Tales Of Greeks And Trojans Circe Im Inlove.

Speaking of how Troy 2004 has personally offended me:

They took sandpaper and went to town on Hector. Smoothed out all his imperfections because how can good man also be bad man sometimes oh no my brain can't deal with that.

Also they didn't make him nearly as scary as he should be. Hector in the iliad is the. Scariest. The achaeans are terrified of him. Like he's the guy that walks on the battlefield and people run for their lives. He can lift boulders. He gets his ribcage smashed and gets back up like ten minutes later (granted, that's apollo, but in the god-less universe of troy they could've used it to make him even scarier) He doesn't go home all clean, he goes home and talks to his wife and holds his son while covered in gore. It's stressed that nobody but Achilles can beat him. He nearly burns the ships. He boasts and commits hybris after killing Patroclus.

Hector is the unbeatable war machine that makes mistakes sometimes, that morphs into a loving, smiling dad when he sees his son. The unbeatable war machine that's keeping an entire city safe, that gets scared and runs for his life when he knows he's in actual danger. That in the second-to-final moment has to be tricked into bravery, to stand and fight, so he has the chance at the final moment to recover from that and be supremely brave again and run straight to death, with his mind set on glory. Because he's extremely human right to the end. And his pride is as huge as his feeling of duty and love.

Also they took away that great scene where he's like "fuck your bird signs" he was such a legend for that in the iliad.

sketch

Blasphemous II + concept art by Juan Miguel López Barea

Do you have any article related to the odyssey you'd reccommend as complementary to the source?

sorry i've been sitting on your ask for so long! i am not and never have been a classics student; i came across most of these articles incidentally or here on tumblr:

"the odysseys within the odyssey" by italo calvino

"a note on memory and reciprocity in homer's odyssey" by anita nikkanen

"penelope and the poetics of remembering" by melissa mueller

"a glossary of haunting" by eve tuck and c. ree (this is mostly about horror fiction and settler-colonialism but it has a gloss on the cyclops that i think everyone, certainly everyone american, should read)

silence in the land of logos by silvia montiglio chapter 8: "silence, ruse, and endurance: odysseus and beyond"

"the name of odysseus" by g.e. dimock, jr.

also ok it's very much not "good" but there's an article by w.b. stanford called "personal relationships" that just lists all his hot takes about the relationships in the odyssey for 25 pages. it reads just like scrolling the blog of a mutual twice removed. they let men publish ANYTHING in the 60s. i love this essay. i would read this essay out loud over discord right now if someone asked me.

Eurpides’ The Trojan Women at Alumnae Theatre (2011)

valentine doodles

Electra ‼️‼️

ref : courage anxiety and despair: watching the battle (James Sant 1850)

I have endured what no one on earth has ever done before

I put to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son.

i’ve seen some chatter regarding pro-war sentiment in rings of power. lotr was so clearly anti war, and people are claiming that is lost in rop. are we watching the same show?

when finrod goes to war, galadriel loses her best friend and brother.

when the southlanders go to war against the orcs, they end up slaughtering their own townsfolk.

when elendil sails to middle earth with miriel, he is sailing to the loss of his son and she her eyes. when she returned, her father was dead and her kingdom at a precipice.

when galadriel takes ups arms with halbrand, she ends up bringing the destruction of the southlands and advances sauron’s own plans.

war touches even the harfoots, who come to arrive to their haven to find the stones of eruption have destroyed their grove and all their food and hope for the next season.

there is no glory in war here. there is only ruin, black orc-blood, and the ashes of mount doom. when the characters in rings of power go to war, they end up killing their own kin and causing a chain of events that cannot be undone.