#symposium

Cause, like, personally, when I see a conjoined being split in half by the angry Gods in an Ancient Greek setting, my mind jumps to Plato's Symposium and Aristophanes' 'creation myth' within it about the origin of love. The idea of humans starting out as spherical creatures with faces on each side of their face, who were punished for their hubris by being split into two people and now forced to seek their 'other half'...

Now, the Symposium was specifically talking about the nature of romantic/sexual love (Eros) while the Cosmic Owl's story is about the familial love between siblings, plus the Cosmic Owl was punished just as much for betraying/breaking the bonds of Familial Love as he was for defying the gods (and the Cosmic Owl and his brother couldn't really do a sick cartwheel)...

But it still feels like the Symposium reference here is intentional… Like, it feels like it specifically trying to drive home the idea that Familial Love can feel like a sense of 'wholeness' in the same way that Aristophanes in the Symposium describes the concept of 'Eros'.

Especially since we do know of another brother whose been feeling like half of himself ever since he's been separated from his brother…

~ Kylix with a Symposion Scene.

Artist, attributed to: Gales Painter (Greek, Attic, active ca. 530–ca. 500. B.C.)

Culture: Greek, Attic

Period: Late Archaic

my thoughts about this is that Yoshiki doesn't meet gender expectations and sticks out like a sore thumb about it.

i feel like all he sees about masculinity around him is his unhappy absent dad who's in a lavander marriage, the old conservative men around town, his most probably annoying classmates and of course Hikaru, who was amazing at pretending and talked about when he Yoshiki had a girlfriend, when talking about girls is like a foreign language to him.

Two Satyrs (mosaic) , 4th century BC , Eretria (Evia Island)-Greece