#udad penelope

[nikoisme]

udad!Penelope sketch between studying :)

[shitty-mechs-headcannons]

I don't know if I've sent this before, but, consider: Penelope (early 20s) was an Illium citizen who was deaf and when Ulysses’ Trojan Horse started going off she, unaffected by the pitch, managed to barricade herself away from the others as they went insane. Ulysses found her when they entered Illium to assess the damage and became filled with regret and decided to protect and let Penelope come with them as they left, they fell in love, and Penelope ended up terminally ill, which is when Ulysses decided to create The Vault so when she finally passed she could die there and not become part of The Acheron.

GUYS WHY ARE YOU COOKING SUCH GOOD ANGST!!!! THIS IS THE SHITTY MECHS BLOG NOT THE STELLAR 10/10 INCREDIBLE MECHS BLOG!!!!!

-Mod wil

[mechanismslorearchive]

Elysian Fields cover performed by Rachel L. Hughes (Raphaella's actor)

clipped from this Facebook livestream

[rainbowstargazerlilies]

Mechs Ships Tournament: Shipping Preliminary Round Poll 11

Propaganda:

Ashes/Brian/Ivy/Tim:

#i submitted ashes/brian/ivy/tim. i have no good propaganda. i just like them all together. they love each other in whatever kinda way you-#want. mixture rom/alt/platonic.#its just. take all the reason for the separate ships and mush them togethet#no way its gonna get anything against penelope/ulysses. but just. i need you to consider ashes/brian/ivy/tim. just think about it (tags via @majorshatterandhare)

Penelope/Ulysses:

They are so tragic, we never even learn anything about Penelope but it's so emotional and aaaaaa

justice for short king ulysses and tall queen penelope

Heracles/Therapy/Anger Management: Favoured Son

The winner of this poll will advance to the full bracket :)

[fivesevenseveneight]

she haunts the narrative. to me

[ID: Pen-on-paper lineart of Penelope from Ulysses Dies at Dawn. Penelope is a thin Black woman in her 30s or 40s. she wears small, round glasses and her hair is in thick, loose braids with two pigtails draped over her shoulders. she sits on the grass and leans against the trunk of a large oak tree. she is relaxed and reading a book. penelope is wearing a trenchcoat and a skirt that ends just above her knees. she is barefoot. she smiles softly as she studies the book. End ID]

ough for real tho i need more people to talk about penelope bc she is just so crunchy. interesting

[alukardtheabysswalker]

I find interesting the relationship (or lack thereof) that Ulysses Dies At Dawn has with The Odyssey.

For starters the name of the character, no Odysseus there, however the full album and story takes heavily from The Iliad in fact almost the same general plot and resolution, changing the political and romantic conflict to a revolutionary and still heavily political but in a different way conflict (not mention of Helen or a parallel of her at all).

So Ulysses is Ulysses and has not gone through an Odyssey yet they did spent over twenty years at war and then in regret. Original Odysseus wanted nothing more than to get back home, to his kingdom and son but mostly to his dear Penelope, a woman who did everything to wait for him, in fact what else she did was focused on making sure everything was in place for when he got back. So obviously The Mechs (in meta) wanted to avoid that stereotype (that in some ways was set by the legend of Penelope herself) but this is where we do get to how UDAD does in fact relate to The Odyssey, somewhat.

Ulysses wins the war and regrets the massacre if not outright genocide they committed so they spend a decade or more drunk, high and or fucking but no Penelope to go back to. We find out in the end is because she is dead, but for how long? When did she die?

Admittedly I haven't read all of the lore posts so this whole thing might have been answered already but when she died is important here. If she died before the war on Ilium it sets Ulysses' mind (did the people of Ilium kill her somehow?) during the war also could have affected them (did she participate?) Or was it after the war? And for how long?

The tree next to which she is buried is stated to have been a beacon of rebellion that at least Ulysses if not her as well wanted to use, long ago. That beacon, that thing it symbolizes is death. True death, death as freedom, as liberation from the oppression of The Olympians.

That is what Ulysses is after, truly, they want to return to Penelope, to reunite with her, which they can only do in death.

Their Odyssey is to die.

[differentnerddiplomatopera]

Shorter Prompts

Summary:

Ya’ll, we are a small fandom😭😭. My girlfriend is bragging about her fics getting updated every day into the thousands. Please I beg, write more. I am busy, but I will keep pumping out ideas. “Inhale” PLEASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSE WRITE MORE ODYDIO!!!!! I LOVE MY COMPLEX TOXIC, LOVE-HATE, ENEMIES AND LOVERS SHITTT. I LOVE THESE PATHETIC TRAUMATIZED MEN😭😭😭😭😭

Chapter Text

1#. Scar kissing: Diomedes used to think his scars were ugly. Penelope and Odysseus prove him wrong.

