Anonymous asked: What's your opinion of the Prince of Egypt movie?
i sent a pestilence a plague into your house into your bed into your streams into your streets into your drink into your bread! upon your cattle, on your sheep upon your oxen, in your field into your dreams into your sleep until you break until you yield! I - sent - the - swarm - I - sent - the - hoard - thu'saieth the looooord
once i called you brother, once i thought the chance to make you laugh, was all i ever wanted (ISENTHEFIREFROMTHESKYISENTTHEFIRERAININGDOWN.) and even now, i wish that god had chose another, serving as your foe on his behalf, is the last thing that i wanteeeeeeeeeed (I SENT A HAIL OF BURNING ICE ON EVERY FIELD ON EVERY TOWN!) THIS was my home, all this pain and devastation, how it tortures me inside, all the innocent who suffer, from your STUBBORNNESS AND PRIIIIIIIIIIDE (I SENT THE LOCUSTS ON THE WIND SUCH AS THE WORLD HAS NEVER SEEN FROM EVERY LEAF ON EVERY STALK UNTIL THERE’S NOTHING LEFT BUT GREEN!) I - sent - my - scourge - I - sent - my - sword - thu'saieth the looooord you who i call brother, why must you call down another blow, is this what you wanteeeeeeeed I - sent - my - scourge - I - sent - my - swoooooooord LET MY PEOPLE GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO (THUS SAITH THE LORD) THUS SAITH THE LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORD
you who i called brother, how could you have come to hate me so, is this what you wanted I - sent - the - swarm - I - sent - the - hoard - then let my heart be hardened, and never mind how high the cost may grow, this will still be so. i will never let. yoooour peeeeeeeopleeeeeee go. (THUS SAITH THE LORD) thus saith the looooooooooord i will not let. (let) your- (my people) gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
Anonymous asked: Do you have any thoughts about David and Jonathan?
The David cycle (can it be called a cycle? Or is it more a saga? Or just a multi-generational family tragedy?) is deeply underrated from a literary point of view. It’s one of the longest stories we have of a single life in the Old Testament aside from maybe Joseph? It’s got it all; mad kings, prophecies fulfilled, self-sacrificing princes, supernatural feats, and a shining peasant king at the center with enough charisma to burn up anyone who gets too close to him and a relationship to God so intimate that he is referred to as God’s son. And the Davidic fall from grace is just….brutal, and he’s so aware of what’s happening through a lot of it. Like his devotion to God just grows more ferocious even as the bodies pile up around him, and David’s laments for his children and Jonathon are heart-wrenching. They still wreck me.
Jonathon is honestly one of the most honorable, good, and wonderful men of the entire Old Testament. His filial loyalty to his useless father and his adoring fealty of David never waver; even when Jonathon’s birthright is stripped from him, even when those warring loves quite literally kill him. Like, everyone I know at seminary is still upset about the death of Jonathon. Reviews on David as a human are mixed, but everyone still mourns the firstborn son of Saul.
So yeah, I get glassy eyed about the love between David and Jonathon and its potentially romantic nature like everyone else on Tumblr, but there’s….a lot more there. And that relationship only haunts readers so much because of how well the author captured these two reckless, hard-loving, blood-stained boys with the world on their shoulders.
one of the lessons i learned from captain america:
sometimes you fight, not because you think you can win, but because you need to be able to look back later and say, “i fought.”
“In King Lear (III:vii) there is a man who is such a minor character that Shakespeare has not given him even a name: he is merely “First Servant.” All the characters around him – Regan, Cornwall, and Edmund – have fine long-term plans. They think they know how the story is going to end, and they are quite wrong. The servant has no such delusions. He has no notion of how the play is going to go. But he understands the present scene. He sees an abomination (the blinding of old Gloucester) taking place. He will not stand it.
His sword is out and pointed at his master’s breast in a moment: then Regan stabs him dead from behind. That is his whole part: eight lines all told. But if it were real life and not a play, that is the part it would be best to have acted.”
– C.S. Lewis, “The World’s Last Night”
So Stanford professor Ken Taylor has a whole lecture on this in Hamlet, and the role of defiant resignation (citing Kierkegaard’s concept of resignation) where you are urged to act despite understanding that it won’t change anything, simply to demonstrate your dissatisfaction with the world as it stands, and your belief in what it should be. But Steve demonstrates a lot of this.
When nothing you do matters, all that matters is what you do.
Prince Geoffrey: My you chivalric fool… as if the way one fell down mattered.
Prince Richard: When the fall is all there is, it matters a great deal.
(via slyrider)
Guys. This is what a national chain store trolling Trump looks like. A bunch of dystopian novels with a sign (I presume) meant for the travel section.
