Throughout Leverage We See Multiple Different People Driving The Team/groups. Parker With The "I Was

John Rogers, co-creator + executive producer: "Look, if we told you Eliot's entire timeline or Nate's entire timeline, you wouldn’t be able to have then have enough flexibility to fold that timeline in with Supernatural in your fanfics because they'd be no space for that. The space we leave is the space for you to write your slash! That's super important for us to do! We do that for you, people! The fans appreciate the empty space we leave so you can write your Buffy, Supernatural, NCIS, Criminal Minds, Leverage crossovers."

Geoffrey Thorne, co-producer + writer of this episode: "But don't do any Doctor Who ones because…"

John: "You're writing those."

Geoffrey: "Just don't do it."

Chris Downey, co-creator + executive producer: "You've staked those out?"

John: "He's staked those out."

— Leverage 10 Podcast: 512 The White Rabbit Job

*Kung Fu Monkey blog: LEVERAGE #205 "The Three Days of the Hunter Job" Post-game (August 24, 2009) for the original "I think fanfic is the sign of a healthy show" short essay

I can't stop thinking about this rabbit hole I went down a few weeks ago when I was procrastinating on my Iliad paper.

So basically. In the Lattimore translation of the Iliad (the one we read in class), he has Helen call herself a slut.

"That man is Atreus’ son Agamemnon, widely powerful,  at the same time a good king and a strong spearfighter,  once my kinsman, slut that I am. Did this ever happen?” (Lattimore 3.178-180)

Naturally I'm like yikes. Then I started wondering whether this was actually what it said in the Greek, and whether other translators disagreed.

(This is not a new thing to wonder about; people talked about this quite a bit after Emily Wilson discussed it.)

To summarize: the Greek word used here is kunops, which literally translates to dog-face or dog-eyed. This word is used precisely two other times in the Iliad: once in book one when Achilles is insulting Agamemnon and once in book eighteen when Hephaestus is talking about how his mother (Hera) threw him out. Surprise surprise, the male translators usually don't use the same word in those two places.

I could have stopped here, but naturally at this point I was like, obviously the best possible use of my time would be to go down into the depths of the library and see what word is used in these three places in every single translation of the Iliad that we have.

Too much time later, I ended up with this:

I think this table kind of speaks for itself.

Just. The way that the male translators all decide that when a woman is called "dog-face," that must mean that she's a shameless bitch, but when a man is called "dog-face," he can just be a dog-face. The bias is REALLY showing through here. I can understand shameless, but where are they getting slut bitch whore?

Lattimore is supposed to be the most literal translation! But then he just has to go and call Helen a slut for no apparent reason! Why would he do this where did it come from I want to scream. why do they assume that a woman criticizing herself has to be about sexual condemnation??

Some things that are worth noting!

As I mentioned, people have talked about this a lot in regards to Emily Wilson's translation! She gave a couple great interviews about her translation of this word (here and here). What many people forget is that she wasn't actually the first woman to translate the Iliad into English, nor was she the first person to translate the word as "dog-face." That was Caroline Alexander, eight years earlier. I love Wilson as much as the next person but let's not forget Alexander.

Yes dog-face is an insult! And yes it arguably is associated with shamelessness! There's a lot to unpack about why Helen was talking about herself this way. But it's really hard to analyze that when the bias of the male translators is bleeding through so much. I appreciate the decision to translate it literally and let readers decide for ourselves what she meant.

"Neal plays the tycoon to lure in his victims, and then cons them out of thousands of dollars."

Leverage Redemption S03E06 The Swipe Right Job.

hi excuse me kristin cashore is working on FOUR books rn ??

what do we think they are 👀

Leverage | The Big Bang Job

Random linguistic worldbuilding: A language with six sets of pronouns, which are set by one's current state of existence. There's a separate pronoun for people who are alive, people who are dead, and potential future people who are yet to be born, and the ambiguous ones of "may or may not be alive or aleady dead", "may or may not have even been born yet", and the ultimate general/ambiguous all-covering one that covers all ambiguous states.

The culture has a specific defined term for that tragic span of time when a widow keeps accidentally referring to their spouse with living pronouns. New parents-to-be dropping the happy surprise news of a pregnancy by referring to their future child with the "is yet to be born" pronoun instead of a more ambiguous one and waiting for the "wait what did you just say?" reactions.

