#they died in that lake for some homoerotic reason

[crowchemicals]

girl ghosts

[allgremlinart]

haiiiiii friend can you explain jianzhu to me I keep seeing you post about them and I’m nosy and wanna know (<- stopped watching atla bc I realized zutara was never gonna be canon)

also jetko. can you explain jetko too (I’m thinking they’re more on the ghostbat spectrum where it’s like. intense friendship that left both emotionally scarred for the rest of their lives)

TEEHEE HEEHE HEE <- me when I get the opportunity to explain/infodump cross-fandom stuff to mutuals

ok so Jianzhu... ahhh Jianzhu... ((SPOILERS for anyone reading the Kyoshi novels))

This is Jianzhu and also like... probably one of maybe 4 canon images/art there is of him... he's not from the original cartoon he's from the Avatar Kyoshi spin-off novels that take place abt 400 yrs before the events of the show (idk how much you know abt atla lore from osmosis so this might get a little tedious? I'm just gonna explain as succinctly as possible.)

To be brief, he's a cunty old man. But unlike when I call, say, Minhkhoa a cunty old man it's not really loving ... its more like... I love to hate him. He's a REALLY good villain.

He's a politician. He made 500 people dig their own graves and then buried them alive. He beheaded his friend of like 20+ years. He drugs and kidnaps teenagers. etc. It's great.

His whole character arc is like... He's in control. You start off the book and he is very clearly in control, and he knows what he's doing, and he even sounds halfway reasonable sometimes but over the course of the novel he gets more and more desperate to grab hold of a situation that spirals wildly away from him and you get to watch it happen. His justifications for his actions get crazier, he gets sloppier and sloppier with his murders....

OH also you know how sometimes people think Bruce is some callous asshole who was only using his adoptive son who worshipped him as a weapon, and when he died he quickly sought to replace him without remorse ? Yeah he's like that but. Like actually this time. His dead adoptive son also then comes back after eating an eyeball in the spirit world (idk) and kills him by pressing a pebble through his sternum so. More successful than Jason at patricide I'd say. Look there's a lot I didn't cover, here's his wiki.

ok Jetko... ah... the ancient yaoi..

Important required reading before I explain this ship is this post. What you have to understand about Zuko is that for basically like... 40 episodes the only person he shares significant screen time with is his uncle so when him and Jet met in s2 and had a decent 3 episodes worth of interactions ... it was enough, lets just say that.

The basic Jetko timeline is they meet on a ferry while Zuko and his Uncle are disguised as refugees and they steal food together -> Jet tries to get Zuko (who he only ever knows as "Li") to join his emo band gang which Zuko refuses -> Jet sees Uncle Warcrimes heating his tea and correctly deduces that they are firebenders (ie not who they say they are; the enemy) -> Zuko and his Uncle work in a tea shop while Jet stalks them and steals things from their house and watches them from behind clotheslines (yeah) -> Jet confronts them in the teashop, sword fight, Jet gets arrested and brainwashed by the secret police (yeah) -> Jet dies under a lake which Zuko only finds out about a season later.

So they never had the 4 years of intense homoerotic cohabitation that ghostbat had,.. their chemistry and potential are pretty much instigated by a few of Jet's weird intense lines, such as "As soon as I saw your scar I knew exactly who you were - you're an outcast, like me." And the crux of the ship is like.. Jet both does and doesn't know who Zuko is.

He knows he is also angry and restless, like himself - he knows he is running from his past, like himself - and he knows he is going to Ba Sing Se to create a new identity. These things are all true, for both of them; what Jet doesn't know is that Zuko is from the imperialist nation that brutally murdered his parents and invaded his home and he incorrectly assumes that the anger he recognizes in Zuko stems from the same need to enact violence on those who have taken everything from him.

So I guess the "thought you were exactly like me but then I found out you're not which enrages and humiliates me so know I'm going to beat the shit out of you" thing from BTK no. 6 is something they share with ghostbat but.. Jet's anger is probably a little more justified than Minhkhoa's lol...

