Happy Pride Month :0

Reblog if your blog is lgbt+ positive and won’t stand for transphobia, homophobia, biphobia, lesbiphobia, and so on!!!!!!!!

Absolutely reeling.

So I knew that the origin of "Hector was a great man, moral, noble, better than all of the Greeks" began as Roman propaganda that somehow has made it to now, the year 2023, and is still taught to high school students.

What I did not know was why scholars shit on Achilles as vehemently as they did (and still do).

My copy of Fagles' translation of the Iliad has a preface by a different scholar who I'm not going to bother to name because he's an idiot (and idk probably dead at this point). I read the entire thing, absolutely baffled, because he would cite a part of the text (that I admittedly had not read yet! at all!), quote it, and then come to the most batshit interpretation based on that quote I had ever seen in my life. His general take was that Achilles was a sociopath who had no feelings for anyone other than himself and his own pride, and every action he took (until welcoming Priam into his hut) was done in service of that pride. To support this, he decided that Achilles did not see Patroclus as a person, but rather as an extension of himself, and thus someone injuring Patroclus was them injuring Achilles, and so he did not care about Patroclus, he only cared about his wounded pride.

Yeah.

That sounded wrong before reading the book, and while reading the book all i could think was, "Did we read the same fucking thing???" Put in context, those quotations still did not support his conclusions whatsoever.

But i cracked open Caroline Alexander's "The War That Killed Achilles" last night, and she solves this mystery of "Hector good, Achilles bad" for me right out the gate (which is good because so far I've only read the preface).

Western Europeans by and large learned about the Trojan war from Roman stories, which became fairly popular, and not the Iliad, which was not translated into French or English until centuries later. As mentioned, these were propaganda that cast the Trojans in a much better light than the Greeks because the Romans believed they were descended from Trojan refugees. This starts a trend that is still going on in scholarly circles as casting the Iliad as a war between "barbaric Greeks living in a shitty, lawless camp" vs "civilized, educated, weaving, real-wife-having Trojans," making the Iliad a tragedy in which Homer for some reason skewers his own people and their warlike culture as barbaric while propping up a dead, foreign city-state. This interpretation is still extant and was the postscript to another copy of the Iliad I have.

According to Alexander, scholars closer to Homer's time saw the entire war as a tragedy--both the destruction of Troy AND the destruction of the Greek army. While this is not covered in the Iliad, very few Greeks actually made it home after Troy. Some that did were then outcast (Teucer for example), some were murdered (bye, Agamemnon), some went on to create new kingdoms in other places (Diomedes), but by and large, there was no going home from that war. There was no great victory with all their loot. The entire thing was a disaster for both sides, spurred on by fickle gods.

Back to the more recent European interpretations of this story, one reason Hector ended up cast in such a "good" light, despite being a dumbass who wants to dishonor dead people just as badly as Achilles ever did, was in order to make Achilles look worse. Why was it important that Achilles becomes a villain in this story in which he is very much not a villain? Because Europeans were involved in so much war with each other and the rest of the world that a young, insubordinate man who criticizes his idiot of a commander, decides his life isn't worth throwing away for this war, and refuses to fight to sack a city was an affront to their values. Young men were to be obedient, follow their commanding officers, and colonize the world for queen and country. Achilles suggesting losing his life is not worth it to prop up Agamemnon's war is a dangerous precedent for all the good little soldiers needed to make their nations wealthy.

It's almost funny that these analyses propping up Troy as a beacon of civilization were made by people living in countries so bent on colonizing the world. They identified with the city being sacked and not the greedy sackers of said city, who they were much closer to. And Achilles, educated, morally rigid, emotional Achilles, is recast as a sociopathic asshole who doesn't care about anyone other than himself, unlike all of those other beacons of selflessness among the Greek leadership.

The tragedy of the Iliad is that Achilles is right, the war is pointless, Agamemnon did dishonor the shit out of him, and it doesn't matter because he's going to die in it anyway.

Frankly, given how badly his character has been interpreted for so long, I think the muses owe him an apology.

The Original Take - Ep 27 | Zhou Zishu laid on Wen Kexing’s shoulder for the initial shot, this was the take that Zhang Zhehan said was too gay and they had to tone it down despite him thinking it was a really good one

We also didn’t have that lone tear dropping from Wen Kexing’s eye in the final cut

Or that little smile at the end at the thought of Zhou Zishu willing to die with him right now

Koichi and Yukako are a t4t couple. I will not be taking any criticism at this time.

I don’t care who the top or bottom is in your gay relationship, who’s Achilles and who’s Patroclus? Hmmmm??????

Why is the song “Me and my Husband” by Mitski literally Casca…

Anyone who knows how to edit, y’all are welcome for this idea

oooooooooh someone’s got a crush

to know the flaws and love them, too.

post by user gayassnatural / 300 arguments, sarah magnuso / coffee and cigarettes, sade andria zabala / wild geese, mary oliver / state of grace, taylor swift / the first bad man, miranda july

hey i've got a fun game for you all! it's called "guess what the hell this animal from a roman mosaic is"!

i'm not even sure that i believe in God, but i started going to this episcopal church recently bc there were just so many older gay people there and i felt like i needed that in my life and there was a gay priest. people were actually so chill about me being trans, which shocked me, but i figured there were just humoring me - but this past sunday the priest did a sermon on the story in acts about the Ethiopian eunuch. and like, i've heard a thousand sermons on this passage bc its like the first missionary story and people use it a lot to justify their colonization blah blah blah but like everyone glossed over the eunuch thing.

but the (straight) priest talked about how eunuch is a kind of stand in word for gender non-conforming person and actually literally said from the pulpit that we should be welcoming and accepting of all trans people and not ask them to change and !?!?!?! like i never expected to hear that preached in my lifetime, especially in fucking kentucky.

the world can seem so dark and being trans is fucking hard and you just come to expect so little from people ESPECIALLY chrisitans and i'm just so pleasantly surprised. it's just kind of amazing to see chrsitians live up to this loving their neighbor shit they are always talking about