Support your local disgruntled bookstore manager with a dark sense of humor.
The best part of this is it isn’t just one disgruntled manager that made this happen. I used to work at B&N and I can tell you what goes on those promo tables is dictated by corporate headquarters, not just one pissed-off employee. Like, the instructions for assembling that table came from on high and had to pass through whole echelons of marketing and management personnel and everyone along the way had to go, “Yep, that looks good and not at all inflammatory,” before it actually appeared on bookstore floors so may I just say to the B&N chain of command BRAVO
procraesthetics asked: I wonder what would happen if Dudley grew up in the wizarding world but still as a muggle? like kind of reverse AU where his parents are dead and he has to go to Lily for whatever reason? do you think he would become bitter like Petunia about magic?
Lily remembered her sister, how there had been a time she was curious and delighted about magic, before it slowly sank in that she could look and not touch.
The last thing Petunia had said to Lily before she died was a chilly goodbye, ending a holiday dinner where they’d had a shrieking row in the entryway. Petunia had said freak and Lily had hissed better than this, better than this being my whole fucking world, Tune, do you even see yourself, are you happy–
And now here was Dudley Vernon Dursley fussing himself to sleep as Lily walked the halls of the Godric’s Hollow house. His tiny soft hands with their tiny soft fingernails curled under her chin, the same way Harry always had.
She passed James, who was gently bouncing his way up the hall the opposite way. “I think he’s asleep,” James mouthed over Harry’s tousled head. His hair was the same mess, bent down to peer at his sleeping son.
Lily stopped where she stood, her nephew heavy on her chest, her husband smiling, her sister buried. “James,” she said. “How are we going to do this?”
“Oh,” he said. “Hey. Don’t you cry, you’ll start them off– unless you need to cry, I mean, you go ahead, hey, sweetheart, hey, it’s alright, you just let it out.” He stepped forward, shifting Harry gently to his other shoulder, and pressed his forehead to hers. “We tuck them in, okay, that’s what we do next. Then we go to our own bed, okay, and go to sleep, and when we wake up it’ll be a new day.”
“A new day,” she said. “Another day– James, that’s the– I’m so tired.”
“So let’s sleep. It’ll look better in the morning,” he said. “And if it doesn’t look better this morning, it’ll look better in the next one.”
“You promise?”
“Better than that. I’ll show you. Every day,” he said and kissed her cold forehead.
–
Dudley had not shown up on the Potters’ doorstep with the milk bottles. Lily had gotten a phone call from the landline she still had installed in Godric’s Hollow, about an accident, and she had gone down to the Muggle police station to identify the bodies.
The cupboard under the stairs was filled with spiders, broomsticks, and the sewing machine Lily’s mother had given her when she married James– that’s all. Dudley slept downstairs. Uncle Remus taught Dudley and Harry to knock out coded messages through the wall their rooms shared.
In the backyard, beside a rickety porch and an ambitious hedge, James taught them to fly– first on little tot brooms where their toes brushed the grass the whole time, then out of the barrels of practice brooms James used for lessons and coaching Little League Quidditch.
When the boys turned ten, five weeks apart, they both got shiny new Nimbuses on Dudley’s birthday (which came first), and a set of enchanted Quidditch balls on Harry’s, to share. The Bludgers were enchanted to be very kind but Dudley spent long afternoons whacking them far afield while Harry chased the Snitch at his back.
Harry had a scar on his forehead, like a jagged bit of lightning. Dudley had no scars– the car crash that had killed his parents hadn’t touched him where he sat strapped into a car seat in the back, chewing on a stuffed dinosaur toy.
Lily did not believe in lying to the children. She was bare years off being a child herself, and spare moments on the far side of a war. When Dudley asked about his parents, she told him there had been an accident. She pulled pictures off the shelf and wrote Petunia’s old university friends for more.
Photographs came by mailman, the images still and unnatural to Dudley’s eye. Every day he’d gone out to play, for years, he’d been waving at the picture near the back door of his aunt and uncle on their wedding day, and they waved back every time.
“She was very clever,” Lily said. “Your mom liked to know everything.”
“And my dad?”
“Vernon liked… cars?” James offered. “That’s the word, right, Lily?”
“I didn’t know him very well,” Lily said. “He liked drills, I think; he worked for a firm that made them, and he talked about that a lot.”
Dudley brushed his thumbs over the dull edges of the photos. When Lily went off to Auror headquarters the next morning for work, James bundled the boys up and took them on an impromptu invisible tour of Grunnings Drill Manufacturing Inc.
