Hi, I saw on one of your ao3 comments that you think Homers' Achilles is on the spectrum. This is a really interesting idea to me, but I don't know that much about autism - could you elaborate on why you think that? (Also, I think all of your fics are amazing ☺️)
Autism as a word and diagnosis did not exist in ancient Greece, and I have no idea if there would have been a similar concept about it (doubt it) or if more likely people with certain autistic traits would have been considered to have a certain type of personality. So for me to say that Homer deliberately wrote Achilles as "autistic" is a little tongue in cheek.
That said, reading the Iliad I did have a moment of "Ohhhh, dude's autistic I get it." Some people might look at my reasoning and say, "well, that could be a whole other thing with these other reasons," and that's fair. This is just how it came across to me and why.
Sense of justice/fairness. This is one of the more obscure autistic traits (that often gets misunderstood and shit upon by people), but it's how the book begins, so I'll start here. Autistic people are more likely to learn and follow rules to a T. This gets rolled into the trait of "rigid thinking" and has been related to autistic people's preference for solid routines. To think about where you lie with this trait, one example is the "walk" signal at a crosswalk. Some people jaywalk when the road is very clear and no one is around. Some people jaywalk when the road ISN'T clear because they don't give a fuck. And some people will wait for that light to turn white no matter what because that's what you are supposed to do and there are rules (although culture/country of origin will also affect how much relevance traffic lights have in your life).
This is a rule, but it has little do to with justice. So to figure out where you stand in terms of justice sensitivity, another metric is how angry you feel when you watch someone cut in line and not get punished for it. Some of us will sigh and move on with our life because dicks are everywhere, whatever, and some people will have a harder time letting go because this person broke a rule in an obviously unfair way, and they should be punished for that.
This trait does not mean that autistic people have a better sense of what justice is or what rules/laws are "just." That is all very subjective. But this trait does result in a stronger negative reaction to seeing those rules/laws violated.
Such as rage.
Achilles fits the bill here in both in terms of rigid thinking and his sense of justice. His reputation in the Greek tradition is as someone who was very educated. In fact, he is the most educated with regards to law and religion than the rest of the Achaeans thanks to his time with Chiron. More than that, he actually cared about what he was taught and was considered kind of a stick-in-the-mud in terms of believing that the armies should follow the rules and customs of their people at all times and that violating their own laws was bad, even if you really, really wanted to bang a hot chick.
When Agamemnon decides to take Briseis, he is breaking a Rule. The common interpretation of what happens here is that he has violated Achilles' pride and honor in doing so, and Achilles loses his shit. That's valid. To me it read a little differently. I mean, for one, Achilles is 100% correct in the first book. Agamemnon pissed off the gods in a way he shouldn't have bringing plague on everyone, and how does he solve this? By agreeing to do the thing Achilles told him to do to solve it and then immediately violating their customs to steal from Achilles, bringing down a plague of "Achilles is not going to help you anymore."
Achilles cries to his mom that he wants the gods to fuck over the Greeks to prove Achilles right, which is deeply immature, but also really makes sense to me. Like, Agamemnon did this shitty, illegal, rules-breaking thing, and he needs to feel the consequences of that action. Achilles isn't a god who can bring down a plague, but his mommy is, so get fucked, Agamemnon. It's Zeus time.
During the time Achilles is out of the fighting, he is routinely called hard-hearted, stubborn, and other words to indicate he will not be swayed, which again speaks to his rigidity of understanding how things should be done.
The Way Achilles Talks About His Emotions. Achilles very clearly states what he is feeling throughout the book, and he often restates it. We get it, bro. You're mad. And then sad. Really, really sad. While this is almost definitely for the audience to understand his feelings and just how deep they run, Homer also could have just told us outright what he was thinking without having Achilles say it out loud repeatedly. It also felt to me that Achilles talks about his feelings far more often and bluntly than other characters do, but again this could be because the story revolves around his 'rage.'
Regardless, even if it was purely for audience benefit, this is a behavior I have noticed with my adult ND friends, which is basically after a childhood feeling confused by what other people around them are doing or why they are reacting to things in a certain way, they have a strategy of very bluntly expressing themselves and where they are at in this situation. It can be far easier than trying to follow the subtleties of NT culture and just get whatever issue it is out in the open. Saying to someone "I am angry at you" can come off as overly aggressive and blunt depending on context, but it cuts to the heart of the matter. We can compare this with Odysseus, who does not express any very deep emotions at all in the Iliad (other than the fact that Thersites should shut the fuck up, anyway), presumably because that's nobody else's business.
