#they are telling an epic love story

[stagefoureddiediaz]

Just thinking about the universe and catalysts and paths diverging so you can learn and grow before merging again!

Eddie got buried under 40feet of mud and had to take a different route to get back to the surface (even ground)- he was buried under his trauma and couldn’t get out by going back the way he came so he had to forge a new path. Which we then saw him do through seasons 4 and 5.

Then there’s Buck climbing that crane after Eddie got shot but metaphorically speaking, he never came back down. The idea of detachment from the world - you can still see it and you’re still part of it, but you’re not actively participating in it (Which is also a metaphor for donor not dad!). It connects in really interestingly with touch points of Bucks storyline since the well - his searching for something (a way down) while we keep seeing scenes happening involving height/ high things - the train rescue, then he met Abby on a hill overlooking the city (the same metaphor)blimps, walkways collapsing, the fact we’ve been out on bucks balcony a few times even the fact we’ve seen the firefam up on the roof of the firehouse!

It’s so interesting how the two arcs are paralleling each other and counterbalancing each other at key points - starting from the well. It’s the same trigger points for them both and how Buck tried to dig to get to Eddie but couldn’t because Eddie needed to find his own way back to the ground, and how Eddie is going to try to get to Buck but won’t be able to, because Buck needs to find his own way down (by this I mean separate from Eddie as if he’s in a coma he won’t be getting down on his own in the literal sense!)

It also therefore stands to reason that the flashbacks (or coma dream for Buck) will counter balance each other as well. Eddie’s flashbacks showed him his family - the one he was building and made him realise that Buck is a central part of that and I would argue, allowed him to recognise and accept that Shannon, whilst an important relationship in his life and someone he loved, was also toxic for him and that he could put that part of his life to rest. Bucks coma dream will conversely (most likely as we don’t actually know at this point) show him what life would be like without Eddie and Chris in it (fully expecting 6x11 to be an Eddie free episode because his absence is more telling and important then his presence!) and how what he thinks he wants and what he actually wants (and is already on his way to getting) are two different things - that the fantasy childhood he’s been dreaming of wouldn’t necessarily lead him to a happy adult life - that what he has fought to build is far better.

The universe is taking matters into its own hands to get him down - it might have been happy to let Eddie take a longer route to get back to the ground, because Eddie was making progress but Buck has been stuck in the air ultimately in stasis so it’s going to be a quicker route to the ground as it just shocks (literally and metaphorically) him into action and to getting back to the ground.

We’re so close to them both being in the same place at the same time that I’m vibrating at the epic story unfolding

[o3o-lapd-o3o]

odysseus is a better person than me...

because if the person/woman/goddess who had me trapped & under her control for 7 years, and was forcing onto me a one-sided relationship (even though she knew from day 1, that i had a wife called penelope, who i cried for every day at the beach for those 7 years)

was then crying about being "not sorry for loving you" and trying to justify her actions in keeping me prisoner (you can't convince me she wasn't)

my response to my LIE (she asked him to lie don't forget) saying "i love you" and her responding "you do?"

it certainly wouldn't be "but not in the way you want me to"

it would be "HADES NO, YOU DERANGED ASS MANIPULATIVE HARPY"

before swiftly grabbing my stuff, jumping onto my raft and sailing away as quick as i can (while totally not giving her the ancient greek equivalent of a middle finger)

but that's just me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[rillils]

Oh, my love when will you come to look for me?

Tom McRae, Still lost | @catws-anniversary

[wowsosad]

Tw/Cw: Grooming behaviors, feminization, John is a bad parent and Dean is an even worse brother, Transfem!Sam Winchester

Transfem Sam but in the sense that John allowed Dean to treat Sam like a younger sister, because otherwise Dean would get angry and give everyone a fuming silent treatment for months on end. Sammy being the little sister, wearing thrifted pink skirts and dresses, never cutting her hair, painting her nails. She’d pitch her voice up “cus otherwise De gets weird”, and wear panties and bras even though she could tell she was growing up to look like Dean and John, her facial features sharpening and shoulders broadening.

Sam breaking out of the mould when he’s fifteen, when he can’t pass in school anymore, having a panic attack when Dean and John are out on a hunt. They come back to Sam’s hair short and choppy, piles of brown hair (long, it used to be so long, down to his tailbone) in the motel’s bathroom trashcan. Dean doesn’t speak a single word for over three months.

