You Know What? Fuck It. I'm Celebrating That Finale.

my new favourite moment of season 3: mari genuinely trying to revive the dead guy by scooping his splattered brains back into his skull while lottie scoops it back out playing with her new blood foundation shade called 'you'll see' from her collection called 'the wilderness is me'.

You make it sound like it’s a bad thing, to be a monster. But the day will come when you wish for a monster to drive away the true evil, but I wasn’t here to be at your side.

- And on that day, your kingdom will fall // CBL

“I hope the world is better. I hope that people are too, I don't think they will be but I can hope.”

What the actual fuck was I on in eighth grade???? (clearly not medication)

Hehehehe but like what if you didn’t, for my sanity 🔫

i wrote a twin cinema poem about two gay soldiers in wwi

context: the two sides, read separately, are the two soldiers thinking about their futures with each other. when read together, it's a reflection of their final thoughts when they die together struck by bullets <3

i love how s3 finale completely flips our perspective on the hunt from the pilot. half of the girls weren’t even hunting. van standing over the pit seemed so menacing in the pilot but now it’s just heartbreaking. mari being pit girl, not because the wilderness chose but because shauna chose. mari was only wearing a nightdress so she could use her clothes as a decoy. and turns out mari was a decoy while the others tried to get rescue. misty removing her mask and smiling not because they caught mari but because they’re getting rescued and there’s nothing shauna can do about it. the hair on the antler queen costume wasn’t a collection of various victims’ hair, it was just mari’s. this whole time we thought it was all the girls collectively giving in to the hunt and the wildness of it, but really it was just shauna, along with lottie and tai. none of them wanted to do a hunt, none of them wanted mari to be chosen.

Do not tell me that girls cannot change the world. I grew on stories of a twelve year old Anne Frank in a cramped, silent room weaving hopeful magic with just a pen. And Ruby Bridges facing racist monsters when she was only six, to become the first African American child to desegregate an all white school. And Anandi Gopal Joshi, only 19 years old and the first woman doctor of India. And Mary Shelley changing the face of fiction forever by inventing a whole new genre at 18. I grew up on tales of girls fighting destiny, carving history with their own two hands, breaking down walls. So if my daughter ever doubts herself because she is told she cannot, I will hand her stories as a sword and faith as a shield and tell her, “You know what? They told Anne and Ruby and Anandi and Mary they couldn’t, too. And it didn’t stop them. Because nothing can stop a girl with eyes aflame with courage and a war song in her chest.”

Nikita Gill, Stories of Girls Who Changed The World

Welp might lose the right to marry a woman because marriage is between a man and woman and apparently a Christian creation, just like America is a Christian nation (a complete and utter lie) fucking lovely

“i want you to know, i will love you as long as i breathe.”

dune part ii / ojibwa / waiting for this story to end before i begin another, jan heller lev

In the past I've shared other people's musings about the different interpretations of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Namely, why Orpheus looks back at Eurydice, even though he knows it means he'll lose her forever. So many people seem to think they've found the one true explanation of the myth. But to me, the beauty of myths is that they have many possible meanings.

So I thought I would share a list of every interpretation I know, from every serious adaptation of the story and every analysis I've ever heard or read, of why Orpheus looks back.

One interpretation – advocated by Monteverdi's opera, for example – is that the backward glance represents excessive passion and a fatal lack of self-control. Orpheus loves Eurydice to such excess that he tries to defy the laws of nature by bringing her back from the dead, yet that very same passion dooms his quest fo fail, because he can't resist the temptation to look back at her.

He can also be seen as succumbing to that classic "tragic flaw" of hubris, excessive pride. Because his music and his love conquer the Underworld, it might be that he makes the mistake of thinking he's entirely above divine law, and fatally allows himself to break the one rule that Hades and Persephone set for him.

Then there are the versions where his flaw is his lack of faith, because he looks back out of doubt that Eurydice is really there. I think there are three possible interpretations of this scenario, which can each work alone or else co-exist with each other. From what I've read about Hadestown, it sounds as if it combines all three.

In one interpretation, he doubts Hades and Persephone's promise. Will they really give Eurydice back to him, or is it all a cruel trick? In this case, the message seems to be a warning to trust in the gods; if you doubt their blessings, you might lose them.

