I must away and tend to my crows.

I love this video so much it brings me so much joy every time it crosses my dash again

One of the things that I really enjoyed about the "Epic of Gilgamesh" is that Gilgamesh is a shitty person. Like, he's a king and two-thirds divine and all that, a warrior among warriors, his experiences could not be more different from the average person, and yet none of that saves him. I think the messages about grief and mortality hit as hard as they do because he's so selfish and privileged and awful at the beginning, before being irreversibly changed by friendship and love and loss and regret. He has all of this classical "greatness" and that does not spare him. He has been changed and chooses to change, and there's no miraculous reward for that. None of the widespread pain he's caused and is still capable of causing his subjects spares him either. There's something striking and even cathartic in seeing this greedy, cruel, mythologically "heroic" figure be so deeply humbled by a universal tragedy; to see him essentially crying out, "Not even me?" and receiving the firm answer of, "No, not even you."

Nothing more fully illustrates that fandom is an interpretive stance and not merely a point in time than the fact that there are people blorboposting as we speak about the fucking Epic of Gilgamesh.

HUUUDRREEEEEAAAHHH