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selenakWhen I heard that Bryan Singer deserted the X-Men franchise for Superman, I was crushed, but now it seems all those interviews in which Joss Whedon liberally hinted he'd love to write and direct X3 are paying off: according to this, our man Joss will be allowed to have a go at the X-Men on screen as well. This makes me a happy fangirl and lets me hope he'll include Emma Frost in X3, since he's writing her so splendidly in Astonishing X-Men.
Now, onwards with the fourth season of Angel:
This was the season for literary allusions. A Long Day's Journey Into The Night indeed, as the AI clan can compete with any O'Neill characters for dysfunctional family vibe at this point of the show. The sun vanishes in more than one sense. Gwen and the bitchy comments she inspires in Cordy are basically the only light stuff. Speaking of Gwen, she strikes one as an escapee from X-Men country, not that that's a bad thing if handled right. She's fun, but I keep expecting Wolverine to show up next when she's around. It's a bit distracting.
The other comic relief, until he comes to a bloody end, is Manny, last member of the Ratet, and one good example of AtS' tendency to play demons as every day guys. Ra being the Egyptian god of the sun you realize what the Beast intends to do a bit sooner than Our Heroes manage to if you're up to your ancient gods. And while we're speaking mythology, the long night of Los Angeles which starts here has lots of parallels and echoes. Usually the sun is brought back by children or lost loves. But this is not what will happen. And then there are a whole slot of mythological characters who wander into the underworld to bring back their loved ones, most prominently Innana and Orpheus. Few of these wanderers succeed (Orpheus certainly doesn't). Perversely, Wesley at the end of this episode decides they should bring someone back from the underworld whom none of them love and all of them fear: Angelus.
(Footnote: The first time around, it annoyed me that the fourth season insisted on letting Angel and Angelus talk in the third person about each other and treated them as different entities. This seemed to refute not just the BTVS canon but season 2 of AtS; if Angelus truly is a different entity, Angel had no reason to feel any kind of connection to Darla, since it had been Angelus - up to that point - who had been with her for 150 years. However, the fifth season thankfully put an end to the third person nonsense, and we were back to first person singular, probably due to Spike being present. As with Darla, if Angelus were a different entity, any kind of backstory save for the Sunnydale one would be pointless.)
In retrospect, it's very clear to see how Pod!Cordy pulled everyone's strings here, and why she wanted Angelus around (other than for the ratings). First she kept the suspicion about Connor and the Beast alive, then accused Gwen, but sooner or later, it would have become obvious that the only ones in a position to kill Manny had been Angel and herself. By bringing up Angelus as the Beast's old acquaintance, she didn't just keep everyone from wondering further but gave Wesley the fatal idea that a Q & A with Angelus could help them. And the sun sets, an image that is very, very effective. The idea of eternal night sets off some atavistic chills in all of us, I think.
Awakening continues to showcase Cordy the master manipulator, as she gets Angel to agree to the Angelus thing by buttering up to his ego, insinuating he's an evil genius sans soul. The rest of the episode is one of those few things where it really is better to be spoiled. Had I been unspoiled, I'd have been angry and confused for most of it. Spoiled, you can see Angel's perfect day/night unfold and be somewhat amused. For starters, everyone apologizes to him. (While he apologizes to no-one.) Wesley, Cordy, even Connor in the end. Fred and Gunn are mere blips on his radar - you do get Gunn doing their old handshake with Wes and clown around as if he were his season 2 self, but that's all in the background. In the foreground are the things Angel needs for perfect happiness most of all. To save the day for everyone, sure, but also to be genuinely reconciled with Wesley, to have Cordy not just apologize profusely for sleeping with Connor (he even has her equate sleeping with Connor with his deeds as Angelus in his fantasy) but assure him he's the only one she ever wanted. Angel's fantasy can't quite skip another fight with Connor, but then the kid learns his lesson, admits Cordy is too old for him, and helps Angel out in the crucial fight against the representative of evilness.
(The last element is suddenly very poignant if you have seen season 5 and realize that this part of Angel's fantasy becomes true, in Not Fade Away when Connor comes to the rescue in just this fashion.)
As Angelus remarks later, Angel does have an Indiana Jones fantasy there, with traps and a hidden treasure, but it's also a visual walk through the underworld, in other words, an image fitting with what is really going on - the Shaman going inside of Angel and setting free the demon.
