The Ovidian Narcissus falls in love with his mirror-image; his same-sex equal. Modernity associates Narcissus solely with arrogance, but that’s not all he was to the Romans nor later writers through to the Renaissance; it’s about semantics, ya’ll. Mirror imagery, and ‘Narcissus’ were codes for representing (male) same-sex love, and this coding was used in both romantic and heroic poetry like TheProse Cycle when regarding Lancelot and Galehaut, or Benoit de Saint-Maure’s Achilles in the Roman de Troie.
“Tamquam alter idem” (‘as if another self’) from Cicero’s speech about ‘friendship’ derives from this same idea: “He who looks upon a true friend, looks as it were upon a sort of image of himself”. The mythology that grows from the fall of Rome (British, Italian, French), developing into these great epic tales which the Raven Cycle is based from, were suffused with Ciceronian and Ovidian intertextuality, and because of that, this homoerotic idea of two knights, each completing each other as if they were mirror-images, was an integral element.
Maggie Stiefvater is playing with this tradition, and I can’t get enough of it.
THE RAVEN KING CHAPTER 31- comic adaptation PART 1 **IF YOU HAVEN’T READ THE 4TH BOOK AND DON’T WANT TO BE SPOILED PLEASE SCROLL THROUGH!!! **PART 2
My first time doing a comic longer than 2 pages lmao i died drawing this it was so. HARD!! and it’s only 14 pages long!! so much respect for comic artists all around the world. Here is my xmas/new year gift for the fandom :”) I had to make some changes to adapt the written words to comic but hope that i did a good enough job on this (some feedback would be nice!!)
@bibliophilesnet mission 002 : favourite ship╱ adam parrish & ronan lynch (the raven cycle)
the scent of cabeswater, all trees after rain, drifted past Adam, and he realized that while he’d been looking at ronan, ronan had been looking at him.
