eugh don’t like that

obviously like….nothing against the people who are going to use disco elysium collage but do not let the studio bury the lawsuit with this thing. do not stop talking about how this game was stolen by greedy venture capitalists. do not stop talking and please don’t stop being angry

also I’m still deeply mad about that fuckin art they commissioned for Disco's birthday last year. the cutesy ass picture of Jean in a pink bunny suit and everyone at the bloody murder station being cute and wholesome

this brooklyn 99-ification of DE's cast makes it so so much more marketable to fandom types I feel like I’m spiraling this is so goddamn dismal

thinking about how one of the only truly *real* details we get about dora is how she liked war games. and harry thinks of her as dolores dei. and dei was the innocence of colonialism and “for-the-greater-good” bloodshed. it all comes full circle. he was obsessed with her not only for whatever shallow holiness he associated with her but also for the violence she was capable of. whatever his reasons may be, he’s drawn to abuse and degradation.

let’s talk about how for all he misses her, the only things he seems to remember are negative. he feels hunted by her, he remembers the way she’d yell at him, but he didn’t internalize any of the good things that she must have said or done, only the feeling that he loved and worshipped her. but in the flashbacks and the crosswalk suddenly there are all these bad things he can remember. the fact that he’s been *wronged* is a core tenet of his personality, even after a full factory-reset brain wipe. he wants to hurt himself so he holds on to all the ways she ever hurt him so he can just dig the knife in a little deeper. so much of the crosswalk scene just reads as him projecting– i don’t doubt that she expressed some of those sentiments to him, albeit maybe not verbatim, but the phrasing and the sheer intensity of it just feels like it’s him borrowing her image to beat himself with all the things he hates about himself. this guy really does just self-harm using the people he loves, doesn’t he

I've talked about this before, but Harry's inner dialogues about Dora, besides olfactory memories, are almost always about her body -

I think Harry's grief over her loss [at least post-amnesia] is about the loss of a status symbol, an object of desire that everyone wants but only he had access to. I believe he uses sexuality [even dangerous sexuality] to cope with his numerous struggles, and lost a huge part of that coping mechanism when they broke up.

This can also be inferred in this dialogue with Ruby, when talking about Klaasje:

Electrochemistry says "that kind" - to me, this is an implicit comparison to Dora.

Harry was the first one to completely objectify Dora, and I think it's likely that he spoke about her that way as well, pre-amnesia.

Edit: as a side note, his obession with her body isn't always kept internally, either; you can harass and ask her if she's naked on the payphone, and EC chimes in at some point to reiterate Harry's obsession with her presumed nudity in the same conversation.

that moment, when hades sings orpheus’ song, and creates a flower for persephone? watching the show live for the first time, it made me sick. it felt like…like he’d stolen this moment from orpheus and eurydice. like appropriation, like the heart of it was gone, he took everything from orpheus and eurydice. their future, their joy, and now, this melody. this moment that was magical and wonderful and theirs, now imitated. stripped of its magic. it disgusted me.

which is weird because while just listening to the soundtrack and hearing him sing, i thought it was sweet, that hades sang. that he remembered the song of his love. but seeing it just…made me mad.

most of dora's facts stemming from harry's dream version of her, or jean who's only ever heard harry shitting on her, makes it hard to figure out what she's like. i get that's the point but i'm so curious. would she really think he's a poverty-stricken fuck if they lived in that matchbox with fleeting electricity if she wrote that letter that's so full of infatuation? her parents paid for their life and harry's RCM training but for how long? was she still an arts academic? obviously at some point the last straw on the mountain of straws made it fizzle into nothingness but... idk i can't help but feel the letter & dream-dora stating she fell in love with harry at first sight from how Cool he was, being a form of worship on her part too, an innocent version. "I wanted you to be the rest of my life that day." and along the years that worship tipped over to a detrimental degree on harry's side. and even the dream version of her who spits back the things most likely said durimg arguments, goes from frustration to pity to wistfulness, but what made it sadder to me was how long the phone call can go on for. dream-dora says she moved on so bluntly and lists all the things she dislikes about him, but phone-dora's patience shined through even when harry's saying shitty stuff to her. she could have just hung up immediately and never pick up again the first time he rings her

so going off this, the following are personal headcanons

Errol Flynn and Alexis Smith in Gentleman Jim (1942) dir. Raoul Walsh

Disco Elysium is one of the greatest games ever made. There is so much there, so much relevance to our current languishing postmodern age. 