Still, Awakening is positively fluffy when compared to Soulless, directed by Sean "Sam Gamgee" Astin, who manages to make the steel bars of Angelus' cage players as well and does a great job all around. As far as cinematic echoes are concerned, this is clearly Angelus as Dr. Lecter, dispensing unwelcome and twisted truths left, right and center and getting into everyone's head. (Everyone's but Cordy's, but I'll come to that in a moment.) Naturally, he's being kept in the cellar, but he can hear what's going on upstairs; the Id, the monster below, is only barely repressed and will soon rise completely. Much attention is being paid to body language in this episode. Wesley sits down in front of the cage, trying to establish he's calm and untouched by what Angelus says, but rises and starts to walk soon. His control is illusion, and each of the things Angelus brings up (Fred, Wesley's failure as a Watcher, Faith, Connor) is a genuine vulnerability. Gunn and Fred are on the stairs and behind a trolley respectively and still get overwhelmed easily. Connor walks straight towards Angelus, only being kept back at the last minute by Cordy.
Cordy, however, matches Angelus step for step. (Check it out - she really does, always remaining on the same level with him.) He's missing the crucial information here, that this is no longer Cordelia, and so he is the one whose strings are being pulled, as opposed to all the other encounters.
Not that each of them doesn't have results. Fred and Gunn have been imploding for a while, but the spontaneous kiss between Fred and Wesley, and Gunn's decision to end the relationship, are probably the direct result of the way Angelus had stirred all of them up.
More tragic, however, are the results with Connor. As I said earlier, Angelus' Oedipus crack is not what gets to him at all. (Both because he doesn't remember Cordy as his mother, and because he probably doesn't know the play.) What does get to him, and will stay with him, is what Angelus says about Darla and Holtz. That Darla killed herself because she hated her child so much. That Holtz killed himself because Connor disappointed him so much. There is just enough truth in the lies - i.e. both Darla and Holtz really did kill themselves because of Connor, but for very different reasons than the one Angelus names - that it hits Connor badly. And he does believe it. He will refer to it both in Inside Out and in Home.
Since Connor's return from Quortoth, everyone has constantly referred to him as Angel's son, and compared him with Angel. They either forgot or more accurately surpressed he was Darla's son as well. (Surprisingly, since he looks more like her if you ask me.) If someone had told him about his mother sooner, he might have been able to push Angelus' words aside and believe that she loved him. As it was….
"You're my real father," Connor tells Angelus, and that's the only time anyone other than Cordy with her offer manages to surprise the soulless version of Angel. It's an incredibly intense moment, and you're not quite sure what Angelus would have done if Connor had managed to reach the cage. Somehow, I don't think he would have drained him.
Calvary, the mountain of skulls, the place of the crucifixion (where according to John the sun was blotted out the moment Jesus died), is the next episode title. There is a skull around, a prop for a faked ensouling spell, but the person really carrying the stigmata who ends up dying is the least likely candidate for a Christ allusion - Lilah. It's the last time we see her alive. Something of her late season 2 nervousness and desperation is back, but she still hasn't given up and fights to live until her last moment. Lilah's last appearance as a living woman is full of sadness and ironies for the watcher (no pun intended): she brings an important clue, the Reinhardt book which shows that some gigantic manipulation regarding the Beast is going on, messing with everyone's memories (ah, foreshadowing irony), she calls Cordy with the nickname exasperated fans have called her in season 3, Saint Cordelia, in precisely the episode in which it will be revealed how unsaintly she is these days, and she joins with the good guys only to be killed for exactly that, not because of her guilty past.
The sequence where Angelus chases Lilah through the hotel is a deliberate echo of the one in Passion where he chases Jenny Calendar, down to something being thrown at him on a couple of stairs, so the shocking twist of letting the hand that grabs Lilah's throat belong to Cordelia is all the more effective. And let's hear it for unspoiledness here. It's one hell of a moment.
When Lilah visited Wesley for the first time, all the way back to season 3, she brought Dante's Divine Comedy with her as a gift. They've been wandering the circles of hell together ever since, and so it is fitting that their way ends in an episode named Calvary, and that he is haunted by her spectre in Salvage while meditating over her dead body. Wesley has a Madonna and Whore complex (yet another reason why the thing with Lilah had no more future than the thing with Fred), but Lilah, assigned the later role, is the first one to become his Beatrice. Fred will be in season 5. He decapitates Lilah to save her from becoming a vampire (believing as he does that Angelus killed her), and tries to save Fred the same way, but in the second case, his weapon is useless. Wesley can't save Lilah, and he can't save Fred. But it is his very brokenness resulting from these failures which will create what you can call heart, soul or humanity in Illyria, the first woman (being?) in his life outside of these classifications, for whom he'll finally become the Watcher he never could be before.