Transfem Sam finally getting to be A Boy at Stanford, having male friends and wearing male clothes and doing Male Things, though he can’t help his eyes from lingering on Jess’s underwear. He sticks to softer colors, purples and pinks and light greens, and frequently finds himself in the women’s section in clothing stores without even realizing it. He cut his hair so short when he first started college, but he feels naked and cold without it on his neck, over his forehead, covering his ears, so he grows it out again. He keeps his face shaved, shaves his legs and his armpits and his chest, all too aware of when his body hair touches his clothes.

Dean comes, Jess dies, they’re back on the road, and Sam hasn’t been Sammy in nearly four years. In the Impala, driving down some no-name highway to their next hunt, Dean reaches over to cradle the back of Sam’s neck, and murmurs “I missed you, sweet girl.”

Sam wilts, then Sammy straightens up, and turns her head towards Dean’s hand with a hum.

“I missed you too, De.”

[sirjo-esque]

Okay I think that one thing we're really not talking about is how Telemachus adds something to the end of each song, the exact moment we think it's over.

"If I fight those monsters, is it you I'll find? or "Tell me Athena why you came to my aid"

He's setting up for the next song, telling us that there's still more to it. In the Wisdom Saga, he figuratively acts as a reprise to Odysseus, through his relationship with Athena and the riffs Jay pointed out in We'll Be Fine.

That's why I think it's especially important that in We'll Be Fine, Athena is the one adding to the end of the song.

"You're a good kid."

Though Telemachus technically has the last line there too, it's not one that provokes action. Instead Athena adds a line, which in theory didn't need to be there. In all technicality, the song had ended. The next song, she takes action.

She's giving herself a reprise. A second chance.

[midnight-drip]

i look into your eyes, and i

think back to a friend of mine

you're as old as he was

when we left for war

[dootznbootz]

Jay understands Odysseus so well and it's fucking fantastic. He knows that every Epic the Musical saga needs to have at least ONE song of Odysseus rambling about his family or then that's not Odysseus 😤

[completelymindfucked]

They wrote these while Sam was at Stanford you can’t tell me otherwise.

[greenerteacups]

oooh please someday tell us what you think of GOT

oh, no, it's my fatal weakness! it's [checks notes] literally just the bare modicum of temptation! okay you got me.

SO. in order to tell what's wrong with game of thrones you kind of have to have read the books, because the books are the reason the show goes off the rails. i actually blame the showrunners relatively little in proportion to GRRM for how bad the show was (which I'm not gonna rehash here because if you're interested in GOT in any capacity you've already seen that horse flogged to death). people debate when GOT "got bad" in terms of writing, but regardless of when you think it dropped off, everyone agrees the quality declined sharply in season 8, and to a certain extent, season 7. these are the seasons that are more or less entirely spun from whole cloth, because season 7 marks the beginning of what will, if we ever see it, be the Winds of Winter storyline. it's the first part that isn't based on a book by George R.R. Martin. it's said that he gave the showrunners plot outlines, but we don't know how detailed they were, or how much the writers diverged from the blueprint — and honestly, considering the cumulative changes made to the story by that point, some stark divergence would have been required. (there's a reason for this. i'll get there in a sec.)

so far, i'm not saying anything all that original. a lot of people recognized how bad the show got as soon as they ran out of Book to adapt. (I think it's kind of weird that they agreed to make a show about an unfinished series in the first place — did GRRM figure that this was his one shot at a really good HBO adaptation, and forego misgivings about his ability to write two full books in however many years it took to adapt? did he think they would wait for him? did he not care that the series would eventually spoil his magnum opus, which he's spent the last three decades of his life writing? perplexing.) but the more interesting question is why the show got bad once it ran out of Book, because in my mind, that's not a given. a lot of great shows depart from the books they were based on. fanfiction does exactly that, all the time! if you have good writers who understand the characters they're working with, departure means a different story, not a worse one. now, the natural reply would be to say that the writers of GOT just aren't good, or at least aren't good at the things that make for great television, and that's why they needed the books as a structure, but I don't think that's true or fair, either. books and television are very different things. the pacing of a book is totally different from the pacing of a television show, and even an episodic book like ASOIAF is going to need a lot of work before it's remotely watchable as a series. bad writers cannot make great series of television, regardless of how good their source material is. sure, they didn't invent the characters of tyrion lannister and daenerys targaryen, but they sure as hell understood story structure well enough to write a damn compelling season of TV about them!

