#spoilers but not really since in merrily skipping far from canon

[vorchagirl]

Here's a little teeeensy tiny snippet of a Rook x Spite moment from a future chapter of my fic Untouchable - enjoy!

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Kash awoke to the sensation of hands sliding over her skin, the rustle of feathers, and the deep purple glow that could only be Spite. She opened her eyes to find the room still in darkness, the watery light of the window hidden behind the thick velvet drapes and lit only by the amethyst glow of Spite's wings as he curled them around her in a glowing cocoon. He pressed his face into the crook of her neck, inhaling her scent as though ravenously hungry, and trailed a hand down her thigh, his nails scraping along her skin.

“My Rook,” he murmured possessively, rolling himself on top of her in a graceful move that sent wisps of purple drifting through the air. “You smell of Lucanis. Of us.”

🤫😉🫠

[kashuan]

Do you think Clytemnestra was justified in killing Agamemnon?

I’ve been asked this a few times and I feel like it’s a difficult question to answer, to say the least. There are a lot of ways you could, such as:1) It’s irrelevant to try and answer because it’s not the point of this series of stories. We’re shown how eye for an eye justice completely FAILS in this house (Atreus gets revenge on Thyestes, Thyestes gets revenge on Atreus, Aegisthus gets revenge on Agamemnon, Orestes gets revenge on Aegisthus, Orestes is doomed to be Goddamn Miserable– there is never a ‘good end’ after anyone’s revenge) and though Clytemnestra’s intention may have been to end this very cycle of violence that plagues this house through killing Agamemnon, that obviously didn’t work. So from an overall plot/moral of the story standpoint, no? I guess? 2) If not in a overall story sense, is it justified to the reader at least? Dunno, depends how you look at it. Do you take stock in Euripides’ whackass, nonsensical canon (mentioned nowhere else ever) that Agamemnon violently killed Clytemnestra’s first family? Then I guess okay, you can say he had it coming. Given that he had absolutely zero reason to do that, and babies were involved, not sure what reader would miss the scum (see: why there’s no mixed feelings about King ‘I made my nephews into a soup for my bro just for the drama of it all’ Atreus’ murder)However, if we disregard that left-field one liner (as every other text does when talking about Clytemnestra’s reason), then there’s just the murder of Iphigenia to focus on. So then how does the reader interpret Agamemnon’s actions in IoA? Some people seem to come away thinking he just threw her on the altar, cut her throat and was merrily off to Troy on the same day without so much as a second thought spared (These people can not read. Some of them are even published authors. I am deeply sad.) Other readers have said: “I don’t care that he was Conflicted and Sad, he could have just like, Walked Away, you know,” which, as I’ve said in other posts, is a fallacy (there’s plenty of essays to be found on jstor on the subject). If either of these interpretations were correct, then again, I guess? you could feel his murder was justified. Yet I don’t think they are, so…. I won’t get into details here since I’ve written about it before, but his choices were more likely: (kill daughter) or (have an angry mob kill daughter and harm rest of family) or (have an angry god do both A and B and possibly smite the rest of the army as well by association). There never was a Walk Away And Everything’s All Right option. At least, not that his character would have good reason to believe. IoA is a tragedy not because it’s sad that an innocent girl dies to an Evil Man, but because of the utter hopelessness of the situation from all angles. I’ve seen some people who say that Artemis would have just let Agamemnon off the hook if he refused, and it was just a Test all along, but uh, have you read any stories with Artemis/Apollo? Very vindictive gods. The sacrifice was not just to appeal to her for favorable winds, but to apologize for unknowingly killing her sacred deer. He was already locked in to owing her repayment. Can’t just skip out on that. For more on why not to piss off this particular pair, and the bad results which follow if you think their commands can just be ignored, refer to: book 1, the iliadAnyway, getting back to the point, if Agamemnon did in fact have no better choice, if his hand was forced, and the whole catalyst for Clytemnestra’s decision is based on this, does it seem morally justified? I really don’t know. Does she have every reason to hate him all the same, sure. As a mother consumed by her grief, can we understand why she does what she does? Yes! Does his character deserve to get a free pass after the fact that it was likely his own greed in the first place that set off this series of events? Absolutely not.  But I’ve never read his death as being 100% Deserved And Justified, open and shut case, either, for the reason stated above. Final verdict: It’s Complicated.3) Is the reader given indication that it was Justified after the fact? The stories of Electra and Orestes are always what throw me off especially when it comes to how we’re ‘meant’ to interpret Agamemnon’s death. Their lives end up essentially ruined after their father dies, they end up emotionally abused and neglected by the mother. Conversely, both of them are also shown to be unreasonably extreme in some points in their stories, but this also seems author dependent, and, at least for me, never pushes their characters so far to outright be interpreted as The Bad Guys (aight, except for the end of Euripides’ Orestes where Ore just goes absolutely apeshit and decides to commit arson, kidnapping and murder all at once, but…like..Euripides, man. We’ve been over this.) It always has struck an odd chord with me that the character whose whole motive is to avenge her daughter, treats her remaining children so poorly, which leaves me unable to read her as the unproblematic Justified heroine that some others do (spoilers: nearly everyone in this family is heavily flawed, and yet I would still like all of them to live). My point is, I feel like if we, the readers, were supposed to feel Clytemnestra’s choice had been the “right” one, we would either be shown a brighter future after Agamemnon’s death, or at least, Electra and Orestes’ stories likely wouldn’t cast them as such sympathetic characters opposite hers. That isn’t to say these things convey it was the ‘wrong’ choice either, necessarily, but rather that is ambiguous and pinning one of those black and white terms on it is impossible.Having said all that, I want to conclude that this is all obviously based on my own opinion alongside that I’ve put a lot of hours into researching the ins and outs of this particular series of stories. I’m not claiming I’m giving the one correct answer here. Literature can be interpreted many ways, colored by our own preferences and opinions. But I was asked for my own personal take, so there you go :^)