LINKDING

<blockquote>My mother had daughters year after year, and one by one, my father devoured us. There were only three names allowed in the family, and only three children. There was the oldest, who was always Ruth, and the middle child, who was always Susan. The youngest was “the baby” or simply Baby. When a new daughter was born, she became the baby. The former baby became Susan, and Susan became Ruth—and Ruth vanished. Telling the story like this, it sounds as if we knew what was happening. We did not. I am telling you this so that it will not be a shock to you, the way that it was to me.</blockquote> ➤ gosh. wow. this is really good.

<blockquote>They are not so very different, Ariadne and Pasiphaë, Icarus and Daedalus, Ariadne and Icarus.</blockquote>

<blockquote>King's wives; king's sons.</blockquote>

author's summary from tumblr: <blockquote>I wrote a Les Mis fic! It’s sad unrequited E/R, because that’s what this fandom was missing. Also there’s sex in it, sort of.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Child Ballad 32 is a loathly lady story. The only popular version I know of is Steeleye Span’s “King Henry,” on Below the Salt. I have had this album for well over a decade, and occasionally I found myself wondering about the monstrous lady in the story, and even more about King Henry, who agreed to kill his horse and hawk and hounds to feed her. I don’t know that I’d easily forgive someone who forced me to kill my dog. This had been kicking around in my head for the better part of a decade, and then I was privy to a very odd conversation in a bookstore about people with extreme forms of body dysmorphic disorder, and then I drank a lot of coffee and drove for about forty-five minutes and “King Henry” came on the CD player and I went home and wrote the story in one long jag, which probably explains a few things about it.</blockquote>

<blockquote>She doesn’t want to kill the soldiers on this iteration; she’s never killed anyone before, and doesn’t want to start. But unless she can get poor, weak Sammi out of that prison in the next fifty/infinity minutes, they’ll start in on him with the rubber hoses and he’ll tell them what he’s done. And though she loves her brother with all her heart, it would be a blessing then if the Americans beat him to death.</blockquote>

➤ the famed story

➤ on issues of race in the movies author's note: "This isn't really fic, it's stupid meta speculation disguised as fic"

➤ OH MY GOD. Starts off hilarious and adorable and just sort of invisibly slides into this kind of harrowing and tragic (but still also hilarious and adorable!) depiction of the suckiness of life on Atlantis for everyone involved.