#For context this is the man who told me the story of the Odyssey as a bedtime story

[major-knighton]

@emma-d-klutz asked for an update, so I will inform you my dad absolutely loved his new mug and has been showing it off to all his colleagues

Hi, I'm sorry if this is annoying but would it be possible to ask Blue how one says "I love you father" in ancient Greek? I can't access my own father's dictionaries bc it would draw his attention and ruin the surprise

No problem!

"Πάτερ, σε φιλώ" or "Σε φιλώ πάτερ"

[autumnmobile12]

The Epic Saga: Just A Man

Trigger warning for infanticide.

I want to talk about what an interesting choice it was in Epic's first installment for Odysseus to be the one to kill the infant.

In all versions of the story, the fate of Astyanax, son of Prince Hector, is always the same. He is thrown from the walls of Troy while the city is sacked. What varies from telling to telling is who does the deed, and it's usually between two people: Odysseus and Neoptolemus.

Most modern retellings make Neoptolemus the villain in this story, or they'll leave out this part entirely, because in the eyes of today's society, the senseless murder of a helpless infant is something only a villain would do.

Who's Odysseus? He's the man who won the Trojan War by engineering the idea behind the Trojan Horse, he's the guy who took ten years to sail home, he's the main character of The Odyssey. Odysseus is a hero. And heroes don't kill infants.

Who's Neoptolemus? He's forgettable. He didn't go on any heroic quests like Herakles or Perseus. He didn't slay any noteworthy monsters. Neoptolemus' biggest claim to fame are three things: He's the son of Achilles, he clubs King Priam to death in the sacking of Troy, and in some versions, he kills Astyanax. (He also enslaved Astyanax's mother.)

From the lens of the Ancient Greeks, a hero wasn't an upstanding guy who did the right thing. A hero was the guy who fought for what he wanted and did horrible things to his enemy in the process.

In the context of modern society, it's no wonder why the dubious credit of Astyanax's death goes to Neoptolemus. When that's the only real claim to fame he has, of course he's going to be a villain. We can't be having heroes killing babies because that's insane.

So let me tell you that when I first listened to The Horse and The Infant and I realized it was Odysseus who was committing the deed, that took me so off guard and I had to pause the song just to tell my poor sister how fucking crazy that is. I rarely saw this version. I mean, I understand the reasoning; it's setting up Odysseus' guilty conscious that'll plague him for the remainder of the musical. It's the flawed hero trope, which is a far cry from the brutality of the original myths.

And that in itself is testament of how mythologies have evolved over the centuries. It's why we have different variations of the myth in the first place. Societal views and values change and the stories told adapt accordingly.

Did Hades kidnap Persephone or did she go willingly to escape Demeter, her overbearing mother? Both versions are correct. All versions are correct. We cannot look for something as narrow-minded as a 'canon' version of mythology because mythology is a jumble of headcanons about the same basic concept thrown together by countless storytellers over literal centuries of storytelling.

In The Horse and The Infant, Zeus directly warns Odysseus that if Astyanax lives, he will take vengeance on him and his homeland. And after what the Greeks did to Troy, slaying the men, enslaving the women, and leaving the city in ruins, Odysseus is one of many Greek kings who have a lot to answer for.

Is Odysseus heroic for protecting his family by killing Astyanax because now the infant prince won't grow up to take vengeance?

Is Odysseus a flawed hero who carries the shame of his sins with him?

Is the deed committed by Neoptolemus and Odysseus goes home with his honor unsullied?

It all depends on interpretation. You can choose one that reflects a harsh history or you can pick the one that's been adapted to suit modern values. You don't even have to pick. You can appreciate them all for what they are.

And Epic: The Musical came out swinging.

[faithtrickedhope]

hello!! curious to know ur thoughts on penelope / telemachus / the suitors!! penelope has always been so interesting to me as a character & i’d love to know what ur take on her is!!

hello! thank you for the ask !!

right off the back i’ll say, i am so excited to see more of penelope in the musical. i haven’t read the odyssey myself (i do want to though, eventually), so this is my first introduction to a chunk of these characters and most of the storylines. penelope is really interesting to me, then, because she sort of haunts the narrative for a large portion of the musical before she actually shows up. odysseus mentions her constantly, she is reason to keep pushing, but we - the audience (if we’re looking purely in the context of the musical - haven’t met her, we don’t know anything about her.

and then we do meet her but… not really. the siren presents as penelope and gives us a glimpse into what she could be like, what her and odysseus’ relationship could be, but it’s not really something that can be seen to be accurate because the sirens are deceitful and ody is playing their game. what this does do, though, is reveal how deep odysseus’ love for penelope goes, that the siren would know to take her form to try and seduce him. i also think “the things i would do for you” line is about how odysseus is going to kill the sirens in order to get back to the real penelope.

we do hear penelope two other times in the sagas that we have so far, and i think these are both very interesting. first, in keep your friends close, odysseus dreams of her, and it is the dream version of her that warms him the wind bag is being opened. i think it’s telling how desperate ody wants to get back to her that his dream penelope would be the one to warm him of this, but it could also imply that that’s the sort of person she is, someone who looks out for danger and tries to keep him safe. we here here voice again in scylla, telling odysseus that she can take his suffering way. these are not her words though, they are the siren’s echoed in ody’s mind. he is so desperate to see his wife that he is using the words of a monster in her voice to push himself to get back to her.

but, okay, that’s all penelope through odysseus, what about penelope herself? we are told by telemachus (more on him soon) in legendary:

There are strangers in our halls Tryin' to win the heart of my mom, but she is standing tall 108 old faces of men who call me small They keep takin' space and it's not much longer we can stall

there are men trying to force penelope’s hand, to force her into marriage, and she is “standing tall”. twenty years her husband has been gone, twenty years and he might well be dead. but she is still standing talk for him. because just as odysseus is fighting tooth and nail to get back to itacha, penelope has devoted her life to waiting for him there. one thing we know for certain about her: she loves him.

there’s some pretty dark connotations with antinous’ line in legendary too, an implication that at least some of the suitors care less about being king and more just want to take advantage of the situation to take advantage of penelope. it’s shows, while not the same experiences, penelope is still fighting her own war back in itacha. she is suffering in waiting for odysseus. but she still waits. she still does not choose a new man. and doesn’t that say so much about the person she is? about how much she values love, and how strong a resolve she must have to keep standing her ground against all of this?

it’s no wonder she has a son who is so desperate to be a hero. telemachus’ desire to fight and “be legendary” is attested mostly to odysseus - the stories of him at least. but penelope must be the one telling these tales, and it tells of a lot how she wants her son to view his father. she doesn’t know what odysseus has done within the last twenty years, she doesn’t know if he’s even still alive. but she still wants to paint him as a hero because she has faith that he will get home one day to prove it. and she wants her son to know the type of person he could become. so, really, she deserves some credit for shaping him into a hero.

telemachus as a whole reflects odysseus in the early sagas, but especially the glimpses of a young odysseus we see in warrior of the mind. his willingness to fight, his casual nature around a literal goddess and desire to befriend her, his desire to be something more - it’s all things we’ve seen in his father. he has so much faith in his mother to believe she telling him the truth about a man he’s never met, and so much faith in his father to believe he is that man. but he does have that faith, that hope, because he still has reason to hope.

i think telemachus and the suitors are an interesting dynamic. because really, he shouldn’t matter to them. they’re just here for penelope, they’re just here to be king. if telemachus didn’t stand up to them, they would probably never acknowledge him much more than “calling him small”. and the fact the fight during little wolf seems to be the first time there’s been a confrontation between them i feel like could imply that before now telemachus has just tried to ignore them too. but when antinous talks i’ll of his mother, that’s enough to push him over the edge into rebutting. despite his prior admittance that he hasn’t had any real experience in fighting, telemachus provokes someone who very well might fight him for it, for the sake of his mother. because if there is one thing that telemachus and odysseus absolutely have in common, it is their love for penelope.

in terms of my own headcanons, i think penelope did teach telemachus basic combat and self defence, as well as more artistic and practical skills! they are very close, especially with the suitors outnumbering them horribly. penelope doesn’t leave out any details about odysseus - even the less glowing ones - and it’s helped telecmhus to actually think of him as a real person.

[the-lazyyy-artist]

What I love about No Longer You

The more I listen to this song, I began to pick parts of it that I can consider my favorites.

One of those is the Merry-Go-Round tune that plays whenever Tiresias sings. It's present in the chorus and in the second verse. It made me think that since he sees everything in time, it seems like a merry-go-round where the beginning and end of time just go round and round in his prophecies. (EDIT: the song is a WALTZ!!! but it really gave me the impression that it was a merry-go-round.)

The other thing I love is Odysseus' "WHO?" I know everyone in the fandom felt Ody's frustrations upon hearing what Tiresias told him. I mean, who wouldn't even break when he hears that he and his comrades won't make it home, and his wife will be with another man?

The last thing that I absolutely love is the sentence/line "I see a man who gets to make it home alive, but it's no longer you." As a listener and knowing the context of the whole story of The Odyssey, Odysseus really came home a changed man. He's no longer the Odysseus who left for the war. But, knowing Odysseus who has only one goal in mind, he took that quite literally, thinking that he's never going to see his estranged wife and son.

Jay really put so much care on writing every song in this musical. God, what a mind!

[theodysseyofhomer]

i'm right with you on the resonance between the events! what i took issue with was the idea that odysseus breaking xenia is what he/homer is intentionally presenting with polyphemus. i don't think we have to agree with the text (or be charitable to odysseus), but i do believe in the importance of understanding what it's doing and distinguishing where our arguments run counter to it. (i get that leaving tags is different from writing an essay! but your tags sparked thoughts, and because of who i am as a person i wanted to be specific in my response)

i think a lot about emily wilson's old tweet about how the odyssey is what 20 years does, how long does it take to come home from a war, will we ever be who we were? because insofar as the text gives an answer, it's conditional at best. he can reassert the status quo, but only by bringing the war home. he can pass penelope's tests, but he still can't promise to be the real odysseus, just the only version of odysseus that is left. none of them can get the time back. no glory and no peace, either. the looming threat even after athena diverts the final battle is that he still can't stay.

anyway, please do drop a line if you find what you're thinking of! that site has a lot of great citations, but unfortunately not one for the paragraph on odysseus actually fulfilling the prophecy, just the citation for the whole telegony section (apollodorus and hyginus). so i'm still only finding "odysseus makes sacrifices in epirus but eventually comes home and is killed" (the telegony via the aforementioned sources) or "odysseus is exiled and dies abroad, unrelated to the oar quest" (apollodorus, plutarch). not that that can't also be relevant! but the part of the prophecy that intrigues me most is carrying the oar inland to a place where no one has heard of the sea or eats salt in their food, and i want badly to know if anyone attests to odysseus actually doing that part specifically.

maybe hyginus and apollodorus take odysseus carrying the oar inland for granted when they mention him making sacrifices? or i'm being too presumptuous in thinking that people in epirus (not landlocked) had probably heard of the sea? but i still haven't found anything that convinces me tiresias was speaking of a real place, especially in the context of the odyssey itself.

there is a very interesting footnote to apollodorus on perseus.tufts, which has this to say:

But the journey itself and the sacrifice are not recorded by Homer. In a little island off Cos a Greek skipper told Dr. W. H. D. Rouse a similar story about the journey inland of the prophet Elias. The prophet, according to this account, was a fisherman who, long buffeted by storms, conceived a horror of the sea, and, putting an oar on his shoulder, took to the hills and walked till he met a man who did not know what an oar was. There the prophet planted his oar in the ground, and there he resolved to abide. That is why all the prophet's chapels are on the tops of hills. This legend was published by Dr. Rouse in The Cambridge Review under the heading of “A Greek skipper.”

it's not so much that a cyclops is monstrous because a one-eyed giant who eats people must be a monster; it's that anyone who does not follow your laws, your customs, your culture must be a monster.

polyphemus eats his guests not because he's a cannibal — cannibalism also being a taboo that applies to humans, and he's not human — but because he doesn't follow xenia. polyphemus says to odysseus "we don't respect zeus here," but odysseus approaches polyphemus as if polyphemus is the foreigner. he expects his customs (which serve him, a conquering hero) to take precedence, even though he is the one away from home. he's been away from home for over ten years.

because to odysseus, there's not much difference between the trojans (the city he's sacked) or the cicones (a people he raided on the way home) and polyphemus, right? except that polyphemus is able to turn the tables. he is a monster, not in the sense that he is not a human being — the trojans have not been treated as human beings — but because he can insist that his law be respected in his own home.

and it's not that odysseus can't adapt. look at how differently he approaches nausicaa, or even circe. but his perspective is what we wayfind by, and all the while odysseus, at troy and during the wanderings, is himself foreign.

and then he comes to phaeacia and weeps over songs of war. and then he comes home and doesn't recognize it. and then divine intervention both hides him from and reveals him to his son and wife. and then he has to conquer his own homeland. and then the poem ends, abrupt and final journey spoken of but unresolved. and each of these things makes his perspective strange to himself, and by extension to us. it is exactly at the moment odysseus comes home that he believes himself to be lost, foreign, for good.

