Quoth the Raven,

the traditional theatre masks come from ancient greece, where philosophers saw religious songs and rituals that told the stories of gods and thought “huh so we keep telling people that murder is bad in these songs but people still kill their kids. what should we do about that.” and this guy Thespis was like “hey let’s pretend to be the gods and *show* them that murder is wrong” and invented catharsis. that’s where theatre came from inherently.

now, the thing about these plays was that they were performed for literally everyone. so they needed a really big stage (i’m talking 15,000 seats big). so nobody could hear these people performing because the actors were so far away, and they weren’t learning any lessons and they were still killing their kids. to fix this problem, the greeks invented masks that not only showed the characters being played and their emotions, but they also were made specifically to amplify the sound of their chanting for everyone to hear. that’s where the masks come from.

the traditional comedy and tragedy symbols come from the formatting of the festivals. the festivals would consist of four plays: three of those plays would be three hour long tragedy plays made to show the consequences of disobeying the gods. at the end of those three plays, there would be a thirty minute play called a satyr play, or a comedy. the play would be lighthearted and it would make fun of the stupidity of humans. both types of plays went hand in hand and grew into what we now see as the symbol of theatre.

and not ONCE does mystery ever come up in this. NOT ONCE!!! i had to do a 15 minute project on this in my theatre class along with a 10 minute performance (where i made 14 masks and performed) of The Orestia. and mystery doesn’t even come up later in theatre history either!!! SO WHAT IS THIS??? WHY IS MYSTERY THERE??

media so good i actually make fanart for it,, still figuring out how i wanna stylize simon and rocky

(meme references under the cut)

i think we should like and reblog oc posts not because we know what’s going on but because we appreciate OP for creating something. especially in our current world, we should be happily pushing up artists and not feeling guilty for it.