Latest Posts by neyso - Page 9

Edmund "Bunny" Corcoran, and his possible bisexuality. First of all, I'm aware this is a very common concept on the fandom, but I'm still willing to write about it.

Bunny is well known for his deep rooted hate to homosexuality, which in their context makes sense since the homophobia wasn't unusual back then. The thing is, even if we don't consider the fact that he studied the greeks (which we can argue that he wasn't very aware because he got into that career because of Henry), he does give a lot of signals about his bisexuality, repressed, of course.

First of all, and one thing that I don't see people talk about: just the way he talked to Richard first. In their conversation, as soon as Francis was brought up and his homosexuality was implied, Bunny got defensive and claim that what Francis needed was a girlfriend to distract himself; and what did Bunny do inmediatly after? Talk about his own girlfriend.

This could be easly read as Bunny, unconsciously showing that Marion is a distraction of his likings, that he does get the attraction towards men, but he focuses on his girlfriend instead.

And clearly there are a lot of more hints, like his relationship with Charles (which I alredy talked about on a different post), and his need to assert dominance to Camilla when he told her to iron his clothes, emphasizing on his "role as a man", or his clear disgust towards Francis that could be understood as envy since Francis is not repressed as he is.

However, if I were to talk, Henry is the most evident. When Bunny and Henry were arguing loudly (mostly from Bunny's side), he called Henry a lot of things he considered negative: jew, nazi and gay. And after this, he fell sleep on Henry's bed.

All these things, that Bunny considered terrible and negative were meant to be hurtful, and it is obvious that the concept of gay stands out on these other adjectives because Bunny finds to be gay at the same level of being nazi.

He's deeply terrified of his own sexuality, yet he tries to fill this void with Henry's attention. He somehow tries to be as close as he can be to Henry without crossing the line of friendship: whenever he's in trouble, whenever he needs money, whenever he needs comfort (like sleeping on Henry's bed after a fight with him), all these are the clear signal of Bunny taking a partner role with Henry, on his own way. Which, of course, Henry isn't bothered about (as I said on another post, the greek class seems to take something alike a harem-dynamic, where their center is Henry).

'Are you the new neanias?' he said mockingly. The new young man. I said that I was. 'Cubitum eamus?' 'What?' 'Nothing.'

Osamu get up‼️

Hey guys! I'm just letting you all know that I won't be active that much today.

Me and a bunch of psychos on Tumblr are celebrating the death of some old Roman politician.

the tragedy of tumblr is you will inevitably meet people who you should be having a sleepover with. you should be rolling around on their floor and rummaging through their fridge and watching shitty movies with. you should be shopping with should be going out to a cafe with should be wandering through the aquarium with. people who you should be experiencing quotidian joys with... and you cannot! because they live one million miles away

GREEK GOODS HEARD MY PRAYS AND SEND ME RAIN IM SO GRATEFUL RN

I’m very sorry for this crossover but why Kunikida and Dazai look exactly like I imagined Bunny and Henry in the Rome trip

all of my love goes to camilla macaulay and daisy buchanan, weird blonde girls who were never truly appreciated for their weirdness

Я думаю нужно запретить вставлять стоны в рекламы потому что они заставляют людей(меня) чувствовать себя некомфортно

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)

Isn't writing romantic? You take pieces of yourself and others to Frankenstein into a character who will live longer than any of you. They will be immortalized because of your hand, your words, and your world, and even if readers 20 years from now don't understand, they will read the story and find themselves in the lines.

Is your soul okay?

Bunny Corcoran ;The Death Of Innocence

(I wouldve added images beside the first one from the book with highlights to provide evidence for a statement but like damn, tumblr wont let me for some reason. i'll try from a different device later)

I think Bunny was also supposed to be the picture of innocence.

I know what you're thinking: how can a loudmouth bigoted ass character 😒 be innocent? I'm with you. Surprisingly, Donna wrote extremely 3 dimensional characters. Sometimes, to really understand a certain character, you have to look at all their aspects, zoom out of the negatives (which Richard would have preferred to remain zoomed in on to justify his compliance in the murder of someone who considered him a friend) and look at them as a WHOLE.

Let's define the word innocence in this context with the help of my sturdy old friend, Google.