2#. Love-hate: insert “ ohh I hate that man, I hate that man. But oh Cara Mia, how I love him.”

3#. Spy AU: They get up to gay shit, confuse everyone, and blow up a highly secure facility. It was supposed to be a covert mission.

4#. They match each other’s freak. They are so weird. (You don’t who is this is, guess 😏)

5#. Athena catches them kissing. “Yay, my favorite minions are getting along.”

6#. UDAD AU: just Ulysses and Diomedes in that universe. (Both black and beautiful)

7#. Hades Game au: I don’t see any Diomedes in Hades. So take this as “Diomedes sees Melinoe, they become accustomed to each other, Diomedes tells her about Odysseus, Meli does the ship-sailing thing, and he is reunited with Odysseus AND PENELOPE, THEY ARE TOGETHER, WE DON’T FUCK WITH THAT ODYSSEUS CHEATED ON PENELOPE SHIT. ODYSSEUS LOVES HER TO DEATH, AND SHE IN TURN. ODYSSEUS DID NOT CHEATTT. Anyway. You get that. Yay

8#. Odysseus is annoying Diomedes. So Diomedes pinches him. First to get him to stop, later to watch him squirm.

9#. Odysseus and Diomedes have desperate, longing, sex. They stop the hate and just love, so much. So so much.

[gracklecracklepop]

modern UDAD headcanons

•i feel like ulysses works retail and the olympians and suits are just the really weird customers. the vault tree is a shrub in a pot in the break room given to him by penelope

•orpheus performs at goth and punk clubs as a single artist. people give him money because they feel bad.

•bonus narcissus. sometimes he shows up and does interpretive dance to whatever he sings

•heracles does boxing. i dont have much more to say here. maybe he does part time as a renfaire guy because have you been to a renfaire? bro would love being apart of the fake fights

•oedipus is just a normal doctor. he’s probably that guy in fics characters come to when they have been injured. orpheus and heracles are weirdly enough the two most common for him to see. orpheus falls off stage a weird amount of times and heracles literally fights for a living. he absolutely hates everyone.

•ariadne is in school for computer science and programming. she regularly does cybercrime for random good causes (god forbid women do anything)

[a-pile-of-contented-ravens]

The Bifrost Incident has a happy ending, actually. (sort of.)

Disclaimer- This contains spoilers for every Mechanisms album

-This only discusses lyrics, not the music itself. This is because I have no musical background.

The Mechanisms are a band known for their queer steampunk retellings of mythology and fairy tales. These retellings inevitably end in the tragic deaths of all the characters, to the extent that a song in their first album is aptly titled “no happy endings”. However, despite the dark tone of all of the Mechanisms’ stories, it is important to keep in mind that they don’t take place in an utterly hopeless universe. In the words of frontman Jonny D’ville, they just avoid telling stories with hopeful endings because “it’s boring”. Superficially, The Bifrost Incident (TBI) follows the precedent set by other Mechanisms stories - all of the characters on the Bifrost die horribly or are transformed into monsters, and Loki and Sigyn’s sacrifices only delay the destruction of the rest of the Yggdrasil system.

However, when examined more closely, TBI’s ending is by far the most optimistic of any Mechanisms album. For example, Loki and Sigyn’s deaths can be seen as a happy ending for their characters, where they are finally together again. The idea of a character’s death being a happy ending for them also appears in Ulysses Dies At Dawn (UDAD). However, for Ulysses, “thoughts of revolution are long gone”, and their death changes nothing about their world, but Sigyn leads the Midgardian resistance until her sacrifice, which allows the “fall of the old order” to take place. Ultimately, Sigyn’s mission is a success. Both Ulysses and Loki die the last natural deaths on their worlds, but while Ulysses dies alone, Loki and Sigyn can comfort each other.

Another hopeful aspect of Loki and Sigyn’s deaths is that they emphasise that they are “together”, after years forcibly separated. Similarly, in OUTIS Cinders and Rose Red finally reunite after decades apart. The characters of Rose Red and Loki have parallels, as they both worked for a dictator who later removed their autonomy and separated them from their partners. Cinders and Sigyn are both high ranking members of worlds oppressed by the government that their partners worked for, and against which they later rebel. However, in OUTIS, Rose Red is killed by the antagonist, leaving Cinders “weeping” over her body, while in TBI, Loki tells Sigyn to “shed no tears”. Another contrast between these endings is that Rose dies as soon as Cinders finds her, whilst in TBI Loki is the one to seek out Sigyn, who she asks to slowly kill her. The repetition of “this time” in TBI may reference the similar ending of OUTIS. Perhaps this suggests that Loki and Sigyn are reiterations of Rose Red and Cinders, bookending the Mechanisms’ careers. However, this time Loki takes back her autonomy by seeking out her wife and choosing her fate.