so but then: what gives? i actually do think it's a problem with the books! the show starts out as very faithful to the early books (namely, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings) to the point that most plotlines are copied beat-for-beat. the story is constructed a little differently, and it's definitely condensed, but the meat is still there. and not surprisingly, the early books in ASOIAF are very tightly written. for how long they are, you wouldn't expect it, but on every page of those books, the plot is racing. you can practically watch george trying to beat the fucking clock. and he does! useful context here is that he originally thought GOT was going to be a trilogy, and so the scope of most threads in the first book or two would have been much smaller. it also helps that the first three books are in some respects self-contained stories. the first book is a mystery, the second and third are espionage and war dramas — and they're kept tight in order to serve those respective plots.

the trouble begins with A Feast for Crows, and arguably A Storm of Swords, because GRRM starts multiplying plotlines and treating the series as a story, rather than each individual book. he also massively underestimated the number of pages it would take him to get through certain plot beats — an assumption whose foundation is unclear, because from a reader's standpoint, there is a fucke tonne of shit in Feast and Dance that's spurious. I'm not talking about Brienne's Riverlands storyline (which I adore thematically but speaking honestly should have been its own novella, not a part of Feast proper). I'm talking about whole chapters where Tyrion is sitting on his ass in the river, just talking to people. (will I eat crow about this if these pay off in hugely satisfying ways in Winds or Dream? oh, totally. my brothers, i will gorge myself on sweet sweet corvid. i will wear a dunce cap in the square, and gleefully, if these turn out to not have been wastes of time. the fact that i am writing this means i am willing to stake a non-negligible amount of pride on the prediction that that will not happen). I'm talking about scenes where the characters stare at each other and talk idly about things that have already happened while the author describes things we already have seen in excruciating detail. i'm talking about threads that, while forgivable in a different novel, are unforgivable in this one, because you are neglecting your main characters and their story. and don't tell me you think that a day-by-day account tyrion's river cruise is necessary to telling his story, because in the count of monte cristo, the main guy disappears for nine years and comes hurtling back into the story as a vengeful aristocrat! and while time jumps like that don't work for everything, they certainly do work if what you're talking about isn't a major story thread!

now put aside whether or not all these meandering, unconcluded threads are enjoyable to read (as, in fairness, they often are!). think about them as if you're a tv showrunner. these bad boys are your worst nightmare. because while you know the author put them in for a reason, you haven't read the conclusion to the arc, so you don't know what that reason is. and even if the author tells you in broad strokes how things are going to end for any particular character (and this is a big "if," because GRRM's whole style is that he lets plots "develop as he goes," so I'm not actually convinced that he does have endings written out for most major characters), that still doesn't help you get them from point A (meandering storyline) to point B (actual conclusion). oh, and by the way, you have under a year to write this full season of television, while GRRM has been thinking about how to end the books for at least 10. all of this means you have to basically call an audible on whether or not certain arcs are going to pay off, and, if they are, whether they make for good television, and hence are worth writing. and you have to do that for every. single. unfinished. story. in the books.

here's an example: in the books, Quentin Martell goes on a quest to marry Daenerys and gain a dragon. many chapters are spent detailing this quest. spoiler alert: he fails, and he gets charbroiled by dragons. GRRM includes this plot to set up the actions of House Martell in Winds, but the problem is that we don't know what House Martell does in Winds, because (see above) the book DNE. So, although we can reliably bet that the showrunners understand (1) Daenerys is coming to Westeros with her 3 fantasy nukes, and (2) at some point they're gonna have to deal with the invasion of frozombies from Canada, that DOESN'T mean they necessarily know exactly what's going to happen to Dorne, or House Martell. i mean, fuck! we don't even know if Martin knows what's going to happen to Dorne or House Martell, because he's said he's the kind of writer who doesn't set shit out beforehand! so for every "Cersei defaults on millions of dragons in loans from the notorious Bank of Nobody Fucks With Us, assumes this will have no repercussions for her reign or Westerosi politics in general" plotline — which might as well have a big glaring THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT stamp on top of the chapter heading — you have Arianne Martell trying to do a coup/parent trap switcheroo with Myrcella, or Euron the Goffick Antichrist, or Faegon Targaryen and JonCon preparing a Blackfyre restoration, or anything else that might pan out — but might not! And while that uncertainty about what's important to the "overall story" might be a realistic way of depicting human beings in a world ruled by chance and not Destiny, it makes for much better reading than viewing, because Game of Thrones as a fantasy television series was based on the first three books, which are much more traditional "there is a plot and main characters and you can generally tell who they are" kind of book. I see Feast and Dance as a kind of soft reboot for the series in this respect, because they recenter the story around a much larger cast and cast a much broader net in terms of which characters "deserve" narrative attention.