The Embassy. Achilles' point to Odysseus that this entire war was started over a man stealing a woman is so correct and so ignored. He looks at this situation and says: Paris stole Helen, and Agamemnon rallied all the Achaeans to come make war with Troy. Agamemnon steals Briseis, and I'm meant to... keep fighting for him? In what way does this make sense?
Everyone around him sees it from a completely different perspective, basically that Achilles got angry over a girl. To Achilles this is not what it is about at all. And I'm with him on this. If stealing a woman is a sin egregious enough for thousands of Greeks to spend 10 years attempting to sack a city, then it is the same amount of egregious for Agamemnon to take Briseis and he's lucky Achilles didn't kill him immediately and sack Argos. He's getting off easy, which Achilles tells him.
Reading Odysseus lay out his argument followed by Achilles cutting him down with that bit of logic was like, yeah, I'm with Achilles, I don't even think he's being stubborn I just think he's right.
In the embassy chapter, Achilles also has his famous line about despising men who say one thing but mean another. Being very truthful and having difficulty noticing lies is another common trait of autism, and it would make sense for Achilles to find the dishonesty of his colleagues deeply annoying.
Old British scholars called him a sociopath. This might seem like a weird one, but I'm adding it into evidence. When I read the Iliad, I see Achilles as a very emotional person. Given that half the book is about his grief over Patroclus, I find calling him incapable of caring about others incredibly bizarre. But in addition to determining that these scholars who wrote these batshit essays have never once in their life had a friend, much less a friend that they loved, this kind of fits with how a certain type of old-fashioned scholar understands autism. I've actually been at neuroscience talks with crusty old assholes who talk about how autistics and orphans are incapable of empathy, and then use evidence that really just says to me they express empathy in a different way. (Yes, orphans. For real. A real talk I went to in like 2015. Did you know that orphans don't have feelings and don't care about the feelings of others. /s) Add to the old British tradition of their feral private school kids (which I believe they call public school? idk those assholes in blazers, you know the ones) literally caning each other for being smaller, weaker, or just different, and this to me is solid evidence that Achilles is neurodivergent and unwittingly awoke the bloodlust in these old (dead) bastards.
Speech Patterns. Not being able to read Ancient Greek, I can't actually say much about this one, but multiple scholars have commented that the way Achilles speaks in the Iliad is different to all the others. He has a unique way of speaking. Again, this is not necessarily an autistic trait, but it is common for autistic people to have different speech patterns than NT people, so it's more just a "hmmm, maybe" than actual evidence.
I feel like I'm forgetting other little things, but I'd have to fully reread the Iliad with this in mind to jog my memory, and maybe one day I will. TLDR; Achilles has a very rigid way of thinking and an uncommon way of expressing his emotions.
And as always, autism is a spectrum. Anything I've written about here isn't necessarily true of any autistic person out in the world.
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god don’t mind me just. losing my mind about el, steve and hopper in the time travel au
hopper who comes home late one day and the house is dark and quiet and he feels so bad because he was supposed to be home earlier but something came but — because something always comes up, and it didn’t used to be a problem but now he has a kid to take care of, dammit! so he opens the door, apology already on his tongue, when he sees that steve is here. dropped by after school again to keep the kid company.
and there they are, lying on the couch together, el resting on top of steve, her eyes closed. steve looks up and meets his eyes, a sheepish look on his face as if to say “sorry for the inconvenience”. jim feels the tension leave his shoulders and he waves at the harrington kid that has miraculously become a regular in his life now. steve waves back.
there’s food in the kitchen ready for him, and only then does jim realise just how hungry he is, so he scarfs down three servings of the delicious spaghetti before arms wrap around his middle and el is there, hugging him.
steve takes that as his cue to leave, as he always does. jim doesn’t remember seeing the beemer outside, and knowing steve, he walked all the way over here, wearing nothing but a thin jacket. that boy has no regard for the weather or his own well-being, so jim gets up and hands him his old leather jacket. steve looks so small in it, and hopper finds himself wanting to ask about that haunted look or those bags under his eyes, wants to ask about the faraway look steve gets everytime he calls him ‘kid’, wants to ask about that special bond he has with eleven.
but he doesn’t. one day, he promises himself. steve smiles when he says goodbye and hopper wants to tell him to be safe, to come over tomorrow so he knows the boy is well. he wants to pull him into a tight hug and clap him on the back and pretend that can fix the redness in his eyes or the air of loneliness and trauma he exudes.
