#irene sarantapechaina

[grayjoy15]

Day 4: Queen - Irene Sarantapechaina

[venicepearl]

Irene of Athens (750/756 – 9 August 803), surname Sarantapechaina (Σαρανταπήχαινα), was Byzantine empress consort to Emperor Leo IV from 775 to 780, regent during the childhood of their son Constantine VI from 780 until 790, co-ruler from 792 until 797, and finally empress regnant and sole ruler of the Eastern Roman Empire from 797 to 802. A member of the politically prominent Sarantapechos family, she was selected as Leo IV's bride for unknown reasons in 768. Even though her husband was an iconoclast, she harbored iconophile sympathies. During her rule as regent, she called the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, which condemned iconoclasm as heretical and brought an end to the first iconoclast period (730–787). Her public figure was very polarizing during her 5 year reign, as most saw a woman not right to rule solely. Her reign as such made her the first ever empress regnant, ruling in her own right, in Roman and Byzantine imperial history.

She was influential in government policies during her husband's reign. His untimely death caused the throne to actually fall to her, leaving her solely in charge. As Irene's son Constantine reached maturity, he began to move out from under the influence of his mother. In the early 790s, several revolts tried to proclaim him as sole ruler. One of these revolts succeeded, but in 792 Irene was re-established in all imperial powers as co-emperor with Constantine. In 797, Irene organized a conspiracy in which her supporters gouged out her son's eyes, maiming him severely. He was imprisoned and probably died shortly afterwards. With him out of the way, Irene proclaimed herself sole ruler. Pope Leo III—already seeking to break links with the Byzantine East—used Irene's alleged unprecedented status as a female ruler of the Roman Empire to proclaim Charlemagne as Emperor of the Romans on Christmas Day of 800 under the pretext that a woman could not rule and so the throne of the Roman Empire was actually vacant. A revolt in 802 overthrew Irene and exiled her to the island of Lesbos, supplanting her on the throne with Nikephoros I. Irene died in exile less than a year later.

[dailyhistoryposts]

On This Day In History

April 19th, 797: Empress Irene Sarantapechaina of Athens organizes a conspiracy against her son to maintain power. Her supporters depose him and gouge out his eyes, and he will die of his wounds. Irene proclaims herself basileus (monarch or emperor).

[300iqprower]

I’ve mentioned before I have a Record of Ragnarok fanfic, and i already bit the bullet and put out that preface for the Grail War fic, so....here’s the list! Subject to change, as will become evident with how many freaking fights I’ve come up with, more specifically the contestants in no particular order.

Overseers: 

Brynhildr 

Prometheus

Odin

Bellona

Hestia

Mímir

Humanity:

Uesugi Kenshin

Kriemhild

Zhong Kui

Medusa

Rasputin

Hammurabi

Vlad Țepeș

Tantalus

Mordred Pendragon

William Shakespeare

Julius Caesar

Jing Wei

The Minotaur

Caligula

Saitō Musashibō Benkei

Cao Cao

Baron Samedi

Captain “Nemo” Dakkar

Winston Churchill

Darius III

Fionn mac Cumhaill

Audie Murphy

Benjamin Franklin

Cú Chulainn

Alexander the Great

Paul Bunyan

Irene Sarantapechaina of Athens

Cain

Ibn al-Haytham

Thomas Edison

James Moriarty

Heaven:

Bishamonten

Ares

Freyja

Ah Muzen cab

Hêlēl

Horus

Set

Athena

Artio

Susanoo-no-Mikoto

Indra

Ah Puch

Achilles

Bastet

Nyarlathotep

Xiuhtecuhtli

Pele

The Morrígan

Níðhöggr

Nezha

Anansi

Ishtar

Loki

Hi-no-Kagutsuchi

Yemoja

Bakasura

Daji

Baldr

Arawn

Amun-Ra

Cikap-kamuy

And because even my cut ideas are usually all conceptualized, here’s a list of those I’ve sadly had to trim from the story:

Ivan IV Vasilyevich

Nergal

Fafnir

Genghis Khan

Blackbeard

Aži Dahāka

Wu Zeitan

Galileo

Olorun

Ao Guang

Shaka Zulu

Scáthach

Lyudmila Pavlichenko

Ramesses II

Cernunnos

Czernobog 

Tsukuyomi

Take-Minakata

Typhon

Ba’al

Chronos

Oda Nobunaga

Van Helsing

Charles Babbage

Archimedes

Jeanne d’Arc

Aeneas

Nebuchadnezzar II

(Feel free to shoot any asks about any of them!)

