On Exiles and Princes

     Well, my attempt to blog daily died a very quick and miserable death, but I am still going to try to purge in (web)print my deep-seated frustrations at the way people on AO3 frequently treat certain subjects in Greek mythology.

    And today my topic is specifically in reaction to the hideous trend (which seems at this point to be present in almost all AO3 works dealing with the character) of claiming that Patroclos was a prince before being exiled for murder as a child.

    This is wrong in every way, except the part about him being exiled.

    Patroclos' father was never a king.  Making him a king reveals multiple very deep errors.

    Firstly, it means mistaking the kingdoms of the Late Bronze Age for the city-states of the Iron Age, in that at some point someone said "Well, gee, we don't know who the king of Opus was, so why not make it Patroclus' father?"  Well, guess what?  There was no king of Opus!  You know why?  Because Opus was the palatial center of Locris.  (There is, in fact, no city named Locris.  It is the name of the region/kingdom only.  Thus making a character into the king of Opus is rather like making someone into the President of Washington DC or the Prime Minister of London.)  The king there was Oileus.  He is a very well established mythic character, and his son, the lesser Aias, was such an important character in the Trojan War that he caused the deaths of more of the Greek army than all the Trojans combined did.

    Second, it misunderstands the role and nature of royalty in the culture.  Exiled princes in the Greek Heroic Age did not become nobodies, mere attendants, as Patroclos did.  Exiled princes typically ended up marrying a daughter of their host and then inheriting his kingdom (or at least part of it).  This is how Peleus, Telamon, Teukros and many others came to their thrones, and how Jason would have become king of Corinth if the city hadn't been burned down, taking his prospective bride and her father along with it.  Royal titles were not simply titles:  royalty were believed to be naturally different and superior to the rest of the population.  An exiled prince remained a prince.  (And if you honestly think people have changed in this regard, look at how people react to the British royal family these days.  I can't remember the last time I went to the grocery store and didn't see at least one article on the magazines at the checkout line about the royal family, esp. Prince Harry.  And this country rejected the monarchy almost 250 years ago!)  To have an exiled prince become nobody special means you don't understand the culture you're using as the setting of your story.  (And if you doubt that Patroclos was considered a nobody among the nobility at the Trojan War, let me remind you that he did not have his own hut.  He had to share with Achilles.  Or rather, Achilles let him stay with him in his hut.  If he had been important--as an exiled prince was by definition--he would have had his own hut.  Teukros had his own hut, even though he was not only the son of an enslaved concubine, but the concubine in question was Trojan!  (In fact, in all post-Homeric sources, she is specified to be King Priam's sister Hesione.))

    The third point is more an assumption on my part regarding why people want to make him a prince, and I'm not sure if it comes from the fanfic authors or their solitary source for this mutant version.  Because even without having read it, I know where they're getting this "Prince of Opus" malarkey from.  They're getting it from Madeline Miller's Song of Achilles, which I once contemplated reading and now I'm very, very glad I didn't, because I can see it would have driven me completely mad very quickly.  (For more reasons than I'll get into in today's post...)  So, I'm not sure if it was Miller or if it's the fanfic authors, but I get the feeling someone at some point is/was thinking "well, he's a better match for Achilles if they're both princes!"  Like that's somehow an improvement.

    It's not.  It weakens their relationship.

    Like, by a lot.  Making a prince--a prince who is all but irresistible, according to some authors, and could therefore have just about anyone he wanted, no matter how high their rank--fall in love with another prince is bland.  It's "safe."  But making him fall in love with a man below his station?  An older man, therefore putting him in a position that is--culturally speaking--subordinate to someone who should be far below him?  That is a sign of a truly powerful love, breaking through the boundaries of what is accepted in his society, and one for which he is risking the one thing he normally protects above everything else:  his reputation.  Making him love an equal is so weak that it's pitiful by comparison.

    Admittedly, the ancient Greeks wanted to make them closer to being equals, so that Achilles wasn't "lowering" himself by loving and being loved by someone so much lesser in status.  That was why many ancient authors (dating all the way back to the Hesiodic Catalog of Women) made Menoitios (Patroclos' father) into a brother of Peleus.  (At least one other ancient author made Menoitios the half-brother of Aiakos, making Patroclos into Peleus' first cousin, which is completely insane, because Patroclos kicks way too much butt to be an old man.  Plus his shade literally has a line to Achilles about how they grew up together, so obviously they can't be more than a few years apart in age.)  But they never went so far as to deny the text of the Iliad, which said very bluntly and directly that Achilles was more important than Patroclos, which would not be the case if Patroclos was also a prince.

