Achilles X Patroclus Explained: For Anyone Who Needs It Plainly Mapped Out For Them One More Time.

blessed be the shit that goes down

blessed to see everyday regardless how shit goes down

Why is D4C and AO3 literally the same thing

hey i've got a fun game for you all! it's called "guess what the hell this animal from a roman mosaic is"!

The Original Take - Ep 27 | Zhou Zishu laid on Wen Kexing’s shoulder for the initial shot, this was the take that Zhang Zhehan said was too gay and they had to tone it down despite him thinking it was a really good one

We also didn’t have that lone tear dropping from Wen Kexing’s eye in the final cut

Or that little smile at the end at the thought of Zhou Zishu willing to die with him right now

Jotaro Kujo is Autistic: an Informal Analysis

So. When I first started sdc, I INSTANTLY noticed a lot of core (and lesser known!) autistic traits when it came to Jotaro. I’d see him do something and I’d be like “oh! I do that!” Or “oh! I understand that!” Because you know. I Am Big Autistic Doofus.

So first thing I wanna start with is sensory. One of the first things we see of Jotaro is him yelling at some female students, correct? I noticed a trend here, and some behaviors I have too. Now, these girls are touching him, and they’re all speaking at once, voices overlapping, and he finally yells at them to shut up, right? Sure, you could play it off as him being edgy or whatnot, but that’s not necessarily accurate. Watching that scene personally, I noticed a few really striking things. he only yells after the onslaught of stimuli begins, and you can see him become more and more agitated as the stimuli continues. He reaches his breaking point when these girls start yelling at each other, and he screams.

And chalking it up to him being an Angsty teen doesn’t make sense, either, because the same thing happens in part four. Autism doesn’t go away with age, so it makes sense.

From experience, this is exactly how I experience sensory overload. Distressing stimuli, stimuli continues, your nervous system becomes agitated, and the stress can make you explode if it persists. this can also be why he gets snippy when people touch him unexpectedly. Unwarranted (ESPECIALLY LIGHT) touch can be really scary and even painful. His sensory issues also would tie into why he always wears his gakuran, even in the hot ass desert. It’s familiar, it’s comfortable and it provides deep pressure input. It’s a comforting weight he needs to keep cool, just like his hat is also a comfort item.

now,,, to break out the big guns,,, communication

Throughout each part we see Jotaro in, it becomes very apparent that he’s not the best with words, and not the best at reading people. He communicates, but it’s mostly actions instead of speech, so his intentions are often misunderstood and he’s seen as rude or brash. Again, another core autistic trait. an example I really love to use is the way he knew holly was sick. Despite his bitchiness about her being annoying (yes, that’s probably because’s he’s a fucking edgelord and can’t handle his emotions mostly) he genuinely loves her despite never saying so with speech. he knew something was wrong becuase she didn’t give him a kiss goodbye before he left for school. For a lot of us autistic people, routine is important, especially routines around people we love and cherish. Him getting a hug and a kiss goodbye is an ingrained part in his routine because he loves his mom. not receiving that affection threw him off, and perhaps caused some anxiety because “I’m leaving, why hasn’t she given me a kiss? She ALWAYS gives me a kiss goodbye, something must be wrong”

Along with that, rather than outwardly saying “I’m worried about my mommy” he travels across an entire continent to save her life. this also ties into how we read and understand people a lot of the time, and also a little thing called cognitive empathy and theory of mind. Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand why a person may be feeling a way, “putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes”. Theory of mind is the ability to understand what a person may be thinking or feeling, and understand that people don’t know what you’re thinking or feeling without you explicitly saying so. In jotaro’s character bio, he is said to not be verbally expressive becuase he truly believes people know his motives and feelings with out him explaining, which is A HUGE AUTISTIC TRAIT.

personally, I do struggle with theory of mind and I also kind of assume people know what I’m talking about because that’s just how my brain works! Jotaro IS empathetic, and emotional, and kind hearted, but he just shows it differently.