[therealvinelle]

I agree that Aro definitely is not straight, but if he is gay and not bi, why window shop for a wife? If he wanted a partner for some reason, why not find a male one? It was a different era, yes, but are vampires really homophobic?

So, for this meta, we’ll have to get historical. Before we do, keep in mind that while I know Ancient Greece better than most, having studied it (introductory level classes only, mind), I don’t know it well enough to be any kind of authority on the matter. History, more than any other discipline I can think of, is not respected as an academic field, and people with poor to no understanding of historical hermeneutics will make very bold assumptions that they then have too poor understanding of history to realize are bullshit. This is a disclaimer because I don’t want to join in on the chorus of authoritative-sounding people on the internet with no verifiable credentials who spout things about history that are then taken to be gospel truth by readers because the author made it sound good.

More, I say this because your question is asking me to explain the morality and social norms surrounding a character from 14th century BC Greece. And this man would not, for the record have been Ancient Greek, he would have been Mycenaean Greek. Very quick history lesson: Mycenaean Greece was a flourishing society that suffered a downfall, Greek civilization fell into its very own dark ages, until around 800 BC when Greeks began forming what would become the Ancient Greece we know and love. This in turn means that I can’t very well read up on the marital and sexual norms of Ancient Greece when I’m researching for Aro, because he was five hundred years old already when Ancient Greece became a thing.

And your question concerns cultural history. And for that we’re going to have to look at how we know the things we know about history. How history is studied.

Historians have two kinds of sources: archeological findings and written records. (I’m aware that oral tradition, like the one carried by the Aborigine people, isn’t technically one of these, but to my understanding it’ll be treated to similar analysis as written records, which leaves us with the two types of sources standing strong.) These sources are analyzed, and we apply various theories and models onto them to make sense of the context they were written in. The more sources we have, the more we can refine or eliminate these theories or models.

More, history is an ever evolving field. There are movements and schools of thought that influence how history is written (marxism in history, that is, history as a class struggle, was heavy in the 60′s and I think until the 80′s), which means that how a certain culture will be perceived today is not the way it was perceived a few decades ago, nor will it be perceived the same way a few decades in the future.

You see why I am daunted by you asking me to give you an answer about sexual and marital norms for a guy who lived 3000 years ago, and I hope you’ll understand why I feel this word vomit is necessary.

Now, the danger with Mycenaean Greece is that it’s a society it’s easy to feel we know a lot about, because it was the precursor to Ancient Greece, and we know a lot about the latter. But, first of, the reason why we know as much as we do about the Ancient Greeks is the Romans. The Greeks wrote about their history, their philosophy, their government, and they wrote plays and told stories. However, that was two thousand years ago and their writings would have been lost to the sands of time if the Romans hadn’t idolized and sought to emulate their society. This meant preserving their written records. This tradition was carried on by the Christians, in part because Hellenistic philosophy was incorporated into Christian philosophy. We have neo-platonism to thank for Christian asceticism, the “mind over matter” cornerstone.

What I’m getting at with all of this is that we know the insane amount about Ancient Greece that we do because of some very unique circumstances, and so we can make very sophisticated theories about what the Hellenistic world was like. It’s still detective work, but not Pepe Silvia type of detective work. This is not the case for Mycenaean Greece. We know a comparative lot about Mycenaean Greece, considering how long ago it was, but there is very much we don’t know.

With Mycenaean Greece, we are dealing with a lot more uncertainty. We haven’t deciphered one of their two writing styles, and a lot of the text we do have is very fragmentary. Coming up with detailed societal models for Mycenaean Greece, and for the 14th century BC specifically, is... well I don’t know enough about what this society left behind to know what historians have to work with, but I imagine they have their work cut out.

More, I haven’t studied this at all, which means that any attempt on my end to research this would be stumbling around in the dark.

One example: the Illiad and the Odyssey, while composed around the 8th century BC, were set in the early 12th century BC, which is nearly Aro’s time period. The Illiad depicts a homoerotic relationship between Patroclus and Achilles, and both works depict a lot of matrimonies, so I wish I could use it as a source. However, not only would this time gap alone make these sources questionable, but there’s also the matter of the Illiad and the Odyssey being transmitted orally, from bard to bard. Changes were made over the years. For example, the technology described in the Illiad is from several eras, as the warriors will be using bronze weaponry in one book and then switch to iron in the next. This game of telephone is what happens when a story is transmitted orally from person to person. So, while it’s tempting to use these works as a sort of reference point, the possibility, likelihood even, that the bards made adjustments to keep the old story entertaining for their contemporary audience is strong.

For this reason, I can’t give you any kind of historically correct analysis on what the marital or sexual mores would have been like in Aro’s time. Even if the knowledge is out there, I don’t have it.

But I can say this, spouses have for the longest time been partners. Men and women got married, even in the gay, gay, Ancient Greece, not just to have children but because they complemented each other, they were partners. Men needs wives, and women needs husbands. And a partner was canonically exactly what Aro was looking for, feelings had nothing to do with it:

After Caius and Marcus had found their romantic attachments, Aro decided to find his own, although rather than finding his other half in another vampire Aro decided to create his own instead. Aro had a certain type of woman in mind and he found what he was looking for in Sulpicia. He successfully courted her and she came to fall in love with him.

As for vampires being homophobic, I think that is for another post about what culture they bring with them into their new life. But to be brief I’ll say that while the individual vampire can be homophobic, there can be no homophobia at an institutional level because vampires have no institutions. And it’s the institutional homophobia that gets ya. It’s what the whole fight for gay rights has been about: secure legislation against discrimination and that protects gay people. (The right to marry and protection from employees firing LGBT employees comes to mind as examples of this.)

So, no one could force Aro to marry a woman. 

And I’d go into a rant here about how the prospect of gay marriage, of even identifying as homosexual (the labels homosexual, bisexual, and heterosexual are very new and, to my recollection, were born off of the Western psychiatric discipline as men who slept with other men were diagnosed with homosexuality. I imagine a man from the Antiquity would be confused at the notion that just because he likes to sleep with dudes he shouldn’t get married to a woman), was unthinkable up until very recently, but I just made this obscenely long rant about how I can’t really make these kinds of guesses, so I’m not gonna.

I think being married to a woman and then banging hot dudes who came along suited Aro just fine.

Also, I can’t believe I’m doing this, but - I’m going to encourage history asks. Because this fandom has a bit of a history problem, as a lot of the characters are from different time periods and many feel unsatisfied with the way Meyer handled that. I am by no means a historian, but I know several of the historical periods the characters of Twilight are from well enough to make educated guesses.

So, hit me with your worst.

[dwellordream]

“Helen's character in the Iliad has usually been taken at face value by scholars: they describe her rueful responses to Priam and Hector and her angry rejection of Paris and Aphrodite as sympathetic depictions, often without analyzing in any detail the ambiguous quality of these verbal exchanges. I suggest, in contrast, that in these exchanges 1) Helen's apparent tone often does not match her ultimate intention, and 2) the speech types she uses— which range from the mournful widow's to the flyting warrior's—are transposed from their usual contexts to form locutions unique to her. Helen is also significantly aware of her centrality to the narratives of others, manifesting a concern for reputation (kleos) that connects her to the Muses, the Sirens, and ultimately the poet, as a number of scholars have recognized.

In the Teichoscopia (//. 3.141-244), for example, when she is asked by Priam to name a warrior, Helen uses her identification of Agamemnon to frame an elegiac look at her own past, thus substituting her story for his. Her reply is not particularly suited to the context. In fact, it somewhat resembles in content Andromache's mournful speech in book 6, when the latter bewails her widow's fate to her living husband. Andromache's voice, however, is consistently grief-stricken, and her use of the mourner's topoi (e.g., lamenting family ties, dilation on the effect the death will have on one's life) coheres with her role as loyal wife. Helen's rueful self-reference instead mingles regret with an emphatic awareness of her own singular status. 

When Priam asks Helen to name Ajax, her identification moves quickly from his epithets to the Cretan leader Idomeneus, who as a guest-friend of Menelaus reminds her again of her own story, and she remarks on the absence of her brothers from the battlefield (3.234-42). She then conjectures that their absence can be explained by their fears of shame and reproach that are rightfully hers (3.242). Since she views the actions of others as dependent on her error and rues bitterly this damage to her reputation, Helen assigns herself the crucial role in others' stories, thereby giving voice to the blame tradition that the narrator avoids. Her sense of her public reputation is anomalous among the female figures in Homeric epic; kleos is rightfully the concern of the warrior, not of the warrior's prize. 

Like any good warrior (and unlike her paramour), she fears the insults of others (3.242, 3.412, 24.767-68) and recognizes the vulnerability of her public position. Helen, in contrast to the chaste Andromache, treats her story—in part the battles waged essentially for her that she weaves in her second husband's halls (//. 3.125-28)—as if it were the story most central to every warrior's life. And this in some sense is the case: whereas the mourning wife's story would only be properly told in keening over her husband, Helen's story is on the lips of everyone, since it is relevant to all the warriors. As the catalyzing, fateful figure for these heroes, her story is their story; her own kleos is inevitably bound up with the kleosoi each.

But the complexity of Helen's figure and voice in this scene does not end there. Before she lapses into self-reflection in response to Priam's first inquiry, she says that he is worthy of veneration (aiSoioç ) and fearsome (ôeivôç ) in her eyes (3.172), using a show of extreme respect that implies an apologetic attitude consistent with her penchant for self-abuse, the primary stylistic tendency unique to her. Helen then declares, in reference to her coming to Troy, "Would that evil death had pleased me" (3.173 -74), invoking in a sensuous manner the end point with which she is associated. She makes a similar (though blander) declaration in her mourning speech over the body of Hector in book 24: "Would that I had been destroyed before" (764). 

Andromache uses a related construction when, as Hector is dragged around the city walls, she regrets that Eetion bore her (22.481). In book 21, fearing an unheroic end to his life, Achilles cries out to Zeus in prayer: "Would that Hector had killed me" (279). In the Odyssey, the shade of Achilles wishes something similar for Agamemnon: "Would that you had met your death and fate in Troy" (24.30- 31). Most famously, in Odyssey 5 Odysseus exclaims as he faces the storm near Scheria, "How I wish I had died and met my fate in Troy" (5.308); he repeats the exclamation in the fictional account of his travails that he gives to Eumaeus (14.274).

The ophelon phrase thus seems to be a locution used both by those in mourning and by Homeric heroes caught in threatening or painful situations—or, in the case of Odysseus, when telling about them in guest-friendship situations. The phrase does not, however, only communicate bitter despair (which may be either a cri du coeur or a persuasive tactic). When turned on another, it may also be used as an insult in verbal contests, reproaches, and taunts, an important aspect of its usage for analyzing Helen's speeches. In the Odyssey, Odysseus most frequently utters the phrase, deploying it twice (of four times in the Odyssey and once in the Iliad) when he is trying to use a painful situation to gain sympathy, a complex deployment similar to Helen's. 

In the Iliad, it is Helen's favorite locution for expressing both despair and scorn, which she usually does with some other end in mind (of all characters she uses the phrase most often, five times in the Iliad). As a stranger in Troy, her usage in the Iliad resembles that of Odysseus in the Odyssey, who must make clever use of guest-friendship situations to win his way home. Just as Odysseus, when seeking empathy from the Phaeacians {Od. 11.547), regrets that he won Achilles' arms instead of Ajax, Helen, when seeking empathy from Priam and Hector {II. 3 and 6), regrets that she followed Paris. Though each time she employs the phrase Helen's aim is slightly different, never is it simply the direct outpouring of emotion that it sounds. 

Although its repetition links her tone both to mourning diction and to the hero's emotions and concern for kleos, her application of this type of phrase is unique. Rather than actually being a widow or a hero in challenging circumstances, Helen echoes their outbursts by employing an emotional appeal that sounds like self-address, a layered locution whose related aims are deflecting blame and cementing allegiances. In her use of the phrase to cast scorn on Paris, for example, once she seems to be teasing him and once to be flattering his brother. The earlier scene in book 3 involving Paris alone is plotted by Aphrodite, whose machinations irk her protegee and who inspires in her a passion that seems suspended between desire (for the beautiful Paris whom Aphrodite describes, 3.391-94) and anger at the very goddess with whom she is so closely associated.

Note that Helen herself calls her painful feelings aKpixa (3.412), the most common meaning of which is "confused, indeterminate," a word that thus underscores both the complexity of Helen's passion and (what comes to the same thing) the merging of roles in this scene, so that Helen's abuse of Aphrodite comes close to self-abuse. Helen has been referred to as a "faded Aphrodite";  their conversation resembles an internal dialogue—a debate not only between Helen and her daimon but also between two of the facets that make up her many-sided figure, with its multiple motivations and opposing traditions. Moreover, her scornful responses to her intimates resemble each other: she exhorts both Aphrodite and Paris with dismissive imperatives (3.406, 432) and pictures each in a compromised position (3.407-9, 434-36); correlatively, she uses the ophelon phrases of both herself and Paris.

