Oops

oops

fun fact!! it turns out that now when u make a new blog, tumblr forces you to follow 3-4 people before you can change your icon or modify your blog in any way!! this, of course, means that, yes, some of the "potential bots" many of us have been automatically blocking could have possibly been genuine new users who were only just seconds in to having an account!!! tumblr is literally screwing new users over!!!!

I know nobody really reads these but it's fun to shout into the void.

Anyway I'm obsessed with myth. I'm obsessed with the tragedy of "this is how it was always going to end." I'm obsessed with Hadestown and singing the song again and again as though it might turn out differently, despite knowing deep down that it never will. I'm obsessed with the concept of myth as silhouette, where even if you change the names, change the circumstances, it always ends the same way. I'm obsessed with tragic flaws.

Also, completely unrelated, I'm obsessed with wolves?? Like,,, what is a wolf. In literature, I mean. Because sometimes it's just an animal, with no meaning behind it. But that's boring.

And sometimes a "wolf" is a man---a metaphor for the uniquely human concept of cruelty for cruelty's sake. In many versions of Little Red Riding Hood, for example, the wolf is a man. In some, it's explicit---the moral is about the dangers of little girls talking to strange men. But I think that's tired, and it's also kind of missing the point? Like, no, cruelty isn't of animals. It's of men. You lose something when you call an evil man a wolf.

So then there's the third kind of wolf (are there more than three kinds? no shut up. i make the rules) which is Just An Animal, and the difference between that and the first kind is. stark.

So wolves that are just an animal (lowercase) are like. real wolves. They can be friendly, they can have families, they can be tamed, they're the ancestors of dogs. These are the wolves we mean when we say "raised by wolves" and mean like Mowgli (for lack of a better example)---when we mean kind and understanding of family and empathy, and just... lacking manners.

And wolves that are Just An Animal (uppercase) are like. The epitome of animalistic tendency. They are Hungry. They are a manifestation of starvation and cold. They are the loss of rational thought in the face of hunger and the fallback to pure instinct. They are the wolves of Will in Scarlet, the wolves of The Werewolf (Angela Carter), the wolves of any story where the reason you don't go out at night is because of "The Wolves". They are always thin, always cold, always hungry, always starving. And I think that this version of wolves in literature gets so much right. Like. They're not bad. And that's extremely important. It's not bad to be hungry. They aren't cruel. They're just animals. Animals must eat. They are more a force of nature than anything else---blameless in their drive to devour, relatable, the reduction of sentience to desperation in the face of the cold.

And I think the other really cool thing about this kind of wolf is the way they connect to the Cold. Like. Idk if whoever is reading this has seen the Jacob Geller essay about cold (if you haven't go watch it smh) but. Cold doesn't care. It's unemotional in it's destruction. It harms good and evil alike. And it is the mechanism for the creation of Wolves. Wolves aren't starving when food is plentiful. It's only when the frost creeps in and the deer cannot eat and begin to die that the wolves get hungry.

And like there's a warning there. A warning about the cold. It says, "Look. Look what happened to them, what they've been reduced to. The Cold will do that to you as well. The Cold will make you nothing but an Animal." And isn't that just so much more interesting than wolves being a shitty metaphor for cruel men?

expressssiiiiooooonnssss

i got a lot of sticky notes

so i’ve been getting into Hellboy recently…