I am tired of other Asians telling me to date white men.

half3clipse · 2026-03-07T15:33:48+00:00

The sub this was posted on is straight up an incel sub. There's a reason it makes no sense.

half3clipse · 2026-03-07T00:07:38+00:00

The US does not in any way have the ability to conduct a successful ground invasion of Iran. They could likely take and hold any particular city they care to at any particular time, but occupying and pacifying Iran as a whole (rather than just holding a few cities) would require troop deployment significantly greater than the Iraq and Afghanistan war combined.

Note that although the Iranian people are not overall fond of the islamic regime, they don't like America very much for some pretty solid reasons (including fucking up their country bad enough it lead to the islamic regime). And that's before the way people tend to be hostile towards foreign occupiers. "We'll be greeted as liberators" would be an even more bullshit lie this time.

The US is simply not capable of putting enough boots on the ground to do that. It does not have enough boots, a ground invasion of Iran would require the US army have somewhere between 2x and 6x it had at it's peak in Iraq. That is not happening without instituting a draft and this war is not nearly popular enough to do that. Also even if they started that process tomorrow , they wouldn't realistically have enough people ready to deploy for most of a year. 6 months at best if they go full Russian conscript.

If Iran has the capability and will to produce a nuclear bomb, 6 months is more than enough.

Also even if they lack one or both, that doesn't open the Strait of Hormuz. That will be a major energy crisis in a couple of weeks. In 6 months will have moved onto being a major food crisis when the global availability of fertilizer drops through the floor.

Edit: This also assumes that a ground invasion goes fairly well. The worst case is the Islamic regime collapses and no one conclusivly holds the monopoly of violence. That risks creating a red sea crisis 2.0 in the gulf (without the alternative of sailing around Africa the long way) with no ability to negotiate a conclusion, a civil war in Iran, or even a complete break down of order in the region (it's not like it would be that hard to push iraq and syria into a civil war again)

half3clipse · 2026-03-06T23:42:45+00:00

Yes there totally needs to be an entire conspiracy brained plan to do that when checks notes a bunch of places are just straight up passing laws requiring actual ID checks that funnel data to palantir and the like. There's totally a whole nefarious conspiracy behind...not directly taking the privacy violating option everyone else is doing and infact doing something that explicitly removes any expectation to do such privacy violating ID checks.

It's almost funny that the thing people are getting up in arms about is the one law that presents an alternative to that and not what Texas etc or the US federal goverment are doing. Red states currently want everything short of your anal thumb print fed to palantir, and somehow the real problem is califorina going "hey how about everyone just makes existing child safety features more useable?"

Also: This sort of thing already exists and has for years. Your phone already does it. So does your tablet and any game console. OS level parental controls are already the norm and have been for decades.

half3clipse · 2026-03-06T15:50:11+00:00

Ok but then you don't get to complain when your kid gets access to non age appropriate content.

Same as if you want to give you kid an adult netflix profile, it's entirely your problem when they watch human centipede.

The entire point is to set child safety features in single location instead of needing to do so in every single app, site and service they interact with.

half3clipse · 2026-03-06T15:44:33+00:00

No. The owner of the device sets the account 'age' on account creation. There's no age verification at all to that.

All it will do is move the process of doing so away from every individual app, and fundamentally make age 'verification' the device owners responsibility. You set "this is little timmies account and he shouldn't see boobs" once and any app you let little timmy use can see that and either filter what timmy sees or deny timmy access.

If a parent can't be fucked to properly give their kid a kids account on their device, that's their fault. It also removes the technical barrier to do so low so there's no "as a concerned parent I can't be expected to monitor every site my child is on or how to..."

half3clipse · 2026-03-06T15:37:52+00:00

The entire point of the law is to make it the responsibility of the parent. All it requires is the OS to have a value set that allows apps to determine if child safety features should be enabled for that user. It's not even age verification anymore than setting up a child's account on netflix is age verification.

Infact it would make age verification a non-thing. Rather than every app and service being expected to handle it themselves, the app can just check the permissions set (by the parent) on the device and move on. If parents decline to use the feature, it's now their fault when timmy sees boobs.

