#god i'm ancient

[cloysterbell]

Just rewatched The Runaway Bride and I can confirm that Love Don’t Roam still absolutely fucks but in other news look at this fuckin gif I found deep in my collection

[kensatou]

you think YOU had a bad day at work?

bonus: sid shrieking "no!!!! NO!!!!!" loud enough to be heard in the stands and on camera

[o3o-lapd-o3o]

people be wondering why there's no appearance from hades in any of the sagas, especially the underworld saga (even if he wasn't in the odyssey itself) i have a theory!

spoilers for vengeance saga and future ithaca saga!

do you not understand how busy that poor guy/god is during odysseus' terrible, horrible, no good, bad journey home™

first he has 7 freshly made pancakes men (14 if you count the club smash noises in survive, but we'll go with 7 for this) sent by chef polyphemus, appearing one after the other.

not long after that, you have 550 very soaked (drowned) men pop through in the blink of an eye, no thanks to his younger brother, mr ruthlessness himself, poseidon.

then while he's still counting/organising the paperwork for them, a young man appears, who happens to be very drunk (talking about pig men?)

not long after that, somehow a warship filled with mortal men breaks into the underworld, ALL ALIVE, and the (king? leader? captain? he's not too sure at this point) starts singing outside his front door about becoming a monster????? but before he can sic cerberus on them, they leave on their own

finally he thinks he has a break when 6 men holding torches (are some missing limbs?!?) have now joined the party down under (granted they're all in no mood to party, they weren't expecting to become snacks for a sea monster)

and just as quick as they'd arrived, in a flash (just like the snap of lightning that took them out) 36 crispy/fried men (gods damn it zeus) appear, weapons drawn like they were about to attack someone (how does that one guy at the front swing such a big sword?)

at this point hades is wondering what the fuck is happening upstairs, because ain't no way these 600 men are all from the same fleet/island under one guy's command (turns out the captain's name is odysseus)

he thinks his prayers are answered because he has had peace for 7 years, just the normal flow of souls into the underworld- (wait whats that chanting)

suddenly those previous 600 souls are flying their way outta the underworld (he didn't know they could do that) while singing "six hundred men! (six hundred)" on repeat

they return though (thank the gods, he didn't need to go soul hunting) and once again he thinks everything will be calm

(he also found out from zeus, that their brother got his godly-ass handed to him by that MORTAL odysseus! WHO USED HIS OWN WEAPON AGAINST HIM (something to help make him laugh over spring & summer and while he waits for his beautiful persephone to return home))

he finally thinks his time with odysseus and the souls that come from him/being around him is over. when in minutes of each other, the souls of 108 men appear, all killed in gruesome ways. then they tell him that they were killed by beggar who then revealed himself as king odysseus, from trying to marry his wife and take over his kingdom (ok very understandable murder then)

at this point hades doesn't know whether he's excited for, or dreading the day he actually meets odysseus in the distant future (yes distant, i don't care about/ don't accept the telegony. let the poor man enjoy the rest of his life with his son and wife!!!)

but yeah, understandable why you don't hear from him throughout the sagas

[my-name-is-apollo]

I saw a Troilus post and that made me have Feels™ all over again. Something that particularly upsets me is the image of Troilus being dragged by his hair to Apollo's altar:

Like even putting aside the fact that Troilus, apart from being Apollo's son, is also a suppliant to Apollo here and to harm anyone in a god's temple is already an unforgivable violation of the sacredness of the place-

Troilus was a little boy or a youth at the most. His hair was most definitely sacred to him. It would have been cut and dedicated to Apollo, the protector of boys, if he had reached his adulthood. But he got dragged by his hair to his death, as if he was an animal being sacrificed to the god. Achilles didn't simply kill Troilus, he deliberately violated everything Troilus would have held sacred to him - his hair, his body, his god's temple...

Achilles had previously killed Tenes as well, another son of Apollo, despite Thetis very clearly warning him not to do so. So all of this was him knowingly spitting in Apollo's face, if you think about it.

[hephaestn]

Alexander and Hephaestion in Film/TV throughout the years.

Alexander the Great (Robert Rossen, 1956)

Adventure Story (Rudolph Cartier, 1961)

Alexander (Oliver Stone, 2004)

Young Alexander the Great (Jalal Merhi, 2010)

Alexander, the Great (Terra X, 2014)

Ancient Empires (History Channel, 2023)

Alexander: The Making of a God (Netflix, 2024)

[ekat-fandom-blog]

Jack decides he needs a bit of time away from family to mourn the loss of his one sided friendship with Vlad and Vlad's death. So he takes a trip to Gotham. On this trip, he runs into Damian and Tim, who are convinced he's Captain Marvel in disguise.

