#the song is really strong

[hooked-on-elvis]

Movie still from the 1957 Paramount Picture's film Loving You. In this scene Elvis Presley is performing "Lonesome Cowboy." Interesting fact, Loving You was originally entitled "Lonesome Cowboy."

[benevolenterrancy]

May your hardened heart be woken By the soft and distant song Of all you left here unspoken All the shards we keep stepping on - Take this body home Take this body home Call the wind, and let her know Take this life outgrown Take this broken soul Call the stars, call them all And take it high, take it far, take it home

[space-sheep08]

This originally started as a rough sketch to try and figure out how I wanted to draw the Stark children then I blacked out and woke up with this.

Won't be their final designs though, I want to truly work on their outfits which wasn't the case here.

I made two alternative versions because I couldn't choose which one I liked better-

[starflungwaddledee]

a light shines through a cloud of colour fumes and i can feel the warmth of the sun

Gravity, let me go ♫⋆｡♪ destroyer - of monsters and men

⋆｡ ﾟ☁︎｡ ⋆｡ ﾟ☀︎｡ ⋆｡ ﾟ ┊ ┊ ┊ ┊ ┊ ┊ ┊ ˚★⋆｡˚ ┊ ┊ ⋆ ┊ ★⋆ ┊ ◦ kirbytober 2024 #01 ★⋆ dream // revenge // song

[jeeaark]

Firstly, I dedicate this cheese moment to the song LP- One Last Moment . Be sad with me.

Secondly, ha, this moment probably doesn't hold as much impact nowadays but I drew this when patch 0 only had TWO OPTIONS and NOTHING ELSE. You could say it's my loving 'like fuck we won't ever see each other again my sun, moon, stars, and all of the above' response to Lae'zel's Goodbye. Had to give myself hope gosh darn it. But it's lovely to know that Greygold wasn't wrong. So I share cheesy moment anyway.

Third. YEAH I SAID GO. BABE'S GOTTA KILL VLAAKITH. You think Greygold is gonna be selfish and ask her to stay now??? After all that? PUH. Greygold knows responsibility sucks, but set a killer hawk free and all that. (of course I checked what's up with the other choice after the game and 'oofed' but still. PRINCIPLES. Gave myself delusional hope anyway pssh.)

[potato-lord-but-not]

you appear familiar, dear! (you look just like my bathroom mirror)

[laenaism]

it’s kind of crazy to me how often people are so quick to downplay Laenor’s father role when it comes to the velaryon boys. i know their bastardy is rumored in the book and pretty much ‘proven’ in the show (even though they don’t actually know for certain bc they can’t do a paternity test lmao), but even if they are bastards, they are still Laenor’s sons. in that case, Laenor would be their adoptive father but that wouldn’t make him any less of their father than if they were his biologically. like imagine if you said to an adopted child, “but who’s your ACTUAL father?” that would be so offensive and cruel to both the child and their father. Don’t get me wrong, they could also acknowledge Harwin as their father, which Jace does in the show, but the complete disregard of Laenor i see in this fandom is WILD! Laenor spent ten years of his life with his sons, he taught them to fish, he sang them songs, no doubt snuck them food (like cake 😉) and told them about his adventures, and yet he’s looked at as ‘inferior’ bc the velaryon boys may not be his biological children 🤨? i know he left in the show, but let’s not act like he had a true choice in the first place. if he tried to stay, no doubt he would’ve been ‘mysteriously’ killed. all of this is to say that i genuinely hope some of y’all don’t go up to adoptive children/parents and go “you’re not actually their child/parent” but i fear some of you would feel inclined to. weird.

anyways, love how fondly Jace spoke of his father Laenor in the latest episode :)

i know f&b/hotd is fictional, but it still irritates me, i needed to rant about this lmao.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Cannot Unsee. Cannot Unknow.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[starrysharks]

i am the cattt just chillin outt but in the night she's all i think aboutttt

[keepingupwiththeboltons]

Leaked promotional stills of larys and argon in season 3 (real)

Real and unedited

[woof-verine]

any woofverine songrecs

ohhhh man!