Wesley's failure as a Watcher with Buffy and Faith haunts him. The reason why I already sympathized with him in season 3 of BtVS was that he was in a no-win situation there. No Watcher not Giles ever had a chance with Buffy, and certainly not after the Cruciamentum. As for Faith, she committed her accidental killing of a man within 48 hours or so after his arrival in Sunnydale. Wesley, fresh out of the academy, reacted the way he was trained to and alerted the Council. This was catastrophic for Faith who had wavered on responding to Angel at that point, and yet it's hard to say what any new professional on his first job would have done BUT react according to training. (Personally, I blame Giles far more than Wesley for Faith's season 3 way. As opposed to Wesley, Giles had months as Faith's Watcher, from her arrival in Sunnydale till Bad Girls, and in all that time had pretty much ignored her outside of Slaying business instead of forming a relationship with her.)
When Faith took Wesley prisoner and tortured him in Five by Five, she didn't do so just to provoke Angel. She blamed him for what had happened to her as well. Ever since I had been hoping we'd get the two of them meet again, and in Salvage, I finally got my wish. (Incidentally, the way Angelus brought up Faith two episodes before was neat preparation and a good reminder.)
Faith's name has always carried a slight irony. Her very first appearance on BTVS showed that she was full of fears and self-doubts behind her confident façade. Yet the cardinal virtue of faith is lacking in the increasingly demoralized AI lot, and Wesley sees the sun again for the first time when he leaves L.A. to retrieve her. Bringing Faith to L.A. Yet this also means bringing Faith into the underworld. In sunlit prison, she appears to have made peace with herself, disagreeable visits from Bringers aside. Back in the darkness of Los Angeles, the first thing Wesley does is testing her, completely old Watcher style, by throwing her among three vampires. Faith has the hoped-for effect on the crew, galvanizing everyone (and proving in between that Connor, like Angel and Uncle Spike, likes women who boss him around once they've demonstrated they actually can throw him around as well), but the Beast beats the crap out of her. A return to the underworld means lots of pain for Faith the Vampire Slayer, and the physical pain is just the beginning. It's Angelus who kills the Beast, just because he can (and presumably for ego reasons - with the Beast around, he just isn't the most impressive scare in town, and besides, this way he demonstrates that he's been smarter than everyone else in figuring out the method). And he promises Faith more pain. The sun might be back, but no one is out of the woods yet…
In other news, Farscape and Babylon 5 fans should check out![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hobsonphile's DraconCon report at her lj. Excuse me while I imitate the Hullk here...
Now, onwards with the fourth season of Angel:
This was the season for literary allusions. A Long Day's Journey Into The Night indeed, as the AI clan can compete with any O'Neill characters for dysfunctional family vibe at this point of the show. The sun vanishes in more than one sense. Gwen and the bitchy comments she inspires in Cordy are basically the only light stuff. Speaking of Gwen, she strikes one as an escapee from X-Men country, not that that's a bad thing if handled right. She's fun, but I keep expecting Wolverine to show up next when she's around. It's a bit distracting.
The other comic relief, until he comes to a bloody end, is Manny, last member of the Ratet, and one good example of AtS' tendency to play demons as every day guys. Ra being the Egyptian god of the sun you realize what the Beast intends to do a bit sooner than Our Heroes manage to if you're up to your ancient gods. And while we're speaking mythology, the long night of Los Angeles which starts here has lots of parallels and echoes. Usually the sun is brought back by children or lost loves. But this is not what will happen. And then there are a whole slot of mythological characters who wander into the underworld to bring back their loved ones, most prominently Innana and Orpheus. Few of these wanderers succeed (Orpheus certainly doesn't). Perversely, Wesley at the end of this episode decides they should bring someone back from the underworld whom none of them love and all of them fear: Angelus.
(Footnote: The first time around, it annoyed me that the fourth season insisted on letting Angel and Angelus talk in the third person about each other and treated them as different entities. This seemed to refute not just the BTVS canon but season 2 of AtS; if Angelus truly is a different entity, Angel had no reason to feel any kind of connection to Darla, since it had been Angelus - up to that point - who had been with her for 150 years. However, the fifth season thankfully put an end to the third person nonsense, and we were back to first person singular, probably due to Spike being present. As with Darla, if Angelus were a different entity, any kind of backstory save for the Sunnydale one would be pointless.)