    Of course, it also said (in a couple different places) that Patroclos' father moved to Phthia with him when he was exiled, a fact which all those modern authors are steadfastly ignoring, and/or ignorant of.  Because the poet of the Iliad understood the purpose of exiling a murderer, and none of those modern people seem to get it, or if they do, they're ignoring it.

    Exile was not the "punishment" for murder.

    Murderers were exiled for the protection of the community.

    Not because they were expected to kill again (though I'm sure that also played a role in it in many cases!) but because killing someone off the field of battle left the killer polluted.  It was a stain that was actually dangerous to those around him/her.  A murderer was ejected from the community so that they could be purified of that pollution, in order to prevent a plague or other disaster from striking.

    Don't believe me?  Take a look at the first of Sophocles' Oedipus trilogy sometime.  In it, Thebes is suffering from a terrible plague.  Seers are consulted, and it's learned that the reason for the plague is because of an unpurified murderer in the town!  (Worse still, the murderer of their previous king!)  And what does Oedipus promise to do about the murderer?  To banish him from Thebes, of course.

    Because that's what you did with murderers to protect everyone else.

    Then some other king could purify them, and--unless the banishment was specified to be permanent--they could return home and everything would be just fine.  (Y'know, except for the dead person and their family and friends...)  There are a lot of examples of this in surviving myths.  Peleus and Telamon, for example, you know why they were exiled from Aegina?  Because they had murdered their half-brother.  Jason was exiled from Iolcos because of his role in the murder of Pelias.  In Euripides' surviving Hippolytus (he wrote another play about the same subject, which has been lost), the play starts with Theseus in the midst of a one year exile, due to having killed someone.  Queen Penthesileia of the Amazons arrived in Troy in the final year of the war because she had accidentally killed her sister, and was thus in exile to be purified of the death, but she would have gone home again at the end of the war if Achilles hadn't killed her.  Achilles himself, in fact, was briefly exiled from the Achaian camp due to having killed Thersites when the wretch mocked him for mourning the fallen Amazon queen.  (Of course, that was a very carefully arranged exile, as Odysseus accompanied him to the nearest convenient still-standing city to purify him, so they were probably only gone two or three days, tops.  Normally, it wouldn't be quite so heavily planned in advance.)

    So, in other words, there was nothing cruel or unusual about the young Patroclos being exiled from Opus after he accidentally killed a friend in a quarrel.  It was standard procedure, and far from being a heartless father sending his young son out alone in the world, his father uprooted his entire life to accompany the boy.  (Presumably this also meant uprooting the boy's mother and any siblings he might have had, but the subject did not come up in the Iliad.)  The fact that they never returned to Opus likely had nothing to do with being forbidden to do so, but rather to having found a much better situation at Peleus' court than whatever Menoitios' situation was in Opus.  (All known ancient lists of the Argonauts include both Peleus and Menoitios, so even in the versions where they're not brothers, they would at the least be old comrades, so being welcomed with open arms makes complete sense.)

    What bothers me most about the modern authors deciding to turn a devoted father into a cruel one is that I feel like someone (whether Miller or someone in the fanfic community) decided that it was "necessary" in order to give Patroclos' situation more "drama."

    I'm sorry, but if you think his situation needs more drama than it already has, there's something wrong with you.  He's just a child, and he accidentally killed one of his friends.  If you need more drama than that, I suggest you seek therapy.

The most persistent robo-scam?

     I went to my brother's place this afternoon to watch a movie.  It took longer than expected to get ready, so I was there most of the afternoon.

    I got home and found messages waiting on my landline.  (Yes, I still have a landline.  I like having it.  It's easier to talk on a landline phone than a cell phone.)  Nine of them.

    Not that they were actually different messages.  They were all the same recording, claiming to be "Apple security advisor".

    They must have filled my answering machine's capacity, because there were 13 missed calls on the caller ID, all from different numbers with the same first three digits as mine.  (Not the area code, the next part.  Y'know, the part they replace with 555 when giving phone numbers in movies.)

    It's called back three more times since I got home.

    I seriously want it to stop, but I have no idea how to force it to do that.  I mean, maybe if I answered it and played along and got talking to one of the scammers on the other end and played stupid for a while until I then claimed to have been recording them for the FBI, then maybe they'd go away for good.  I ran a quick search after I got home and found someone's account where they had done just that.  But I'm not good with confrontation, you know?  I feel like I'd mess up.