Her reproach of Aphrodite for using seductive talk (3.399) also recalls Hector's insulting of his brother for being a seducer (3.49). Helen engages in this derogatory language only with those closest to her; a significant variation on the normal context of such blame speech, her usage parallels as well Hector's treatment of Paris. The scornful abuse of one so intimate can sound similar to the dueling speech of warriors (e.g., the use of negative epithets and goading imperatives). Coupled with Helen's self-abusive epithets, this speech and that in which she reproaches Paris mimic the aggressive challenge of the hero on the battlefield. When Helen returns to the bedroom as ordered by Aphrodite, her expression and tone suggest pique, while her taunting phrases recall the flyting warrior: "Would that you had died there," she says, "subdued by the better man, who was once my husband" (3.428-29). 

At the beginning of book 3 Hector similarly chastises his brother on the battlefield, declaring that he wishes Paris had never been born or had died unmarried (3.40). In the bedroom Helen changes her tack with brusque abruptness, first telling Paris to go and challenge Menelaus for a second time, then remarking that he had better not, since Menelaus would probably kill him (3.432-36). Compare first Achilles, who goads Aeneas with a parallel insult in a famous flyting scene, when he urges him to retreat into the mass of soldiers lest he be harmed (20.197). And compare again Hector, who challenges his brother in similar terms ("Couldn't you stand up to Ares-loving Menelaus?" 3.51), and then predicts that if he did he would end up "mingling with the dust" (uiyevnc, 3.55). 

Both Helen and Hector contrast Paris unfavorably with Menelaus, and point up the superiority of the Greek by giving Paris' defeat sexual overtones (e.g., "mingling" [3.48, 55], "subduing" [3.429,436]). For Paris the lover, even encounters on the battlefield have a tincture of the bedroom. These two scornful acknowledgments of his unwarlike attitude serve to frame book 3, so that it begins and ends with Paris' sensual presence and the bellicose types who reproach him: Hector and Helen. Helen's use of this stance is not nearly so straightforward as her brother-in-law's, of course. She imports a verbal style that belongs on the battlefield, and that here in the intimate context of the bedroom takes on an additional layer of meaning—offering a sexual as well as a military challenge. 

Indeed, Paris (lover that he is) responds to this goading by treating it as a kind of bitter foreplay. And it appears that Helen's amorous husband has interpreted her taunts in some sense rightly, for Helen follows him to bed. By invoking her war-loving first husband in order to prick her bed-loving second, she employs the militaristic attitude of the one in order to denigrate qualities that she herself shares with the other, and her physical acquiescence reiterates her reluctant bond with him. That is, when she turns the emotional phrasing of the angry wish against her too-tender husband, she links herself to him and both of them to Aphrodite (since she and the goddess are the other recipients of such reproach). 

The hero's despair as well as his scorn thus take on a singular usage in Helen's mouth: in challenging those who share her affinities, she implicates herself in the abuse that she levels at them, while also preempting the criticism of others. In this way she stands poised against the gentle judgments of those who would forgive her, her character operating as a window on this defamatory tradition. Something similar occurs in book 6, although Helen's tone has changed somewhat since her interaction with Paris in book 3, and now she speaks with a post-coital combination of enticement and gentle abuse. 

When Hector comes to rouse Paris from his sensuous reverie in the bedroom, Helen tries to get her manly brother-in-law to sit down by scorning her soft and lovely husband. She engages in a delicate seduction of Hector, addressing him with "honey-sweet words" (6.343). Both Nestor and the Sirens also speak in a honeyed manner, so that the term delimits a range of speech types from the authoritatively but gently persuasive to the dangerously seductive, a mesmerizing quality that marks  Helen's speaking style in this passage. When Hector first enters and reproaches his brother, the mild Paris responds that Helen had just been urging him to return to battle with "soft words" (6.3 3 7)— unusual content for such beguiling tones. 

The enticing associations that attend malakos ("soft") thus contrast strangely with the stringency of her message, while those that attend meilichios ("honey-sweet") lend her words a potentially threatening quality. Thus Hector's refusal to sit with her becomes a refusal to play the victim role to her Siren, a role that his brother willingly takes on. While the Homeric poet may counter this ominous seductive quality at the surface level of the scene, it nonetheless resonates there as a disturbing subtext. From this perspective, it should not be surprising that Helen begins her conversation with Hector by invoking her threatening qualities, but in the self-debasing mode that she employed with his father. 

She calls herself an "evil-devising, shudder-inspiring dog" (6.344; 6.356; 3.180). The wish construction that follows is an elaborate expansion of her earlier use of it. Rather than simply desiring to die, she declares that she wishes that on her day of birth a gust of wind had carried her off to the mountains, or into a wave of the many-voiced sea (6.345-48). Helen purports to desire a type of end that Jean-Pierre Vernant relates to being seized by a god, invoking a connection between erotic love and death that he considers especially relevant to Helen's type. An echo of her wish in book 3 that death had "pleased" her (àôeîv, 3.173), Helen's lyrical desire for rapture here in Iliad 6 lends sensuous overtones to her speech. 

While her words explicitly depict regret, her flowery turns of phrase and sweetened tones suggest an attempt to soften Hector's attitude toward herself if not her husband: she sides with Hector in his chastising of his brother, yearns aloud for divine seizure, and notes ruefully her and Paris' future fame. Recall the similarity of Hector's and Helen's reproaches in book 3; here again she mimics his attitude, this time to his face with the goal of cementing her connection to him. Her maneuver is a delicate one. She must acknowledge her alliance with Paris in order to show her awareness of their shame; but she thereby also isolates herself from him, since he assumes no responsibility for his actions.

 As in book 3, Helen brackets herself with Paris as objects of abuse, highlighting their status here by using the ophelon phrase twice in expressions of heroic bitterness to apply to herself and her husband (6.345, 350). Homer thus has Helen transform the typical intentions of the phrase by using it for this anomalous speech act, layering self-abuse, scorn for an intimate, and a seductive allegiance of perspective, all of which ultimately aim at softening the heart of her interlocutor. While Hector does not in the end sit down with Helen, neither does he speak roughly to her, instead responding with a respect that resembles his father's treatment of her. By introducing a defamatory tradition that threatens to reveal her infamous side and yet ultimately serves an apotropaic function, Helen succeeds in deflecting blame: again, no one else abuses her as she abuses herself. 

At the end of the Iliad (24.760-75), Helen has the final mourning speech over Hector's dead body—a surprising status that supports Graver's argument that the Homeric poet is forcefully asserting an alternate tradition that elevates Helen and questions her blame. But if we look more closely at precisely how she mourns Hector, beyond her use of the mourner's topos of bewailing her fate as vulnerable survivor, we can see that her lament in this case focuses entirely on the threat of blame—the threat, that is, of the other story, the tale of bad-dog Helen. This is not to say that other mourners do not fear ill repute: Andromache certainly does, but mostly for her son Astyanax (e.g., 77. 22.494- 501).

Helen's lament, in some contrast, is only about repute; in detailing her fears for the future, she makes no mention of other horrors such as slavery and remarriage, which are often voiced by newly bereft female mourners in both epic and tragedy. After expressing her usual sentiment of regret (24.764), Helen notes that she had never heard a debasing or disrespectful word from her brother-in-law. She adds that if anyone else in his family ever reproached her, Hector would fend them off verbally with his gentle mind and words (24.768-72). She concludes by declaring that everyone else shudders in her presence (24.775). 

Helen's final word in the Iliad resonates with the dread that she might inspire, as the dog-faced daughter of Nemesis whose self-blame in Homer repeatedly suggests this other story. Hector, like the poet, may be gentle-minded toward Helen, but her description of his protection reveals how tenuous this praise tradition is; here as elsewhere in the poem her words declare one thing but point to another—this time her dangerous qualities, which cause a sensation in those around her like the chilly hand of Hades. At these moments Helen's figure suggests the deadly side of the female, to which Greek poets often attribute the downfall of men in some profound and sweeping manner. 

These figures are the embodiment of Fate (Moîpa/ Kf|p), the Medusa who freezes the bones, the Nemesis who is the end of the hubristic man, even the Aphrodite who (dog-faced) devours the husband's energy and wealth alike. 3 6 The word nemesis ("retribution") in fact surfaces repeatedly in Helen's speech and that of those who speak in her presence (e.g., 3.156,3.410,6.3 3 5 -36,6.3 51). That is, in the scenes where Helen appears, her presence seems to call forth the nemesis that is an essential aspect of her story. And her speeches, in their insistence on her infamous associations, serve as constant reminders of the just indignation and deserved retribution that acts of hubris bring down on the heads of those who commit them.”

- Nancy Worman, “This Voice Which Is Not One: HELEN’S VERBAL GUISES IN HOMERIC EPIC.” in Making Silence Speak: Women's Voices in Greek Literature and Society

[katerinaaqu]

Thank you really much I am glad you liked it.

Well you know what I am going to say that I ain't a fan long time how but yeah one could say that I guess but as you see I am not a fan of "Little Wolf" either not because it is a bad song but because it twists the meaning of Telemachus as I said above to my analysis. If anything I think "Little Wolf" would be an amazing song to add during the murder of the suitors. Athena could have encouraging lyrics or stuff to both Odysseus and Telemachus to also show her character development. For example for Telemachus who fights a real murderous fight for the first time needs encouraging so Athena appears behind him and be like "Fight Little wolf fight Little wolf show them that you got some" and go to Odysseus and be like "Fight my dear friend fight my dear friend show them what's your real strength" or something. I would love that context much more than whatever we got there (not to mention as my dear friend mentioned to the comments Odysseus was perfectly okay to defeat the freaking king of earth alone but Telemachus had his ass handed to him with Athena's help)

So yeah many things could have been done much better in my opinion and again little does it matter to me anymore because I respected what Jorge said during the first two sagas that were actually following the sources but of course they were having liberties so Jorge made sure that people knew. Right now it feels like "Fuck yeah did my duty and told them I am not following the Odyssey so screw the Odyssey from now on I'll do my own shit instead of creating an original character and story let's just screw the most iconic parts! I already told them I am not accurate so from now on it's free game" and this pains me beyond words!

But I agree to what you said he absolutely was alone in a sea of people he hated alone in his home when his own mother; the one steadfast figure he had in his life finally broke 💔 his grandfather probably he respected now gone mad in sorrow and of course his grandmother who had such a shaming death on top of his own doubts about his inheritance. His loneliness and depression were key parts to the story.

I am glad I gave some food for thought and yes I agree. Telemachus absolutely NEEDED that journey. He needed to discover himself his roots and his father. He needed to know on his own which is why he had no doubts when he embraced his father in the Odyssey; he heard from others that he was a good man, someone admired. Telemachus got to know him a little bit and so that embrace was redemptory. It was of outpost importance!

What's your opinion on how Telemachus was handled in Epic (so far) ? I'm curious 😀.

And what is different from his Odyssey portrayal ? Not counting the fanart that infantilizes him, I'm strictly talking about the musical itself.

Hahahaha you guys definitely wanna put me against a wall one of these days! XD But I absolutely LOVE this question! Hahaha okay here goes;

Absolutely I wasn't gonna talk about the fanart and all that is part of the designing process and arguably that is part of every person to do. They could easily choose the depiction more Odyssey-accurate and still use the musical sound so yes you do well to mention it because yes I myself wouldn't touch the design part in this ask

Anyways long story short; I don't like it.

Storywise it is overly-simplified and shows only one portion of his possible emotions; the one that tries to connect with his father. That part is genuine and I see where the portrayal such as the song "Legendary" came from. Arguably Homer himself also touches the subject of glory through one's deeds and I see where the musical came from when Telemachus says what he says but the song was too bbbly, too naive portrayal of Telemachus and in a way completely disregarded the true depth of sadness and depression in Telemachus.

In the Odyssey Telemachus never connected to his father because his father was never there. To the point where he was even doubting whether he was his son or not. He basically says that "everyone calls me that but how can I know? The dude was never there. Possibly never will be here again". His whole energy was the total opposite than Epic.

Epic portrays Telemachus in a manner that reminds me of Disney's Little Mermaid in "Part of your world"; a bubbly teenager who dreams to start his life or to be making a legendary name for himself like his father and in childish naive energy says "bring me all these monsters to fight them!" while in his childish naive nature was also making him afraid or worried to face the bullying of the suitors (the way the suitors were portrayed as if Jorge wanted to make them EVEN MORE evil also had me cringe like Antinous calling Penelope "tramp". Antinous called Penelope more or less "divious" because of her scheme against them but that was all. In here they are competing for her hand while calling her names without reason? Yeah right....). He seemed like the average teenager that needs the adult to get him to realize video games is not the life and that he needs to do something about his future! Does he also seem low-key sad? Yes. But just like Ariel in the Disney movie was pictured as a dreamer that wanted escape from his confided situation through bubbly and childish dreams.

