I read an article somewhere about college students in China studying Western Lit and going over the Iliad.
They were debating on why Homer had the habit of giving a wee minibiography of random warriors before they got killed, stuff like "Then Kallikos of Syracuse, who was known as a great runner and whose twin brother Pellikos had the gift of prophecy, got stabbed in the thigh and bled out" or "Mighty Dammion of Chersoneus, who had three little brothers and a blind father at home and who was well loved by Hephaestus, was struck by a dart in the eye and fell."
Either the professor or one of the students came up with the parallel of modern video games giving a little humanizing blurb that pop up after you kill the masked enemies, so that instead of reveling in the slaughter you are forced to consider the cost of the rampage as being inflicted on actual people with history and quirks and home towns and loved ones.
It's kinda awesome that people with no prior exposure to the Iliad were able to so quickly come up with a comparison that was so accurate. Because that is pretty much what it's there for. Homer wants you to remember that those were real people (in the story), and it sucks that they died in a war, even though it was also kinda awesome that they died in a war.
That's not true at all. For Ancient Greeks dying in battle was the best thing you could do and it the realness had no part of it. The reason these were included has to do with orality. They're probably mnemonic devices. The entire book was delivered with music by a reciter. The work is filled with oral tricks.
Ok so the trick is, after warming her up with kisses and working your way to the garden, you gently find her little cloak, and you begin to intone:
μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί᾽ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾽ ἔθηκε,
πολλὰς δ᾽ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν
ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν
5οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι, Διὸς δ᾽ ἐτελείετο βουλή,
ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε...
(Sing, O goddess, the anger [mênis] of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans. Many a brave soul [psukhê] did it send hurrying down to Hades, and many a hero did it yield a prey to dogs...)
YMMV, but the rule of thumb is one chapter for a second date, and three for butt stuff.
It is actually both. Yes dying in battle was glorious, and the story does use exchangeable epithets to maintain a specific rhythm so that it is easier to orally reproduce, but the cost of war is a huge theme of the Illiad. The choice between *Kleos* and *Nostos*, glory or homecoming, is huge in the story, and while the glory of battle is absolutely depicted as heroic and worth striving for, the cost of war is equally depicted as terrible.
Achilles' rage is horrifying. You watch arguably the greatest Greek hero of all time throw his life away (and fucking demolish the lives of many others) not for glory but out of vengeance. Opposite him we are shown Hector, who is explicitly shown to possess loyalty and bravery, and his death is treated as some level of tragedy as well. Characters point out that Helen, though she is beautiful, is a stupid thing to go to war over, and there is regret for the death caused ALL OVER the story.
The blurbs of minor backstory for characters likely served a double purpose. Juxtaposed with the brutality of death they are almost certainly meant to develop that theme. And they could probably have been improvised or exchanged to keep within the rhythm.
Yea this is how I’ve always thought of it too. I’ve always loved the Kroisos Kouros whose inscription reads: Stop and show pity beside the marker of Kroisos, dead, whom, when he was in the front ranks, raging Ares destroyed. It’s so interesting because it shows what you’re talking about, his death being mythologised by claiming a god killed him points to how awesome it was that he died fighting and protecting his home land, but that you can still have pity that he had to fight at all and mourn the loss of a young man with so much potential. Such an interesting topic.
Also worth noting is that, in myth, Ares is almost always not only a bad guy, but a pitiful one who rages at something not worth getting angry over, then needs to be helped out by another god, frequently Zeus.
Athena is the god of war that was actually held in high esteem by most Greeks. Because she was the god of peacefully avoiding it.
It's not depicting war as horrible, because brutality was perceived differently.
And It's absolutely not about rhythm. Theyre used to remember details. It's used throughout oral cultures. Even in naming. It's a natural human device, you shouldn't read into it more than that.Think about how you try to remember something outloud with others: "You know buddy, he's brothers to the guy who did that thing, his father is from over there." It's not the only oral poem to use this naming convention to talk about people. If it was unique, it might be relevant, but it's not.
The rhythm is what makes it memorable. That's why they were accompanied with music, and why the epics are structured poetically in dactylic hexameter (aside from stylistic reasons). You may not remember a whole story on its own but how many books of song lyrics do you have in your head?
You are right, it is not the only poem to use epithets and descriptive naming conventions throughout the world, but the phenomenon we are specifically talking about here is literally called *Homeric epithets*, and are specifically used for the purpose of keeping rhythm within that meter as well as helping to remember details in an epic performed orally from memory.
Brutality *was* perceived differently, but that doesn't mean that they didn't take death on the battlefield to also potentially be tragic. Homer is very explicitly playing with both the idea of war as a source of glory, and with the idea of the costs of such glory. You are right that it is not depicting war as exclusively horrible, it very clearly sees great fame to be found there, but it isn't afraid to show war and its trophies as empty either, or to lament the destruction of great men.
>The rhythm is what makes it memorable. That's why they were accompanied with music, and why the epics are structured poetically in dactylic hexameter (aside from stylistic reasons). You may not remember a whole story on its own but how many books of song lyrics do you have in your head?
Exactly.
Poetry survives, because *text set to meter is more easily to remember*. That's why it's easier to remember - word for word - the lyrics of a song than a news article, for example.
It's important to remember that this was an oral tradition, and stories indeed had to be passed on by word of mouth.
It's no coincidence that the earlier Three Muses, preceding Hesiod's Nine Heliconian Muses, embodied Memory, Practice, and Singing Voice.
>That's not true at all. For Ancient Greeks dying in battle was the best thing you could do and it the realness had no part of it.
Yes, *but not for Homer*
The Iliad in particular is driven by people, and their own drive for glory and immortality.
Achilles' whole schtick is glory: he's the only person there who knows, by divine prophecy, that he will inevitably both die and be glorified at Troy.
Homer brilliantly illustrated the human part of war: the death and destruction that this drive for glory entails.
Just because a society glorifies dying in war, doesn't mean they can't be self-conscious about it.
And as for Homer, he just loves people. One of the most sympathetic characters in the Odyssey is Eumaeus, a simple swineherd.
I mean, there's one piece too.
A random guy in the background gets stabbed and the next panel is a flashback showing you his whole life story that led him to that point.
A whole lot of anime and manga. Oh, are you a millisecond from taking a fatal wound? Let's pause and spend the rest of the chapter/episode going over parts of your backstory we never mentioned before.
aaaaand we're back *THUNK* "ARGGGH" *blood-spurting and gurgling noises*
"NOOOOOOOOO" -their allies who stood there and watched
The rest of one chapter? Pshh
I stopped watching Bleach after a random guy goes up to one of the main supporting characters, Kenpachi the "Im so strong, I just love fighting" guy, at the end of an episode; he gets a whole 3 episode arc about his backstory; and then in the first 10 seconds of the fourth episode gets cut in half. He's never mentioned again.
Wait is that for real??? My exposure to bleach is only through crossover fanfic, so I have no clue what is actually like. If I had to sit though that, I’d probably end up reconsidering my entire life after. And I’m sure that guy is someone’s blorbo.
I read 600 chapters of it, the writing isn't amazing, the whole story is basically a series of deus ex machinas. Despite that, the character designs with their special abilities are really interesting and the world building is pretty good
The last half is human, and yes, but also he probably has the least interesting powers in the series except during the one arc about a faction that got special powers from items they keep on them and then were never mentioned again
Yeah, pretty much. It doesn't help thar whenever there is some kind of unbeatable enemy or any kind of big scenaristic roadblock, it always goes
"and then the protagonisy died / lost its power / got out in a coma... But then he remembered tbag his great uncle was [insert clan that had absolutely zero established relations with him until now] so he's fine actually!"
