BucketsOfSalt

Modern college AU of the Iliad I did for a concept class last semester 🤩🤩🤩

There are briefs for how the info/roles are interpreted but TLDR Greece (Sparta) and Troy are frathouses and they’re fighting over Helen who is represented by a revered and beloved horse mascot. I think everything more or less gets explained here, as for the ending after Patroclus dies (gets detained) Achilles does his whole thing knocks many people unconscious and then is expertly disarmed by Hektor, eventually ends up getting arrested as well for both trespassing and also aggravated assault, then instead of the two of their ashes getting mixed together in death they’re put in the same holding cell lmao.

Well, sandbox love never dies <3

But yes, the fact that their relationship developed in childhood is extremely important (and heartbreaking). Childhood is a time when you can somewhat escape the rules and conventions of society. No wonder Cathy says “I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free... I’m sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills.” The moors, where Cathy and Heathcliff played and ran wild together stand for childhood, nature and unrestrained passion, as opposed to the House (especially the Grange), which is a human construction, and as such represents the confinements of society, rules, conventions, marriage and adulthood.

So it’s very important that Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship developed during childhood, and that they’re both stuck with those memories, unable to fully let go - unable to grow up completely. A lot of readers dislike Cathy and Heathcliff, and they are irrational, selfish and childish, because they have never completely left childhood. Heathcliff is described as a “wolfish man” and compared to a "bird of bad omen” - his wild nature is childhood, whereas Linton’s restrained, conventional posture is adulthood. Cathy marries Linton, but her heart will always belong to Heathcliff - or rather, her soul, her very self. That opposition between childhood and adulthood, nature and society, is at the very heart of the book. Bataille writes:

As Jacques Blondel pointed out, we must always keep in mind that ‘the feelings are formed during Catherine’s and Heathcliff’s childhood’. But even if children have the power to forget the world of adults for a time, they are nevertheless doomed to live in this world. Catastrophe ensues. Heathcliff, the foundling, is obliged to flee from the enchanted kingdom where he raced Catherine on the heath, while Catherine, though she remains as rugged as ever, denies her wild childhood: she allows herself to be seduced by the easy life personified by a young, rich and sensitive gentleman. (...) So, when he returns rich from a long journey, Heathcliff is prepared to believe that Catherine has betrayed the sovereign kingdom of childhood to which, body and soul, she belonged with him.

(Literature and Evil, Georges Bataille, tr. Alastair Hamilton)

And, he is also the double of his most obvious opposite, Lockwood, in a way that finally punctuates the indifference of antagonists, the irrelevance of counting, the generality of antagonism. For just as the condition of possibility of the narrative is the intrusion of the foreigner Lockwood, the condition of possibility of the story is the incorporation of the exotic Heathcliff.”

From “The Wuther of the Other in Wuthering Heights” by Steven Vine

Racists want Heathcliff to be white because he is actually a flattering character in a twisted way. He is the smartest, the most charismatic and the most powerful character in the narrative he is in and he plays everyone like a fiddle.