They tiptoed down halls and past water coolers and ringing fellytones. They held hands under the Cloak as they dodged around the machines on the manufacturing floor, thumping and pounding and whirring away loudly enough that Harry and Dudley could whisper to each other under the noise. An elevator took them all the way up to the top floor. Harry whistled cheerily and eerily along with the elevator music while the Muggles slowly edged toward the doors and pressed floor buttons lower than they’d originally wanted.
There were boxes and cabinets and folders and desks and staticky monitor screens full of numbers strewn in endless grids. “Merlin’s knuckles,” said Harry, who was seven and a half and rather proud of this expletive. “People can look at this all day, their whole lives, and not die?”
“Work is hard work,” said James.
“At least mum gets to curse things.”
“But my dad liked it?” Dudley said, peering at a white board that was bleeding enthusiastic marker. “There’s a lot of things, here. Maybe he liked knowing things, too.”
When the boys asked about the scar on Harry’s forehead, Lily and James looked at each other. “You know how sometimes we sit with Uncle Remus and talk about a war?” James said. “Or with Ms. Amelia or Mr. Mundungus.”
“Mr. Mundungus is kinda smelly,” Harry said helpfully.
“It’s not nice to say so though,” said James, and Lily made a face.
“Are we raising them to be nice?” Lily said.
“I’m trying,” said James.
“You talk about a war,” said Harry and shrugged. Dudley nodded.
“There was a very bad man, in those days,” said James.
“Voldemort,” said Lily, and James made a face.
“He was so scary a lot of people don’t like to say his name, even now,” said James. “And he was coming after us because we had been fighting against him, in the war. He came to the house and he tried to hurt you, Harry. But it didn’t work. It hurt him instead, and gave you that scar.”
“Is he going to come back?” said Dudley, who was paler than his normal pink.
“No one’s heard of him since then,” said Lily.
“Where were you?” said Harry, because all his life they had been right there.
“Oh,” said Lily, but her throat closed up.
“We were at Dudley’s mum and dad’s funeral,” said James. “Our friend– our friend Sirius was watching you two. The bad man, he came to the house. He. Well. I.”
“Sirius died,” said Lily, one hand squeezing James’s knee and the other reaching down to brush hair off Dudley’s forehead. “You lived, Harry, and Voldemort vanished. And that’s why sometimes people stare in the streets, baby.” James tweaked Harry’s collar absently.
–
Two days after they had buried Lily’s sister, the Potters had stood together in the first chills of November and buried James’s brother.
Sirius had been burned off the Black family tree years before. Lily and James had talked to his cousin Andromeda, to Remus, and then they had laid him to rest in the Potter family plot. At the wake, they’d told old jokes about squirrel breath, shedding, and man’s best friend. Remus had fallen asleep on their couch and stayed for a month.
–
It took a two hour row with HR for Lily to get two passes to the Ministry’s Bring Your Kid To Work Day.
“He’s a Muggle.”
“He’s not,” Lily snapped. “He’s family.”
She had to get permission, sign a million forms, and she also had to take the boys in early so that Dudley could get smothered in the spells that would keep the Anti-Muggle wards around the Ministry from activating on him. “If a Muggle stumbles in somehow, they just see a funny-smelling supply cabinet and turn back around,” Lily told Dudley. He nodded and dragged Harry off by the wrist to go look at the fountain.
The windows were pouring sunlight into the underground room– the maintenance workers had just gotten a win on their contract negotiations and had banished the grimy rain-spattered windows of the previous weeks. The light hit the falling water, the golden statues, and the small excitable crowd of Ministry dependents who were gathering in the atrium. Dudley was fishing about in the fountain for Knuts to toss back out again, elbow-deep, and Harry was laughing and coming up with weird wishes to make on them.
Lily hadn’t said son. She’d said family, and that was true enough, wasn’t it? She didn’t say son– she had a son, and she had a nephew, a ward, another child who came to her after nightmares and scraped knees. It was not less, it was just words.
Lily worried about stealing more things from Petunia. Tuney had shrieked at her, in ladies’ restrooms and suburban foyers, had hissed at her in grocery store aisles and family dinners, because Lily got everything. And now Lily had her son.
Lily could just imagine it– could just see Petunia’s face twisting and chin stabbing at the air. You could have anything, and you took my son– my son!
“You left him to me,” Lily whispered, but that wasn’t quite right. “You left,” she whispered, and that wasn’t quite right either, so she strode off toward the fountain to ask the boys if they wanted to go see the Auror spellwork ranges. Dudley’s sodden shirt sleeves dripped all over the Ministry floors. Harry’s hair fell down into his eyes and they both grinned bright enough to rival the spelled sunlight.