In retrospect, it's very clear to see how Pod!Cordy pulled everyone's strings here, and why she wanted Angelus around (other than for the ratings). First she kept the suspicion about Connor and the Beast alive, then accused Gwen, but sooner or later, it would have become obvious that the only ones in a position to kill Manny had been Angel and herself. By bringing up Angelus as the Beast's old acquaintance, she didn't just keep everyone from wondering further but gave Wesley the fatal idea that a Q & A with Angelus could help them. And the sun sets, an image that is very, very effective. The idea of eternal night sets off some atavistic chills in all of us, I think.
Awakening continues to showcase Cordy the master manipulator, as she gets Angel to agree to the Angelus thing by buttering up to his ego, insinuating he's an evil genius sans soul. The rest of the episode is one of those few things where it really is better to be spoiled. Had I been unspoiled, I'd have been angry and confused for most of it. Spoiled, you can see Angel's perfect day/night unfold and be somewhat amused. For starters, everyone apologizes to him. (While he apologizes to no-one.) Wesley, Cordy, even Connor in the end. Fred and Gunn are mere blips on his radar - you do get Gunn doing their old handshake with Wes and clown around as if he were his season 2 self, but that's all in the background. In the foreground are the things Angel needs for perfect happiness most of all. To save the day for everyone, sure, but also to be genuinely reconciled with Wesley, to have Cordy not just apologize profusely for sleeping with Connor (he even has her equate sleeping with Connor with his deeds as Angelus in his fantasy) but assure him he's the only one she ever wanted. Angel's fantasy can't quite skip another fight with Connor, but then the kid learns his lesson, admits Cordy is too old for him, and helps Angel out in the crucial fight against the representative of evilness.
(The last element is suddenly very poignant if you have seen season 5 and realize that this part of Angel's fantasy becomes true, in Not Fade Away when Connor comes to the rescue in just this fashion.)
As Angelus remarks later, Angel does have an Indiana Jones fantasy there, with traps and a hidden treasure, but it's also a visual walk through the underworld, in other words, an image fitting with what is really going on - the Shaman going inside of Angel and setting free the demon.
Still, Awakening is positively fluffy when compared to Soulless, directed by Sean "Sam Gamgee" Astin, who manages to make the steel bars of Angelus' cage players as well and does a great job all around. As far as cinematic echoes are concerned, this is clearly Angelus as Dr. Lecter, dispensing unwelcome and twisted truths left, right and center and getting into everyone's head. (Everyone's but Cordy's, but I'll come to that in a moment.) Naturally, he's being kept in the cellar, but he can hear what's going on upstairs; the Id, the monster below, is only barely repressed and will soon rise completely. Much attention is being paid to body language in this episode. Wesley sits down in front of the cage, trying to establish he's calm and untouched by what Angelus says, but rises and starts to walk soon. His control is illusion, and each of the things Angelus brings up (Fred, Wesley's failure as a Watcher, Faith, Connor) is a genuine vulnerability. Gunn and Fred are on the stairs and behind a trolley respectively and still get overwhelmed easily. Connor walks straight towards Angelus, only being kept back at the last minute by Cordy.
Cordy, however, matches Angelus step for step. (Check it out - she really does, always remaining on the same level with him.) He's missing the crucial information here, that this is no longer Cordelia, and so he is the one whose strings are being pulled, as opposed to all the other encounters.
Not that each of them doesn't have results. Fred and Gunn have been imploding for a while, but the spontaneous kiss between Fred and Wesley, and Gunn's decision to end the relationship, are probably the direct result of the way Angelus had stirred all of them up.
More tragic, however, are the results with Connor. As I said earlier, Angelus' Oedipus crack is not what gets to him at all. (Both because he doesn't remember Cordy as his mother, and because he probably doesn't know the play.) What does get to him, and will stay with him, is what Angelus says about Darla and Holtz. That Darla killed herself because she hated her child so much. That Holtz killed himself because Connor disappointed him so much. There is just enough truth in the lies - i.e. both Darla and Holtz really did kill themselves because of Connor, but for very different reasons than the one Angelus names - that it hits Connor badly. And he does believe it. He will refer to it both in Inside Out and in Home.
Since Connor's return from Quortoth, everyone has constantly referred to him as Angel's son, and compared him with Angel. They either forgot or more accurately surpressed he was Darla's son as well. (Surprisingly, since he looks more like her if you ask me.) If someone had told him about his mother sooner, he might have been able to push Angelus' words aside and believe that she loved him. As it was….