Odyssey Telemachus was both emotionally and psychologically exhausted; his mother was taken down by grief and endless waiting and had confided herself in her chambers, trying her best to avoid the suitors that were at her home for FOUR YEARS, constantly crying at this point. Telemachus also saw his grandfather lose his mind in sorrow and his grandmother melting away by desperation and sadness and dying or potentially killing herself by it. The last thing he wanted was "to be legendary". In fact Telemachus gave me the exact opposite energy than a dreamer. He was very down to earth and his main goal was to get out of this nasty situation, trying to grow as a person to set himself free from this torment. He had so much in his plate that the last thing he wanted was to dream. In fact he gave me the impression of a person with no more the luxury of dreaming. He almost seemed crushed to the point of breaking himself almost like every other member of his family. (He gives me the impression of a person that after spent years of trying and fulflling their dreams now they are forced to work in a work they hate for survival and think that "dreams are for fools. No luxury for them!")

Like I said Menelaus described Telemachus as a spitting image of his father including his eyes, which is something I find the most important. Menelaus compared Telemachus's gaze to Odysseus; a man that fought a war with him! A man exhausted by the evil he saw and caused. Telemachus's profound grief was so intense that his look was equivalent to a man Menelaus fought a war with! He was the opposite of what we see in Epic! In fact we know that Telemachus was also very much silent and tried to keep a low profile so he didn't need to face the humiliation of the men that were literally plundering his wealth and harassing his mother and himself. The last thing he had in his mind would be to "be legendary". He was also plundered by the fact that not only was he doubting that Odysseus was his father per se but also he was in doubt that this Odysseus that everyone named his father would be alive or dead. He didn't know that. He was actually almost certain that Odysseus was dead but that part in the back of his head was not yet leaving him in peace which is why he needed Athena's guidance

Which brings me to the next part; Athena In Epic Athena appears to...give Telemachus the boost to fist-fight the suitors for some reason and mind you he still gets his ass handed at him! It made it seem as Telemachus's only problem was that he didn't have the guts or skills to fight the suitors and Athena gave him a solution! (potentially a message to stand up against bullies for teenagers? Perhaps but still I felt it massively undermined Telemachis's situation in the book) As I have answered to another person around here, Telemachus's problem was that the suitors claimed the law of hospitality and named themselves ODYSSEUS'S guests. Telemachus could not yet take over as king and he had no power to send them away. Plus he was plundered by doubt about his own inheritence. What Athena did was not to make Telemachus a fighter for he already was (we see how well he stands against them at the side of his father in the Odyssey) she came to encourage him to find out on his own.

Arguably the trip of Telemachus was a mirror counterpart of Odysseus's but instead of a trip that makes you lost like Odysseus was lost, it was a trip for self-discovery. Mind you, both the trip of Odysseus and the trip of Telemachus are cognitive trips; both characters learn in them and come in contact with places. Psychologically the trip allows Telemachus to escape this boarderline toxic grief in his home and explore the world. Also find out on his own information about his father. Now, arguably he never really finds out about his father's whereabouts for certain apart from Menelaus's vision but there is something he definitely gets out of his trip that is not talked about enough;

He finds out he REALLY is the son of his father and he gets information about what kind of man he was!

He hears from friends that fought with him how similar he looks to him; not just from his closed and secluded environment but of people outside his circle and his known people that he looks like him and they also give him information about him. No more the random comments the suitors he hated say or his sad mother who could either idealize his father to escape her grief or the loyal slave Euryclea who adored the family naturally like a mother; now it was also friends and known people of Odysseus that speak about him Telemachus is double-checking his information! Thus coming home much more confident on his inheritence and his own destiny and duty

Arguably the Odyssey is as much Telemachus's story as it is Odysseus's. Telemachus was in one way a spectrum of Odysseus; fighting a different type of war; losing himself in a different type of sadness. His story was a story of coming of age not a story of a goddess that teaches him how to stand up against bullies. Telemachus already does that in the Odyssey by calling the council. Arguably he was alays standing against the suitors but his position did not allow him to do something drastic! I think just like many things Epic missed this by a mile; reducing Telemachus's profound grief, sadness and uncertainty to an average teenage escapism story rather than the fact that Telemachus had no luxury or energy for escapism, Athena's advice for self-discovery to the average "raise your fists and fight your bullies" story ignoring the deep cultural details that led Telemachus to that tight spot in the first place and of course it completely abandoned the importance of Telemachus's trip which could be a subject of a movie on its own! (Quite frankly Telemacheia covers more chapters in the Odyssey than Odysseus's own flashback! It covers 5 rhapsodies of the Odyssey while Odysseus's story covers 3-4)

I hope this answers some questions! I will be happy to elaborate more.

[365days365movies]

May 1, 2021: The Prestige (2006) (Recap: Part One)

What’s that old Arthur C. Clarke quote again?

Not that one, although that’s...that’s fantastic, and I need to know more context to that conversation. But no, no, not that. The other one.

Not that one, although that’s...horrifying. Let me explain something first, then. Clarke was the author of the classic science-fiction novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, which definitely didn’t go on to become one of the most widely regarded films of all time. Anyway, he was a big-shot in science fiction, and was even knighted for his prominence in pop culture in the UK and across the world.

Fellow famous sci-fi author Isaac Asimov is well known for three rules of robotics, but Clarke has three rules of his own. A futurist, his laws describe conjecture about scientific development in the future of out societies. Those laws are:

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Magic, huh?

God, I love Weird Al. Anyway, as a child of the ‘90s, I am well-acquainted with the boom of stage magicians that appeared during that time, and during the early 2000s. David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear, David Blaine coughed up a live frog, Criss Angel freaked minds; lot of stuff back then.

And yet, despite other recent magicians like Penn and Teller or Dynamo, the greatest age of stage magic isn’t even CLOSE to the 90′s. No, no, to really see magic in its heyday, we need to go back to the late 1800s and early 1900s, to the days of the stage illusionist. 

Obviously, the first person that comes to mind is Harry Houdini, a man whose feats have lasted the test of time, and may have led to his death. Not only did he get buried alive, not only did he escape from a straitjacket in chains underwater, NOT ONLY did he hold his breath inside a water-filled milk can inside of a wooden chest repeatedly for FOUR YEARS, but he was also the greatest enemy of spiritualists and mediums everywhere!

Yeah, despite being a stage magician, Houdini was OBSESSED with exposing those who claimed to be actually supernatural. After all, as a showman, he was interesting in exposing tricks that were meant to defraud the innocent public. Dude was awesome, is what I’m saying. He died from a burst appendix, which miiiiight have been caused by a student who punched him in the stomach after asking if he was actually resistant to abdominal damage. Yeah, not a great death. And he wasn’t the only illusionist to die of tragic circumstances, but that’s a discussion for another day. Because of this is sci-fi month...why am I talking about magic? Well...imagine a lighter.

Now image that you went back 5,000 years, to any civilization, and showed them a lighter. The ability to create fire with seemingly nothing but your bare hands? You’re basically a wizard! Fire from no visible fuel? TEACH ME YOUR WAYS, O SORCERER OF THE FLAME!!! And that’s just a goddamn lighter. 

What about a light bulb? Light from energy you’ve harnessed from metals and from the air itself? Jujube! A camera? With the ability to capture a moment in time in the form of a tangible image? WITCHCRAFT!!! A smartphone? A FUCKING SMARTPHONE???

And so, in celebration of the blurring of magic and science...why not start this month with an unconventional form of science fiction, huh? Something that blurs magic and science in a way that’s indistinguishable. And so, I can FINALLY watch a movie that I’ve wanted to watch for YEARS!

I am so excited, and this is a hell of a way to kick off the month! Why this? Well, I’ll explain that later. But for now...LET’S DO THIS.

SPOILER ALERT!!!

Recap (1/2)

There are three acts of magic.

First is “the pledge”, where the magician shows something normal. Then, there’s “the turn”, which is when the ordinary becomes extraordinary. And finally, there’s the act of bringing the show full-circle; bringing back a disappeared object, in a new way and with a new technique. That final act, the showmanship, the establishment of the mystery, is called “the prestige”.

So is told to us by John Cutter (Michael Caine), keeper of canaries and stage engineer to magicians, via narration abut magic. Intercut with that narration, and with a disappearing canary trick, is the presentation of an act being performed by Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman). In it, he turns on a machine using electricity, with lightning bolts flying freely. He steps inside of it, and disappears.

Meanwhile, coming from the audience, a man pretends to be part of the act, and goes backstage and underneath the machine. There, he witnesses Angier fall through a trap door into a water tank, unable to get out, panicking and drowning. Which is just super fun to watch, lemme tell you! And that is where the story starts.

The man from the audience was Alfred Borden (Christian Bale), who is quickly put on trial for the murder of Angier. A rival of his during the 1890s and early 1900s, Borden is sent to jail, and sent to death by hanging. This is as his young daughter watches on. In court, Alfred testifies against Bruce Wayne on how he murdered Wolverine, because this is all I could think of the entire time. Anyway, the court asks for more details on the trick that killed Angier, called “the Transported Man”. He refuses to divulge it publicly, but agrees to tell it to one of the judges in secret.

In prison, Borden’s visited by a representative of a wealthy collector of items, Lord Caldlow. He asks if he will sell him his most prominent trick, the “Transported Man”. But Borden also refuses, as it’s HIS trick. Still, in response, the man gives Borden a journal of Angier’s’, and asks him to think about selling the secret. And from there: flashback!

Angier is on a train, heading to Colorado Springs, where he’s surprised to see that the whole town has electricity. His plan is to go up the mountain, which is closed for scientific experimentation. Which isn’t ominous at all! That completely banal revelation is followed by a walk up the mountain in the fog, past a fence that says no trespassing and LITERAL WARNING SIGNS.

There, he’s greeted by Alley (Andy Serkis), the assistant of the estate’s owner. Apparently, said owner made a machine for Borden, and Angier wants to learn the secrets. Another flashback, and we learn that Borden and Angier, rival magicians now, met a long time ago at the show of another magician, both volunteering to tie up the female assistant, Julia (Piper Perabo). Which would be creepy out of context, and then is creepy IN context when Angier kisses her thigh. Ew.

Anyway, they drop her into a tank, with a pretty stereotypical trick. After the show, we also learn that these two men are actually working for the magician, Milton (Ricky Jay), which makes that thigh kiss less creepy. Talking to Cutter and Julia, Borden mocks Milton’s trick, noting that the old magician won’t even try something like a bullet catch. Cutter mocks this idea, and asks if Borden has any better ideas. It’s around this time that Cutter suggests seeing Chung Ling Soo. Huh. I won’t say anything about that until later.

Or right now! And, uh...oh shit, this is extraordinarily awkward. Here’s the thing: this is NOT Chung Ling Soo. I know this for two reasons. One, Soo didn’t really pretend to be crippled, as Borden and Angier suggest. Wasn’t really his bag. But something that IS interesting about the guy is how he died! BULLET CATCH TRICK!! Yup! He tried the bullet catch trick, and he died when the bullet actually fired at him! Yeah, awkward.

And you know what else is awkward, and really different from this story? Chung Ling Soo was...not Chinese. Even a little bit. His real name was William Ellsworth Robinson, he married his assistant, cheated on her with another assistant, never divorced and still married his new assistant illegally, etc. He was an interesting guy. Ignoring, y’know, the whole disgustingly shitty yellow-face thing. Different times, unfortunately.

Borden’s frustration with an act he considers boring and obsolete erupts during one of Milton’s shows, where we see him KILL A BIRD, FUCK ME MAN. Yeah, I get it, Borden, this is terrible! This coincides with meeting a young woman and her nephew, who is also upset to see a bird die in front of him. The woman is Sarah (Rebecca Hall), and the two start a romance. Meanwhile, the romance between Angier and Julia is a straight-up marriage, making that thigh kiss fare more understandable. And, the two are about to have a baby, to both of their delight! Nothing bad will happen now!

We flash forward to the future, where Cutter is showing the judge what’s what with the device. He claims that a wizard built it, and that the machine can actually do what magicians have only pretended to do for years. They also look at a tank, and Cutter reveals that the tank has a terrible history, especially for the two magicians.

Flashback again, to a night of yet another show. That night, Milton and the group go through with their trick, as per usual. However, Borden decides to make it a little tougher and more exciting by tying a different knot this time. And unfortunately...Julia can’t untie it. They try to get her out in time, but alas...it’s too late.

Julia dies, and Angier blames Borden, who isn’t even entirely sure if he tied the knot that killed Julia...allegedly. Not a big fan of Borden right now. The act is over, and Borden decides to split off and do his own act, calling himself “the Professor”. Now having a child of his own with Sarah, he decides to do a bullet trick, with the help of new stage engineer, Fallon. But this is a tricky trick to perform. And the understandable mental breakdown of Angier causes its own problems.

See, during one of Borden’s shows (which is going TERRIBLY), a disguised Angiers shows up and loads a REAL bullet into the gun for the trick, and BLOWS OFF TWO OF HIS FINGERS FUCK ME!!! Borden’s not exactly happy about this, but he recovers quickly. Shortly after, Cutter finds Angier at a bar, and offers him the opportunity to make a new show of his own. Reluctantly, he accepts, and takes up the moniker “the Great Danton”, a name that his late wife suggested.

