Millionth thought about “Burn” I’ve had this month: Eliza goes for Hamilton’s jugular – but not by repeating the insults we’ve heard before, (arrogant, loud mouthed, obnoxious, son of a whore, bastard, etc…) She rips Hamilton up on the thing he’s most known for, what he’s most proud of – his WRITING. His SENSELESS sentences, his SELF OBSESSED and PARANOID tone. She’s tearing him up about not just the CONTENT of the Reynolds Pamphlet, but the way in which he wrote it. She takes the time in the middle of her rage to mock his style, which is such a rap battle move.
And what is she going to do with all of the beautiful writing he gave her over the years, his letters?
Burn them.
I think about this LITERALLY of the time. About how she pushes the button she knows will kill him.
“not only did you totally drag our names through the mud, and ruin our reputation, it wasn’t. even. your. best. work.”
^^^^^^^^^ killed ‘em ^^^^^^^^^
Okay but that isn’t even the most hardcore part:
The entire play is a fourth wall-breaking battle for narrative control of personal and professional legacy. That’s what it’s about. Conventional wisdom — and basic logic — states that history is written by the winners. Hamilton: An American Musical shows us the battle for that proverbial quill.
Literally the first song tells us “His enemies destroyed his rep/America forgot him” because up until the release of this play, Alexander Hamilton’s legacy was mostly overlooked by the average American, largely thanks to folks like Jefferson and Madison underselling his contributions after he died.
(This is also why Jefferson isn’t shy and awkward in the play. While that would have been historically accurate, the point is that the modern perception of Jefferson is that he’s a Big Fucking Deal. Because he made himself look that way.)
So the characters on stage are constantly fighting to make their version of events the version of events.
Burr is the narrator because this is his opportunity to tell his side of things. “History obliterates in every picture it paints, it paints me in all my mistakes.” He’s saying that in the end he LOST the fight for narrative control. And yet — and here’s the fucking amazing part — the mere act of explaining this to the audience CHANGES OUR PERCEPTION OF BURR and alters his place in history. God Lin is too smart for his own goddamn good.
(“History has its eyes on you,” Washington says, putting a very fine point on things. And if you don’t think he also means there’s an audience sitting watching this play, you’re not paying attention.)
So, let’s talk about Alexander, his obsession with legacy, and his tried and true method for controlling the narrative:
Writing.
In “Hurricane” he says “I’ll write my way out! Write everything down far as I can see! … Overwhelm them with honesty! This is the eye of the hurricane, this is the only way I can protect my legacy!”
“It doesn’t work” you might say, going by the contents of “The Reynolds Pamphlet.” Except… it kinda does. “At least he was honest with our money!” the company sings. Which was really Alexander’s main concern, after all. Think of his priorities in “We Know” where his first instinct is to gloat because “You have nothing!” It’s not until a beat later that he even considers Eliza.
He published the Reynolds Pamphlet because he didn’t want people to think he was disloyal to the United States. His concern was with his professional legacy. And in that sense… he succeeded.
(He succeeded in another way, too. Listen to “Say No To This.” (God I could write a 40 page paper on that song alone.) This is where we actually hear the contents of the Reynolds Pamphlets. And how does the song begin? With Burr explicitly handing narrative control to Alexander Hamilton. “And Alexander’s by himself. I’ll let him tell it.”
Every line of dialogue from Maria is prefaced with Hamilton saying “she said.” That’s because HAMILTON IS WRITING HER DIALOGUE. Hamilton is creating this character of a sultry seductress in red, coming to him when he was weak and luring him to adultery. Maria Reynolds in the play not a character, she’s a fantasy, created to excuse Hamilton’s transgressions.
It’s worth noting at this juncture that Maria Reynolds, the real woman, wrote her own pamphlet. No one would publish it. She was silenced. And Hamilton’s depiction of her as a morally corrupt temptress became the dominant narrative.
So suck on that literally any time you want to fucking blame Maria for Hamilton’s affair: good job, you’ve bought into a serial adulterer’s lies about a battered woman. Also don’t do that, I swear to god I will come for you.)
SO. What does any of this have to do with Burn?
In the very end, it’s revealed that it wasn’t Jefferson or Burr or Hamilton in control of the Almighty Narrative.
It was Eliza.
The very last second of the play is Alexander Hamilton turning Eliza to face the audience. She sees the people watching, and she gasps. Because she did this. She’s the reason this play exists. She’s the reason Lin Manuel Miranda is telling us a damn thing about Alexander Hamilton, she’s the reason Hamilton got a massively popular zeitgeist musical.
Now. Throughout the course of the play Eliza sees all these people weaving their important stories and she thinks she’s somehow… outside. She’s not a statesman, she’s not brilliant like Angelica, she’s just a wife and a mother and she has no place among these giants. At one point she LITERALLY ASKS HER HUSBAND TO BE INCLUDED I’M GONNA SCREAM.
And yet she never had to ask. She was in control the whole time.
And how, how did she do it? How did she “keep” Alexander’s “flame?” By collecting and preserving everything he WROTE, of course. Making sense of it all. She spent fifty years on the project. Everything she collected BECAME THE NARRATIVE.
But you know what wasn’t in there?
That’s right: those letters she burned.
So she didn’t just insult him, oh noooo. Eliza WHOLESALE OBLITERATED A PIECE OF ALEXANDER HAMILTON FROM THE NARRATIVE.
And not just any piece. “You built me palaces out of paragraphs, you built cathedrals,” she sings. In “Hurricane” Hamilton lists his letters to Eliza among his greatest accomplishments, (conflating his writing them with actually BEING HER HUSBAND, god what a self-centered prick). “I wrote Eliza love letters until she fell.”
