Knights For Days!

This sounds scary, but then you remember that Mae has a 0/4 win-loss ratio and has been chased out of China, India, China again, and Japan with her tails figuratively between her legs

she’s just gonna get hospitalized with covid and cry about how she was totally gonna take over all of Asia this time for real definitely

“Going 0 for 4” is a pretty optimistic way to describe causing chaos and misery for like 3000 years across three different countries, every time achieving power and prestige until finally exposed, and three times getting away and doing it again. Even after they finally killed her Japan was plunged into a civil war.

if she’s your girl why am I wearing her favour at the tournament

If she’s your girl why am I her champion

Why is Li Shuwen 200 years in the past? To punch people, next question.

“Go outside and touch grass” well I can’t 🙄 A curse is on me if I stay my weaving, either night or day, to look down to Camelot

But you don’t even know what the curse is! Maybe it doesn’t actually do anything? Come ON, live a little, just look out the window for a moment! The water lilies are blooming, it’s really pretty! There is this knight passing by wearing a really shiny helmet with a pretty plume on it!

Hmm maybe you’ve got a point. I am half-sick of shadows anyway. BRB

UPDATE: the curse has come upon me

WHAT DOOM FOR YOU?

back again with my Please Read The Thebaid Agenda! I adapted the ending of Book VII into a comic because oh boy. thoughts thoughts thoughts.

There is a horror in having yourself altered to such a degree where you are unrecognizable in your own self, to know that it is happening, to know that you should be dead and yet you are not. You have already seen the moment of your death!!!! (Stat. Theb. 3.537 – 47) There's a horror in knowing, and in it being treated as an act of love when it's really more like a violation. Amphiaraus is spared Creon's decree, but by falling into the underworld, it makes things worse on a cosmic scale.

Statius' Thebaid Book VII, trans. Jane Wilson Joyce

Statius and Virgil: The Thebaid and the Reinterpretation of the Aeneid, Randall T. Ganiban

Statius' Thebaid and the Poetics of Civil War, Charles McNelis

The Perils of Prophecy: Statius' Amphiaraus and His Literary Antecedents, E. Fantham

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Illustrations from the 1949 edition of Vikenty Veresayev’s translation of The Iliad.

The Arming of Perseus by Edward Burne-Jones (1885)

The reason Bedwyr exists in the background despite being a God Damn marshal is because Arthur has never once employed a strategy in his entire life.

hey, can we talk for a second? it’s about your girlfriend. yeah, she’s great. no, yeah, I agree. It’s just that… she seems really devoted to you? Like really devoted. Almost as if you were the sole, fragile line mooring her to the shores of humanity. No, that’s not romant—ugh. Listen. Me and the girls, we’re worried you might be the last good thing to happen to her and that were some tragedy to inevitably befall you, she would tear the gods from their thrones and dye the infinite western seas wine-dark with their ichor. Do you think you could introduce her to a new hobby or something? we don’t want to have to argue over what color “wine-dark” is supposed to be

The first time Odysseus sees Penelope after coming back, he is in disguise. He tells her a bunch of lies, but also two very important truths: "your husband is coming back" and "all of his companions are dead". He talks about this traumatic loss in the third person, while sitting right next to the woman he's spent 20 years trying to come back to. He could easily have found a way to take her aside and tell her who he is while asking her to keep it a secret, but he doesn't because he is polytropos, which I choose to translate as wrong in the head, and that is why he is the blorbest and I love him

Part 1/2

As a fic author can we talk about readers who follow you to fandoms they don’t even know because i would hand my firstborn child to them

You don't get Hestia as an option because what, you think I'm gonna make this EASY on you?

The Arming of Perseus by Edward Burne-Jones (1885)

gettinge forciblye ouſted from mine medæval booke clubbe after we reade le morte darþur and i ſay þat ſir lancelot did noþing wronge

at the start of every month everyone reblogs some insane poetry that’s like “august has arrived and again I swallow my bones in the burning sun” and every time I’m like damn that makes no sense. but kind of true.

Then Mordred himself softly answered,

Kneeling in denial to the noble Conquerer:

'I beg you, Sire, my blood brother and lord,

Choose another for this charge, for charity's sake!

If you appoint me to this post your people will be deceived;

I am too feeble to fulfill the function of a prince.

Where warriors wise in warfare are esteemed hereafter,

My talents, I truly say, will be attested as minor.

I intend to travel with your troops, my liege,

And my preparation is plain to my peerless knights.'

- Sir Mordred, on being made Viceroy for King Arthur's upcoming absence. The Alliterative Morte Arthure, lines 679-688, translated by Brian Stone

When you are used to the no-nonsense, no-context approach of medieval Irish stories, trying to read Old Norse saga literature does feel kind of like you're being told a medieval story by Uncle Colm from Derry Girls.

#you know young thorgrim as it was #ah this wouldn't be the thorgrim who was thorstein's son #THAT thorgrim lived on the other side of the fjord #or WAS it that thorgrim? #no it was the other thorgrim #his father was thorstein too you see but he was quite a different man #although you wouldn't know it to look at his farm #a mess of a place it was #i said to him thorstein i said you need to start asking thorgrim to help you more #and he said they've a haunting #would you believe it! #a haunting! #it would have been around then or was it the winter after that when they had the famine #no i think it was that winter #and a young man arrived. a warrior he was. #i never knew his father but his father's uncle— (via @trans-cuchulainn)

If this were a medieval Irish story, it would be more like:

"There was an excellent warrior, Thorir his name. He was fostered by Thorstein, who had a son called Thorgrim, but it was not an auspicious time for their farm, because there was a haunting there. When Thorir saw the dead man, he tied a withe around its feet, but it pursued him anyway. Then he performed the sword-feat, and cut the man into many pieces. He took his head and went back to Thorgrim mac Thorstein. 'O fosterbrother,' he said, 'I have killed the man who was haunting you, that is, the revenant.' Thorgrim said, 'This is a great deed.' And that is why that place is called Hill of the Dead Man."

And we will never find out who any of these people are or what was up with the revenant or what Thorir was trying to achieve with the withe -- or even who the revenant was before he was dead.

Meanwhile in the Norse saga we're still learning his family tree and Thorir hasn't even shown up yet.

#god okay YES but also #if this were an Irish story you would know EXACTLY what everyone was wearing and it would be the most tripping balls outfit you ever saw #it's not that they don't go on they're just not that concerned with genealogy #meanwhile in a norse saga you're lucky if they bother to mention what colour hair anyone has or if they've got both arms (via @explorersaremadeofhope)

This is true... mostly... but sometimes when dealing with Irish material you also get texts where this is the entire story:

ET CETERA? YOU'RE GOING TO ET CETERA ME? AFTER *THAT*?

(Ces Ulad, my beloathed. I love all the (?)s implying that even the translator -- Vernam Hull, I believe -- didn't know what was going on.)

So sometimes Irish texts really don't bother telling you... well, anything, including any of the pieces of information that might have made the story make sense. Love that for them.

(And sometimes they do get excessively genealogical, they just usually don't do it right at the beginning of a prose text, and very often they're polite enough to do it in an entirely different text that is dedicated purely to listing people's relations, which I think is considerate of them.)

the early days were rough