It Could And Should Be Dumber

30 years old. Coming here rather than there to tend a garden of sadness. It gets overgrown sometimes. He/Him

[punishedsaints]

[fuckthisshit-ugh]

please read this even if you're not indian. especially if you're not indian.

you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.

first, the history you skipped: britain ruled india for two centuries and drained it. economist utsa patnaik's research estimates around $45 trillion in today's money was taken. the india that got independence in 1947 was one of the poorest countries on earth. every "why is india like this" question starts there. you don't get to profit off a robbery and then mock the crime scene.

now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:

in may the question paper for NEET leaked. that's the national medical entrance exam. over 2.2 million students took it. cancelled. years of studying, families' savings poured into coaching, gone overnight because someone sold the paper. students died by suicide after. these were kids who wanted to be doctors.

and out of that came a protest movement. a gen z group called the cockroach janta party, started by a 30 year old named abhijeet dipke, got 22 million instagram followers within DAYS. they've been doing a sit-in at jantar mantar in delhi demanding education minister dharmendra pradhan resign.

and then there's sonam wangchuk. if you've watched 3 idiots, he's the real engineer the character was based on. built solar schools in ladakh. invented ice stupas so himalayan villages have water. spent his whole life on education. he's 59 and he's been on hunger strike for 17+ days now. reporters went to see him this week and he was too weak to talk. and the troll armies are calling him "anti national" and "foreign funded". a man starving himself for other people's children. that's the thing here, anyone who asks a question is suddenly a traitor.

it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:

• infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.

• youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.

• only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.

• manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.

• journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.

• even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.

and through all of it, the PM, who came to power on religious polarisation (americans, sound familiar?), travels abroad for photo ops and has not held one single open press conference in over a decade. not one.

what i'm asking:

if you're not indian: share this. our media mostly won't cover any of it because the big outlets are owned by the same billionaires the government serves. the only reason wangchuk's fast is getting any coverage is people refusing to look away.

if you ARE indian: speak up even if you're comfortable. especially if you're comfortable. join the protests. add to this, correct me, translate it. staying quiet is a choice when nothing in this post touches your life.

india is not "dirty". india was robbed, and it's being robbed again, from the inside this time. but it's also the country where a 59 year old will starve for strangers' kids and 22 million young people will rally behind a party literally named after cockroaches, because cockroaches survive everything.

we can still save her. but only loudly.

reblog. share. don't scroll past.

[notmybabies]

very happy that people react badly when they disagree with the adaptation of their favorite stories from one form to another even when the story has been adapted and translated for thousands of years before our existence let’s never stop being nerds please

[angelwalking]

(source) its so funny how actual Greek and Homeric scholars are talking about this movie vs the fact that people on tumblr are acting like Nolan personally dug up Homer's actual bones and pissed on them

[mattoflamancha]

Wow Tumblr has ethnonationalists coming out to give opinions on the Odyssey too.

And they say the chuds are just on Twitter.

Seriously, folks saying only Greeks should be allowed to tell the story of the Odyssey, let alone act in a movie about it is like saying only people of purest English descent are allowed to do anything with the works of Shakespeare.

Legit someone called The Odyssey their country’s history. A literal myth whose “author” is just as mythical as the characters in the myth itself.

Somehow Tumblr has given me more of a headache than the morons making it a culture war thing. I expected them to be losers.

But some of y’all here on Tumblr? Nah y’all are just disappointing.

[hipsofsteel]

some of y'all just want a book report on a nearly 3,000 year old story and some of us want to see a man's personal interpretation of one of the oldest written stories we still have even if it's flawed

[seek--rest]

Me, having watched the odyssey and loved it, talking about it with my beloved and smart mutuals about the meaning and themes of this ancient epic and the masterful way Nolan was able to make this foundational western story feel modern in a way that still paid tribute: wow, I’m sure the people of tumblr dot com— the people who love Themes and Meanings and Messages and conversations around the social construct, of consequences, and of the intricacies of mankind— will understand

Also me, scrolling the tag for (1) minute:

oh i forgot you all are stupid. that’s my b.