Eliza says: “I’m burning the memories, burning the letters that might have redeemed you.”
The best pieces of Alexander Hamilton: gone.
God I’m gonna go curl up in a ball and freak out about this some more. FUCK.
i dont get offended at white people jokes even though im white because:
i can recognize white people as a whole have systemically oppressed POC in america, which is where i live
most people when they make white people jokes only mean the shitty white people and i am not a shitty white person
im not a pissbaby
my white friends that have reblogged this give me life
4. Sometimes I am a shitty white person and the jokes remind me to FUCKIN STOP
If ur white and like this post I fux with u
^absolutely
5. It’s hard to be offended when white people jokes involve bland food/tourist dads in socks and sandals/white girls in yoga pants obsessed with pumpkin spice/suburban PTA moms and other harmless and mostly true stereotypes while jokes about POC involve them being called thugs/criminals/slurs/uneducated/illegal immigrants.
i fucks with u heavy if ur white and you reblog this
6. They’re usually really fucking funny and don’t perpetuate stereotypes that will ever affect me economically, politically, or cause me any true harm, let alone create risks that “justify” my murder and/or death
Headcanon that an outraged 6-year-old Charlie Weasley writes to an elderly Newt Scamander wanting to know why Gringotts keeps a dragon locked up underground and begging him to fix it. Newt writes back saying that sadly he’s been fighting that fight for years and no one ever wants to listen to him because the powerful families whose money is being kept safe by the dragon always shut him down, and that Charlie is the first person he’s heard of who’s as angry as he is about it. Charlie decides that day to dedicate his life to finding out everything he can about dragons so that one day he can free the poor Gringotts dragon. After the war, when they hear that Harry, Ron and Hermione freed the dragon, they celebrate and immediately begin petitioning to have it made illegal to imprison dragons so that nothing like that ever happens again. It’s only when Hermione becomes Minister that it’s finally signed into law.
This is the best Harry Potter headcanon I’ve ever seen
Just imagine how that conversation would go though, like Charlie’s been learning about dragons his whole life, studying them, learning about the laws surrounding them, practising the jailbreak of dragons by smuggling one out of Hogwarts, preparing for the moment when, one day, he can free the Ukrainian Ironbelly from Gringotts.
And Ron’s like “Oh, yeah, don’t worry about it—we broke into Gringotts and used him as our get-away vehicle. He’s just chilling in the wilds somewhere now so, yeah. Job done.”
I want an AU where Ron, completely convinced that he’s overshadowed by all his brothers and will never be as remarkable or as well-recognised as any of them, just accidentally achieves all of their major life goals without noticing. They’re all super jealous and think of him as The Golden Brother and he’s completely clueless.
I’d just like to say I am happy to be here with my family. My super weird family with two black dads, and two Latina daughters, and two white sons, and Gina.
edited to say that yes I know witchcraft ingredients were coded. I think this was a clever deflection to an irrelevant question.
He kept saying things like she was maliciously attacking the president with this action. I feel like the title “binding spell” should be pretty clear…? And he kept deflecting the point of “we are doing this because the president’s actions are threatening the people we love” with stupid, irrelevant stuff about her using her beliefs as a tool. It’s no different than going and praying for something, and he kept using it to deflect her actual point, that the president is dangerous and his actions are going to have severe fallout.
A picture of the Cobweb Panther in the 1980s. Thought to have a new color mutation, she gave birth to two litters which did not inherit her coloration.
This one is technically not yet history, because at the time of posting, the little craft has about half an hour left to go. That said, let’s proceed.
In 2017, NASA’s Cassini space probe ended its twenty-year mission at Saturn. After a nearly-seven-year-long journey there, it orbited the ringed planet for 13 years and just over two months, gathering copious amounts of information about the planet, said rings, and many of its moons. It landed an ESA probe called Huygens on Titan, the first-ever soft landing in the outer Solar System. It discovered lakes, seas, and rivers of methane on Titan, geysers of water erupting from Enceladus (and passed within 50 miles of that moon’s surface), and found gigantic, raging hurricanes at both of Saturn’s poles.
And the images it returned are beautiful enough to make you weep.
On this day in 2017, with the fuel for Cassini’s directional thrusters running low, the probe was de-orbited into the Saturnian atmosphere to prevent any possibility of any contamination of possible biotic environments on Titan or Enceladus. The remaining thruster fuel was used to keep the radio dish pointed towards Earth so the probe could transmit information about the upper atmosphere of Saturn while it was burning up due to atmospheric friction.
This is us at our best. We spent no small amount of money on a nuclear-powered robot, launched it into space, sent it a billion miles away, and worked with it for two decades just to learn about another planet. And when the repeatedly-extended missions were through, we made the little craft sacrifice itself like a samurai, performing its duty as long as it could while it became a shooting star in the Saturnian sky.
Rhea occulting Saturn
Water geysers on Enceladus
Strange Iapetus
Look at this gorgeousness
A gigantic motherfucking storm in Saturn’s northern hemisphere
Tethys
This image is from the surface of a moon of a planet at least 746 million miles away. Sweet lord
Mimas
Vertical structures in the rings. Holy shit
Titan and Dione occulting Saturn, rings visible
Little Daphnis making gravitational ripples in the rings
That’s here. That’s home. That’s all of us that ever lived.
- -a.k.a. TheWholeDamnTime on Ao3 - - - - - - a.k.a. Kara in the real world - - - -
I'm an amateur writer and crazy fangirl combination with a life that enjoys pulling pranks on her. Welcome to my life :)
My Fandoms: Fantastic Beasts, Carmilla, Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Sherlock, Harry Potter, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Marvel Cinematic Universe, and many, many more.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Note: I'm open to talk to anyone at any time! <3
