Portraits Of “The Wrath Of Achilles” That Just Make Me Wanna Cuddle Him

by Mallory Ortberg · June 30, 2016

achilles1

aww, the buddy! he is too nude and angry to even play his lute, little pal

 

achilles2

lil friend! I’ll hold you back from stabbing the ocean!! you’re okay buddy, it’s okay, you’re safe now, you’re gonna hurt yourself wrestling around in my strong arms like that

 

achilles4

awww, you’re so mad about Briseis that you don’t have a shirt on anymore!!! buddy you can’t let your feelings keep you from getting dressed though

 

achilles5

it’s no fun to yell at all your friends while you are wearing your jammies!! let me cuddle your face ok

 

achilles6

buddy!!! you’ve got the right idea of cuddling but you should only cuddle the living ok

 

achilles7

you’re so serious and damp about the ankles but I think you should give up pointing and warfare and let me snuggle you please ok

 

achilles8

C’MERE AND LET ME CUDDLE THE SADNESS RIGHT OUT OF YOUR HAIR

[Images via]

Mallory is an Editor of The Toast.

80 Comments

  1. theburnersmydestination +212

    That foam is seriously fighting the laws of Nature to cover up that guy’s junk in the 6th picture.

    1. gclouts +78

      But we get him full on in the first. Not what I have come to expect from these- makes me sort of miss the physics defying little dick ribbons

      1. thebeagee +185

        I think #1 is so upset because he forgot to put on his dick ribbon this morning.

    2. leider_hosen +34

      yeah, lol @ that very convenient wave protecting Poseidon’s (?) dick from us

      1. ConcinnityB +59

        I /think/ it’s the river god Scamander. Because obviously when you’re angry, you pick the nearest low-powered god to take it out on.

      1. MissBadcrumble +93

        Let nature itself take care of all your dick-covering problems!
        Introducing: The Dick Wave ®

      1. lavaloving +48

        Does anyone else ever think the penis covers were added afterwards? Like the painter finished and left the room all happy and sweaty and covered in spots of blue paint (I’m not a painter so….I’m assuming this is what painting is like).

        And then his apprentice or mother or cat comes in and is like ‘eeeeek!’ we can’t have that! and quickly covers the offending parts with no regard to form or function or physics.

  2. PolarBearGirl92 +137

    Achilles #1 has mastered the “oh shit i think i left the iron on” look for all time.

  3. damanoid +114

    This, then, was the Golden Age of Emotive Flopping Around. Here we see the Wrath of Achilles, as he in his wrath sort of sprawls, and flings his arms out, and lounges, and flops around. The Flopping Around school was well suited for any subject of extreme drama or emotion. Passionate romance? Flopping around. Profound sorrow? Droopily flopping around. Mass warfare? Vast surging crowds of soldiers, all flopping around on each other.

  4. nopemobile +109

    Is anyone else as woefully unfamiliar with mythology as I and having a hard time parsing out which person in the crowd scenes is emoting enough wrath to be Achilles?

    1. nopemobile +60

      Like in some of them the composition makes it easy enough to guess but in others it’s just a seething mass of mythically muscular limbs and any ONE of them could be the subject, probably

    2. Lizardskingirl +41

      Yep. I’m also trying to remember what he was wrathful about, and the paintings aren’t helping much in that regard either. His boyfriend died? There was a war of some kind? The Greek gods are up to no good as usual?

      1. Borednow +29

        His boss made them all go to war to “rescue” his “stolen” wife, then came to his tent and stole his wife

        1. Xolandra +49

          This; Achilles is full on mad that Agamemnon had to give up his woman-prize and so was like “o, tasty morsel mine now” to Achilles’ girl-prize (Briseis, mentioned above), to the point where the Greeks were almost destroyed. Then, in an effort for every Greek to NOT DIE, Achilles’ patron/lover (Patroclus) pretends to be him and gets himself killed, and THEN Achilles is like “FINE DEATH TO TROJANS” and kills Hector and refuses to not-be-awful to Hector’s body.

        3. praemunire +10

          It wasn’t Agamemnon’s wife who was abducted; it was his brother’s (Menelaus).

          1. Marblejar +10

            And Menelaus really didn’t seem too fussed. It’s Agamemnon that keeps going on about how it shows Menelaus up to be a failure. Siblings, hey?

      2. Annie +10

        He was a god of war made invulnerable with a weak spot on his foot because his mom was only half-crazy instead of full-on nuts. I think he gets wrathful over Hector dying at Troy? But no one is sure if Hector was a romance or a bromance.

        1. fcjaugusta +22

          No, he slaughters the heck out of Hector (pun not intended at first, but I decided to go with it). First he’s mad that Agamemnon stole his war prize (in the modern world we call these “women”), and then he’s unbelievably supernaturally mad that Hector kills his best friend. Like, he kind of stops being a person for a good while and just turns into the personification of murderous wrath. In the second to last one there the river god is pissed that Achilles has polluted the river with so many bodies, and Achilles is basically like, “Fuck you, I’ll choke you to death with bodies and then I’ll eat the bodies.”