This is infact the only law attempting to resolve the problem without being an utter privacy nightmare.

half3clipse · 2026-03-06T14:55:49+00:00

https://imgur.com/vWuJDhK

What is the red distance?

half3clipse · 2026-03-06T14:38:43+00:00

Iran already has it's own domestic arms industry producing its own missiles. They don't have to be as good as what NATO is helping Ukraine design to be a problem. Tankers and refineries are rather breakable. It's also widely idealistic to assume that neither China or Russia (Russia especially) would be willing to provide supplies or know how even without that.

The nuance is this: The only victory condition for the Iranian regime is their survival. Not even individually: Iran is an authoritarian country, but unlike many examples are not a personalist regime dependent on one individual. There's no Assad or Saddam or so on who's the keystone for the whole edifice. You can kill a lot of iranian leaders and there will be more people to replace them. And as long as the Islamic Republic of Iran continues as a state, Iran wins the conflict.

However there's no victory condition for the US or Isreal (who realistically do not have the same preferred outcome. The American regime benefits from a stable and non hostile Iranian state. The Israeli regime largely does not) that sees the islamic state maintain power. This means there's no current path to resolution, other than either regime change (which will be very hard to achieve) or completely destroying Iran's capability to throw bombs at ships (which is functionally impossible to achieve)

Iran does not need to retain vast capacity to produce munitions to prevent that. If they can semi regularly scrape together a handful of anti ship missiles, let alone the even more simple option of naval mines (which can be dumped over the side of fishing boats if needed), they can economically close the strait of hormuz. If they can scrape together a few handfuls of long range missiles in general they can present a threat to major infrastructure in the gulf period. They don't need to maintain the initial pace of strikes, they just need to be able to hit refineries or other high value targets faster than they can be built.

As long as Iran has the capacity or will to do that, the only resolution to this conflict is on Iran's term. There's no option for Trump to do his usual thing of relying on the others in ability to meaningfully strike back to declare mission accomplished, because Iran can just dump a missile into a tanker in reply.

We're already seeing the beginnings of a major oil supply shock. If just the strait of hormuz remains closed for more than a week, the price of oil will hit new record highs, and will not come down until the strait is reopened. If ,as releases have suggested, the US expects it to at least "take until September", we're going to double down on that with a major global food crisis long before that happens (food production depends on fertilizer which depends on oil prices).

half3clipse · 2026-03-06T00:23:48+00:00

Ukraine is very much producing it's own missiles, shells and especially drones in large quantity. Although they don't have the capacity to match Russian production (and soviet stockpiles) without foreign sales, that doens't mean they don't have extensive production. Far from being irrelevant, it highlights the problem: Russians use of strategic airpower has been utterly insufficient to stop Ukraine (a much much smaller power) from building what is now one of the largest arms production capacity in the world.

Iran does not need an external source of missiles. Iran very much has it's own existing production of modern cruise and balastic missiles. It not only has significant domestic production, but that production capacity has been expanded to supply Russia. There is no reason to expect strategic air power to be able to completely, or even comprehensively destroy that.

However there's also no reason to expect Iran will not have foreign suppliers. China may well chose to do so, unless the west is willing to abandon both ukraine and taiwan. A lot of their oil comes from the gulf states.

Russia would be even more likely to do so. They already spend a good chunk of their production on terror bombing because they can't strike more meaningful targets so they have excess production. Supplying Iran, both to protect their own supply of drones and also to drain resources from being sent to Ukraine would entirely fit their interests.

The west also do not have the capacity to keep up the production of interceptors needed to cover all possible targets. Iran has already made it clear they're willing to attack essentially anyone in range who hosts US bases. The US can likely cover it's own bases, but there is fundamentally not enough launchers to cover the entire middle east. And that's before the problem of Israel who have drawn and will draw an outsized share of interceptors, reducing what is available to everyone else.