"You're my real father," Connor tells Angelus, and that's the only time anyone other than Cordy with her offer manages to surprise the soulless version of Angel. It's an incredibly intense moment, and you're not quite sure what Angelus would have done if Connor had managed to reach the cage. Somehow, I don't think he would have drained him.
Calvary, the mountain of skulls, the place of the crucifixion (where according to John the sun was blotted out the moment Jesus died), is the next episode title. There is a skull around, a prop for a faked ensouling spell, but the person really carrying the stigmata who ends up dying is the least likely candidate for a Christ allusion - Lilah. It's the last time we see her alive. Something of her late season 2 nervousness and desperation is back, but she still hasn't given up and fights to live until her last moment. Lilah's last appearance as a living woman is full of sadness and ironies for the watcher (no pun intended): she brings an important clue, the Reinhardt book which shows that some gigantic manipulation regarding the Beast is going on, messing with everyone's memories (ah, foreshadowing irony), she calls Cordy with the nickname exasperated fans have called her in season 3, Saint Cordelia, in precisely the episode in which it will be revealed how unsaintly she is these days, and she joins with the good guys only to be killed for exactly that, not because of her guilty past.
The sequence where Angelus chases Lilah through the hotel is a deliberate echo of the one in Passion where he chases Jenny Calendar, down to something being thrown at him on a couple of stairs, so the shocking twist of letting the hand that grabs Lilah's throat belong to Cordelia is all the more effective. And let's hear it for unspoiledness here. It's one hell of a moment.
When Lilah visited Wesley for the first time, all the way back to season 3, she brought Dante's Divine Comedy with her as a gift. They've been wandering the circles of hell together ever since, and so it is fitting that their way ends in an episode named Calvary, and that he is haunted by her spectre in Salvage while meditating over her dead body. Wesley has a Madonna and Whore complex (yet another reason why the thing with Lilah had no more future than the thing with Fred), but Lilah, assigned the later role, is the first one to become his Beatrice. Fred will be in season 5. He decapitates Lilah to save her from becoming a vampire (believing as he does that Angelus killed her), and tries to save Fred the same way, but in the second case, his weapon is useless. Wesley can't save Lilah, and he can't save Fred. But it is his very brokenness resulting from these failures which will create what you can call heart, soul or humanity in Illyria, the first woman (being?) in his life outside of these classifications, for whom he'll finally become the Watcher he never could be before.
Wesley's failure as a Watcher with Buffy and Faith haunts him. The reason why I already sympathized with him in season 3 of BtVS was that he was in a no-win situation there. No Watcher not Giles ever had a chance with Buffy, and certainly not after the Cruciamentum. As for Faith, she committed her accidental killing of a man within 48 hours or so after his arrival in Sunnydale. Wesley, fresh out of the academy, reacted the way he was trained to and alerted the Council. This was catastrophic for Faith who had wavered on responding to Angel at that point, and yet it's hard to say what any new professional on his first job would have done BUT react according to training. (Personally, I blame Giles far more than Wesley for Faith's season 3 way. As opposed to Wesley, Giles had months as Faith's Watcher, from her arrival in Sunnydale till Bad Girls, and in all that time had pretty much ignored her outside of Slaying business instead of forming a relationship with her.)
When Faith took Wesley prisoner and tortured him in Five by Five, she didn't do so just to provoke Angel. She blamed him for what had happened to her as well. Ever since I had been hoping we'd get the two of them meet again, and in Salvage, I finally got my wish. (Incidentally, the way Angelus brought up Faith two episodes before was neat preparation and a good reminder.)
Faith's name has always carried a slight irony. Her very first appearance on BTVS showed that she was full of fears and self-doubts behind her confident façade. Yet the cardinal virtue of faith is lacking in the increasingly demoralized AI lot, and Wesley sees the sun again for the first time when he leaves L.A. to retrieve her. Bringing Faith to L.A. Yet this also means bringing Faith into the underworld. In sunlit prison, she appears to have made peace with herself, disagreeable visits from Bringers aside. Back in the darkness of Los Angeles, the first thing Wesley does is testing her, completely old Watcher style, by throwing her among three vampires. Faith has the hoped-for effect on the crew, galvanizing everyone (and proving in between that Connor, like Angel and Uncle Spike, likes women who boss him around once they've demonstrated they actually can throw him around as well), but the Beast beats the crap out of her. A return to the underworld means lots of pain for Faith the Vampire Slayer, and the physical pain is just the beginning. It's Angelus who kills the Beast, just because he can (and presumably for ego reasons - with the Beast around, he just isn't the most impressive scare in town, and besides, this way he demonstrates that he's been smarter than everyone else in figuring out the method). And he promises Faith more pain. The sun might be back, but no one is out of the woods yet…
In other news, Farscape and Babylon 5 fans should check out
hobsonphile's DraconCon report at her lj. Excuse me while I imitate the Hullk here...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-09-10 07:39 am (UTC)Had I been unspoiled, I'd have been angry and confused for most of it.