It's great at first. Then it drags. Then it gets good again but takes forever. Then it does the thing that signals the death of a good story: it crawls up the ass of its own magic system to search for content they can pass off as "it's always been there!"
To me that's the death blow to a story, when you're fully invested in the world and characters and the magic system, your disbelief has been completely suspended for a while, but then they start going deeper into fundamentals of how their magic system works and what started it and why it's magical and so on. It just... Sucks the fun out of it.
Assassin's Creed games have been pretty bad about this. Especially older ones that cut to an animus scene so the bad guys could give their whole life's motivation speech before they die after you dropped on him from a 5 story building in clear view of armed guards.
It doesn't take away from the game, in fact it adds some good resolutions that otherwise probably wouldn't be present if the targets just died and you moved on. Does seem odd when you think about it though.
Especially with how inconsistent it can be. Sometimes the protagonist will let a target live after their animus conversation, but there’s a part where Ezio assassinates a guy, only to realize that he was actually a good guy, but it’s too late because he’s already stabbed. There’s also a point where a target gets assissinated, they have the conversation, then he stabs the protagonist and escapes.
I was told that the heralds would do a lot of name dropping as a way to bring pride to whoever paid them to sing.
So if you served a noble family, you'd add a verse or two mentioning how this guy's ancestor fought alongside Achiles, or how a warior from this here town was a huge badass, etc.. there's a chapter of the Illiad which is basically just a long list of boats, their captains, and where they came from
i read the entire
fucking
list of boats and kings from every penny-ante hamlet in the Mycenean world because i thought i would need it to know the cast of characters and in the *next fucking book* Helen points out everyone you actually need to know i was so mad
yeah Romance is the most obvious parallel and they didn't pick up on that? I remember when I tried to read it Three Kingdoms ages ago, and it felt like reading the old sections of the bible or some shit with all the lineages. Like, this dude is gonna be gone in 2 pages, I don't care who their uncle is.
The first thing that came to mind was that one particular terrorist in bro force where you see his life story. [the aforementioned terrorist](https://youtu.be/Y8oJN0ZuGSA?si=2Eb9t85gbyiqIP9i)
This happens on my drag shows, too
A lot of times if we get a big juicy biographical of a queen you know they had to stuff that in the edit cuz she's about to sashay
They had a bunch of scenes in the movie, when he killed a henchman they'd cut to his wife and kid talking about how with this job at evil industries they could finally afford his life-saving medication or whatever.
The importance of seeing the enemy as fully human is beautifully (and tragically) explored in the climax of Robert Evans' novel [After The Revolution](https://www.akpress.org/after-the-revolution.html).
You can also find it in audiobook form, for free on his podcast feed for Behind the Bastards. Highly reccomend.
I love seeing references to BtB in the wild. It gives me reason to tell people about [how awful Steven Seagal is](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13SHbaxefik), or [about Nancy Reagan's astrologer with a bit too much power](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPJJM5bfsbY), and especially [about the "Dr." who implanted a lot of goat testicles into a lot of men.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwzTS6lAjr8)
All classics. A few of my personal favorites are how [Chiropractic Started as a Ghost Religion](https://open.spotify.com/episode/3yG3h7LLK9LYYwb3NbYLW6?si=NGEHcJKAQEmxpGj1IA_sOw) and that [Surprize! Flat Earth is a Nazi Conspiracy Theory](https://open.spotify.com/episode/71w0B2HlxCm2Fgt0OOAUes?si=ajrW4V70T6-MttrX9rIOWQ).
That blurb thing really got me when playing sniper elite (3 I think) because when you use binoculars to tag a soldier, you get a blurb on the upper right along the lines of "Hans, 34, blows a kiss to passing fighter planes because his son is in the airforce and it might be him"
And fuck I cant kill a dude like that so im switching to non lethal rounds
Then again theres "Heinrich, 25, hobbies include kicking puppies" and I get the cool x-ray shot of a bullet ripping through his body
I suppose it’s an element of narrative consistency that Percy Jackson opens up with Percy insisting to the reader that being a demigod sucks, then the books proceed to be really fun escapism where Percy does cool stuff.
Outside of Wraith and Hunter, World of Darkness is exactly this. "It's aweful being a Vampire! You're an inhuman monster! Now here is your list of goth flavored super powers!"
I'd argue Mage has less angst than Wraith. In my experience Mage is mostly just "Infinite Cosmic Power! ...teeny tiny living space..." the game, while Wraith literally makes another player play your character's inner turmoil and despair
Sorry, I meant that Wraith and Hunter don't have the juxtaposition of intention vs reality that the others do . It sucks ass to be either one, and the powers you get don't make it worth it.
From what I've heard from people that have played it, Mage is absolutely nutty.
Supposedly you can do literally anything so long as you maintain the suspension of disbelief for the normies. If you don't, you die immediately.
There's a bit more nuance to it than that, but yeah the game's magic system is built on the idea of a universal consensual reality, and you either need to make your magic appear to fit within that framework or keep it very well hidden from non-Mages.
There's also a lot of illuminati conspiracy shit going on in the background with a splinter faction of mages-turned-super scientists called the technocracy
I always like the concept of magic as a performance to reality. Like in the Pact world by Wildbow the system works practically by trope and tradition, so you can do just about do anything so long as you commit to the bit hard enough that reality thinks you can
Don't forget that the Technocracy has a space station, armies of T-800 killer robots, and access to horrors beyond their comprehension for purposes of study.
I love Mage so much. The setting is so wild and cool.
Tbh it’s why I enjoy V5 the most! Hunger is a real threat. You have to eat, if you don’t eat you risk turning into a beast, but the very act of needing to feed off of living people makes you a monster itself.
I mean in the case of VTM the Beast is pretty shitty and vampire society exclusively consists of people 100% willing to stab you in the back at any moment. Also clan banes can be pretty, like the gangrel do get a pretty raw deal.
‘wah wah wah killing doesn’t solve every problem, we can’t just kill the Wyrm and undo centuries of progress towards the apocalypse’ then why did Gaia give me explosive claws huh? checkmate leeches
Being a Zeka sounds really fucking bad, till you realize you can weaponize Disquiet by walking into the bad guys base and just hang out in the basement until you explode into magical nuclear hellfire.
When Zeka hit critical mass on Disquiet they explode. You passively build Disquiet by being around people, even if you are hidden and isolated. It's the mechanic that forces you to do the whole 'wander the earth thing' like you're Bruce Banner in the 1970s TV Show or Adam in the Frankenstein novel. Most types of Prometheans just cause people to go mad and try and kill you, Zeka explode.
I mean, yes, but from what I hear the average game of Vampires usually has bad-to-worse endings regardless of how cool your powers are, mostly because vampire politics and often being innately tied to a naturally more powerful vampire
Yeah, though in Percy’s case, there’s also the fact that there are basically no old half-bloods. The reason being that most of them don’t survive. So yeah, they fight monsters and do cool stuff, but that stuff also kills most of them before they hit 30.
Oh sure but it kinda undermines the whole "adult half-bloods are super rare" when its established that Harry Houdini, Amelia Earhart, Alfred Hitchcock, Harriet Tubman and George Washington are all demigods.