1. The obvious, Bunny committed no crime. He was innocent in the legal sense.

2. Without experience

We can say he was less experienced in the basics of life (was 24, didn't have a bank account, couldn't even drive i think? We never see Bunny drive. Didn't even have finances or know how to manage them-clearly. He might not even have understood the gravity of his over-spending nature)

3. Lacking

Clearly, when compared to his peers, he was lacking;

Financial help from his family (except when it came to comparing him to Richard). You could argue the twins were as poor as him- its mentioned in the book. But the case here is different. Bunny's parents were rich, yet he was not. The twins came from a middle class family, and they had their grandmother sending them money. Someone was taking care of them. Bunny had been thrown into boarding schools his whole life and learned to "fend" for himself by becoming a thief and a mooch. Two very different lifestyles.

He could also be considered to lack in academics. He struggled with dyslexia (and I think also ADHD), which is implied to have affected his studies/studious motivation

Bunny was also lacking in pretentiousness; and I'd wager that, though he probably was insecure, he wasn't insecure in a way that made him chase an aesthetic to such a fatal degree. Yes he was a man of illusions, yes he kept these illusions up to maintain a certain image of himself (in that regard, he was very similar to Richard, whose narration of Bunny is usually judgmental). But Bunny was not pretentious like Henry, Julian etc were. He wasn't walling himself in to be an elitist in a scholarly way, I think this fact is reflected in the fact that he had friends and connections outside of the class.

4. Not responsible for a crime but suffering it's consequences

Bunny isn't involved in the bacchanal, yet he suffers its consequence. He finds out about it, has multiple breakdowns to the point of getting drunk and writing an absolutely insane letter to a teacher with his feelings and suspicions bared, and he also opens up to Richard in his drunken carelessness. A mistake which cost him his life. He wasn't just killed because he was annoying, or that he knew too much-- Bunny had to die because he couldn't deal with the weight of knowing what had been done. Or perhaps, he couldn't deal with what the reality of his closest friend was.

5. Not corrupted

Easily, Bunny isn't corrupted with what I call " visions of grandeur" like everyone else in the class is. They all thought they were something. Henry and Julian especially. They were obsessed with ideals that, in a practical sense, ran the risk of polarizing their own selves. We could also speak on the fact he technically wasn't free from moral wrong. He was homophobic, rude, kind of hateful. But in a more fundamental way, he wasn't corrupted in the sense that he did anything that was major AND physically wrong.

I know verbal offences are valid too, and I'm not excusing his hatred/hate speech, I'm just saying.

Even him stealing that goddamn cake from the fridge or something, which Richard tried to conveniently paint as "he doesnt care for people (forget that he can't read)". YES, stealing other people's food is bad, but is it (done for survival?) as bad as:

incest (also pre-unhinged Charles, I dont know if what the twins did was consensual or if Charles used to force himself on Camilla or use an abusive dynamic to make her submit. I think that only came on after Bunny died, but idk)

poisoning someone's dogs

killing a baby chick or whatever weird shit richard did as a kid. and then as an adult the many questionable things he did

francis lowkey seemed like a sexual predator and i understand this might make people upset but i feel like he preyed on Charles' weakened mental / alcoholic state to sleep with him when charles (despite being bi) was not comfortable with the fact that he was attracted to men and wouldnt sleep with francis when he was sober.

Julian is just all wrong

6. Simple ; naive

So, without repeating anything- I genuinely feel like Bunny was so simple sometimes he was genuinely a dumbass. His death itself....how did he see the man he KNEW wanted to kill him (and I know this because in the letter to Julian, Bunny explicitly mentions "He" (Henry, not "THEY" the class) is going to kill him)

He sees them all there and still lets his guard down. He was so naive, that despite his very real paranoia of being stalked/killed, he still engaged with them like they were just a bunch of friends.

Another thing, child-like attributes are often related to naivety. (Him bouncing on everyone's beds that one morning, he was hyper, couldn't regulate his emotions, even his anger and aggression was very childish/immature in nature)

7. Not intended to cause harm

This is the only one I disagree with, because this was the only sense in which Bunny was NOT innocent. He very much had antagonistic qualities and intended to cause emotional harm to those he didn't like.

CONCLUSION

But yeah, overall, he practically fits the innocent role, which is why i think, after his death, things take such dark turns-- the reader loses their innocence too, in a sense, with the things that are revealed about the twins, about Charles, about Francis/Charles, about that one awful moment where Richard thinks the vilest shit about Camilla. The group starts falling apart and becomes disillusioned with each other- Richard starts seeing everyone for who they are, as well. His irritation towards Henry and the rest becomes palpable, and he also realizes his true friends could have been Judy etc (the normal students).

