I feel like people tend to imagine achilles as being big and hairy and muscle-bound but I just want to remind y’all that he apparently spent quite a long time disguised as a girl and nobody could fucking tell?? including Odysseus, who had to trick him into revealing himself, but was apparently not smart enough to figure out which of the beautiful women in front of him was a man in a dress???
so like please consider: petite fine-boned achilles. achilles with killer cheekbones and big dark eyes w long eyelashes. ppl meeting achilles and being all “you’re the one who’s supposed to be a scary warrior?” and then later he he picks up trojans twice his size and flings them across the battlefield and they’re like ‘oh’. achilles being significantly shorter than hector and needing to tilt his head back to yell at him. patroclus being able to sling achilles over his shoulder. patroclus giving achilles piggyback rides. achilles needing patroclus to reach stuff down for him sometimes. achilles being the little spoon. tiny pretty achilles okay
People in Ancient Greece literally used to argue whether Achilles topped or not because some of them thought he was too girly which tells us mainly that Achilles has always been a twink and that yaoi fandom never really changes
So I have an issue with common fandom interpretations of Hashirama and Madara. (Not together, but it applies to Hashimada too)
Whenever I see Hashirama in the context of a relationship or the bedroom, he’s always either superderp or supertop. Whenever I see Madara, he’s either the smoothest dude ever or just ultra dominant.
Let me tell you something.
Madara is the man who turned Hashirama into a meme because he’s so incapable of articulating himself that when he saw his old friend and enemy he just decided to scream “HASHIRAMAAA” at him. This is the guy who can’t pee if someone looks at him while he’s doing it. This dude somehow managed to fail to convince his own clan, who he was presumably the leader and most powerful member of, to leave Konoha and ended up getting booted out.
By his own clan.
He failed charisma checks to get Hokage even when his friend and the only Hokage to exist at that point wanted him to be Hokage, and he failed so badly not one Uchiha joined him when he stormed out.
He self destructed partly because he can’t figure out that children are kind of important to have, because he saw them as brats running around his ankles. We see him with no personal bonds other than his siblings (primarily the one brother he had during his time with Hashirama) and Hashirama, and while he does manipulate quite well, it’s with violence and controlling circumstances. When he gets to ramble he sounds like a crazy old man.
He literally could not convince his own best friend to see things his way and he was one of the ones who founded the village in the first place.
Meanwhile, Hashirama became Hokage, founded and grew a village, forged the first peace between the nations, and had a wife and children. He convinced thousands of people, even those who were his enemies, to see things his way. He swayed Sasuke at least some small amount.
He had presence. He demanded respect and admiration from those around him, and even slapped down Tobirama. We’re also shown him manipulating and generally messing with people socially, not by heavily traumatizing them into a broken mess and picking up the pieces.
My point is, almost certainly, the smooth frick of the pair is Hashirama. He might also be derp, he might or might not be super top, but Hashirama is the dude to look out for. One does not successfully create a (temporary but also lasting) peace and village structure out of chaos and war without being wily.
Madara, on the other hand, is savage, a little feral, and insanely laser focused. And ultimately ended up being manipulated by a plant, like every other Uchiha ever. So. Madara probably uses his chopsticks by gripping them with his fist, stabbing through the plate, and lighting anything on fire that refuses to be skewered.
His mating call is probably just to scream at the person he’s interested in.
I’m just saying.
There’s no indicator that he’s a smooth operator anywhere ever.
since I was talking about weird things I’ve seen on the interstate driving through the mountains I wanna bring up the time Brie and I were driving to Baltimore in 2016 and we needed gas so we took an exit that just said “gas” on the sign and we ended up in this town with literally one single road through it and there was a beautiful farmhouse I said I wanted to live in but the entire time we didn’t pass a single person or a single car but it didn’t really strike us as weird
so we drove about half a mile before we came to this tiny gas station with two pumps and I got out to pump my gas and there were other ppl parked at the gas station and I got out to pump my gas and the attendant came out and said “no we do that for you” so we went inside to prepay and we got out a debit card and he said “what’s that” and we laughed bc we thought he was kidding but there was a long awkward pause and finally one of us was like “a….debit card?” and he said “haha, I don’t think I can take that!” so we paid in cash and suddenly
it seemed very weird that we’d not seen a single person until we got to the gas station and that there was only a single road and beautiful mansion-size farmhouses and an attendant who was at least acting like he honest to god didn’t know what a debit card was and we got our gas and left and I have no idea where that even was but that’s why I’m sort of afraid of Maryland
Evil cackling is the wrong response to this, right?
