#kleos and nostos story

[badolmen]

the thing is my ocs all sound like completely ridiculous Mary Sues out of context but once you realize everyone has the exact same level of insane bullshit going on its like oh thank god someone normal (said about someone who has committed acts of terrorism, murder, and espionage before they were 26)

[breitzbachbea]

"I am neither man nor mythical" is a very good Francesco line. Especially because Salomé very rarely likes to acknowledge her humanity in a serious, attached way and Trygve does, but he fancies himself much more mythical. He likes that idea so much more than the mundanity of a mortal life.

But Francesco Belfari? Oh, so human! If he could only be divine enough to encompass all of humanity! If he only could master and tame both the abyss and the peak! He is human! He is more than that! He's Francesco Belfari, your desire and darkest nightmare!

[charles-jpg]

kleos means, “glory won at war,” and nostos, “glory of homecoming.” these two things don’t logically coexist with one another very well.

c!tommy is nostos. he just wants to go home. he just wants someone to come back home with him. he'll do anything to get back to what it used to be before the wars. he wants his family to be safe and loved, somewhere peaceful, where they can look back at the bad times and laugh it off. he wants someone to make him feel at home. and he will find them and drag them home. he's tired of it all, but he'll keep going, because he just wants to go home.

c!wilbur is kleos. he knows nostos isn't achievable anymore. he thinks it's naive to think things could ever go back to what they were. to think he could get back to who he used to be. he doesn't care about nostos anymore. home exists in a feeling that he hasn't felt in a long time. even if it all ends finally, he knows he won't recover. and maybe they'll tell his story, maybe they won't. but he'll be able to save them, give them a chance for nostos. and that's enough glory for him. he'll take the rush of adrenaline and ride it all the way to hell.

[wistfulrat]

heyo, it’s me, mary oliver/phoebe bridgers anon. :-) i’m so happy those connections resonated with you!! pls feel free to word vom to your heart’s content. i seriously adored cruel river and would love to hear anything you have to say about it/time/longing/intertextuality/anything. <3

aahh thank you so much i’ve been listening to funeral on repeat since yesterday! also you truly have opened the wistful floodgates with this ask.

sometimes i feel like my brain is just one tangled mess of thematic comparatives. bc it went from your (cruel river -> funeral -> in blackwater woods) to (nick drake’s place to be -> alabama shakes’ sound and color -> patroclus retelling his story to thetis in madeline miller’s song of achilles)

i feel like if were to force a through-line here it’s looking for that specific bittersweetness of holding sand—having something and watching it slip through your hands simultaneously. it’s this really specific kind of longing that widens the definition of nostalgia to me. i feel like eleventy7 is really good at accessing that emotional tension. bc in the act of remembering, an artist gets to suspend you/a character in time—where all versions of the past and present self are occurring at once. you’ve temporarily breached an inevitable distance. and i love how concrete language sort of fails us in describing that disorienting feeling.

so mary oliver talks about nameless ponds, trees whose bodies turn into pillars, and black rivers. and phoebe bridgers talks about a dream where she’s screaming underwater. and alabama shakes talks about “falling awake”—sleeping and waking up to a strange world. and nick drake talks about himself as colors in nature that emphasize how he’s changed. and madeline miller writes patroclus saying “But the memories well up like springwater, faster than I can hold them back. They do not come as words, but like dreams, rising as scent from the rain-wet earth.”

like it’s about the immensity!! of time, loss, change, newness, etc. and i think that’s something i love about post-deathly hallows drarry fics because you get to chase the nostos after kleos—all the reflections on the loss of adolescence/innocence that come post-war. it’s such a satisfying narrative movement to me. which i think makes sense bc i’ve always favored the odyssey over the iliad for this same reason.

i think mostly it’s the surreality of this mood that really does it for me. that almost sublime occurrence in visceral memories that sort of pull you outside yourself. the longing is near unbearable but you can’t help but want to sit inside it and look and look. like trying to hold a world in your hand. i love it.

anyway thank you for this, it’s put me in my favorite art headspace tbh haha.

here are the sound and color // place to be lyrics :)

[argivebeauty]

Helen + her thoughts on being the most beautiful

send me a topic to write a meta about my muse on ;; always accepting

Like most things with Helen, she is ambivalent about it.

Would she choose not to fill these shoes if the option was given to her? Frankly, I don’t know - because Helen doesn’t know it either, but there were definitely times when she wished she could. 

Her beauty is at the same time a curse and a weapon, but it’s also more, much more than that, because it is made to be admired just as well as feared, and where one sows fear one reaps power. Think about it like a parallel to Achille’s choice - he could either live a long life or be a hero in the war. Helen never had the choice to be part of the war or not, but if she had the choice would not have been easy, either, because as much as she resents being put in that position, Helen is also very aware of the meaning of those things and the importance of her role in the way that fate unfolds.  It’s the good old conflict between kleos and nostos, and if the choice was ever granted to her, she would have been no different from the heroes who have experienced it, in the sense of being conflicted by it.

Clearly, there is a part of her that resents that predicament, since it has brought her so many inconveniences (can a girl just stop getting kidnapped for a little while? Give her a break ppl), and yet she thinks it is befitting of her, for she is Zeus’ only mortal daughter and prideful as fuck because of it, and beauty and reputation in her times had different meanings then than they do today, they were a commodity as valuable as gold, if not more so, thus she does not feel uncomfortable with the beauty itself or the attention that it gives her - just that others would have the boldness to claim it.