[crystallllines]

who the fuck suggested that charlemagne marry irene sarantapechaina; i haven’t looked too far into it yet but it looks like there are three notions:

1) someone else suggested it

2) irene thought of it

3) charlie magnus thought of it

there’s a great potential comedy of errors here

[mst3kproject]

519: Outlaw

I don't want to talk about the Gor books.  I don't think I need to talk about them – there's plenty to mock in Outlaw without going into its source material.  Anyway, if I were going to talk about them I'd have to read them, and everything I've ever heard about them tells me that I definitely don't want to do that.  They sound like a Fifty Shades of Grey for basement-dwelling misogynist nerd stereotypes.

A couple of assholes named Watney (no relation to the guy who got left behind on Mars) and Cabot (no relation to the author of The Princess Diaries) are on their way to a bar when they are forced to make a detour into another dimension.  Fortunately, this is a sequel: Cabot has been here before and so rather than dying of thirst in the desert, they find their way to the cardboard city of Coroba. There, the two become embroiled in a plot by Queen Lara to murder her husband and seize power.  She imprisons Watney and the rightful heir, Princess Talena, and sends a bounty hunter to capture the escaped Cabot.  After much pointless wandering around, the conspiracy is revealed.  The bounty hunter kills Lara, Cabot marries Talena and becomes king, Watney is sent back to Earth, and Zeno the High Priest does basically nothing despite being played by the only cast member anybody in the audience has ever heard of.

Quick Note: the 'desert snake' that appears in one shot appears to be a Burmese python, a semi-aquatic species that lives in the rainforests of southeast Asia.  They could not have gotten that more wrong if they'd tried.

Besides that stunning failure of herpetology, the thing about this movie that most sticks in my mind is the kissing.  Cabot and Talena share several kisses.  They're supposed to be epic and passionate, but there's something weirdly mechanical about them, like we're watching exaggerated stop-motion animation of a kiss. It's as if neither Urbano Barberini nor Rebecca Feratti have any actual experience of kissing, and are trying to kiss based on having read an anatomical study of the muscles involved.  Gross.

After that, the second thing I remember about the movie is how incredibly fake everything in it looks.  Cabot's flashback tells us that Gor is a harsh world, and it breeds harsh people – this is supposed to be a gritty, raw, half-savage place, where the aristocracy wallow in decadence while the common folk toil in the mud, and where death is always a just a hair away.  The sets and costumes are admittedly elaborate, and there is at least some unity of design (unlike, say, Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell, where they just used whatever they could find in the prop warehouse), but everything looks like it was made in a high school art class.  King Marlenus' crowns appear to be made of cardboard and hot glue, spray-painted gold.  Talena and the 'Leather Women' look like they're wearing bondage gear from Spencer's Gifts, while the dancers are in 'sexy genie' Hallowe'en costumes.  The entire city of Coroba is built out of plywood, except for the parts that are built from styrofoam (hence why the slaves are being worked to death in the styrofoam mines).  That stupid 'lizard woman' face painted on the wall looks like the work of a twelve-year-old who has just learned how to grid out facial proportions.

The biggest problem with Outlaw, however, is one that only becomes obvious after a little thought.  Having pondered the film's story for a while, trying to figure out why it seems so pointless, I eventually realized – it's because Cabot, our ostensible hero, never does anything.

Well, that's not quite true.  He does a couple of things, but nothing he does ever matters.  He beats up some sand Nazis when they first arrive on Gor, but that has absolutely no connection with the rest of the plot.  He gets himself and Watney to Coroba, where he is conveniently present to be framed when Lara murders her husband.  Afterwards he flees into the desert where he and his sidekick Hup get lost and wander in circles for a while.  They find a group of slavers chasing people in the middle of nowhere for some reason, and stage a jailbreak which frees exactly one slave.  Then they're caught by the bounty hunter and taken back to Coroba, where both Lara and Zeno try to bargain for Cabot's loyalty and fail.  The villains lose not because of him, but because they turn on each other.  The whole movie could have happened just fine even if Cabot never bothered to show up.

It's not like there weren't opportunities for him to do something.  Cabot could have gotten the slaves in the desert camp to rise up against their captors, and then rallied them into an army to storm Coroba.  He didn't do that.  He could have snuck back into the city to free Talena and get the support of the people to put her on the throne.  He didn't do that either.  He could have pretended to join forces with Zeno against Lara, or Lara against Zeno, or just killed Lara when she tried to seduce him.  Didn't do that.  He could have led a revolt in the styrofoam mines after the cave-in sowed discontent with the regime.  Didn't do that either. Cabot seems to spend the whole movie waiting around for a chance to do something heroic, but every time one arrives he lets it pass by.

