God tier bit or incomparable brainrot?
https://mobile.twitter.com/MiddleEarthMixr/status/1563624452369559552
don’t even know what the Iliad is
Oh the dEcLInE of tHe weSTeRN cIVIlIzATiOn
Lol literally the same dorks who don't understand that the Romans would've absolutely despised them and called them savages.
I'll never stop laughing at the fact that they needed a drug addled demagogue to tell them to clean their room in order to have an awakening. But yeah, supersoldiers of a new Pax Americana
People having 0 understanding of the traditional canon of western literature is a massive problem, and I hate that "decolonizing your bookshelf" has been used by some people to mean you can't have old European texts in your house. Obviously this is a minority of cases and we aren't short of copies of Homeric epics, but it's annoying that people don't expand their horizons and instead narrow them.
People having 0 understanding of the traditional canon of western literature is a massive problem
is it really, though? sounds like some boomer shit tbh
suggests reading and understanding less, having a less clear view of history and devaluing important art, calls me a boomer.
Yes it is. The cultural and literary traditions of the Greeks has had a profound impact on European and American society, and if you can't understand their literature and how they thought and wrote and what stories were important to them you cannot understand them and their impact on us. Imnot saying everyone needs to read all of the Iliad and the odyssey in the original Greek, but at least reading part of it and knowing the story is fundamental to seeing the rich literary tradition that has lead to modern works, and understanding the culture that created these works that also have a massive impact on us. You don't have to like them but you do have to know about them. Same with Shakespeare and the Bible. If you think Jesus and the church is all bs to steal your money whatever, but you cannot just ignore that the Bible has had a massive impact on the philosophy and behaviors of people in Europe, the Americas, and parts of Africa and Asia. Having some knowledge of Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Thoreau, and Hemingway will allow you to see how the world and cultures have changed, and will open up your reading horizons and ability to think and consider multiple perspectives. What is important moving forward is to make sure more women, more people of color, more queer people, and more leftist get included in the so-called literary canon of the west, or a global literary canon which should be developed.
god i cannot articulate what i wanna say and i hate it
anyway nuke the west and its books too
You are literally the exact problem I was complaining about. And you think suggesting book burning is a good idea?
Ancient Greek stuff is bleached statues with no paint whatsoever and never in garish colors and the more it is bleached statues the more Ancient Greek it is.
just two awful people having a twitter fight. I keep hoping that sdl person will just go away forever but it still hasn't happened
Literally have no idea who either of these people are, we can dunk on both of them
oh yeah it's definitely a double dunk, but that sdl person got outed as a huge piece of shit but for some reason they keep lingering around the internet
I could have sworn I read on :reddit-logo: a couple years ago that his parent/s were arms dealers or something along those lines. He's also friends with Vaush.
He's Richard Bissell's grandson, absolutely a bourgeois ghoul trying to infiltrate socialist groups
I’ve noticed reactionaries are incredibly skilled at lingering around the internet
everyone is the hero of their own story, pointing it out to them they're huge pieces of shit won't make them melt, it takes them 0 effort to just not change anything and keep doing what they've always been doing so not really a sherlock holmes mistery now is it
My man is arguing against fucking SDL and still somehow comes up with the worse take. How the fuck do you DO that?
as I was reading each line, I was thinking this was another SDL dunk, but...
Not everyone in ASOIAF is awful. Ned Stark, The Viper, Jon Snow, Robb Stark, Dany (book Dany), Sam, Deric Dondarrion, Thoros of Myr, Davos Seaworthy, Grey Worm, Sansa Stark… all of these people I would say lean on the side of “good” even if they aren’t perfect.
They often lose and don’t have plot armor, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist and struggle for their causes (revenge, family, stability, peace, etc)
It’s pretty evidently shown that the conditions and relations of feudalism and coming winter are what causes a lot of people to act viciously and in evil ways
Not everyone in ASOIAF is awful. Ned Stark, The Viper, Jon Snow, Robb Stark, Dany (book Dany), Sam, Deric Dondarrion, Thoros of Myr, Davos Seaworthy, Grey Worm, Sansa Stark…
Thank you, now follow me to the :gulag: for knowing those names. Don’t worry, I’ll there with you.
The brotherhood without banners needs to expropriate all the bourgeois dipshits who are wasting time and resources on the brink of winter
This is pre-bourgeois. They needed to expropriate the feudal aristocratic dipshits
They are the progressive force under feudalism and in fact need to be the ones doing the expropriation. Dany or Jon would be the Robespierre, Napoleon or Cromwell of this world
I’m just saying the maesters, free cities and slaves need to overthrow the aristocracy
The most unrealistic aspect of ASOIAF is that the conspiracy by the intelligentsia (maesters) and liberated slaves (faceless men) to eliminate weapons of mass destruction (dragons) was ultimately successful and for the most part did put that genie back in the bottle.
He’s currently dead in the books. Show is not canon as far as I’m concerned
https://pics.me.me/thumb_good-memegenerator-net-good-grumpy-cat-says-good-meme-53388133.png
I stopped looking at the books after it was clear that I would be putting myself through more of the same, and I didn't like what I was already reading, no matter how many times my college peers insisted that it was so mature and not cookie cutter sunshine and rainbows whatever that means.