On another level, it’s a major tool for her. First because Helen is intelligent and resourceful af, but the first thing people will notice about her is that she’s beautiful, which makes it all so very easy for her to play dumb if necessary. Besides, it gives her power to influence people. Helen literally managed to survive her husband’s wrath after ten years in a war allegedly caused by her infidelity simply because she seduced him as he held his sword to her neck, I’ll never get over how awesome this moment is for me tbh. That is why it’s also impossible for me to conceive a version of Helen who has no agency in her story. Helen knows how to survive and how to get what she wants, and between those two things beauty is both a resource and a nuisance at the same time.

[rottenappleusach]

Heroes & Heroines: A Journey Through Myth (Introduction & Index)

By Felipe Oro

Introduction

Before everything is said and done, I would like to tell you about what I have set to do here. Over the course of 2016 I gathered and selected some essays and stories and books that were, for the most part, about people. There were people from the past and people that never were. Gods, demigods, fae folk, women and men and whatnot. All of them very remarkable, often courageous or fearless or straightaway foolish. Common folk called these beings Heroes and they told stories about them and they eventually came to write them down and to study them. They were real then and they are as real now.

Now, both the ideas of Hero and Heroine are exceedingly broad in their scope. I could drone on about Heroic figures in all kinds of media and from every time period and corner of the world and quite possible never finish. Attempting to define what makes someone a hero can be troublesome as well. For instance, Harvard University Professor and author Gregory Nagy, writes on his book The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours: “In ancient Greek traditions, heroes were humans, male or female, of the remote past, endowed with superhuman abilities and descended from the immortal gods themselves” (Nagy, 10). 

Often, the status of Hero of many of these entities is questionable and even that may well be an understatement. For Heroes are often associated with wars and violence, which eventually leads one to pick sides. Are both Achilles and Hector heroes, even if they fight for different sides? Or is, perhaps, one of them a villain? Nagy writes: “The sadness of Achilles’s song is just as the hero’s death, his mortality, is necessary. The hero, the story of the hero, cannot be complete if he lives on. For in death the hero wins the ultimate prize of life eternal in song” (50). According to Nagy, the Greek hero is one who carries “the burden of two different fated ways [keres] leading to the final moment [telos] of death” (51). The hero must then deny their safe homecoming [nostos] and embrace death in battle to “have a glory [kleos] that is imperishable [amphiton]” (51). 

There are also those who most definitely walked among us, people who breathed and lived and died, and who were chanted and vilified and summoned into the long-stretching halls of heroic-hood... 

As it goes well beyond my current skills to unify all these diverse heroes into a single common thread, what I will do here will be next best thing: The Monomyth or Hero’s Journey.

What is the Monomyth?   It is a template, a set of stages most hero myth narratives have in common. Its study dates to 1871, when anthropologist Edward Taylor observed common patterns in the plot of hero’s journeys. However, it was not until the publication of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in 1949, that the study began to be recognized as such. In fact, it has become so popular that, in 2011, Time listed it as one of the 100 most influential books written in the English language. It is so influential that many writers use it as an actual template, where each step is to be followed if success is to be attained. In short: it has been done to death.

So, Why the Monomyth? We live in a culture where the fear of things being spoiled is ever-present. We relish the thought of knowing what we should not know for now, like casks of wine hidden away in the darkness and cobwebs of a cellar, aging until they are ripe for drinking. The Hero’s Journey is, in a manner of speaking, the spoiler of spoilers. Once its patterns are known and recognizable to you, a good deal of stories will cease to surprise you. As writer Neil Gaiman puts it: “I think I got about half way through The Hero with a Thousand Faces and found myself thinking if this is true—I don't want to know. I really would rather not know this stuff. I’d rather do it because it's true and because I accidentally wind up creating something that falls into this pattern than be told what the pattern is.” Personally, I think that if a story follows every step of the journey to the letter, then it is not doing a very good job. Then again, I also think that a story’s value lies more in the little, deeper details than on its convoluted, shocking plot twists.

Nevertheless, the Hero’s Journey does not escape neither scrutiny nor criticism. There are many stories that do not fit the pattern, as well as alternatives that branch out of it or appear nearly independently. One of such criticisms has to do with the vastly predominant presence of male heroes, in lieu of their feminine counterparts. While heroines do appear from time to time in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, it would seem that, for Campbell, the journey itself was more of a man thing. Because of this, I will be comparing Campbell’s Hero’s Journey with Maureen Murdock’s model in The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness and Valerie Estelle Frankel’s From Girl to Goddess: The Heroine’s Journey Through Myth and Legend.

Index

Part I: Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Part II: Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness

Part III: Valerie Estelle Frankel’s From Girl to Goddess: The Heroine’s Journey Through Myth and Legend ( 1 / 2 / 3 )

Comparative Chart

Conclusion & Works Cited

[blessedstarlight]

I love and hate my Greek class in equal measure mostly because it takes me forever to write 500 word essays. Because the whole time I'm sitting here thinking about Noctis

Like

Why couldn't he have the kind of kleos that Odysseus gets? Homecoming with taking back your land and saving your people and you know. Getting to live until old age. Why does he have to be so painfully like Achilles? Why does it take his loved ones being severely harmed to light a fire under him just so that he can make the decision to die at the correct time and place

They will sing his glory for thousands of  years. The King who sacrificed all for the sake of the world. His story will become a myth that the land of Eos lives by and sings of.

Why couldn't he have nostos without death I'm. So. Sad

[badolmen]

sometimes a qpr is two guys with the emotional temperament of anxious cheetahs and their emotional support partner.

[badolmen]

*head in hands* writing an AU for your own story sucks because someone has to know the original story and characters for the AU to be impactful