    Which is a pity, actually, because I think it would be fun to really screw with them, like pretend to be a senile old lady who not only hasn't got an iPhone, but hasn't even got a computer, because what would they do with the scam from there?  (Back before I had caller ID, I used to get calls claiming to be from "the Windows," and sometimes I was able to successfully mess with them and be like "No, I just had my windows cleaned, thanks," or another time (possibly one where they said they were from "the Microsoft") where I was like "stop harassing me, I'll never switch from Linux!")

    OMG, it just called back again.

    That makes seventeen times today!

    These last two times, they actually managed to spoof numbers that are in use, so it gave a name ("Commercial Deve"-something the first time, and an individual's name this most recent time) instead of just putting the number on both lines.

    This is really maddening, and I have no idea what to do about it.

    In the olden days, I could have left the phone off the hook overnight to see if it would stop (or at least to make sure I'd be able to get some sleep tonight), but my current landline is only wireless handsets; it's impossible to leave it off the hook. :<  Yet another reason to miss the way telephones worked in the old days.  (I wonder if maybe I can unhook the main base from the line, though.  That should work, as long as I remember to plug it back in when I get up in the morning.  But maybe the scam calls will stop long before bedtime.  They don't usually call past seven or eight at night, so hopefully?)

A deep sense of malaise?

     I'm feeling very down today, so I'm not going to continue the rant-series I started yesterday, because focusing on that kind of negative sentiment will only make me feel worse.  (That may be the case no matter how I'm feeling, but...)

    I kind of feel like my whole life is collapsing on my head.

    I know it's not, but it feels that way.  (Even though I know for a fact that I have a lot of options on how to get out of every single one of my problems.)

    My car is currently non-functional, again, because...well, the mechanics at the dealership the last time claimed it was just the battery and it was solely because I don't drive it enough, but the AAA people who jumped it for me said it wasn't just the battery.  And I'm inclined to believe the people from the AAA, because a) they're not reaping any benefit from me continually having to get my car fixed while the people at the dealership are, b) if cars needed to be jumpstarted every time they weren't driven for two weeks, then every airport's long-term parking lot would have to have a dedicated automotive triage center, and c) the people at the dealership's repair department have always had this attitude around me like "you're just a dumb female so we can milk you for all the money we want," and I see no reason to think this attitude has changed just because there's something more serious wrong with my car now.  Since I would likely get the same treatment at most other places I could take the car to get it repaired--not to mention that obviously I get very little use from having it since losing my job--I've been thinking I should just sell it and be done with it.  Of course, that has its own drawbacks, in that suddenly I would be dependent on my brother to take me to the grocery store (admittedly, we usually do end up going together, because we hang out a lot and there's a grocery store directly in between our houses) or have to have my groceries delivered.  (In the right weather I could walk, in theory, but I'm so out of shape right now that I don't know how successful I would be at having the strength to walk all the way there, do my shopping, and then carry it all back again.)  Not to mention that if I want to go somewhere fun by myself (like an antique mall) then I'd either be out of luck or would have to call a taxi/uber, and that sounds like a tremendous waste of money, not to mention would require human contact that I'm not entirely comfortable with at the moment.  I've told myself I could rent a car for periods when I know my brother won't be able to give me a ride, etc., but I wonder if I really could?  Do car rental places require a credit check?  My credit is so bad that I literally couldn't get a cell phone account from a regular place and had to go to a cheapie carrier that doesn't check credit.  (It's not even my fault; I've been good about my bills for years now, but I don't have a credit card, and that paying credit card bills seems to be the only thing that makes it go up.  But I am just not doing that, not again.)

    And I just paid my taxes, which came to an appalling sum, about a quarter of the money I have to live on for the year.  (This makes the "selling my car" option particularly appealing, since according to whatever website it was I looked it up on last week, the blue book value for my car, even in crappy condition, is nearly as much as I paid in taxes, because it's a hybrid, and those are hot right now.  Also then I wouldn't have to be paying an exorbitant amount in auto insurance.  I'd say it would also mean a savings in gas, but honestly, between the hybrid and not driving it much, I don't even remember the last time I bought gas.  It was probably last year.)

    My mother is constantly getting on my case to replace my roof, my house is a sty, and I think my refrigerator is dying, but I don't think there's any way I can replace it because of the aforementioned styness of the house.

    On top of all this, I released book two in my quasi-YA series, and absolutely no one has looked at it.