Love is a theme of every Mechanisms album. This begins in their first album, Once Upon a Time (In Space) (OUTIS), where Cinders devotes her life to finding her fiancée, and appears again in UDAD with Ulysses and Penelope. The most interesting example is Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot from High Noon Over Camelot (HNOC), whose polyamorous relationship deftly sidesteps centuries of love triangle cliches. In the climax of the album, each of them finds that, “love war[s] with greed.” They choose love and aim to rebuild their world. The Mechanisms suggest that, “just this once, there could be a happy ending”. However, the fantasy that love could save the day is ripped away in the next very line when Mordred kills Guinevere and Lancelot and destroys Fort Gallfridean. This story is in conversation with the Mechanisms previous albums, as shown by the reference to the song “No Happy Endings”, but the impact of that is undercut by its ending, which is as hopeless as ever. This contrasts with TBI, where Loki finds Sigyn “for love”, and the message is that love can be an effective force for good. The real genius of TBI is in creating a story which manages the expectations for a tragic ending established by other Mechanisms albums while also featuring optimistic themes and showing real change for good.

[yourlocalmechanism-dr-carmilla]

When ulysses dies at dawn or smth idk

I PROJECTED MY CANE ONTO ULYSSES AAND I LOVE IT! in general i am rather pleased with how this came out :3

(Imagine if he and epic musical odysseus would meet- considering udad penelope is dead

[twentysidednerd]

this post is gonna sound like a broken record but i just find it so POWERFUL how Ulysses Dies at Dawn ends the way it does. not just in the sense of “oh the mechanisms always end their albums with pretty much everyone dead and the whole situation is hopeless” but in the sense that the City is meant to chew everyone except the Olympians up and spit them out and Ulysses gets the ending they do.

yes, they’ve been messed up by the war with Ilium and the circumstances of the City but in the end, they aren’t condemned to the hell of the Acheron. they aren���t condemned to watch the Suits take the vault away from them. they get what they got to give to Penelope years ago when her time came: a true, peaceful death. away from the toil and strife of the City. saved from the destruction of the planet by the Mechs as well when they leave. they don’t have to suffer through the new horror that burning down the Acheron brings to the end of the story. they get what’s probably the most peaceful end to a horrible beginning out of every single ending the Mechanisms have come up with

this album makes me cry too much and this is how i cope lmao. anyway stan UDAD

[kindred-spirit-93]

the wedding ring hnhghjnbgbn *disintegrates*

Ulysses was happy once, right??

[phantomdecibel]

NO CAUSE LIKE . In UDAD, if we include Astyanax, who on earth killed the bab ? It couldn’t be Ulysses, because of their whole Trojan horse plan being completely different, right ?

So either Astyanax was killed by a member of their own court or…

…Ulysses was part of the people tasked with ensuring the complete fall of Illiam . Anyone still alive, no matter how broken by the violence they’d caused, was to be killed on sight .

It was eerily silent, bloodied walls surrounding them . They could get lost in it . For as much as they hated to admit it, the walls were impenetrable, an incredible system of mazes designed by some of the most skilled craftsmen among the Olympians. So many had tried to run through them . It was where they found the most people half dead .

Of course, anyone who was actually within the city was gone, no husks, barely anything more than splatters .

The castle was, at the very least, well defended enough . They’d had more leftovers there . They did their job unthinkingly .

They thought that if they were asked to do this kind of thing back then, they would’ve refused . Would’ve said something .

They put a bullet through the shell of a man, they don’t ask who he was .

And then, the silence is broken . Not by the moaning of someone half dead, not by the rest of their crew calling for them.

But by wailing .

A baby wailing .

And when they look into that cradle, seeing the son they could’ve had, had Penelope survived …..

……Of course, they do kill it . Zeus would allow nothing else, and they cannot afford a slip up around the Olympians if they wish to escape the clutches of the Acheron .

Of course they kill it . What other choice do they have ?

Of course they kill it . It is the will of the gods .

……They can never stop thinking about it .

It was surrounded by violence- everyone around it had been driven mad or dying but-

It looked healthy . He . Looked . Healthy .

Even in the midst of their madness, had the palace staff tried their best to take care of the bab? To stop violence from meeting his innocent eyes ?

……………..They don’t want to think about whether they would’ve had that strength .

They don’t want to think about who the people they killed were .

………They can’t stop thinking about that infant .

ASGDGDGFHDTGJYFDGFHSFFHGDGDFHGDFHDG HOOOOOOOOLY FUCK

GOD THEY CANT. THEY CANT STOP THINKING ABOUT THAT INFANT.