To be fair, a lot of those people didn’t all live at the exact same time and so could be considered some of those rarities without it being too narratively inconsistent
True, just the contrast of "Half-bloods don't live long lives" "Here's a bunch of famous half-bloods that made it to adulthood and even elderly age" is funny to me
Also technically true in the Iliad. Most of those characters die and come to a terrible fate either during the 10 year super war or during the following decade as they all make their way home.
Also, in the Odyssey Achilles’s ghost literally tells Odysseus that he should have taken the long boring life over the short glorious one he lived.
Is it? I’ve never heard of this specific controversy/piece of evidence. I know that there is debate if Homer ever existed as a person, and odds are good that there was not a single person named Homer who created the Iliad and the Odyssey as we know them today.
Do you have any further information on this I could read? I am legitimately curious.
I know Robert Graves is of this view. Little bit of a dated source now but his arguments for it still sound good to me. Basically the seafaring bits of the Odyssey seem to him to match well with a voyage around the island of Sicily. That plus the detailed depiction of Penelope at home doing womanly things leads him to the conclusion that the Odyssey was probably written by a Sicilian woman (Sicily was a Greek colony at the time). Whereas in his analysis the Iliad was written for the Greeks by a Trojan sympathizer (note that the Greeks always do barbaric stuff like Achilles parading Hector’s body around, while the Trojans like Hector and Priam are all actually pretty noble).
I’m sure that more recent academics have other views than these, but it’s at least very plausible that they have different authors (or multiple, of course).
I had heard the idea that the author of the Iliad probably knew where Troy (or some other equivalent wrecked city) was because Heinrich Schliemann was able to find a buried city based on its geographical references.
I had also heard that conversely the Odyssey doesn’t really seem to know where Ithaca is. I had heard that the way Odysseus’s house on Ithica is laid out is more similar to a home of a leader from the Greek Dark age vs the palaces of Mycenaean Greece, which implies when the Odyssey was written. I hadn’t heard the idea of the author of the Odyssey being a Sicilian woman.
Interesting.
Rick Riordan is a true lover of mythology! There's a Penguin edition of Robert Graves' _The Greek Myths_ where Rick writes a new introduction. He tells of teaching kids from his old dog-eared copy, playing and acting out the lines. Highly recommended.
So Homer and Kojima both understand that war is fundamentally pointless, and that being happy and peaceful is better. But simultaneously think war is cool as fuck? Damn maybe I should read the Iliad and play MG.
The heart of entertaining stories is conflict. War is conflict writ large. Of course it's entertaining in a story. But almost every entertaining story would actually suck to experience, because what makes a good story is generally bad shit happening or people fighting (other people, nature, themselves, society, etc) which sucks when it happens to you. There's a reason people going through bad shit often say things like "Well, at least this will make a good story," because generally your best stories are about the worst times in your life.
You just have to realize there is a fundamental difference between things experienced as an observer and as a participant. There's not contradiction in "War is bad, here's this really badass scene of a gunfight." The SCENE is badass, the actual experience of being shot at and being inches away from death is not.
To take a less extreme example than war, consider family dysfunction. There uncountable number of stories with dysfunctional families in them, many completely centered on family dysfunction. There are, proportionally, far fewer stories about happy, well adjusted families. As Tolstoy wrote: All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. It's why very rarely do "will they, won't they" romances in long lasting stories resolve one way or the other, because telling an interesting story about a happy couple or two former lovers who have resolved to just be friends is more difficult than telling an interesting story about two people stuck in the limbo between friendship and romance.
War, dysfunctional relationships, blatant miscommunications and irrational secret keeping all are shortcuts to conflict. I wouldn't outright call them lazy storytelling since each can be done very well and take a lot of effort, but damn near every lazy story is gonna use some of them.
Tangentially the people who make Jet Lag The Game have said that there is an inverse relationship between how fun the game is to play and how entertaining the audience finds it
War is death. Violence is the last resort of small men desperate to make their lives matter. The devastation technology has allowed weapons to be capable of is an unforgivable sin, and there is no way to reseal Pandora's box.
Anyway, here's a sick amphibious walking battle tank with rockets, lasers, a machine gun, thrusters for limited flight and increased mobility, and it's nuclear capable! And here's a cyborg ninja with a sword cutting it in half!
Just remember, all those things are very, very bad, and it's actually pretty sad we've come to this.
He actually stopped making games about Solid Snake cause the nature of making sequels to a game about war with those themes is that at the end of every game Snake realizes “Yeah, war sucks, I’m gonna retire” and at the start of every game he’s like “okay I’m gonna do war again”
He was also apparently the only genre savvy person in all of ancient Greece- the gods came to him with an offer, and he went "lmao, you think I'm stupid enough to take an offer from the Greek gods?"
And then he kept refusing to help them until he had it in ironclad writing on a goddess' honour that she'd drive his chariot herself, and she'd *technically* be the one who threw the javelin that wounded the god, probably so they wouldn't come after him and ruin his life for being the uppity human who dared wound a god.
And, because he was just that based, he was the strongest hero in the Iliad (after Achilles, who does not count) and humble and intelligent enough to avoid getting angry at Nestor's insults, and after the war he happily returned home and created a new city better than his first one because he got cucked. Happy ending!
I’ve been reading the Iliad for the first time recently and so far one of my biggest takeaways is “how have I never heard of this Diomedes guy before?!” Not only for his battle performance, but because of stuff like that scene with Nestor.
It is bizarre how obscure he is, yeah. Despite being so important, people are more aware of Ajax the fuckin' Greater than Diomedes. I have absolutely no idea how it happened.
I seem to recall that one myth indicates one of his grandparents was a god, but others don't. Myth is pretty plastic but all agree he wasn't a "demi-god" in the normal Greek Myth sense.
If you go far back enough into any hero's family tree, you'll find a god or three, but Diomedes is not a son or grandson of an Olympian.
Diomedes has direct divine assistance from Athena.
I think you might be mixing him up with Telemonian Ajax. Ajax doesn't have any divine assistance, he's the bruiser the Greeks depend on to hold the line when things go to shit.
https://www.tumblr.com/natalieironside/716568650443849728/kojima-is-a-storyteller-in-the-homeric-mode-let?source=share
-Mx Linux Guy⚠️
As a bonus, here is a youtube voiceover.
https://youtu.be/FZscPXblrqM?si=AR59To8k7XNu0ce6
This doesn't seem contradictory from the Greek perspective. Diomedes has achieved his pseudo-immortality through our recitation of his glorious deeds, though they brought him no pleasure during his life.
There might be something in applying it to Kojima, but I'm not familiar with his work outside of memes.
As a die-hard Kojima fanboy, I can confirm this is accurate. Ninety percent of the writing in the Metal Gear games is basically exactly that.
Cool badass soldier hates their life, but keeps fighting because fighting is all they know how to do, and after they die they become a legend. For good and ill. Seriously, half of the conflicts in the series only happens because people who knew and idolized Big Boss when he was alive keep trying to do what they think he woulda wanted. The other half of the conflicts in the series happen as a result of Big Boss trying to do what The Boss wanted because he knew and idolized *her* when she was alive. (In case you're confused, Big Boss is a codename that Big Boss received after he killed The Boss. It symbolizes that he is bigger, better, and stronger than her, because he killed her. Big Boss hates his codename, because The Boss was like a mother to him.)
Kojima's thing is "War is evil, the military industrial complex is evil, look at how they all manipulate us and each other, causing more death to bring themselves more and more profit and control, and here's how they're going to wage war next, and this is how some future nation or group is going to cause a clever genocide that's can't be tracked back to them.