Meanwhile, Jason's also run into Jack as he's coming into his ghost powers. Jason starts freaking out because someone just saw him when his new powers started glitching. Panicking only worsens the situation as now he can't figure out how to get his foot un-caught in the cement.

Jack, despite not knowing if this kid is a halfa or not, decides to give him advice based on how Danny told him his powers work. It works.

Now, Jason has a sort-of mentor that he didn't ask for but definitely needs, and Jack has something to do while he sorts out his feelings on the whole Vlad-was-never-his-friend thing.

Eventually, Damian and Tim catch them while Jack is trying to explain how Jason might have a second form. While Jack explains, Jason just transforms. His ghost form isn't what either expected. Jack was expecting something similar to Danny's or Vlad's. Not a winged little kid with a mask.

To be honest, this just solidifies that this guy is Captain Marvel for Damian and Tim. Obviously he decided to teach Jason magic.

[jcollinswrites]

New update 27/09/24

The Captain of the Guard is playable!!! WOOOH! It was a big work, and currently only a very linear path is playable with the captain through Chapter 1, but I will add the rest of the choices later.

GOOD NEWS: It's the path that will definitely redeem poor Captain {instert-clever-insult} in the eyes of those who read the thief origin ❤️ So please give the captain a chance to do some good deeds to our resident little thief ✨✨✨

What the update includes:

Captain of the Theban Guard origin is playable! Lots of choices are still greyed out, but you can read through chapter 1 as the captain now.

16k words added to the demo, so that makes the total word count 185k.

I made a map! Well... I translated a map from my native language that I made ages ago for a similar book. It took me forever last week to find the English names for certain cities, and I'm not sure if some of them are correct or not but fuck it, it's good as it is. You can find the map in the Codex page in the Stats!

Did lots of bug and code fixes

Fixed some grammar and spelling errors

Next week, I'll add the missing choices in the captain route. Not sure if I'll have time to add all of them by the Friday update, but I'll try :)))

LINK TO DEMO

Hope you'll enjoy it! I'm especially interested to hear the opinion of those who've read the thief origin before 👀

❤️

[pinkd3mon]

Dedede at the end of revenge of the king

Day 4 of drawing random kirby shitpost for every day of October

[the-sunlit-earth]

[notbecauseofvictories]

This is going to sound negative, but I think Snuff deserves to be the last Discworld book. I mean, Raising Steam is good in certain ways, a fond elegy to the characters and plots a reader has come to know so well. I don't even object to the visceral pleasure of the earlier novels giving way to something diffuse, harder to pin down. (Unseen Academicals felt like this---a wonderful novel, but not actually a victory; just a plot that rearranged matters in an interesting way.) But there's a sort of...ill magic setting in, by the time you get to the scene where Vetinari gives medals to our wonderful shining heroes of the railway.

Namely, they're too good at this.

Vimes uses the Summoning Dark multiple times, and without even the terrified self-doubt he was showing in Snuff. (I have other issues with Snuff, but that was an interesting thread to pull.) Vetinari not-too-discretely points the Black Clerks at a problem, and it is solved; when necessary, he goes undercover working on something he personally considers vaguely distasteful, and yet becomes the center of a folk song. Moist neither sleeps, nor eats nor makes love to his wife (except sometimes, too rarely in his opinion) but rushes all over doing the railways' job for---what? for why?

They're too good, they've climbed too high; Vimes and Vetinari are edging into myth while still being alive, and Moist was already half of a song anyway, has been since he put on the golden suit.

I'm not saying it's not an interesting setup, because strangely it is. But it feels like the start of something, not closure at all, because what else is Discworld good for if not to tackle the fact that everything glowy and laden with awe will not remain such. Because, you know, that's how the world works.

[crabussy]

most of my life giving magus art I've done!! somebody help me they're in my mind shedding feathers everywhere and lamenting about their shitty dad. KISS THAT OLD MAN SILLY!!!!!!! KISS HIM TO PIECES

I spent So Long on the IDs I hope they're coherent!!! reblog to subject your loyal followers to old man wizard yuri I guess

[evilios]

νοερός (noeros) - a poetic epithet of Apollo with the meaning "related to intelligence; intellectual".