What about any of the other 'good' characters?  An old wizard called the Elder was the one who brought Cabot and Watney to Gor, in the hopes that they would accomplish something.  He gets stabbed by Lara before he can tell them what.  Talena spends most of the movie in a dungeon.  She maims a couple of dominatrices but that's about it for her.  Hup follows Cabot around, complaining about how hot, hungry, and lost they are.  Watney, too, rots in jail, out of sight and out of mind, for ninety percent of the film – then at the final showdown, he announces to the public that Lara murdered King Marlenus.  This is what brings about the end of the movie, as the bounty hunter kills her with a spear and Cabot and Talena are able to become King and Queen.  That's right, folks – the only ‘hero’ character in the movie who does anything directly to overthrow Lara is fucking Watney.

Watney deserves some kind of award for being probably the most hateable single character ever to appear on MST3K – and that's saying something.  His competition includes such nails-on-chalkboard specimens as various Gamera kids, the peeping soldiers from Attack of the The Eye Creatures, and Mitchell, but Watney blows them all away.  He's a sexist pig, a whiny asshole, and a fucking idiot combined.  Lara promises to make him a king and he seriously expects her to follow through on it, even still shouting threats at the guards who drag him away.  Yet at the end, when he, Cabot, Hup, and Talena are all about the be executed, he's the only person who responds proactively.  The movie would have ended the same way without Cabot, but not without Watney.  I guess that makes him the hero.  What a horrible thought.

So much for the good guys.  How about the villains?  Zeno mixes potions and has passive-aggressive arguments with Lara, but she gets fed up and kills him before he can really take any action against her.  Lara herself is a cartoon character – she's evil, and that's one hundred percent of her personality and motivation.  There is exactly one line in the movie that hints at a backstory for her. She claims that she had to learn the hard way that power is all that matters.  This suggests that she may have been a slave herself before rising to her current position, and if it had been explored a little this could have made something interesting out of her.  Historical parrallels could be drawn to Anne Boleyn or Irene Sarantapechaina, a former concubine using royal authority to punish those she feels have abused her.

But nobody else in this movie has more than one dimension, so why should she?  She seems interested in nothing but power for its own sake.  The reponsibilities that come with wielding it are entirely immaterial to her – she just wants to tell people what to do and then watch as they are forced to do it regardless of whether it actually makes any sense.  In fact, a number of the things she does, such as ordering the slaves to be locked in during the cave-in at the styrofoam mine, seem to have no purpose beyond exercising this total authority.  It's as if she wants to be surrounded by people who despise her, while she enjoys the fact that they can't do anything about her.  Imagine if she had a twitter account.

Then there's the most nonsensical character of all, the bounty hunter.  I think his name is Horst.  Lara hires him to bring Cabot and Hup back, he does so, she pays him, and he leaves.  It seems like his role in the story is done, but then he turns up again at the finale to kill Lara for no reason other than Watney said so.  I was sure this scene had to be otherwise motivated.  MST3K must've cut the bit where we find out she cheated him out of money or something – but no, apparently he just decided that it was time for the movie to end.  Maybe he's the hero.

The movie, however, treats Cabot as the hero throughout, so I suppose Cabot is the person it wants us to emulate.  What does that mean?  I guess it means that when evil appears to have triumphed, all we need to do is keep our heads down and wait it out.  We can put up with other people doing terrible things as long as we don't explicitly support them, and occasionally make some small show of loyalty to good, and sooner or later somebody else will topple the evil for you.  White-Liberal-est movie ever.

See what I meant?  There's heaps to complain about in Outlaw, and I didn't have to mention the books once.

[grayjoy15]

Day 16: Rotrude, daughter of Charlemagne. As a child, she was engaged to Constantine VI, the son of Byzantine Empress Irene Sarantapechaina, and educated by a Greek monk. The betrothal fell through, and she never married as Charlemagne then forbade all his daughters from marrying in order to prevent any claimants to the throne. Still, she was allowed to take lovers and have children, and she was very well educated and a counselor to her father.

[300iqprower]

Which historical figure you dislike (any, be it ancient or recent) do you want to see mangled by Fate? Even if they didn't do anything worthy of being a Heroic Spirit. Easy Mode: No Hitler

I mean....none. I know I'm a spiteful jaded bastard, but I don't want to see any character done poorly. I (someone jewish) have Erwin Rommel aka a literal nazi general as one of my Riders in a grail war fic, because it doesn't matter how much a piece of shit they were in life - the beauty of a concept like heroic spirits is you can make an interesting story out of anyone in the right place at the right time.

...Oh wait do you mean like in the Columbus sense of someone who gets super villified and gets their shit kicked in? If so then I got three of em off the top of my head: Empress Irene Sarantapechaina (better known as Irene of Athens), Athena (funny coincidence that), and Andrew Jackson