Let’s talk emotions and emotional processing. it is common knowledge that Jotaro is an emotionally constipated dumbass. But again, watching him as an autistic person IT LOOKS LIKE SO MUCH MOREEEEEE

We usually don’t see Jotaro express much emotion outwardly, which we previously discussed has to do with theory of mind. But it ALSO seems to do with a little something called alexithymia. That is the ability to identify an emotion or feeling, which I personally believe is something he lacks. Not only that, but because of it anger seems to be the only emotion he can process and react to accordingly. anger is easy. It’s intense, it’s heated, and it is easy to express. Jotaro has a lot of trouble processing his emotions and identifying them. Grief, anxiety, sadness, overwhelm, they all come out as anger. Let me explain a little bit more about alexithymia, becuase again that’s something I deal with. So, if you have alexithymia, you may feel a certain way, but are unable to describe it in the moment. If I’m anxious, it’s squiggly or ragged or ziggzagged and blah, or “it feels like a lily is blooming in my stomach”. If I’m sad and don’t really know I’m sad, “I feel blah, and kind of heavy, and my hands feel funny.” If I’m overwhelmed, an example i used yesterday in voice chat on discord is ”I feel wiggly, my body feels like jelly” it can go on. Emotions can be tangible, physical sensations that can make them hard to describe. As a kid, when I’d dissociate I would say “today was a gray day.” Colors and shapes and sensations came easy, words not so much.

one more thing I’d like to touch on with emotions are meltdowns and shutdowns. Meltdowns are essentially outward expressions of extreme distress. This can range from crying and stimming to destructive things like throwing stuff, (TW) self injury like biting or punching or othering things like getting into fights and snapping at people. Meltdowns are triggered by fight or flight, your nerves are completely haywire, you can’t think everything’s too much and it’s all ??? and you just need to be alone to get though it. Shutdowns are exactly what they sound like: you are so overwhelmed that your brain and body completely shut off. You can’t move, speak, or think properly. Jotaro a big guy, and for a lot of autistic people our traits are seen as threatening or like we’re instigating, Espeically for somebody of his build.

so stimming is something everybody does, it can range from bouncing your leg or tapping your fingers on something, or rocking and flapping and humming. Despite stimming being a natural human behavior, neurodivergent people are notorious for it because we need to do it more regularly. It helps us regulate our senses and express our emotions. Something I noticed he does quite a lot is fist clenching. Fist clenching offers deep pressure input, and seems to be his body’s expression of anger or fear along with him biting his lip and clenching his jaw. Another very obvious thing he does is tipping his hat, a comforting motion, and also an expression of embarrassment, anxiousness, and I think it’s also to avoid looking at people’s eyes. last ones I wanna talk about are the notorious phrases...

“yare yare daze”. Feels nice to say, first off, and from what I’ve gathered it almost always seems to be used when he doesn’t know what to say or he uses it as an expression of exasperation or confusion.

ora! Something I belive has a lot of credibility is that stands will have the autistic traits their autistic user does, and, since star is jotaro’s authentic self it would make sense that the only thing he says is a vocal stim.

Last thing! So. Perception. How you view the world and interact with it. Autistic people are super well known for our attention to the small details, and what is one of the first things we learn about star platinum?

stands are a complete manifestation of their user’s authentic self, and, if that user is autistic their stand would be also. Wouldn’t it make sense for their strongest traits to show?

This concludes my essay.

For now...

When I say I’m a homosexual, I mean I’m a gay who relates all my relationships to the dynamic of Achilles and Patroclus yearning for some sort of love as beautiful and tragic as theirs.

to know the flaws and love them, too.

post by user gayassnatural / 300 arguments, sarah magnuso / coffee and cigarettes, sade andria zabala / wild geese, mary oliver / state of grace, taylor swift / the first bad man, miranda july

they cut this scene from the pilot because it was too gay!!!!!! too explicit!!!!! stop looking at each other like that!! stop playing soft and heartfelt music!!!!

i'm not even sure that i believe in God, but i started going to this episcopal church recently bc there were just so many older gay people there and i felt like i needed that in my life and there was a gay priest. people were actually so chill about me being trans, which shocked me, but i figured there were just humoring me - but this past sunday the priest did a sermon on the story in acts about the Ethiopian eunuch. and like, i've heard a thousand sermons on this passage bc its like the first missionary story and people use it a lot to justify their colonization blah blah blah but like everyone glossed over the eunuch thing.

but the (straight) priest talked about how eunuch is a kind of stand in word for gender non-conforming person and actually literally said from the pulpit that we should be welcoming and accepting of all trans people and not ask them to change and !?!?!?! like i never expected to hear that preached in my lifetime, especially in fucking kentucky.

the world can seem so dark and being trans is fucking hard and you just come to expect so little from people ESPECIALLY chrisitans and i'm just so pleasantly surprised. it's just kind of amazing to see chrsitians live up to this loving their neighbor shit they are always talking about

Absolutely reeling.

