let's talk icons
[h&c] lasciate ogne speranza
by me! -- (light up, light up) -- voi ch'intrate
This is from the most iconic (ha) scene in the anime Honey & Clover, in which Hagu imagines the gift/curse of true artistic talent and inspiration as being like an endless amount of boxes, each of which contains something wonderful, and you want to open each box and make something lovely out of the contents but there are too many boxes for you to ever accomplish this in a lifetime. The text on the icon, as if you have a choice, and in the comment, light up, light up, are lyrics from Snow Patrol's song 'Run'. The latter because of the imagery, the light slowly illuminating the mass of boxes, and the former because the theory of art being expressed is one in which the artist has no choice but to keep opening the boxes. The Italian is taken directly from Dante's Inferno, which is discussed in that same episode of the anime. The keywords translate to abandon all hope (ie. of ever getting through all the boxes) and the bit in the comments is just to finish off the line, all ye who enter here. I may have overthought this one slightly :D
[buffy] the line that divides
by angelaficionado -- (check my vital signs)
Lyrics in both keywords & comments are from 'Boulevard of Broken Dreams' because of shati's mashup fanvid, which springs into my head whenever I think of Buffy because the whole song is so perfect for that show and for Buffy in particular. I also like using 'check my vital signs' here because of the pink shirt = Buffybot, and the scene in which Buffy pretends to be an automated version of herself. Which is a delicious mouthful of irony considering her struggles to maintain a facade of nomality in S6.
[x] eye of the storm
by binded -- okay, yes, that is a terrible pun
This is an icon of Kishuu Arashi from the manga X/1999, which was probably my...second?...proper fandom, and through which I met crazylittleme <3. Arashi is a shrine-maiden and a warrior and prefers to look flatly at people instead of speaking to them, and she is EXTREMELY KICKASS. She has a sword. Which comes out of her hand. I cosplayed as her once sheerly on the basis of that sword. Anyway, 'Arashi' means 'storm' (thus the terrible pun) and the phrase fits because the icon could easily portray a moment of stillness before she leaps into action.
[ff] dreams started singing to me
by retrolights -- (I want to wake up kicking and screaming)
Lyrics from Switchfoot's song 'Awakening', aptly enough, and I thought the line in the keywords was particularly River-esque. This is actually one of the icons I've had in my icons folder for the longest, and I really like the clinical feel of the colouring and the way the text is placed.
[disney] pieds nus sur les pavés
by x_bluemoon_x -- c'est une bohémienne / une sorcière
Esmeralda! I have a newfound fondness for her character after I had enormous amounts of fun cosplaying her at Supanova last year, and I love the way her hands are slightly out-of-frame here. It's like she was dancing and someone managed to capture a hasty picture before she twirled away again. Disney, it must be said, is GREAT for vividly colourful icons. The keywords are from 'Bohémienne', the Esmeralda solo in Notre Dame de Paris, the French musical which also tells the story of Hugo's novel (albeit with more angst and torture, and fewer talking gargoyles). Comments are from 'La Sorcière', another song from that musical. They translate roughly to 'bare feet on the cobbles' and 'it's (she's) a gypsy / a witch'.
[ss] must have been mistook
by liminalliz -- GENDER IDENTITY CRISIS
This is Helena Bonham Carter as Olivia and Imogen Stubbs as Viola-in-diguise-as-Cesario, from the delightful movie adaptation of Twelfth Night. I love this play! I love the crazy genderbending and sexual confusion! And I especially love this scene, in which Olivia determinedly propositions 'Cesario' and Viola's poor little head explodes because she is pretending to be a boy who must woo Olivia on behalf of Orsino, with whom Viola is TOTALLY IN LOVE, and basically in the film Toby Stephens plays Orsino as Rather Conflicted And Questioning His Own Sexuality because he catches himself smelling his manservant's hair and it's all ridiculous and expressed in hilarious puns. OH SHAKESPEARE <3333 Anyway, the sort-of-quoted line is:
SEBASTIAN.
[To OLIVIA] So comes it, lady, you have been mistook;
But nature to her bias drew in that.
You would have been contracted to a maid;
Nor are you therein, by my life, deceiv'd,
You are betroth'd both to a maid and man.
[other] meetings on the stair
by loki013 -- our chances at the great heroisms
This is an icon of Helena from the film Mirrormask -- I took the keywords/comment for this one from this essay by Diane Duane, which ariastar linked to a while back. This is a fantastic, life-changing sort of essay and you should all READ IT IMMEDIATELY (I'll wait) or at least bookmark it and savour it later with a cup of tea and a biscuit. I thought that the essay's theme was something that slotted in nicely with Helena's character, her willing escapism and the way her life becomes a blend of reality and metaphor, the way she ends up fighting her battles in a fantasy world because she feels so helpless against the abstracted evils of her own world. The quoted paragraph is about using lessons and role models from escapist fiction to make us better people in reality, even in small ways:
Far from doing me harm, these people are innocent of anything but enriching my life. There have been times when I’ve found it easier to be kind to some person who drives me crazy, because of the impression made on me by the way Frodo let Gollum off easy on Mount Doom: times when taking a slightly dangerous stand, at a time when it might have been more politic to keep quiet, was just a shade easier because of the memory of Luke Skywalker throwing his lightsaber across that dark chamber in the new Deathstar and telling the Emperor, in that voice that’s finally found its certainty, “I am a Jedi, as my father was before me!” How many chances at the great heroisms do any of us have, after all?...and what harm is there in committing the little ones of everyday life in the names of one’s friends? Later in life-next week, next year-you may see your way through the names to the issue, the virtue, of heroism for its own sake. Or you may never see it. But in the meantime, enacting those small heroisms with the old friends in mind is better than not doing them at all.