With a new bird/cage trick, one that lets the bird LIVE (THANK YOU), they’re almost set. But they also add a new assistant, in the form of...Black Widow. I mean, sorry, Olivia Wenscombe (Scarlett Johansson). Yeah, um...Wolver, Alfred Pennyworth, and Black Widow are working together in competition against Batman. Also, Gollum is in the movie, too. God, what’s next, David Bowie?

Anyway, the show is on once again, and Angier asks for some volunteers in the audience. But, uh oh! One of them is Borden in disguise, and he sabotages the trick in front of EVERYBODY, breaking an audience member’s fingers, and killing the bird, completely fucking up Angier’s career, in revenge for his fingers. Oh, also, MOTHERFUCKER YOU KILLED HIS WIFE (maybe)!!! Doesn’t justify Angier shooting off your fingers, but you could’ve just let bygones be! No wonder you’re rivals in the future! Batman’s a dick (which, given Christian Bale, isn’t that surprising).

Well, since his trick, Angier’s fucked. They’re kicked out of the theater, and in need of a new act. Cutter suggests that Angier goes to the upcoming science exposition for ideas. And yes...that’s where the science fiction angle starts in. See, like Clarke said, any science that’s sophisticated enough LOOKS like magic to audiences who don’t understand it. And Borden has the same idea, as he also heads to the expo. 

It’s there that a presentation of a massive electrical generator is being held, with the machine having been invented by...Nicola Tesla! YO!

I don’t think I need to tell anybody about Tesla at this point, but he was a brilliant physicist and inventor from the early 1900s. His legendary Current War with Thomas Alva Edison for the current to be used by the United States (Tesla’s DC vs. Edison’s AC) is the stuff of science legend...and is a conflict that the far less charismatic Tesla lost. Still, his mastery of electricity (such as the above Tesla coil) is remembered today. If you want to go sightseeing, check out New York! In Niagara Falls, he’s got a massive statue overlooking the falls; and in Bryant Park in NYC, you can sit on the bench where he fed his beloved pigeons. Yeah, he loved pigeons, which I respect.

Anyway, the expo’s shut down due to presumed danger of the exhibit, possibly spurred on by Thomas Edison and his PR team. Which is pretty accurate, not gonna lie. Still, the experiment interests both Angier and Borden. Still, Angier doesn’t do much with this information. Right now, anyway.

Flash forward to Angier in Colorado Springs, and a group of men from Edison’s employ are there for some reason. But undeterred, Angier heads back to Tesla’s lab, where Alley shows him a gorgeous sight: lightbulbs dotting a field, making a gorgeous grid of light. He reveals that the source of the electricity is 15 miles away, as a testament to Tesla’s scientific genius. Stellar.

A great place to pause. See you in Part Two of this Recap!

[hecallsmehischild]

Recent Media Consumed

Books

War Nerd by Gary Brecher. I have a lot of conflicting feelings about this book. First off, I had to try three times to read it, because the first two times I read it, I was in an emotionally unstable period, and this is NOT a book to read in emotionally unstable periods. On the third try, I blew right through it. Second thing is about the way it’s written. On the one hand, I wish all history texts were written with HALF the color and vigor and humor of this writer, because I would have retained way more information. On the other hand, it was incredibly difficult for me to come to terms with this style of angry, bitter humor combined with a worldview I can’t really understand. Which, I suppose, leads into some of my major take-aways from this book: human nature is not basically good (I already believed that, but this is a pretty good secular argument for it), human nature seems to crave war and peace is the exception, and there literally are people in the world who I will never understand no matter how hard I try because they want things that are antithetical to absolutely everything I deem important. I don’t mean minor things or even the things we all know come into conflict, like religion. I’m talking about things like peace. If you look at what peoples’ actions tell you over their words, it seems like some people (individuals AND nation groups) genuinely thrive on death and war, and that that was in fact the state of things for far longer than attempts at peace. It’s a difficult book on all fronts (except readability, it’s quite readable and certainly more enjoyable than most history texts as I’ve said), but it makes you think. I also can’t speak for how accurate this book is, but it is written by someone who clearly has a hyperfixation, so...

Inside The Robe by Katherine Mader. Judge Mader, a criminal court judge in LA County, kept a court diary throughout 2016. This book is the result of that diary, and is her attempt at giving an “insider’s view” on being a criminal court judge. She is a colorful writer with very clear descriptions and a distinctive voice. This book was a pleasure to read and gave me a better understanding of the incentives and constraints on judges through her daily vignettes.

Economic Facts and Fallacies by Thomas Sowell. I read this in the wake of my second reading of Basic Economics and thought this would be a good follow-up read. There’s a lot of overlap here, but this book delves more in-depth into some concepts that Sowell had to give less attention to in Basic Economics for the sake of providing a broader overview. As usual, there are some concepts that get a little too abstract for me to hang onto very well, but the majority of his work is very understandable and makes sense to me. I am grateful for the clarity with which he writes.

A Man of Letters by Thomas Sowell. This is actually a good accompaniment to his memoir, A Personal Odyssey. He collects several letters he wrote (and a few select ones addressed to him) to sketch his reactions to various events in his life. He has quite the dry wit. It was a treat to get a further glimpse into his life.

Books I had to drop and why

Battles of the Bible by Chaim Herzog and Mordechai Gichon. Sometimes I have to admit I made a mistake and not keep trying to force myself to spend time on a book I’m not enjoying. I thought perhaps this book would help me understand some context of the Biblical stories more, but really what this is is comprehensive step-by-step war strategy (complete with diagrams and TERRAIN MAPS) of each battle in the Old Testament. And… that’s not what I’m looking for.

The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek. I’m kind of sad about this one. Thomas Sowell has referenced Hayek reverently and I was told The Road to Serfdom would be a good read for me. Unfortunately what I’m coming to understand is that it’s very difficult for me to grasp ideas when talked about ONLY in the abstract. This is why Sowell is usually a much better read for me, because he tends toward giving concrete examples, so after about 3 chapters of barely getting what Hayek wanted to convey, I switched over to…

Marxism by Thomas Sowell. And I was also crestfallen here. From the fragments I gather, Marx (who Sowell studied extensively and followed wholeheartedly in his college days) broke things down almost exclusively to their most abstract concepts before building back toward concrete ideas and tended to look down on any economist who only examined things as they appeared. Prior to this I had some vague notion that maybe I could eventually read Marx and understand the root texts of socialism/communism, but according to Sowell, there’s a lot of pre-requisite reading involved in really understanding what Marx & Engels were talking about. He also criticized most interpreters of not bothering to do their homework on surrounding texts and that many have mangled some of Marx’s points. I was not able to make it past chapter two of this book because I was floundering pretty hard. It’s a little discouraging to feel the limits of my comprehension so sharply. I’m going to take a break with some fiction.

Video Games

Bendy and the Ink Machine. Want to talk about being late to the bandwagon? I mean, I got on the bandwagon when everyone was talking about it, but then I got through chapter 3 and there was a graphics reboot, so I started playing from the top and then kind of… dropped off? Never got past chapter 3. Finally, I felt like I was in a good place and could take the jump scares, so I blasted through the first three chapters in about a night. Then for the next couple days I played through the last two chapters. I have to say, chapter 4 is my favorite and has probably the most disturbing image that, while disturbing, was epic and fantastic in its own creepy way (merry-go-round-and-round, anybody?). I didn’t really understand the ending, but there were some interesting theories to be found on Youtube about what it all means. This was an enjoyable game for someone like me who can’t really handle high level horror and isn’t too adept with controls because it had simple controls and the horror was… toned down, I’d say. I played through Soma and I tried (and absolutely ditched) Amnesia, and Bendy is at about the level of horror I can deal with. Good game.

Confess My Love. Started and ditched it. I was very, very annoyed at the girl by five rejections. In the end, I rejected HER by uninstalling the game.

Movies

Wolfwalkers. *inarticulate noises* f-f-found family…. nnngh…. *gentle sobbing*

[joumiwrites]

One thought on: Circe by Madeline Miller

Naming this series of posts was the most difficult thing ever. Mainly because this is not strictly a review, and it's too short and incomplete to be a proper analysis. It's just that sometimes I have these very specific thoughts about a book I've liked and the only way to properly analyze them is to elaborate them in written form.

Even if it's not technically a review, I'll begin with my general opinion on the book as a whole, to set the mood.

Today I'll focus on “Circe” by Madeline Miller. It's a retelling of the story of Circe, the witch from the Odyssey that became famous for turning men into pigs and delaying Ulysses' journey home for a year.

This novel is beautifully written. There's a mythical atmosphere that hovers on the background of everything that happens, even the most 'human' and mundane events. It's in first person, following Circe's viewpoint as she grows up among powerful gods, trying to find love, acceptance and her place in a world that doesn't want her to exist.

Love in particular has a big role in the story, especially romantic love. Which was expected, since she's mostly known from the time when she kept Ulysses on her island. What I didn't expect were the other men. Every portion of her life is marked by the presence of a man (or god) she falls in love with. You can almost say that every decision she makes is somehow prompted by a man. Which is a bit of a wasted potential, since we don't get to see Circe shine on her own.

But there's one thing that this book does really well: mythology. And I'm not just talking about how Miller weaved the myths together inside the story, but the worldbuilding itself. She managed to give coherence to the confusing jumble of mythology.

Greek myths focus on gods and mortals and how they hurt or save each other. They don't care about telling us the difference between a god and a titan: is it all just generational? Are they otherwise the exact same thing, or is there something more? And why titans weren't worshipped or, when they were (Helios and Chronos come to mind), they didn't have a seat in Olympus?

What's the difference between a nymph and full blown goddess? Are nymphs even goddesses or just magical creatures? How do you distinguish a goddess from a witch? How can a goddess be also a witch, if the powers of the other gods are innate and don't depend on anything else but the gods themselves?

These are some of the questions that have always bugged me, since I was a kid learning about Greek mythology in school. Now that I'm older, I don't expect it to explain all of this. I know each city of Ancient Greece had its own differences in beliefs, even if some of them never changed (for example, there were always twelve gods on Olympus, even if nobody agreed on who exactly they were).

Plus, the religion these myths were part of was practiced for at least a thousand years, during which some beliefs changed and new gods were imported from other religions or outright created.

It doesn't help that, when myths are told or referenced, they're usually treated as if they were completely separate from one another, and the connections between them are usually difficult to see or even remember (looking at you, Zeus and your thousand lovers and children).

Miller manages to make all these connections clear and solid, while offering an explanation about the nature and differences between gods, titans, nymphs and, obviously, witches. And she managed to do all of this without adding rules.

What I mean by this is that she didn't add any worldbuilding information that couldn't already be found in the myths themselves. She only worked on the characters and the relationships between them. She made clear what the gods' goals and fears were, how the war between gods and titans has impacted the world, and why the characters act the way they do in the myths.

And we find out that most of the distinctions between all the categories above, humans, gods, titans, nymphs and witches, is based on differences in power. The gods are scared of any power that isn't their own, nymphs are inferior to goddesses because they're not as powerful, and it's better for a nymph to turn into a monster than staying a simple nymph. And in this context, it's clear from the beginning why Circe is so alienated from the world of gods around her: aside from her quiet nature and her desperate search for someone that can understand her, she makes a point of telling us how her voice is weak like the one of a mortal, when mortals are the lowest point in this hierarchy of power.

"Circe" makes Greek mythology feel new, both through its amazing worldbuilding, and by having as a protagonist one of the most secretive and fascinating characters of the Odyssey.