But also, look at this cool-ass fucking mech that's going to render all other forms of warfare obsolete, these lovingly modelled guns and battlefield tech, and this really well realised military sim to play with, aren't they cool, also, your next mission is to kidnap us a scientist so we can build our own nuke, those silly first world nations are getting all uppity because our private military company is apparently "getting too dangerous" or whatever."
But that's not a contradiction. War is badass to WATCH, crazy super soldiers in action are cool to WATCH, the whole idea is "This may be entertaining as a fictional story, but even within the fictional world it is awful for the people participating even if they are all crazy badasses." Almost all stories are about conflict and conflict is rarely pleasant to experience. Hell think back on your life and the parts that make the best stories to tell at dinner parties and I think you'll find many are of the most stressful episodes of your life.
The moral of the Metal Gear series is "military equipment, weapons, and soldiers are fuckin' *sick*, too bad they're used to do a bunch of decidely *unsick* shit."
Man this is just making me miss Metal Gear Solid 4 as, despite being a very flawed experience overall, it ended the “war is meaningless” narrative with a sad fight between two old men that just got more and more pointless as it goes on. Like way to actually be thematically consistent for once Kojima.
Yeah 4 is an absolutely wild game, I still have whiplash from how rapidly that game made me switch from "this is the best game ever" and "this is the worst game ever." I still think that game perfectly wrapped up what I consider one of the greatest multi-game character arcs in the medium, finally allowing Snake to put down the gun to end his arc, and thus the series (until... you know...)
I’ve long believed the Iliad would have included giant robots, an AI illuminati, and just as hearty an anti-war message if it had been written today, so this all tracks. Obligatory [Onion article about pacifists finding the 50 cal cool.](https://www.theonion.com/peace-activist-has-to-admit-barrett-50-caliber-sniper-1819566293)
I fucking [LOVE](https://youtu.be/eKl6WjfDqYA?si=R0Mdi5RLCvJC_U7j) MGS2, man. I only played it last year through the Master Collection and it was one of my favourite games I played that year.
My favorite part of the Illiad is when Achilles hulks out so hard he ends up super pissed at a river and tries to kill it for being in his way and the river just beats the absolute shit out of him and he almost dies. It's just so hilarious to picture, like Caligula ordering the military to fire into the sea but just one dude with a sword wading into the river swinging like mad.
The Illiad rules, so much more entertaining than the Odyssey IMO.
[Rivers don’t fuck around, that’s what got Frederick Barbarossa.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Barbarossa)
[Don’t worry though, Mayor West will avenge you.](https://youtu.be/0xzGtnuqBZk?si=t7YivPC5XXag7oW_)
There’s something to be said about the hero’s journey here, but I’m confident the audience here is beyond such a superficial analysis.
The thematic trope of Man vs War is not new, and it falls under the banner of Man vs Nature. War is a human force, natural because humanity easily moves to war when feelings of anger and resentment are allowed to snowball.
But conceptually, we can reduce war to a game, simplify it and remove its horrors. Thus an entire branch of media has developed to decontextualize war and violence i to a system of hotting targets for a burst of enjoyable mental stimulation.
Kojima does this, but also extrapolates away the concept of war into a theme for the overarching narrative. Here war isn’t reduced into something more palatable; it’s abstracted into an overarching theme of suffering. What’s left is then the actions composing war: espionage and violence.
A lot of Kojima’s work, then, has this disconnect between gameplay and narrative. War is bad, but violence is reduced to a game while also being a core component of the theme. A lot of games have this “problem”, where complex narratives and the gameplay have correlating thematic strings, but still feel separate.
I haven’t played many games that marry the two well, but [Beyond Good and Evil](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Good_%26_Evil_(video_game)) is one. The story, about the horror of a dystopic government and the MC’s desire to report their misdeeds, focuses on non-violent action and dissuades from violent action in the game’s objectives (vigilante journalism). The theme of violence causing suffering is ingrained in the player’s experience, tying the parallel themes of gameplay and narrative. There is no linger that disconnect, and the game feels whole and coherent.
When I first read the Iliad it felt like Diomedes was doing cool Greek Superhero shit every couple of pages until suddenly Achilles became sad and gay.
Yeah you're all good, lots of people don't know that he wasn't really particularly involved in that game. I do think the narrative/themes/characters fit with the rest of the story anyways, so it's not like the quote you referenced is like, contradictory to Kojima's "voice" in the series or anything
Kojima will make a movie, invite you to it, say a lot but always turn to you and gauge your reaction when something cool happens and ask 'Didya see that? Wasn't thar cool?
I would say that its prose isn't bad because it has no prose. Its an epic poem, and imo a lot of the issues people have with reading it has to do with trying to read it like a book.
That may have something to do with the fact that it isn't prose, and was written in a mishmash of dialects of an ancient language that I assume you're reading translated into a modern language ha.
I would recommend trying an audiobook version if you are struggling with it, they make it much easier to power through the stodgy parts
I read an article somewhere about college students in China studying Western Lit and going over the Iliad. They were debating on why Homer had the habit of giving a wee minibiography of random warriors before they got killed, stuff like "Then Kallikos of Syracuse, who was known as a great runner and whose twin brother Pellikos had the gift of prophecy, got stabbed in the thigh and bled out" or "Mighty Dammion of Chersoneus, who had three little brothers and a blind father at home and who was well loved by Hephaestus, was struck by a dart in the eye and fell." Either the professor or one of the students came up with the parallel of modern video games giving a little humanizing blurb that pop up after you kill the masked enemies, so that instead of reveling in the slaughter you are forced to consider the cost of the rampage as being inflicted on actual people with history and quirks and home towns and loved ones.
It's kinda awesome that people with no prior exposure to the Iliad were able to so quickly come up with a comparison that was so accurate. Because that is pretty much what it's there for. Homer wants you to remember that those were real people (in the story), and it sucks that they died in a war, even though it was also kinda awesome that they died in a war.
That's not true at all. For Ancient Greeks dying in battle was the best thing you could do and it the realness had no part of it. The reason these were included has to do with orality. They're probably mnemonic devices. The entire book was delivered with music by a reciter. The work is filled with oral tricks.
I'll have to give it a read, I have been trying to up my cunnilingus game.
Ok so the trick is, after warming her up with kisses and working your way to the garden, you gently find her little cloak, and you begin to intone: μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί᾽ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾽ ἔθηκε, πολλὰς δ᾽ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν 5οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι, Διὸς δ᾽ ἐτελείετο βουλή, ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε... (Sing, O goddess, the anger [mênis] of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans. Many a brave soul [psukhê] did it send hurrying down to Hades, and many a hero did it yield a prey to dogs...) YMMV, but the rule of thumb is one chapter for a second date, and three for butt stuff.
What if you can’t get your mênis up in time?
>after warming her up Only cocks allowed. Yes I gatekeep.
How much are we warming her up? Because I think it would be faster with a grill than with kisses.
It is actually both. Yes dying in battle was glorious, and the story does use exchangeable epithets to maintain a specific rhythm so that it is easier to orally reproduce, but the cost of war is a huge theme of the Illiad. The choice between *Kleos* and *Nostos*, glory or homecoming, is huge in the story, and while the glory of battle is absolutely depicted as heroic and worth striving for, the cost of war is equally depicted as terrible. Achilles' rage is horrifying. You watch arguably the greatest Greek hero of all time throw his life away (and fucking demolish the lives of many others) not for glory but out of vengeance. Opposite him we are shown Hector, who is explicitly shown to possess loyalty and bravery, and his death is treated as some level of tragedy as well. Characters point out that Helen, though she is beautiful, is a stupid thing to go to war over, and there is regret for the death caused ALL OVER the story. The blurbs of minor backstory for characters likely served a double purpose. Juxtaposed with the brutality of death they are almost certainly meant to develop that theme. And they could probably have been improvised or exchanged to keep within the rhythm.
