Unable to shut up

Good question! I ruminated on this and still didn't find a perfect answer.

I think it'd be easy to shaft Finn with sloth, but other than the sleeping beauty thing he isn't actually that apathetic or disengaged from purpose or lazy—he wakes up and immediately gets down to the business of being angry and vengeful, there is not a lot that he is tangibly indifferent about. I think he's the angriest of the Mikaelsons. He's angry in the flashbacks, he's angry during the dagger and after it’s finally removed. Of all the personality traits that people give him pre-dagger, I think one of the only ones strongly supported by canon is his rage. So I'm giving him wrath.

Kol is envious of the care his siblings give to each other and to those outside of their family. Sure, he says he's angry, that he's been angry for a thousand years, but why is he angry? It's not because he is inherently an angry person—he feels that he is being denied something that he is owed. His anger largely dissipates after meeting Davina, someone who gives him that care and priority he has always yearned for and felt jealous of. He's envy to me.

I lowkey buck against giving Rebekah lust because she actually doesn't have that many canon love interests—her brothers just slut shame her to the max. Elijah, across both shows and the novels, has eleven canon love interests, and that's not including popular dynamics like Elejah, for whom he does have undeniable canon feelings. He's a slut, so I'm giving him lust. I don't want to give the brothers a win by giving that to the girl.

Now I have this thing where I feel that greed and gluttony have the most in common of the seven sins—greed is a need to have more and gluttony is the taking of that more to excess, it is glutting yourself on that more with abandon. Neither is ever satisfied with what they have because there is always more. The difference is probably that greed is about hoarding those things and that it often also dances with envy: you see something, often something someone else has, and you think "that should be mine." Gluttony is a desire to possess that thing within yourself. To that end, I am giving Klaus greed and Rebekah gluttony.

Finn as Wrath. Spot on!!!!

It’s a little lazy to give Klaus pride so I’ll give Henrik pride. Just to get it out of the way and because there’s nothing to disprove this, for me, and it leaves me room to give the others the ones I want to. You could tie Pride back to Mikael and Esther if you want to.

SO! Kol is VERY envy and I cannot imagine people would disagree with that because… cmon…. He says it like four times. He’s envious he was left out of the cesspool of klelijah!

Elijah, likewise, is lust to me. Sexual lust, bloodlust. It’s all him.

SO! Sloth, Greed, Gluttony and my remaining three Mikaelsons are Freya, Klaus and Rebekah. I agree that greed and gluttony are the most alike and to that degree, I’m giving Klaus gluttony and Freya greed. I think Freya has a deep need to covet and collect her family members and the things that matter to them and she gets jealous when others seem to so easily grasp those things. Klaus, for your definition of gluttony!!!

Pride in the Divine Comedy is a misdirected and excessive love of The Self, it is presumptive and rebellious and boastful. Rather than a lack of or incompleteness of love, it is an ill-bent one. It is, fundamentally, the root of all sins coming after it—it is what allows the envious to believe that they deserve what their neighbor does, it is what makes the slothful believe they are above the need to care, what makes the lustful believe their love should supersede Dante’s belief that to be righteous one must make due with your place, that you must be free of vice and free of yearning, that you must love (because in the text love is, at its core, the innate seed of every action ever taken) but you must never allow that love to eclipse your greater purpose—in the text, since it is a religious one, that is love of The Creator. (As someone who is not religious, I find that lame as hell but whatever. You can retrofit that for whatever greater purpose you find the most fitting ig.)

Envy as the love of one's own good and the belief that another's joy and love diminishes their own, that they should be equal even if it means that they must deprive others of their goodness. It assumes love is a limited resource, that there is a finite amount of it in the world, and that someone loving another is to rob them of their rightful share.

There are two expressions of wrath in the Divine Comedy—the active, who gave in to their rage and vented it through violence and anger, and the passive or sullen, who repressed their anger and harbored their bitter, silent resentments until it poisoned their soul. It a desire for justice perverted in the text, because those who suffer from it have had their love is misdirected into something offended and angry, they believe that their justice can only be found by striking back at those who hurt them, that their revenge is both justified and necessary.

Sloth, as I said in a different post, is "a streak of apathy and indifference, the type of love deficiency that Dante wrote about wherein there is a laxness to you, your sin is in a deep and terrible insufficiency of love and zeal." If pride is an excess of love for thyself and envy is a love for what others have and greed is love for what you could have, then sloth is a lack of spiritual love. If I were to give Elijah anything other than lust, then I would give him sloth 100%. That's my boy. That's my freakish you-belong-in-the-trash boy.

Okay so funny story, but the fifth terrace isn't just greed and avarice, it is also squandering and prodigality. Avarice, wherein you place something over someone: your love is excessive, you need more, it will never be enough because there is a gaping hole within you. Prodigality is the neglect of the things you have accumulated, it is want coupled with a lack of gratitude for the things you possess.

Gluttony is, like I said, very similar to avarice in Dante's work—it is placing The Object over The Self or The Other (or The Creator, like I said this is a very religious text). It is to love something fleeting—food, drink, something you can consume. It is a natural impulse (in Rebekah's case, a desire to be free, a desire to love and love freely and with abandon, to get the things she wants) that is fundamentally good or natural, perverted when appetite begins to rule the person rather than the person ruling their appetite.

That's why I gave it to greed to Klaus over someone like Freya, who does covet and want more, but there is a point wherein she would be satisfied nor does she squander what she desires. Greed is to have, within you, a fundamental lack of appreciation for the things you possess and, in your rush to possess even more, to trample upon what you already have. I choose to give Rebekah gluttony because the things she want are fleeting, they short lived, and born from a fundamentally understandable impulse. I actually sort want to give Freya that one now LOL

Lust is, again, the disorderment of love, but where avarice and gluttony are to love The Object and pride is to love The Self, Lust is to love The Other—to love someone above yourself and above The Creator (because Dante is a religious text, it is obsessed with these things through a religious context). It is the opposing force to religious chastity, which has always been about purity of the mind and control over the body—it is to give over your soul to your passions, as he says it is the subjugation of "reason to desire." (This is why I give this to Esther. It isn't because she had an affair, it is because she loves The Other (Mikael, Ansel, Klaus, her children) past the point of reason.

I’m still mentally playing musical chairs between avarice, gluttony, pride, and sloth between Rebekah, Freya, Klaus, and Henrik. I think… sloth is just Elijah to me, but I refuse to not use lust for him. I’ve decided he gets to be both and Henrik gets no sin because I like him #mybelovedhypocrisy

*local action, campaigning, planting trees, targeted politician lobbying, whatever: something CONCRETE and achievable with measurable results

“No age gap??!?!?”

“And no non-con elements”

“NO NON CON?”

“And no coercion or otherwise manipulative behaviors”

“Joe they want a vampire with NOTHING”

I kept seeing this post in my notes and it made me want to make a new one that was better and not made under duress so here we go

"The noble Alcestis, who voluntarily gave her life to save her husband Admetus. Though the play clearly describes her death and funeral, it ends with Heracles restoring a veiled woman to Admetus, who is revealed to be Alcestis. Heracles claims to have wrestled her away from Thanatos, the personification of death." [x]