I was unspoiled the first time. Yelling at the television, tempted to throw things, barely able to not turn it off.
Thank you
Date: 2004-09-10 07:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-10 09:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-10 10:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-10 01:14 pm (UTC)BTW, I loved the Connor-Sandman fic. I'm currently at the library looking for Sandman volumes I haven't read!
no subject
Date: 2004-09-10 09:57 pm (UTC)And thank you! I'm really glad it worked for you, and absolutely, read more Sandman!
no subject
Date: 2004-09-10 10:51 pm (UTC)Meanwhile, let me shyly pimp my version of Buffy & the Immortal, 'cause I think it might amuse you. Aka "Immortal Beloved", it lives on this page (http://pages.ivillage.com/suestress/beautyeffulgent/id22.html). Coming up with the mythology of the Immortal was fun, and if I ever try to write a "serious" fantasy story, I might steal from myself.
Neil is so pretty in your icon -- I think he's going to be in DC next month. I must try to go see him!
no subject
Date: 2004-09-10 11:25 pm (UTC)*blushes*
Thank you. He is my favourite of the Big Three (Aischylos, Sophocles, Euripides), being the most sceptical and cynical of them yet also the most intense. If you really want to read a play of his, I'd start with Medea. Or, pimping one of my favourite English poets again, Ted Hughes' translation of Alcestis, one of the few Euripedean plays with a happy ending.
The Kindly Ones: Well, that is the big finale, of course, combining all the various plot threads of the saga. Two things, if you want to tackle it, since both Lyta Hall's and Dream's actions are incomprehensible if not knowing them:
1) In Doll's House, the second volume of the saga, Dream came across a situation where some servants of his who had gone rogue during his imprisonment had build up one Hector Hall as a Sandman they could control. Said Hector had brought his pregnant wife with him. The entire situation (very complicated, no need to go into details) ended with Hector dead and Dream telling Lyta that since her child had been gestated in the Dreaming, something that was pretty unique, he'd come and claim it one day. These two factors endeared him to Lyta to no end, and ever since her child, a boy named Daniel (Dream showed up to name him, too) was born, she has been afraid he will one day be taken from her.
2) Dream had one child, just one - the singer Orpheus (yup, the mythological one), whose mother was the muse Calliope. That father/son relationship was complicated and hit an all-time low when Orpheus asked for Dream's help after Euridice's death, because he wanted his wife back, only to be told that death was part of mortal existence and that Orpheus just had to accept that. Orpheus didn't, stalked off swearing never to talk to his father again, ended up losing Euridice all over again (look up the myth), but since he had asked Dream's sister Death (his aunt) for help before and she had made him immortal so he could go to the underworld, that meant he could now never die. When the Bacchae (look up the myth) tore him apart, his head remained still alive and immortal. Dream had some priests of Apollon pick it up and protect it in a temple, but told Orpheus that he'd never see him again, due to Orpheus' earlier vow. (Did I mention Dream is an expert in relationships.)
Anyway, in "Brief Lives", which is a wonderful, sad and funny story, Dream ends up seeing Orpheus again after millennia... and Orpheus big request is that he should finally be allowed to die. So Dream kills him, and can't handle that at all.
That is the crucial set-up for the situation where "The Kindly Ones" starts.
Yes, you must see him if you have the chance! And now I'm off to read your story...
P.S.
Date: 2004-09-12 12:12 am (UTC)Re: P.S.
Date: 2004-09-12 10:12 am (UTC)Re: P.S.
Date: 2004-09-12 11:25 am (UTC)Re: P.S.
Date: 2004-09-12 12:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-13 03:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-13 04:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-13 04:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-13 04:39 am (UTC)Made by the talented
Yay for Joss!
Date: 2004-09-10 08:07 pm (UTC)Re: Yay for Joss!
Date: 2004-09-10 09:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-13 09:44 am (UTC)Did that make any sense? I'll come back and try to clarify if it didn't...
no subject
Date: 2004-09-13 11:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-13 10:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-13 10:58 pm (UTC)