    Okay, not absolutely no one, but...something like five browser plays (I released it on itch.io as something to be "played" online), and as the novel is over a hundred thousand words long, there is no conceivable way that someone could read it in one sitting, so...either five people started it and said "yuck" and went away again, or one person read it in five sittings, or something in between.  I think it's the former, though.  I've also been posting it to AO3 in chapters, and there have been a total of 4 views.  Three of them were accrued after the first posting, which had the prologue and first chapter, the fourth was there after the second chapter went up, and no one bothered to read the third chapter.

    So...yeah, evidently it sucks even harder than the previous book.

    Which is weird; I thought that people would like it better, since it gets into the interesting stuff right away.  (I mean, by the second chapter they're having to make their way past Scylla and Charybdis!  The second chapter of the first book is mostly just the two girls walking from Pedasos to the ruins of the Achaian camp outside Troy.)

    ...and this is turning out to be even more negativity than the other would have been, so I'm going to stop here before I make it even worse.

Patronymics are not the same as last names!

     Okay, I've decided to take the plunge and start ranting posting about certain things that people do in Greek mythology works on AO3 (specifically in the ones focusing on the romance between Patroclos and Achilles) which drive me completely up the wall because they are so very, very wrong.  And yes, I do know that these are amateur works posted by fans (indeed, the bulk of my work available online is on AO3, so who could know better than I?), but that does not stop me from being annoyed by it.  (And, indeed, it should not stop the authors from taking the time to do a little research before they actually post what they've written.  A really good fanfic author makes sure to get things right first, whether that means double-checking the canon work or learning a bit about the culture in which their work is set.)

    Some of these things I know come from a specific, highly-publicized, highly-lauded novel (which I personally have not read, so I'm not sure how many of the others also came from it), but I probably won't get to those things until the second post (trying to keep it to a few things per post, all revolving around a specific theme), so I won't mention the novel in question until I get there.

    Today's primary beef is the way so many of the authors use patronymics as direct equivalents of modern last names.  And I don't mean in introductions, as that's one of the only places it might be used in an equivalent  manner.  No, I mean using both their name and their patronymic for emphasis.  As in, a modern mother might yell at her son "John Smith, you get back here this instant!" to really hammer home how angry she is at him.

    No one would ever do that with a patronymic in Ancient Greece.

    The two do not serve the same function.  And, more importantly, that whole thing of adding the last name for emphasis is a cultural thing.  It's something people in the US do, yes.  Probably in the other English-speaking countries as well.  (I'm drawing a blank on whether or not I've seen anyone do that in any of the British TV and movies I've watched over the years...ooh, no, I just recalled Gandalf doing that with both Sam and Pippin in Fellowship of the Ring (don't remember offhand if the either line was in the book, though) so...yeah, probably there in all English-speaking countries.)  I find it highly improbable that people do that in every non-Anglophone country in the modern world, however.  The more different the language, the more different the culture, the higher chance that it doesn't happen, it seems to me.  And that's despite that there is a growing world subculture low-key blending everyone's reactions and behaviors.  (If I was only close to someone from modern Greece, I'd ask if people even do that last-name-for-emphasis thing there now, because I feel like the answer would probably be "no."  Unfortunately, I'm not.  I do know of one person in a few game dev Discord servers who's from Greece, but I don't know him well enough to ask such a weird and random question.  Don't really know him at all, in fact.)

    And if not everyone now does that, is there any reason to think people three thousand years ago did it?

    Answer:  no, there absolutely is not.

    More importantly, the last name and the patronymic serve radically different functions.  The last name is something passed down from generation to generation, identifying the larger group to which you belong.  The closest ancient equivalent would be the gens name in ancient Rome, but the behavior regarding the gens name is radically different:  unless you were really close to someone, you spoke to or about them using their gens name, possibly adding their praenomen on the front if there was any concern that someone might be confused as to which member of the family you were talking about, or using their cognomen if they have one.  (Roman names are very complicated.  I would have to give them a full post of their own to explain them, but I'm sure the information is already posted online in many places, all of them better than any explanation I could provide.)