For example, one could write a detailed essay on the disastrous effects toxic masculinity has on men as seen with Harry Du Bois’s relationships with women and his inability to seek help in treating his mental illness, choosing instead to self-medicate with drugs, alcohol, and more cases. Or with Titus and Dros, and their obsession with Klaasje (which Harry also is guilty of) that leads to them all projecting angelic, vulnerable qualities onto her, only to turn bitter and irascible when they learn she is not the innocent broken bird they assumed she was. All three men feel personally betrayed when their fantasies are ruined, and that betrayal turns to anger and a desire for revenge and punishment. The fact that the game informs you that you were tricked by Klaasje’s ‘feminine wiles’ is an intentional narrative decision to place a spotlight on how Harry is to blame for allowing himself to blindly accept Klaasje at face value. If he had looked deeper, if he had seen her as more than just a pretty, mysterious face, he would have noticed some pieces weren’t aligning right. 

It is the age-old cycle on display: Man Objectifies Woman with Selfish Assumptions, Woman Inevitably Invalidates Man’s Selfish Assumptions, Man Get Angry that Woman Invalidated His Selfish Assumptions, Man Punishes Woman For Being More Complex Than the Sum of His Selfish Assumptions.

Hadestown - August 17, 2022

Way Down Hadestown

Performed by T. Oliver Reid, Tara Jackson, Patrick Page, Eva Noblezada & company.

How to get to Hadestown? Take the escalator.

This is partly inspired by a tweet and was way funnier In my head. The other inspiration is the escalator to get to the subway in Washington D.C which could a quite possibly actually decend into hell. I think they’re the longest/steepest ever.

In “Our Lady of the Underground” Persephone keeps asking the shades, “what’s my name” and the replies are all different titles until the end when Persephone says her own name. I just realized that this is probably a reference to the fact that you are not supposed to envoke the name of the Queen of the Underworld.

Ooh, I never thought of it that way; I always just sort of ignored that part as just a chorus, but yeah, now that you mention it, it really sounds like Persephone is almost-desperately trying to get someone to talk to her like a person instead of a queen and they just can’t.

It’s like, whenever she’s in the Underworld, no one probably uses her name; we generally hear Hades call her “lover”, and the subjects have various honorifics for her. On the surface, Orpheus gives her both an honorific and a name: “To the patroness of all of this: Persephone”. She’s herself AND a queen. In the Underworld, she’s only a queen; half of who she is is erased to make room for Hades.

You know what’d be amazing? If Eurydice sang a major part in Epic iii. Think about it, this is a character that hasn’t fully understood the power of music (see: “Orpheus all the pretty songs you sing ain’t gonna shelter us”) and over the course of the show gets more in tune with Orpheus’s message. We already have her relaying the “la la la” theme during Chant ii to the other workers in Hadestown, and leading the rallying cries in the refrain. It just makes sense to me for her to have a bigger part in Epic iii than just the bridge where everyone joins in. 

So here’s my idea: after everyone sings the “la la la” theme in the bridge, every character supports the idea of letting Eurydice and Orpheus go (as well as the rest of Hadestown) EXCEPT for Hades. We extend the pause, and just when everyone’s about to give up, Eurydice steps forward from the crowd and sings the “what has become of the heart of that man…“ verse in acapella since she can’t play an instrument. And then Orpheus after being shocked, accompanies her on his guitar for the final notes of the song. Not only would it give Eurydice more action in /her/ story (instead of waiting for a man to come save her lol), Eurydice singing the pivotal point would be a reminder to Hades of the woman he fell in love with and risked/does everything for. Plus it just makes sense since Persephone told /Eurydice/ that garden story.

idk that’s how i just picture it.

