Retrogression By Dazai Osamu Is The #1 New Release In Japanese Literature!

Promises of Gold, José Olivarez

never related to authors being like "childhood is such a blessed innocent time", catch me with that jane eyre shit like "such dread as children only can feel" and "I then sat with my doll on my knee til the fire got low, glancing round occasionally to make sure nothing worse than myself haunted the shadowy room"

If Will dies first, it is obvious Hannibal would cannibalize Will’s flesh. Hannibal mourned Mischa by eating her, and he would do the same for Will; to consume and eat and incorporate is part of grieving. But what would Hannibal do with Will’s bones? He’d eat the marrow, maybe make soup from them, but what of the calcified parts that remain, the parts that can’t be eaten?

I don’t really see him just keeping them around or displaying them, something stagnant and to be ogled. Burying them in the family plot in Lithuania makes sense because Will is family, but it also requires Hannibal to go back to a place he can’t go. Hannibal could cremate the bones, but then what? Spreading the ashes doesn’t seem like something he would do; he can’t know what happens to them. Keeping Will in an urn on his desk or a shelf also feels out of character, a memory collecting dust.

What if Hannibal had Will’s ashes pressed into pencil lead? There are ways to compress ashes into something that could be written with or drawn. What if Hannibal draws Will with his own ashes, commemorating him in a completed cycle. Sketching the man with his own remains. Remembering Will as he saw him, recreating moments they shared from Hannibal’s mind palace. Having Will live forever in depictions of himself. Hannibal would never be truly left behind. And Hannibal would sharpen the pencils as he always had; he isn’t unfamiliar with taking a blade to Will. Shaving off a layer but keeping him sharp.

Displaying and keeping art made from Will’s ashes would mean so much more than a reconstructed skeleton or an urn on a shelf or a plot that would become overgrown with weeds. He could draw Will in motion, alive, as he wished to remember him, and create moments and memories they didn’t get to experience together.

My favorite jokes are about mispronouncing philosophers' names but I'm afraid it's a nietzsche subgenre

Eboshi: THIS IS NOT A GAME!

Ashitaka: No, it most certainly is not.

San: Why are you doing this?

Eboshi: Yes, I’d quite like to know that as well. Why risk putting your life in further jeopardy?

Ashitaka: (*pissed off at this point*) BECAUSE IT’S NOT A GAME, EBOSHI! This is a scale model of war. Every war, ever fought, right here in front of you. Because it’s always the same. The moment you lay a hand on your sword, no matter how right you feel, you have no idea who’s going to die! You don’t know whose children are going to scream and suffer! How many hearts will be broken? How many lives shattered? How much blood will spill until everybody does, what they’re always going to have to do from the very beginning? SIT! DOWN! AND! TALK!

Btw if we're mutuals and you feel like you always have to start the conversation I'm really sorry, my ADHD means I'm really bad at keeping track of people that aren't literally in front of me so it's very hard for me to keep up with Internet friends, even the ones I love the most cuz I'm either like "oh I wonder how they're doing?" and then do nothing about it or I'm like "oh so and so is messaging me yay! I wonder what's happened in the couple days since we last spoke!!" and they're like "so how was your summer" and I'm like "what?" and the last time we spoke was April.

Tl:dr; please don't read my lack of initiation as lack of caring, I'm just very bad at friendship maintenance skills like time management and task initiation

They say the loveliest angels make the cruelest demons, and my darling

You were so beautiful

Before they dragged you into hell.

mental health status: need to look at the sea for hours and stay quiet

Just thinking about Will, in this exact moment, hearing and feeling Hannibal's heart pounding and finally knowing the answer to his question, "Is he in love with me?"—that raw certainty hitting him firsthand. Like damn.