#what's eri's surname omg

[greysfall]

[A story only Hachiko knows] long comic strip and birthday gift for @areiml​. This is my imagination of a story set during the 3 years between OG and Neo, featuring a short meeting between Eri and Beat as they talked about how everyone was coping with Neku’s disappearance and moving on with their own lives. 

This comic referred to several comic strips I made before, sorta intertwined between canon game lore, my thoughts on the unexplored potentials of Eri’s role in the story and my friend & I’s BeatEri fever dream. I imagined it would be set at around 3-6 months after Neku’s disappearance and shortly before the gang entered high school. I never thought it was gonna be this long as it all started out as a few whimsical panels. While the comic has mentions of NeShiki and BeatEri, you can read it as general friendship if that’s your preferred interpretation (save for the bonus piece below). 

I actually have zero confidence writing Beat’s dialogues, tho I’m pleased with his design - which I put together by imagining Beat without his knitted cap, plus changing to some of his favourite WildBoar threads. My friend joked that since I’m used to draw sparkly Composers, I made Beat so handsome that even his parents won’t recognise him. Eri is canonically pretty, so I wanted to depict her as TV-star-pretty. Another trivia is that Beat generally isn’t a dessert fan, he also tends to dislike fruit-flavoured desserts and only enjoys chocolate-flavoured ones so it was a surprise that strawberry is his favourite boba flavour lmao. Now who does strawberry boba remind me of? Guess.

With this done, I’m one comic strip away from having enough materials for an anthology. The “final” strip was already drafted along with the Composers strip. If we’re lucky, I might get to draw it next year.

There is a Japanese version of this comic on Twitter in case you need it. And lastly, here is the bonus piece which is a redraw of my friend’s comic strip. Happy Birthday! (have fun being at the same age as Asa while I’m Tougou’s, teehee)

[spirits-child]

Reasons to not do oaths we can’t complete (if it’s not obvious already)

“DELPHIC MAXIM #19 DO NOT USE AN OATH”

(english is not my main language so sorry for my bad grammar)

Kind regards to my dad for inspiring this post.

So today while my dad told me about his trips with my mom it slipped out that he did an oath to a deity, now I suffer. So what’s an oath? WHAT IS IT.

Here you have my dear Achilles doing it:

“…and swear it with a great oath- nay, by this my sceptre…”

It’s basically “ a statement of fact sworn upon, ‘the head of Zeus’ or upon the River Styx*.”

Now that you get the context of why this post exists and you are new into um hellenism or paganism or any religion, why don’t we do oaths we can’t complete? Or just in general? Well... WELL.

I read someone say that oaths was self-cursing and absolutely, yes, 10/10 right. 

WELL, WEEEEELL. Oath you do and you don’t complete is the highway to punishment, badly, so why would you do it? 

Reason 1 to not do it: There’s literally an entity (Horkos) in hellenism that is in charge of punishing people that don’t fulfill their oaths. He is also the companion of a deity (Dike) and he is described as an “avenger of perjury”... WHY WOULD YOU OMG.

Horkos "whom Eris bore, to be a plague on those who take false oath”, does that scream “lets make oaths” to you? I hope not. 

Want another reason? Well, reason 2 not do do it: here it is theoi.com helping my beautiful research. So here, have a Zeus epithet: HO′RCIUS (Horkios), the god who watches over oaths, or is invoked in oaths, and punishes their violation, occurs chiefly as a surname of Zeus, under which the god had a statue at Olympia. (Paus. v. 24. § 2; Eurip. Hippol. 1025.)

I love Zeus, he is one of my deities and I’m ready to defend him with my life but if you think getting in his bad side is a great idea... you’re wrong. So wrong. Please get some help.

MORE REASONS?! I’LL GET YOU MORE REASONS! Reason 3 to not do it: @arkefthos who has an amazing post on oaths (you can find it here, amazing) found this from Harvard and their hellenic center studies so read it if you’re not convinced yet:

Notably in Greek, thanks to the Homeric expression hórkon omnúnai, meaning “to swear an oath,” we can grasp its concrete origin: “to take hold of the hórkos,” an object charged with malevolent powers which will be unleashed in case the oath is broken. The old sacramental formula ístō Zeús is an appeal to the divinities as eyewitnesses and consequently as irrefutable judges (cf. Lat. iudex arbiter). Latin sacramentum ‘oath’, and perhaps Hittite lingāis (cf. Gr. élenkhos?), underline the potential malediction which specifically defines the binding declaration of the oath.

Let me highlight an specific part for the lazy to read: an object charged with malevolent powers which will be unleashed in case the oath is broken.

Is it not clear yet? AREN’T YOU HAPPY YET? Well, reason 4 not do it:  Here, have what happens to a deity if they break an oath described by Hesiod: 

“[When a god] is forsworn, [he] lies breathless until a full year is completed, and never comes near to taste ambrosia and nectar, but lies spiritless and voiceless on a strewn bed: and a heavy trance overshadows him. But when he has spent a long year in his sickness, another penance and an harder follows after the first. For nine years he is cut off from the eternal gods and never joins their councils of their feasts, nine full years. But in the tenth year he comes again to join the assemblies of the deathless gods who live in the house of Olympus.”

Hope it’s clear, don’t do it kids. 

 Hesiod, Theogony  Homer, The Iliad