    As to the patronymic, it's not passed down from generation to generation.  (With the occasional oddity, like Achilles sometimes being referred to as Aiakides in the Iliad, which means "son of Aiakos," and is technically his father's patronymic.  Aiakides, therefore, could function like a modern last name, since it's more referring to the founder of his line of descent from Zeus.)  It specifically identifies the father of the person in question.  The patronymic is specifically designed to be used both to identify the father and the son, thus its primary use in epic is actually in place of the character's name.  Atreides, "son of Atreus," is probably the most famous and commonly used (outside of the Iliad), and could be applied to both Agamemnon and Menelaos, though I think it was mostly just used for Agamemnon.  It sets the tone of expectations for a person:  by identifying Agamemnon as Atreides, the poet could signify in a single word that he had a dark and bloody past and would have a dark and bloody future (Atreus was murdered by a tag-team of his brother and his brother's son/grandson (product of father-daughter rape), Agamemnon murdered the uncle in question and would later be himself murdered by the cousin in question), by identifying Achilles as Aiakides, the poet could instantly remind the listener/reader of his glorious ancestor who went on to be one of the judges of the underworld and thus signal Achilles' glorious present and his future as a minor god of the dead (though actually I'm not sure if he'd been deified yet when the Iliad was composed), and by identifying Patroclos as Menoitiades the poet could signal that he was from dependable heroic stock who never actually achieved any great or lasting fame (though really his name kind of already signals that, as only the most arrogant or the most insignificant would ever name their son "glory of the father," depending on whether they meant "product of my own glory" or "son who is my only chance of ever getting any glory").

    Now, there are cases where it's reasonable to put the patronymic directly after the name, as if it was a normal last name.  For example, in my books, I have Eurysakes frequently identify himself as "son of Aias Telamoniades."  This is for the very sensible reason that there were two men named Aias who were of great note in the Trojan War:  one was the bulwark of the Achaians and the original tank character, while the other was a mean-spirited little man who literally got most of the Greek army killed on the way home from Troy.  As the son of the former, Eurysakes does not want to risk anyone thinking he's the son of the latter!

    That's not the purpose of these people just sticking a patronymic on at the back of the character's name, though.  They're going for the "I just can't believe you, John Smith, you rogue!" thing.

    And. That. Is. Not. Right.

    It drives me insane.

    And, in a deeply-related note, considering the character who's been the butt of that behavior...

    ACHILLES' PATRONYMIC IS NOT PELIDES!!!!!!!!!!!

    Sorry to shout, but....AARRRGGGGHHHH!!!!!!

    I mean, what do they think his father's name is?

    Pelos?  Peles?

    Because that's what "Pelides" would mean.  Son of Pelos or son of Peles.

    Neither of which, to the best of my knowledge, was ever an ancient Greek name.

    Achilles' patronymic is Peleides.  Or sometimes Peleades, depending on the metrical needs of the line in question.  But that second "e" is deeply important, because his father's name is Peleus, not Peles or Pelos.

    I mean, really, what do these people think the patronymic for "son of Pelias" would be?  Or rather, if they think that "son of Peleus" is "Pelides" then how do they think anyone would tell "son of Peleus" from "son of Pelias," since by their logic they would both be the same thing?

    Is it that they just don't think?  Are they so ignorant of Greek mythology that they've never heard of Pelias?  Have the only encountered patronymics in one novel that got them so drastically wrong that a) they misspelled Achilles' patronymic and b) used it like a last name and c) didn't even use any others?  Do they just not care that they're 100% wrong?

    .

    ..

    ...

    Yeah.

    Sorry.

    That just really freaking bothers me.  Especially since every time I've run into the first problem, it's been a double-whammy with the second one.

    Sometimes makes me want to bash my head into a wall.

    (Needless to say, I actually gave up on trying to read Patroclos/Achilles fics on AO3 a long time ago, but the frustration has been lingering and festering ever since, so I'm trying to purge it.)

And again...

     ...today is basically the same as yesterday, only I'm even more tired, plus I'm worried about the big thunderstorm that's supposed to roll through town tomorrow, so I pretty much only booted up the laptop to see if it needed charging.

    I'll do a real post tomorrow.

    I hope.

    (Maybe the whole "post every day" thing was a bad idea after all?)

Taxes

     Spent half the day working on my taxes.  (A bit late in the game for it, but...)

    Didn't finish because I didn't have one of the numbers I needed for the state taxes.  I shudder to think what the state is going to soak me for considering how much the federal government wants.  It's not that it's a huge amount, but for someone unemployed like me...ugh.

    I am just not in the mood to blog today. :<

    Maybe tomorrow I'll start on my multi-post rant about some of the maddening mistakes people make over and over and over and over again when they're writing Trojan War pieces to post on AO3.

    I'm not up to it today, though.

Thermae Romae (Primae et Novae)

    Not too long ago, I logged into Netflix and found that the "we're promoting this today" product was a new anime, Thermae Romae Novae.  My reaction, of course, was "huh, really?  That's a weird choice to give a sequel to.  Didn't realize anyone even remembered that show..."

    Then I let the trailer play and I was like "wait, it's a remake?"

    Naturally, I added it to my watch list and just left myself a mental note to get to it later.

