#not a big meta writer but if you poke me with a stick i might just write a small essay about it

[johaerys-writes]

i’d be super curious to hear your thoughts of the characterisation of achilles in the iliad! because while he is considered honourable and respected by the standards of the culture, surely by modern day standards he wouldn’t be so much? which is why i think that MM did such a great job, because she basically modernised him so that we would see him in the same ways that the greeks did re: his nobility versus his arrogance, but i thought the general consensus on achilles is that he’s an ancient greek hero which equals Not A Good Guy by our standards (but my formal education in classics is limited, i mostly partake as a hobby, so i’m always looking to expand my understandings and opinions and you’re obviously a very intelligent and considered person)

So I think the most important thing anyone needs to do when engaging with ancient greek works (and indeed any sort of work, especially those created millennia ago) is to keep an open mind. Importing modern moral judgement is anachronistic when it comes to the Iliad; hubris, as we understand it now, simply does not exist in the Iliad, there are no Good Guys vs Bad Guys, there are no Heroes or Villains. Those notions came much later and are very much a Christian thing. A hero in the Homeric world has no moral implication; he is simply a warrior. A dude that does things, and not necessarily admirable things. So it would be pointless to try to view Achilles or Hector or Agamemnon (or even the gods in the Iliad who do some pretty fucked up shit) as good or bad guys, because such a thing is irrelevant in the Iliad.

That being said, I feel like Achilles is portrayed generally positively both in the Iliad and also in other ancient Greek works. He is noble, that is, he is of noble/divine lineage, he is well-spoken, well-educated, generally reasonable and polite with pretty much everyone, except for Agamemnon in that opening scene in the Iliad (who was a dick to him as well). He is also honourable and with a very rigid moral code: in the Iliad it is stated many times that he prefers to ransom back captives instead of kill them, and he even lets the body of one of the Trojans he slew be burned with his armour on as a sign of respect, even though it is a thing of great importance in the Iliad to claim the armour of the people one slew. He is not greedy and doesn't flaunt his wealth, he is generous with his Myrmidons and is generally rather well-liked. Until Patroclus is killed and he goes on his rampage, he is a pretty chill dude; and then after Hector is killed, he organises the funeral games for Patroclus where he is shown to be very diplomatic and reasonable, even with Agamemnon; and then when Priam goes to ask him for Hector's body back, Achilles treats him with respect and the two men bond over their grief. So like, idk about you but those don't seem like the actions of someone crazed or extremely arrogant or bad, even by modern standards.

I think what is most telling about how a character like Achilles was perceived in the culture that created him, is that his portrayal in later ancient greek works, mainly the theatrical and philosophical works of around the 5th cent BC, is generally positive. Some playwrights depicted him as a bit of a hothead or a little boisterous and full of himself, but that isn't really framed as a bad thing. Achilles in those works is a famous and powerful hero who knows how good he is and how much the army needs him, but he isn't needlessly flashy, he always keeps his word, he is brave and heroic even by modern standards: in Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis, Achilles goes to great lengths to protect Clytemnestra and Iphigenia from the mob, and it is pointed out many times how averse he is to trickery and lies and that Chiron brought him up to be honourable, steadfast, to keep true to his values and to stay away from wickedness (which is what Agamemnon did, essentially). So I think it's really clear that for the ancient Greeks Achilles has many admirable traits.

You mentioned MM and how she modernised Achilles and made him sympathetic to a modern reader's eyes, and I simply don't think that's true. I think MM's portrayal of Achilles is pretty close both to the Iliad and how other ancient Greeks imagined him; perhaps the only way she differs is by portraying him a bit calmer in places lol. She simply took away all those layers of nonsense that had been piled on top of him through centuries of literary criticism that took all the later Roman works that depicted him as a sadistic monster a little too seriously or only focused on how awful he was compared to Noble Hector (no hate on Hector but those classicists really need to find a new blorbo *smh*)

