Ancient Literature Discussion (History, Myth, Philosophy &c.)

[Mattias]

That's not true. He's got a bunch of great recommendations. You always know what harem romcom episodes to avoid because he starts waxing poetic about the loli.

[LegalLoliLover]

Nah, I prefer the schadenfreude of you walking onto that landmine. Does cunny trigger you?

[Mattias]

What landmine? You're like a foxhound, the minute there's a hint of a loli ass shot you start popping off.

[LegalLoliLover]

You do need to collaborate to have an argument though, or else you're just shouting into the wind.

"You're wrong, and you yourself should research why" is also not an argument.

What landmine? You're like a foxhound, the minute there's a hint of a loli ass shot you start popping off.

You must have a low standard for poetry, if you consider "this looks interesting; I'll watch it" as a poem.

[Mattias]

"You're wrong, and you yourself should research why" is also not an argument.

It isn't, but I never said it was. Just that an argument is a collaborative effort, while you said they were mutually exclusive.

You must have a low standard for poetry, if you consider "this looks interesting; I'll watch it" as a poem.

Given the state of current internet culture where '10/10 would bang' is the norm, your thoughts on loli ass are Shakespeare, man.

[LegalLoliLover]

Given the state of current internet culture where '10/10 would bang' is the norm, your thoughts on loli ass are Shakespeare, man.

Perhaps the same can be said of all full sentences.

[Mattias]

Tru dat.






(am I meme-ing right?)

[LegalLoliLover]

Funny, in both the classic Journey to the West and the modern game God of War, when both main characters calm down, as the story progresses, they also become weaker. What does the Sith code say about passion? Also, as I mentioned before, Sith and Saiyans seem to power up using the same motivation, but I digress.

[Castellan]

I wrote this one up elsewhere while I was still dealing with early-onset Plague but thought it was a funny enough summary of one of the funky little anecdotes in The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne to be worth sharing on the interwebs:

So as I attempt to fight off the mucus in my head that’s making it very hard not to cough a lung out, I am reminded of my favorite Diarmuid anecdote in the Pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne. I don’t have the full text on hand, but I’ve told the story enough times to remember most of it. Who knows, maybe other people will appreciate this bit of absolute nonsense:

So about midway through the story of the Pursuit, Fionn gets a brilliant idea. Most of the Fianna, especially his inner circle, either refuse to fight Diarmuid or have sworn an oath not to intentionally harm him. “I know what I’ll do,” he thinks to himself, “I’ll hire some Norwegians!”

(Specifically he says he’ll hire some Lochlannach, “people of the land of the lochs,” which is just a fancy way to say “Norwegians”).

Anyway, Diarmuid scouts them out on the shore near where he’s hiding out with Gráinne, but apparently the Lochlannach haven’t been told what he looks like, because he’s able to leave his weapons with Gráinne and walk right up to them and all the Lochlann chieftain says is “ey buddy have you seen Diarmuid ua Duibhne?”

Diarmuid says “oh yeah I saw him just the other day. I’ll tell you if you give me a drink.” So the Lochlannach take a keg of wine from the hull of their ship but just as they’re about to pour it into a mug Diarmuid lifts the keg in one outstretched arm and proceeds to guzzle straight from it. And when he’s done and the barrel is still half full he goes “hey watch this,” rolls the barrel to the top of a nearby hill and balances on top of it as he rolls it back down. One of the Lochlannach goes “pfft, that’s easy, I could do that,” Diarmuid asks him to prove it, he sets up the barrel to repeat the trick, falls under it on the way down and gets crushed to death. This repeats forty-nine times before the Lochlannach chieftain is like “sir you’ve drunk half our wine and killed fifty of our dudes please leave.”

The day after he rocks up to the Lochlannach camp with his spear and performs some Spear Acrobatics, including a maneuver where he belly-flops on top of it without harming himself at all, balancing his whole body on the tip of the lance. “Pfft, big deal,” says a Lochlann warrior. “I can do that too.” Diarmuid dares him to show it, the Lochlann warrior does a belly-flop and, surprise, fucking dies. Forty-nine more warriors die before the chieftain tells Diarmuid to leave again.

But Diarmuid isn’t quite done making an absolute mockery of the proceedings yet. On the third day, he sets up his sword, sharp edge facing upward, between two forked sticks, and walks across the edge without so much as scratching his feet. “Big deal,” says a Lochlann warrior, “I can do that too.” Diarmuid dares him to try, the Lochlann warrior slips on the edge and gets cleanly cut in two. This goes on for ninety-nine attempts before the Lochlannach chieftain goes “please fuck off and don’t come back unless you’re ready to tell us where Diarmuid is or I will just straight up murder you at this point.”

So Diarmuid goes back and fetches all his weapons and armor and meets the Lochlannach chieftain on the beach. This time they all crowd around him, weapons at the ready, extremely weary. “I have decided,” Diarmuid says, “that I won’t tell you where Diarmuid is, because if he were captured by the likes of you it’d be fucking embarrassing.” The Lochlannach chieftain goes “ah, you must be a friend of his then. Good thing there’s also a bounty on friends of Diarmuid.” He barely gets to finish his sentence before Diarmuid has caved his face in with Moralltach, and we get this glorious sequence:

“Then he drew near to the host of green Fianna and began to slaughter and to discomfort them heroically and with swift valor, so that he rushed under them, through them and over them, as a hawk would go through small birds, or a wolf through a large flock of small sheep; and thus it was that Diarmuid hewed crossways the glittering very beautiful mail of the men of Lochlann, so that there not from that spot a man to tell tidings or to boast of great deeds, without having the grievousness of death and the final end of life executed upon him, but the three green chiefs and a small number of people that fled to their ships.”

