The not so discreet relationship that everyone at the galaxy garrison) had to endure for years ….but that somehow Shiro forgot to mention to his team
“Patrochilles is real,” I say into the mic, the crowd boos. I begin to walk off the stage in shame. “No, she’s right!” I hear a voice in the back say. The lights come on. It's Alexander the Great.
"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.
I can always hear you sing, I wanna hear you speak to me
So I just rewatched HH for the second time and I want to ramble a bit about my favorite character: Cash!!!
Even apart from the gay ace rep, Cash is such a unique character. As the designated "bad boy" of the show, I really didn’t pay him no attention at all at the beginning, thinking he’d be a full stereotype: either the homophobic gay dealer or the asocial loner who can’t connect to people. His appearance led me to believe he’d be the typical repressed tough guy who can’t express his emotions and be soft because of toxic masculinity, and I thought at first glance that his arc would be to learn how to do that… Boy was I wrong. He’s the sweetest EVER.
His character feels so human. So multifaceted. Funny, sarcastic, tender, awkward, vulnerable, hurt, lost, he does it all without once being unbelievable as a character. Every time he was on screen in a new situation, I felt surprised cause I had not at all predicted in which direction it would go. For example, when Darren brought the bag back to him, I expected him to be angry ??? He wasn’t !!! Or when he and Darren got close, I thought he’d be super closed off and guarded about his romantic orientation, but instead he was obviously flirting with Darren and he took the lead to kiss them!!!!
So I found myself extremely drawn to him because of how easily my expectations based on his appearance and demeanour were turned down, and how surprising he was every step of the way. He’s sweet from the start, comfortable in his sexuality, knows what’s good and what isn’t, is super goofy and nervous when it comes to love, but also takes the lead and flirts when he wants to, is caring and dedicated to those he loves, and he knows how to express his emotions and needs!!!! I just- I love him.
Im so excited to live in an era where men in fiction and especially in teen dramas are beginning to be depicted outside of the restraints of toxic masculinity. I expected him to be one way because of the dozens of characters looking and acting like him in the past who did. But characters in Heartbreak High are more than just tropes and cliches and I love that. I hope to see more characters like him in the future. Props to William McDonald who did an amazing job and to the whole cast
if no one else got me I know I can’t stop the loneliness by anri got me
your favourite fish girl surfer 🏄🏼♀️
#ally
fag