#because there is no glory in war

[anarchypumpkincowboy]

I was gonna live blog as I watched but I very quickly started crying and ignored my phone the whole way through. It’s gonna be a rewatch tho so I’ll blog on the next run through

Quick end of episode rapid fire thoughts

Capitalism and ai will doom us until we forcibly end the hold greed has over humanity. Organized religion is absolutely a part of the problem BUT IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE Y’ALL JUST GOTTA STOP OPRESSING AND KILLING OTHERS IN THE NAME OF YOUR FUCKING GODS! Humanity has done and still has the potential to do amazing things but we gotta hold compassion higher than greed and control.

[jules-ln]

Achilles, my poor little meow meow, the wettest, angriest, most pathetic man I've ever seen

He did everything wrong, and he deserved the punishment. But hes still my fave I don't care if they cancel him <3

[emilianadarling]

I can't get enough of this sketch of Luke by @lovey-dovey-and-sad. (He just captivates me completely!!)

Check out the gorgeous colour final version as well as close-ups on lovey's blog. 💗The fic the art was drawn for as part of a collab can be found here.

[rowanisawriter]

looking at athena’s wikipedia page for fic research and finding this trojan war era art of athena wearing a boar helmet…. i wasn’t specifically looking for even more odysseus and diomedes boar parallels but when god speaks i must Listen

[just-an-enby-lemon]

I'm unable to explain my thoughts well-enough but I do think one of the reasons Odysseus is my favorite hero from the whole Ancient Greece is because I'm brazilian. Hear me out: Odysseus wins by being the cleverest, not always the most inteligent (that would likely be Palimedes, who Odysseus murders at cold blood) and definitivaly not the strongest.

He doesn't take the bow to war but that is his favorite weapon, the weapon that is stated as a coward's one, the one Paris is mocked for using. And that adds to: he refused honor, he tried to dodge his word and avoid the war. He wants the recognizement and glory (as Diomedes absolutly knows) and after they go he does everything to win (looks to all the war crimes including Iphigenia and Pilocteles) but he never wanted to be there at all.

His second act of cleverness is his failure at pretending to be mad (bonus points for the fact Penelope helped, they are two peas in a pot or however the expression goes) and his dishonorable act is what made me fall in love with him. Because dying for glory, for my country, was never really in my culture, if Brazil decided to invade Paraguay again right now even the people who deny the first war crimes would just go "heck no". When President Lula criticized Venezuela even the people that agreed with him were all like "sure but please don't go to war over it we really don't wanna". The army does dictatorships and paint roads and I fully preffer the roads.

On the other hand being clever and resorcefull those are our heros. Loyal not to a country but to their people, and very much not the most moral people. É o jeitinho brasileiro. And while it does help to maintain a culture of corruption (tho absolutly not as much as people make it seem, the corruption is waaay more because of the power imbalance, income inequality, imperialism, the belief the 1% always have that they are better and the dehumanization of the working class). Is the belief that while yes it is absolutly wrong to let's say throw an infant from a wall because otherwise he'll grow up to destroy your family, better Hector's son dies than yours.

Is selfish but it's also in a lot of ways the recognizement that glory is meaningless. Surviving and helping other people survive, achiving happiness is way more important. Our kids are not pretending to be older to go to war and if they try they better prepare to deal with their mother's rage. We are suppose to never get into a fight. But if we do anyway we better win and come back or else.

[moltengoldveins]

broke: Technoblade is the deity of blood/war/anarchy/violence and his power comes from shedding blood/waging war

Woke: Technoblade is the deity of covenants/blood bonds/family/vows and his power comes from people’s (and dog’s) fealty and devotion

Bespoke: Technoblade is the god of the harvest and the anarchy blood thing is like… just the Way He Is. His power comes from like, veggie sacrifices. He makes peoples potato farms flourish.