I also think that maybe MM went a little too hard on the arrogance thing and on his obsession with glory without explaining it enough, but that's just my personal opinion. Achilles is very concerned with his glory in the Iliad as well, but we have to keep in mind his position here: Achilles gave up everything for that glory. He knew about the prophecy and knew that he would die in Troy, and made the choice to fight in the war because glory is just that important within the context of the Iliad. I think that many of the heroes we see in the Iliad would have chosen the same, if given a dilemma like that. So Achilles gave up the life he could have had, his kingdom, his family, just for his name to live on through the ages, and then Agamemnon royally fucked that up by disrespecting and insulting him publicly in the vilest of ways. Achilles then made up his mind to abstain from the war and to go back to Phthia and thus giving up his claim to glory because he was so over the war, and he probably would have done that had Patroclus not died. And then there was nothing else for him to do other than to die as well. So like.... idk. His actions make sense to me. He is a passionate character who is swept away by his emotions, he has flaws, he isn't perfect (if such a thing even exists) but I think he's all the more compelling for it.

I hope this answered your question, anon! Thank you for giving me the chance to ramble about my favourite fictional man <3

[natsunoomoi]

More SVSSS stuff because I just watched ep 5. I’m not in a position at the moment to pay for the VIP pass and plus it’s like one show that I’d be paying for, so eh. I think I can wait.

The highlight for me is definitely always just looking at Shen Qingqiu’s face. I really like how he looks. Like when they show grown Luo Binghe he looks nice too, but it’s not that often. When Liu Qingge comes out of the cave I’ll probably enjoy the eye candy for every episode thereafter. I’m not normally really like this, so I think the aesthetics of this show just touch on something very comfortable deep in the recesses of my memory of some kung fu movie I watched with my Dad as a young child that imprinted on me so I have a very specific weakness for men with that kind of a look.

I also have a very specific weakness for villain characters that have a kind of redemption or a complicated past with some inklings of maybe they could be redeemed even if overall they were kind of a dick for at least a portion of their lives. This is my Hiei from Yu Yu Hakusho weakness that almost universally applies to almost all my interests in life. I think the idea that Shen Jiu set his owner’s house on fire and killed them all except for his friend relates rather strongly to that because that is the thing that Hiei ulitimately decided not to do, but was the thing the Koorime in Hyouka no Kuni feared. Except Shen Jiu acted on it.

But like Shen Jiu supposedly could have been saved if the original’s author was a better writer and wasn’t writing a bullshit stallion novel. Like the fact that he saved Haitang is a compelling example of how his heart wasn’t completely cold. Of course she was his fiancee and people kind of are iffy about if they really were, but like they probably were between each other. Even if he was a slave, she lived in his house and she was his friend and they talk to each other. Naturally if you get along with each other really well, maybe as kids you just say, “When I grow up, I want to marry you.” Then because they’re friends and they like each other, they agree and they plan it that way. Just between them. Nothing to do with her family or the reality of the situation. Just two cute kids making a promise innocently. But like with that backdrop, it’s kind of understandable that he would save her from his slaughter and the fire that he set to destroy her family house. The interesting thing is that he never once in his entire time living there or even in the aftermath tried to tell her what her family was really like and what they did to him. He left her to hate him for what he did and assume that her family was innocent and the attack was unprovoked. He didn’t do anything to destroy her image of her loved ones.