In conclusion it's your basic "doomed relationship/they work great together but that doesn't fix anything" ship premise. It used to be more popular back in the day... pretty sure I owe my life to maybe 3 different Taiwanese/Chinese doujin artists from 2009... yeah that's the gist of it.

[tillman]

Hi, it's Valentine, back with another essay on Lancelot again. I’m deranged and you all have to accept this. Anyways this ones been a long time coming mostly because i'm lazy and only now had some free time to sit down and delve into so many sources to find quotes and proof for the main claim of this post: Mr Lancelot du Lac is an autistic man. Hes also trans and gay and i have proof for both of those (one is literally not even subtext) but those are for different essays. 

Anyways to start off with some smaller bits I wanna at least mention the history connecting autistic people with changelings or fae. The idea of a normal seeming child being “replaced” by something not entirely human to explain neurological differences has been around for a while and can tie in with a lot of autistic people's feelings of being different or completely disconnected from those around them. Thematically all of this ties in with Lancelot’s narrative of being “stolen away” by a fae as a child and coming back different. He grew up in a realm of fairies, and Chrétien de Troyes in Knight of the Cart, which may be the first story about Lancelot, simply calls his mother who in later texts grows to be the Lady of the Lake, “a fairy.” Another smaller point is Lancelot tends to go nonverbal when he gets extremely upset which is neat! One bit i can’t get a quote for (vulgate pdf when) is after Galehaut’s death, he locks up completely and his mother, the Lady, who is wonderful and perfect, explains the situation for him. You could also look at all the times Lancelot runs off into the woods and refuses to speak for a while for more proof of that. He does this a lot. It's just a thing people expect from him.

Anyways, I wanna talk about Lancelot’s inability to comprehend emotions or communication in general. Please, I've been dying to talk about Lancelot’s issues with communication for days. God he has them and I can relate so hard. Covering the dutch prose first just look at the story of the hart with the white foot. A lady comes to court talking about how whatever knight will get the foot of his hart will get her hand in marriage. Lancelot actually ends up missing the lady speak about what will happen, and after hearing Kay fail to do it, declares hell go after this hart instead. "When he heard this account / he spoke impetuously: / "By my faith, I fully intend / to follow this little dog.” He doesn’t think it though, he doesn't really know what he's getting into, Lancelot is just a yes man who likes doing knightly deeds. He has to in the end be rescued twice by Gawain, one from his fucking up while hunting the hart, and the other by accidently leading a lady on thinking that he’ll marry her, something Gawain negotiates Lancelot out of. Moving onto not the dutch prose since i just spent 3 hours reading up on it, let's move onto le morte.

Malory pulls a lot from the french sources, and i'll talk about what he left out in a sec cus . god. But I mostly want to touch on his relationship with two of the people he’s closest to, those being Guenevere and Gawain. Guenevere is a very weird case considering her literal emotional manipulation of him in moments he is very vulnerable and just how not great she is to him in general but his take on their relationship is honestly pretty easy to pin down. Lancelot honestly idolizes Guenevere, as his queen, as his lady, as a person who showed him basic respect when he first came to court. He has the mindset that a knight should love and do anything for his lady, and after Guenevere knights him really without any thought to what she was doing, he decided he would do anything for her. The vulgate does a better job dealing with their relationship through the mediator figure of Galehaut who is a whole other bag of worms, but Guenevere mostly indulges him for the fun of it. She sees that he’s a young knight who’s willing to die for her and uses this to her advantage politically and for other reasons. This constantly goes over Lancelot's head, until towards the end of le morte where he finally realizes how much he suffers for this relationship while she doesn't even care, “This is not the first time, said Sir Launcelot, that ye had been displeased with me causeless, but, madam, ever I must suffer you, but what sorrow I endure I take no force.” He resigns himself to put up with a relationship he admits is actively hurting him because he believes it’s love, and as a good knight, he should love his lady. His relationship with Gawain is less dicey, and more him constantly not getting Gawain’s implications. He admits to his love of Gawain only during their war saying in the vulgate, “But he will never be able to hate me so much that I stop loving him." Like. bold of him to just ignore all of Gawains previous advances until theyre in a life or death war. Bro accept your homoerotic rivals and move on already. 