[smolandweirdwriter]

Gladly! Right, so the first thing I was introduced to when I first met other people (specifically people with on tumblr) who also liked Greek mythology was Hades and Persephone. Now, I’d never really considered them too deeply before. my interest in mythology at this point was sort of that I knew stuff, Percy Jackson was the what sparked my interest but I was invested in getting more knowledge and information and I really enjoyed learning about it, I’d read D’Aulaires, then the illiad and odyssey and the Aeneid, and it was around the beginning of high school that I was introduced to Lore Olympus, which got me SUPER invested in the myth of Persephone and Hades. I found it fascinating, but the first thing I learned was that it was good. That Persephone wanted hades. That they loved each other. That he cheated on her least of all the gods. That he was the best, more moral, more exceptional, kind, that if there was blame to be assigned (which everyone claimed there was not) then everything was Zeus’s fault. And I said, “Okay. I guess that makes sense. Sure.” I believed it for several months, maybe a year. I loved Hades and Persephone in this context. I loved what they embodied, what they represented. And then I was told that those things weren’t true. I was distressed! Even Hades was bad? Really? I desperately wanted it to be untrue. I tried backing the “there’s so many different versions, we don’t know the real one, most of these were oral” claims. Then I read a collection of the Homeric Hymns. And I felt like something had been flipped in my mind. I’d been considering this whole thing as a 21st century teenage girl. But that was never the intended audience for the story. It was to appease men and to support women and girls of the 7th century BCE. Zeus does what a king, what a father does: his brother is powerful, he needs an alliance, he gives away his daughter. Demeter represents what all mothers want to be: she can’t yell at Zeus, but she can make a point. She wants her daughter back, safe and unharmed, and dammit she’s gonna try. Persephone is a portrayal of the best that women could get: she’s still going to see her mother, and she’s married to a man who is powerful. But still she has no choice in the matter. It’s not a love story, and it never was. It’s a portrayal of the views of their society. so now I go, huh. So Hades isn’t a good man. I think back to some other relationships in mythology. How about Eros and Psyche? She fought for him, didn’t she? They loved each other, didn’t they? Weeeell… Did SHE have a choice? No. She was kidnapped, much like Persephone. Did he help her when she was pregnant? Was he ever there when his mother (Aphrodite being his mother in this myth) was punishing her? Nope to both! Really the amount of parallels to be drawn between Psyche and Eros and Persephone and Hades are rather astounding. It COULD certainly be argued that both couples eventually found happiness and love together, but there’s a bit of speculation/deeper digging required for that. In terms of relationships that don’t require speculation or deep digging, we turn at last to Ares and Aphrodite! Ares in Greek mythology represented not just war but also masculine strength. And a HUGE part of being a man was control over one’s household— protecting your family, their honor, especially that of the women. Did that mean men always treated their daughters, sisters, or wives well? Fuck no. Definitely not. But we’re talking about the gods as what they were— a metaphor, a lesson. And Ares? He never hurt a woman in a literal sense. He was representative of those virtues of masculinity: physical strength and protect of the weak. Ares never raped anyone. When Poseidon’s son Halirrhothius raped his daughter, Ares killed the man so violently he was put on trial. Imagine that for a moment. A Greek god kills a mortal and it is so violent he is put on trial by other Greek gods. That’s Ares representing Ancient Greek virtue of protecting the weak/protecting family that I mentioned earlier. Now onto Aphrodite. you might be

thinking I’m hypocritical, after all haven’t I already stated that cheating is wrong in godly relationships? Well… sort of. Let me explain! When Zeus forced himself on Hera, makes her marry him, she wants him not to be in other sexual relationships outside their monogamous one, and he doesn’t, then I think that is wrong. When Aphrodite arrives on Olympus and, having no say in the matter, is gifted to Hephaestus (whether or not this is to appease the other gods is another debate) and forced into a marriage with him, I think that is wrong as well. When Aphrodite, with no say nor choice in her marriage, likes Ares and he likes her and she (and this is the important bit) actively chooses him, then no, I don’t think that is wrong. My reason being? Consent! There is no instance in which Ares EVER has a nonconsensual relationship or intercourse! Not one! (His Roman counterpart, Mars, is, but we’re discussing Greek Ares, not Roman Mars.)

In conclusion… Ares is the least problematic in terms of nonconsensual behavior/intercourse. Hopefully this was explanatory!

the hades to eros to ares pipeline is REAL

[naruhearts]

OKAY SO I've just spent the best part of an hour scrolling through your blog and reading a bunch of your destiel meta and I HAD to message you... I was one of the many people who STRONGLY believed destiel had a chance of being canon after season 8 (more like season gr8 am i right), but throughout the years I slowly lost all hope. However, S14 has made me 110% invested in the show again and YOUR META IS GIVING ME HOPE FOR DESTIEL, which is TERRIFYING. Your writing is wonderful and I'm STRESSED.

Got back from Washington late last night!

Oh my gosh @alovelikecas, your message really made my day and I’m SO glad you enjoy my meta xox (even when most of my meta looks like, to me, sloppy-ass writing, haha! I’ll probably make an end-season meta post after 14x20 — if I have the time — that touches upon SPN’s current and repeating themes since Season New Beginnings S12/Dabb Era, not to mention I have, like, some more unfinished meta in my drafts >.>)

Yeah I mean, I didn’t join Destiel land until Summer 2016, and before that, I was late to the Season 11 party, so I basically had no narrative context for anything, and I’ll copy-paste what I said here: 

Looking back, one significant thing I recall? S11 gave me a sense of Destiel’s true narrative validity (as not a ‘fanon’ ship but organically developed in the canon) when I perceived it as a season that was ‘missing something’. Keep in mind I had no idea about Destiel yet while watching S11 at the time.

I was literally asking myself — repeatedly — why Dean/Amara seemed to contain odd narrative holes, considering A. Dean explicitly said that the non-consensual attraction he felt for Amara was NOT love and “it scares him”, B. Amara told Dean that ‘something stops you - keeps you from having it all’, C. Djinn!Amara stated that she can: ‘feel the love [Dean] feels, except it’s cloaked in shame,’ and D. Mildred’s iconic ‘You’re pining for someone’ —> which did not logically correlate with A and C, meaning: since Dean doesn’t freely love Amara and thus isn’t possibly pining for her — with female love interests as currently non-existent (I remember crossing off the dead/gone girls on a piece of paper lol) — who the hell was he pining for, then?

Originally posted by elizabethrobertajones

Obviously, without writing long-ass paragraphs of meta about it again in this post, S11 made sense as soon as I watched it within the Destiel context (especially after I read up on some grandiose pieces of Destiel meta (@charlie-minion was the very first person who inspired me to write meta; I followed her once I joined the fandom Oh my god, here we go, holy crap this subtext – I’m invested in this godforsaken ship because they’re in love with each other and I’m not getting off any time soon. The rest is history.

I’m aware that I do come off as positive (and I’m still Destiel-positive; whatever happens in 14x20 this week may or may not change that), but I hope you don’t mind if I use your lovely ask as an additional opportunity to clarify my meta standpoint: no one’s saying Destiel WILL become text. 

The general Destiel meta community (all subfactions: Destiel-positive, -negative, -neutral, and in-between) is not the Most Holy Canon Word, and we aren’t SPN writers, and again, we can’t actually speak to the veracity of Destiel as guaranteed-gonna-go-textual, but we — a diverse pool of critical thinkers from all walks of life: particularly those who have some degree of experience in literary academia/English literature studies (fun fact: I was actually pursuing a Minor’s in English until I changed my mind - my first love’s Health Science/Biology, which I stuck with, but here I am doing lit-crit analysis on the side *wink*) — can speak to the veracity of Destiel as a real, palpable, and ever-substantial long-running romance narrative aka the love story between Dean and Cas IS THERE. I see it. We all see it. We didn’t pluck it out of the random ether one day. It naturally evolved across the show’s overarching narrative like some vast spiderweb, linked together by numerous character arc amalgamations of Dean Winchester and Castiel as separate individuals who were then brought together — who brought themselves together, by the sheer force of free will and choice — and are now inherent parts of the other’s story (and respective character progression).

I say this too many times to count: the entire point of writing meta? Personally, it enables me to appreciate the literary gorgeousness of Dean and Cas’ relationship as, first and foremost, a tentative alliance offset by the very moment Cas raised Dean from perdition (it’s a poetic beginning). Their alliance then inevitably proliferated into a rocky — at times, necessarily turbulent — friendship, then a deep profound bond…one that crossed platonic boundaries since S7/8 and is, ultimately, indelibly rooted in romance. Together, Dean and Cas build up each other’s strengths, complement each other’s flaws, and narratively motivate the other to self-introspect — to become the best version of themselves that they were always meant to be: self-actualized entities who let go of their painful, horrifying, psychologically/emotionally destitute pasts.

These above reasons and more are why I think Destiel belongs right up there on the shelf of Ye Olde Classics, similar to epics by John Milton, Shakespearian tragic dramas, Homeric characteristic cruxes, and the great Odyssey journey: a legendary journey, fraught with circumstance, that finally ended with Odysseus (now an enlightened man) returning to Penelope, the love of his life.

Channeling the scope of Homer’s Odyssey, Destiel is an incredible storytelling feat of obstacles, both internal and external, romance tropes, mirroring, foreshadowing, and visual cadence/emotion, enhancing SPN’s already character-driven main plot in that Dean and Cas try to make it back to one another; like Penelope, their love holds true despite everything. If Destiel were an M/F couple, we all know their love story would be absolutely undeniable to the GA.

I do understand the bitterness S14’s fostered in some viewers, though. I do understand that Dean and Cas seem distant (and yeah, it’s a noticeable difference compared to S12/S13), but I believe the Destiel subtext is still heavy and holds steady.

Right now, at this point, there remains multiple personal issues for the characters to solve, you know? Dean and Cas aren’t talking properly; their love languages stay mistranslated, although we’re persistently shown that they still understand each other on a certain level that no one else can, and the visual narrative keeps framing them as on-the-nose solid counterparts: a domestic-spousal romantic unit independent of Sam.

Originally posted by incatastrophicmind

They want to be there for the other. They need to quash the final remnants of their respective internal loathing (Dean’s self-worthiness, Cas’ self-expendability) before they’re able to give the other 100% of their time, efforts, attention, and love (as flawed and complicated but compellingly beautiful as it can possibly be). During the times Dean and Cas do try to talk shit out, extraneous issues continue to get between them.

As other friends/meta pals discussed with me, S14 is like S10 in that it’s confusing the cast/audiences. And exactly: S8, besides S11/S12/early S13, also belongs in the close-to-canon serious Destiel narrative transition! I can discuss the showrunning/writer problem of SBL (Singer + Bucklemming; @occamshipper hits the nail on the head) that tugs subtext – especially subtext linked to Destiel – back and forth, sometimes in the weirdest nonsensical ways, but I won’t go too far into it here. I agree, however, with the recent idea that Jensen does seem a bit confused as to where he should bring Dean emotionally this season (don’t get me wrong, I do NOT believe Dean is OOC; OOC is a completely different concept vs expected character behaviour). And if Dean’s consistently romance-coded past interactions with Cas are any indication, Jensen would also — in the same vein as all of us — want Dean and Cas to start getting their shit together. Long-running fictional characters like Dean and Cas, conceived over 10 years, are so well-written to the point where you, the author, can predict what they’ll do even if you just plop both of them inside a room and give them no direction, and I personally feel that nowadays Jensen is prevented from achieving Dean’s further internal growth/unsure how to act in the moment because of some dumb SBL scripts saying one thing while his character’s heart says another. Wank aside—

Season 15 should hopefully convey a much more logical subtextual perspective e.g. unbelievably amazingly cohesive Season Destiel 11 that aired after choppy S10. Not all hope is lost!! I also want to clarify that I personally LOVED Season 14 in general. It’s been mostly Emotion-centric constant, with Yockey, Berens, Perez, and Dabb usually making my top-rank SPN writer list.

Currently the narrative’s still allowing pretty significant (imho) wiggle room for the lovers to fracture apart and get back together, where their miscommunication comes to a dramatic head. We just saw Dean and Cas argue over Jack’s well-being in 14x18 and 19. Dean — besides putting Cas at the top of his You’re-Dead-to-Me-Because-You-Lied-but-I-Still-Love-You-Goddammit hitlist (for clear spousal-coded reasons) and taking Cas’ actions to heart (he’s the person he trusted the most who lied to him) — no doubt blamed himself for what happened, and Sam was, like I said, the mouthpiece of truth. TFW were all culpable. They all failed Jack in some way, shape, or form.

I’m not expecting anything for 14x20, but I’m nervous either way! Thanks for sticking with my long answer

[darlingseraa]

Odyssey || Theory time.

Aight. So. Less than 24h after the official teaser release, and I have a theory on it. Typical, I know lmao. I’ll admit I had a completely different theory about this before I saw all of this.

Anyway, let’s take a look at the splash arts for Odyssey Kayn and Sona for a minute, okay?

Here’s Kayn:

Here’s Sona:

Now. There’s a few things I’ve noticed (thanks to @sushi-okita) about them that make me question what kind of relationship they have with each other in the Odyssey universe.

First up, the golden orb, that strange gold liquid they both wield. For Sona, it originates from her etwahl; for Kayn, it originates where Rhaast’s eye should be on his scythe. 

Their eyes are the same golden color.

They both have golden markings / tribal designs on their faces.

Kayn literally has one dialogue line (in the teaser) refering to an unknown female; “You took what was mine! I will find her, and I-”

Now that that’s out of the way, notice how, on Kayn’s splash art, he seems to absorb the life out of a man’s body. The color of the life-sapping liquid coming out of the corpse’s eyes? 

Gold.

Just like the orb replacing Rhaast’s eye. 

Kayn’s official voicelines for this new skin have also been released (and I can’t tell if he’s totally batshit insane, suffers from a superiority complex or both lol). There are many things I’ve noticed in them:

Both Rhaast and Kayn mention something called ‘aura’.

Rhaast has three voicelines aimed directly to (or refering to) Sona, telling her to ‘open the gates’ (whatever that means) and [here speaking to Kayn] “I told you to leave her ALIVE!” (to which Kayn responds there was a ‘change of plans’) and also “Face the monster you unleashed, Sona!”

Rhaast mentions that ‘gate’ twice, in the aforementioned line directed to Sona, as well as this one; “You should never have opened that gate!”

Kayn has a few lines targeted directly to Sona; “Rhaast can’t save you now, Sona!” along with “At last, Sona, the secrets of the Aura Gate will be mine!” 

Both keep referencing someone called the Templar, which I believe is one way they refer to Sona. Their lines concerning this Templar person are variations of the lines they already voice towards the maven, so it’s only logical to interpret that the Templar is, in fact, Sona.