[kazhanko-art]

“Why aren’t Ukrainians surrendering” Russians are castrating Ukrainian soldiers so that they can’t have Ukrainian children. You know, in case the hundreds of other crimes weren’t enough

[vorbarrsultana]

i finished rereading the first four vorkosigan books (+ "the flowers of vashnoi" because ekaterin!!!), and you really have to feel for piotr vorkosigan because what a nightmare life, truly.

imagine you are born just in time for your world to be unified by dorca vorbarra and rediscovered by people from wider galaxy. things are finally looking good, for the first time in 600 years of isolation there is no more feudal infighting, and the promise of galactic medicine and technologies being available lightens everyone's perspectives. sure, your grandpa is called count pierre "le sanguinaire", but who doesn't have terrible relatives?

then you are 15, and suddenly your planet is attacked by the aggressive eugenecist space empire hell-bent on subjugating your people and turning them into disposable material for unethical genetic experiments. you flee into the mountains, away from your family, and create guerrilla forces from locals sworn to your dad, and it's really terrible for a very long time. you have no high-tech weapons and no food, you sleep in a cave in the dead of winter, and the cetagandans try everything (from carpet bombing to chemical weapons) to murder you.

but hey, at least you now have your bff ezar vorbarra, and (from the bff's words on his deathbed) it sounds like you two had so much fun between unimaginable horrors and despair, and it's not surprising, since no one really believes in death after life at 20. then the emperor makes you a general at the tender age of 22. fortunately for him, you & bff make a frighteningly competent dream-team, and the joke's on cetagandans.

then, several years later, you ask the emperor for weapons, because you still sleep on the bare cave floor, there are little resources, and every ghem on the planet is trying to murder you. he offers you the hand of his granddaughter instead, like it's some sort of twisted fairytale, but you grow to love your olivia more than anything, and the tide of war is finally turning, and you allow yourself to entertain the idea of peaceful life, and then...

the space eugenecist empire nukes your hometown, killing your mom, dad, surviving brothers, and two hundred thousand of your people. plus your bff (ezar) gets a radiation doze large enough for it to cause severe cancer thirty years later. great.

but you win! your district is in shambles, your capital is an irradiated crater, your castle is in ruins, but you win! the old dorca dies, and yuri ascends the throne, but politicking is secondary to the fact that you are alive.

yes, you are probably not entirely sane, and you've long forgotten what the peaceful times look like, but you are alive, just under 35, and your entire life is ahead of you. olivia is alive too, and ezar, and you now have three wonderful children, and the extended vorpatril-vorbarra family that hosts regular get-togethers. sure, your mom-in-law is a betan with all sorts of crazy ideas in her head, but she is not pierre vorrutyer. small mercies.

but then the new emperor goes mad, and decides to murder your entire family overnight. your brothers-in-law are gone, one of your sisters-in-law too, and all your nephews and nieces except little padma. but all of this pales in comparison to the facts that olivia is murdered, and that your heir and daughter lay dead beside her.

all you have left of her, of your house, of the family you've lost in vashnoi not a ten years ago, is aral, whom you keep by your side throughout the bloody civil war to put your bff on the throne.

but you win again. you are 43, and ezar vorbarra is now the emperor. you are responsible for the imperium's entire ground forces. you are also responsible for a severely traumatized boy of 13, and the only children you've interacted with without olivia's genle guidance were little messengers of guerilla companies.

what a mess.

[oplishin]

rin and nezha are terrible for each other because they’re both bottoms

[blluespirit]

I sort of like the thought that Zuko and Aang take the Sun Warriors' warning not to tell anyone about the dragons a little more seriously… and they keep it between them. Of course, they trust Sokka, Toph and Katara. Of course they know they wouldn’t tell anyone, but now three people (including Iroh) know the truth about Ran and Shaw. And that’s three too many when you’re trying to keep a secret.

(and there are other people at the temple as well - like Haru, Teo and The Duke - who, while trustworthy, aren’t as close to them as the others, and when it comes to secrets with as much consequence as this one, you can’t afford to take any chances.)

Furthermore, the culture within the Fire Nation since Sozin’s rein has been warped. The culture is not to respect the dragons as the original firebenders, it’s to conquer and kill them. It’s the ultimate proof of your strength as a firebender. All it takes is one mistake before rumour spreads, and people go looking for the ultimate hunt. It’s not something Zuko or Aang can risk.

Whether Katara, Toph and Sokka (and Suki) ever find out the truth is up to you. But post-war, after Zuko returns from a strange, poorly explained trip with a dragon, and eventually develops the ability to use rainbow fire, either the others have some questions about Aang’s knowing look, or they are finally let in on a monumental secret.

[coline7373]

Morning glory...

[uncanny-tranny]

There's this pull in recovery to feel behind in comparison to your peer group, and that's, of course, a valid feeling. It's understandable, but I think a lot of what we don't remember is that... they often aren't starting out in the same place you are.

I think part of the reason so many feel terrible about "being behind" is that it feels like we have to blame ourselves for being behind. If you just weren't affected by it, you'd be right where your peers are, right? It's a way to blame yourself in severe cases.

