Chthonic Cassandra @chthonic-cassandra - Tumblr Blog

Me

gods-cursed prophetess pretending to be a normal person

staunch champion of Ancient Greek girls, vampire brides, ethically conflicted concubines, and spiders

Rules/expectations here

I don't do internet arguments or debate; if you try to draw me into one I'm going to remove myself and/or delete your comment

asks/replies/messages are welcome, but please don't take it personally if I don't reply quickly or at all

no anonymous asks, ever

trauma- or violence-related posts are always tagged with 'trauma' or 'trauma frameworks'; frequently but not consistently with more specific type of content

if I miss making a personal post non-rebloggable, please don't reblog it

do not expect personally identifying information from me

if you think you do know me/know who I am offline, please let me know so we can make a plan for how to handle that

Writing

I sometimes write fic, largely about vampires and almost exclusively about trauma/violence. My AO3 is here. A couple of representative examples:

Compromise (58k, complete) - Dracula darkest timeline AU about co-victimhood and living within ongoing violence. Written over a 14 year span of time, based on which you should set your timeline expectations for any ongoing projects of mine.

Pallakai (8k, ongoing) - studies of concubine characters on Xena: Warrior Princess.

Sadeian Women (20k, incomplete) - sometimes I have feelings about the victims in the Marquis de Sade's fiction and then I write about them.

#admin

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#not sure i would actually be the protagonist #personal #trauma frameworks #(this probably isn't a thing i write in this form & definitely not a thing i seek publication for it's just funny to think)

chthonic-cassandra

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Very quickly written little Brides of Dracula thing.

15-16 June 2026

Tea: - Harney & Sons Paris - iced London fog - Ceylon with rose, cardamom, and borage - black and green tea blend with rose, safflower, and vanilla - finished up my pitcher of iced raspberry rose oolong

Perfume: - My Soul Acquiesced in It (melancholic white rose petals drifting in a pool of white musk, bitter almond, and icy vanilla) - Flesh of My Flesh (a deep crimson musk threaded with mesmerizing Tunisian amber, voluptuous champaca blossom, vanilla absolute, labdanum, bitter almond, and black orchid) - Flower Moon (wisteria, swamp jasmine, honeysuckle, daffodil, rhodedendon, phlox, and a mix of california wildflowers coated in thick, golden honey) - Come, Sister (icy musk draped in osmanthus and white gardenia, a whisper of ti leaf and orchid, crystalline amber, and incense smoke) - Against Idleness and Mischief (pollen-dusted honey, diligent tonka, steadfast chamomile, and goodly hyssop)

Reading: - reread Slavenka Drakulic, S. (trans. Marko Ivic) - started John Barton, Playing Shakespeare: An Actor's Guide

#logging

gorgeous fic! i love the concept of an unholy sisterhood, of Mina longing for a connection w Lucy through the brides— a sort of link between the still living, the undead and the long gone.

Thank you so much! This is a really beautiful description, and I am touched to know those elements of the story landed so well for you; I appreciate you letting me know.

I've been wanting to do more directly about the brides and Lucy for a long time, but it's such poignantly sad material that it's taking me a while to figure out how to approach it. I explored Mina and the brides and sisterhood much more extensively in the later sections of Compromise.

#encyclopedica #people talking about me tag #dracula #my writing

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An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Very quickly written little Brides of Dracula thing.

#vampire brides #my writing #dracula #domestic life in castle dracula

neapolis-neapolis

Danzatrici (I sec.), dalla Casa di Cicerone - Pompei, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Napoli.