THEY CANT STOP THINKING ABOUT HOW THAT INFANT HAD STRETCHED HIS LITTLE, HEALTHY ARMS OUT TOWARDS THEM

NOT IN VIOLENCE. NO, THE CHILD HAD GRABBED HIS FINGER GENTLY, OH SO GENTLY

THEY CANT STOP THINKING

THEY CANT. STOP. THINKING. ABOUT THAT INFANT, WHO COOED AND LAUGHED AND GURGLED (WEAKLY, THE POOR THING WAS STARVED. HE WOULD HAVE DIED ANYWAYS. ODYSSEUS TRIES TO TELL THEMSELF THEY WERE DOING HIM A FAVOUR. IT DIESNT WORK) AS HE WAS PICKED UP

THEY CANT STOP THINKING ABOUT THE ABSOLUTE TRUST IN THE DEPTH OF THOSE DARK, SOULFUL EYES – THE ABSOLUTE TRUST, EVEN AS HE WAS DANGLED OVER THE CITY WALLS

SOMETIMES IN THEIR NIGHTMARES, THOSE EYES NEVER LEAVE THEIRS AS THE CHILD FALLS

THEY CANT

STOP

THINKING

ABOUT THAT CHILD, NOW NOTHING MORE THAN ANOTHER UNREMARKABLE BLOODSTAIN AGAINST THE STONE OF TROY

JUST LIKE THE REST OF HIS WORLD.

[pelideswhore]

May i ask if there is any significance to udad having exactly 20 songs?

in the odyssey, 20 is a pretty significant number because odysseus (or ulysses ig) has been away from home for exactly 20 years, which is reinforced by a dream penelope has of 20 geese. in udad the ‘two decades’ is how long ulysses has been carrying the Eye with them. either way, every song represents one year of his struggle

[fivesevenseveneight]

one more quick penelope before i unplug for the week <3

[ID: Pen on paper lineart of Penelope from Ulysses Dies at Dawn. Penelope is a thin Black woman in her 20s or 30s. she wears small glasses. she is wearing a turtleneck shirt under a modest short-sleeved dress. the sleeves of the turtleneck are rolled up to the top of her arms. on each arm, penelope wears a leather band — one on her left bicep and one on her right forearm. each band has a set of small vials strapped to it. penelope wears knee high boots. she also has small acorn earrings, her wedding band on a necklace, and a small lotus flower tucked behind her ear. her hair is in thick, loose braids with two pigtails trailing down her shoulders.

penelope is standing and holding a mid-sized pot in her hands. a small oak sprout pokes out of the dirt in the pot. penelope looks down at the sprout, smiling amazedly, fascinated. surrounding the sprout are four sharp bursts, indicating excitement or energy.

End ID]

[herding-octokittens]

Prompt 3 is up (and it’s only 11 days late!)

@mechanismszine

In the twenty years they were together, Ulysses could never be sure what it was Penelope saw in them.

They were well aware of what they saw in Penelope (what everyone saw in Penelope). She was kind and sweet and caring. She was a genius, but more than that she was sharp of wit and tongue, and truly intelligent. She was proud and confident and would not hesitate to show it. She was brutally honest when she wanted to be, and was just as likely to tear you apart as she was to build you up. She had made just as many friends as enemies at school, but Ulysses was hard pressed to name anyone who actively hated her. Even those who would proclaim themselves her enemies gave her their grudging respect and admiration.

And somehow,  in all the upheaval and fear and madness and chaos of starting university, growing into adulthood, living in the City, Ulysses had found her. Ulysses had befriended her. Ulysses had fallen in love with her. And Penelope had fallen in love with Ulysses in return.

They had gotten married. They had bought a small apartment, somewhere to call their own. Ulysses had gone on to groundbreaking psychological research. Penelope had become a professor of history. They had a son together. They should have been able to grow old together.

Instead, Ulysses had been asked to join the Ilium War. Telemachos had been threatened as leverage, and there was nothing Ulysses wouldn’t do for their son. They would tear down the world for their son. Not that it mattered. Telemachos had died not two weeks after the initial threat. A health complication, something entirely unrelated, but somehow even worse. The threat had shifted onto Penelope. They had already lost half of their world. They couldn’t afford to lose anything else. So Ulysses had gone to war.

They had been an idealist, once. They had wanted to make the world a better place. 

The idea was laughable, in retrospect. Turns out all it took to break their morals was the slightest bit of well-placed pressure and a bit of bad luck.

The war had taken the last of Ulysses’ spirit, broken it down to dust and scattered it upon the wind. They had come home to a shockingly empty house. Penelope was there in body, but her mind was even farther away than theirs.

It had taken years, but they had built each other back up. Piece by shattered piece, they had found each other and held each other tight through it all. There was no way to go back to who they had been, but they were doing their best to try again.