Recovery isn't about "catching up," I think. It's about pressing the play button and letting yourself live. You might never "catch up," you might never be at the "same level," but that fundamentally doesn't change that your life is worth living how you want it to.

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

Authors making literary choices about their characters that add an edge that could be hard for the audience to sit with is, in fact, a good thing

[foccaccia]

rereading animorphs and once in a while marco will say “people dont understand the word ruthless. they think it means ‘mean.’ its not about being mean. its about seeing the bright, clear line that leads from a to b. the line that goes from motive to means. beginning to end. its about seeing that bright, clear line and not caring about anything but the beautiful fact that you can see the solution. not caring about anything else but the perfection of it.” and then repeat it, over and over, "i can see the bright clear line and i know she can too" as he tries over and over again, as he tries to lead a group of his friends to kill his own mother, who is host and slave to the leader of a race of parasitic slugs who have so much genocide and incomprehensible crimes on their hands its impossible to describe in a succinct post

and then they go to school the next day and giggle about cinnabon, play video games, and steal back a doodle saying "cassie ♡ jake" from another students house. bc theyre all like. 13 years old. and the second they stop having to carry the weight of a species and a war on their shoulders, theyre really fucking written like 13 year olds k.a. applegate did such a good job with this series

[chaiaurchaandni]

today, i watch a child on motaz azaiza's instagram stories collecting a human being's fleshy and bloody remains from the road after an israeli bombing and putting them in a plastic bag. the worst part is the kid wasnt even crying or upset, he just looked numb, as if he had done this before. then i log onto tumblr to see people still trying to suggest that it's antisemitic to oppose this, condemn it, or even talk about it. i dont know what to do

[moondyad]

idk what i was expecting when going into The Acolyte. i didn't really look into promotional material, just waited to watch the show blind, like i do with most media. Mae and Osha were very compelling characters to me. i loved watching a "twins are not the same person" story where as they grow up, even people with the same DNA can choose different paths. which kind of became ironic with the reveal at the end of the season haha. i'm actually so intrigued by Mae and Osha being the exact same person. i desperately want to know how that happened and why Mother Aniseya created/summoned them. that part of the story makes sense and is great to follow along with for me.

my one gripe remains the same. i still can't quite take Qimir seriously. it stems from my understanding of Star Wars. Sith are never portrayed as morally grey in Star Wars. that's a specific request from George Lucas. the Sith were always evil and selfish while the Jedi were always good and selfless. Lucas always despised "grey Jedi" in the legends canon and didn't consider them true to the major canon. interjecting before someone gets mad, i love morally grey characters! i love people taking Lucas's characters and amplifying their grey qualities! however, as i understood it, no Star Wars media would ever show Sith or Jedi as morally grey (unless they were in the process of changing sides or something) due to it conflicting with the core values of those groups and Lucas's vision for them. so, when the goofball side character was revealed to be the big bad Sith i was ??? because it was to my understanding that Sith don't act like comic relief characters or show mercy. apparently this reveal only blindsided me, because i saw a lot of people who claimed to have picked up on it after his first or second scene. blinded by my understanding of the lore, I wrote Qimir off and was waiting for someone darker, more sinister to show their hand. i don't mind this series being the first to show morally grey Jedi and Sith. i love that Sol was so blinded by his righteousness that he could only see a path forward in which he removed one or both girls from their family and way of life. that's crazy! Sol was either on a path to becoming a Sith or staying light enough that he might have lead a splinter group from the Jedi Order, and either option would have been fascinating to watch. i feel like we haven't learned enough about Qimir yet to have his reveal felt earned. Sol's devastating past actions were earned! we got to know him how he is now and the absolute love he holds for Osha despite it being his biggest weakness. all we know is Qimir now. so i guess that's why the goof to Sith feels so sudden and the morally grey actions don't feel earned. i think Osha joining him was super fast-paced and didn't really feel earned either. i feel like he didn't challenge her beliefs enough. Mae did a better job at that than Qimir did. why didn't she just run off with Mae and not choose either side? she got a sick scene where she bled a kyber crystal and the blade turned red, but that alone doesn't make you a Sith. especially since this seems to be the morally grey Sith/Jedi series. what i need from the second season, if there is one, is way more of a focus on Qimir. i need his morality to have felt earned, just like how Osha's and Sol's were.

also insane how Vernestra just swept everything under the rug. another morally grey Jedi to add to the collection.