Can I have your headcanon of Thenamesh in the movie pleaseee? 💌🫶 love yaaa😘
Original Thenamesh headcanons! I've got plenty, let's talk.
So...Arthur proposed. He had been in love with Thena for plenty long enough of course, and everyone just kind of thought...oh, that's...cute. Gilgamesh just laughed and laughed. He thought it was adorable, like when little kids say they'll get married when they grow up or something. Arthur did not like being laughed at in this situation.
Sprite did make up the Epic of Gilgamesh, but she added the bit about him being a tyrannical king and huge asshole after he ate some dessert she had been saving. Gil felt really bad that this would go down in history but he agreed to let it go. Thena did not; she threw Sprite into the ocean the next day. They can't drown, keep in mind, but Sprite doesn't like swimming.
None of them are great swimmers. The movie shows that they can, but really they should all sink like stones. Sprite, Druig and Phastos are the worst, but Thena isn't much better, just kind of claws and flails around.
Thena did manage to help Gil with the Deviant that found them all the way out in Australia. It was the first time she had fought in literal centuries but Gil got in somewhat of a tight spot and they pulled it off. So, when Sersi says "even Ikaris couldn't kill it" it really is funny. The old married couple handled it just fine.
Everyone thinks Thena was the one who sewed Gil's frilly cute apron, but Thena doesn't know how to sew. Gil sewed the initial 'kiss the chef' and the face. Thena told him he should add a personal touch to it, and then he added the flowers.
Thena is still a restless sleeper by nature, but if she's dealing with the aftermath of an episode, she's like a cat drugged up for a flight. She'll close her eyes and fall right asleep. Gil just picks her up and moves her when need be. She'll wake up eventually.
Thena loves tending to all the lizards she finds. She's like a princess in a fairy tale, except instead of cute little furry creatures they all have scales and cold blood. She doesn't get along with snakes, though.
Gil is always trying to discourage her but there's at least one or two scaly dudes hanging around the house. In fairness, she has let him take in a pet a few times throughout their hundreds of years together. It's not all the time, though. They die so quickly, and he gets sad about it, so she only says yes once every fifty years or so.
Ignoring certain events in the movie, Jack and Thena and Gil get along great together. Jack and Thena really do vibe. He thinks her powers are cool, and she doesn't dress up her words or keep things from him just because he's a kid. Likewise, Thena can tell pretty easily what Jack is thinking or feeling. The first time he calls her Aunt Thena is the first time she experiences cute aggression and wants to pinch his cheeks. She pinches Gil's instead.
They spend some time travelling after everything rather than rebuild the house right away. They do hit Fiji, and plenty of other places. Thena doesn't do well with cars or boats or anything but Gil gives her a little something for her nerves and lets her sleep. Dane freaks out when he sees her taking an entire bottle of benedryl but Sersi tells him it's fine, it's just for the train ride.
Thena and Dane get along surprisingly well. Dane grows more confident the more he can get used to her, and Sersi and Gil are just happy their partners are getting along. Thena thinks Dane is funny, and Dane actually kind of likes how direct and dry Thena can be.
The more they're out in the real world, the more Gil learns that men these days have the audacity. Thena is getting not just flirted with but harassed constantly, and he is not here for it. He's always been Gilgamesh "my wife" the Strongest Eternal, but it's time for him to truly enter his my wife era.
It takes a lot for him to get drunk, but also alcohol isn't the same as it was hundreds of years ago. Gil learns what shots are and starts challenging people to arm wrestling. Sersi tells him he can't because he'll kill them, or at best rip their arms off.
They travel the planet for quite some time, spending some with their family, maybe even a few years depending on the place. Then they're off again. Eventually they wonder if more of the galaxy is worth seeing too.
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we've both talked about how scully isn't jealous fire. what differences do you see between protective scully vs jealous scully?
yeah to me the main difference is that one is more external and the other internal. she gets very emotional when she’s jealous. in episodes like alpha (literally sitting that woman down and going “i’m watching you.” cracks me tf up. Dana nobody is taking your man.) and war of the coprophages, it’s kind of angry. it’s louder, but still something very vulnerable and true to her (hater-ism). in episodes like the end, it’s heartbreak. that’s one of the very few episodes where i think she was purely jealous, and sad. she usually understands what’s going on and i think she knew as soon as she heard him call diana by her first name that something was going to change. i think it hurt her feelings, that specific display of connection, usually reserved for her.
when she’s jealous she retreats. she watches quietly. she cries alone in her car. she needs a moment to herself.
it’s when she’s protective that you can’t shake her for anything. one of my favorite images in fire is her standing in the doorway while mulder and phoebe meet with the arson specialist. i didn’t even notice she was there the first time i saw it. she wasn’t invited. she’s just keeping watch. later, she’s standing in the hallway. after that, she’s in his hotel room, and doesn’t leave when phoebe comes in. says “are you okay?” the moment they’re alone.