#greek girls #dance #art #classics

I must confess, I find it very difficult to draw a clear division between what you've [John Barton] called the Two Traditions [naturalistic and Elizabethan acting]. I'm sure you're fighting to define the difference between good acting and bad acting. As Ben [Kingsley] has suggested, any play is going to be concerned with the playwright's organized view of the world and of the inner world of the characters we are playing. Every speech we utter, whether it's in a soap opera or by Shakespeare, is not going to be like speech in real life. So we always have the problem of coming to terms with the style of the acting. But I think the style of acting against which modern actors, of whatever generation they come from, rebel, is not so much the style of the writing as the style of the actors of the previous generation. And I suspect that actors from Richard Burbage, the man who first acted Shakespeare's heroes, right through to us today, have all been concerned with truth, reality and nature. It's just that we've all had different perceptions of it. Our naturalism today is a reaction against the supposed naturalism of, let us say, the nineteenth century, where indeed the playing style was large, partly because the theaters were large. Partly two because in nineteenth-century England everything about the world seemed to be certain. The British Empire was going to last for a thousand years, and therefore Henry Irving could stand firmly on a stage in front of three thousand people and make declarations. We have a different perception of the world. Life is difficult, ambiguous and complicated. The British Empire doesn't exist anymore. We ask ourselves, what is our role as a nation in the world and what is our role as parents, as children? This tends to direct our attention into details and away from the big gestures.

Ian McKellen in John Barton, Playing Shakespeare

Cracking up about McKellen interjecting here, "but what about the Anxiety of Influence"

#shakespeare #ian mckellen #performance

#there's still plenty i can & want to do with fic #but it's a weird and striking feeling #personal #on writing #trauma frameworks

boundwithpurple

one part of my own artistic philosophy, which has real moral and political meaning for me, is that the most important task in depicting any human individual, no matter how horrifying, is to track an honest attempt to understand their own motivations and belief system and interior reality, despite how supposedly unaccountable or hard to understand or difficult to confront this may be, and then to communicate that with as much rigor as possible.

#💙💙💙#on writing

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The insanity of both my life and my internal world are feeling very marked right now, but what can I do with that except keep living it and make fiction of out it?

#personal #trauma

#flowers #photo tag

clerkrard

going to start saying "it's ok i have the blood of akasha in me" when faced with any kind of problem at all

#the vampire lestat #vc reread

oldbutchdanielmolloy

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE: 2.05 + 3.02

#vampire attachment theory #interview with the vampire #vc reread #the vampire lestat

#flowers #photo tag

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chthonic-cassandra

I'm not quite sure how to phrase this, but what are your feelings on Cassandra and Apollo's relationship?

Okay, this is really, really hard to explain. Except that I think everyone else is wrong. I am going to give you an answer, but it is not going to be a complete or adequate one.

He is her god. She is his priestess. She calls herself his latris, his servant. She is devoted to him. He has also hurt her immensely, he has also caused her unbearable suffering.

She wears his garlands, carries his sacred staff. She calls him her philtatos, her dearest, her beloved. She also calls him her destroyer. She addresses him constantly; he is always with her, she can always feel his presence.

She was trying to consent to him, and could not. ξυναινέσασα Λοξίαν ἐψευσάμην, “In consenting to Loxias I lied.” The consent and the deception happen at the same moment; she does not make a promise and renege on it, it’s nothing so simple as that. Consenting to a god is difficult; sex with a god is unlike sex with a mortal. He overwhelms her with his sheer physical presence, with the intensity of his divinity, breathing charis upon her body. She cannot accept him. It is like a test she failed. He punishes for it, and this is a terrible cruelty, it is a disrespect against her own bodily autonomy. It shows that he believes there is no part of herself she should hold back from him.

It is cruel, but he is a god, and the cruelty of the gods is unlike human cruelty. They rarely respect mortals’ autonomy, their right to control their own bodies and their own fates. His cruelty is to be expected.

The text makes it difficult to tell whether he rapes her, or whether, at her refusal he steps back and leaves her body alone. I don’t know. It could be either.

One critic says that her rejection of him is about a refusal to bear his child in her body, arguing that she is one of the few women desired by a god who does not bear a divine child.

Even if she denies him access to her physical body, he is always within her. That is what prophecy means, this is what it means to be his priestess. This is its own, unique type of intimacy. He gives her visions which are agony. And she also experiences the joy and glory which is his presence.

She laughs, and sings, and invites him to lead her to Agamemnon’s bed: άγε συ Φοιβε νιν, κατα σον εν δάφναις ανάκτορον θυηπολω, “You, Phoebus, lead me; among the laurels I offer sacrifice at your shrine.” This means: “Look what you have done to me, take responsibility for it.” This means: “Look how I serve you still, even when you have forsaken me.” This means: “Help me find joy in my subjugation.” This means: “I love you.”

#someone just liked this one again & I remembered that this is a thing that I said on the internet 11 years ago

#personal #trauma

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