Another casualty from Lancelot not realizing emotional connotations until too late is Galehaut, who literally dies of longing over the knight. Like Elaine of Astolat but worse because Galehauts just genuinely one of the best people in Arthurian literature. He doesn’t realize until too late that the person who actually loves him is the one willing to do anything for him, and ends up almost killing himself over Galehauts death. I have too much to say on that and it's not relevant to anything in this essay but god know i yearn over them all the time. 

Other thing is Lancelot has a lot of struggle with mental health anyways,  he really just truly is traumatized and that’s kinda fucked. He has a lot of problems with depression and poor coping mechanisms. I mean his main coping mechanism is falling asleep instead of dealing with the issues. That's not completely on topic but it's a big mood and ties in vaguely and also i don't have any other way to end this. There are way more bits to add but i am falling asleep at my desk and need to get lunch before it gets too late. Anyways this is probably not great i wrote this in 4 hours directly after waking up at 12 and spent 2 of those hours reading literary essays on the dutch romances. GOOD NIGHT . 

[themauvesoul]

what's your current project 👀👀👀

Aldndkdmdmslck love how ur pretending I DONT text u details every time I sit down to write it

Anyways, for everyone who is NOT dating me: I have a favorite Greek myth. In it, Athena is sent to go train with nymphs at lake tritonis right after she’s born for Plot Reasons. So she goes to the lake and fights a bunch of ppl and generally has a good time. Pallas is a nymph at the lake. She also happens to be the best at fighting, so naturally, she and Athena r instantly besties. They chill together, have homoerotic fights together, etc. After a while Zeus decides to check in on Athena and like. See how she’s adjusting to life outside of his Horrible Skull. He sees Pallas and Athena fighting, and gasp! They look like they’re going to kill each other!!! Now sources kinda vary for this part: some ppl say he had the aegis, aka the shield that has Medusa’s head on it, and some ppl say he just redirected sunlight somehow, but he successfully distracts Pallas, saving his daughter!! Only, Athena goes HARD when she fights, so when Pallas is distracted, Athena kinda sorta accidentally stabs her. And then Pallas dies.

I wrote a gay version of this for a prose workshop last semester. It’s got all the good shit: homoerotic fight scenes, oblivious pining, posthumous love confessions, and ur typical tragic ending. This is, after all, still a Greek myth. I felt like. Rlly bad abt it tho. I didn’t WANT to bury Pallas. So I’m writing a sequel!!!

The sequel is. A trip. Literally. Athena goes down to the underworld to beg hades for the right to take pallas’s soul out of the underworld. He agrees, with a couple of conditions. First, Athena has to carry Pallas the whole way out. If any part of Pallas touches the ground, even for a moment, Pallas goes back to the underworld. Second, Athena cannot stop at any point along the way. If she does, same thing. So Athena is giving Pallas a piggyback ride up a very long flight of stairs. Eventually, Athena learns abt the Twist: Pallas is literally getting heavier as they go, and Athena may be a god, but there’s only so much she can carry before her body literally gives out. If this sounds familiar to u, congrats!! U noticed I’m referencing Orpheus and Eurydice!!! My second favorite myth!!!

The original retelling I wrote was from pallas’s perspective, so the sequel is through Athena’s!! It’s told in alternating present tense and past tense confessions/flashbacks!!! It’s v tender and soft and I have Everything Must Be Poetic disease so it sounds like a big long prose poem when u read it!!! It’s also incredibly sad and makes my heart hurt but that’s ok!!! This one has comfort this time!!!!!