I know the show wandered into the weeds, but even then, the "canon" line was blurry for me from the start because the show at first was just the books with more
spoiler
rape added and more female characters converted from positions of agency and leadership into titillation-focused portrayals of sex workers or rape victims.
Literature with a morally grey world can have evident virtues if you have the bare minimum of media literacy.
But the right-wing mind sees no good or bad actions, only good or bad teams.
Everything the good side does is good, everything the bad side does is bad. If Aragorn does something, it's good because he's Aragorn and Aragorn is a good guy. That's as far as a right-winger's understanding of morality goes.
So if a text doesn't clearly tell them who the good guys are, they have no way of judging the morality of anything.
It doesn't take a lot of media literacy to understand the 'good guys' of asoiaf are just the groups without power. It's less about good guys vs bad guys, and more about how the petty conflicts between the active agents of story cause untold suffering for the powerless. It kind of smacks you over the head with it tbh. Also, aristocrats are dumb, evil and petty.
Eh, Ender's Game judges Ender pretty harshly for destroying the Formic home world, and judges the society that produced him even harder. He was literally leading thirty child soldiers who were commanding thousands of people who were all sent on suicide missions around the galaxy - and the instant that the unifying threat to humanity was gone, World War 3 started. The arc of Speaker for the Dead revolves around Ender seeking redemption for that act by 1) finding a new home world for the last Formic queen, and 2) saving the Porquininos from being genocided in the same way.
The later books get fucking wild. Peter Wiggin's soul manifests inside a eugenics-bred polymath when he gets moved into the ftl dimension of conceptual hypersoul beings. Bean has children who all have his gigantism mutation but they find a cure by working with queen less formics on a slow ark ship, btw formics are mental slaves to the queens because they're otherwise independent creatures, there's a buck wild interstellar virus that obliterates biospheres if you get it but it's actually a mutation of a biological archival instrument made by god knows who, there's human-intellect ravens on a planet with the morlocks and eloi from The Time Machine and by the way God exists and she lives on the interplanetary internet
I dropped the Bean thrillers in revulsion after Ender's mum gives an Author Filibuster to Petra about how being a broodmare is the only TRUE happiness.
I was far from a leftist at the time, but it was both ham handed and completely out of place with the characterization established in Ender's game.
When I came back to them years later because :treats: she then spends the rest of the series as the Damsel.
I need to read less :lmayo: authors who would be better off spending their publishing checks on therapy.
I only read a couple books in the Bean Dad series, seemed like the whole series was focused on the wrong thing. Why is the story about the super genius sociopath who manipulated the opinions of the entire world via the internet in order to lead a series of armed uprisings that will eventually merge into one world government the side story to a plot about a bunch of embryos?
I'm pretty sure Card wrote a Peter series at some point. There's a full on Ender Literary Universe at this point since it's a cash cow. He just doesn't usually continue the mainline Ender plot any more. Plenty of stuff between the xenocide and the end of Ender's story.
I stopped reading after they encountered the alien species that communicates through scents (iirc), I should pick up the series again that stuff sounds nuts.
TBH I found out about Card's incredibly bad opinions years after I read those books, and it made me avoid anything else by him. Maybe if I read Speaker for the Dead now I'd find a lot that I don't like that I just don't remember anymore.
-I don't know what it is
-It's socialist propaganda
Truly the greatest of minds.
entirely possible that this guy thinks that Tolkien and GRR Martin are the only two authors
This is up there with "My grandma was illiterate and she was the most anticommunist person I ever knew"
God tier bit. The account's response pattern is just too well-targeted to be an actual chud.
I really like this piece by Simone Weil on The Iliad. It discusses the dehumanizing nature of force and how the Iliad is fairly alone in the western canon in how it treats the reality of war and violence very simply and evenly, revealing the depth of its horror.
how the Iliad is fairly alone in the western canon in how it treats the reality of war and violence very simply and evenly, revealing the depth of its horror.
It was, and yet, by modern standards, it presented and even illustrated atrocities, cruelty, and war crimes without having to excessively feed the hogs over and over again by emphasizing just how much and how often
spoiler
the Greeks would rape the Trojans and give painstaking detail about how mindbreaking and utterly degrading it would be over and over again under pious pretenses of "well the war criminals have this perspective so let's keep focusing on the war criminals getting off to war crimes"
totally just to reillustrate over and over again that totally strictly just for further illustration and realism and totally not for ongoing hog feeding.
Even the violence in the Iliad, while vivid and visceral at times, doesn't need to go around around again and again under pretenses of realism instead of just presenting it enough to understand it then moving on to the next story beat.
saying this like the first chapter of the iliad isn't about achilles & agamemnon fighting over which trojan women to keep as slaves.
before you call me a treat defender i don't necessarily approve of grr martin, i haven't read his books---but the iliad is not an appropriate riposte. ancient greeks were extremely gung-ho about patriarchal violence and any text which treats women as people is on better moral footing than the iliad
It isn't about what happens in the story beats. I didn't say bad or even monstrous characters aren't allowed to exist in literature. It's how it's presented in the text (and especially on screen considering that's the whole point of visual mediums compared to prose and verse) and specifically what is emphasized and reemphasized.
