something at work in my soul

Sapphic Dynamic where the popular queen bee type is hopelessly in love with the weirdo girl that runs Anime Club. She's so down on herself, writing in her diary "Erin is so cool. She can beat Super Mario Brothers in under five minutes, she learned Japanese to read imported manga, and she runs an Anime Club even though nobody shows up. She's committed to that club longer than I've committed to a hair style. I just know about clothes and makeup, she'd be so bored by me. Oh what would I do for her attention?"

having read some Martha Wells interviews it does really tickle me to imagine that when Murderbot asks for a ride, ART is basically doing that thing where you decide to entertain an obvious scam artist for a bit. Like, "Well, this is most likely a corporate spy, but I guess I am spying back on corporates right now so sure LOL let's see what the humans told it to do to trick me"

There's characters I think are fun to read as trans masc for my own enjoyment, characters I enjoy building a case *to* read as trans masc, one or two rare characters I genuinely think can be theorized to *be* canonically trans masc

I see a lot of people online saying that Orpheus (Hadestown specifically) looks back because he loves Eurydice so much, that there isn't a world in which he doesn't look back, because the kind of man who wouldn't look back is not the kind of man who would go after her in the first place, etc. It's inevitable because of the strength of his love. But I don't see that as being the whole picture. Textually, it is explicitly his doubt in himself, and in the narrative of his life, that makes him look back: "Doubt Comes In", and he wonders, who is he that Hades would let him win? Who is he that Eurydice would follow him through the dark? Orpheus used to have a very simple, naive view of the world and his place in it. He was single-minded. At the beginning he tells Eurydice he's the man who is going to marry her because...well, that's how the story should go, and he is a poet first and foremost. Then, when he meets Hades, he is confronted by what Eurydice did and what the world is really like. He is shattered by the realisation that Eurydice wasn't just a simple, "pure" victim, but that she signed her life away. He is beaten down and loses faith, he goes into "Is this how it is?" after he's literally already done the impossible by reaching Hadestown on foot. He should have proven his abilities to himself by this point, but things aren't going the way they are supposed to and he doesn't know who he is anymore. He isn't just a boy in love with a girl who sings a song to bring back spring: he's a boy who didn't look back when he should have the first time when she called his name; she's a girl who chose her immediate needs over his grand ideals. His faith in a world where they make it back together is broken. He looks back because he doesn't trust himself or the narrative that he's found himself in. It's even more heartbreaking to me, because the Orpheus he was at the beginning of the musical might not have looked back, but that version of Orpheus doesn't make it out of the Underworld.

More from that one post

me: truly a well crafted tragedy is such a bittersweet pleasure to take in and serves a purpose, not just as a sad story but as a reminder that even that which ends badly might not have happened in vain or for nothing. The love, the grief, the actions still meant something simply for having taken place and for us partaking in it.