[prolibytherium]

There's a LOT of things people do wrong when constructing fantasy beliefs in pantheons of gods, but one of the more specific is having only one god related to fertility and it kind of being just a horny sex thing.

Like you'll have one in the entire bunch whose sphere is listed as fertility and it's basically like Yeah this is the sex one. She's always depicted naked (but not TOO naked because censorship and/or the writer's own skittishness). She's going to have the exact body type epitomized in contemporary western beauty standards and there's usually no chance in hell that she's gonna be fat (unless MAYBE they're referencing 'venus' figurines). Her thing is fertility, which means having sex and making babies. Might be a goddess of beauty or love or marriage too, because these are kinda sex things, but that's probably it. And yeah that sort of thing is virtually nonexistent in real life.

Like the concept of fertility is so fundamentally important to the function of most societies in human history in ways that it is just Not in industrialized imperial core countries. Most people are getting food from stores, and not having to worry about harvesting crops or breeding livestock or foraging for food or having enough animals to hunt, so fertility only really comes up as a concern if you're trying to have kids (and there is certainly societal pressure to have children, but your wellbeing and survival is rarely going to Depend on it). And I think writing only from that perspective and not even trying to learn about WHY fertility is so conceptually important is why you see this trend.

There's no absolute universal statement about how people believe in gods but it's broadly accurate that systems with many deities will Usually have more than one deity associated with fertility, and these associations will certainly include human reproduction but also the fertility of livestock/hunted animals, plants, the land itself.

Some fertility deities may also be heavily associated with seasonal changes or environmental factors that agriculture or foraging is dependent on (spring/summer/fall, seasonal rains, seasonal flooding, rain itself, sunlight, good soil, rivers, wetlands, etc). Some certainly might be related to love, marriage, sex, and beauty, but that's VERY RARELY going to be the sole way the concept of fertility is embodied. And they'll often will have other associations not directly about fertility, or related to fertility in culturally specific ways.

[losver07]

hi sorry to interrupt but i just wanted to share the mental image i got of sirius clutching his knuckles, crying and yelling “Noble and Most Ancient House of FUCK ”

[generouskittentidalwave]

Odysseus: *Gets Palamedes framed and stoned to death after he threatened his son*

My reaction: "Damn, I wonder who he got that from-"

Athena: *Drives greater Ajax mad to the point that he kills a bunch of sheep before then killing himself all because he was hostile towards Odysseus.*

My reaction: "Oh, that's who"

[serpentface]

Do psychotropic drugs and/or ritual play a role in any of the blightseed cultures? A pretty broad question, lol

Yeah that’s a very broad question, the answer is about as much as it tends to play roles in real history. Alcohol is pretty ubiquitous (outside of cultures that abstain from intoxicants) and used for a variety of purposes, opioids are commonly used in some parts for pain relief or recreational purposes, stimulants (usually in mild, natural forms) are used to provide extra energy, and hallucinogens are most commonly used as part of a larger religious framework (rather than for recreational purposes). Any more elaborate answer kinda has to be case by case in a certain culture or part of the setting.

I'll just take this as an opportunity to talk about the one established sect that pretty much REVOLVES around psychoactive use. This is the Scholarly Order of the Root, which is a sort of mystery religion + elite community of scholars who currently occupy the Ur-Tree and its forest in the far southern Lowlands (southeast of Imperial Wardin, on the same land mass).

The Ur-Tree is the obligatory Huge Fucking Fantasy Tree (and its surrounding forest). It’s a mass of vegetation about a mile tall and almost as old as Plant Life Itself, its upper branches are primeval plants, which become more modern the nearer they get to the ground (and each 'level' holds tiny ecosystems, some containing descendants of LONG-extinct arthropods/other small animals). Its lowest branches and the surrounding forest are contemporary plant life, and all is connected and protected by an incomparably MASSIVE fungal mycelium network (which is itself a living god).

A lot of the Scholars' more secretive practices revolve around experimentation with substance use with the goal of expanding the Mind and transcending the body to fully connect to the Dreamlands, and they have a supply chain of traders and mercenaries called Rootrunners who traffic substances into the Lowlands. Most of their psychoactive use is in a very intentional capacity and not just like, for fun, but a LOT of them are just straight up addicted to cocaine (in the form of alchemically refined bruljenum, which is used for practical purposes of its stimulant effect during long hours of work).