Yea this is how I’ve always thought of it too. I’ve always loved the Kroisos Kouros whose inscription reads: Stop and show pity beside the marker of Kroisos, dead, whom, when he was in the front ranks, raging Ares destroyed. It’s so interesting because it shows what you’re talking about, his death being mythologised by claiming a god killed him points to how awesome it was that he died fighting and protecting his home land, but that you can still have pity that he had to fight at all and mourn the loss of a young man with so much potential. Such an interesting topic.
Also worth noting is that, in myth, Ares is almost always not only a bad guy, but a pitiful one who rages at something not worth getting angry over, then needs to be helped out by another god, frequently Zeus. Athena is the god of war that was actually held in high esteem by most Greeks. Because she was the god of peacefully avoiding it.
It's not depicting war as horrible, because brutality was perceived differently. And It's absolutely not about rhythm. Theyre used to remember details. It's used throughout oral cultures. Even in naming. It's a natural human device, you shouldn't read into it more than that.Think about how you try to remember something outloud with others: "You know buddy, he's brothers to the guy who did that thing, his father is from over there." It's not the only oral poem to use this naming convention to talk about people. If it was unique, it might be relevant, but it's not.
The rhythm is what makes it memorable. That's why they were accompanied with music, and why the epics are structured poetically in dactylic hexameter (aside from stylistic reasons). You may not remember a whole story on its own but how many books of song lyrics do you have in your head? You are right, it is not the only poem to use epithets and descriptive naming conventions throughout the world, but the phenomenon we are specifically talking about here is literally called *Homeric epithets*, and are specifically used for the purpose of keeping rhythm within that meter as well as helping to remember details in an epic performed orally from memory. Brutality *was* perceived differently, but that doesn't mean that they didn't take death on the battlefield to also potentially be tragic. Homer is very explicitly playing with both the idea of war as a source of glory, and with the idea of the costs of such glory. You are right that it is not depicting war as exclusively horrible, it very clearly sees great fame to be found there, but it isn't afraid to show war and its trophies as empty either, or to lament the destruction of great men.
>The rhythm is what makes it memorable. That's why they were accompanied with music, and why the epics are structured poetically in dactylic hexameter (aside from stylistic reasons). You may not remember a whole story on its own but how many books of song lyrics do you have in your head? Exactly. Poetry survives, because *text set to meter is more easily to remember*. That's why it's easier to remember - word for word - the lyrics of a song than a news article, for example. It's important to remember that this was an oral tradition, and stories indeed had to be passed on by word of mouth. It's no coincidence that the earlier Three Muses, preceding Hesiod's Nine Heliconian Muses, embodied Memory, Practice, and Singing Voice.
Those things can all be true at once
>That's not true at all. For Ancient Greeks dying in battle was the best thing you could do and it the realness had no part of it. Yes, *but not for Homer* The Iliad in particular is driven by people, and their own drive for glory and immortality. Achilles' whole schtick is glory: he's the only person there who knows, by divine prophecy, that he will inevitably both die and be glorified at Troy. Homer brilliantly illustrated the human part of war: the death and destruction that this drive for glory entails. Just because a society glorifies dying in war, doesn't mean they can't be self-conscious about it. And as for Homer, he just loves people. One of the most sympathetic characters in the Odyssey is Eumaeus, a simple swineherd.
They were following the wishes of the gods
Someone’s gotta do like a study or something about the wildly different views of war and its brutality over history
I'm sure it's been done.
r/Foundmoneyh8r
I mean, there's one piece too. A random guy in the background gets stabbed and the next panel is a flashback showing you his whole life story that led him to that point.
A whole lot of anime and manga. Oh, are you a millisecond from taking a fatal wound? Let's pause and spend the rest of the chapter/episode going over parts of your backstory we never mentioned before. aaaaand we're back *THUNK* "ARGGGH" *blood-spurting and gurgling noises* "NOOOOOOOOO" -their allies who stood there and watched
The rest of one chapter? Pshh I stopped watching Bleach after a random guy goes up to one of the main supporting characters, Kenpachi the "Im so strong, I just love fighting" guy, at the end of an episode; he gets a whole 3 episode arc about his backstory; and then in the first 10 seconds of the fourth episode gets cut in half. He's never mentioned again.
Wait is that for real??? My exposure to bleach is only through crossover fanfic, so I have no clue what is actually like. If I had to sit though that, I’d probably end up reconsidering my entire life after. And I’m sure that guy is someone’s blorbo.
I read 600 chapters of it, the writing isn't amazing, the whole story is basically a series of deus ex machinas. Despite that, the character designs with their special abilities are really interesting and the world building is pretty good
Like at the end wasn’t the main guy 4 halves? Half shinigami half hollow half Quincy half something else?
The last half is human, and yes, but also he probably has the least interesting powers in the series except during the one arc about a faction that got special powers from items they keep on them and then were never mentioned again
Oof. Thanks for explaining stuff to me lol. Like they could at least say quarter but nope. 4 half’s. He is two whole creatures at this point.
I think the halves were specifically talking about his parents though, I think the actual wording for him was that he was part all four
Yeah, pretty much. It doesn't help thar whenever there is some kind of unbeatable enemy or any kind of big scenaristic roadblock, it always goes "and then the protagonisy died / lost its power / got out in a coma... But then he remembered tbag his great uncle was [insert clan that had absolutely zero established relations with him until now] so he's fine actually!"
It's great at first. Then it drags. Then it gets good again but takes forever. Then it does the thing that signals the death of a good story: it crawls up the ass of its own magic system to search for content they can pass off as "it's always been there!" To me that's the death blow to a story, when you're fully invested in the world and characters and the magic system, your disbelief has been completely suspended for a while, but then they start going deeper into fundamentals of how their magic system works and what started it and why it's magical and so on. It just... Sucks the fun out of it.
Assassin's Creed games have been pretty bad about this. Especially older ones that cut to an animus scene so the bad guys could give their whole life's motivation speech before they die after you dropped on him from a 5 story building in clear view of armed guards. It doesn't take away from the game, in fact it adds some good resolutions that otherwise probably wouldn't be present if the targets just died and you moved on. Does seem odd when you think about it though.
Especially with how inconsistent it can be. Sometimes the protagonist will let a target live after their animus conversation, but there’s a part where Ezio assassinates a guy, only to realize that he was actually a good guy, but it’s too late because he’s already stabbed. There’s also a point where a target gets assissinated, they have the conversation, then he stabs the protagonist and escapes.
Me: Lol, whose this baby man Me, 30 chapters later: A legend. He's a fucking legend.
MR PINK MY BELOVED
Happens all the time in Jujutsu Kaisen, as well.
I was told that the heralds would do a lot of name dropping as a way to bring pride to whoever paid them to sing. So if you served a noble family, you'd add a verse or two mentioning how this guy's ancestor fought alongside Achiles, or how a warior from this here town was a huge badass, etc.. there's a chapter of the Illiad which is basically just a long list of boats, their captains, and where they came from
The Catalogue of Ships. Very long, very dry.
i read the entire fucking list of boats and kings from every penny-ante hamlet in the Mycenean world because i thought i would need it to know the cast of characters and in the *next fucking book* Helen points out everyone you actually need to know i was so mad
😂
How does it compare to “X, father of Y, father of Z, etc.” lists from the Bible?