It’s really sad how strong his mistrust for other men is, but that’s trauma too. We’re not really given specifics of how exactly he lived as a slave. We know that he was the 9th one bought, but he likely slept in close quarters with other slaves because it’s not like a noble family would give a whole lot to their slaves and amenities were probably sparse. For very different reasons, the disciple quarters even on Qing Jing Peak are probably similar. Sparse to focus on training and cultivation and close because of the number of disciples and just the overall situation. Even if the quarters had relatively more space than his slave quarters, that does sound too similar for it to be a huge trauma trigger for him on top of being surrounded by mostly other males. Self-isolation as a result of the trauma and hyper focusing on just his cultivation as a means to survive and get by day by day and create the foundation for his entire identity and basically it’s definitely the set up for disaster and all of Shen Jiu’s problems socially that lead him to being the main villain for the original story. It’s very sad. If only Yue Qingyuan tried to actually talk with him more instead of apologizing. I know he probably figured ultimately his excuse doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t, but Shen Jiu really needed help and to feel like his whole world wasn’t cold. Just knowing that he was in his friend’s thoughts and he tried to come back maybe could have eased his suffering even a little and start to build up a new level of trust again for him in particular but even for men in general. It’s sad as well that no mentors in his time there as a disciple ever like kind of noticed and tried to like just talk to him. I know he keeps his cards close and probably didn’t show outwardly he was struggling, but like how come no one asked how come he was spending so much time at the Warm Red Pavilion with women? That’s strange right? No one was concerned? I mean, like even if ultimately you say, it’s up to you if you want to keep going and that’s your business, still maybe ask and be like, “Hey, so I notice you’re not sleeping along with the other disciples and spend every night with the ladies over there? Uh, what’s up?” I think like for his teachers that might have been an important thing they should have done, but no one did? That seems like a big plothole to me that he was allowed to just continue like that with no one asking even once or showing concern that the top disciple of Qing Jing Peak was not socializing with the other disciples or sleeping in the same quarters as them. I’m surprised even not one of the ladies in the Pavilion even asked why he was there every night. I mean, I’m sure they wouldn’t want to shoo a way a client, but like no one asked even like one time? I understand from the meta point of view that plothole is probably there on purpose to show how the original’s author was a dumpster fire to create a horrible world of super toxic masculinity as an ouroboros eating itself, but jfc I really feel bad for Shen Jiu that he was made to feel such suffering as a result of absolutely shit writing just to make him an enemy for Demon Binghe.

Oh and he just had a shit first cultivation master too. What the hell with the horrible luck. This poor kid is just trying to survive and he just gets a raw deal.

But I suppose that’s also like a masterful backstory on MXTX’s part to make us root for Shen Yuan’s rewrite and create a happy life for “Qingqiu” that he wasn’t able to make himself. He did it initially for his own self-interest, but the Qingqiu everyone knows in the end is much more well-adjusted. I’m still sad though that it feels like that means original Shen Jiu still left that world with Shen Yuan replacing him only knowing sadness.

So then I was poking around the tags on here and saw someone had a theory that original Shen Jiu got punted from his timeline and turning into Shen Yuan who knows the whole story and then dies and gets put into his old body. I actually buy this, but my version of the timeline is different. Like I was thinking Shen Jiu-Qingqiu died as a human stick under all the torture and everything and then became reborn as Shen Yuan reading through his whole life and mistakes through a horribly written story and then dying via food poisoning and brought into his own old life with a chance to redeem himself. I really like this idea except that Shen Jiu seems really, really straight and Shen Yuan may be a bit more fluid.

But all this to say, that I have an itch in a confluence of all of my weaknesses to want to really comfort Shen Jiu. ;o; There’s a small part of me that while enjoying Shen Yuan’s rewrites, also really wished Shen Jiu could have been happier so he didn’t turn into such a dick because literally no one else around him seemed to do anything except let him fuck himself over including the people who supposedly cared about him. So very sad. T_T

And then maybe this should be in a different post that’s a different topic. I kind of touched on a bit how the image of the situation probably doesn’t look great, but it looks like some people are like bashing on the Bingqiu ship? It’s the canon ship for one, so just stop there.

But if you really want to go into it, as another person pointed out, the actual teacher-student relationship was between original Qingqiu and Binghe. We’re reading a different situation because it’s Shen Yuan who was a Binghe fanboy who has the relationship with Binghe. The imaging isn’t great because he’s in and controlling Qingqiu’s body, and the rest of the characters in the world don’t know this, but the meta reading of this is that it’s okay because it’s a different person actually. In world, the other characters do probably find it a little odd and the issue with Qingge in the succubus cave as I mentioned before, he’s probably panicking when the succubus mentions that Qingqiiu’s love interest is a junior because he can only think of himself as that role and didn’t think to include a disciple into that description. It doesn’t seem like it’s completely unheard of or taboo though because there seems to be some implications that maybe Shen Jiu originally had some kind of designs on Ning Yingying because he’s also a bit jealous of Binghe for getting her attention too? A large part of his jealousy comes from his insecurity with his cultivation and other people having more advantage or potential to surpass him despite his hard work, because again trauma and hyper focusing on building his entire identity around one thing and no one helping him, but like also seems in this world there’s some leeway between teacher-student relations turning into something else. This is not really a normal kind of situation where they go into a modern school or anything. A lot of the disciples were probably at one point also juniors to their master before they graduated to become a lord, and when they grow enough to end their disciple term and can become more independent cultivators they’re not really obligated to stick by such a standard because they’re adults. Like maybe they hang around the sect still and work as like someone they happen to send out on demon slaying missions if they choose to stay instead of going off somewhere and it functions a bit more like an army in that regard where they’re not really learning anything new or getting any new instruction, but they’re still kind of a disciple. It’s not a perfect 1:1 relation to teacher-student relationships because of the structure of cultivation sects. It’s not great in the army to have a relationship with your CO either, but the point in the story when their relationship develops is more like that. But like Mingfan probably eventually would go back to his family and just live out a noble life because he is a noble, so it’s not like all the disciples would stay and perpetually be students forever. There’s some very important distinctions at play here in the story that the people who object to this aren’t understanding. 