The only quarrel I have with this is that it means Orpheus doesn’t sing the “see how he labors” notes, but they could give him that one line. Like Eurydice could sing from “What has become…” to “now that he has everything?” Then:

Orpheus: The more he has, the more he holds.

Eurydice: The greater the weight of the world on his shoulders.

Orpheus: See how he labors beneath that load.

Eurydice: Afraid to look up.

Orpheus: And afraid to let go.

That ties their differing struggles together nicely, they can have a look-at-each-other-while-talking-to-someone-else-to-show-that-they-understand-each-other-better moment, and then Orpheus can finish up the song from there, since this is technically his task that Hades gave him, and Eurydice’s arc has been satisfied by restoring the hope once silence has fallen.

i know we all love Damon, but can we please give Nabiyah some praise

Her voice is so rich and earthy and grounded, and so expressive as well! She puts so much gravitas into a single line! Eurydice is the most human of all the characters and Nabiyah’s voice really reflects her down-to-earth nature! She’s the perfect complement to Damon’s light and airy vocals and SUCH an asset to the cast!!!

WAIT NO BETTER IDEA FOR A SWAP PLOT: 

orpheus who stays up top too long, who doesn’t wanna go back down to hadestown and he causes droughts, heat waves, storms, flooding, the seasons are all wrong.

persephone thinks its great, letting everything grow and flourish, a year-round. party that never has to end, and lets herself get dragged away and wrapped up in it. meanwhile, hades goes down to the underworld to plead for eurydice to come get her fuckin man. idk, maybe something with her forgetting abt orpheus over time, too wrapped up in her work. no one is immune to the underworld’s power to suck the soul right out of you, not even its ruler. or maybe she makes a deal with hades to reign in orpheus in return for him working for her some sort of engineer or designer something? this has a few different facets where it may be an attempt to keep orpheus down below longer by making it all pretty (neon necropolis here we come) anyway the end result is the same; persephone’s never-ending party comes to an end, leaving her with no fiancé and no springtime, so she marches down to the underworld to make things right.

New addition to my series of posts about “NYTW is better than Broadway”: the original conflict of “is there room for art in desperate times?” is a really interesting conflict. Because yeah, we need art, but on the other hand, Eurydice is starving and can live without art but not without food. it’s complex, interesting, and sympathetic. Eurydice supports Orpheus, but to what degree? Orpheus loves Eurydice but he ignores her attempts to reach him. They are flawed, they are human. They are figuring out the relationship between one another and between themselves and their survival as creatively sustained people and alive people. The Broadway conflict of “Orpheus needs to figure out his song so the desperate times will become more bearable and how long can Eurydice support his mission until she is forced to give up because she’s gotta eat” isn’t so much a conflict as a matter of time.

their relationship in bway definitely feels more like…conditional to me, compared to nytw, with eurydice being so invested in orpehus not just out of love for him but because of the promise of his song physically healing the world

if it’s an actual demonstrable physical power of orpheus’ song and not just, like, metaphor, then it kind of inherently puts a power imbalance between him and eurydice. she doesn’t just dedicate herself to him out of love but because he needs someone to take care of him while he works on his song to fix the world. and we can’t blame him for neglecting her because he’s distracted working on something More Important, it then becomes that much more eurydice’s fault alone for going to hadestown. rather than their relationship being equal in all respects including blame

making the song a literal world-changing magic spell really cheapens the theme of the art itself being special/worthwhile (music and poetry) imo. which is slightly different from but certainly goes hand in hand with the bway lyric changes that cut out a lot of the poetry from earlier versions

I think also given the context of Eurydice being Orpheus’ muse, it puts pressure on her to just sort of Be There to inspire his song that will fix the world. It forces her into a passive existence rather than being an active lover and an active pursuer of a life for the two of them before she leaves him (an active choice in both productions). Again, the NYTW version of Eurydice is just more interesting.

