#was i silent or was i SILENCED?

[ghost-proofbaby]

Hiya!

I saw this tiktok and it made me swoon over the idea of modernpilot!Eddie bc this whole thing feels so eddie coded (not necessarily a request I just needed someone to gush over this with)

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTLrYCxab/

- @gaylittlenerdsblog 💗

clickable link

oh my GOOOD, this story has popped up all over my fyp and you're right - it is so eddie 😭genuinely it's so sweet and i literally adore the idea. and the fact that i headcanon eddie as more of a cat person makes the entire thought so much sweeter 😭

like imagine him stumbling upon you posting about your current situation, obviously very sad and devastated, and the man sees it and he just can't seem to scroll past it. he doesn't even like dogs that much - he prefers his temperamental cat at home far more than any dog he's ever met - but he can see how much you love your dog and he knows he can help. and it's an insane idea, one that he tries to ignore for several nights, but he just can't stop thinking about it. he'd be pacing his apartment thinking about it until he finally takes the plunge and dms you about it. finds himself a nervous wreck until you respond so kindly and excitedly, brimming with gratitude as the two of you work out how to put his spontaneous plan into actual action. obviously you two would be talking quite a bit in the days leading up and well- he can't tell if he's warming up to your dog from the sweet videos and photos you send, or if he's warming up to the sound of your giggles and 'pet voice' you use in the background of said videos. and don't even get me started on his reaction to finally meeting and how he'd make an absolute fool of himself in front of you that morning when you meet up to do what he'd previously thought might be impossible or just be such a stupid idea. fumbling over himself, stuttering, blushing at all your kind words that pour out. watching you love on your dog in real time. he never stood a chance, and suddenly, he's got a damn crush on this stranger from the internet and he's actually liking your damn dog which is just ridiculous but god is it the dog who's cute as hell or is it just you.

anyways when your dog meets his cat and they actually get along he nearly faints from the cuteness and realizes he's never letting you go. 😭 lord give me the strength because eddie munson is a softie at his core and his whole 'gathering up sheepies' definitely extends well past just the high schoolers he took under his wing - apparently, it'll even extend to a four-legged yapper and his gorgeous owner with a heart of gold.

(this is one of those posts that went to the drafts graveyard for some reason and i am truly offended. i want everyone to think of pilot!eddie. what the hell tumblr.)

[jedibongrip]

obikin 'life with derek' au where- [GUNSHOTS]

[1-800-dreamgirl]

this is what everyone has been saying!! no one is looking at celebrities for political statements, but they should and must use their platform to amplify the voices of those who need and most importantly be against this genocide!!

[luolii]

isn’t it ironic that the media will never understand victor’s personal perspective at his prime despite being so dearly beloved and in the same way us viewers will never get to understand him either because all we have of that is a clip of him skating and yuuri (a fan’s perspective)

[stromer]

go to the box, please. GO to the box, please! NOW!

[fairydrowning]

"So, if you are too tired to speak, sit next to me for I, too, am fluent in silence."

– R. Arnold

"I'm a master of speaking silently—all my life I've spoken silently and I've lived through entire tragedies in silence."

– Fyodor Dostoyevsky

[empty-dream]

This turns into a horror psychological thriller for a split second. What a marvelous direction.

[pinkresurrection]

📸: voguearabia

“These are but a handful of the doctors, journalists, and photographers who are risking their lives day and night to bury the dead, heal the wounded, and show the world the horrors raining down on Gaza.”

From top to bottom:

Plestia Alaqad, Journalist

Motaz Azaiza, Photographer

Youmna El-Qunsol, Journalist

Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, Surgeon

Dr. Mohammed Al Ghoula, Doctor

[zehl0w]

Very messy scribble of a comic because they were on my mind (I doubt I’ll ever clean it up so I’m just posting it now so it doesn’t rot in my procreate files LOL)

[penwrythe]

What's stopping the possibility of a ceasefire is pretty simple. Hamas is holding 239 Israeli civilians hostage including children and the elderly. What's happening in Palestine is a travesty and horrendous. But Israel can't initiate a ceasefire from the position they're in, so we need to be agitating for Hamas to release the hostages and call for a ceasefire instead.

NO GENOCIDE IS JUSTIFIABLE

HOW DOES THE KILLING OF INNOCENT PEOPLE ON THIS EXTREME LEVEL FORCE HAMAS TO RETURN HOSTAGES??

ISRAEL'S BOMBARDMENT AND INDISCRIMINATE SHOOTING IN GAZA THREATEN EVERYONE THERE INCLUDING DOCTORS JOURNALISTS CHILDREN ENTIRE FAMILIES AND THE HOSTAGES

EVERYONE IS TARGETED

YOU HAVE HOSPITALS BOMBED HOW ANY OF THIS IS JUSTIFIED

@sarroora @fairuzfan @palipunk @wearenotjustnumbers2

You know more about this than I do.

[heldentenxr]

i just wanna say that being a Ukrainian is difficult asf. russia is literally committing genocide on us, kills our best people, strikes hospitals and houses, tortures civilians, murders children, all while still sitting un the UNSC and having a shit ton of influence over the West through propaganda. “white people” will never treat us as equal: they probably never even heard of us in the first place and thought we were a part of russia. they ask us if we have Internet or malls in Ukraine like it’s a cavemen county and not one in the centre of Europe. people of color think that we get some sort of “special treatment” in our literal struggle to survive, because they didn’t receive it (i can’t blame them, really, but sometimes they go too far in their bitterness). our allies do help us, but they didn’t want to give us any sort of serious ammunition/weapons/warplanes because they were afraid of escalation, not to mention that they were ready to let us be devoured by russian terrorists in the beginning of the full-scale invasion. the UN congratulated the world with fucking russian language day on the day those bastards blew up the Kakhovka dam, killing hundreds, not evacuating civilians in occupied regions, because that was the point. killing. as a Ukrainian poet and politician Volodymyr Vynnychenko once said, and i hate that those words are true, “being a Ukrainian is being in a constant state of proving your right of existence.”

[kristiliqua]

by the way ,

if you do not support palestine , get the fuck out .

/srs . you cannot be neutral on a genocide , and i’m sure as hell not going to let any pro-israel motherfuckers in here . get the fuck out . i don’t want you here , ever . thanks :)

[sunsetsandsunshine]

I- YOU- FUCKING-

WORDS.

[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.

[brokeboysbeachhouse]

Every once in a while…

… our society reinvents ‘The Monkees’ and those who are aware of this end up having to silently tolerate those who aren’t

[fisheito]

Owl legs