One of Kayn’s lines in particular may seem very small, but once you understand that the Templar is Sona, this line becomes key to deciphering the lore; “Captain Yasuo, why don’t you tell me where you are hiding the Templar?”

It is also worth noting that Rhaast himself refers to the Dark Star skin line quite a few times, implying that he himself is a Dark Star, and even having one or two voicelines refering to Thresh in that same context.

Based on this, we can assume a few concrete things;

Sona is a priestess / princess tasked with guarding an ancient gate leading to another dimension; her golden orb is the key to said gate.

This other dimension (to which said gate leads) is where Rhaast came from, which is where the Dark Star / Cosmic / Star Guardian skin lines exist, making the Odyssey skin line their own universe (to make things simpler, SGs / Dark Star / Cosmic are NOT in the same dimension as Odyssey).

Aura refers to a person’s life force, which Kayn needs in order to become stronger (and possibly access the gate Sona is tasked with keeping).

When Kayn harvests a person’s aura, he is strengthening both himself and Rhaast. The aura is stored within the golden orb replacing Rhaast’s eye on the scythe.

Yasuo’s crew are, in a way, taking Sona into hiding so that Kayn can never find her and access the Aura Gate.

Opening said gate would unleash the other Dark Stars into the Odyssey universe and cause their end.

If you paid attention, at one point I mentioned Rhaast had told Kayn to keep Sona alive. I think Rhaast knows something Kayn doesn’t; I’ll assume that in order to open the gate, they need a high priestess to do so. My guess is that they need a SPECIFIC aura to open the gate. More on that later.

Keeping all of the previous information in mind (I know there’s a lot, but bear with me, it will all end up making sense), we can make an educated guess as to what the possible story behind this skin line is - or, at least, we can guess as to what kind of role Sona and Kayn actually have within it. Here’s my interpretation of it based on all of the information above;

Sona is a High-Priestess, refered to as the Templar. Keeper of the Aura Gate. Her golden orb is an association of all the previous Keepers’ auras. This means ONLY a Keeper (Templar and / or High-Priestess, all three are the same) can wield this specific orb, and said Keeper is the only person who can access the Aura Gate’s power. In this universe, I believe there is ONLY ONE KEEPER. She originates from the same world as Kayn, hence their shared facial markings and eye color.

I believe Kayn and Sona have a shared past; Kayn speaks to her with such familiarity, calling her by name in most of his voicelines, that it would be illogical to think they don’t have any connection besides Kayn wanting to kill her to gain access to the Aura Gate. They may have been classmates, studying together or training together at some point. They may have been friends, or they may have been more (which would be logical considering Kayn himself in the teaser refers to Sona as ‘what was mine’ (unless that line refers to her orb) and says that he will find her).

In any case, from Kayn’s voicelines we gather that he was an Imperial Soldier before Rhaast came along. I believe that he might have been one of the best, part of the elite if you will, whom the previous emperor of their world had sent through the Aura Gate to retrieve something that might aid them in the conquering of new planets and solar systems. Rhaast was that ‘something’ the emperor had wanted them to get; a weapon forged from the dying heart of a Dark Star, corrupted through and through. 

It was the sentient weapon’s corruption that turned Kayn into this insane, ambitious and power-hungry man, who overthrew the emperor to rule in his stead over the Empire, and desiring even more power had decided to take Sona as his own in order to have access once more to the Aura Gate. This caused the Templar to flee the temple -and eventually, the planet- where the now inaccessible gate resides, finding refuge with Yasuo and his crew after her spaceship was attacked by monstrous creatures following her escape from her home planet. 

Although Sona has found herself surrounded by a band of misfits, she quickly understood that they could all be trusted. They all have their quirks, but they were her new family, people she needed to protect. She blames herself for the trouble she puts them through; because of her, Kayn is now after them. Because of her, Kayn has strayed from his path; because of her, he is no longer human; because of her, he has caused suffering to so many, just to find her.

Ever since she escaped, Kayn and Rhaast have been bent on finding her and have hunted down Yasuo’s ship and crew, meaning to kill those who dared take Sona away from them and, eventually, meaning to kill Sona herself, so she can never take the key to the Aura Gate away from him again.

***

And there you have it! I know, this was a loooong ass post. Have a cookie! 

I’m really excited to see what kind of lore is truly behind this skin line. What do you guys think? I’m hyped as hell. I’m not sure my predictions are accurate but hey, who knows!

I really want to know you guys’ thoughts on this :3

P.S.: For those of you who haven’t heard Kayn’s new voicelines yet and have over 30min of free time to waste, here’s the link to them good lines. Some of them just made me crack up. He throws some SERIOUS shade tho lmao. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pnqu0e1758c ♥

[emmagreen1220-blog]

New Post has been published on Literary Techniques

New Post has been published on https://literarytechniques.org/allusion/

Allusion

Allusion Definition

Allusion can be defined as a casual reference to a person or a thing which adds extra meaning to the neighboring context. In other words, merely saying “The Good Samaritan is a character in a parable told by Jesus in the Gospel of Luke” is not an allusion—it is merely a straightforward reference. However, it is an allusion when, for example, Julia says to Edward in T.S Eliot’s comedy The Cocktail Party (I.2.49-50): “Don’t you realise how lucky you are/ To have two Good Samaritans?”

Allusions are, by definition, indirect. That means that they are never explicitly clarified by the author and that they work pretty much like riddles: it is left to the reader to both identify them and make the connection to a previous text. However, sometimes this process can prove especially tricky.

For example, Alexander Pope’s verses are densely allusive, filled with both classical and topical references that can’t be understood without some proper help from a specialized scholar. Moreover, modernist poets such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound consciously strove to enrich their writings with obscure, esoteric and personal allusions, the understanding of which is frequently essential to understanding the meaning of the works as a whole.

In some cases, allusions may even have a structural significance: James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, for example, is modeled after Homer’s epic Odyssey and can’t be sufficiently made sense of without it.

ExamplesQuizFlashcardsWorksheets

Allusion Examples

Allusion in a Sentence

Example #1: Achilles’ Heel

Divorce is the Achilles’ heel of marriage.

– George Bernard Shaw, Letters (July 2, 1965)

According to a story in Greek mythology, in an attempt to make her son immortal, the sea nymph Thetis washed the baby Achilles in the waters of the infernal river Styx. However, as she was doing this, she held him by his heel, which remained the only vulnerable place on her son’s body. This would prove a fatal mistake, since, late in the Trojan War, an arrow fired by the Trojan prince Paris and guided by Apollo, pierced through the heel of Achilles, killing the great Achaean hero on the spot. In the 19th century, the phrase “Achilles’ heel” was first used to mean a weak spot in spite of overall strength—and George Bernard Shaw wittily plays with this meaning in his clever remark above.

Example #2: Janus

A friend is Janus-faced: he looks to the past and the future. He is the child of all my foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Friendship” (1841)

Janus was an ancient Roman deity, worshipped as a guardian of doors and gates, and as a god of transitions, beginnings and endings. He was depicted as having two faces—one looking back and another forward—and this is what Ralph Waldo Emerson alludes to in the sentences above, describing a friend as someone who is both an indelible part of one’s past and an architect of his or her future.

Example #3: Panglossian

Many searchers for life beyond Earth seem to be possessed of an almost Panglossian optimism, and since their speculations include the entire universe, their optimism might seem justified.

– Tim Flannery, The New York Review of Books, November 2, 2000

Dr. Pangloss is a character in Voltaire’s 1759 satirical masterpiece Candide. A professor of “metaphysico-theologo-cosmoronology” he is a self-proclaimed optimist who firmly believes that we are living in “the best of all possible worlds” and that “all is for the best.” He remains convinced in the veracity of his beliefs even after countless misfortunes, which cost him an eye and an ear due to syphilis, and, at one point, even his freedom. Because of this, when someone is Panglossian, he or she is overly—and naively—optimistic.

(Further Reading: Top 10 Examples of Allusion in a Sentence)

Allusion in Poetry

Example #1: Dead Sea Fruits

May Life’s unblessed cup for him Be drugg’d with treacheries to the brim, With hopes that but allure to fly, With joys that vanish while he sips, Like Dead-Sea fruits, that tempt the eye, But turn to ashes on the lips!

– Thomas Moore, Lalla Rookh (1817)

A Dead Sea fruit—sometimes also called a Sodom apple—is, according to the legend, a tempting fruit which dissolves into smoke and ashes once touched. Thomas Moore must have considered the allusion somewhat obscure when he wrote the above stanza in 1817 because he decided to annotate it himself, quoting a sentence by French explorer Jean de Thévenot as an explanation: “They say that there are apple-trees upon the sides of this sea, which bear very lovely fruit, but within are full of ashes.” A Dead Sea fruit is now used as an allusion to anything which may look promising at first but ultimately brings disappointment and discontent.

Example #2: Gehenna

Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne, He travels the fastest who travels alone.

– Rudyard Kipling, “The Winners” (1890)

Gehenna—or, literally translated, the “Valley of (the Son of) Hinnom”—is a place in Jerusalem, where, according to the Old Testament, worshippers of the pagan gods Baal and Moloch sacrificed their children by fire: “They have built the high places of Baal to burn their children in the fire as offerings to Baal” (Jeremiah 19:5). In time, the term came to symbolize Hell itself, so much so that the name given to Hell in the Quran, Jahannam, is a direct derivation of Gehenna. Additionally, the phrase “go to Gehenna” can be used as a more esoteric alternative to the everyday expression “go to hell.”

Example #3: The Mad Hatter

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter, It isn’t just one of your holiday games; You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.

– T. S. Eliot, “The Naming of Cats” 1-4 (1939)

As almost everybody knows, the Mad Hatter is a character in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and the eccentric host of one of the craziest tea parties you can ever imagine, also attended by the March Hare and the Dormouse. However, the phrases “mad as a hatter” and “mad as a (March) hare” predate Carroll’s book. According to OED, the first of these two expressions may refer to “the effects of mercury poisoning formerly suffered by hat-makers as a result of the use of mercurous nitrate in the manufacture of felt hats.” Ultimately, however, it’s irrelevant which of these sources is alluded to by T.S. Eliot in the stanza above—the meaning is immediately clear either way.

Example #4: Paris · Menelaus · Troy

I will be Paris and, for love of thee, Instead of Troy shall Wittenberg be sacked; And I will combat with weak Menelaus And wear thy colours on my plumed crest.

– Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus V.1.98-101 (1592)

This is what Doctor Faustus says to a summoned infernal spirit who has assumed the shape of Helen in the fifth act of Christopher Marlowe’s tragedy. The wife of Menelaus, Helen was a Spartan princess who was abducted by the Trojan prince, Paris—an event which triggered the Trojan War. Doctor Faustus reimagines himself as Helen’s lover and, in a trance, rewrites parts of the original story: in Homer’s Iliad, it is Paris who is unskilled and cowardly, and Menelaus an epitome of bravery. A few verses above this passage, Marlowe describes Helen’s face as one “that launch’d a thousand ships,/ And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?,” a phrase which has been alluded to numerous times ever since.

Example #5: The Trojan War · Helen and Clytemnestra

A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead.

– William Butler Yeats, “Leda and the Swan” 9-11 (1923)

As you can read in the example above, Yeats finds an even more implicit way to allude to some of the people and events Christopher Marlowe calls into mind in Doctor Faustus. His sonnet “Leda and the Swan” vividly describes how Zeus, disguised as a swan, rapes Leda, the Queen of Sparta. From this union, Helen and Clytemnestra were subsequently born, the former responsible for the Trojan War (“the broken wall, the burning roof and tower”) and the latter the murderer of the Achaean leader (“And Agamemnon dead”). Thus, the three verses above hide allusions within allusions: by referring to the consequences (the Trojan War and the death of Agamemnon), Yeats actually alludes to the causes (Helen and Clytemnestra) without even using their names.

(Further Reading: Top 10 Examples of Allusion in Poetry)

Allusion in Literature

Example #1: Gargantua

You must borrow me Gargantua’s mouth first. ‘Tis a word too great for any mouth of this age’s size.

– William Shakespeare, As You Like It III.2.221 (1599)

This is what Celia replies to Rosalind in Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy, As You Like It, after the latter asks to answer her “in one word” a host of Orlando-related questions. (“What did he when thou saw’st him? What said he? How looked he? Wherein went he? What makes him here? Did he ask for me? Where remains he? How parted he with thee? And when shalt thou see him again?”) The meaning of the sentence is clear as it is, but it becomes even more palpable once you learn that Gargantua is a giant, the title protagonist in François Rabelais’ satirical pentalogy of novels, The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel.

Example #2: Methuselah

Now, you are my witness, Miss Summerson, I say I don’t care—but if he was to come to our house with his great, shining, lumpy forehead night after night till he was as old as Methuselah, I wouldn’t have anything to say to him.

– Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853)

The son of Enoch and the grandfather of Noah, Methuselah is the oldest man mentioned in the Bible; Genesis 5:27 claims that he lived to be 969 years. Consequently, the word Methuselah is now almost synonymous with longevity, and is often used to mean “extremely aged” or “ancient.” The phrase “as old as Methuselah” is also regularly used.

