#ally

"I think Homer outwits most writers who have written on the War [fantasy archetype], by not taking sides.

The Trojan war is not and you cannot make it be the War of Good vs. Evil. It’s just a war, a wasteful, useless, needless, stupid, protracted, cruel mess full of individual acts of courage, cowardice, nobility, betrayal, limb-hacking-off, and disembowelment. Homer was a Greek and might have been partial to the Greek side, but he had a sense of justice or balance that seems characteristically Greek — maybe his people learned a good deal of it from him? His impartiality is far from dispassionate; the story is a torrent of passionate actions, generous, despicable, magnificent, trivial. But it is unprejudiced. It isn’t Satan vs. Angels. It isn’t Holy Warriors vs. Infidels. It isn’t hobbits vs. orcs. It’s just people vs. people.

Of course you can take sides, and almost everybody does. I try not to, but it’s no use; I just like the Trojans better than the Greeks. But Homer truly doesn’t take sides, and so he permits the story to be tragic. By tragedy, mind and soul are grieved, enlarged, and exalted.

Whether war itself can rise to tragedy, can enlarge and exalt the soul, I leave to those who have been more immediately part of a war than I have. I think some believe that it can, and might say that the opportunity for heroism and tragedy justifies war. I don’t know; all I know is what a poem about a war can do. In any case, war is something human beings do and show no signs of stopping doing, and so it may be less important to condemn it or to justify it than to be able to perceive it as tragic.

But once you take sides, you have lost that ability.

Is it our dominant religion that makes us want war to be between the good guys and the bad guys?

In the War of Good vs. Evil there can be divine or supernal justice but not human tragedy. It is by definition, technically, comic (as in The Divine Comedy): the good guys win. It has a happy ending. If the bad guys beat the good guys, unhappy ending, that’s mere reversal, flip side of the same coin. The author is not impartial. Dystopia is not tragedy.

Milton, a Christian, had to take sides, and couldn’t avoid comedy. He could approach tragedy only by making Evil, in the person of Lucifer, grand, heroic, and even sympathetic — which is faking it. He faked it very well.

Maybe it’s not only Christian habits of thought but the difficulty we all have in growing up that makes us insist justice must favor the good.

After all, 'Let the best man win' doesn’t mean the good man will win. It means, 'This will be a fair fight, no prejudice, no interference — so the best fighter will win it.' If the treacherous bully fairly defeats the nice guy, the treacherous bully is declared champion. This is justice. But it’s the kind of justice that children can’t bear. They rage against it. It’s not fair!

But if children never learn to bear it, they can’t go on to learn that a victory or a defeat in battle, or in any competition other than a purely moral one (whatever that might be), has nothing to do with who is morally better.

Might does not make right — right?

Therefore right does not make might. Right?

But we want it to. 'My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure.'

If we insist that in the real world the ultimate victor must be the good guy, we’ve sacrificed right to might. (That’s what History does after most wars, when it applauds the victors for their superior virtue as well as their superior firepower.) If we falsify the terms of the competition, handicapping it, so that the good guys may lose the battle but always win the war, we’ve left the real world, we’re in fantasy land — wishful thinking country.

Homer didn’t do wishful thinking.

Homer’s Achilles is a disobedient officer, a sulky, self-pitying teenager who gets his nose out of joint and won’t fight for his own side. A sign that Achilles might grow up someday, if given time, is his love for his friend Patroclus. But his big snit is over a girl he was given to rape but has to give back to his superior officer, which to me rather dims the love story. To me Achilles is not a good guy. But he is a good warrior, a great fighter — even better than the Trojan prime warrior, Hector. Hector is a good guy on any terms — kind husband, kind father, responsible on all counts — a mensch. But right does not make might. Achilles kills him.

The famous Helen plays a quite small part in The Iliad. Because I know that she’ll come through the whole war with not a hair in her blond blow-dry out of place, I see her as opportunistic, immoral, emotionally about as deep as a cookie sheet. But if I believed that the good guys win, that the reward goes to the virtuous, I’d have to see her as an innocent beauty wronged by Fate and saved by the Greeks.

And people do see her that way. Homer lets us each make our own Helen; and so she is immortal.

I don’t know if such nobility of mind (in the sense of the impartial 'noble' gases) is possible to a modern writer of fantasy. Since we have worked so hard to separate History from Fiction, our fantasies are dire warnings, or mere nightmares, or else they are wish fulfillments."

- Ursula K. Le Guin, from No Time to Spare, 2013.

COMIN’ AT YA!