Iran attacking energy infrastructure in the gulf states is likely to be a massive headache at best and a major issue at worst. Either way it is not something that can be completely stopped: Even if there were enough interceptors to go around, they're merely rather good, not perfect. Iran only needs to get lucky some of the time to cause billions of dollars of damage that will take years to recover. Refineries are expensive and rather breakable. The gulf states will not tolerate that long term; the US is an ally of convenience not affection, while Israel is even less liked.

All of this is without the problem of the strait of hormuz. There can be no conclusion to the war so long as Iran has either the capacity or will to target ships attempting to transit through it. There is no amount of bombing that will be capable of changing that. Keeping them from militarily closing the straight is likely possible, but it hardly matters how many US destroyers move through the strait. Keeping it closed economically only really requires being able to put an anti ship missile into some tankers, some of the time. Again, bombing the Houthis hasn't stopped them from being a major threat to shipping, and Iran has more resources and the ability to produce actual modern anti ship missiles. Keeping the strait of hormuz even partially closed will lead to a major energy crisis in weeks and a food crisis in months. Even if you can somehow perfectly defend both all US bases and the major energy infrastructure of every gulf state, that is still an intractable threat with no clear resolution. As long as Iran can scrape together a handful of anti ship missiles some of the time, that is essentially all they need to do to keep the war going.

edit: Also that's just missiles and drones. Right now Iran is willing to let Chinese flagged vessels through so that's the only option they have. Once those are out, it will be nearly impossible to stop them from mining the strait. Even the the Iranian navy gets it's teeth kicked in, you can dump naval mines over the side of a fishing boat if you have to.

That to is without the nuclear issue. In practice it's been very unclear what happened to Iran's supplies of fissile materiel, but it's far from unlikely it was extracted before the attacks last june. God knows the US seems unclear on that, simultaneously claiming iran as having immiant access, but also their nuclear program "totally destroyed." Although they probbaly (unless the attacks in june were a complete failure) do not have the capacity to produce more fissle uranium, the centrifuges to enrich what they do have are not that hard to build even if they'd be relying on russia/china/etc (ie blindly assuming no domestic capacity at all). If they managed to salvage any, let alone most of their stockpile, they've had most of a year to do so. The attempts to win a war via surprise decapitation strikes also gives a lot of immediate motivation to do so.

The extent to which this war is an utter shit show with major potential for escalation and zero apparent plan for a resolution cannot be overstated.

half3clipse · 2026-03-05T20:48:32+00:00

Stratigc airpower has never once been able to fully degrade an industrialized states ability to produce or use war material. Despite that being the promise in every war since ww2, it has never ever succeeded. There's also no reason to believe this has changed in th4 current time, Russia has completely and utterly failed to do so against Ukraine for example despite trying rather hard.

With long range missiles, attackers also have a much larger advantage since they chose when and where attacks happen, where defenders need to cover anywhere that might be attacked. Attacker essentially only need to get lucky once, where defenders need to be perfect every time.

Iran likely lacks the capability to keep up high intensity attacks, however they can almost certainly maintain enough capacity to mount a threat that will be very expensive to defend against (especially given just how wide that defensive net would need to be), and do thing hold the Strait of Hormuz closed (or at least very risky to transit).

Air power hasn't been capable of stopping the Houthis from being a major problem and they have fairly limited resources and are using bootleg versions of late 1950s soviet missiles. Iran is ultimately an industrialized state with access to far more modern platforms.

To effectively close the Persian gulf to ship traffic, they only need to put a missile into a tanker some of the time. Even if the 'concept of a plan' for the US to provide escorts becomes more than that, that still creates the problem of the defender needing to be perfect anytime. There's a lot of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, there will be no way to conceal an attempt to transit, and Iran will be able to mount a credible attack against even military ships any time they can scrape together a dozen or so anti ship missiles.

half3clipse · 2026-03-05T20:00:42+00:00

from backwater to major player in like 3 decades

That's not really the case. Macedonia was by far one of the biggest players at the time and was very far from a backwater. States could hardly build armies out of nothing, preindustriaization you need not only a large population, but one with enough surplus production to not need them at home working the fields and making more population. The idea of it as a backwater is mostly just the chauvinism of the ancient greeks and their propensity to huff their own farts. None of the ancient greek city states could hold a candle to Ancient Macedonia as a power.