Example #3: Procrustean Bed

‘The measures, then,’ he continued, ‘were good in their kind, and well executed; their defect lay in their being inapplicable to the case, and to the man. A certain set of highly ingenious resources are, with the Prefect, a sort of Procrustean bed, to which he forcibly adapts his designs. But he perpetually errs by being too deep or too shallow, for the matter in hand; and many a schoolboy is a better reasoner than he.

– Edgar Allan Poe, “The Purloined Letter” (1845)

Procrustes—literally, “The Stretcher”—was a street bandit in Greek mythology famous for the eccentricity of his modus operandi. Namely, he first invited travelers to lie on an iron bed he held in his possession, and, then, in an attempt to force them to fit the length of the bed, he either stretched them (if they were short) or cut off their legs (if they were longer than his bed). The adjective “procrustean” refers to this act, and means enforcing conformity through ruthless measures which disregard individual differences.

(Further Reading: Top 10 Allusion Examples in Literature)

Songs with Assonance

Example #1: The Cure, Killing an Arab (1979)

Standing on the beach With a gun in my hand Staring at the sea Staring at the sand Staring down the barrel At the Arab on the ground I can see his open mouth But I hear no sound

I’m alive I’m dead I’m the stranger Killing an Arab

Released a few days before the end of 1978, Killing an Arab was the controversial debut single of The Cure. As Robert Smith explains in a 1991 interview, the song “is a short poetic attempt at condensing [his] impression of the key moments in The Stranger by Albert Camus”—explicitly referenced in the chorus quoted above. However, the allusion was lost to many, leading to many accusations that Killing an Arab is a racist song which promotes violence against Arabs. As a result of the hostile response, The Cure rarely play the song even today; and when they do, they modify the last verse of the chorus to either “Killing another” or “Killing an Ahab.” And yes—the latter is another example of literary allusion!

Example #2: Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah (1984)

Well, your faith was strong but you needed proof You saw her bathing on the roof Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew ya She tied you to the kitchen chair She broke your throne and she cut your hair And from your lips, she drew the Hallelujah Hallelujah, Hallelujah Hallelujah, Hallelujah

The second stanza of Leonard Cohen’s most covered song, Hallelujah, skillfully merges two biblical accounts. In the first three verses, it alludes to the story of David and Bathsheba, and the moment the Jewish king falls in love with the wife of Uriah the Hittite: “One evening David got up from his bed and walked around on the roof of the palace. From the roof he saw a woman bathing. The woman was very beautiful” (2 Samuel 11:2). Furthermore, the second three verses refer to the story of Samson, an Israelite of enormous strength, who lost all of it after his lover Delilah betrayed him and cut his hair (Judges 13-16). However, Cohen subverts the climax of this story, portraying the emasculated Samson/David not as a bitter man, but one ready to greet his defeat with a “Hallelujah.”

Example #3: Frank Turner, 1933 (2018)

The first time it was a tragedy The second time is a farce Outside it’s 1933 so I’m hitting the bar.

Written—by his own admission—during the U.S. election campaign of 2016, 1933 refers, both in the title and in the last verse of the pre-chorus excerpted above, to the year when the Nazis came to power in Germany. In Turner’s opinion, something similar is happening around us at the moment. (The chorus states this explicitly: “I don’t know what’s going on anymore/ The world outside is burning with a brand-new light/ But it isn’t one that makes me feel warm.”) To point out how farcical this all seems, he alludes to a famous Karl Marx observation in the first two verses above. It can be found in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon and, originally, it goes something like this: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”

(Further Reading: Top 5 Songs with Allusion)

Quiz

Flashcards

Worksheets

[didanawisgi]

The Odyssey is about a man. It says so right at the beginning — in Robert Fagles’s 1996 translation, for example, the poem opens with the line, “Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns.”

In the course of the poem, that man plots his return home after fighting the Trojan War, slaughters the suitors vying to marry his wife Penelope, and reestablishes himself as the head of his household.

But the Odyssey is also about other people: Penelope, the nymph Calypso, the witch Circe, the princess Nausicaa; Odysseus’s many shipmates who died before they could make it home; the countless slaves in Odysseus’s house, many of whom are never named.

Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English, is as concerned with these surrounding characters as she is with Odysseus himself. Written in plain, contemporary language and released earlier this month to much fanfare, her translationlays bare some of the inequalities between characters that other translations have elided. It offers not just a new version of the poem, but a new way of thinking about it in the context of gender and power relationships today. As Wilson puts it, “the question of who matters is actually central to what the text is about.”

Why it matters for a woman to translate the Odyssey

Composed around the 8th century BC, the Odyssey is one of the oldest works of literature typically read by an American audience; for comparison, it’s almost 2,000 years older than Beowulf. While the Iliad tells the story of the Trojan War, the Odyssey picks up after the war is over, when Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, is trying to make his way home.

Both poems are traditionally attributed to the Greek poet Homer, but since they almost certainly originated as oral performances and not written texts, it’s hard to tell whether a single person composed them, or whether they are the result of many different creators and performers refining and contributing to a story over a period of time. (The introduction to Wilson’s translation includes a longer discussion of the question of who “Homer” was.)

Wilson, a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, has also translated plays by the ancient Greek playwright Euripides and the Roman philosopher Seneca. Her translation of the Odyssey is one of many in English (though the others have been by men), including versions by Fagles, Robert Fitzgerald, Richmond Lattimore, and more. Translating the long-dead language Homer used — a variant of ancient Greek called Homeric Greek — into contemporary English is no easy task, and translators bring their own skills, opinions, and stylistic sensibilities to the text. The result is that every translation is different, almost a new poem in itself.

A battlefield epic, the Iliad has very few major female characters. The Odyssey, however, devotes significant time to the life (and even the dreams) of Penelope. Circe, Calypso, and the goddess Athena all play important roles. This was one of the reasons I was drawn to the Odyssey as a teenager, and why I’ve returned to it many times over the years.

But the Odyssey is hardly a feminist text. Odysseus may have trouble getting home, but at least he gets to travel the world and have sex with beautiful women like Calypso and Circe. Penelope, meanwhile, has to wait around while boorish suitors drink and carouse in her family’s home, pressuring her to marry one of them. To buy time, she says she can’t marry until she finishes weaving a funeral shroud for her father-in-law, but every night she undoes the day’s work, making the task last as long as she can. “His work always gets him somewhere,” Wilson told me. “Her work is all about undoing. It’s all about hiding herself, hiding her desires, and creating something whose only purpose is to get nowhere.”

Some feminist readings of the Odyssey have tried to cast Penelope as heroic in her own way, sometimes by comparing her to Odysseus. “I think there’s so many things wrong with that,” Wilson said. “She’s constantly still being judged by, is she like him.” What’s more, the heroic-Penelope reading focuses on a wealthy woman at the expense of the many enslaved women in the poem, some of whom meet an untimely and brutal end. When Odysseus returns home and kills all the suitors, he also tells his son Telemachus to kill the slave women who had sex with (or were raped by) the suitors. “Hack at them with long swords, eradicate / all life from them,” Odysseus says in Wilson’s translation. “They will forget the things / the suitors made them do with them in secret.”

As a woman, Wilson believes she comes to the Odyssey with a different perspective than translators who have gone before her. “Female translators often stand at a critical distance when approaching authors who are not only male, but also deeply embedded in a canon that has for many centuries been imagined as belonging to men,” she wrote in a recent essay at the Guardian. She called translating Homer as a woman an experience of “intimate alienation.”

“Earlier translators are not as uncomfortable with the text as I am,” she explained to me, “and I like that I’m uncomfortable.” Part of her goal with the translation was to make readers uncomfortable too — with the fact that Odysseus owns slaves, and with the inequities in his marriage to Penelope. Making these aspects of the poem visible, rather than glossing over them, “makes it a more interesting text,” she said.

Wilson’s translation is different from its predecessors in subtle — and not so subtle — ways

Part of the way Wilson challenges previous readings of the Odyssey is with style. Her translation made a splash months before it was published, when an excerpt ran in the summer 2017 issue of the Paris Review. I and other Odyssey fans were excited by Wilson’s opening line: “Tell me about a complicated man.” In its matter-of-fact language, it’s worlds different from Fagles’s “Sing to me of the man, Muse,” or Robert Fitzgerald’s 1961 version, “Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story / of that man skilled in all ways of contending.” Wilson chose to use plain, relatively contemporary language in part to “invite readers to respond more actively with the text,” she writes in a translator’s note. “Impressive displays of rhetoric and linguistic force are a good way to seem important and invite a particular kind of admiration, but they tend to silence dissent and discourage deeper modes of engagement.”

“There’s an idea that Homer has to sound heroic and ancient,” Wilson told me, but that idea comes with a value system attached, one that includes “endorsing this very hierarchical kind of society as if that’s what heroism is.” Telling the story in plainer language allows readers to see Odysseus and his society in another light.

There are flashes of beauty in Wilson’s Odyssey. “The early Dawn was born,” she writes in Book 2; “her fingers bloomed.” Of the forest on Calypso’s island, where many birds nest, she writes, “It was full of wings.” But throughout the book, there’s a frankness to Wilson’s language around work and the people who do it. Of Eurymedusa, a slave in the house of princess Nausicaa, she writes, “She used to babysit young Nausicaa / and now she lit her fire and cooked her meal.”

The slaves in older translations of the Odyssey do not “babysit” — often, they’re not identified as slaves at all. Fagles, for instance, calls Eurymedusa a “chambermaid.” Fitzgerald calls her a “nurse.” “It sort of stuns me when I look at other translations,” Wilson said, “how much work seems to go into making slavery invisible.”

Wilson, by contrast, uses the word “slave” for Eurymedusa and many other enslaved characters, even when the original uses a more specific term. The Homeric Greek dmoe, or “female-house-slave,” Wilson writes in her translator’s note, could be translated as “maid” or “domestic servant,” but those terms would imply that the woman was free. “The need to acknowledge the fact and the horror of slavery,” she writes, “and to mark the fact that the idealized society depicted in the poem is one where slavery is shockingly taken for granted, seems to me to outweigh the need to specify, in every instance, the type of slave.”

While Wilson’s language is often plain, it’s also carefully chosen. She told Wyatt Mason at the New York Times magazine she could have begun the poem with the line “Tell me about a straying husband,” an even more radical choice that would still have been “a viable translation.” But, she said, “it would give an entirely different perspective and an entirely different setup for the poem.” She spoke, Mason noted, with “the firmness of someone making hard choices she believes in.”

Those choices show up clearly in her treatment of Penelope. Penelope is a frustrating character — it’s not entirely clear why she doesn’t simply send the suitors away or marry one of them, and the poem offers limited access to her thoughts and feelings. Wilson didn’t try to make Penelope easier to understand — “the opacity of Penelope,” as she puts it, is one of the aspects of the poem she wants to trouble readers and make them uncomfortable.

But small details can tell us something about even the most frustrating of characters. At one point in Book 21, Penelope unlocks the storeroom where Odysseus keeps his weapons — as Wilson writes in her translator’s note, this act sets in motion the slaughter of the suitors and the resolution of the poem. As she picks up the key, Homer describes her hand as pachus, or “thick.” “There is a problem here,” Wilson writes, “since in our culture, women are not supposed to have big, thick, or fat hands.” Translators have usually solved the problem by skipping the adjective, or putting in something more traditional — Fagles mentions Penelope’s “steady hand.” Wilson, however, renders the moment this way: “Her muscular, firm hand/ picked up the ivory handle of the key.”

“Weaving does in fact make a person’s hands more muscular,” she writes. “I wanted to ensure that my translation, like the original, underlines Penelope’s physical competence, which marks her as a character who plays a crucial part in the action — whether or not she knows what she is doing.”

Wilson does not give Penelope more agency or power than she has in the original poem, but she also does not take any of the queen’s original power away by making descriptions of her conform to modern gender stereotypes.

“Part of fighting misogyny in the current world is having a really clear sense of what the structures of thought and the structures of society are that have enabled androcentrism in different cultures, including our own,” Wilson said, and the Odyssey, looked at in the right way, can help readers understand those structures more clearly. The poem offers a “defense of a male dominant society, a defense of its own hero and his triumph over everybody else,” she said, “but it also seems to provide these avenues for realizing what’s so horrible about this narrative, what’s missing about this narrative.”

Recent events have led to a widespread debate over how audiences should consume the work of people we know to be abusers of women. This is intertwined with the question of how we should consume art that has racist, sexist, or otherwise bigoted elements. Often elided from this conversation is the fact that people of color and women of all races have been consuming racist and sexist art in America for generations (in many classes on Western literature, for instance, they have had little choice), and developing their own responses to it, responses that are often deeply nuanced.

Conservative talk of “special snowflakes” demanding trigger warnings ignores the fact that people marginalized in the Western canon have long read literature from it in exactly the way Wilson describes: both as an endorsement of its author’s values, and as evidence of how horrible those values can be, and whom they leave out.

Wilson’s translation, then, is not a feminist version of the Odyssey. It is a version of the Odyssey that lays bare the morals of its time and place, and invites us to consider how different they are from our own, and how similar.