🎶 Whoever can string my husband's old bow
And shoot through twelve axes cleanly
Will be the new king, sit down at the throne
And rule with me as his queen 🎶
EPIC ramble cuz I gotta practice writer's effect for school
pulls up a 200-slide powerpoint presentation
Athena's verse: so on the surface, Athena is showing how during their time apart, she has learned the mercy Ody was referencing to in Remember Them ("When mercy is a skill more of this world could learn to use"), while Ody has taken the Warrior of the Mind mindset to its greatest extent, to the point of ruthlessness, and now that Athena has learned this mercy, she feels she's at fault for Ody becoming the monster, a not-so-good person.
Implicitly, Athena is asking Ody if he wants to be her student again, since while yes, Athena likes Telemachus, he will never be Odysseus, and Athena is in so much regret that she messed up so horribly with Ody and wants to try again.
Very, very long ramble below the line VV
Ody's verse: on the surface, Ody is showing how he gets that that world where mercy is a skill more people use exists because after all, he's the one that said this to Athena. But he can't see that world anymore, because of 1) He is already the monster. He's gone too far, he can't go back. 2) He's home again, and he definitely is not going anywhere else ever fucking again. 3) he's already old, and he's mortal.
Which very convieniently leads to the implicit:
Odysseus is not a god like Athena. Ody is mortal, and he's already like 50-something by the time he's home, he knows he isn't gonna live long enough to see that world so he is indirectly declining Athena's offer to be her student again, to be her warrior of the mind again. Because he is not spending any more of his precious, limited days trying to make the world a better place, when he has his world right here, with Penelope, with Telemachus
Very well.
Ohhhhh boy.
You can hear Athena's pain in these two, little words. Why? Because Ody is her favorite mortal, and as I said before, Telemachus will never be Odysseus. And the regret Athena feels for My Goodbye that she tries to make up for by asking Ody again, he declines. So she will never be able to try again. She will never be able to see what could happen if she didn't make that mistake. She will never right her wrong. And she has to live with this for… millennia.
Telemachus and Penelope's songs aren't sad, more relief (kind of, it's 3 AM man go away) So, so much relief, that tears prick your eyes. Because this is Odysseus' happy ending. Odysseus's. The whole royal family's happy ending. They get to spend the rest of their lives until the day they die in happiness (there is no war in Ba Sing Se, there is no Telegony in the EPIC fandom)
Not Athena's.
Athena, an immortal, made the 'foolish' mistake of befriending a mortal, because mortals cannot live forever, and when they die, the god that befriends them are the ones that bear that pain forever.
Ramble over
I'm gonna sleep now
blakekathryn
prguitarman
baratheonpilled
romaincrisis
turnnoffyourmind
annaxmalina
vaporwave
theartofmadeline