        2. queenofbithynia +7

          “no one is sure if Hector was a romance or a bromance”

          I’M sure

        1. arachnidette +50

          I want to learn all my mythology/history through Kate Beaton and all my Western Art History through Mallory. I’ll be in the Toast Archives studying.

        2. PettyVengeanceFetish +24

          “But then we don’t. We don’t do that. Not in Scamaders River” is my new shut down to all stupid ideas

          2. PettyVengeanceFetish +9

            I was thinking Steven Fry at his most angry and condescending but your idea is also amazing and I love it.

          3. hummingrose +7

            Ok, I know Lucky a little in real life (haven’t seen him in a few years since I moved, but he’s good friends with good friends of mine) and I had no idea he was on Archer. Nifty and weird.

      4. praemunire +41

        Mallory’s compiled paintings of a few separate dramatic incidents. The technical Wrath is when Agamemnon takes away Achilles’s “prize” Briseis for himself because Achilles had argued that, to appease the anger of Apollo, Apollo’s priest should be restored his daughter Chryseis, who was Agamemnon’s prize. This causes him to sulk, withdraw from battle, and go running to his mommy for help.

        However, what most people remember is Achilles’s anger when his companion Patroclus later goes into battle against the Trojans and is killed by the Trojan prince Hektor. Achilles then returns to battle, kills the snot out of Hektor, and then ties his body to a chariot and rides it around and around the city, so that Hektor’s aged father, Priam, and his family and friends can see him dishonoring the corpse.

        1. nopemobile +87

          This is like trying to get into Marvel comics. There is just too much backstory and too many characters to understand before it will even compute.

        2. Unreadaethel +7

          His treatment of Hector gets more and more disturbing the more you study 20th-century US history, btw. Just saying.

          1. hummingrose +1

            Those are two things I have never correlated and now I desperately want to see someone do that production onstage. Or in a film. Though I haven’t studied the full Trojan war in a while, so it may be Problematic for other reasons.

            This is why I am going to miss the Toast, right here.

          2. Unreadaethel +3

            Me, first reading the Iliad: OMG that’s so sad poor Priam.

            Me, thinking about That Scene now: OH MY GOD this is horrifying.

    3. Annie +15

      I have no idea tbh. I know way more about Celtic and Norse and even trickster mythology than Greek. Lots of dudes with weapons being angsty is not my cup of tea and I have never read the Illiad.

    4. popelizbet +10

      #5 is Achilles crying on the dead body of the boyfriend. That one is intentionally homoerotic.

  5. caatness +57

    I’m liking the Confused Single Finger Gun happening in Number 6, with the Beardos being all, “The actual fuck, dude? We’re trying to have stabbing times here, and you’re just… like.. pa-pow? Who does that?”

    2. Unreadaethel +71

      If the Sea were your dick ribbon, you’d eventually get tired of the constant film of salt, but you couldn’t stay mad at the Sea, you’d know it was only trying to help.

      If the Sea were your dick ribbon, not even the interference of Achilles’ Hot Goddess Mom would be able to get you down, because you’d know you had the Sea on your side. And at your front. Lovingly wrapped around you at all times, no matter how improbable that seemed.

      If the Sea were your dick ribbon, you’d sometimes get stressed out over the laws of physics, and the Sea would whisper to you, “it’s ok, I know how much it bothers you,” and quietly take the laws of physics aside for a quick word about the importance of letting other people win sometimes. Then the Sea would return to lovingly cradling your balls.

      1. Either_Ada +15

        I woke up to this comment and giggled my way out of bed, up the stairs, over coffee, and stumbling over to this computer.

        Best/most meta “If X Were Your Y” ever.

  7. logicbutton +108

    Put a computer desk in #1 and it becomes Achilles doing an impression of me working from home.

  11. MissBadcrumble +37

    Kate Beaton laughs at your cuddly Achilleses!
    (Comic in reply because of hugeness)

        1. MissBadcrumble +4

          I was ecstatic the other week when I learned to add pictures and gifs!

          Ok, so you can make a picture smaller, that’s great, thank you for the tip!
          So, for example img src=”IMAGE URL” width=”600″ , what unit is “600”? Is it something like 6.00 cm:s? Or maybe it’s a code.

          1. MopRocks +3

            No idea! Pixels? I usually just edit my comments, dialing down the number (300, 270, 230, etc.) until I’m happy with it.

          4. MissBadcrumble +3

            Success! Tiny and just barely readable, this is what “200” looks like. 🙂 Thanks for your help!

  13. bethcorriveau +37

    Re #3, definitely just stared at it in confusion for a good minute before I realized that, oh, his arm is raised and behind his head, his chest is NOT ACTUALLY massively deformed. I may need a new computer monitor.

  14. aitch_ess +52

    I read all of these in the voice I use when I feel sorry-but-not-worried for my anxious dog.

  17. rebeccalibrarian +14

    I’m fairly certain that in #2 Hera (I guess?) has a wand and I’m pretty sure she is saying “It’s Le-vee-OH-sah, not Le-vee-oh-SAH” and the other guy is agreeing with her.

  18. RebeccaTheLibrarian

    I'm fairly certain that in #2 Hera (I guess?) has a wand and I'm pretty sure she is saying "It's Le-vee-OH-sah, not Le-vee-oh-SAH" and the other guy is agreeing with her.