#Paradise Lost

[sunseed-fandump]

Cookie Run X PROJECT MOON

Pure Night

[toastyoffering]

Anyone else thinking about Dante’s Inferno and the Jesus/Judas dynamic between Viktor and Jayce?

The lowest circle of hell is reserved for betrayers.

Its main characterization is a merciless icy blizzard.

Mage Vik saves child Jayce from a brutal death in a blizzard, knowing he will grow up to create Hextech, to break his promise to destroy the core, to ultimately betray his docile greeting in the commune, and saves him anyway. He could not have committed those betrayals without Vik’s help, and to me that stinks of a grand kind of forgiveness.

Jesus traditionally is considered aware of all past and future sins when he chooses to sacrifice himself for humanity.

Jayce ultimately acts within Viktor’s plan for him, so he’s weirdly both loyal and a traitor at the same time, which is all very physicksy and quantum and whatnot which I kind of love.

If MageVik let nature take its course Jayce would die and debatably much evil would be avoided. You could argue that the natural world’s fate is God or the pre-Christ divine order of the cosmos. Viktor instigates the change, perhaps even conceivably defying God/the natural world to do so. The difference between Old Testament and New Testament god is pretty drastic, so it’s kind of interesting to see Viktor seemingly embody that sort of shift. You can’t really say a god is infallible and then *changed*.

It’s also when Viktor is arguably shown at his most powerful, literally holding the world in his hand, and stopping death (Christ as a vehicle for immortality).

Jayce is devoted and chasing him from that moment on.

Seeing these ideas get played with is great fun.

[renardchagrin]

L'amour, ou plutôt le béguin, ça existe ; mais il est éphémère. Tout comme la vie même...

Et pourtant, rien ne nous empêche d'en profiter, d'entrer en extase au moment où on le vit.

L'avoir vécu, même pour un bref instant, ça nous rend chanceux. Le bonheur n'est jamais éternel, ni destiné à tout le monde.

J’ai toujours cru en l’amour. Toujours.

Mais là je ne suis plus sûre qu’il existe réellement.

On s’éprend de notre corps tout entier d’une personne qu’on rencontre et qui rentre dans notre vie sans même qu’on s’en rende compte.

Et un jour, plus rien, le silence total, le vide total, on ne ressent plus rien. Le vide.

[msue0027]

Ah yes, my favourite Bible fanfics, in no particular order

"Paradise Lost", John Milton

"Divine Comedy", Dante Alighieri

"Good Omens", Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

[weirdlookindog]

John Martin (1789-1854) - Pandemonium, 1841

[lillithdeluna]

In Praise of the Stygian. The twisted world of Lilith de Luna. As darkness settles in, ask yourself: Do you run from it, or do you hide?

[illustratus]

Chaos watches as the Rebel Angels are thrown into Hell (Milton's Paradise Lost)

by Gustave Doré

[sictransitgloriamvndi]

Fall of the Rebel Angels (1850/steel etching) - Gustave Doré

[brigitoshaughnessy]

"Beware of an old man in a profession where men usually die young."

[postalredeux]

when im mad i chew on this photo of postal dude

[eelhound]

"I think Homer outwits most writers who have written on the War [fantasy archetype], by not taking sides.

The Trojan war is not and you cannot make it be the War of Good vs. Evil. It’s just a war, a wasteful, useless, needless, stupid, protracted, cruel mess full of individual acts of courage, cowardice, nobility, betrayal, limb-hacking-off, and disembowelment. Homer was a Greek and might have been partial to the Greek side, but he had a sense of justice or balance that seems characteristically Greek — maybe his people learned a good deal of it from him? His impartiality is far from dispassionate; the story is a torrent of passionate actions, generous, despicable, magnificent, trivial. But it is unprejudiced. It isn’t Satan vs. Angels. It isn’t Holy Warriors vs. Infidels. It isn’t hobbits vs. orcs. It’s just people vs. people.

Of course you can take sides, and almost everybody does. I try not to, but it’s no use; I just like the Trojans better than the Greeks. But Homer truly doesn’t take sides, and so he permits the story to be tragic. By tragedy, mind and soul are grieved, enlarged, and exalted.