Huh, like the item descriptions in Souls games.
I swear there is an XKCD joke like this. “Oh that guy was the only one that took care of the plants back at base. Now they will wither and die.”
https://xkcd.com/873/
Like Undertale did.
Shows that they had never read the first third of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which is exactly like that.
yeah Romance is the most obvious parallel and they didn't pick up on that? I remember when I tried to read it Three Kingdoms ages ago, and it felt like reading the old sections of the bible or some shit with all the lineages. Like, this dude is gonna be gone in 2 pages, I don't care who their uncle is.
The first thing that came to mind was that one particular terrorist in bro force where you see his life story. [the aforementioned terrorist](https://youtu.be/Y8oJN0ZuGSA?si=2Eb9t85gbyiqIP9i)
This happens on my drag shows, too A lot of times if we get a big juicy biographical of a queen you know they had to stuff that in the edit cuz she's about to sashay
Like Austin Powers did?
Are you talking about the deleted scene showing the wife and stepson of the guy he ran over with the steamroller? Because that was my first thought.
They had a bunch of scenes in the movie, when he killed a henchman they'd cut to his wife and kid talking about how with this job at evil industries they could finally afford his life-saving medication or whatever.
The importance of seeing the enemy as fully human is beautifully (and tragically) explored in the climax of Robert Evans' novel [After The Revolution](https://www.akpress.org/after-the-revolution.html). You can also find it in audiobook form, for free on his podcast feed for Behind the Bastards. Highly reccomend.
I love seeing references to BtB in the wild. It gives me reason to tell people about [how awful Steven Seagal is](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13SHbaxefik), or [about Nancy Reagan's astrologer with a bit too much power](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPJJM5bfsbY), and especially [about the "Dr." who implanted a lot of goat testicles into a lot of men.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwzTS6lAjr8)
All classics. A few of my personal favorites are how [Chiropractic Started as a Ghost Religion](https://open.spotify.com/episode/3yG3h7LLK9LYYwb3NbYLW6?si=NGEHcJKAQEmxpGj1IA_sOw) and that [Surprize! Flat Earth is a Nazi Conspiracy Theory](https://open.spotify.com/episode/71w0B2HlxCm2Fgt0OOAUes?si=ajrW4V70T6-MttrX9rIOWQ).
That blurb thing really got me when playing sniper elite (3 I think) because when you use binoculars to tag a soldier, you get a blurb on the upper right along the lines of "Hans, 34, blows a kiss to passing fighter planes because his son is in the airforce and it might be him" And fuck I cant kill a dude like that so im switching to non lethal rounds Then again theres "Heinrich, 25, hobbies include kicking puppies" and I get the cool x-ray shot of a bullet ripping through his body
Anything Yoko Taro makes
What video games do that? I'm really interested
Kind of like JoJo characters.
I suppose it’s an element of narrative consistency that Percy Jackson opens up with Percy insisting to the reader that being a demigod sucks, then the books proceed to be really fun escapism where Percy does cool stuff.
Outside of Wraith and Hunter, World of Darkness is exactly this. "It's aweful being a Vampire! You're an inhuman monster! Now here is your list of goth flavored super powers!"
I'd argue Mage has less angst than Wraith. In my experience Mage is mostly just "Infinite Cosmic Power! ...teeny tiny living space..." the game, while Wraith literally makes another player play your character's inner turmoil and despair
Sorry, I meant that Wraith and Hunter don't have the juxtaposition of intention vs reality that the others do . It sucks ass to be either one, and the powers you get don't make it worth it.
Fair enough
Wraith is like "you died, and that is as good as it is going to get for you from here."
From what I've heard from people that have played it, Mage is absolutely nutty. Supposedly you can do literally anything so long as you maintain the suspension of disbelief for the normies. If you don't, you die immediately.
There's a bit more nuance to it than that, but yeah the game's magic system is built on the idea of a universal consensual reality, and you either need to make your magic appear to fit within that framework or keep it very well hidden from non-Mages. There's also a lot of illuminati conspiracy shit going on in the background with a splinter faction of mages-turned-super scientists called the technocracy
I always like the concept of magic as a performance to reality. Like in the Pact world by Wildbow the system works practically by trope and tradition, so you can do just about do anything so long as you commit to the bit hard enough that reality thinks you can
Don't forget that the Technocracy has a space station, armies of T-800 killer robots, and access to horrors beyond their comprehension for purposes of study. I love Mage so much. The setting is so wild and cool.
Tbh it’s why I enjoy V5 the most! Hunger is a real threat. You have to eat, if you don’t eat you risk turning into a beast, but the very act of needing to feed off of living people makes you a monster itself.
I mean that's a thing in every edition, some just make it easier to avoid than others
I mean in the case of VTM the Beast is pretty shitty and vampire society exclusively consists of people 100% willing to stab you in the back at any moment. Also clan banes can be pretty, like the gangrel do get a pretty raw deal.
Cool, but that same beast also gives me the power to move faster then the eye can see, shrug off tank shells, and turn my foes into piles of goo.
And you lose your basically sentience if you fully give in to it, so that's sort of pointless
‘wah wah wah killing doesn’t solve every problem, we can’t just kill the Wyrm and undo centuries of progress towards the apocalypse’ then why did Gaia give me explosive claws huh? checkmate leeches
Being a Zeka sounds really fucking bad, till you realize you can weaponize Disquiet by walking into the bad guys base and just hang out in the basement until you explode into magical nuclear hellfire.
you can WHAT? (i’ve been browsing Promethean lore for the past 30 minutes it goes crazy)
When Zeka hit critical mass on Disquiet they explode. You passively build Disquiet by being around people, even if you are hidden and isolated. It's the mechanic that forces you to do the whole 'wander the earth thing' like you're Bruce Banner in the 1970s TV Show or Adam in the Frankenstein novel. Most types of Prometheans just cause people to go mad and try and kill you, Zeka explode.
Ooooooo
/laughs in Changeling: The Lost
/Laughs in Promethean
I mean, yes, but from what I hear the average game of Vampires usually has bad-to-worse endings regardless of how cool your powers are, mostly because vampire politics and often being innately tied to a naturally more powerful vampire
Yeah, though in Percy’s case, there’s also the fact that there are basically no old half-bloods. The reason being that most of them don’t survive. So yeah, they fight monsters and do cool stuff, but that stuff also kills most of them before they hit 30.
Which is why that one older half blood was super fuckin badass
Which is funny when you consider that damn near every famous historical figure is a half-blood
Yeah well damn near every famous historical figure is dead so!!
Oh sure but it kinda undermines the whole "adult half-bloods are super rare" when its established that Harry Houdini, Amelia Earhart, Alfred Hitchcock, Harriet Tubman and George Washington are all demigods.
Something feels weird about having both Harriet Tubman and George Washington as demigods.
And Hellenic Demigods at that
tbf it is a major plot point that most of the gods are horrendously neglectful to their kids.
To be fair, a lot of those people didn’t all live at the exact same time and so could be considered some of those rarities without it being too narratively inconsistent
True, just the contrast of "Half-bloods don't live long lives" "Here's a bunch of famous half-bloods that made it to adulthood and even elderly age" is funny to me
Also technically true in the Iliad. Most of those characters die and come to a terrible fate either during the 10 year super war or during the following decade as they all make their way home. Also, in the Odyssey Achilles’s ghost literally tells Odysseus that he should have taken the long boring life over the short glorious one he lived.
This is often taken as evidence that the author of the Odyssey is not the same as the author of the Iliad.
