Damn bro CLAMP basically """"stealthily"""" poking fun at how all these justifications are just yuri-pervert Cope for TEEN GIRL, truly based and seer-like bc this intro feels much more honest NOW than how it would have felt however many years ago, more than I've even been alive for realistically😭😭😭😭

”Guys are totally gross" okay CLAMP, I'll just opine that that's not how the sentiment comes across in either RIGVEDA or Tokyo Babylon/X lmao, but if I wanted to write a postface to justify writing +drawing a bunch of Bishoujo Molestation I'd prolly come up with a similar Cope so you're off the hook

four chapters in (and these are some short chapters) and even the Alice In Wonderland pretext gets defenestrated like some 80s beat em up final boss and it just becomes about how Miyuki-chan is more Employed than the average zoomette and the next chapter is about Mahjong bc CLAMP are sinoboos

reading Miyuki-chan in Wonderland and it's almost admirable how every single scene starts like this with no build-up or restraint, I did not take CLAMP as having such a big-time fetish for Big Bishoujo Woman molesting Schoolgirl

compare per example this passage from the Yašna 19, verses 42-44. That we are talking about the same proto-story as Hektor, Achilles and how the latter treats the former's son Astyanax - in another Avestan passage, Kərəsāspa nails this guy/s heels to his chariot too and like Achilles, goes to hell

Judging from ur designs (VERY true to form btw) you've 100% already seen it, but this sherd from Hattusa features a very unique High Tier Guy, generally agreed as either Mycenawean or from Miletus (Millawanda in Hittite archives) or Wilusa, the more Mycenaean-inspired cities of West Anatolia.

by old I mean like Chapman's groundbreaking one, or Alexander Pope's which was all the rage with Victorian ladies (well, his Odyssey was but whatever), which is just as good bc goddamn these Victorian writers? Straight up atrocities against literature & language in these translations (Morris, here)

I Kept Thinkin', A Lot, on this, and... on this silver Scythian vase, from Voronež, we seem to have an identical conception to the Greek/Indian poems: 1st scene, council between two elders, one even holding a ritual implement; 2nd) an elder hands a bow to a young man, with an emphasis on the string;

Worth noting that in R̥gVeda X, 125, a song where Vāc ("Voice"/"Word") sings her own praises in trifunctional order - 1) the function of voice and word in religion; 2) the rumble of the bow; 3) the prosperity normal human communication allows for - is identical to the newborn Apollo's own formulation

A new recruit for the evergrowing army of the Master of Beasts.... Civie Nekokharmēn.... delighting in kitties...

Went out to buy some pastries and vodka at 8:30 am and just started petting this guy and gave him a bit of sausage pastry...

Reminding myself on how truly high quality the Sporus and Nero drama was in the "force society to treat this feminized boy as your wife" department. Love the "pwease wail for me like I'm Hektor at Troy and you're my personal Andromache" lmao

the Homeric ones are above all notable for their focusing on minor characters and for their very keen focus on Mediterranean family dynamics, the youth as primarily the "son of his mother" motif... I find the this one for one of Ajax's enemies specially touching

These are actually full laments, like those Andromache etc sing for Hector - they're the type of biographical poem that would be sung by singer-priests (in Sumer the famous gala; in Minoan Crete they also crossdressed). In Mycenaean sarcophagi you can actually see such wailers, so these are vintage.

The Sauromatians were a nomadic Iranian people who, like many of em, had an egalitarian set of gender relations, by which I mean to marry a girl would have to kill a man in combat. This is the ultimate shoujo premise, the ending of all shoujo (marriage) is united with the motivation for the action.

This story and all its nasty things are actually very emblematic of JUNE stories (nεκrοphilia specially comes up bizarrely commonly, as it does here) and I find this old tanbi 耽美 aesthetic frankly wonderful, and reflected in some of the best of later manga.

Unfortunately Bsky does not allow large images so I cannot post the HQ images here - I wonder where I could post this instead, so it's properly archived for all who want to see? I wanna translate more JUNE stories and manga, so it'd be a good idea to have a repository!

Reposting here my translation of the JUNE illustrated manga prose short Dominique! Written by Kaoru Kurimoto and illustrated by Keiko Takemiya of Kaze to Ki no Uta fame. Check the translator's note due to how the story's text is formatted! Apologies for the strange formatting.