Whether war itself can rise to tragedy, can enlarge and exalt the soul, I leave to those who have been more immediately part of a war than I have. I think some believe that it can, and might say that the opportunity for heroism and tragedy justifies war. I don’t know; all I know is what a poem about a war can do. In any case, war is something human beings do and show no signs of stopping doing, and so it may be less important to condemn it or to justify it than to be able to perceive it as tragic.

But once you take sides, you have lost that ability.

Is it our dominant religion that makes us want war to be between the good guys and the bad guys?

In the War of Good vs. Evil there can be divine or supernal justice but not human tragedy. It is by definition, technically, comic (as in The Divine Comedy): the good guys win. It has a happy ending. If the bad guys beat the good guys, unhappy ending, that’s mere reversal, flip side of the same coin. The author is not impartial. Dystopia is not tragedy.

Milton, a Christian, had to take sides, and couldn’t avoid comedy. He could approach tragedy only by making Evil, in the person of Lucifer, grand, heroic, and even sympathetic — which is faking it. He faked it very well.

Maybe it’s not only Christian habits of thought but the difficulty we all have in growing up that makes us insist justice must favor the good.

After all, 'Let the best man win' doesn’t mean the good man will win. It means, 'This will be a fair fight, no prejudice, no interference — so the best fighter will win it.' If the treacherous bully fairly defeats the nice guy, the treacherous bully is declared champion. This is justice. But it’s the kind of justice that children can’t bear. They rage against it. It’s not fair!

But if children never learn to bear it, they can’t go on to learn that a victory or a defeat in battle, or in any competition other than a purely moral one (whatever that might be), has nothing to do with who is morally better.

Might does not make right — right?

Therefore right does not make might. Right?

But we want it to. 'My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure.'

If we insist that in the real world the ultimate victor must be the good guy, we’ve sacrificed right to might. (That’s what History does after most wars, when it applauds the victors for their superior virtue as well as their superior firepower.) If we falsify the terms of the competition, handicapping it, so that the good guys may lose the battle but always win the war, we’ve left the real world, we’re in fantasy land — wishful thinking country.

Homer didn’t do wishful thinking.

Homer’s Achilles is a disobedient officer, a sulky, self-pitying teenager who gets his nose out of joint and won’t fight for his own side. A sign that Achilles might grow up someday, if given time, is his love for his friend Patroclus. But his big snit is over a girl he was given to rape but has to give back to his superior officer, which to me rather dims the love story. To me Achilles is not a good guy. But he is a good warrior, a great fighter — even better than the Trojan prime warrior, Hector. Hector is a good guy on any terms — kind husband, kind father, responsible on all counts — a mensch. But right does not make might. Achilles kills him.

The famous Helen plays a quite small part in The Iliad. Because I know that she’ll come through the whole war with not a hair in her blond blow-dry out of place, I see her as opportunistic, immoral, emotionally about as deep as a cookie sheet. But if I believed that the good guys win, that the reward goes to the virtuous, I’d have to see her as an innocent beauty wronged by Fate and saved by the Greeks.

And people do see her that way. Homer lets us each make our own Helen; and so she is immortal.

I don’t know if such nobility of mind (in the sense of the impartial 'noble' gases) is possible to a modern writer of fantasy. Since we have worked so hard to separate History from Fiction, our fantasies are dire warnings, or mere nightmares, or else they are wish fulfillments."

- Ursula K. Le Guin, from No Time to Spare, 2013.

[letsbeapoemtogether]

“Across centuries and the void of a world, sleepless, I seek you.”

Rafael Alberti, tr. by Ben Belitt, from An Anthology of Spanish Poetry: From the Beginnings to the Present Day, Including Both Spain and Spanish America; "Paradise Lost"

[worldsfinestpowercouple]

It's good to be a dc fan.

[drgluckenstein]

[shisasan]

John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1 [originally published 1667]

[weirdlookindog]

John Martin (1789-1854) - Satan viewing the Ascent to Heaven, 1824

from 'The Paradise Lost of John Milton with illustrations by John Martin', 1846