To lose one's innocence, we first have to encounter a scenario or go through something that gives us a greater awareness of the pain or the evil we are surrounded by. Here, losing Bunny was the catalyst in making Richard (and by extension, us) realize the characters and situations for what they really were.

Бог собрал во мне комбинацию самых чудесных чувств: ненависти злости и зависти 🥰 на самом деле я совсем не так ощущаю себя 90% времени но этот месяц меня убивает

He is trying to fool himself

“You need to tell me about *A*” oh no no no no no. I don’t need to tell you about A.

I nearly cried because car didn’t hit me

I don’t understand what’s happening to me but I want myself dead and hurt so much because I know I’m not worth anything, I’m dumb and I can’t be trusted or loved. I shouldn’t care about that and I’m definitely not going to give up on my dreams but gosh how much I want someone to be with me entirely with body and soul.

bro. bro you are romantisizing the secret history. bro you are enamored with the greek class just like richard. bro you are ignoring the bad things and creating aesthetics based on a book telling a murder of a young man. brother.

Today I discovered that a couple of TSH characters were based on actual people Donna Tartt knew at Bennington College- amongst them were students Todd O'Neal and Matt Jacobsen, who were the inspiration for Henry and Bunny respectively.

AND JUST—

There's even their own comments about it and it's so funny wait:

Here's the source

the fact that richard sees/wants us to see judy poovey as sort of dumb, while also seeing/wanting us to see julian morrow as some revolutionary mind when they're having the same damn thoughts is crazy to me

like near the end of the first chapter when we hear some about the class discussion, one of the points julian discusses (in simple terms lol) is how people who tend to bottle things up and stay composed all the time end up causing greater amounts of destruction when they "lose control" than people who allow themselves to lose control on occasion, but he does it with many words and references

and richard is like "wow this is awesome how sick is this guy"

then at the beginning of chapter two, judy poovey is telling richard about the time henry beat the fuck out of spike romney and she says something about how when uptight people lose it they REALLY lose it, but in terms just as simple as those

and richard just goes "yeah, i guess"

which there for sure is something to be said about the way people use words and the difference that use of language has on the way people feel about certain concepts, but you know

(EDIT)

also: misogyny, clearly

Begging people to read into the gothic conventions used in “The Secret History” instead of repeatedly discussing the queerness (which is ultimately just bad representation and nothing more).

Edmund Corcoran is called “Bunny” to show the corruption of innocence - which was a gothic fear used in novels like Wuthering Heights and Frankenstein. Bunny is innocence, not for his morality but rather because he is ignorant and able to live outside reality with zero consequences (until the ol’ murder and he is corrupted by panic, guilt and death)

Henry Winter is Richard Papen’s double as he represent all the inner darkness within Papen he fails to express. Papen helps them poison Bunny and is complicit throughout the murders but doesn’t take direct action. This extends back to Dr Jeykll and Mr Hyde but I don’t want to discuss that novella rn. You can read this as Papen being Winter’s double, but elaborate because I don’t necessarily agree.

Henry is the epitome of a Byronic hero which was used in Frankenstein and so much more. He dies in such a way in order to solidify his status as a Byronic hero - in my opinion anyhow.

If you google “gothic literature conventions” you will begin to see TSH as less of a “dark academic aesthetic” novel, and more of a gothic horror inspired by Victorian literature okay thank you and goodnight.

headcanon that henry winter locks himself in his apartment during the ides of march and refuses to leave or let anyone in

bunny corcoran on a trip in the most ridiculous hawaiian shirt, buying the most stupid ‘i <3 rome’ or ‘i <3 paris’ tourist shirts and wearing them UNIRONICALLY. bunny corcoran with a fanny pack and a sling with a big ass camera hanging around his neck. (the pictures are all blurry and of his own feet). bunny corcoran in socks and sandals, getting the classic tourist pictures taken like making it look like he’s holding the eiffel tower. yeah thats it.

I hate when people are discoursing on The Secret History and are like "oh I never fell for it, I knew they were pretentious assholes the whole time" like okay???? I'm sorry you have such a devastating lack of imagination. sorry you missed out on the silliest and loveliest part of the book. that's sad.

Morning routine before Greek class 🏛️ 📖

I think artworks are too kind to Richard’s hair, here is my lore-accurate nail scissors haircut for him.

rip Bunny Corcoran, you would have loved chatgpt