people write off her behavior in this one as being “jealous” because she has a lil crush and there’s another woman there, but i honestly find that dismissive. sometimes people discuss scully through such a wide lens, not taking into account who she is. she’s really surprised throughout the time that phoebe was there. it’s that soft edge that still shocks to cruelty, that she never really loses. it’s what shocks in the pilot when the doctor hits mulder twice. what shocks in the following episode when the government agents punch him on the side of the road. (look at you you’ve radicalized scully). it’s what makes her wary of jerry lamana, even before he stole mulder’s work.
but phoebe is so cruel, and so personal, and has so much history. it’s not jealousy that makes scully linger in doorways. it’s not jealousy that spawns that folie a deux. no one else understands. no one else can be trusted. (which i do kind of think started in fire, i’ve said before). she isn’t jealous that he startles when he hears this woman’s voice.
and i know that’s a lot on phoebe as an example, but it doesn’t stop. she doesn’t stop keeping watch. she doesn’t stop shocking to cruelty. she’ll get loud. she’ll make plans. she’ll surprise herself. and it doesn’t come with jealousy’s mortifying intimacy.
(don’t have much else to say but i found this from an old post of mine and wanted to share: “scully has that kind of protectiveness towards him that you have towards a child that hasn't been touched by the world yet. it's very 'the world is at least half terrible, though i keep this from my children.’ 'good bones' by maggie smith. scully in the beginning is like......there is something here that should have broken by now. and she wants to watch him be able to walk into every room with the most hopeful answer and a hand out to every stranger.”)
she shares him with the world only reluctantly, Etc etc
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Tumblr isn't letting me find again @fictionadventurer's and my own posts on epistolary novels, but I have been thinking about it again, because I fell down a Goodreads review rabbit hall and I have thoughts again.
So many people dislike the style, and honestly, I don't blame them, because it's so often done... not well. It is in some aspects, a deceptively easy one, and in others, deceptively hard. And because I'm trying to write a novel with this format myself, I have been thinking about what makes or breaks an epistolary novel.
I talked yesterday about TGLPPS, because it is an interesting case to analyze. I have thought many times about it, and cannot think of a single non-merely-aesthetic reason for it to be told in an epistolary style. A lot of it depends on -British- people who have survived some terrible war conditions willingly opening up to a stranger about their experiences, and that's made... even more difficult if the medium is letters? typically writers will appeal to tropes like making the reserved character drunk, or have them share an extreme experience in isolation with the stranger to create sudden intimacy. None of this is possible in writing; if anything, one is much more self-conscious about the things one writes than the things one says; verba volant, scripta manent.
It seems to me the story would have flowed much more naturally if Juliet had been stranded on Guernsey for some reason -like the first author herself!- suddenly Dawsey commenting that he got a book from her library makes so much more sense! Yes, certainly, if you met a stranger out there, and they introduce themselves and you realize you have a book that once belonged to them, you would tell them so! And it is in this way that the epistolary format does violence to a story that would otherwise sound much less contrived.
Another problem is the large cast of characters and multiple settings. For all I complain about Dracula, Stoker manages this pretty well (of course he has the model of The Woman in White, but TWiW has fewer povs), at least on the first half, because structurally the storylines of the characters are converging, and that does a lot to guide the reader in the understanding of the character's relationships. TGLPPS's relationship structure is more of a multidirectional flow chart, and that becomes confusing really fast.
Another novel I read reviews for recently is one set in WWI, composed of back and forth letters between two lovers torn apart by war, and one common complaint was... that the climactic scenes, the times they meet, etc all happen... off-camera. It is a fair complaint, but also one I cannot really blame the author for, because that's what usually happens with real life compilations of letters of that kind. Sure, usually the editor/compiler will fill in the blanks sometimes and add an epilogue of sorts explaining what happened afterwards, and that is possible if you are writing it fictionally too, but some may think it spoils the effect of immediacy and whatnot, which, fair too.
But it makes me think of how aware Jean Webster was of these difficulties, and how deftly she managed them in both Daddy Long-Legs and Dear Enemy. Both novels have aged badly in terms of content and message, but they are very interesting stylistically.
DLL is a bildungsroman with a dash of romance; through Judy's letters to daddy long-legs we can see how she grows as a person, gaining independence intellectually and economically, and as a writer, as her grammar and vocabulary change and grow. Between making Judy an orphan who hates the orphanage where she has lived her whole life, and one where she lived past the usual age of being thrown into the world, Webster does away with the need for letters between Judy and her friends and family: all her friends and family are her college roommates and her benefactor, who is the person she writes to. The benefactor scheme also makes it so that she doesn't have to write dll's replies, which in turns makes it much more natural and acceptable for the reader when Judy writes him the ending's love letter describing the feelings and impressions of their finally meeting in person and in truth; Judy has become a writer, and she is so used to write to him as another person all the time, that it just makes sense for her to write to him one more letter at the point where her benefactor and her lover become one and the same person. She has written a novel where the core is the correspondence between lovers AND managed to include as well all the moments of their meetings that we would otherwise miss.