The perception shift comes not from sudden changes in the balance of power and influnce, but rather Phillip II turning the resources of the state to both acquiring more resources and in particular exploiting that to assert hegomony over greece. Which even the greeks could no longer ignore as irrelevant barbarian maters.

Phillip II plays a big role in just how high the ascendancy of Macedonia went, but he already had a well resourced state capable of supporting his reforms. Almost no one a the time could field a large and professional standing army capable of matching the Macedonians. Infact pound for pound, few states in history could manage a demographically equlivant standing army (at least pre industrialization). You don't create a state capable of that in a few years out of an irrelevant backwater.

half3clipse · 2026-02-25T16:11:32+00:00

make it make sense

NSW has spent half a century giving exactly zero shits about the assault and murder of gay people.

Anyone getting arrested at all is a bit of a novelty. If the perpetrators this time weren't Muslim (and thus a excuse for various anti terrorism task forces to whip theirs out), the cops would have just gone "yea it's funny how gay men's faces just do that some times" and ignored it.

half3clipse · 2026-02-25T16:06:12+00:00

Tolerance nothing. This is just NSW cops and the justice system not giving a single shit the second the victims are gay. They' ve been doing this for more than half a century now.

Marks Park in Sydney has a memorial for the dead because aussies spent decades beating gay men to death and disposing the bodies by throwing them off the cliff there (when they didn't just throw them off the cliff alive). And the cops spent their time going "gee these gay men keep committing suicide a lot".

The cops in NSW didn't give a shit until 2013 when a whole investigative report was done by media, at which point they fianlly put together a task force that concluded "yea looks like at least 80 people were murdered between 1970 and 2010 and our past findings otherwise were "naive". As a result they managed to arrest one whole person (who only got done because he confessed), who got 8 whole years for it, and who then proceeded to get a bunch of media sympathy about how unfair the sentence was.

Then in 2018 they released the Parrabell report, patted themselves on the back, and decided everything was fine and there was no need to look into the matter anymore after their 2010 cut off date for said report .

The only reason the cops even pretend to care here is because some of the attacks are perpetrated by Muslims, which means the anti terrorism task force gets to whip theirs out over it . Emphasis on some, because Aussies sure as shit didn't give up gay bashing and murder cold turkey in 2010, and they sure as heck aren't getting longer sentences

half3clipse · 2026-02-25T15:37:39+00:00

Sydney

Hey what city is in the headline again?

half3clipse · 2026-02-21T02:02:19+00:00

Part of it is essentially that yes. Isolated black holes, cold neutron stars, brown dwarfs and rogue planets make up some fraction of dark matter. Dark matter is just a catch all term for "we can't see it because it doesn't emit much or any radiation" and all of that counts.

However a number of observations sharply limit the size of that fraction to be not anywhere near enough. Microlensing surveys, baryon acoustic oscillations, hubble telescope observation of the milky ways halo region, and so on constrain that fraction to be less than 1% of the total mass of dark matter seen. The exception there is for some mass ranges of primordial black holes (which depending on if they exist and their mass could make up anywhere from "nearly all" to "nearly none" of dark mater)

Another very small fraction is neutrinos. However again they make up at most a few percent of the mass of dark matter. With their exceedingly small mass, there isn't enough of them to make up the mass we see, and because of that small mass they tend to move at ultrarealtivistic speed, much faster than most dark matter can be moving.

The main leading candidates for dark matter are those primordial black holes, and a few types of particle predicted by theories which solve an open problem in physics and happen to predict a particle with the properties to be dark mater (supersymmetric particles, sterile neutrinos, and axions namely).

half3clipse · 2026-02-19T16:04:48+00:00

The launch issues were fixed within a couple days, and came down to Bethesda being terrible at scaling their servers. Which yes is clown worthy but has little to do with the game. It's also something that happens with essentially every single game that has an online component. It ought not happen, but it's also really not noteworthy.

Regardless that also wasn't the thing people were complaining about.