    So, I watched the first episode last night.  It's a weird mix of "clearly a lot of research went into this" and "why the *^%^& would they do that?!"  (Warning, this discussion will have some "spoilers" for the first episode, but...is this really the kind of show where there even is such a thing as a "spoiler"?  I mean, the premise is "the Roman who bathed through time," you know?  It's not about story so much as the humorous reactions of an ancient Roman bathmaker in modern day Japanese bathhouses.)

    I mean, right from the start, it's a little weird in the opening credits to have music based on Italian opera and visuals based on Greek vases.  (Sort of.  More the figures and the poses but less so the actual art style and not the coloration at all.  Hard to explain properly, esp. without having the visuals right in front of me.  (I've only seen it the once, after all!))

    Then we get the introductory sequence of "welcome to Ancient Rome" and the fly-over of the city, and I'm thinking that it looks pretty darn good.  The city looks about like it should, and the animation quality is good.

    And then we get a series of short scenes to further introduce the Roman people as a whole.

    Including a party-goer throwing up (either from too much wine or to make room for the next course, most likely) while his fellow-partiers call him back over...

    ...and the fellow partiers are lying on their stomachs on featureless couches.

    On.

    Their.

    Stomachs.

    I'll pause here a moment to let you fully take that in.

    The weird thing is, that's not the first time I've seen someone so completely misunderstand how reclining at the table worked.

    And the other was also Japanese pop culture, so I suspect there's some "classic" Japanese history text that made that mistake and generations of Japanese students have just absorbed it.  (Or maybe it comes from that movie about Cleopatra that Tezuka made?  I don't know much about that movie...)  Anyway, the other place was in a cute little manga called NG Life, by Mizuho Kusanagi, about a man from Pompeii who was reincarnated in modern-day Japan but still remembers his life as a Roman.  (It had a lot of other mistakes in it, esp. regarding the social role of gladiators, but it was still cute.)

    In both cases, it's hard for me to understand how no one with editorial oversight didn't look it up online and realize that the reclining position should look like this:

    I mean, that took me maybe five, ten minutes to get.  (Took me longer than necessary 'cause I was trying to get those Etruscan tomb frescoes showing all the young men at a symposium, only then it turned out the pictures weren't all that good at showing what I wanted...)  The pictures are, in order from top to bottom, an Etruscan sarcophagus, a panel from a Roman sarcophagus, a Greek vase (the reclining figure is on the lower tier), and a fresco from Pompeii.  (All the pictures above are from Wikimedia Commons, and you can click the pictures to go to the page with the full-size images and photographer credits.)  And that Etruscan sarcophagus is one of the most famous works of Etruscan sculpture of all time--one of the main things you think of when someone says "Etruscan art"--so there's not a lot of excuse for not knowing what it looks like.

    Moving on, after that absurdity left, then we had the bulk of the first episode following our protagonist, Lucius, as a child.  And there were still some little inaccuracies (I thought for a while that everyone was wearing these odd seashell necklaces until I realized they were supposed to be cloth pouches to hold their money, which is inaccurate in that you wouldn't wear that outside your clothes where the thieves can see it! (also inaccurate in that a child would not be carrying money with him unless he was specifically on an errand to buy something)) and the streets didn't have anywhere near enough people on them, but mostly it was looking good.  (There were still a lot of cultural awkwardnesses, of course.  I don't think bullies would have acted the same way in Ancient Rome that they did in mid-century Japan, you know?  I mean, I admit to ignorance about how the urban middle to lower class boys bullied each other in Rome, but...I don't think that was it.  And Lucius was on an errand to bring lunch to his grandfather, but I'm not so sure lunch was even a thing in antiquity.  I need to look that up; I had sudden panic as I was preparing my latest novel for release on itch.io as I realized that it was probably grotesquely inaccurate to have people eating a midday meal in the Late Bronze Age.  But I'm not sure when lunch, as we think of it, started happening.  I feel like for most of human history it was two meals a day:  one in the morning and one in the evening.  But I need to research that...)

    And we got through this prefatory material pretty smoothly, and then we get Lucius as a grown man, freshly returned from studying in Athens...so he can be a better bathmaker.  Of course, Athens was not exactly known for its baths.  That was a Roman thing.  It was known for its architecture, though, and Romans loved the cache they got from having studied in Greece (esp. for rhetoric or poetry), so that wasn't too big a deal...

    ...but then Lucius stops to pay his respects to his father and grandfather, represented by these little full-figure statuettes standing where the household gods should be.

    That is a huge "no."