And this is the story of how Diarmuid double dog dared two hundred men to death before styling on their surviving comrades.

[LegalLoliLover]

I note that Nobunaga's title, Demon King of the Sixth Heaven, comes from a Buddhist demon, but as for the name, is Mara the Indian name, while Hajun is the Japanese name, or am I misinterpreting something?

[Nanashi(kari)]

Hajun comes from the chinese transliteration of Pāpīyas which is often used as a synonymous of Mara.

[InsertNameHere]

IDK, did Max Stirner have a "delayed adolescence crisis"? Again, instead of trying to counter any of my points, you go straight for well poisoning. Funny how Gau called me an "authoritarian", and then when I mock a classic work for writing a full paragraph's worth of poem praising authoritarianism, I'm the one "called out for hateposting". Want to call me an sociopathic egoist while you're at it?

I hate to be late to the party, but as another egoist who's studied Stirner's works I feel like I need to give my piece as well. A few of them, really.

First off, the people who wrote the Bible and Journey to the West were products of their time and cultures- what we call authoritarianism was the way the world worked for them, and they never had a reason to see it any other way. We naturally might see things differently now, but it's pointless to apply our standards to an entirely different time and place.

Second, there's nothing that specifically prevents you from having ideas that coincide with or are identical to what can be called "morality", or "the Good", or whatever you wish to call it. It effectively produces a new cop in our brain to examine every nook and cranny of our thoughts to make sure they are in line with our "self-interest", a term which takes on a negative definition as "not Moral" or "not Christian" even if we find the thoughts themselves to be interesting enough to call them our own (and one must remember that Stirner said self-interest excludes nothing but the uninteresting). To put it in more concrete terms, I have a strong sense of right and wrong not because it is imposed upon me, but because it pleases me to follow said sense. I hypothetically the potential to renounce it and become a sociopath, but as the prospect of doing so fills me with a sense of revulsion and disgust it remains simply that: potential.

[LegalLoliLover]

Maybe, but then we'd have to go into the life experiences that developed this sense, as well as what one would learn from history and fiction with more realistic moral (or lack thereof) systems. It's like how knights nominally follow a code of chivalry, but as Charlemagne, as portrayed in Fate/extella, found out, there is nothing chivalric about being a knight. Similarly, Boy Scouts also follow a similar code of conduct, but like knights, it is shown to be equally bullshit... Obviously, less corpses involved because, unlike with knights, Boy Scouts are not a military organization. I say this remembering when I was in the Boy Scouts, and I and another found a walking stick. Not an artificial one, obviously, but a natural stick found on a trail that could be used for the purposes of hiking and the like.

Because we both found it first, and because I insisted on having it, saying that his seniority didn't matter, the older Scout said that I could have it in exchange for solving what he believed to be a math problem outside of my intellectual scope. I solved it. In response, he deliberately broke the stick in half, so that I couldn't get it either. In other words, he tried to use that math question, not as a test but as a means of lording over me. I would not be lorded over by getting the question or dropping the issue altogether. When I complained about it to who I assumed would be a fair mediator, I was forced into dinner dish cleaning duty, because the older Scout was obviously a higher rank than me, or else I wouldn't have breakfast the next morning. Breakfast sucked (that probably wasn't deliberate because everyone had the same meal, but some idiots didn't realize that damp air makes soggy pancakes).

I quit the next week. Obviously, Charlie stuck with being an un-chivalric knight and eventually earned, through blood and conquest, the title of Emperor. I thought that, based on my math skills, but I deserved that stick, but it turned that, as Thrawn would say: Who deserves what is irrelevant. What matters is who has power.

[Five_X]

I love the LLL extended universe we're getting here.

[Mattias]

It's like the Episode 22 flashback you get right before the big finale.

[RoydGolden]

Using rambling Boy Scouts anecdotes to demonstrate the futility of chivalry is definitely peak LLL content.

[LegalLoliLover]

FYI, the reason that I'm not as harsh on Three Kingdoms as the Bible or Journey to the West is because the characters of Three Kingdoms are supposed to be opportunistic warlords, but if a monk or otherwise "holy" man starts thinking like that, what value is that profession? I think Werner Herzog did a documentary on "modern" monks, and many appear to be Tweeting more than they are praying, but I digress.

[SpoonyViking]

First off, the people who wrote the Bible and Journey to the West were products of their time and cultures- what we call authoritarianism was the way the world worked for them, and they never had a reason to see it any other way.

Antigone:
I at least will say something to the rulers of the Cadmeans: even if no one else is willing to share in burying him, I will bury him alone and risk the peril of burying my own brother. Nor am I ashamed to act in defiant opposition to the rulers of the city. A thing to be held in awe is the common womb from which we were born, of a wretched mother and unfortunate father. Therefore, my soul, willingly share his evils, even though they are unwilling, and live in kindred spirit with the dead. No hollow-bellied wolves will tear his flesh—let no one “decree” that! Even though I am a woman, I will myself find the means to give him burial and a grave, carrying the earth in the fold of my linen robe. With my own hands I will cover him over—let no one “decree” it otherwise. Take heart, I will have the means to do it.

The notion that pre-Modern cultures did not have such ideological debates is its own form of anachronism.

[Deathhappens]

It's worth noting that both Sophocles writing Antigone and Aeschylus writing Seven On Thebes were writing about events that were, to them, mythical or at least so far in the past as to blur the line between reality and fiction. And while the plays were certainly meant to be educational and thought-provoking, what lessons we take from them today may be far from what the authors intended them to be.

[SpoonyViking]

The notion that a pre-Modern audience was incapable of interpreting what's literally in the text is its own form of anachronism.