Helena lives her fantasy, as most of us do not, and then at the end -- a reward? -- manages to hold onto a sly shadow-piece of that fantasy, even though she is forced to return to apply the lessons she's learned to her real life. She's a great character. It's a great film.
[other] kafka on the shore
by jillicons -- displaced in dreams
This is a very pretty icon in and of itself, but I uploaded it because it reminded me of the book Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, which I finished recently. One of the main characters is a tragic figure, a woman who wrote a famous ballady pop song when she was very young, and then lost the love of her life in a senseless accident and never recovered from this loss. One of the most repeated images in the book is of a beach; thus the icon. The comment is displaced in dreams because half of this character's interactions with the protagonist of the book are as a middle-aged woman, in real life (er, to the extent that anything in a Murakami book is 'real life') but the other half is as the young girl that she once was, through the medium of his dreams. Communication & action & identity as they relate to the dreaming state are very important in this book. I recommend it; it's weird as all getout, but very engaging. One of the characters is a transsexual haemophiliac librarian! WHAT IS NOT TO LIKE.
[deadwood] if ye break faith
by so_spiffed -- (we shall not sleep / though poppies grow)
This is an icon of Alma from Deadwood, who is an amazing character to watch as she grows and changes over the three seasons of the show. The keywords/comments are from the famous poem 'In Flanders Fields' by a man called Lt. Col. John McCrae, a doctor with the Canadian army in WWI:
IN FLANDERS FIELDS the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
I used it for two reasons: the tradition of using poppies to remember the dead (and Alma, like so many of Deadwood's characters, is shaped by the deaths of those around her) and the fact that when we first meet Alma she is addicted to laudanum. This is a holding-fast icon. An icon for strength.
[bsg] persephone in perpetua
by maiconography -- kyil kohr means enlightened vision
HAHA. Actually I stole these keywords/comments wholesale from another icon, because I love them JUST THAT MUCH. So I've discussed those in a meme before: they both refer to aspects of my fic Eleusis (and by my god have I jumped over a wall) which discusses Kara's role in the series by drawing on the Greek myth of Persephone-Kore. And this is a lovely icon for the mythological aspects of Kara's character, with the mandala (the kyil kohr) behind her head like a painted halo, and the muted colours with everything just a little out of focus.
He likes to quote Scripture into her mouth, punctuating not with laughter but with his own tongue, and he likes to tell her stories while she throws buckets after bucket of paint against the wall until her shoulders ache with the effort. He tells her about Aurora. He tells her about Apollo. He tells her about Persephone, the Kore, the girl who stepped out of the world of the living and into the underworld, and she’s heard it before but she listens anyway because, by now, she can tell when he is making a point.
“Persephone never stayed still,” she says, to annoy him. “Never in one place.”
He catches her in the cheek with a dab of water. “Persephone,” he says, teasing, “should not have eaten the seeds.”
[lucifer] all the best tunes
by spiffed_icon -- mike carey's lucifer. find it. revere it.
Briefly, the icon itself: one of the few not-female icons I have uploaded at the moment. The devil has all the best tunes.
Holly said 'I want to hear you rant about Carey's Lucifer!' and I am not about to deny her that. I got into this comic almost by accident, looking up some stuff to do with Neil Gaiman's Sandman series (the Lucifer character that Carey portrays is a spinoff, in a sense, of Gaiman's Lucifer, who retires to Earth after giving up his position as Prince of Hell). The series is complete now, 11 TPs in all, and I collected it religiously as it came out. It was the only thing I would always, ALWAYS spend money on, no matter how broke I was when a new one hit the shelves. At the time I started reading it I had just started RPing Lucifer in Milliways, and this comic definitely influenced how I treated my character, how I fleshed out his personality, and above all how I began to think carefully and creatively about the Morningstar in the Christian mythos. So for me it's something deeply personal and a part of my developmental history as a writer, but I would also recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone else: it's a complex, beautiful, dark, epic story, with a sharp script and a lot of lovely artwork by various artists. The cast grows slowly and people keep appearing and disappearing and reappearing in clever ways, and as well as Lucifer himself the cast includes the half-demon Mazikeen, his lady knight (I NEED a Mazikeen icon to add to my collection, she's fucking amazing), a pack of sentient and malevolent Tarot cards, heaps and heaps of angels and demons and figures from various other world mythologies (Norse, Japanese, Native American, to name just a few), and Elaine Belloc, of whom I DO have an icon. And I won't go on too much about Elaine, because her journey should be read and experienced. The plots are mindblowing. There are enormous narrative arcs and gorgeous, self-contained little stories. It's about revenge and destiny and independence and responsibility and the comparative ethics of power. It's about families. It's about love and loyalty. It's about the lines we choose to draw and the battles we choose to fight. It's about beauty, and tragedy, and transcendence. It's one of my favourite works of fiction in any medium. You should read it.
Keep asking! I love this game.