They Finally Got Names! Camilla And Angelo.

i love shakespeare academics. i fucking love them. there’s this one guy who wrote an essay about how claudius is actually possibly innocent, or at least didn’t kill the king by putting poison in his ear, and the ghost was in part a hallucination (it’s a really interesting essay with many good points and i’m using it in my final synthesis for this class) but. BUT. some guy read it on a train. and he lost it.

this guy literally said this essay drove him to “insanity”. he went off the fucking rails about it so much so that he wrote a book over the course of EIGHTEEN YEARS about what ACTUALLY happened in hamlet and dedicated it to the guy who wrote the essay as a big “fuck you”. and that exchange between them is literally inescapable when reading about the play today. here’s an excerpt from the beginning:

this is like. the equivalent of someone making a well-thought out discourse post and then out of nowehere someone reblogging it with thousands of words of pure furious rambling about why op is wrong YEARS LATER. this bullshit started a hundred years ago, literally in the middle of the first world fucking war, and i STILL cannot escape it while reading a book on hamlet published in fucking 2000 because it’s so iconic. and i love it.

back to regularly scheduled malevolent posting

One episode of TMA that I will NEVER be able to shut up about is 170 (Recollection). The first episode that made me properly cry! Not only is it a beautiful exploration of Martin as a character, but humanity in general.

The light, innocent, childish small talk that Martin offers to the tape recorder. He tries so hard to keep it comforted, welcome in his home, looked after. It'd be wrong of course, to ignore it, even in his despair; others should always be put first.

Through tangled, rambling sentences, Martin manages to always explain away his own emotions, actions... To be visibly uncomfortable, unwelcoming, is wrong. He offers up his life, details of his existence, but talks them into offhanded mentions.

The subtle embarrassment he has for himself; a hallmark of much of English society. Everyone must be a self contained functioning person, lest they risk being 'odd', 'troubled', perhaps even 'disruptive'.

And as Martin's inhibitions fade, as his memories of everything grow dim, his instinctual desperation shows so painfully through. Desperately reaching for answers, as a child desperately holds their hand out for an absent parent.

Martin never had a safe person to reach for, someone always there for him. His father gone before he really knew who he was, his mother infinitely distainful... This abandonment mirrored by Jon's absence that floats into his mind in phases.

And even to be denied the pain, to forget what you were crying about, there's something terrible about it. Feeling the lump in your throat, the tears on your cheeks, but never really being sure why they were there, if they even are.

And the chairs. To be denied the simple comfort of a soft place to rest.

Martin's eventual return to his duties, caring for his mother, the subtle falsified joy he finds in it, and his decline into self hatred, blame. How easy it is for him to find his way back to a place of insecurity even when he has nothing to grasp onto.

And how strong he stays. How ready he is to shoulder the blame, to carry on, to be there for anyone who might need him, anything. It's all outside, and when he falls deeper into the fog his internal, pressed down emotions spill out.

All of Martin's fears come from a place of worrying he isn't enough, and this domain reduces him to a state where he is nothing; and yet, he prevails.

I love getting overly attached to characters who are just so lame. Like, Jonathan Jarchivist Sims does have attributes that are theoretically very cool (he became god, he could kill people with his mind and all that) but the scenes that have me grinning and twirling my hair are always, like. Jon sitting at his desk and bitterly muttering about how his coworkers stole his pens.

louis cradling and crying over lestat after slitting his throat himself.... that's gothic romance excellence

Lestat de Lioncourt in Interview with the Vampire (2022–) → 😡😏🙄😍

Modern Hamlet character designs. I love them far too much. 😭

Arabesques on the Theme of Pirosmani (Sergei Parajanov, 1985)