Great Quotes

Bev:

Finally getting over Xena, is she?
Not a great choice of guy, though... look what happened to Ophelia! People often make bad choices on the rebound.

Gabby was always bi, however, if you note, the dane was hitting on her, until she told him she was not a virgin. Then he left, suggesting she may please two other men in that insulting way some men can have when a women makes choices they don't like. She then made fun of his rules.

That was my take anyway

Ah, I see. What a male-chaivinist twerp! I'm glad he gets poisoned in the end!

No kidding, Irnia. If he were only playing mad, why didn't he let Ophelia in on it? Jerk. Why does the woman always end up dead or ruined because of some idiot guy and his big plans?

Cos otherwise it wouldn't be a tragedy?

Oh Corwin, can't people have tragedies just by taking revenge on their mom and uncle without screwing over someone innocent?

I bet you are going to tell me that Greek men who fooled around on their wives and destroyed the lives of young women who fell for them were "heroes". No wonder Cybele turned the lot of them into pigs. Seems to be little change, really.

That has always disturbed me a bit about Hamlet. Among other things. The best defense I can offer, at the moment, would be this: Hamlet is a real person who has been subjected to a terrible trauma, discovering that his mother has successfully conspired with his father's brother to murder his father. It is of course totally irrational and unjust of him to take this out on Ophelia, who is apparently unconnected with the crime. Being a real human being and not an ideal rational being, he responds in irrational and unconstructive ways. One of his responses is to generalize from his mother to all womankind; another is to overgeneralize to as to condemn all sexuality ("take thee to a nunnery). Shakespeare is not saying, "If you find out that your mother has done something like this, you should take it out on your girlfriend." he's saying that in fact, alas, people will do this sort of thing, sometimes. This is a tragic fact about the human condition: we have the ability to have deep moral insights, but under stress, we can radically fail to live up to them. Hamlet's trauma causes him to question everything, even the value of human life itself. He is clearly very bright and serious, and given time and peace, he might have eventually worked his way out of it, but events move too fast.

I would add that I would hesitate to draw any conclusions about men in general from the story of Hamlet, just as I would not draw conclusions about women in general from the fact that Medea makes soup out of her children.

Besides, however terrible men may be, they do have that wonderful jar icy duh thing... [shudders]

Hee hee, I wasn't really generalizing about men, I was objecting to a common trend of "heroes" and the like treating other people as objects, a means to an end, and how infrequently this behavior is commented on.

BTW you know that "nunnery" was code for whore house, right? He was being quite rude, our mad Dane. Not saying it's not human, just saying that a people could object to using others that way, even if "love" and sexual politics are involved. It's also wrong of hot women to pretend they are interested in desperate, unattractive men for fun and profit. There are just fewer stories where the heroine does that and it's not even a side note. Most bad girls in stories die gruesome deaths and pay for their evil ways.

Well, Hamlet dies, too. But I'm not sure that we really disagree about anything at this point.