i live in a hologram with you

lil sketch dump - Athena, Ares, Zeus, Hades, Poseidon

"Lord of the silver bow, now hear my prayer! Great guardian of Tenedos and Chryse and sandy Cilla! Mouse Lord! If I ever built temples to your liking, ever burned fat thighs of oxen or of goats for you, fulfill this prayer for me, and let the Greeks suffer your arrows to avenge my tears!" (Homer. Iliad, trans. wilson)

Apollo sends a plague to the Greeks, my piece for the 2026 edition, Sing! O Muse Zine.

like yes basil cares about dorian in a way lord henry very obviously does not but the way he cares is not actually harmless.

basil doesn’t just love dorian. he idealizes him to the point where dorian stops being a person and starts being a kind of living artwork.

the portrait isn’t just about dorian’s soul. it’s about basil projecting himself onto dorian and then being afraid of what that projection reveals.

henry objectifies dorian through language and philosophy turning him into a kind of experiment. but basil objectifies him through worship which is quieter and feels more sincere but still strips dorian of agency in a different way.

and the wild part is basil knows this. he literally says the painting shows too much of himself which means he understands that his love is tangled up in ego and possession. he just frames it as purity instead of control.

so dorian ends up caught between two people who both refuse to see him as a full human being.

henry pushes him toward experience and excess. while basil freezes him into this perfect untouchable ideal. neither of them actually lets dorian just exist.

which makes basil less of a moral center and more of a different kind of danger. not corruption through indulgence but corruption through idealization.