I’m interpreting this as deadpool/wolverine related recs so:

• It Will Come Back by Hozier — this is THE wolverine song. I was enlightened by @moths-obsessions and now I can’t stop playing it

• Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want by The Smiths — this is both a deadpool AND wolverine song to me, basically just about asking for something good to happen to you for once

• Kiss With a Fist by Florence and the Machine — do I even have to explain this one? it’s all in the title

• Vampire Empire by Big Thief — BIG helping of angst, filed under ‘songs about two fucked up people trying to make it work’

• Man to Man by Dorian Electra — it’s a song about fighting and kissing men, what more do you need? I know wade has this on a playlist somewhere

I have more but that would take forever so hopefully this answers your ask 😭

[purecommemasolitude]

pov you're listening to any song that has or mentions darry in a significant capacity in the outsiders musical

does the musical have flaws sure but by god misunderstanding darry curtis is not one of them

[prolibytherium]

I never touched it but I feel like i only ever hear positive things said about song of achilles.. in (rough strokes at least) what makes it dogshit to you?

Okay it's been a while since I actually read it so some of this might not be spot on accurate. Sorry if at any point I say 'the book never does xyz' and it actually does once or twice but I think my underlying criticisms are accurate

-Patroclus is made into like this soft gentle tender quivering little yaoi boy. In the source text, he's shown as compassionate and moved by the suffering of his own men (and apparently having some medical skill, tending to the wounded in the camp), but very much invested n combat and very, very good at it (pages worth of descriptions of the guys he's killing left and right). In this, the arguably more complex character from this 8th century BC text is flattened into Being A Healer, he doesn't want to go to war he just wants to help people, he only goes because Achilles has to but he doesn't want to fight he's a HEALER he's a gentle lover NOT A FIGHTER who just wants to help he just wants to help everyone around him he HEALS while Achilles is a doomed warrior who is so good at fighting and KILLING its a DICHOTOMY GUYS!!!LIKE THE BEAUTIFUL SUN AND MOON DOOMED LOVERS SO SAD patocluse HEALER . (I Think he's specifically characterized as being BAD at fighting but might be misremembering)

-I don't remember much about Achilles' characterization I think it just makes him less of a jackass while not adding anything of interest and levels out into being mad boring.

-Not getting into the literal millenias old debate whether the mythological characters Achilles and Patroclus were being characterized as some type of lover by the original oral sources of the Iliad or its Homeric writers. We will never know. We don't even know what (if any) culturally accepted conventions of male homosexuality existed in bronze age Greece (we know much more about their descendants). But there are some interesting elements of their characterization in this direction, with how unconventional their relationship is WITHIN the text itself- Patroclus is described as cooking for Achilles and his guests (very specifically a woman/wife's job), Achilles chides Patroclus like a father, but there's also scene where Achilles' mourning of him directly echoes a passage of Hector's wife mourning her husband, Patroclus is explicitly stated to Achilles' elder, and is overall treated as his equal or near-equal, closest confidant and most beloved friend (to the point that pederastic classical Greeks would debate over who was erastes (older authority figure lover) and who was eromenos (adolescent 'beloved')- many took it as a given that this text depicted their present-day cultural norms of homosexual behavior but it existed so Outside of these norms that it had to be debated who was who). Their relationship is non-standard both within the text and to the descendants of the civilization that wrote them.

Basically what I'm saying is this book had opportunities to like, explore the unconventionality of the relationship (being presented here as explicitly lovers), explore the dynamics of why Patroclus wants to do 'women's work' (besides being a tenderhearted softboy), the weird dynamics where they take on paternal roles to each other but also roles of wives, how they feel about being this way, and just kind of Doesn't. Which I guess isn't an intrinsic fault (because it omits much of what I just talked about to begin with). it's just like.... Lame. This book takes jsut abandons everything interesting about the source text in favor of flattening it into bland Doomed Yaoi.

-The conflict that sets off the core story of the Iliad is Achilles and Agamemnon fighting over Briseis, an enslaved Trojan woman taken by Achilles as a war-trophy, Achilles spends most of the story moping because he was dishonored by his 'trophy' being taken. Achilles and Patroclus and everyone else are raping their captives, all the women in the story are either captured Trojans (or in the case of the free women within the walls of Troy, soon to be enslaved, and are slave owners themselves). Slavery as an institution and extreme patriarchal conventions are innate to the text and reflective of the context in which it was developed. You cannot avoid it.

But obviously you can't have your soft yaoi boys doing this, so the author has them capturing women to Protect Them from the other men. Their slaves are UNDER THEIR PROTECTION and VERY SAFE (and they might even Like And Befriend Them but I might be misremembering that. Briseis does though). Our heroes have apparently absorbed none of the ideals of the culture they exist in and the author seems to think "they're gay and aren't sexually attracted to their captives" would translate to them being outright benevolent (also as if wartime sexual violence is just about attraction and not part of a wider spectrum of violent acts to dehumanize and brutalize an accepted 'enemy')

In the source text, Briseis mourns Patroclus as being the kindest to her of her captors, who tried to get her a slightly better outcome by getting her married to Achilles (which probably would be the Least Bad of all possible outcomes for a woman in that situation, becoming a legal wife instead of a slave), and wonders what will happen to her now that he's gone. This is a really really sad, horrible, and compelling dynamic which could be fleshed out in very interesting ways but is instead is tossed entirely aside in favor of them being Besties. Like brother and sister.