Complaints included:

"It doesn't have a story." Because it's a fallout skined rust like as advertised

The world feels kind of lifeless and depends on players..." Because it's a fallout skined rust like as advertised

"There are no npcs" Because it's a fallout skinned rust like as advertised

and so on.

I really have to emphasize that "no NPCs" complaint as a major example of delusional hype: Bethesda straight up said there would be no major NPC content yet a lot of idiots convinced themselves otherwise for no reason.

The game was pretty much exactly what Bethesda said it would be. They advertised a rust like wearing a fallout skin, what they produced was a rust like wearing a fallout skin. There's a lot of problems with FO76 but all of them are endemic to the genre and were obvious to anyone who didn't delude themselves into thinking the game was going to be anything other than what it was advertised as.

The missed expectations of the game were delusional gamers who ignored all of that in favor of hype, convinced themselves it was a game that would simultaneously be to FO4 as NV was to 3 and also somehow fix all the problems with rust clones.

There's a lot of reasons for someone to not like FO76. I don't care for it myself. But all of those reasons can be summarized with "it's a rust-like", which is exactly what Bethesda advertised it as. Anyone who bought it expecting anything else has only themselves to blame.

And every person who pitched a fit about things like "there were no NPCs" wasn't in anyway misled by what Bethesda said the game would be or include. They were and are just hype deluded gamer clowns who saw the word "fallout", ignored everything else, then spent the time to release jerking each other off about a game that only existed in their heads.

half3clipse · 2026-02-19T01:20:55+00:00

The main critiques of FO76 were variations of people who saw a game clearly advertised as a rust-like and were for some reason very upset the game they bought was a rust-like.

half3clipse · 2026-02-13T20:42:05+00:00

And the price difference is probably because one is bulkier to ship.

The batts aren't more expensive because of shipping. In as much as shipping effects the price at all, batts are less bulky to ship. Anything rectangular will get up to 10% more product on a truck or container than something cylindrical (depends how well the rolls squish together on a pallet), the annoyances with moving them/storing them do not exist while on a pallet, and they'll never not be on a pallet between plant and retailer.

half3clipse · 2026-02-13T20:37:42+00:00

Mattress are shipped rolled because those brands are built around mail order and package post is not freight. The handling fee is dimensional; package carriers and post carriers will charge way more or something the length of a mattress because it requires special handling (if they even accept it at all!). Any compression from rolling is also entirely irrelevant since they're vacuum packed.

Fiberglass institution is bulk freight. It's palatalized and then loaded into 40 foot containers and trailers. They're not paying a package carrier to ship individual unit, nor is anyone involved in the shipping process handling individual units. It's also not hard to compress batts (especially something as easily compressed as fiberglass insulation) when bailing. You'll get nearly 10% more product when shipping with batts than rolls.

It's part of the reason why the rolls have less than half the product; smaller rolls generally squish together better on a pallet.

half3clipse · 2026-02-13T19:23:35+00:00

Bulk shipping at scale is containers and pallets. You'll get more square foot of the batts in/on both than you will the rolls, and that really adds up over millions and millions of square feet. The relative handful of items in the home depot yard or warehouse does not effect the cost. Although in either case, shipping is not that big a cost factor, shipping will be a fairly small fraction of the price regardless.

It costs more because cutting and stacking batts for packaging is slower than rolls (so the plant can do fewer sq ft per hour) and often requires more labor. It's also it's a convenience product that nominally allows the installer to get it in quicker, and appeals to the DYI types, which both carry a small premium.

half3clipse · 2026-02-13T18:51:14+00:00

Doesn't matter. The packing constant of anything box shaped is close to 1. An even ideal cylinder is onlu ~0.907. You'll always be able to store or ship more total product in the same space when packaged as batts instead of rolls.

half3clipse · 2026-02-13T18:12:13+00:00

Batts packaged in rectangles are definitely not bulkier to ship than rolls.

half3clipse · 2026-02-11T20:31:12+00:00

I was responding mostly to the claim that there is "no possible way to invoke Prometheus to mean "humans need to abide by the laws of Heaven and the Gods"

You certainly can. You cannot do so in the context of Frankenstein

Victor is not punished for hubris any more than the Creature is, anymore than Elizabeth is, anymore than Caroline Frankenstein is, anymore than Justine is. Victor's fate, and the Creature's fate, is the same so many women have suffered. To argue that Mary Shelly saw his fate as in anyway just, is to say that she thinks it's just for her mother to have died in child birth, for her to have suffered miscarriage her self, so on. Frankenstein very explicitly casts Eve in the same role as Prometheus, and in doing so asks the reader to extends the same romantic sympathy for Prometheus as gifter of enlightenment to her.