Come and See would be a lot different (and worse, and probably nazi hog feed) if it was under the pretenses of realism and illustration with an ongoing point of view of nazis directly in the acts of murder over and over again with maximum front-row seat repetitive slaughters from their perspective and opinions over and over again under whatever pretenses instead of it being a thing that happened and can be understood well enough without that being the repetitive focus and emphasis. That would be replacing Flyora's moment
spoiler
with the gang rape victim, covered in blood,
with some illustrative and realistic nazi point of view of the same atrocity as it happened. Maybe you'd go out of your way to defend that too (maybe also claiming to not having saw that for yourself but still wanting to be contrarian against the treat criticizer) but my argument is nothing of value would be added with that choice, not for anyone that I'd care to ever know anyway.
It wasn't a titillating POV shift to Achilles and/or Agamemnon illustrating the realistic outcome of that enslavement discussion with exhausting visceral details of the sexual violence, and it wasn't a returning and recurring emphasis either.
If you're going to try to preempt accusations of being a knee-jerk treat defender, at least try to use the arguments I made in return, instead of the ones you want me to have made because I criticized the treats again and you found that unacceptable, especially for something you claim you don't even read/watch. How is that not knee-jerk treat defending?
the iliad does not have 'monstrous characters'. the moral content of the text is monstrous. explicit depiction ala GOT is not the only bad way to have this stuff, i'd argue its close to as bad or worse to present such things as completely ordinary and okay like the Iliad does.
you're so aggro everytime anyone disagrees with you, thats why i tried to pre-empt but i should've just not engaged. i really have not read GoT.
i have read the iliad, i'm really repulsed by its sexpolitics, and it bothers me that you'd bring it up as a counterexample for bad handling of SV. that's it.
I didn't say it had monstrous characters. I said that even if it did that wouldn't automatically disqualify it to me. I wasn't even casting a moral argument against or even for it. You were. You're accusing me of something that you're doing that has nothing to do with my argument. It's like shadow boxing. Speaking of that...
you’re so aggro everytime
Says you, being the one and only person leaping at me in this thread, with built-in grievances ready to go, defending a treat that by your own claim you haven't even read. You're casting moral judgements against the Iliad and at the same time claiming that it surely must be worse than GRRM (in a category of judgement I wasn't even getting into to begin with, and I made no claim to agree with Homer's particular ethical arguments or lack thereof for that matter, only in how the material is presented and what is emphasized in that perspective), which again you haven't even read the work you're defending, by your own claim.
What are you even doing besides "aggro" knee-jerk treat defending here? You're never going to like my point of view, and you're barely even listening to mine except to find what you think are "gotcha" moments to try nail me with, and by your own admission you know less about GRRM's work than I do, and that's not even a high bar to clear.
What is even your goal here? It looks like a petty grudge to me, especially with how the apparent crux of your argument is "I didn't read the work I'm defending but I don't like you, especially when you criticize the treats that I don't consume. How dare you."
You're doing nothing but "aggro" here. Stop.
The cyclops arc in the Iliad predicted Trotskyism and warns about the short-term flaws of Lysenkoism, prove me wrong.
The cyclops arc in the Iliad
That was in The Odyssey. QED. :expert-shapiro:
NGL, I'm annoyed by the nihilistic "I'm so deep" Grimderp slop that often passes for Dark Fantasy (albeit ASoIaF is more nuanced than that).
Of course, this nerd takes the kneejerk approach lol
I read a teen dark fantasy book recently that's very edgy, which is probably a good influence for kids. The Silent Gods series by Justin Call captures a feeling of discovering adults are fallible, being lied to and not considered by people who are meant to protect you, and that you can love people and long for acceptance and they'll still reject you for how you were born. there's lot of prophecy and killing and torture too, but that previously mentioned misanthropy feels like what makes it well conceived and meaningfully nihilistic. I feel like it might've gone too far rehabilitating the bully character though.
Maybe Malazan Book of the Fallen is more an example pretentious dark fantasy... I would say If I could keep track of what the hell the narrative in Gardens of the Moon is.
In my experience it’s overwhelmingly just regressive fanfic from guys who got carpal tunnel playing too much black ops.
I think we're gonna need @Redbolshevik2 and @UlyssesT to weigh in on this Twitter discussion.
Lmao this is actually one quote tweet away from the take I was mad about yesterday.
I actually have no issue with the Iliad or the Odyssey or even the Aeneid as written. Now if there was a grittier grimdarkier edgier version, under pretense of novelty that's a few decades redundant by now, some "let's illustrate and reillustrate and reillustrate violator-perspective titillation-angled sexual violence as the totally-just-for-realism inevitable consequences of Troy falling to the Greeks over and over again and keep doing that for extra maturity and totally not as hog feed" version, yeah I'd have an issue. I'd say the same about excessive gore/torture scenes because the works were a lot more about (a lot of) spilled blood and sometimes about beheadings or the hubris of dragging corpses that the gods would rather have handled with respect.