All of the above pisses me off so much. If you don't want to engage in the icky parts of ancient/bronze age Greece then don't write a retelling of a story taking place in bronze age Greece. I'm not gonna get mad at children's adaptations of Greek myths or silly fun stories loosely based on them for omitting the rape and slavery but it is SO fundamental to the Iliad. If you're not willing to handle it, either fully omit it or better yet set your Iliad inspired yaoi in an invented swords-and-sandals setting where you can have all your heartbreaking tragic doomed lovers plot beats and not have to clumsily write around the women they're brutalizing.

-The author didn't seem to know what to do with Thetis and she made her just like, Achilles bitch mother who spends most of the story trying to separate our Yaoi Boys (iirc her disguising Achilles as a girl and hiding him on Scyros is made to be more about getting him away from Patroclus than trying to save her son from his prophesied doom in the Trojan War) until she sees how much they loooove each other and I think helps Patroclus' spirit get to the afterlife or something in the end?

-This is more of a personal taste gripe but it has that writing style I loathe where the prose feels less like a story and more like an attempt to string together Deep Beautiful Hard Hitting Poetic Lines that will look great as excerpts on booktok (might predate booktok but same vibe). It's all very Pretty and Haunting and Deep but feels devoid of real substance.

I really like The Iliad and The Odyssey in of themselves. They're fascinating historical texts that give a window into how 8th century BC Greeks told their stories, saw their world, interpreted their ancestors, etc. And genuinely I think these texts have 'good' characters, there's a lot of complexity and humanity to it.

WRT the Iliad- all of the main Achaeans are pretty fascinating, the one singular part where Briseis Gets To Talk and laments her situation is great, Achilles fantasizing that all of the Trojans AND the Achaeans die so he and Patroclus alone can have the glory of conquering Troy (wild), Achilles asking to embrace Patroclus' shade and reaching out for him but it's immaterial (and the shade being sucked back underground with a 'squeak' (the squeak kinda gets me it's disturbing and sad)), Hecuba talking about wanting to tear out Achilles' liver and eat it in a (taboo, exceptioally pointed) expression of rage and grief for his mutilation of her son's corpse, just one tiny line where the enslaved women performing ritual wailing for their dead captors are described as using it as an outlet to 'grieve for their own troubles' is heartrending, etc. A lot of grappling with anger and grief and the inevitability of death, a lot of groundwork laid for characters that could be very interesting when expanded upon in the framework of a conventional novel.

And Song Of Achilles really doesn't do much with all that. I know a lot of my gripes here are kind of just "It's different from the Iliad", I would have thought of it as mostly mediocre and forgettable rather than infuriating if it wasn't a retelling (and I DEFINITELY have strong biases here). But I think the ways in which it is different are less just a product of a retelling (of course there's going to be omissions and differences) and more a complete and utter disinterest in vast majority of its own subject matter, to the book's detriment. I think a retelling has a point when it EXPANDS on the source, or provides a NEW ANGLE to the source. This book doesn't Really do either, it just shaves off the complexity of its source material, renders the characters into a really boring archetype of a gay relationship, and gives very little else. Its content boils down to a middling tragic romance that has been inserted into the hollowed out defleshed skeleton of the Iliad.

Bottom line: I definitely would not be as mad about it if I wasn't familiar with the source material but I think it's fair to expect a retelling to Engage with/expand on its source, and I also think it's weak purely on its own merits. This book was set up to disappoint Me specifically.

[smoothshine]

𝘔𝘺 𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘯𝘦, 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘪𝘷𝘺 𝘨𝘳𝘰𝘸𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘯𝘰𝘸 𝘐'𝘮 𝘤𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘺𝘰𝘶

[madaqueue]

currently yearning in a way only boys can

[qilingxiong]

it's so fascinating to read someone's work when they write like they're writing a film. by which i don't mean that the narrative reads like a script, but that their descriptions and transitions and imagery essentially function as storyboards. you can easily imagine where shots would be divided up, and who/where a camera would cut to at a certain moment. the way the work has its greatest impact is when you translate the words to film atmosphere and action in your head. it's startling how visually/viscerally someone can write when they've settled into that style and i wish i could write like that