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Devil May Cry | Official Announcement |27/09/2023
(Warning: Out of character)
it's Me the Problem
This is my blog, I do quite a few things here:
1. Write about murder, depression and Satan.
2. Rant about things that are probably not relatable but adding a #relatable tag anyway.
3. Dante Quotes. Lots and Lots of Dante Quotes. An unholy amount of Dante Alighieri Quotes. "Surrender all hope ye who enter".
4. Write about book reviews or opinions on certain pieces of literature or classical artwork.
5. The Umbrella Academy. No explanation needed. Steve Blackman I'm coming for you after S4.
6. Be the least judgmental person you will ever meet. Seriously my ask box is open to anyone who needs to talk.
7. đđđ
Edit because new obsessions detected.
8. Green Day
9. Bo Burnham
10. Seinfeld. Seinfeld. Chinese Restaurant Episode. (Yes ik he dated minors but the show is PEAK comfort)
11. Bassists being neglected by the band.
12. THE HUNGER GAMES AND HARRY POTTAH (yes ik jk Rowling is a bigot, no I don't support her, but it heals some of my childhood trauma so let me have this).
13. m a r v e l. Shhhhhh.... Don't tell
Just realised I need to add a DNI:
Creeps, people asking for donations IM BROKE. Homophobes, racists, MAGA, pyramid schemes.
Stuff I would like:
Friendly debates
Questions
Answers
Philosophical debates and discussions
Literary analysis and critiques
Family shit.
Yaâll like my cat Dante? He is an asshole and does stuff like this
Made some drawings at 4-5am today for the Pride Month! I was bored, and I have never draw things related to this, so I decided to make some silly drawings with some of my favorite bois!
I headcanon SuperBrainz as gay, he does a lot of things in GW2 and BFN that show that xD
I imagine all type of gods as pansexual, in some religions being gay or lesbian in older times wasnt considered a sin, even some gods did that, so thats why Raiden is pan
Whitty is confirmed asexual, so there isnt explication about that xD
Now, actually I dont see Dante as gay and Vergil as bi, they both are straight, but I like to imagine that Dante is supportive to LGBTQ even though he doesnt show it. He bought Vergil a hoodie with the bisexual flag so they both could support this month together!!
If some of you want me to draw more characters with pride hoodies for this month, just ask me! :3
Where's the sequel?
-Benjamin Alire Saenz(Aristotle and Dante discover the secrets of the universe)
-Aristotle.
-Benjamin Alire Saenz, (Aristotle and Dante discover the secrets of the universe)
-Benjamin Alire Saenz ,Aristotle and Dante discovers the secrets of the universe .
It's more than just a book. It's beautiful.
Iâve been wanting for a while to do a comparison of Danteâs Divine Comedy with CS Lewisâ The Great Divorce, since the latter is very much modelled after the former (with George MacDonald in the place of Virgil) and they deal with very similar concepts.
My first inpression of the difference between them is that Dante develops a very specific and granular categorization and hierarchy on sins throughout the Inferno and Purgatorio, whereas to me all of the ones that Lewis showed were variations on a commonn theme of pride, the choice of oneâs own opinions and preconceptions and self-image over heaven. In Lewisâ words, âThere is always something they prefer to joy.â But as I think about it more closely, I think there are more specific correspondences between the two.
As Dorothy L. Sayers discusses in the introduction to her translation of the Commedia, there are two types of allegories: ones where all the characters are representations of specific concepts (such as in Spencerâs The Fairie Queen or Bunyanâs Pilgrimâs Progress), or one where characters with their own names and identities can stand in for specific concepts: Virgil is Virgil, but he also represents Human Reason, Ciacco is an actual Florentine who existed, but he also represents gluttony, and so forth. This makes the characters more real and alive than the first type of allegories usually feel, and also allows the work to show nuances in its concepts by having multiple characters representing the same concept and so showing different nuances of it. Both the Commedia and The Last Divorce are the latter types, but they differ in how they design their characters: in the Commedia they are specific, named characters from Danteâs time, or from history, mythology, or the Bible. Lewis doesnât do this (probably wisely; in an age of mass media, if he was sending MPs to Hell, any conversation about the books would be about that, and not about the bookâs themes); instead he gives them epithets like the Big Ghost, and Hard-bitten Ghost, and Ghost in a Bowler; I will sometimes give them other names in this post. One of the thinfs this lets Lewis do is to deliberately subvert the prominence of famous religious and historical figures in the Comedy by having his celebrated and beloved âgreat saintâ in Heaven be not a figure from the Bible or later Christian history, but an ordinary woman named Sarah Smith with an ordinary life who was good, kind, and loving to everyone she met.