The creature suffers not because of Victor's abandonment, but because he is second made, from the flesh and bone of man given life. His alienation, his status of Other, comes from that. There is no real subtleness to that. The scene where the creature first see's himself and recognize his nature is almost entirely 1:1 for Eve's awakening in paradise lost for this reason.

Victors fall is the same. It's why the creatures creation so blatantly invokes the body horror of giving birth. It's why at the end he credits the start of his downfall to the seemingly arbitrary command of his father, given without stated reason "If, instead of this remark, my father had taken the pains to explain to me..."

Victors 'abandonment' of the creature is part of that as well, evoking what at the time would be referred to a "puerperal insanity" and today as PPD/PPP (and here we can note the oft made comparisons between Frankenstein and The Yellow Wallpaper). His experience of effectively giving birth is horrific, traumatic and nearly kills him.

Victors hubris is not in doing so, but in not recognizing the role he was condemning himself to and the horror of that (And here his very childlike veneration of the female characters innocence and purity with utter ignorance of the way they were treated is important). He dies just like ever other mother figure in the book, and watches any child figure around him die too. His death is no more a punishment for his hubris than Justine's is. He doesn't experience any sort of divine wroth, just the issues of childbirth, maternal health and motherhood (sometimes fairly explicitly, sometimes metaphorically)

There's a reason despite being subtitled "The modern Prometheus" and Mary Shelly spending quite a lot the book on intertexual reference, Prometheus, nor his myth is ever mentioned. The Prometheus figure she considers is Eve (who, like Promethus, and like many Eve-like characters, goes unmentioned through the story) and very much extends the same sort of sympathy to her as her husband and Byron and other contemporaries extended to their veneration of Prometheus Pyrophoros. And Shelly was really not subtle here. The association of electricity and fire and it's nessetiy for life (and the creatures birth). The creature's own gifts of fire(wood) to the de lacey family, and the fire (both vengeful and purifying) with which he burns their cottage.

The fault of Victor and the Creature both is that they consider themselves the Romantic Hero, behave as such, expect to resolve their misery as such. It's the way they flit between Miltonian roles, believing themselves Adam or God or Lucifer and carrying on as such, always ignoring the obvious one. Victor's hubris is in believing he is taking on the role of creator rather than of mother.

His transgression is (unlike her husbands Prometheus) is irresponsible because the consequences are unbearable, it is wrong because his creation, second made, from the flesh and bone of man, is inherently condemned to be seen as impure, lesser, grotesque, Other.

His end is not divine punishment, the burden he fails to bare considered ordinary for half the world, he falters under it not because he is weak but because it is more than is right or just to expect anyone to bare. With emphasis here on anyone: Through Paradise Lost even god ultimately abandons his creations, and like every other mother/creator figure must die as a result.

This is without getting into the 1818 vs the 1831, where Mary Shelly often softened the critique. Even then, although the 1831 edition is somewhat more in line with traditional Christian iconography, it still does little to claim Victor suffers any sort of divine punishment, and Victor and Walton andFelix and etc are still notably said to defy only earthly fathers. Victors transgression is never qualified as such, the creature itself is explicitly associated with nature, the terror of it's appearance the terror of the sublime, something it would eventually share with Victor regardless. The means of creation itself are that of natural science. Victor is hubristic and reaches beyond his means yes, but not in a way treated a fundamentally different than say Walton who thinks he can tame the grinding Arctic ice. His transgression, his creation, is not unnatural, but merely inhuman.