No thoughts, just Road To Hell playing on someone’s restored 1930s radio

ok its ace week and i’m ace so you have to listen to me on this one: what if……….. ogh i shant say…………. what if nytw orpheus and eurydice were asexual/demisexual

because you see they didn’t fuck Live On Stage like bway orphydice. we can’t prove that they are allosexuals. Therefore, until there is Explicit Evidence, they belong to my greedy ace hands 

Hello old school hadestown fans! While perusing the internet yesterday I found:

1) A near-complete playlist of a show on a hadestown tour in 2011 (America sings hadestown). The tour was, should my memory serve me, to celebrate the release of the studio album. The link is here.

2) A ten minute long video containing highlights from a show in the 2007 Vermont tour. It has clips of songs like Everything Written and Cloud Machine. Audio and video aren’t the best, but holy shit, there’s actual footage. The link is here.

That’s all, folks. Happy listening!

This National Theatre promo for “Hadestown” is so strange to me that I had to commit like, an hour to figuring out why I find it so off and here’s what I’ve come up with:

1. The clothes. I’m guessing this picture was taken before the costumes were finalized because everyone is dressed in a way that is evocative of their costumes but none of them are accurate replications. While I could maybe believe these are the actor’s own clothes utilized to represent their characters, I don’t feel like I’m looking at the actors either (we all know Reeve has utterly bizarre personal style, Amber wears as many variations of overalls as she possibly can, and every picture of Andre from London has him wearing the same tracksuit so I’m calling shenanigans). They are not quite the characters but not quite the actors either. In theory I like the black with touches of red color scheme though.

2. The texture. The background of this picture is exactly what you would expect for “Hadestown.” It’s the background of the poster and the texture is also basically the color of the official shirts. The thing is, they also applied some kind of gritty texture to the actual pictures of the actors and it kind of makes them all look … dirty? They all seem like they need to wash their faces or something. It’s cohesive but it looks just a bit wrong. I think they found a better filter by Broadway because a lot of the offical Broadway pictures have a kind of gritty-ish look to them but one that’s way more subtle, still colorful, and actually makes the actors look good.

3. The composition. Nice things first: putting Patrick and Amber next to each other on one side of Andre and Eva and Reeve together on the other side of Andre is a very sensible set up. Still, this looks so odd because of the obvious fact that these are five individual pictures put together. There’s also something a little weird about how they’re all just staring seriously straight ahead. “Hadestown” is a really dynamic show and that feeling is not here at all. It looks more like a play promo than a musical promo, maybe a Tennessee Williams play. There’s some AU of Hadestown with the same plot as the musical but it’s a dramatic play that takes place in the south in the 1930s and doesn’t really have the mythology elements. Hades is a wealthy land developer or oil tycon or something who wants to try to have an affair with Eurydice to spite his depressed, alcoholic wife Persephone but will learn in the end that he can’t believe he loves his wife so much (lots of lost youth themes here). Hermes owns the bar Persephone’s always hanging out at and is the voice of reason and is probably a stand-in for the author. Orpheus is a waiter at the bar (and plays gigs) when he meets Eurydice and falls in love with her no-nonsense attitude.

By the way, that Tennessee Williams AU concept is free to anyone who wants to write fanfiction about it. Please do.

Anyway, this promo is weird.

“one must imagine sisyphus happy” no, one must imagine him a stubborn asshole who thinks he’s smarter than everyone including the gods. i’ve heard plenty of versions where hades gives him the CHOICE to roll the boulder up the hill; it’s the only way he’s getting into elysium. if he wants to walk away, fine! he’ll just be relegated to the asphodel meadows (the “nosebleed/overflow” section of the underworld where all the normies end up).

and sisyphus, well, he’s a goddamn king. he cheated death! twice! a simple boulder is no match for his mighty wit.

hades’ punishment isn’t “you are forced to perform an unwinnable task forever”. it must fit sisyphus’ crimes. his hubris. any sane person, and quite a few insane ones, would spend a while pushing the boulder, maybe a few hours, maybe a few months, and eventually realize it was futile. an eternity in a peaceful meadow, not alone, not tortured, seems agreeable. but not to sisyphus. no, he’s too famous, too smart for that. he’ll get it to the top this time. this time. this time for sure.