Boy oh boy Hades is SO ENDLESSLY OPAQUE. Even the Persephone myth isn’t really about Hade

Boy oh boy Hades is SO ENDLESSLY OPAQUE. Even the Persephone myth isn’t really about Hades! You could make it at least a little bit about Hades, I suppose, but it’s really difficult to foreground him in that story (despite the fact that he plays such an ~active~ role in it) because Persephone and Demeter have such strong emotional reactions that do most of the narrative work. That’s probably an interesting commentary on the gendered pitfalls of assigning “agency” to characters, like being active is the only ethically important way to exist in a story; often, doing is less interesting than saying or feeling.Not to say that Hades is uninteresting, per se. But I think he’s meant to be carefully unelaborated, very deliberately set apart from the hubbub of mythological comings and goings, right? Maybe there are some things you just can’t joke about too much. Maybe the ability to make light of Hades – or at least the impulse to humanize him – only comes at the cost of Classical faith. Once the real intangible concept of death is no longer believed to reside within the figure of Hades, does that free him up for elaboration? But then again, what even is faith, and what would be the modern analogue for that hypothetical sort of sacred silence? What aspect of death is it still taboo for us to joke about in the contemporary Western world? My instinctive answer would be, I think, the physical– but let all of that alone, I think the most important thing here is that whatever happened, at whichever time, it directly led to us being able to live in a world where Disney’s Hercules is a thing. So are we not blessed? ARE WE NOT BLESSED? Hi omg you are too sweet :’( I hope your winter stretch has been kind to you! I have been having an alright year of it so far, all things considered! Something something very busy something something no time to something something all of that applies, as it has always applied for pretty much the entire time I’ve even had this blog, but… well, it’s probably time for me to admit to myself that I’ll never have as much free time as I used to– many people go their entire lives without having that much free time at once, I bet! There was a time when I had NOTHING TO DO but feed myself! This right now is more like just, you know, having responsibilities and being responsible about them. I have to stop hoping that one day, all of this will just come to a stop and I’ll look out over a vast horizon and take a deep breath and have zero things on my to-do list. That’s not going to happen. This is why people buy lottery tickets, isn’t it??? I’M SORRY you did not ask for any of this, you just sent me best wishes, not a request to listen to my cry for help SHOULD I BUY A LOTTERY TICKET? I won’t, but even without that windfall, may the rest of this year be as blissfully uneventful as possible for all of us. fjkl;dlkhg;l “a year from now” YOU DELIVER SHADE WITH A LIGHT HAND BUT YOUR POINT IS WELL-TAKEN, ANON. By the Chinese Classics do you mean the Four Novels? It might be that I’m not great with what things are actually called and that’s not what you meant, but that’s what your question made me think of!If so, I have indeed read them and also continue to have very biased and overly intense feelings about a portion of one of them in particular I JUST!!!!!!! ZHUGE LIANG IS A DELICATE FLOWER AND AN INSUFFERABLE TROLL WHO LOVES HIS LOVES TOO DEEPLY, AND OF ALL OF HIS LOVES, HE LOVES SETTING THINGS ON FIRE THE MOST!!!!!!!!! LIANG!!!! IF HISTORICAL ACCURACY WANTS TO CHALLENGE ANY OF THIS, HISTORICAL ACCURACY CAN MEET ME WITH PISTOLS AT DAWN. I WILL PROTECT THIS WITCH, THE MOST BEAUTIFUL AND USELESS FARMER TO EVER HAVE EXISTED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  I’m, uh… I’m pretty fond of Three Kingdoms.I sort of do think about the Water Margin on a regular basis because I remember being very emotionally scarred when I read it as a child, like I was all HA HA! WHAT HIJINKS!! and then everything just goes so precipitously downhill all of a sudden in the last volume or something and honestly, in chronicling the adventures and exploits of a group, it is not imperative to also include the account of how THE GROUP FELL APART AND LITERALLY EVERYBODY DIED. Do you hear me, Water Margin? Do you hear me, LES MIS AND ALSO ARTHURIAN ROMANCES AND ALSO APOSTOLIC HAGIOGRAPHY anyway, it serves as a kind of emotional blueprint for me in illustrating the axiom of how nothing good ever lasts and we only ever meet to part from one another.Journey to the West has been so completely overwritten in my brain by Saiyuki that I have retained absolutely nothing about the novel itself. Like there are a million reimaginings of this story, but Saiyuki got me at a very formative time and besides, SAIYUKI IS SAIYUKI, I don’t think I need to explain WHY I CAN’T EVER SHAKE MYSELF FREE OF IT. SAIYUKI WAS LITERALLY DESIGNED TO MAGNETICALLY ADHERE TO THE READER’S ID. It doesn’t matter if you are perfectly aware of how ridiculous and how id-baity it is, BEING AWARE OF GRAVITY DOESN’T STOP YOU FROM FALLING WHEN YOU STEP OFF OF A CLIFF but enough about that, tragically I don’t remember anything about Dream of the Red Chamber, isn’t that weird? I think I was literally just too young to understand why it was interesting! Red Chamber is probably the only one of these four that I would really want to revisit now as an adult, I’m fairly certain that I would enjoy it a great deal and I feel like I missed out on it the first time around.Well no that’s not true, I’m constantly revisiting bits and pieces of Three Kingdoms just to be EMOTIONAL ABOUT ZHUGE LIANG AT WU, TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS OF AGE, QUIETLY WATCHING THE RIVER ROLL PAST HIM, WAITING FOR THE WIND TO CHANGE FOR HIM, WAITING FOR ZHAO YUN TO SCARE THE LIVING SHIT OUT OF SOME FISHERMEN AND COMMANDEER SOME BOATS FOR THEIR HONEYMOON CRUISE -- source link

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