Manosuavez - Jayslay

The final troll lineup!

do you ever just... think about the sun, pippin. think about her golden glance... how she lights the world up, well, now is your chance... with the guardians of splendor inviting you to dance. pippin... think about the sun...

DAVE: dude were kind of giving ketchup and mustard rn

KARKAT: WHAT?

DAVE: yknow like the condiments

KARKAT: CONDOM… MEANT…?

DAVE: oh man dont tell me you guys are rawdogging your roasted tubular barkbeastflesh or whatever the fuck you would call them in trollsylvania

DAVE: just imagining the vantas extended family standing around at a cookout

DAVE: hurling obscenities at one another whilst horking down dry meat nestled betwixt even drier buns made of pulverized wriggler pupa molt

DAVE: roll footage of that over a troll sarah mclaughlin track and the caegars come pouring in

DAVE: anyway back to the first thing

DAVE: it kinda fits our vibe too

DAVE: me being the sweet sexy tangy coulis that every flag waving american wants slathered on their hog this summer

DAVE: shit lets be honest every other season too

DAVE: you being the grainy pungent explosively spicy heterogeneous gunk whose delicate honeylike undertones can only be unlocked by individuals with an acquired taste

DAVE: and lucky for you ive procured the shit outta your sapor

DAVE: theres a poupon joke to be made here somewhere gimme a sec

KARKAT: SOMETIMES I WONDER IF EDUCATING MYSELF MORE ABOUT YOUR FRIVOLOUS, SOFT-BELLIED HUMAN CUSTOMS WOULD SPARE ME AT LEAST AN HOUR PER DAY OF NONSENSISMS SPEWING FORTH FROM YOUR WASTECHUTE DIRECTLY INTO MY NOW CONSTANTLY-OVERSATURATED AURICULAR SPONGE CLOTS.

DAVE: not a chance babe

DAVE: you present me with a delectable little seedling of a talking point and ill nurture the bastard regardless of how much background knowledge you possess

DAVE: cultivating entire cropfields worth of witticisms

DAVE: at least fifty seven varieties

(a sort-of redraw of this old post!)

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i think i just realized something pretty interesting about the retconned timeline and why adding vriska onto the meteor somehow “magically” solved some problems.

so, right before she was killed in the game over timeline kanaya right hooks her into realizing her latent lesbianism:

because this event happened in both timelines, people maybe forgot, but vriska essentially just developed a red crush on her old moirail. so she tries to get close with her again and tries to sneak herself into the time kanaya’s been spending with rose.

and at some point she’s gotta notice these two are becoming an item and she just accepts that her crush is crushing on someone else, but then…

rose, her crush’s crush, fucking ditches kanaya on their supposed first date. instead, vriska finds her drinking soporifics and she’s just livid. “WH8T ARE YOU DOING???????? WEREN’T YOU SUPPOSED TO MEET UP WITH HER? YOU’RE THE ONE THAT M8KES HER HAPPY AND YOU CHOSE THIS SHIT INSTEAD OF BEING WITH HER?”

what im getting at here is that adding vriska didn’t just magically fix rose’s drinking problem or that vriska was just butting into other people’s affairs so they could be ready for the approaching big battle. she wouldn’t have actually thought it was a problem since there’s a cultural gap between humans and trolls when it comes to alcohol abuse. in the game over timeline karkat said the drinking made rose “more charming than usual” and didnt understand why it was a problem. i think that her motivations for getting involved with rose’s issue in particular was strictly because she didn’t like how rose was treating someone she had feelings for after she had resigned herself to not confess because she realized kanaya already had feelings for rose.

in middle school during my Intense Greek Mythology Phase, Artemis was, as you can likely guess, my best girl. Iphigenia was my OTHER best girl. Yes at the same time.

The story of Iphigenia always gets to me when it's not presented as a story of Artemis being capricious and having arbitrary rules about where you can and can't hunt, but instead, making a point about war.

Artemis was, among other things--patron of hunting, wild places, the moon, singlehood--the protector of young girls. That's a really important aspect she was worshipped as: she protected girls and young women. But she was the one who demanded Agamemnon sacrifice his daughter in order for his fleet to be able to sail on for Troy.

There's no contradiction, though, when it's framed as, Artemis making Agamemnon face what he’s doing to the women and children of Troy. His children are not in danger. His son will not be thrown off the ramparts, his daughters will not be taken captive as sex slaves and dragged off to foreign lands, his wife will not have to watch her husband and brothers and children killed. Yet this is what he’s sailing off to Troy to inevitably do. That’s what happens in war. He’s going to go kill other people’s daughters; can he stand to do that to his own? As long as the answer is no—he can kill other people’s children, but not his own—he can’t sail off to war.

Which casts Artemis is a fascinating light, compared to the other gods of the Trojan War. The Trojan War is really a squabble of pride and insults within the Olympian family; Eris decided to cause problems on purpose, leaving Aphrodite smug and Hera and Athena snubbed, and all of this was kinda Zeus’s fault in the first place for not being able to keep it in his pants. And out of this fight mortal men were their game pieces and mortal cities their prizes in restoring their pride. And if hundreds of people die and hundred more lives are ruined, well, that’s what happens when gods fight. Mortals pay the price for gods’ whims and the gods move on in time and the mortals don’t and that’s how it is.

And women especially—Zeus wanted Leda, so he took her. Paris wanted Helen, so he took her. There’s a reason “the Trojan women” even since ancient times were the emblems of victims of a war they never wanted, never asked for, and never had a say in choosing, but was brought down on their heads anyway.