All known psychoactives are desirable for experimentation (particularly hallucinogens), with each having properties that either allow expansion of the Mind, transcendence of the body, or outright divine communion. Their effects are logged in great detail and interpreted to form the basis of the Scholars' understanding of the natural world and reality itself.

The most important substance is Ur-Root, which is root matter from subterranean levels of the Ur-Tree that have both their own intrinsic psychoactive substances and a very, very high concentration of living god mycelium. The tree root contains DMT and the mycelium has its own wholly unique effects (being an actual living god). They alchemically refine it into a purer, more potent form, and use it to expand beyond the body and directly commune with the Giants, a group of entities they have identified as the only true gods.

An Ur-Root trip starts off with minor visual distortion, which turns into shifting fractals that slowly obscure the vision. Eventually the senses are entirely taken over by a 'tunnel' of rapidly shifting fractals and geometries. In a complete trip, the experiencer gets a sense that they have been pushed through a membrane and entered another realm, finding themselves in a distinct experiential Space.

At this point they may encounter entities which communicate to them in a language impossible to describe but wholly understood. These beings are understood to be the Giants, or at least aspects of the Giants that mortals are capable of comprehending (they often take familiar tutelary forms of the Mantis or the Snake, or appear resembling the same type of sophont that the experiencer is, all composed of ever-shifting geometries). The experiencer often feels a sense of unconditional and endless love from these beings, though the Giants may be more hostile and may appear in the form of the Trickster (usually a cultural figure regarded as malicious, be it an animal or otherwise) in a bad trip.

(^Up until this point, this has mostly just been a DMT 'breakthrough' experience ft. 'machine elves' and the like).

They are then removed from this space and returned to something that feels like the real world, but is nearly unrecognizable. They have a sense of rapidly moving through time, and will usually see 'the spires' towards the beginning, which just so happen to look like this:

(source + some context via Implication- the spires are exactly what this art is depicting)

The experiencer continues to move across an unfathomable amount of time, occasionally 'seeing' other such flashes of unfamiliar landscapes and creatures, and yet also being devoid of all their senses, the 'seeing' is pure, unfiltered experience. There is a sense of interconnectedness with all life, and that one has become the forest (or even Life) itself. The sense of time is wildly distorted, the trip lasts only about 5 minutes but feels like an eternity and is understood as literal hundreds of millions of years.

The experiencer has usually lost any remaining sense of Self and individual consciousness during this phase (in which case this time distortion is usually a neutral or even peaceful experience), but some retain a fraction of their identity, and find themselves trapped and conscious while experiencing what feels like eternity (which can be LIFE-CHANGINGLY distressing, even after the fact).

(^This latter part of the trip is the effects of the Ur-Tree fungus).

The trip ends with a sense of rushing through the ground and back up into one's body, at which point they will abruptly return to their senses and consciousness. The details are then immediately retrieved via interview and recorded in immense detail. The whole experience is understood as having been full comprehension of the Dreamlands, communion with the Giants, and then a tour through the act of creation.

This is done as part of the initiatory practice into the inner mystery-religion of the scholars, and as needed for study by high scholar-priests. It is not taken lightly, both as it is absolute communion with the gods and reality, and in that it can be a very, very difficult experience. People who have gone through this often walk away with a permanently shifted perspective, often in a positive and/or comforting way- a sense of interconnectedness with all life, a peace with the concept of death, seeing less of a point in individual ego and the concept of Self, and comfort in the sense of divine love they (may have) experienced. This heavily influences the philosophy of the Scholars and has had effects by proxy in the religious worldviews of the region.

Details of this experience are closely guarded, and initiates are given absolutely no prior knowledge and expectations for their trip. This is seen as a necessity- their naivety will allow for a true, unfiltered experience, and can be used to gauge whether they should or should not be accepted. Those that have a distinctly bad trip upon initiation may be assumed to have been 'rejected' by the giants and thus denied full priesthood, though this largely depends on How they interpret their distressing trip- those who identify this as a test and harsh lesson in a journey to enlightenment may be accepted (as this is how fully initiated scholar-priests interpret and handle their bad trips).

This inner priesthood is only a small fraction of the Scholarly Order, and its greater function is as a hub of education and repository of knowledge, and Scholar-trained doctors can provide some of the best medical care available in the setting ('best medical care in this setting' only means so much but it's pretty solid, relatively speaking). Only a chosen few Scholars ever get to commune with the Ur-Root, and most of the divine secrets revealed in the process are kept hidden (though they indirectly influence the politics and worldview of the entire order).