#apologies I know this is Old

[roydeezed]

One thing for those who have watched The Boy and The Heron or will watch it. The Japanese title for it is How Do You Live? And Miyazaki stated he was leaving it for his grandson, saying, "Grandpa is moving onto the next world soon but he is leaving behind this film".

The deaths of contemporaries and friends such as Satoshi Kon and Isao Takahata and also the expected successor of Yoshifumi Kondo were things that have always weighed heavily on the back of Miyazaki's mind.

He recognizes the industry and the occupation for how soul crushing it was, grinding up either the spirit or the physical body of those who work in it. He loves and hates the industry he stands on the peak of and fully recognizes how it will probably be the death of him. And he knows it'll leave him unable to say a lot of things to his Grandson.

So How Do You Live? is a lesson. For his grandson. For himself. For his two sons. And probably for anyone else willing to pay attention.

Hayao Miyazaki is a flawed man that makes things so important to so many people. And I think more than any other film of his, in this you get to pull back the curtain a bit and see him at work. And what should be this giant unblemished titan can be seen for what he is, a sad old man who had higher hopes for himself and has even higher hopes for the people he makes his work for.

It's a beautiful thing to see another's humanity in their work. To look past the artifice and glam of commercialized art and find humans behind it. And humans willing to show their humanity and mortality is even rarer. And something to be celebrated. So when you watch it. Or if you've watched it already. Understand that this film is Miyazaki kneeling down, weary after years of weaving dreams and making mistakes, reaching out and saying to you that he hopes you can do better. It's an old man who's made all the mistakes of the world passing it on to you, hoping you do better, and making sure you know it's okay if you don't.

How do you Live? By making mistakes. By messing up. But still moving forward. And still reaching out.

[allaboutmyths]

The Aeneid, Vergil, translated by Robert Fitzgerald, Book VI lines 564-574

“Great Cerberus barking with his triple throat makes all that shoreline ring, as he lies huge in a facing cave. Seeing his neck begin to come alive with snakes, the prophetess tossed him a lump of honey and drugged meal to make him drowse. Three ravenous gullets  gaped and he snapped up the sop. Then his great bulk subsided and lay down through all the cave. Now seeing the watchdog deep in sleep, Aeneas took the opening: swiftly he turned away from the river over which no soul returns.”

translated by Robert Fagles, Book VI lines 478-489

“                                                                        These are the realms that monsterous Cerberus rocks with howls braying out of his three throats, his enormous bulk squatting low in the cave that faced them there. The Sibyl, seeing the serpents writhe around his neck, tossed him a sop, slumberous with honey and drugged seed, and he, frothing with hunger, three jaws spread wide, snapped it up where the Sibyl tossed it -- gone. His tremendous back relaxed, he sags to earth and sprawls over all his cave, his giant hulk limp. The watchdog buried now in sleep, Aeneas seizes the way in, quickly clear of the river’s edge, the point of no return.”

And lastly, the Latin itself, lines 417-425

“Cerberus haec ingens latratu regna trifauci personat adverso recubans immanis in atro. Cui vates horrere videns jam colla colubris melle soporatum et medicatis frugibus offam objicit. Ille fame rabida tria guttura pandens corripit objectam, atque immania terga resolvit fusus humi totoque ingens extenditur antro. Occupat Aeneas aditum custode sepulto evaditque celar ripam inremaebilis undae.”

hey quick question since there’s a long time since I’ve read the passage of the Underworld in the Aeneid but uhhhhh does Vergil state that Cerberus breathe fire??????? Bc he (Cerberus, not Vergil) do breathe fire in this medieval retelling of the Aeneid??

[hey-hey-j]

(sort of a companion piece to this)

older brother instinct

(★ my Kofi)

[ghostlylicious]

hc as julian gets older there are some things he's not allowed to consume anymore and geralt is constantly trying to save his life, like he always does ❤️ and it looks smth like this

inspired by me telling myself im not allowed to consume smth but consuming it anyways

[watmalik]

Poolverine out of context…either they have a pain kink or they just like getting tied up…or both? Let’s do both.

[mumuqings]

tgcf book spoilers, but one mu qing and xie lian snippet that I think about a lot is this one, at the start of xie lian’s second banishment when he’s surprised to hear mu qing being described as generous and kind:

as opposed to this memory from before his first ascension when mu qing started giving out cherries to the kids in the city:

I think it just really goes to show 1) how deeply mq’s actions truly affected xl and what he thought of him, but also 2) just how different mq and xl are fundamentally in the way that they think and approach things.

I don’t have a lot of commentary on xl that hasn’t already been said, but bc we get the story from xl’s pov, we see a lot of mq’s actions being framed as selfish or suspicious (which is fair, bc again, we know how much his actions hurt xl), but we also see a lot of misconstrued kindness, like in book 8 where it’s revealed that he knocked out fx in order to save him. it’s also pretty obvious how much mq still cares abt xl, with how quickly he volunteers as fu yao and the lengths he goes to protect him when he deems hc a threat, so I also think it’s very likely that mq leaving the trio first was exactly what he said it was — that he thought becoming a junior official, ascending quickly, would be the best way to take care of not just his mother, but also xl, fx, the king and queen, and himself, and so in a way, him leaving was him acting on his kindness. but ofc it doesn’t work out, and he spends the next 800 years fighting w/ fx about it, defending himself, his decisions, and his kindness, and nitpicking the accuracies of his statues while he himself remains completely misunderstood by the two people he probably cares abt the most.

and idk, I guess I just think that’s probably a really lonely way to spend 800 years.