Someone jokingly referring to themselves with the dead person pronouns just to highlight how horrible their current hangover is. A notorious aspiring ladies' man who keeps trying to pursue women in their 20s despite of approaching middle age fails to notice the insult when someone asks him when he's planning to get married, and uses the pronoun that implies that his ideal future bride may not even be born yet.

A mother whose young adult child just moved away from home for the first time, who continues to dramatically refer to their child with "may or may not be already dead" until the aforementioned child replies to her on facebook like "ma stop telling people I'm dead" and having her respond with "well how could I possibly know that when you don't even write to us? >:,C"

What's in a name:

The team leveraging Hardison's first name to get him to take them seriously.

It started with the Grave Danger Job. With Parker's panicked "I need you. Do you hear me, Alec? I need you!" It isn't something that's conscious or anything, but all of them lean into it occasionally.

"Alec, just drop it," Nate stares at Hardison, watching the young man realize maybe he'd been pushing Nate too hard on a topic that was a sore subject. Alec nods grimly and backs down.

"Hardison, how long have you been up?" Sophie asks gently, watching the genius wipe the grit from his eyes, his latest forging project laid out around him. When he mumbles something about not remembering, needing to finish, Sophie catches his chin in a manicured hand and holds his attention. "Alec, go to bed." He goes.

"Come on, man, get off the screen for a little while, let's go get some sun," Eliot pokes him after a long job on top of a new World of Warcraft update. Hardison can't even remember what he said back, something glib he's sure, but he remembers the hesitation in Eliot's voice. "Alec, please. You're gonna fuck up your eyesight before you're thirty, staring at blue light a foot away from your face. Please?" Hardison goes with him. They go to an outdoor gun range. Hardison rags Eliot about them both not liking guns, but listens as his best friend talks him through focusing on targets of different distances. He'll never have Eliot's skill, but it's a quick way to help his eyesight and he turns out to be half decent with practice.

"Alec, I'm serious!" Parker pleads with him, a picture of some conspiracy theory held up in her hands. "I need to know if this is real or not, please. Because it doesn't seem real and then it does seem real and Eliot won't give me a straight answer and Nate won't give me any answer at all, and I need to know if-" if I'm going crazy, she doesn't say, but he hears it now. He lays a hand over hers and explains that it's not real, explains the joke patiently until she understands and can laugh at it and "yes, and" Eliot when that particular theory comes up again.

"Hey y'all, it's Alec," he says, a gun to his head and a phone in his hand, one chance to get it right, to make them understand that this is serious. He can practically hear them all sitting up in the tones of their voices, in the grimness of the rapid fire questions, and he breathes a sigh of relief. They'll come get him. They know it's serious.

"We’ve been providing military advisors, internationally, for over forty years."

Leverage S01E02 The Homecoming Job.

God I love the episodes of Leverage that are like “yes Eliot is working class. yes he grew up surrounded by trades people and “menial” labourers. yes he knows so much about those jobs and will ALWAYS support those workers and their job choices.”

Because it’s something that really does set Eliot apart from the other characters. Like, Sophie is all about the finer things in life, and even if she did ever grow up poor or around labourers, she doesn’t exactly respect that life style. She’s all about getting away from that, if she ever was that lower class, which I don’t think she ever really was. Nate is Office Worker tm, just in vibes. That man has never seen a shovel. And while Parker and Hardison both went through the system, they’re both very city centric. And I mean, Parker has never once thought about real jobs or anything, ever. And Hardison definitely has a bit of a thing about age of the geek, and def starts out looking down on “menial” jobs.

But Eliot, throughout the entire show, is very much all about that. The mining episode in particular is such a favourite just because of the respect and care for these workers that Eliot shows. And I really like how different all of the leverage characters are, not just in skills but also in backgrounds, and how those backgrounds affect how they treat people. Eliot comes from a family of workers and a community of workers, and he holds those people in such high respect.

i need the ao3 tag wranglers to tag wrangle so it's easier to find the united healthcare shooter fic (there are 23 fics about him currently) (i did manually count) (i don't know what to tell you the internet is a bizarre and hilarious place sometimes)