chasing a spurious starlight

idk sometimes i forget how clytemnestra is half sister to helen and how they are both cousins of penelope and their lives are SO interconnected and the marriage of helen changes the courses of all of their lives forever. but at the time they are so separated into their own stories and their own tragedies and are known mostly only in isolation from each other. their paths don’t cross much by the time the disasters unfold but once they did. helen and penelope make it out alive but without clytemnestra. and they must think about it sometimes. they were children together

why are greek mythology adaptations always so gritty when there’s so many weird ridiculous antics to pull from. helen of troy not knowing how to cheer up telemachus so she just drugs him unconscious and calls it a night. athena divinely intervening to curl odysseus’ hair so he looks sexy enough to successfully beg for help. aphrodite trying help her kid on the battlefield and having to run away immediately because she gets beat up by a random mortal. achilles’ horse prophesying death to him and then never speaking again

i do in hindsight really love the concept of complaining about adaptational changes in a 3000 year old oral tradition of which there isn’t really a definitive version so much as a surviving one that is also the most adapted story of all time. my chud forebears in Roman Britain throwing rocks at a bard going nah nah nah the last one said some different other shit at that part you gotta do it again is a comforting image to me

Almost one thousand years ago a woman with my exact face and probably better bangs in rural Morgannwyg was defending to the whole village the latest iteration of the marchog gwyrdd where Gwalchmei ap Gwyar is called Gawain and gets a little gay with it even though it’s different than the tale we have earlier heard from a previous bard so that I can fight the same battle on letterboxd today. God bless complaining the worlds oldest activity

btw speaking of manuscripts did you all know that you can just go to this website that lists all the lancelot-grail manuscripts that exist and links to views for most of them, all of which are available for free to look at online!!! you can just go browsing and find your favorite arthurian characters :) a little hard to navigate + definitely helpful if you happen to know medieval french LOL but regardless you too can peruse medieval arthurian manuscripts for free whenever you want

in the furthest right column it also will tell you which manuscripts are illustrated and how much illustrations they have so you can easily see which ones have pictures (because some of them don’t.) this manuscript is one that i found that has pretty large and very high quality illustrations if you would like a place to start :)

imo the really interesting story of the iliad is the fact that, because it’s a later telling of the story, all the characters are self-conscious abt their legendary status. like the first time we see helen, she’s weaving a tapestry of all the men who will die for her. the characters all have a tragic sense of foreboding & also a feeling of helpless submission to the power of the narrative. the greek nonbelief in human agency is always super weird but its esp weird in homer imo bc the cosmological force isn’t so much fate as it is the story: hektor and achilles know that they’re tragic heroes, helen knows she’s an evil seductress, cassandra knows she’s cursed, patroklos and andromache know that they can’t do anything 2 stop the men they love from dying. which makes the tone of the story very strange, almost as if the characters are going thru the motions of a story they’re told before

feng shui sabotage by placing thousands of tiny ball bearings in a bag under your couch you won't see them but you'll feel the clutter

1 million years of Duncan Idaho

sequel to one hundred years of solitude