as their strong enough to go and do it. there are MANY passages in many different star wars stories, even in different mediums, that say this out loud)

AND (this is more of a critical thought than just stating the lore) the fact that they started doing it out of necessity doesn't mean it's 100% good BUT you know. the whole set up of the prequels is that we're starting off the story in a period of crisis and decadence all around. most of the systems of the times were about to fall. OF COURSE they had problems. if they didn't, we wouldn't have the story to begin with.

that doesn't automatically mean jedi = bad and sith are better, tho. you wouldn't take the last, chaotic and decadent period to jugde something, would you? it's like deciding that the athenian democracy sucked because people at the times of Demosthenes failed at recognizing the new schemes in which the world was evolving into, and still believed that their city would be important as it had been in the previous century. They just didn't fucking expect the Macedons would conquer half the world known and more, and have the subsequent political power. Still, their experiences in the 5th century with democracy were very good, even better than ours on many fronts, if you contextualize a little. the jedi had flaws, and most importantly, they didn't fucking know the future and everything that ever happened, ever, so they made mistakes. that doesn't automatically make the system ill, or bad, or not-working. systems can have setbacks when the world changes. (just like athenian democracy had one when they lost the empire that was funding the democracy. they even had a tyranny for a while and then fixed the problems. that doesn't diminish retrospectively their democracy)

[kimi-no-chikara]

You looked like you needed saving

君が救けを求める顔してた

[bayetea]

I don't like to think about this because it makes me sad but given that og pjo had a whole thread going about how you need to accept death for what it is it's the natural order of things and bad things happen when you try to change it (the most obvious example is nico coming to terms with bianca's death but tbh I think the same general notion applies to other things, e.g. all the times we hear about demigods trying to force quests to happen a particular way and it ends very badly)

I think hazel should've been sent back to the underworld after hoo but instead this time she goes to elysium. yes it's angsty and sad and no one wants hazel dead but the justifications given for why her lasting reanimation is okay just this one time are pretty flimsy when it's emphasized so many times in the franchise that You Can't Disrupt The Way Things Are Meant To Be (more in tags)

[dungeons-and-dragon-age]

OKAY. MAN.

[nerves-nebula]

*voice of exhaustion* you guys are like, so moronically white

[taraxacum-vulpes]

why is everyone pretending like cyberpunk edgerunners is good. the writing is so bad i hate it

[ducksbyday]

In another realm, we would've been fucked.

[AKA, what if the French were present during the Eggpire fiasco]

Extra: I tried to do funny hahas with cropping, but it didn't work so here are the funny haha's :]

(under "read more" more info about the lil AU I made :D)

TLDR: I like connecting different series/worlds. It's one of my favourite things to do, so here's a lil AU where the French members of the QSMP were present during the Eggpire before ending up on the island! :D

Étoiles got sick quickly and was among the first to join the Eggpire. During the red banquet, he was the security guard and stopped people from leaving it. Further, he was also in charge of stopping people from removing the blood vines from the world (which ofc he did by fighting them to the death).

Antoine discovered after a while that he was one of few with full immunity, which gladly made use of by inconveniencing Étoiles whenever he could (thanks to him, Q, Techno and Purple could get into the banquet without being spotted by anyone). He was also a part of the pro-omelette movement.

Pierre was on holiday when the world went to shit and came back right before the banquet started. He decided that it wasn't his business and spent most of his time underground building machines. He helped Antoine clean up the blood vines once but then got attacked by Étoiles and decided that he'd rather not get involved. That encounter did cause him to also get infected, so he locked himself up in a bunker until it all blew over.

(I don't have anything for Baghera or Kameto but ideas are always welcome <3)

(oh yea, also sign translates to: "no armor, no weapons. And no dirt, and no explosives, and no boxes") (and the sign in the comic translates ^^ plus: no camera's, no microphones, no Pierre's, no bags)

[byanyan]

been crying the last couple days thinking about byan, as an adult, eventually picking up a lot of volunteer work & contributing to youth groups for kids growing up in shitty situations that they relate to all that well. like, they're still kind of a menace about it, encouraging the kids to curse and teaching them how to fight and use knives and shit, but being more responsible than they used to be, supporting them all and being this safe space for them in this way they'd always wished someone would be for them... bringing fun little treats and drawing temporary tattoos for 'em all... ugh. UGH. i'll just always and forever have so many feelings when it comes to byan being the person they wished they'd had growing up for kids with nowhere else to turn, being that protective but really fun and cool older sibling who'll tease the shit out of you but never actually judge you for who you are or how you choose to express yourself. byan coming full circle, making sure (to the best of their ability, anyway) that no one has to suffer through all the same shit they did. byan!! growing and learning and helping out instead of remaining bitter and resentful and choosing not to pitch in just because no one ever helped them!!!!

[jichanxo]

how it started:

how it's going:

[aroaessidhe]

2023 reads

The Water Outlaws

fantasy inspired by a wuxia classic

a woman who’s an expert arms instructor is labelled a criminal after being assaulted by a powerful man

she joins a group of rebellious bandits who fight for justice, and becomes entangled in politics both with the group and the empire - who are trying to develop powerful magical weapons

mainly queer & female cast