[ohdorotheabrooke]

you guys are splitting hairs about the nobody scene that nolan cut from the odyssey. he swapped it for the awesome character motif of odysseus strumming his bow to warn animals of his presence - a gesture he does not make for humans. he combats animals but he hunts people. instead of doubling down on the overdone hubris thing, nolan makes us hear the sound of odysseus strumming his bow all throughout the music. we got a version of odysseus that is godlike in the homeric sense, and you guys go grrrrr where are my obvious themes and character beats grrrrrr

[stephfandomdumps]

oh em GEE! it's not accurate?? can you guys wake up homer? find his corpse and ask him what he thinks? was he the first writer of the odyssey? or was he the first person to write it down? did he exist? lets wake up the first ever bard to think of the odyssey! who is he? oh we dont know? that sucks. did you guys ask ovid? did you talk to hesiod? or sophocles? does mythology have one definite story? or does it evolve over time across centuries and milleniums? is there one true translation? or version? dont stories change? should nolan have stood there for 18 hours and recite it in ancient greek while you guys ate food? oh wait sorry thats not accurate. he should speak for one hour over dinner and then you guys come back for 17 straight days and listen for an hour at a time. oh wait sorry that wrong too. he hasnt mastered speaking classical greek. oh wait no one speaks that anymore, no one alive does. let's wake up and find euripedes' ghost too. and aeschylus. and apuleius! cant forget that guy. oh but wait they all lived hundreds of years apart and all told different versions of the different mythologies and added their own messaging and ideas. and they left out other parts too. according to you guys thats not allowed. god forbid. oh sorry. gods forbid.

[cerusee]

Okay. For my money, the entire thesis of Chris Nolan’s 2026 film The Odyssey is that society chokes and sputters and dies when we abuse, ignore, or violate social norms like the laws of hospitality. That is not really what The Odyssey (the book/poem) is about, but I can clearly see why in the horror that is the 2020s, someone could read The Odyssey and go oh my god that’s a lot of bad dropping in. That’s a lot of bad visits. That’s a clear vision of how the loss of social norms and cohesion fucks you up and how war, literal, brutal war, is a terrible wound that destroys your humanity and your understanding of what civilization and society is. I don’t know that the iteration of Greek society that ultimately birthed the poem would agree with Nolan’s take, but I think this movie is quite ideologically coherent, that Nolan knew exactly what he was trying to say with each and every adaptational change, and I think he wasn’t nuts for using one of the most famous classical western civilization works as a way to make that argument.

[mattoflamancha]

This all rocks.

I think this is the beauty of the classics because you can have a bunch of different interpretations. Keeping to dogma a millennium old isn’t always necessary. There have been plenty of more accurate adaptations of the epic put to film.

Film adaptations are naturally transformative pieces of art, especially when translating a 16 hour read into 3 hours of visual storytelling. Lord of the Rings cut out tons, even with the extended editions. Thankfully the feelings of PTSD for the hobbits were textual, and that sentiment that war changes people held up 40 years later.

But nearly three centuries? I think what people miss in Nolan’s adaptation is that the Trojans worship the same gods as the Mycenaeans. What truly broke Odysseus was seeing Athena’s temple sacked, the same goddess he’d been carrying with him since he left home. Odysseus still had a sober enough viewpoint that he could see how 10 years of rage cause those of his army to desecrate and destroy things that even they held sacred.

To Nolan, it wasn’t the act of hubris with Polyphemus that damned Odysseus’ voyage, all of Agamemnon’s army were damned the moment they broke through the gates, some like Agamemnon were damned before they even set sail.

I love that interpretation. And he’s consistent with it. His goal wasn’t to make an accurate to text adaptation and I knew that the moment his name was on the project. Honestly I’m impressed he kept the monsters and magic. I was fully expecting an O Brother Where Art Thou, more set in realism, interpretation of the odyssey. But Nolan actually made some truly horrifying imagery.