Artemis, in the way of gods, is still acting through human proxies. But it seems notable to me to cast her as the one god to look at the destruction the war is about to wreak on people, and challenge Agamemnon: are you ready to kill innocents? Kill children? Destroy families, leave grieving wives and mothers? Are you? Prove it.

It reminds me of that idea about nuclear codes, the concept of implanting the key in the heart of one of the Oval Office staffers who holds the briefcase, so the president would have to stab a man with a knife to get the key to launch the nukes. “That’s horrible!,” it’s said the response was. “If he had to do that, he might never press the button!” And it’s interesting to see Artemis offering Agamemnon the same choice. You want to burn Troy? Kill your own daughter first. Show me you understand what it means that you’re about to do.

yassified DTI marvin falsettos … goodnight yall 😭

there was a mistake with one of the pages im SO mad

Hector and Helenus' potential dynamic is so funny to me

"I think Homer outwits most writers who have written on the War [fantasy archetype], by not taking sides.

The Trojan war is not and you cannot make it be the War of Good vs. Evil. It’s just a war, a wasteful, useless, needless, stupid, protracted, cruel mess full of individual acts of courage, cowardice, nobility, betrayal, limb-hacking-off, and disembowelment. Homer was a Greek and might have been partial to the Greek side, but he had a sense of justice or balance that seems characteristically Greek — maybe his people learned a good deal of it from him? His impartiality is far from dispassionate; the story is a torrent of passionate actions, generous, despicable, magnificent, trivial. But it is unprejudiced. It isn’t Satan vs. Angels. It isn’t Holy Warriors vs. Infidels. It isn’t hobbits vs. orcs. It’s just people vs. people.

Of course you can take sides, and almost everybody does. I try not to, but it’s no use; I just like the Trojans better than the Greeks. But Homer truly doesn’t take sides, and so he permits the story to be tragic. By tragedy, mind and soul are grieved, enlarged, and exalted.

Whether war itself can rise to tragedy, can enlarge and exalt the soul, I leave to those who have been more immediately part of a war than I have. I think some believe that it can, and might say that the opportunity for heroism and tragedy justifies war. I don’t know; all I know is what a poem about a war can do. In any case, war is something human beings do and show no signs of stopping doing, and so it may be less important to condemn it or to justify it than to be able to perceive it as tragic.

But once you take sides, you have lost that ability.

Is it our dominant religion that makes us want war to be between the good guys and the bad guys?

In the War of Good vs. Evil there can be divine or supernal justice but not human tragedy. It is by definition, technically, comic (as in The Divine Comedy): the good guys win. It has a happy ending. If the bad guys beat the good guys, unhappy ending, that’s mere reversal, flip side of the same coin. The author is not impartial. Dystopia is not tragedy.

Milton, a Christian, had to take sides, and couldn’t avoid comedy. He could approach tragedy only by making Evil, in the person of Lucifer, grand, heroic, and even sympathetic — which is faking it. He faked it very well.

Maybe it’s not only Christian habits of thought but the difficulty we all have in growing up that makes us insist justice must favor the good.

After all, 'Let the best man win' doesn’t mean the good man will win. It means, 'This will be a fair fight, no prejudice, no interference — so the best fighter will win it.' If the treacherous bully fairly defeats the nice guy, the treacherous bully is declared champion. This is justice. But it’s the kind of justice that children can’t bear. They rage against it. It’s not fair!

But if children never learn to bear it, they can’t go on to learn that a victory or a defeat in battle, or in any competition other than a purely moral one (whatever that might be), has nothing to do with who is morally better.

Might does not make right — right?

Therefore right does not make might. Right?

But we want it to. 'My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure.'

If we insist that in the real world the ultimate victor must be the good guy, we’ve sacrificed right to might. (That’s what History does after most wars, when it applauds the victors for their superior virtue as well as their superior firepower.) If we falsify the terms of the competition, handicapping it, so that the good guys may lose the battle but always win the war, we’ve left the real world, we’re in fantasy land — wishful thinking country.

Homer didn’t do wishful thinking.

Homer’s Achilles is a disobedient officer, a sulky, self-pitying teenager who gets his nose out of joint and won’t fight for his own side. A sign that Achilles might grow up someday, if given time, is his love for his friend Patroclus. But his big snit is over a girl he was given to rape but has to give back to his superior officer, which to me rather dims the love story. To me Achilles is not a good guy. But he is a good warrior, a great fighter — even better than the Trojan prime warrior, Hector. Hector is a good guy on any terms — kind husband, kind father, responsible on all counts — a mensch. But right does not make might. Achilles kills him.

The famous Helen plays a quite small part in The Iliad. Because I know that she’ll come through the whole war with not a hair in her blond blow-dry out of place, I see her as opportunistic, immoral, emotionally about as deep as a cookie sheet. But if I believed that the good guys win, that the reward goes to the virtuous, I’d have to see her as an innocent beauty wronged by Fate and saved by the Greeks.

And people do see her that way. Homer lets us each make our own Helen; and so she is immortal.

I don’t know if such nobility of mind (in the sense of the impartial 'noble' gases) is possible to a modern writer of fantasy. Since we have worked so hard to separate History from Fiction, our fantasies are dire warnings, or mere nightmares, or else they are wish fulfillments."

- Ursula K. Le Guin, from No Time to Spare, 2013.