    Yes, Romans did keep statues of their deceased family members--male ones, at least--but they tended to be busts, and they were pretty much only brought out for funerals.

    They were not the equivalent of the Buddhist altar you often see in homes in anime and manga (I won't speculate on how accurate that is to Japanese reality, because how would I know?), and they certainly weren't kept in place of the household gods.

    Very, very awkward.

    Then Lucius goes to the baths, where he runs into one of the bullies who was picking on him at the beginning of the episode.  The bully having grown out of being a bully and wanting to apologize for his earlier behavior felt a little forced in an era so far before psychological counselling, but that doesn't mean it couldn't happen, so I'm okay with that.

    I'm much less okay with him using the "thumbs up" gesture in such a modern way.

    Specifically, after the bully-turned-butcher apologizes, Lucius asks if he'll give him a discount next time he visits his butcher's shop.  And the guy gives him a thumbs up.

    That.

    Is.

    So.

    Wrong.

    Firstly, at some point since the gladiatorial games went the way of the dinosaurs, people forgot what the signals meant.  Thumbs down actually meant "put your sword away," as in "let your opponent live."  So, the thumbs up was "kill the guy!"  Therefore, what in the heck would it even mean in this context?

    I can't even imagine.

    Either way, a gesture associated with the brutal fighting in the coliseums would be entirely inappropriate and unnatural in a friendly conversation inside a bath.

    So...yeah.

    Basic reaction to the first episode is "they got so much right that the things they got wrong really jump out at me, screaming and yelling and waving their arms."

    I still plan on watching the rest, of course, but I think it's going to be a "one episode a week" thing to build up my strength again.  (Thankfully, while I'm moderately knowledgeable about it, and used to be pretty good at the language, Ancient Rome doesn't mean the same thing to me that Ancient Greece does, so it's not as big a problem as it could be...)

    Anyway, today I decided to pop the DVD in the player and rewatch the first episode of the original anime (which was from 2012, so I guess this was sort of a 10th anniversary thing?) to see how it compared.

    And I very quickly understood why they wanted to do a new one.

    The first one wasn't really...well...animated.  It was more like sprites sliding around, and lip-flap animations when someone was talking.  I mean, they were much better lip flap animations that you get in most visual novels, but...the difference between that and the lavish animation in the Netflix anime is mind-blowing.  (The original also didn't spend as long setting the scene and just plain showing Rome, so it had less time to make mistakes.  Though the conclusion of the episode made some pretty massive mistakes, in that the Romans did know how to make glass bottles, and also had pottery wheels, so whether those clunky bottles were supposed to be badly made glass or badly made pottery, either way it was wrong.)

    To give you an idea of the difference, visually...

    Here's the promotional images for the two versions side by side.

    Huh...actually, that's not so informative.  You can't really understand what I'm talking about without seeing a clip of the original and then watching the trailer for the new one.  (The main thing you can see here is that in the original, Lucius is blond, which would actually have been pretty unusual for a Roman.)

    Honestly, I think the original was made super on-the-cheap as a promotional thing for the live-action movie, as the teaser poster for it was on the wall when Lucius arrived in Japan in the first episode.  I can't even imagine how this would work extended into a single, movie-length story.  And with everyone being Japanese, I would think it would kind of squash some of the fish-out-of-water when Lucius arrives in the present, since his original basic reaction of "these people look like no one I've ever seen before" would kind of not work if everyone involved is of the same ethnicity.

    That being said, I think a live-action take on this could be really cool (in small chunks only), if you did it right:  get together an appropriate cross-section of humanity for the Rome sequences (keeping in mind that Rome in the time of Hadrian would actually be pretty diverse, due to the spread of the Roman empire and slaves being brought in from all quarters of the empire and then freed, not to mention free people moving to Rome for better opportunities, plus just plain tourism) and have them all speaking in Latin, then the stuff in Japan is of course in Japanese and featuring only Japanese people.  If I were a teacher at a college, I would so try to get the Classics and the Drama departments together to do something like that.  Just to see it, you know?

    (The world should now be very grateful that I do not teach....but if anyone does make a video like what I just described and posts it to YouTube, please let me know, okay?  I want to see it...)

"Creative, Not Famous" - A Reaction

 

    Ooh, copy-pasting an image works!  Sweet!

    *ahem*

    Right, so I'm calling this a "reaction" rather than a "review," because a review ought to be more thorough and stuff.

    Creative, Not Famous:  The Small Potato Manifesto by Ayun Halliday is...actually, let me quote the Kickstarter page, so I won't make a hash of explaining what it is.  (Ugh, pun totally not intended...)

