One Piece Crochet

the girls that get it get it

in middle school during my Intense Greek Mythology Phase, Artemis was, as you can likely guess, my best girl. Iphigenia was my OTHER best girl. Yes at the same time.

The story of Iphigenia always gets to me when it's not presented as a story of Artemis being capricious and having arbitrary rules about where you can and can't hunt, but instead, making a point about war.

Artemis was, among other things--patron of hunting, wild places, the moon, singlehood--the protector of young girls. That's a really important aspect she was worshipped as: she protected girls and young women. But she was the one who demanded Agamemnon sacrifice his daughter in order for his fleet to be able to sail on for Troy.

There's no contradiction, though, when it's framed as, Artemis making Agamemnon face what he’s doing to the women and children of Troy. His children are not in danger. His son will not be thrown off the ramparts, his daughters will not be taken captive as sex slaves and dragged off to foreign lands, his wife will not have to watch her husband and brothers and children killed. Yet this is what he’s sailing off to Troy to inevitably do. That’s what happens in war. He’s going to go kill other people’s daughters; can he stand to do that to his own? As long as the answer is no—he can kill other people’s children, but not his own—he can’t sail off to war.

Which casts Artemis is a fascinating light, compared to the other gods of the Trojan War. The Trojan War is really a squabble of pride and insults within the Olympian family; Eris decided to cause problems on purpose, leaving Aphrodite smug and Hera and Athena snubbed, and all of this was kinda Zeus’s fault in the first place for not being able to keep it in his pants. And out of this fight mortal men were their game pieces and mortal cities their prizes in restoring their pride. And if hundreds of people die and hundred more lives are ruined, well, that’s what happens when gods fight. Mortals pay the price for gods’ whims and the gods move on in time and the mortals don’t and that’s how it is.

And women especially—Zeus wanted Leda, so he took her. Paris wanted Helen, so he took her. There’s a reason “the Trojan women” even since ancient times were the emblems of victims of a war they never wanted, never asked for, and never had a say in choosing, but was brought down on their heads anyway.

Artemis, in the way of gods, is still acting through human proxies. But it seems notable to me to cast her as the one god to look at the destruction the war is about to wreak on people, and challenge Agamemnon: are you ready to kill innocents? Kill children? Destroy families, leave grieving wives and mothers? Are you? Prove it.

It reminds me of that idea about nuclear codes, the concept of implanting the key in the heart of one of the Oval Office staffers who holds the briefcase, so the president would have to stab a man with a knife to get the key to launch the nukes. “That’s horrible!,” it’s said the response was. “If he had to do that, he might never press the button!” And it’s interesting to see Artemis offering Agamemnon the same choice. You want to burn Troy? Kill your own daughter first. Show me you understand what it means that you’re about to do.

Fruit salad 🗣️🗣️🗣️

it is quite frankly baffling to me that pippin isn’t universally regarded to be one of the best musicals of all time... imagine you’re a musical. you’ve got it all: solely bangers on the soundtrack (simple joys! on the right track! extraordinary!). you’ve got identity crises (many). you’ve got sex. you’ve got patricide. you’ve got LAYERS OF PERFORMANCE — the actors are playing actors who are playing the characters and yes of course all of that is important. you’ve got a protagonist who is borderline insufferable for a lot of the show and is almost always being given terrible advice by the other characters. there’s a SING-ALONG portion in most productions! you, as a show, are using and fucking with the medium of theatre to such a degree that by the time the audience reach the finale everything is so tangled that they might not fully understand it and how unsettling it is until they look back and it hits them and they have to sit down for a while. and still nobody else in my life cares about you? ….😔 how come?

waiting for the day Sarah Z does a 3 hour video essay about Averno

a few dirkjakes i have lying around. im on act 2, i only know these 2 thru wikis and fandom. see my unbothered by source material interpretation in action

#ally

fag

Really confused as to how my logo changed to kermit the frog. Unless im starting to have hallucinations from lack of sleep. Still. mindfucked. 

this is one is important as fuck i see so many people not understand this and it drives me crazy

"Sburb ruins, mythic challenges, and personal quests generally tend to come off as shallow busywork, stage props, or set pieces in a spurious Hero's Journey. Rose either faintly glimpses this truth at this early stage, or she's just hitting her rebellious teen stride. Either way, she doesn't take the surface value of the quest seriously at all, and only wants to smash it apart and loot the secrets. My sense is that the average reader reacts to this impulse unfavorably. Because readers watch the formula play out so often, they are trained heavily to respect the journey of the hero, to anticipate and crave its fulfillment, to see it as something verging on contractual in their relationship with a story. So a gut-response to this recklessness is like, "ROSE, NO! STOP THAT! You simply must complete your quest and play the rain!" What comes with this view is the feeling that her evolution as a character is only being delayed for a bit while she gets some anti-narrative foolishness out of her system, and then we'll get down to business and watch her do her quest, play a whole BUNCH of rain, and reap the narrative satisfaction. There's just one problem: she never does that. This candy-coated Kiddie Kwest is at no point ever taken seriously by Rose or the narrative itself, nor should it be.

When trying to parse character arcs, we look out for certain beacons. So when we hear "play the rain," we're like, ah, GOT IT. That's Rose's arc. Once she finally gets over this destructive teen bullshit, she can wise up, play the rain, and her arc will be finished. Wrong. This is almost a red herring arc. Her quest on this planet, its patronizing presentation, its intrinsic shallowness, is a mirage surrounding her that represents a fully regimented series of milestones for achievement and personal growth, much as society dubiously presents to young people in many forms. The true arc-within-the-arc is actually an upside-down version of what it appears to be. What Rose is doing now, which seems to be misguided recklessness taking her further away from the truth of herself, is actually better seen as a good start to her real journey: breaching the mirage of regimented growth, exposing it for the charade it is, and pulling the truth out of it. The real conflict in her arc comes not from the fact that she refuses to take it seriously, by destroying it and taking shortcuts. It's the opposite. It's that, upon trashing her planet, she continues to have this nagging sense that she should be taking this quest seriously, much like how a young adult may have a nagging sense of guilt that they aren't "being an adult right" by the time they approach adulthood. And this nagging, unanswerable guilt arises from the truth that the regimentation of adulthood is completely fake. It was always a mirage. Learning this, making peace with it, is part of the growing process for many, and it is for her too." -Andrew Hussie

intrinsically queer as fuck, too, btw