@b_jonas Will that depend on what hemisphere you're in? Like, if it's December and I'm in New Zealand, will my question get ten rep per upvote? Or perhaps it depends on where the upvote is—in December, an upvote from NZ counts for ten rep but one from CA five rep?
@Tsundoku Oh I had read that one a few days ago. (Not the story, but the post on Parler)
I don't understand why this answer to the Myrmidon question is attracting downvotes. I get that the Achilles/Patroclus stuff is irrelevant, but the first sentence does answer the question completely, I thought. Not descended from ants == not a myrmidon.
Full disclosure, Valerie is a friend and I asked her to take a look at the question. (I didn't know what her answer would be, and found out only upon reading it.)
Could one of the mods move the Achilles/Patroclus stuff to a comment on the question? It's clearly meant in response to @Randal'Thor's comment on the question.
As the asker, I think the first sentence of this reply fully answers the question. By definition myrmidon requires a descent from ants, and Ant-Man isn’t so descended. I agree that the second paragraph is irrelevant and should be in a comment to the q rather than in the answer, but I don’t get the downvotes; the answer does satisfy me. — verbose4 hours ago
@verbose It's a technical matter. We can convert an entire answer to a comment, which results in a deletion of the original answer. I am not aware of a mechanism to convert part of an answer to a comment. Let alone creating a comment that looks like it was written by another user.
Thanks. I'll ask Valerie if she's interested enough to revise as needed. (She doesn't have an account here or anywhere on SE AFAIK)
@bobble I'd not worry about it. Different sites have different audiences, and asking a q on one site might yield an answer when there isn't one on the other site. Case in point, this Petrarch question was cross-posted to both Music and Lit SE.
@verbose I downvoted it and flagged it as Not An Answer, per my comment. Saying Ant-Man isn't descended from ants doesn't imply that his creators never took any inspiration from Myrmidons. Two things don't have to be identical in all respects for one of them to be inspired by the other. The whole thing, IMO, should be a comment rather than an answer.
Also, we can convert part of an answer to a comment, but it requires a bit of editing. Convert answer to comment, edit comment to be only the second half, edit answer to be only the first half. I've used that kind of trick sometimes to convert an answer to a series of comments rather than just one.
@Randal'Thor The question header is "Is Ant-Man a Myrmidon?" If the answer is categorically no, then the rest is irrelevant. Because if he isn't, the stuff about whether the story lines were inspired by Myrmidons doesn't matter. Those story lines would be ways to underscore that Ant-Man was a Myrmidon, which (as the answer rightly points out), he isn't.
Fair enough. In which case, the question itself could be answered with, "He's not a Myrmidon because that doesn't apply to this universe." Or "Well, a case can be made that he is a Myrmidon because these story lines / plot elements clearly are meant to recall the Greek and Roman myths." But those are alternative answers to the question; I don't see why "He's not a Myrmidon because by definition, Myrmidons are descendants of ants and he isn't one" is not just as valid as either of those.
Hmm. I guess I assumed the real question is about inspiration, since "Is Ant-Man a Myrmidon" makes a good headline but can't really be answered without defining what it means to be a Myrmidon (do all aspects of the ancient Greek Myrmidons have to apply?) and isn't such an interesting question (checking whether a list of criteria apply to Ant-Man, or glibly answering "no because that doesn't apply to this universe").
To me it seems like saying Animal Farm isn't about the Russian Revolution because Lenin and Stalin were humans not pigs.
But you're the OP, so you know better what you were asking.
I can still do the convert/edit trick to transport the Patroclus parenthetical to a comment, and leave only the direct answer part in the answer.
@Randal'Thor well as you know from some of my answers, I'm a huge fan of reframing questions so that I answer the question I want to answer rather than simply tackling the question as asked. So sure, the question could be taken in any number of ways, some glib and some more complex. That said, I'm actually fine with the answer "nope, myrmidons have to be descended from ants."
If someone comes back with "Despite the fact that he isn't descended from ants, his story clearly evokes the same sort of tropes as evinced here, here, and here, and/or the creators mentioned this in this interview", that's a great answer too.
@Randal'Thor That would actually be super cool, because I think Valerie just didn't know that this isn't a forum and that discussions of extraneous matter doesn't belong in an answer. I'ven't spoken to her about the answer yet ... I plan to.
@verbose Done. I had to edit the Patroclus part slightly (remove one of the sub-parentheticals and some quote marks) just to make it fit into the comment character limit. Hope she won't mind.
@Gallifreyan Well, that gives us a month, a location, and a host. "February 1990, New York, ABC affiliate radio station" - assuming their memories are reliable.
It's all in the SFF question already though, and nobody there managed to find a transcript or recording.
I'm reading a novel called Persepolis for my English course, and it's about a girl named Marji that grows up during the 1979 Revolution. The author's intention with the novel is to break Western stereotypes of Iran and to show what it was like growing up during that time period. Marji is a fictio...
All this – the house and the remnants of the pasture land, the seashore
below the pale clay cliffs, the walk along it to the fishing village of
Kilauran, the avenue over which the high branches of the chestnut trees
now met – was as much part of Everard Gault as the features of his face
were, th...
I've seen a number of examples of poetry, where "nor" appears without a preceding negative. In these examples, I'm unsure of whether I'm meant to understand the sentence as:
"neither" is elided, so it's really a hidden "(neither) ... nor" sentence
"nor" is an abbreviation for "and not", so the f...
Could Gutenberg have used a different medium to make his printing press besides a wine press? It just makes some sense to me because there has to have other devices that could have done the job of inspiring him.