I'm here with more info dump and more questions about your culture. Because I believe PageBound is where we can also pass down stories and I think that's beautiful. So I would like to know your most favourite, most insane love stories from your culture, please. Eg: Romeo and Juliet. Like, people always bring up stories like Eros and Psyche, Orpheus and Eurydice (my favourite) when talking about mythology and romance, but I genuinely think there are so many more of such stories in different cultures.

Because in my culture we have the story of Sati and Shiva, and I think it’s genuinely tragic that the practice of self-immolation got named after a goddess who didn’t kill herself to give her husband a “good life” or whatever patriarchal reinterpretation people later made of it. She killed herself out of rage. Out of fury at her father for disrespecting both her and the man she loved. Which is such a different emotional framework. It’s less “devoted wife sacrifices herself for husband after his death” and more: fuck you, my death is in your hands kind of thing. And honestly, that same energy exists in the Ramayana too.

Quick rundown: Rama is exiled, his wife Sita is kidnapped by Ravana, and Rama wages this enormous war to bring her back. But after they return to the kingdom, people start gossiping about Sita because she spent time in another man’s palace. So Rama exiles her while she’s pregnant because he has to “do his duty as king." (BUT NOT BEFORE LITERALLY PUTTING HER THROUGH A TRIAL BY FIRE TO PROVE HER INNOCENCE THE AUDACITY OF THIS MAN Y'ALL) And later, after she raises their sons away from him and he finds her and begs her to bring his sons back to him along with herself, he asks her to prove her purity again. A trial by fire. Again. And this time she refuses. Tells her sons to be good boys and she basically says, if I have been truthful and faithful, let the earth itself take me back.

And the earth literally opens up and consumes her. Y'all she's so badass. She's like hahaha we're never ever getting back together.

And Rama is just left there with their sons And I think there’s something so powerful about that ending. It’s Sita essentially saying: you don’t get me anymore.

But the story that always destroys me is Sati and Shiva. Sati falls in love with Shiva despite everyone thinking he’s strange — this ash-covered hermit sitting in cremation grounds, wearing snakes, smoking weed, completely detached from society. In one version of the story, during her swayamvar (think the bachelorette), where she chooses her own husband by putting a garland around a candidate's neck, she throws her garland up in the air and it lands around Shiva’s neck. In another, she meditates and worships him for so long that he finally agrees to marry her. But her father, Daksha, despises Shiva. He thinks he’s beneath her. So one day Daksha hosts this huge ritual and intentionally refuses to invite Shiva and Sati. Shiva tells her not to go because he knows Sati will be humiliated, but Sati insists because, well, it’s her father.

And when she gets there, Daksha humiliates both her and Shiva publicly. So Sati calls upon fire and immolates herself right there. As a final fuck you. And Shiva loses his mind. He becomes so consumed by grief and rage that that he picks up Sati’s burned body and starts dancing the Tandava — the dance of death and destruction and creates these forms of chaos, including Bhadrakali (translates to the dark one who is gentle), who KILLS EVERYONE AND BEHEADS DAKSHA, the irony y'all. And his grief is so immense that it literally threatens cosmic balance. The gods have to intervene because Shiva is basically going to destroy existence itself. So Vishnu uses his chakra (a weapon) to cut Sati’s body into pieces, and the places where those pieces fall become sacred temples across India. Like. I’m sorry. If your love story does not involve cosmic devastation, grief so intense it destabilises the universe, rage powerful enough to birth gods, and dancing with your lover’s charred body until reality itself starts collapsing… is it even love?

Anyway. What’s the most unhinged, devastating, or beautiful love story from your culture’s mythology (doesn't have to be myth can be a literature type of legend too)?