As an example of how Dante and Lewis work similarly and yet differently: the concept of Avarice. Dante shows it in both Hell and Purgatory, in different forms - people who âgetting and spending, laid waste their powersâ (the Ciardi translation actually puts it similarly to thatâ. Lewis has no one who rejects Heaven based on desire for personal possessions; what he has instead is the character Iâll call the Economist, who says that the reason everyone in Hell spreads out (because they quarrel all the time) is because there are no commodities to drive them to live closer together, and tries futilely to bring back one of the - extraordinarily heavy, to him - apples of Heaven as such as commodity. (Is Lewis deliberately recalling the heavy rocks rolled by the Avaricious? Probably a stretch.) His problem is not a personal desire for riches, but the need to see the world in exclusively material terms and the only solution to problems as material ones.
Another example. Lewis, like Dante, has an example of heresy, and the connection between them came to me because of Sayersâ line in her commentary, quoting Charles Williams, that âthe heretic accepted the Church, but preferred his own judgement to that of the churchâŠan obduracy of mind, an intellectual obstinacy.â All of those traits are seen in one of Lewisâ ghosts, a self-identified Christian who denies the Resurrection and insists that one cannot know any spiritual truths for certain and that he wouldnât want to, because it would prevent free inquiry and intellectual broadness. (In opposition to the heavenly spirit he is speaking to, who insists that the point of intellectual inquiry is to learn what is true.) This ghost has another particular trait that recurs in different forms a few times in The Great Divorce: he expresses the, on the surface laudable, sentiment that heâs not of any use in heaven whereas in hell he can help people. The recurrent sentiment - from him, from the Tragedian, from the Economist, from an artist (sort of), from a variety of planners and improvers who are mentioned in passing - is the need to be needed, and the two former of these are explicitly told that they are not needed, though they are certainly wanted and welcomed. The very gratuitousness of heaven leads some to reject it.
As a further example: the Sullen, in Dante, are one of the more problematic aspects of Hell, as their fate seems rather excessively harsh just for being grumpy (or melancholy, in you like). Lewis takes a bit of a different tack that sheds some light on it. Thereâs an elderly ghost in Heaven who we only see complaining to heavenly friend about how dreadful her life was. George MacDonald explains to Lewis that if sheâs simply an old lady with a bad habit of grumbling, sheâll accept heaven and be well in the end; but if thereâs nothing left of her but grumbling, thereâs nothing to be done. The sullenness that Dante depicts is here shown as a person who is looking joy in the face, who is standing in the midst of joy, but is unable to see it in their focus in dwelling on past wrongs.
Curiously, Lewis - unlike Dante in the eighth and ninth circles - spends very little time on those who are deeply evil, beyond saying âThose that hate goodness are sometimes nearer it than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it already.â Rather than Malice, the characteristic of the lowest levels of Danteâs hell, Lewis focuses on a range of forms of distorted love that, I think, we do not see equivalents to in the Commedia. The Commediaâs characterization of the roots of evil in forms of distorted or ill-governed love (or desire) is very helpful to this concept. Virgil (via Aristotle?) characterizes it in three classes: love of thy neighbourâs ill (Pride, Envy, and Wrath: desire to put someone down for your own aggradizement, resentment of someoneâs rise because it dininishes you in comparison, and immoderate anger in response to wrongs), insufficient love (Sloth - which in Lewis would likely be represented by those who donât get on the bus at all) and excessive love of earthly things (Avarice, Gluttony, and Lust).
Lewis takes his critique well beyond that to various forms of non-sexual love for people that are nonetheless harmful to them or others. (This gets into his idea, expressed in Till We Have Faces, that in the absence of grace all human loves are ultimately selfish.) Thereâs a woman, who in a determination to âimproveâ her husband socioeconomically and culturally, drove away all his friends and pushed him into a career that made him miserable until he ultimately died of sheer unhappiness, and on her visit to Heaven can speak of nothing but all the thankless work she did on his behalf, and futilely demand to be allowed to âmanageâ him again. Thereâs a woman who loved her son so all-consumingly that she neglected everyone else in her life, and made them miserable after his death by reorienting her life and theirs entirely around mourning him.