What is a small potato? They're someone whose focus is making cool, meaningful work and living a creative life rather than achieving wealth or celebrity! This book is from small potatoes to small potatoes. 

Inside you’ll find:

• Quotes and advice from 37 creative small potato just like you, including actors, artists, writers, comedians, clowns, musicians, photographers, videographers, mimes, singers, cartoonists, zinesters, and more
• The kind of friendly, collegial wisdom, encouragement, and practical advice that soothes your soul as you try to make art and pay the bills
• A manifesto for small potatoes that builds as you read
• Adorable potato illustrations!

    So, yeah, there you have it.  It's both about the lifestyle and attitude towards your own art you have to have if you're a small potato, but it's also advice about how to live that life, and without having to sacrifice everything else in your life.

    A lot of it's geared towards the performative arts (including playwrights), and most of the rest is about visual artists, so a lot of it didn't really connect for me.  But it was still entertaining, and there was a lot of information that was useful, too.

    ...

    Y'know, I felt like I had more to say than that.

    ...

    Ugh.  I've been away from this too long; I don't remember how to write a book review. 😩

    .....

    Oh well, I guess I'll just get to the one idiotic thing I really wanted to say.

    The whole time I was reading this book, I was suffering from...well, for most of the time, I couldn't figure out what the problem was.  I was like "this seems like food poisoning, but I haven't had meat for a couple of days, so it can't be food poisoning!"

    Then this morning--the same morning I finished reading this--I realized what it was.  It really was food poisoning...caused by under-cooked potatoes.

    The irony is almost palpable, y'know?

Thinking of shaking things up...

     So, I've been reading a book about...uh, it's complicated, actually.  I'll post a review of it later.  Kind of a cross between self-help and an artist's lifestyle how-to?  (Wait, are those actually different?)

    *cough*

    To start over:

    One of the chapters talked about making habits to help with artistic productivity.  And my habits have been pretty all over the place lately.  (Even though I've been doing a lot of work since taking up game devving...)

    So, I was thinking I might try taking up daily blog entries, like I did on my old blog when I first started it.  Probably just mindless drivel, maybe even reflecting on my daily life (or maybe not; my life's pretty dull), or going back to what became my standby on the old blog:  Greek mythology.

    But first I wanted to start with this, 'cause it seemed fun.  Someone made this thing that lets you rank fan fiction tropes, and you can even control what the tiers are named.  So I played around with the tier rank titles and then ranked the tropes thusly:

    My yellow tier having such a long title doesn't make it flow too well, but...

    Enh.  It could be worse, yeah?

IWSG - Free Plot Point!

 

    Okay, dumb post title, but accurate.  Because I came up with a cool idea for one small aspect of a murder mystery.

    Only I don't write murder mysteries, and have zero interest in trying my hand at one (I don't even like reading/watching them!), so I thought I'd just share this small plot point.

    So, it's basically the "why" of a murder, without the who or the how.  Because whoever actually did it has zero connections to the victim--or rather, the victim is probably someone who seems like no one would ever want to kill them.  (Or maybe they seem like the ideal murder victim, hated by tons of people, but everyone with a motive also has an alibi.)

    What's going on is that there's this talk show where the host often gives out gifts to one or more members of the audience.  Things like new cars.  And some criminal organization (could be the mob, could be a spy ring, or anything else you can think of) uses those new cars as mules to get contraband from someone who's infiltrated the television studio to a courier that will take the item, whatever it is, to whoever it's supposed to get it in the end.  Only there was a mishap at the studio, and a car that was supposed to go to someone working for the organization went to a regular audience member, and when someone went to retrieve the item inside the car, things went wrong, and the audience member (or a member of their family? or a neighbor? or an employee?) ended up dead.

    All of this would be super-hard for a detective to figure out with just the murder victim, since the killer would likely have left very few clues, so it would make a good twist for a murder mystery, I'd think.  *shrug*  Just thought I'd put it out here in case anyone can make use of it.

    (I apologize if it's already been done.  As I said, I don't care for the genre, and therefore have little experience with it.)

    I know this isn't really related to insecurity as a writer, but...I mean, I'm sort of in a permanent state of "meh, I suck, but I enjoy writing anyway," so there really isn't any insecurity, 'cause I am actually quite secure, it's just a case of having some insecurity about if it's better to put my awful stuff out there or to just write for myself, which is not really something easy to deal with, and not something anyone else can help with, either.

    But on the other hand, it's supportive towards any mystery writers in the group who happen to see it and could use the idea, right?