So I knew that the origin of "Hector was a great man, moral, noble, better than all of the Greeks" began as Roman propaganda that somehow has made it to now, the year 2023, and is still taught to high school students.

What I did not know was why scholars shit on Achilles as vehemently as they did (and still do).

My copy of Fagles' translation of the Iliad has a preface by a different scholar who I'm not going to bother to name because he's an idiot (and idk probably dead at this point). I read the entire thing, absolutely baffled, because he would cite a part of the text (that I admittedly had not read yet! at all!), quote it, and then come to the most batshit interpretation based on that quote I had ever seen in my life. His general take was that Achilles was a sociopath who had no feelings for anyone other than himself and his own pride, and every action he took (until welcoming Priam into his hut) was done in service of that pride. To support this, he decided that Achilles did not see Patroclus as a person, but rather as an extension of himself, and thus someone injuring Patroclus was them injuring Achilles, and so he did not care about Patroclus, he only cared about his wounded pride.

Yeah.

That sounded wrong before reading the book, and while reading the book all i could think was, "Did we read the same fucking thing???" Put in context, those quotations still did not support his conclusions whatsoever.

But i cracked open Caroline Alexander's "The War That Killed Achilles" last night, and she solves this mystery of "Hector good, Achilles bad" for me right out the gate (which is good because so far I've only read the preface).

Western Europeans by and large learned about the Trojan war from Roman stories, which became fairly popular, and not the Iliad, which was not translated into French or English until centuries later. As mentioned, these were propaganda that cast the Trojans in a much better light than the Greeks because the Romans believed they were descended from Trojan refugees. This starts a trend that is still going on in scholarly circles as casting the Iliad as a war between "barbaric Greeks living in a shitty, lawless camp" vs "civilized, educated, weaving, real-wife-having Trojans," making the Iliad a tragedy in which Homer for some reason skewers his own people and their warlike culture as barbaric while propping up a dead, foreign city-state. This interpretation is still extant and was the postscript to another copy of the Iliad I have.

According to Alexander, scholars closer to Homer's time saw the entire war as a tragedy--both the destruction of Troy AND the destruction of the Greek army. While this is not covered in the Iliad, very few Greeks actually made it home after Troy. Some that did were then outcast (Teucer for example), some were murdered (bye, Agamemnon), some went on to create new kingdoms in other places (Diomedes), but by and large, there was no going home from that war. There was no great victory with all their loot. The entire thing was a disaster for both sides, spurred on by fickle gods.

Back to the more recent European interpretations of this story, one reason Hector ended up cast in such a "good" light, despite being a dumbass who wants to dishonor dead people just as badly as Achilles ever did, was in order to make Achilles look worse. Why was it important that Achilles becomes a villain in this story in which he is very much not a villain? Because Europeans were involved in so much war with each other and the rest of the world that a young, insubordinate man who criticizes his idiot of a commander, decides his life isn't worth throwing away for this war, and refuses to fight to sack a city was an affront to their values. Young men were to be obedient, follow their commanding officers, and colonize the world for queen and country. Achilles suggesting losing his life is not worth it to prop up Agamemnon's war is a dangerous precedent for all the good little soldiers needed to make their nations wealthy.

It's almost funny that these analyses propping up Troy as a beacon of civilization were made by people living in countries so bent on colonizing the world. They identified with the city being sacked and not the greedy sackers of said city, who they were much closer to. And Achilles, educated, morally rigid, emotional Achilles, is recast as a sociopathic asshole who doesn't care about anyone other than himself, unlike all of those other beacons of selflessness among the Greek leadership.

The tragedy of the Iliad is that Achilles is right, the war is pointless, Agamemnon did dishonor the shit out of him, and it doesn't matter because he's going to die in it anyway.

Frankly, given how badly his character has been interpreted for so long, I think the muses owe him an apology.