[aldoodles]

Plz have this rough post-series httyd doodle dump

[lost-in-yahargul]

For research purposes:

[strifesolution]

another doodle because they’re all that’s occupying my brain right now

[wienners]

saw fans that love ‘old man yaoi’ when i pull out the sexualizing tobin bell

[mannequinswithkillappeal]

assad zaman as "prem"

[starryemeralds]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MY FAVORITE TWINS, DIPPER AND MABEL 🩷💙

Bonus Comic Below

[skitskatdacat63]

I've decided to do myself what the cowards at Aston won't. Behold.

[asmo-cosmetics]

still funny to me that there were people legitimately surprised and upset to find out that richard siken is cool with incest shipping. as an oldhead wincestie i promise he has literally never hidden it. like he's known about us and has always been so nice to and appreciative of us. he has said that he's glad that we like his work and associate it with wincest because even though he's not a wincest shipper himself (iirc hasn't even watched spn? but has watched and loved bbc sherlock & is a johnlocker lol) he feels like we're the type of people who actually get his poetry. he has openly said he finds it weird/uncomfortable when people use his work with het pairings, but homoerotic incest passes the vibe check.

like, wow, acclaimed poets? have media literacy? shock and awe

[divorcedfiddleford]

You made a post saying “it has been zero days since our last alex hirsch hates ford so much bullshit” and i know it was mostly hyperbole, but you have some really good takes that I would love to be elaborated on in terms of how ford is written

it really wasn't hyperbolic. over the years he's just really shown a lot of hatred towards this one character.

content warning: discussion of abuse

i want to start with this clip from the commentary which i think of as a microcosm for how the writers and especially alex think about ford.

transcript:

rob renzetti: i mean he [mcgucket] should've basically knocked ford out, and... and destroyed the... you know, tied him up, and, destroyed... and... alex hirsch, speaking over him: yeah he should've beat ford with a wrench and taken this thing apart piece by piece! he's the one who understood how to built [sic] it, but...

... so that seems like a pretty violent course of action. shall we unpack that?

ford is a character who's pretty explicitly written as a victim of abuse, and who now has c-ptsd as a direct result of the abuse he experienced. alex hirsch believes that ford deserved everything bad that happened to him, that it's ford's own fault, and that he also deserved worse things to happen to him. this is why, given every narrative chance, alex hirsch has piled more suffering onto ford's plate. the biggest example of this i can think of is in the journal, when he wrote that fiddleford was actively erasing ford's memory (despite this being a massive timeline contradiction which i still refuse to accept). because god forbid ford even have one remotely healthy relationship with somebody. that would be too good for him. ford was manipulated and lied to by bill, but alex repeatedly compares him to icarus, a teenager whose demise was the result of his own ignorance. this comparison is still so fucking offensive to me. the sun did not lie to icarus, did not guarantee icarus all of the happiness and success and sense of belonging which he had been denied all his life, did not actively shut out the voices of those around him who would try to help him.

alex in general has a very strange relationship with abuse. he seems to get really upset when people read his characters as victims of abuse. the strongest instance of this is actually not with ford, it's with pacifica - especially in the nwmm episode commentary. the episode says "pacifica's parents have conditioned her to respond to a bell" and alex says people got "the wrong idea" about it. like. dude. what the fuck. you wrote abuse. even if you didn't mean to, that's what you wrote. you can't say people got "the wrong idea" just because you didn't think about the subtext of what you were writing. anyway, back to ford: i believe this extends to him as well. alex wanted to write a character who's a foil to stan and who was a selfish unlikable victim of his own arrogance. however that's not what he wrote. he somehow seemingly accidentally wrote a really compelling and relatable awesome autistic guy who had to fight for every good thing he he ever had in his life only for it to be taken from him every single time. but alex can't let go of seeing ford as just "the opposite of stan". when he talks about "how someone as smart as ford could fall for bill's tricks", he refuses to realize he wrote a situation in which a man was being psychologically manipulated and tortured.

it goes back further, too. people repeatedly theorized that filbrick was... not a very good father, to say the least. on top of the very explicit and canon fact that he threw one of his children out on the street (seriously, there is no defense for this), people pointed out that stan would flinch at filbrick, that ford seemed upset by things filbrick said but dared not talk back, that filbrick was mad at stan not for hurting his brother, but for "costing the family potential millions". but alex can't have people seeing ford as sympathetic. ford can't have it bad like stan did. ford had to have everything and he lost it all because he sucks so much. so he wrote the graphic novel story where ford is filbrick's favorite child and filbrick also is not even a bad parent you guys he's just stoic. ignore the whole thing in dreamscaperers where stan perpetuates the abuse that filbrick did to him. ignore the fact that ford was shouting at stan and then completely shut up as soon as filbrick entered the room and did not say another word for the rest of the night. ignore all that because i just made up this story where he cries at a present from stan. filbrick loved his boys for sure you guys!!!

i'm not even touching on how alex repeatedly villainizes traits commonly associated with mental illness and neurodivergence. ford's hypervigilance becomes arrogance. his passion for knowledge means he's a know-it-all. his difficulty socializing and making friends means he's a misanthrope. his lingering resentment for the way he was raised means he hates his brother and is the worst human being to ever have lived. i could go on, go even further into how the finale reaffirms this, but i feel weird talking about this too much.

[notbecauseofvictories]

my workplace put out a "chili cookoff challenge" and I'm trying desperately to resist the temptation to sign up, because anything other than winning will make me despondent but winning will make me unbearable.