Like this isn’t like an actual school like in Harry Potter or something where the kids all go off to Hogwarts and there are actual students and teachers and every Peak is like a Hogwarts House. They’re learning and the peak lord gives them some level of instruction, but there’s also a great deal of independent study because cultivation is very personal and bound by natural talent and how much you put into it. The fact that everyone has their own manual should tell you a lot about the structure and how it’s okay for Qingqiu to leave for 3 years to go meditate in a cave. The masters in these situations are more like more well studied seniors who just have more experience and have been appointed to help you get unstuck or something because they have more experience to troubleshoot. There’s some authority carried with that as well, but it’s a very different experience from like a boarding school, so such a relationship is not entirely taboo. It’s not perfect because if you’re still trying to play the old roles at the same as your new role as a partnership that can get kind of weird, but it can work out if there’s communication involved as with generally all things.

So yeah, Bingqiu is actually okay, and rather than harping on something that’s not an issue, I think the more interesting discussion is how obligated a person is to be faithful to a different person’s life if they end up in their body. Like for body swap movies where the change is temporary they’re always like “Hey, don’t f up my life!” But like this is a permanent change where Shen Yuan was inserted into Qingqiu’s life after he was already established. What is the philosophical theory to how much he should keep up Qingqiu’s responsibilities and how much freedom should he exert for his own desires? That’s the real question. I think the balance he struck became ultimately more happy for everyone in the sect, so eh.

I realize a lot of this is not related to the episode, but the episode is just a continuation of the sparring match and nothing much else to say about it. The most interesting thing is getting to see a flashback of the original Qingqiu and getting a better idea of who he was like instead of the Shen Yuan version we know.

[elizabethrobertajones]

I feel like the hidden theme this season is sleep/awakening. First we get Dean "I don't sleep till I hallucinate sheep" Winchester. Then it’s Patience who has a vision in her sleep. Followed by Cas being woken up in The Empty. Then it’s our friendly neighbourhood cosmic entity telling us it likes sleep, it needs sleep! In 13x06 we have the convo between Jack & Cas about (not) sleeping and Sam & Dean sleeping / being woken up + . What does it all mean? Is it just an SOS from the writer's room?

Probably! There was the thing from before the season about Berens giving up coffee or something, which I took as a sign of DOOOM.

But, I guess more seriously, it’s deeply symbolic… Dean is “hallucinating” and Patience gets a vision in her sleep - sleep and dreams are connected to prophecy, and remember Kaia has been described as her powers being about dreams too, and she seems like she’s getting right up in the mix with the 13x09 episode description… You’re making me wonder if some of the problems from later in the season might be literal nightmares.

Sleep is also associated with innocence, at least in the “sleeping like a baby” sense, which Jack does in 13x02, which mirrors back to Cas in 5x22 when Dean was commenting on how human he was (which… I guess I’m just linking a lot of things right now but I remember talking about that recently :P) so that’s another way to use it… With Jack saying he doesn’t sleep so much, and compared to Cas as they sort of stand together and agree they don’t sleep, it begins to change the focus from how human Jack is to the ways in which he’s different, changing the way he and sleep are presented; to start with he was cute little Nougat Baby who was discovering the world and mostly had wants and needs as basic as eating a bunch of candy, and sitting cross-legged because it made him look childish, and so on (I was looking for a shorter post on it and found a long one instead >.>). There’s also been meta about how his hair is more slicked back in each successive episode, making him look older and older just by transforming his hair. I suppose the fact that Alex Calvert is unrecognisable as Jack in his instagram pics is gradually going to get less of a thing until his character face is allowed to look as mature as his every day face… Anyway, the sleep thing is just a little example in there… Paralleled to Cas both times, but this time to current angel!Cas who is not sleeping, so they stay up together and talk and work the case. 