Aradia gender meta post : 1/2 ( part 2 is in the reblogs! )

Some Song of Achilles page overlays that I made for The Reading Portal a while back 🕊️

TWITTER || INSTAGRAM || PATREON || SHOP

don’t worry about me and these green eyes

. @mothercain <3

Related

The Highlights

hell site - collection of the worst

mogai hell denial - stories of how mogai fucked us over

Actually useful

general advice tag

Trans guy vs lesbian

guy vs lesbian - gay trans guys who thought they were lesbians and vice versa

common signs masterpost

contact list - people to talk to about lesbian/trans guy gender issues

cis gay guy or trans woman? - (link) (link) (link)

Am I gay or bi?

am i gay? - the Am I Bi Or Am I Gay dilemma

compulsory heterosexuality - the workings and stuff

common signs of compulsory heterosexuality

fantasies about power imbalances + what to do

Resource/positivity blogs without mogai bs or terfs?

here’s a list

Where sex is concerned

sex positive ace - forcing yourself into sex just to please your partner is harmful

genitals discourse - is it ok to be repulsed by certain genitals? - read first

Alarming age gaps

inappropriate fandom adults - adults need to be responsible in dealing with minors

age gap discourse - be careful with age gaps in your relationships

Religion

LGBT friendly/run religious resources

Submit yours

Relevant

mogai hell denial - again, how mogai fucked you over

club stories - stories from your local GSAs

Fun stuff

discourse-sonas

discourse shipping 101

scars discourse - how we got our battlescars

first crush - tell me who your first gay crush was!

name stories - how you chose your name

unfollow discourse - personal grounds to unfollow someone

What’s been going on

dragon age discourse - cullen hate brigade

pokemon discourse - team mystic 5ever

yaoi discourse - i cant believe this is what we’re talking about in 2k16

dan and phil discourse - never bring this back

yuri on ice discourse - aka don’t HC gay chars as ace

neurogender discourse - your disorder isnt a sexuality or gender

spongebob discourse - describe the discourse using a spongebob line

blocklist discourse - the worst fucking list on this website

melanie discourse - her persona is bad and she should feel bad

jughead discourse - how to make a gay coded stereotype a stereotypical ace

pewdiepie discourse - antisemitic mess, includes other youtubers

false rep - twitter announcements aren’t enough representation

guide exp - the one time i went away to work a guide job

power imbalance discourse - involuntary gross fantasies dont make you gross

dead lesbian trope - you stop that

soft boys - nice guys reincarnated

slav discourse - i dont read cyrillic and polish is hilarious

ginger discourse - i made fun of ed sheeran and he took out a hit

toxic discourse - disorders arent abusive but some people sure are

Copypastas, memes and stuff

i sneezed in walmart and no one said bless you

take the shot, jessica

are you perhaps

ace discourse musical

government recognition copypasta

plebean copypasta - the reddit fedora mcgee

Blocklist

general (+ callouts)

terfs to block

Tumblr needs to reevaluate the sexyman status of Perch Perkins from the spongebob musical. Him AND Plankton deserve the title!

Virtua Fighter 3tb

バーチャファイター3tb

Sega Model 3 (1997)

waiting so patiently for the School Spirits fandom to come to life so I can talk about it and absorb all the content like a plant soaking up water

the Heir is a hero who reviles what he reveres. an Heir in fairy tales is one who wants nothing more than to attain his father’s station, but hates his father for not giving it to him; or one who loves the privileges of his rank but hates its responsibilities, wishing for the freedom of a commoner.

Equius wants to be dominated by what he hates, and loves what is beneath him when he should be exercising dominance over it. he hates meat - implying to Nepeta that he doesn’t eat it - but values his own “meat” or flesh over his spirit. Alternia’s indigo caste - its Heir class - is entirely a caste of walking contradictions. they treat the planet’s musclebeasts as creatures “meant to be 100ked upon with adoration“, but treat another race of man-beasts as inferior, fit only for the role of being part of a “butler genus”. though they exist to serve those above them, they reject the sea dwellers for being “EVEN PURPLIER“ than the subjugglators, in fact considering themselves “obligated to be at odds”. it’s only fitting that Equius is the one to discuss the difference between friends and enemies with his superior only a page after we’re told that “in troll language, the word for friend is exactly the same as the word for enemy.”

naturally this makes the Heir a class closely tied with the concept of masculinity, because the complex dual nature of masculinity is such a strong theme in Homestuck. the indigoblood’s power comes not just from his position on the hemospectrum but his position in a patriarchal society, and when Equius starts to lose his grip on the saddle of his high horse it’s not only for a lowblood, but for a lowblooded woman.

the successful Heir is a hero who successfully overcomes masculinity’s trappings and, like all heroes ultimately must, reconciles the contradicting aspects of the masculine and the feminine. John matures as an Heir by overcoming the side effects of being brought up in an all male household, under a father who valued his strength of the flesh above all else, and mastering the spirit and the feminine - represented by spirit arms and the feminine blue slime of his ghostly mentor. Equius’ fate is instead to succumb to masculinity altogether, allowing the male superior in his life to cut off his connection to breath entirely.