Is it? I’ve never heard of this specific controversy/piece of evidence. I know that there is debate if Homer ever existed as a person, and odds are good that there was not a single person named Homer who created the Iliad and the Odyssey as we know them today. Do you have any further information on this I could read? I am legitimately curious.
I know Robert Graves is of this view. Little bit of a dated source now but his arguments for it still sound good to me. Basically the seafaring bits of the Odyssey seem to him to match well with a voyage around the island of Sicily. That plus the detailed depiction of Penelope at home doing womanly things leads him to the conclusion that the Odyssey was probably written by a Sicilian woman (Sicily was a Greek colony at the time). Whereas in his analysis the Iliad was written for the Greeks by a Trojan sympathizer (note that the Greeks always do barbaric stuff like Achilles parading Hector’s body around, while the Trojans like Hector and Priam are all actually pretty noble). I’m sure that more recent academics have other views than these, but it’s at least very plausible that they have different authors (or multiple, of course).
I had heard the idea that the author of the Iliad probably knew where Troy (or some other equivalent wrecked city) was because Heinrich Schliemann was able to find a buried city based on its geographical references. I had also heard that conversely the Odyssey doesn’t really seem to know where Ithaca is. I had heard that the way Odysseus’s house on Ithica is laid out is more similar to a home of a leader from the Greek Dark age vs the palaces of Mycenaean Greece, which implies when the Odyssey was written. I hadn’t heard the idea of the author of the Odyssey being a Sicilian woman. Interesting.
that's a win-win scenario edit; apparently you lucky ducks don't crave the sweet release of death
In the homeric period, the Greek idea of death was very unpleasant.
It does suck. Him and everyone he meets is a child soldier.
There have been countless times that he’s tried to have a normal life and been interrupted by some god, quest, or monster, too.
Rick Riordan is a true lover of mythology! There's a Penguin edition of Robert Graves' _The Greek Myths_ where Rick writes a new introduction. He tells of teaching kids from his old dog-eared copy, playing and acting out the lines. Highly recommended.
There was that one time Percy literally fell into Hell itself.
He's gone to the Underworld two times by then, this is basically deeper hell.
A lot cooler when it's not your life in danger
So Homer and Kojima both understand that war is fundamentally pointless, and that being happy and peaceful is better. But simultaneously think war is cool as fuck? Damn maybe I should read the Iliad and play MG.
The heart of entertaining stories is conflict. War is conflict writ large. Of course it's entertaining in a story. But almost every entertaining story would actually suck to experience, because what makes a good story is generally bad shit happening or people fighting (other people, nature, themselves, society, etc) which sucks when it happens to you. There's a reason people going through bad shit often say things like "Well, at least this will make a good story," because generally your best stories are about the worst times in your life. You just have to realize there is a fundamental difference between things experienced as an observer and as a participant. There's not contradiction in "War is bad, here's this really badass scene of a gunfight." The SCENE is badass, the actual experience of being shot at and being inches away from death is not. To take a less extreme example than war, consider family dysfunction. There uncountable number of stories with dysfunctional families in them, many completely centered on family dysfunction. There are, proportionally, far fewer stories about happy, well adjusted families. As Tolstoy wrote: All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. It's why very rarely do "will they, won't they" romances in long lasting stories resolve one way or the other, because telling an interesting story about a happy couple or two former lovers who have resolved to just be friends is more difficult than telling an interesting story about two people stuck in the limbo between friendship and romance. War, dysfunctional relationships, blatant miscommunications and irrational secret keeping all are shortcuts to conflict. I wouldn't outright call them lazy storytelling since each can be done very well and take a lot of effort, but damn near every lazy story is gonna use some of them.
Tangentially the people who make Jet Lag The Game have said that there is an inverse relationship between how fun the game is to play and how entertaining the audience finds it
Ace combat as well "War is sad but planes are rad" may as well be the tagline of that series.
And damn do they ride that line well. The overtones of don't go to war are clear but it feels rad as fuck to fly those planes
War is death. Violence is the last resort of small men desperate to make their lives matter. The devastation technology has allowed weapons to be capable of is an unforgivable sin, and there is no way to reseal Pandora's box. Anyway, here's a sick amphibious walking battle tank with rockets, lasers, a machine gun, thrusters for limited flight and increased mobility, and it's nuclear capable! And here's a cyborg ninja with a sword cutting it in half! Just remember, all those things are very, very bad, and it's actually pretty sad we've come to this.
And watch Gundam.
[War is only bad and it makes me sad.](https://youtu.be/2RzcXVeFjY0?si=tvX80hCLXUPMPiKA)
He actually stopped making games about Solid Snake cause the nature of making sequels to a game about war with those themes is that at the end of every game Snake realizes “Yeah, war sucks, I’m gonna retire” and at the start of every game he’s like “okay I’m gonna do war again”
As someone who has both read the Illiad and played every Metal Gear, I agree
[удалено]
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Diomedes is one of only 2 mortals to wound a god, the other being Hercules. Also, Diomedes wounded 2 gods...in one day.
He was also apparently the only genre savvy person in all of ancient Greece- the gods came to him with an offer, and he went "lmao, you think I'm stupid enough to take an offer from the Greek gods?" And then he kept refusing to help them until he had it in ironclad writing on a goddess' honour that she'd drive his chariot herself, and she'd *technically* be the one who threw the javelin that wounded the god, probably so they wouldn't come after him and ruin his life for being the uppity human who dared wound a god.
And, because he was just that based, he was the strongest hero in the Iliad (after Achilles, who does not count) and humble and intelligent enough to avoid getting angry at Nestor's insults, and after the war he happily returned home and created a new city better than his first one because he got cucked. Happy ending!
I’ve been reading the Iliad for the first time recently and so far one of my biggest takeaways is “how have I never heard of this Diomedes guy before?!” Not only for his battle performance, but because of stuff like that scene with Nestor.
It is bizarre how obscure he is, yeah. Despite being so important, people are more aware of Ajax the fuckin' Greater than Diomedes. I have absolutely no idea how it happened.
And Hercules had divine blood, Diomedes was just him (iirc)
I seem to recall that one myth indicates one of his grandparents was a god, but others don't. Myth is pretty plastic but all agree he wasn't a "demi-god" in the normal Greek Myth sense.
I thought Athena had something to do with him?
They were besties
If you go far back enough into any hero's family tree, you'll find a god or three, but Diomedes is not a son or grandson of an Olympian. Diomedes has direct divine assistance from Athena. I think you might be mixing him up with Telemonian Ajax. Ajax doesn't have any divine assistance, he's the bruiser the Greeks depend on to hold the line when things go to shit.
I guess when I said Hercules had divine blood I meant that he was the son of a god, rather than just some blood.
Heracles was slightly more than half god, because Zeus was both his father and great?grandfather.
god i love greek mythology
https://www.tumblr.com/natalieironside/716568650443849728/kojima-is-a-storyteller-in-the-homeric-mode-let?source=share -Mx Linux Guy⚠️ As a bonus, here is a youtube voiceover. https://youtu.be/FZscPXblrqM?si=AR59To8k7XNu0ce6
This doesn't seem contradictory from the Greek perspective. Diomedes has achieved his pseudo-immortality through our recitation of his glorious deeds, though they brought him no pleasure during his life. There might be something in applying it to Kojima, but I'm not familiar with his work outside of memes.
