but officer, my husband was inside that house!

Gaetan Henrioux – The Kiss (2012)

glee is so awesome because they were like "let's make a singing show!" and then wrote an ensemble of characters who are all varying degrees of evil and possess varying degrees of musical talent (some of them not very much) and most of all every single one of them is wildly manipulative and loooooves cheating and also loves mind games. and they sing and dance on my tv for my entertainment. and they also bring in kurt's dad every so often to make sure i cry a little. it's such good tv.

nods. and gwyneth paltrow was there.

i think more post-apocalyptic prestige dramas should have episodes where the entire plot grinds to a halt to deal with the disappearance of the goddamn baby fucking jesus

Edvard Munch, Women on the Beach, 1898

House / Hausu (1977) dir. Nobuhiko Ōbayashi

so don’t get me wrong because a lot of arthurian stuff is super misogynistic. but it’s never really in the damsel in distress way you expect. like the most helpless damsel is lancelot trapped and crying in a tower, completely useless, until this random girl who made him behead a guy in front of her fifty pages ago rolls up with a pickax and rope and is like “ok I’m minecrafting you out of here.” and this works.

Another direction you’ll see this go is, like… okay, so in Arthurian texts, violence is very much The Province of Men. But women often want violence done for one reason or another, so they’re out there asking knights to fight such-and-such for them & the knights are of course honor-bound to accept under certain conditions, which by genre convention are easy to engineer.

All of this means that one of the standard female roles in Arthurian romance is “quest-giver”. And in some texts, this can drift from “these are damsels in distress and the knights must help them in various ways” to “it kind of seems like the women are the ones who actually know what’s going on & the knights are just being led along to wherever they’re supposed to be”.

It’s still ultimately an example of misogyny and strict gender roles, but it ends up often looking pretty different from the stock “damsel in distress” scenario people expect.

...Is the woman in Arthurian myth who Wants Violence Done but must conscript a man to actually do it the literary ancestress of the modern Femme Fatale? Discuss.

She slipped into my office that night like a demon into the mind of a pious monk, seductive and dripping with heresies. Her gown and headress were of rich silk befitting a maiden, but her eyes were cold and sharp as the executioner's sword, and her lips as red as the apple that tempted Eve. Her legs, presumably, went all the way up, but the aforementioned gown was floor-length, so it's hard to say. Also she'd ridden a horse into the building for some reason, which was quite distracting.

"Sir Knight," she said, dismounting and retrieving something from her saddlebag, "I have a job for you." She tossed a severed head onto my desk.

I peered at the severed head. It had noble features, and had managed to land exactly on top of one of the stains left by previous severed heads. "How did you find me?" I asked. "I swapped my red shield for a blue one; the disguise should be impenetrable."

"The hermit told me where you'd be", she answered in a voice like the bells on a horse's harness before battle.

That tracks. Those hermits are always poking their noses into my business. "How may I serve you, fair lady?" I asked. "I'd kneel, but my armor's gone a bit rusty in the legs."

"The Baron D'Iverjoure has slain my lover," she said, gesturing at the head, the rings on her fingers clinking like manacles in a wicked king's dungeon. "I need you to avenge him."

"I have no quarrel with the Baron D'Iverjoure," I said, knowing as the words echoed in my helmet that I was saying them just for the form of it and I'd end up taking this quest regardless. "I have heard he is an honorable man."

"That may be," said the damsel, in tones as lovely as a reliquary and just as filled with death, "but you took an oath to obey the next lady to ask you a favor, and I'm calling it in."

I silently cursed my habit of swearing rash vows. They always get me in trouble. But you know how that goes. "Your wish is my command, milady."

She nodded and remounted her horse with the help of her two servants who I hadn't bothered to mention before now. "I will listen for news of your success," she said as she left.

That's the way it is with damsels; they always know about the oaths. Even the ones you spoke into a dented chalice, empty of wine, after everyone else had left the feast. And now I've got another quest I can't turn down without losing my honor.

Franz von Stuck, The Kiss of the Sphinx, 1895

— The Stars Undying (Empire Without End #1), by Emery Robin

mystra devnotes when gale talks with her part 1/2

part 2 link

with that the Wolf tore off the clothes and with one bound was upon her!

“oh no!” screamed Little Red Riding Hood, “a thinly veiled metaphor for unrestrained sexuality! please don’t fuck me– I mean, please don’t eat me!”

the Wolf paused, “is that all I am to you? a cheap psychosexual pastiche?”

“well,”

disgusted: “I’m recontextualised multiple times in this story alone! sure, I’m sex, but I’m also death, I’m maturity, I’m the fear that lurks within, I’m inexorable time, I’m– I’m wearing your grandmother’s clothes for god’s sake! and it’s not just a kink thing!”

Red is the color of lust, but green is what lust leaves behind, in heart, in womb. Green is what is left when ardor fades, when passion dies, when we die, too.

The Green Knight (2021) dir. David Lowery

Lucrezia and Cesare Borgia in season one of The Borgias (2011-2013)

These tags had me howling, I'm so so sorry

Gil Elvgren (detail) FASCINATION, 1952

the cool thing about the iliad is that almost everyone in it is a horrible person and/or literal war criminal, so you get to judge characters EXCLUSIVELY by vibes. anyway i don’t blame paris for the trojan war but he IS a little shitheel and i want him out of my city

my favorite thing that hektor repeatedly tells paris is “thank god you’re pretty”