Dear Enemy is a similar, but longer and more ambitious story. Instead of one relationship-connection (Judy and Daddy's), we have Sallie as a nod of connections: she's Judy's friend, Jarvis' "employee", the boss of several characters, has a tense colleague-boss relationship with the visiting doctor, a boyfriend of sorts in Washington, and a family we have met before. It is, in that way, a similar setup to TGLPPS: a urban girl of means becomes a fish out of water in a different setting till she ends up assimilating to it, and settling definitely through marriage. But Webster does a few things differently to make it click.
For starters, it is clear to her that this is the story of Sallie's maturation -I have sometimes talked of Dear Enemy as a novel where a Mary Crawford-like character undergoes a transformation arc. The happenings and stories she meets and tells Judy about along the way serve this arc, besides standing on their own as case studies to illustrate the problems, ideology and solutions proposed to the secondary themes of the story (education and social reform). I feel like TGLPPS is much more interested in Guernsey's survival through the war, in which case Juliet's story is already a frame, which, again, makes the epistolary format cumbersome rather than complementary.
Dear Enemy adds more correspondents, but it is very austere/economical with them, and narrows the letters we see to only those Sallie sends. YMMV regarding if it was too much cutting or not, but the undeniable effect is structural soundness; you are never confused by what is happening or who is writing to whom. We can guess the Honorable Cyrus Wykoff probably wrote some indignant letters to Jervis, and those would be funny to read, but... would they be worth the break in the flow of the narrative? I don't think so. To this effect, just having Sallie write a line to the effect of "I expect at this point you have at hand an irate letter from the Hon. Cyrus" is enough to paint a picture for the reader. Perhaps a letter or two from Dr. MacRae would have helped develop his character more -definitely a first read of the story obscures how much misdirection there is in Sallie's narration to Judy, which in turns tends to create an impression of suddenness to the closing letter that doesn't come across well to the reader.
The choice of Sallie mainly writing to Judy is, IMO, a really good one too. It not only establishes a connection with DLL, but it also allows for the intimacy that makes disclosure believable (something TGLPPS struggles with, as I mentioned above). When you add a few letters to the doctor and Gordon and Jervis, you also get a better perspective of Sallie's personality, how she deals not only with a friend, but with acquaintances, romantic partners and coworkers.
From all this it is pretty evident that for Webster the main function of epistolarity as format is aiding in showing psychological and moral development. But that's not the only thing the format can be really good for: perspective is another, and Austen uses it to great effect in both Lady Susan and Lesley Castle.
Both stories deal with mainly static characters, but who have very strong perspectives of the same situation, and it is this singularity of setting and story that anchors the narrative to avoid confusion, while the variety of perspective brings interest. In Lady Susan, we are dealing mainly with the marrying off of Frederica and seduction of Mrs. Vernon's brother, Reginald. There where Lady Susan paints Frederica as an undisciplined, irrational and ungrateful daughter, her sister in law, Mrs. Vernon, paints her as a sweet girl and a victim of her mother's ruthlessness and lack of love. Both agree that Reginald is being seduced, but, of course, with opposite goals: Lady Susan wants him to succumb, Mrs. Vernon, to escape, and this is a delicious struggle for the reader to follow!*
Lesley Castle being an earlier effort, and unfinished, does show some of the defects I have mentioned before (mainly, the relative confusion of having several correspondents in separate storylines), but illustrates well this same perspective effect: Margaret writes to Charlotte about the new Lady Lesley, and the new Lady Lesley writes to Charlotte about about Margaret and her sister... and in these contrasts lies the main interest of the narrative.
Some conclusions to these musings, then:
Not every story is suited to the epistolary format.
The epistolary format seems to work the best when it is used for either A) showcase psychological and moral development B) to play with perspective on people and/or events.
One of the main difficulties of the format is finding a narrative element to anchor and structure the letters around.
It must have a core couple of correspondents, or at most, two. More than that will make it confusing (unless, perhaps, the story is very short and about a single event or two).
A delicate balance must be found so that the secondary correspondence doesn't cut the flow of the main one, and if possible it must feed into it.
*It is interesting how Love and Friendship, being such a delightful -and I sustain one of the best ever- Austen adaptation, is by force of the perspective switch towards a more impersonal third person, more about a love story between Frederica and Reginald than a struggle between Lady Susan and Mrs. Vernon. Which isn't dissimilar to how adaptations of DLL end up being more about the romance between the leads than Judy's coming of age in college; tropes aside, I feel like if the epistolary format is well embedded in the story, it's going to be nearly impossible to reproduce the effect in adaptation.
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