Hello! OK This Is More An Ask About A Question, But You Know You On The Tag Game When You Mentioned Bunny

Hello there, I would love to hear all your thoughts on 'The Last of the Wine'!

Hey, thanks for the ask! I really loved Last of the Wine! Alexias was a lovely character, and it was really interesting to watch his development and the development of his relationship with Lysis! He was so sweet in the beginning and then he became harder as the book went on; his father said that he once thought Alexias was 'too soft' to be a soldier, and I think he was right to feel that way at a certain point! His entire character progression was a trip to get through!

I absolutely loved the writing, which was beautiful as always, and there are some parts of the story I don't think I'm going to forget about anytime soon; the story of Phaedo (I cried), the moment Alexias exposes his brother and asks him 'bear no ill-will to me' (I cried), quotes like 'at Gurgos's once I lay awake considering how to kill him. But already it was too late,' 'I saw death reach out for you; and I had no philosophy,' 'if there be any god who concerns himself with the lives of men, the god himself must suffer with me,' etc. etc. It was just so good but very disturbing in some points...sometimes, you never stop to wonder why people do the things they do and only see that what has been done is evil. In a way, this is good; evil things ought to be derided as such no matter the circumstances, but in another way it is unfair and unhelpful. This is how I feel about a lot of the last third of the book: I understand why and how certain things happened, I just wish that they hadn't happened.

Something that made me laugh though and which I will think about forever are the few scenes where it's apparent Mary Renault is writing with a modern audience in mind, like the absolutely hilarious scene where Alexias is afraid of asking Xenophon if he only likes girls because he doesn't want to offend him 😭 or the scene where Alexias, assuring his dying father of vengeance, says: "Am I so base of soul as to forgive my enemies?" They're really cool scenes because they kind of play with the expectations of a modern audience and subvert common sentiments and understandings in modern culture and society; the opposite situation in the Xenophon scene would seem likelier to a modern person (especially at the time Mary Renault was writing) with Xenophon worrying about offending Alexias by asking him if he likes boys. And it's really a head-trip to read that question asked by Alexias because it's a direct contradiction to the common and widely known sentiment of forgiveness and loving your enemies within Christianity...this becomes 10x funnier 10 pages later when Alexias accidentally stumbles onto the whole point of Christianity 'God with us' 😭😭😭 I love the whole sequence of these scenes because they seem written specifically to challenge the reader; to get it through your mind that this was a foreign place and time, and these people are foreign to us; they have an understanding different from our own...but maybe not completely different at the same time.

Anyway, I don't know if this makes sense, my thoughts are kind of all over the place with this one but the tldr version of it is: I loved it! The writing was beautiful! It made me sad!

I feel like I’m just being my 10-year-old self. The whole project is to just honor my 10-year-old self. I just rejected feminine — feminine — I wrote this fucking song, “Feminomenon,” and I can’t ever say the actual word. Femininity. Oh, yes, femininity. I hated it. So now my whole persona is just me trying to honor that version of myself that I was never allowed to be. | chappell roan in conversation with trixie mattel, PAPER magazine

we never actually got to see Alastair and Elias interact on their own... why

“𝓘𝓯 𝓘 𝓼𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓪𝓷𝓭 𝓭𝓪𝓷𝓬𝓮, 𝓘 𝓼𝓮𝓭𝓾𝓬𝓮. 𝓐𝓷𝓭 𝓲𝓯 𝓘 𝓭𝓻𝓮𝓼𝓼 𝓪𝓷𝓭 𝓼𝓬𝓮𝓷𝓽 𝓶𝔂𝓼𝓮𝓵𝓯, 𝓘 𝓼𝓵𝓪𝔂.” My copy of Chain of Iron hasn’t arrived yet 😭

(Cordelia Carstairs from “Chain of Gold” by @cassandraclare )

I would like an Alastair/Jem friendship 😤😤

james is actually just gonna wander around with Cordelia's glove and mourn over it for at least 1/3 of chain of thorns lol 😭

I hope Harry and Meghan name their daughter Diana so I can watch the monarchy collapse in real time.

have you ever thought about how any normal person being introduced to the shadow world would probably rather be a vampire or werewolf than a shadowhunter? it's a little funny considering they all think they're better than downworlders but "I'll be young and beautiful forever without hunting things that'll kill me" is just objectively a better job description lol

“Goodnight and great love to you. We see the same stars.”

— George Mallory, from a letter to his wife Ruth during the 1921 Everest Reconnaissance Expedition (via archaeologicals)