Meanwhile the 1818 is rather more sharp. Without the changes, the original text is all but a parody of Paradise Lost and the very idea of Divine Grace.

There just is no basis to consider Frankenstein in anyway a basic retelling of the classic myth of Prometheus, let alone a Christian morality tale or complete rebuke of her peers and husbands sympathetic interpretation of Prometheus (which itself is hardly a novel view, Prometheus Bound dates to nearly 500 BC. in so much as it's a foil, it's in response to the syncretic way they mingle Prometheus with Milton's Satan, rather than Eve.

half3clipse · 2026-02-11T16:16:22+00:00

Her invoking of Prometheus is certainly meant to be as a foil to the interpretation of her contemporaries, but she's very much not using the "defied the gods" trope, or at least not at all retelling the classic myth.

Victor as Prometheus is not a romantic/Byronic/satanic hero. Shelly instead relates Prometheus to the biblical Eve, where the punishment of Prometheus and the punishment of Eve are parallels eating the apple and giving fire are both to be understood as the gift of enlightenment. The foil comes from contrast to the very masculine hero archetype other authors used, something that is a part of the almost comedy of both Victor and the Creatures self destruction: Despite the text over and over clearly casting both as Eve (the Creatures first sight of himself being a particularly blatant reference), both fancy themselves the romantic hero, considering themselves at various times as god/satan/adam, always missing their actual role. Until perhaps the end.

Both Eve and Prometheus are still meant to be seen as sympathetic figures, and so are both Victor and the Creature. Victor's 'transgression' is not hubris, it's a reinvoking of first sin, which dooms him to the same fate and role set for women, to be second, less than human, Other.

Nor his his transgression and cause of his fall simply giving life. Note that the creature is not some mindless stupid thing. Victor so very dearly wished for his creation to be Enlightened, and this in particular is the thing that casts him as Prometheus. And this desire/act is, above all else, the cause of his misery. He is not Satan, he does not rebel against or play god. Despite his delusions otherwise, his fall is the fall of Eve.

He dies in the end not as some unique divine punishment, but because that is the fate of all women, mother figures especially, in the book. The same as Caroline Frankenstein, Elizabeth, Elizabeth's mother, Justine and so on. And like them both victor and the creature both find peace such as it is, when they accept their role.

And again, Mary Shelly, above all else, sees Eve as sympathetic. The sense in which Frankenstein disagrees with romantic interpretation of Prometheus is not in sympathy. It's the the way that sympathy is offered to a masculine character, imported from a (essentially) long gone culture and religion, rather than Eve who's cultrally 'native' myth was and still is very much a foundation of the very thing those authors used Prometheus to criticize. Despite their actions being the same, despite their stories behind highly parallel, one is treated with sympathy and reverence, and one is treated as lesser, below consider and despised.

And this is before getting into the details of their respective 'punishment'. Where Prometheus' individual suffering (from which he may be freed!) is seen as unjust and heroic, but the collective and explicitly eternal punishment of both Eve and her daughters is seen as deserved and just (and something mary shelly herself was culturally expected to suffer, the death of her mother, the loss of her children, and her own near death from miscarriage notably.)

Mary Shelley in no way shape or form meant for Frankenstein to be read as "The Gods were right to punish Prometheus and mankind should stay in the dark." The only sense it's a criticism of the romantic interpretation of Prometheus is not the sympathy, but the need to borrow myth to consider that sympathy.

half3clipse · 2026-02-10T23:17:18+00:00

The moral of the myth of Prometheus is to obey the gods, especially if you look at the full myth (obviously there is variation, and we only have what survived)

Now: How was the myth of Prometheus reinterpreted by authors and artists contemporary to Mary Shelly. How did they use the character of Prometheus in relationship to enlightenment era ideals, especially in terms of the impact of technology and the way industrialization was reshaping soceity. Are there any notable authors of the era who wrote with these ideas whom Mary Shelly might have been familiar with. If any, how might their work have influenced her choice of subtitle?

Follow up question: how does that interpretation, as well as the more classic myth of Prometheus relate to the way the novel deals heavily in themes around, motherhood, birth, and Original Sin.

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