#filodox!

tag 10 people you want to get to know better

1. last song

The Tank by The Dear Hunter. Btw go listen to The Color Spectrum right now!!

2. favourite colours

Currently greens & blossom pinks. 🌸 Also @fred-erick-frankenstein sage green & dark blue supremacy!!

3. watching

The MCU 🫣

4. currently reading

Uhhh technically The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf (about Alexander von Humboldt) but it's been slow due to university. I'm excited to start The Light Eaters by Zoe Schlanger and some more books once my semester wraps up!

5. current obsession

I suppose depictions of / inspired by Nazis in popular culture? It's something that's piqued my curiosity for a long time & that finally intersects with my academic research. Lots of whys and hows there.

6. currently working on

Finishing two history papers so I can graduate... I also spent the last few months managing a regional honors society history conference for my university. Was super fun & it went very well! Still proud of pulling that off & presenting my own research (on the rhetoric used by married women in the U.S. to argue for their place in the workforce during the Great Depression) too!

7. last google search

...pelican mouth copypasta

8. current desktop/phone wallpaper

Desktop is inside the palm house at Kew Gardens. (Never been, but it's on my bucketlist.) Phone is a photo I took in the aquatic plant room of San Francisco's Conservatory of Flowers!! Victoria amazonica my beloved 🪷

I hadn't known the years exactly, but thinking about it now...

I mean, you could of course go and say, "Beckett successfully killed piracy!!!" or something about how the two went down together, and that'd be neat. Something seems inevitable, seems Pyrrhic, about that, somehow. Something something what is victory what does it mean to lose or die here etc.

However, I'm not sure if the "Golden Age of Piracy" as we understand it historically (in reality) maps onto PotC so exactly? There are plenty of subtle differences / "inaccuracies" that make the world of PotC unlike our own. Does the height of piracy "actually" (per canon) end circa Beckett's death?

Above all, I think I personally find it most interesting (if we are seeing that Beckett died just before the end of the height of piracy in the timeline) to think of Beckett as a symptom of bigger currents in the world rather than as a direct cause, y'know? That's something that Beckett's arc was always about, about the end of piracy looming because the world was changing, not so much because of the actions of one man (and his private army). The world "made" Beckett, far more than Beckett "made" the world going forward, in a sense. Beckett... Gosh, he really was a sort of manifestation of everything anti-piracy that had been building in the world of PotC. In that way, like many villains, he's...less a person than a conflict or phenomenon given a face.

I mean, I have so many questions!

Why did Ahk’s family harness the power of Khonsu, of all deities?

On that topic, why would they choose to only come to life at night? Did they not have a “come to life during the day” spell? Did Merenkahre anger Ra?

And, ofc, where was Kahmunrah when all of this happened?

I’m like,,,really curious about Kah.

First off, he’s wearing the Blue Crown of Egypt. The Khepresh is specifically Egypt’s battle crown so !!!

Interestingly, Ahk wears the crown of lower Egypt (the Deshret) and their dad wears the combined crown of upper and lower Egypt (the Pschent) iirc.

I feel like everyone knows that Kah killed Ahk by now, even though that never explicitly made it into the movies. That’s big. 

Also, the Kah we see is a wax figure, not a mummy. He wasn't buried with his family, as we see in the third film. He may not have been properly mummified at all, because there is no evidence that his tomb was ever found. All we seem to know about him is in relation to his gate.

I’ve seen it speculated that Kah was the pharaoh's son via a concubine, while Ahk was the son of both Merenkahre and his queen -- thus Kah being second in line despite being first born. It’s an interesting idea, and I think it’s plausible. I really don’t know what other reason they would have for being all “Ahkmenrah, precious child, light of our life and glory of the gods! Oh and Kahmunrah, who we found in a Taco Bell dumpster.”

Plus, I would love to know what the timeline is with all of this.

Did their parents die and leave the throne to Ahk and then Kah killed him? But then how did Kah die? How was it decided that Ahk and their parents still got their grand family tomb?

Did Ahk ever officially inherit the throne of Egypt or was he killed when their parents were still alive? Hence the crowns? That would also give them some power to make sure they got the burial they wanted and that Kah didn't get buried with them.

How much of a coup was this?

The likelihood of Kah being buried in a tomb is pretty low, considering. It seems like if he really were "Kahmunrah the Bloodthirsty" there's only so many ways this could go.

1) Kah killed Ahk before their parents died, was found out, and was executed or exiled and torn apart by jackals in the desert. The rest of his family all got buried together and he was left to rot.

2) Kah killed Ahk before their parents died, was found out, was executed, and was given a small tomb far away from the rest of his family (which was never found).

3) Kah killed Ahk after their parents died, but Ahk was beloved of the people and Kah was an awful pharaoh. Kah was overthrown and killed by angry peasants / military. All of Egypt decided to bury Ahk with his parents out of respect and Kah was left to rot.

4) Kah killed Ahk after their parents died, but tried to look sane and so buried Ahk with their parents himself. This only really makes sense if he didn't want the tablet while he was still alive, but would possibly get him a tomb of his own.

A lot really depends on the tablet. It was apparently made for Ahk, by their parents, to keep the family together after death (which is weird considering the Egyptian afterlife, but I digress). It does seem like Kah wanted it and knew how to use it, but more importantly it seems like he got a hold of it. His gate is built around a false sarcophagus with parts of the tablet embedded into it, so that it fits perfectly. That definitely implies that he’s opened the gate before -- especially with the "changed the password" bit, implying that he knew the old password (but hasn’t seen the tablet since his death).