I think for Cas the Empty inviting him to sleep forever was to do with the sort of oblivion of his Self and instead he fought back and kept his waking identity and just by being awake he caused the Empty suffering… Now he’s affirming in the most recent episode that he doesn’t sleep - for now that’s an affirmation that he’s back and doesn’t intend to just casually give up any time soon. Being awake is a victory (Dean’s win, and linked to Dean’s desire to keep fighting as well, since it magically reappeared when Cas came back :P) and I think sleep in the Empty is linked to retirement and giving up… Dean paralleled with Cas by going to Billie’s office where they had a similar exchange to Cas in the Empty, but Dean did not have the same positive personal development or decision to fight back. I think the difference between giving up and retiring well with a good end - the happy endgame - was lurking underneath all that. I’ve been tracking Dean vs retirement all season starting with his prayer to Chuck and how defeated about the job he sounded in 13x01, and meeting Billie wasn’t the turning point for him the Empty was for Cas. She sent him back with the warning he had work to do, where Cas chose to come back for personal reasons… I think the temptation to give up is there, and in this case seems to be linked to sleep. 

Although sleep can be healing too - in 13x03 Deans sitting up, wide awake, drinking and keeping himself awake with loud music to the point he seems to be distressing Jack on the other side of the wall, and of course in 13x02 he had been hallucinating sheep because he kept on driving and refused to sleep then as well. In 13x06 he’s happily sleeping once Cas is back and the family can go hunting together and have Cas and Jack hanging out while Dean and Sam sleep. Dean being able to rest and sleep is a nice development, but then they use it as a way to warn Jack about rushing in to poke sleeping bears with the harmless consequence of waking Dean up, and of course the message doesn’t stick because he rushes in again to help with the ghoul and gets his first helping of mega guilt. 

And Dean chasing off his interrupted sleep with coffee is also a really nice moment between him and Cas, where they’re just kind of existing and interacting together in a space, which is a rare pause in the story to do something that’s a raw quiet character moment between them. 

I think after some poking around that sleep has a billion different meanings and it depends entirely on context. In personal ways it depends on what happens with the character - does it make them vulnerable like 3 day old Jack sleeping in the car, or dangerous like Dean the angry sleeper? I guess the Empty is the big mytharc representation of sleep in the story, and in that case sleep is oblivion, which is dangerous and sad in the sort of seeming finality of it and the way the Empty seems to manage his realm, trying everything to settle Cas down just so he can return to sleep himself - and I suppose that might go with the themes of nihilism this season that Dean had completely lost any perspective on the point of what they do and was dangerously losing track of his own sense of self, which Billie called out. Jack already brought Cas back from that fatal sleep though, and Cas stubbornly stayed awake apparently to freedom if we take it on face value what we’ve seen so far. So it’s still pretty dangerous, but not as entirely hopeless as it might seem. And Patience had her gift awakened in her sleep which then woke her up more literally.

Maybe this will come into focus as we get to the midseason because the fact Kaia looks to be main arc important is not something I had been confident we’d get, but I suppose she’s main arc important to Wayward Sisters, so it’s more like I wasn’t expecting the main plot of Supernatural to tangle up in their lives from that direction…. If her gift is all to do with dreamwalking or in that episode description, dreamcatching, then maybe none of this will quite make sense until we know how she can help Jack, and where these themes all go from here. I think loosely sleep is bad and waking up is good, but there’s really obvious exceptions like waking up a grumpy Dean or whatever… it’s a good catch on this being such a prevalent thing :D 

(I once had an anon who said in a vaguely accusatory way, why are you so obsessed with making Dean sleep in your stories? to which I mostly just thought… I hadn’t noticed I do it but the poor bloke deserves to get more sleep than he does in canon. But I suppose if I have a weird bias towards sleep then maybe I don’t even notice when it’s a major theme XD)