I think the thing I’m proudest of is Pallas getting heavier as Athena carries her. It’s abt the literal manifestation of the guilt Athena feels over killing Pallas babey!!!!I’m hoping I’ll have it done by the end of the summer, but idk if I can like. Post it on here. I’m already at 4k elemdmdmcmdmcksn

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

everything i know about lancelot du lac or at least all the stuff that seems immediately relevant to questions i’ve been asked recently idk

so i often say that lancelot du lac is my favourite lancelot text because it has the most lancelot/galehaut content, but it’s actually a surprisingly overlooked text

well, maybe that’s not surprising -- the translation i have is now out of print and i had to work pretty hard to track down a secondhand copy at a reasonable price, so clearly someone at oxford world’s classics doesn’t want people out there to have the joy of gay arthurian stuff, idk

anyway, in response to a question on another post, here is everything i know about lancelot du lac’s age and provenance

i’m taking this primarily from the introduction to corin corley’s translation, because as i have mentioned, my own lecture/essay notes are terrible

lancelot du lac was written in french and in prose early in the thirteenth century by an unknown and unnamed author

it takes his story from his childhood with the lady of the lake up to the point where galehaut dies

it represents the ‘first stage in the devoplment of the great lancelot-grail prose cycle’, while also having its roots in twelfth-century arthurian tradition. i.e. it’s kind of separate / pre-cycle but then parts of it get developed and become that lancelot-grail stuff, i think

it has ‘a coherent structure of its own in medieval terms, but it is also presented as part of a wider arthurian tradition’

but it looks back at chrétien more than forward to grail/galahad stuff (it refers to perceval as grail-winner as though that’s already happened). merlin is also seen as a figure of the past

corley’s translation doesn’t cover the entirety of elspeth kennedy’s edition of the prose lancelot because it was too long, but it’s all the stuff that’s about lancelot, and feels fairly complete/substantial

corley doesn’t provide info about manuscripts, but i imagine kennedy does in her edition, and he gives some references for further reading. the ones in english (rather than french or german) are:

lancelot do lac: the non-cyclic old french prose romance, ed. e kennedy, 2 vols (oxford, 1980) <-- kennedy’s edition of the old french text

arthurian literature in the middle ages: a collaborative history, ed. r s loomis (oxford, 1959), especially pp. 295-318 

lancelot and the grail, elspeth kennedy (oxford, 1986)

so that’s pretty much everything i can tell you about lancelot du lac re: age and texts. it’s like... at least as old as lancelot-grail, i guess is what we can take from this.

diverging slightly from textual tradition, someone else also asked me how the gay the text actually is (since i am well-known for making things gay even when they’re only mildly homoerotic) and... well:

galehaut literally just throws over a war and surrenders because he falls in love with lancelot and doesn’t want to be his enemy and it’s adorable

he just spends the whole thing talking about how much he loves lancelot

when somebody mentions to him that they think lancelot is in love with guinevere his response is basically “lancelot in love with a WOMAN? nope i would definitely know”

to which elias is like “i mean i was more worried about the adultery but you do you”

galehaut also does help set lancelot and guinevere up tho because he knows it’s the only thing that will make lancelot happy and apparently he loves to suffer. why. why galehaut.

later, galehaut believes lancelot has died and just wastes away and dies because he can’t live in a world where lancelot isn’t alive. his tomb says that he died for love of lancelot and the wording used is the exact same used for... elaine? who also dies for love of lancelot, and if the latter’s not platonic the former can’t really be either 

so basically i think the only reason it’s not even gayer is that lancelot is an idiot who doesn’t realise galehaut is the greatest good he’s ever gonna get, leaving it all fairly one-sided. but if lancelot would stop being a disaster for one moment, who knows what would have happened!

why is every medieval irish hero i like such a disaster bi

also why are they all seventeen-year-old ‘beardless boys’

IT’S A THING