Julius Caesar’s two most famous assassins, Brutus and Cassius, were the son and son-in-law, respectively, of a Roman noblewoman named Servilia. And Servilia and Caesar were fucking. Not just a one off thing, either. They were having an affair for literally decades. Everyone knew it. Why did everyone know? Well, one time Caesar and Cato, who was Servilia’s brother, were having a debate (catfight) in the Senate and a servant came in and passed Caesar a note. Cato jumps up, all indignant, and announces that Caesar is committing treason right in the middle of the Senate. See that treasonous note he just got handed? (Like I said, it was a catfight.) And Caesar is like, well Cato, here’s the treasonous note, how about we read it aloud to the Senate, huh? It was a love letter from Servilia. And that’s the story of how Caesar made Cato stand there and listen to the sexts Cato’s sister sent Caesar get read aloud in front of the whole Senate.
I’ve always been privately convinced (on no evidence whatsoever) that Brutus and Cassius killed Caesar because they were so fucking embarrassed that he was fucking their mother/mother-in-law.
Ej you can’t just drop all the goss and then say there’s more without sharing
Oh boy. I guess I can’t back out now, can I? Ok, let’s do this.
So Brutus’s great-grandfather was named Quintus Servilius Caepio and he was a completely shit person generally and got two entire armies massacred because he was an elitist shithead and wouldn’t work with someone he thought was low-class but anyway. He was on campaign and he captured this huge hoard of gold at this town called Tolosa and sent it back to the Roman treasury. But then the caravan carrying the gold was hijacked by bandits and it all disappeared. Surprise! Caepio hired the bandits himself and stole all the gold. People were (understandably) pissed.
I was actually wrong in the tags, it wasn’t Brutus’s grandfather, it was his great-uncle. Anyway, so Roman citizens were allowed to vote, but the other Italians, who made up like half of the Roman armies, weren’t technically citizens and couldn’t vote. Which annoyed them. So Brutus’s great-uncle, Marcus Livius Drusus, basically got all the Italians to swear an oath that they would do whatever he said if he could get them citizenship. And he almost managed it. Only historical example I can think of of someone trying to take over a country by expanding democracy. Drusus got assassinated pretty fucking fast.
And then there’s Cato, which, don’t get me fucking started. The dude tore out his own intestines with his bare hands because he hate Caesar so much. I am not fucking joking.
So Caesar fucked everything. Everything. This wasn’t a secret or anything. The dude (probably) fucked the King of Bithynia when he was like 20 and the king was like 80. He made a habit of seducing the wives of his political enemies just to be an asshole. When he held a triumphal march through Rome, his soldiers chanted “Home we bring the bald whore-monger, Romans lock you wives away.” Caesar was basically the embodiment of Big Dick Energy and he made sure everyone knew it.
So Clodia was like the tabloid sensation of her day. She had lots of affairs, maybe killed her husband, and then she got involved with this guy Caelius. Eventually they broke up, so Clodia got Caelius prosecuted for attempted murder. You know, like you do. I don’t have time to get into all the juicy details, but let’s just say it involved accusations of incest, gleeful slut-shaming, and Cicero’s wife being bizarrely jealous.
As for Antony and Curio, they were friends and Cicero at one point (after Curio was dead, if I remember correctly) accused Antony of having had an affair with Curio when they were young men. It’s not clear if this is true, because on the one hand, it’s totally believable (if Caesar was the embodiment of Big Dick Energy, Antony was the embodiment of just Big Dick. Like, he had a really big dick and he liked to show it off to everyone) but on the other hand, Cicero hated Antony and was talking all kinds of shit about him at the time, so who the fuck knows.
Anyway, please buy my Roman tabloid, because the next issue will discuss that time Clodius dressed up in drag to sneak into Caesar’s house and Caesar’s mother organized all the Roman noblewomen to hunt him down.