“thanks for dinner,” is all he says, and steve only nods.
eleven watches him disappear into the darkness, and so does jim. she takes his hand and hop squeezes, his eyes on steve. who has become a regular in his life. who spends most afternoons here with el, leaving the moment jim comes home as if his only goal is to keep el company, to keep her safe, to keep her anchored. who apologised for the inconvenience even when he keeps his kid happy and makes dinner for everyone while probably not eating enough himself.
steve harrington. jim realises, staring into the darkness of the forest as he is, that he was wrong. he doesn’t have one kid to take care of now. he has two. and yet steve seems to be the one to take care of him. of them.
tomorrow he’s gonna ask steve. to stay a while. about his day. how he’s feeling. if he’s okay. how he’s doing at school. what’s happening in his life.
tomorrow, he’s gonna ask and learn how to take care of steve harrington.
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Okay but you have to understand how READY I am to get a live action ORV film series. Quick disclaimer that I honestly know really little about film/visual media (and even less about East Asian media), but...
On a story level, it simply sounds like a Bad Idea. I mean, how do you translate a story about stories told through the medium of words into live action? How do you translate the way it makes sure to tell you that this story works as reality because you can't see it, because there concepts that you can really only visualise in your head through the written word?
But then again, they could go the direction of using the medium of film itself as Dokja's fourth wall. Make it seem like a cool but generic live action with subtle hints here and there that it's more than it seems. Have Dokja be hot rather than his plain and average...have fight scenes and choose which thoughts or not we get to hear. I mean, seriously...the film doesn't have to be cohesive or accurate to the book. It could literally just be the way Dokja wants you to experience his story and his narration - the film could be a depiction of his unreliable narrative. And as he and the walls begin to crack, so does the story...and maybe we'll get to see those thoughts and cracks in the beginning of the story through flashbacks rather than real time (could make the inner speech filters sound nicer but idk).
Or if it's truly just Bad(tm), it's still fun because yeah...guess who took on the role of the Star Stream and forced a story and its characters into a tale to pander to audiences simply for capital gain? (Or what if they really do make big changes to the ORV story so as to accommodate the medium of film as story? Make it so that the film itself is the Star Stream?)
And also, a last slightly less ironic and overenthusiastic observation....just that, yeah, I do wish ORV was animated instead of live action. But given that their animation industry is somewhat small, currently, and that means they might have to rely on Japanese studios, I prefer they just stick to live action. There's no telling how Japanese studios will localise Korean names/settings/history, as they've done with Solo Levelling and Raelina. Again, I have NO idea if this is a right assumption to make, so if someone knows more about it, I'm happy to be corrected.
The point is, though, that ORV live action has the potential to be spectacularly bad or good - either or. I don't think it's possible for it to be just mediocre or average and I wouldn't want it to. It's either KimCom definitely made this movie post-Dokja return to make money off their leader's stupidity or the studios will capture the essence of how stories and humans are fatefully intertwined but through the medium of film.
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absolutely obsessed with how the music that plays in the final gameplay segment of totk isn’t the final boss theme, it’s not dangerous, it’s not even an uplifting “hero” boss fight theme (a la splatoon), it’s just pure, raw you. just you and zelda, like it should have been all this time, without any of the “hero of hyrule” or “zonai” or “ganondorf” mixed in. without rauru’s arm, without any of the baggage, just soaring, uplifting music that signifies that the hard part is over, your goal is right there, she’s right there, and this is it. it’s going to be over. the theme from the start of the game, as you dove into the unknown to save the one you love—and her theme, everything you’ve fought to save—but even though the fight is over, even though ganondorf has been defeated and hyrule has been saved, it’s still not over for you, and it still comes back to that eternal link between you and zelda because just like it always has been: you are link, and you are fighting to save zelda.
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