but if you're making a season of television, you can't do that, because you've already set up the basic premise and pacing of your story, and you can't suddenly pivot into a long-form tone poem about the horrors of war. so you have to cut something. but what are you gonna cut? bear in mind that you can't just Forget About Dorne, or the Iron Islands, or the Vale, or the North, or pretty much any region of the story, because it's all interconnected, but to fit in everything from the books would require pacing of the sort that no reasonable audience would ever tolerate. and bear in mind that the later books sprout a lot more of these baby-plots that could go somewhere, but also might end up being secondary or tertiary to the "main story," which, at the end of the day, is about dragons and ice zombies and the rot at the heart of the feudal power system glorified in classical fantasy. that's the story that you as the showrunner absolutely must give them an end to, and that's the story that should be your priority 1.

so you do a hack and slash job, and you mortar over whatever you cut out with storylines that you cook up yourself, but you can't go too far afield, because you still need all the characters more or less in place for the final showdown. so you pinch here and push credulity there, and you do your best to put the characters in more or less the same place they would have been if you kept the original, but on a shorter timeframe. and is it as good as the first seasons? of course not! because the material that you have is not suited to TV like the first seasons are. and not only that, but you are now working with source material that is actively fighting your attempt to constrain a linear and well-paced narrative on it. the text that you're working with changed structure when you weren't looking, and now you have to find some way to shanghai this new sprawling behemoth of a Thing into a television show. oh, and by the way, don't think that the (living) author of the source material will be any help with this, because even though he's got years of experience working in television writing, he doesn't actually know how all of these threads will tie together, which is possibly the reason that the next book has taken over 8 years (now 13 and counting) to write. oh and also, your showrunners are sick of this (in fairness, very difficult) job and they want to go write for star wars instead, so they've refused the extra time the studio offered them for pre-production and pushed through a bunch of first-draft scripts, creating a crunch culture of the type that spawns entirely avoidable mistakes, like, say, some poor set designer leaving a starbucks cup in frame.

anyway, that's what I think went wrong with game of thrones.

[valarinde]

“[The Wood-elves] differed from the High Elves of the West, and were more dangerous and less wise. For most of them were descended from the ancient tribes that never went to Faerie in the West. There the Light-elves and the Deep-elves and the Sea-elves went and lived for ages, and grew fairer and wiser and more learned, and invented their magic and their cunning craft in the making of beautiful and marvellous things, before some came back into the Wide World. In the Wide World the Wood-elves lingered in the twilight of our Sun and Moon, but loved best the stars; and they wandered in the great forests that grew tall in lands that are now lost. They dwelt most often by the edges of the woods, from which they could escape at times to hunt, or to ride and run over the open lands by moonlight or starlight; and after the coming of Men they took ever more and more to the gloaming and the dusk.”

The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien

[smutslutartblog]

if i close my eyes maybe i'll see you there one more time...

[2129888]

i don't remember how i stumbled across this interview but i've never seen anyone mention it so i'm dropping it here <3 it's a little dated but still like super valuable and a decently in depth look at higuchi-sensei's previous works and how she works and thinks as a mangaka... personally i think it's the most i've ever learned from an interview of hers. super interesting stuff :0)

[novasjaneway]

Star Trek: Voyager - Nara (J/7)

[schrodingerseurydice]

i like that the longer odysseus is on his journey the more he begins to think and act like a god

polites is like his connection with humanity (treat the world with open arms) while athena tries to convince him to prioritize strategy and long-term goals, and after polites dies he begins to act more like a "monster" (god) as poseidon teaches him that "ruthlessness is mercy"

i ALSO think it's interesting how when odysseus gets to ithaca, he's going to kill all the men who endangered his wife and son, in an exact parallel to how zeus and poseidon tried to destroy HIM for endangering/angering THEIR sons

odysseus really is the man, the myth, the monster... and the god

[sexy-sapphic-sorcerer]

"But the reason why we retell the tales over and over is to create hope. We keep these themes and characters alive because we need them, because we need to make sense of what is happening and what needs to happen in our lives, and what better way to do that than with grand, tragic characters who already make sense to us? They explain the world to us and inspire us to keep going even though a happy ending may not be possible (Gilgamesh) and maybe because a happy ending may not be possible yet (Arthur).

“When Albion’s need is greatest,” Kilgharrah says in the last episode of Merlin, “Arthur will rise again.”

And he has risen when we needed him most. Multiple times. We were even the ones doing the resurrecting."

[guardian-angle22]

Paul Strickland in 9-1-1: Lone Star | Season 4 First Look