Is it perfect? No. I’d love it if we saw an extended cut with more stops of the Odyssey. I think its interpretation of Xenia just doesn’t apply to the deception of the Trojan horse. It’s a stretch to say the least but I can see how someone who holds Athena close as a goddess could see sacking her temple as breaking something in society that shouldn’t be.

[guerrillatech]

[trix-the-artemis]

I keep seeing people bring up Epic the musical when discussing Nolan's Odyssey

and sure they're both retelling's of the Odyssey that make flagrant changes but they really aren't comparable.

one's a passion project by a small creator and his friends and the other is a multimillion dollar international blockbuster.

[breealtair]

I'm gonna be honest, I fuck with a movie that's all about the collapse of a society that perpetuates certain morals and laws that itself is not willing to uphold when it comes to interacting with the rest of the world.

The Greeks used the excuse of a woman and the war of gods to wage war with an economic competitor, then showed up on their enemy's shores and broke their own laws of hospitality to win the war and ransacked the city and its people. The story of those actions traveled the world, making everyone afraid of the "people from the sea," even the Greeks who WERE the people from the sea.

The suitors cried about the laws not being upheld for them but were unwilling to uphold them themselves. The same society was terrified of this invisible enemy that would invade because of their lack of morals, unaware that THEY are the ones who broke the laws first. They are their own boogeyman. The fear of foreignors was never about the actions of foreignors but their own actions.

The gods haunt the narrative as an ideal. If they were confirmed real, then this movie becomes a warning against breaking away from "the correct religion." Instead, it is a warning of how mutual care and respect for your fellow man, whether gods exist or not, is the backbone of society, and without it, morality becomes something to twist and fear monger.

The gods couldn't exist in this adaptation, so a lot of the plot points involving the gods had to be changed or left out. "Nobody" only matters if Odysseus doxxes himself for poseidon to punish. (The crew members insisting that they definitely heard the cyclops say posiedon and jumping to the conclusion that he was poseidon's son and they were cursed was a great change in my opinion.) The wind bag can only exist if the gods exist. Athena can only guide Telemechus and Odysseus if the gods exist. ("Athena" potentially only being Odysseus's guilt for the preistess he let die who only shows up in times where his actions in Troy are thematically important was *chef's kiss*.) The Trojan War is only a war sanctioned by the gods if the gods exist. Odysseus being stuck with Calypso for so long needs another reason (the lotus) if it's not by the will of the gods. What would Circe and Calypso be like if they weren't eternal goddesses? Did the crew go to Hades, or did they just perform a spell that raised the dead?

Magic and Monsters can still exist without the gods, and everything else can be explained by superstition, nature, and bad luck. The ideal of the gods haunt the narrative so wonderfully.

I'm not a fan of Nolan's directorial aesthetic, but for the themes he wanted to explore, I think this was a fantastic retelling of the original. Accuracy isn't and shouldn't always be the goal. Sometimes, taking an existing story and making something new in order to speak to a different aspect of humanity is all we can really hope for.

This doesn't mean people HAVE to like it. There are plenty of "good" movies that I do not enjoy watching. However, acting like it's an objective thing to say that this was a failure of an adaptation is very annoying. It's a subjective opinion of art.

[portraitofadumbassonfire]

On twitter, the right wing grifters are saying that Troy (2003), a film depicting The Iliad, is a more of an accurate adaptation of the Odyssey than Nolan's, despite it making Achilles & Patroclus cousins and on Tumblr, the multi dash usernames are trying to convince people that the Hamiltonized version of the Odyssey that ends with Odysseus bonking Poseiden over the head with his own trident is somehow the better adaptation overall out of pure spite

[running-2-the-riptide]

Person who’s only listened to EPIC watching Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey: I don’t remember this from the musical

[running-2-the-riptide]

Person who’s only listened to EPIC watching Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey: I don’t remember this from the musical

[sepulchretide]

Grabbing people by the scruff of their necks and shaking them. You know Jax being a terrible person was the point right. That she pushed everyone away despite having all the opportunity to be better.

It's meant to be tragic. That even after all that she realized she wanted to change as her last words and thoughts. She didn't want to go.

It's okay I understand this is baby's first nuance.