Another perspective is that he doubts Eurydice. Does she love him enough to follow him? In this case, the warning is that romantic love can't survive unless the lovers trust each other. I'm thinking of Moulin Rouge!, which is ostensibly based on the Orpheus myth, and which uses Christian's jealousy as its equivalent of Orpheus's fatal doubt and explicitly states "Where there is no trust, there is no love."

The third variation is that he doubts himself. Could his music really have the power to sway the Underworld? The message in this version would be that self-doubt can sabotage all our best efforts.

But all of the above interpretations revolve around the concept that Orpheus looks back because of a tragic flaw, which wasn't necessarily the view of Virgil, the earliest known recorder of the myth. Virgil wrote that Orpheus's backward glance was "A pardonable offense, if the spirits knew how to pardon."

In some versions, when the upper world comes into Orpheus's view, he thinks his journey is over. In this moment, he's so ecstatic and so eager to finally see Eurydice that he unthinkingly turns around an instant too soon, either just before he reaches the threshold or when he's already crossed it but Eurydice is still a few steps behind him. In this scenario, it isn't a personal flaw that makes him look back, but just a moment of passion-fueled carelessness, and the fact that it costs him Eurydice shows the pitilessness of the Underworld.

In other versions, concern for Eurydice makes him look back. Sometimes he looks back because the upward path is steep and rocky, and Eurydice is still limping from her snakebite, so he knows she must be struggling, in some versions he even hears her stumble, and he finally can't resist turning around to help her. Or more cruelly, in other versions – for example, in Gluck's opera – Eurydice doesn't know that Orpheus is forbidden to look back at her, and Orpheus is also forbidden to tell her. So she's distraught that her husband seems to be coldly ignoring her and begs him to look at her until he can't bear her anguish anymore.

These versions highlight the harshness of the Underworld's law, and Orpheus's failure to comply with it seems natural and even inevitable. The message here seems to be that death is pitiless and irreversible: a demigod hero might come close to conquering it, but through little or no fault of his own, he's bound to fail in the end.

Another interpretation I've read is that Orpheus's backward glance represents the nature of grief. We can't help but look back on our memories of our dead loved ones, even though it means feeling the pain of loss all over again.

Then there's the interpretation that Orpheus chooses his memory of Eurydice, represented by the backward glance, rather than a future with a living Eurydice. "The poet's choice," as Portrait of a Lady on Fire puts it. In this reading, Orpheus looks back because he realizes he would rather preserve his memory of their youthful, blissful love, just as it was when she died, than face a future of growing older, the difficulties of married life, and the possibility that their love will fade. That's the slightly more sympathetic version. In the version that makes Orpheus more egotistical, he prefers the idealized memory to the real woman because the memory is entirely his possession, in a way that a living wife with her own will could never be, and will never distract him from his music, but can only inspire it.

Then there are the modern feminist interpretations, also alluded to in Portrait of a Lady on Fire but seen in several female-authored adaptations of the myth too, where Eurydice provokes Orpheus into looking back because she wants to stay in the Underworld. The viewpoint kinder to Orpheus is that Eurydice also wants to preserve their love just as it was, youthful, passionate, and blissful, rather than subject it to the ravages of time and the hardships of life. The variation less sympathetic to Orpheus is that Euyridice was at peace in death, in some versions she drank from the river Lethe and doesn't even remember Orpheus, his attempt to take her back is selfish, and she prefers to be her own free woman than be bound to him forever and literally only live for his sake.

With that interpretation in mind, I'm surprised I've never read yet another variation. I can imagine a version where, as Orpheus walks up the path toward the living world, he realizes he's being selfish: Eurydice was happy and at peace in the Elysian Fields, she doesn't even remember him because she drank from Lethe, and she's only following him now because Hades and Persephone have forced her to do so. So he finally looks back out of selfless love, to let her go. Maybe I should write this retelling myself.

Are any of these interpretations – or any others – the "true" or "definitive" reason why Orpheus looks back? I don't think so at all. The fact that they all exist and can all ring true says something valuable about the nature of mythology.