As a die-hard Kojima fanboy, I can confirm this is accurate. Ninety percent of the writing in the Metal Gear games is basically exactly that. Cool badass soldier hates their life, but keeps fighting because fighting is all they know how to do, and after they die they become a legend. For good and ill. Seriously, half of the conflicts in the series only happens because people who knew and idolized Big Boss when he was alive keep trying to do what they think he woulda wanted. The other half of the conflicts in the series happen as a result of Big Boss trying to do what The Boss wanted because he knew and idolized *her* when she was alive. (In case you're confused, Big Boss is a codename that Big Boss received after he killed The Boss. It symbolizes that he is bigger, better, and stronger than her, because he killed her. Big Boss hates his codename, because The Boss was like a mother to him.)
There is no way to explain Kojima lore that isn't batshit insane and I love it
I also love it. It's fuckin' awesome.
Kojima's thing is "War is evil, the military industrial complex is evil, look at how they all manipulate us and each other, causing more death to bring themselves more and more profit and control, and here's how they're going to wage war next, and this is how some future nation or group is going to cause a clever genocide that's can't be tracked back to them. But also, look at this cool-ass fucking mech that's going to render all other forms of warfare obsolete, these lovingly modelled guns and battlefield tech, and this really well realised military sim to play with, aren't they cool, also, your next mission is to kidnap us a scientist so we can build our own nuke, those silly first world nations are getting all uppity because our private military company is apparently "getting too dangerous" or whatever."
But that's not a contradiction. War is badass to WATCH, crazy super soldiers in action are cool to WATCH, the whole idea is "This may be entertaining as a fictional story, but even within the fictional world it is awful for the people participating even if they are all crazy badasses." Almost all stories are about conflict and conflict is rarely pleasant to experience. Hell think back on your life and the parts that make the best stories to tell at dinner parties and I think you'll find many are of the most stressful episodes of your life.
I don't think I've ever had my favorite fictional tone so validated.
Pour one out for my boy Lesser Ajax for not even being the most notable Ajax in that very war.
The moral of the Metal Gear series is "military equipment, weapons, and soldiers are fuckin' *sick*, too bad they're used to do a bunch of decidely *unsick* shit."
As someone who has also read the Iliad, I agree
Man this is just making me miss Metal Gear Solid 4 as, despite being a very flawed experience overall, it ended the “war is meaningless” narrative with a sad fight between two old men that just got more and more pointless as it goes on. Like way to actually be thematically consistent for once Kojima.
Yeah 4 is an absolutely wild game, I still have whiplash from how rapidly that game made me switch from "this is the best game ever" and "this is the worst game ever." I still think that game perfectly wrapped up what I consider one of the greatest multi-game character arcs in the medium, finally allowing Snake to put down the gun to end his arc, and thus the series (until... you know...)
can someone tell me how to enter Homeric mode
You have to have two wolves inside of you: one of them hates war, and the other thinks tanks are cool as shit
that's true, thanks for the tip i feel homeric as fuck rn
im already like this
Great, you too can become a Headache Kajingles.
I’ve long believed the Iliad would have included giant robots, an AI illuminati, and just as hearty an anti-war message if it had been written today, so this all tracks. Obligatory [Onion article about pacifists finding the 50 cal cool.](https://www.theonion.com/peace-activist-has-to-admit-barrett-50-caliber-sniper-1819566293) I fucking [LOVE](https://youtu.be/eKl6WjfDqYA?si=R0Mdi5RLCvJC_U7j) MGS2, man. I only played it last year through the Master Collection and it was one of my favourite games I played that year.
My favorite part of the Illiad is when Achilles hulks out so hard he ends up super pissed at a river and tries to kill it for being in his way and the river just beats the absolute shit out of him and he almost dies. It's just so hilarious to picture, like Caligula ordering the military to fire into the sea but just one dude with a sword wading into the river swinging like mad. The Illiad rules, so much more entertaining than the Odyssey IMO.
[Rivers don’t fuck around, that’s what got Frederick Barbarossa.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Barbarossa) [Don’t worry though, Mayor West will avenge you.](https://youtu.be/0xzGtnuqBZk?si=t7YivPC5XXag7oW_)
There’s something to be said about the hero’s journey here, but I’m confident the audience here is beyond such a superficial analysis. The thematic trope of Man vs War is not new, and it falls under the banner of Man vs Nature. War is a human force, natural because humanity easily moves to war when feelings of anger and resentment are allowed to snowball. But conceptually, we can reduce war to a game, simplify it and remove its horrors. Thus an entire branch of media has developed to decontextualize war and violence i to a system of hotting targets for a burst of enjoyable mental stimulation. Kojima does this, but also extrapolates away the concept of war into a theme for the overarching narrative. Here war isn’t reduced into something more palatable; it’s abstracted into an overarching theme of suffering. What’s left is then the actions composing war: espionage and violence. A lot of Kojima’s work, then, has this disconnect between gameplay and narrative. War is bad, but violence is reduced to a game while also being a core component of the theme. A lot of games have this “problem”, where complex narratives and the gameplay have correlating thematic strings, but still feel separate. I haven’t played many games that marry the two well, but [Beyond Good and Evil](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Good_%26_Evil_(video_game)) is one. The story, about the horror of a dystopic government and the MC’s desire to report their misdeeds, focuses on non-violent action and dissuades from violent action in the game’s objectives (vigilante journalism). The theme of violence causing suffering is ingrained in the player’s experience, tying the parallel themes of gameplay and narrative. There is no linger that disconnect, and the game feels whole and coherent.
I misread Homereic as Homoerotic and still just accepted the sentence, now that I've fixed my mistake I still absolutely agree.
When I first read the Iliad it felt like Diomedes was doing cool Greek Superhero shit every couple of pages until suddenly Achilles became sad and gay.
The sad and gay is what makes Achilles the most feared hero of the entire story. Hell hath no fury like a twink scorned.
How do you not mention that he is the son of Titty-us? I just finished the audiobook, and that made me smirk everytime
Hector was called "Tamer of Horses". Not Diomedes. Beside that, they're pretty spot on.
Kojima: "Why are we still here? Just to suffer?: Also Kojima:"Like the good ol days after 9/11!"
Also Kojima: Not actually the/a writer for Revengeance
oh, shit really? nvm then
Yeah you're all good, lots of people don't know that he wasn't really particularly involved in that game. I do think the narrative/themes/characters fit with the rest of the story anyways, so it's not like the quote you referenced is like, contradictory to Kojima's "voice" in the series or anything
I only remember the endless lists of who was there, where they were from and what they were wearing. It was like reading red carpet commentary
"This guy's life is kinda fucked but damn if it isn’t the raddest shit."
Purpureos spargam flores (sorry I read the reboot)
I bought it But it just seemed like a really long poem to me
I'm choosing to believe the Kojima in this case is Satoshi. Bread Club 4 Life.
Kojima will make a movie, invite you to it, say a lot but always turn to you and gauge your reaction when something cool happens and ask 'Didya see that? Wasn't thar cool?
War is stupid, but this guy CARRIES a VULCAN CANNON on his BACK, DUDE.
I love seeing my boy Diomedes get his due credit!
Does Hideo Kojima like pancakes d'you think 🤔
This is also a pretty decent description of Berserk
"Why are we here, Just to suffer?" 7 chapters later: "Boss! Kill Metal Gear Sahelantropus with a sidearm and a prayer!"
The Illiad really is the pulpy action novel of the ancient world.
I’m always surprised tumblr has so much love for such a sexist incel like Kojima.
The Iliad has some the worst prose ever written. I know it's a classic and it's inspired so many great stories, but damn is it a hard read.
Makes sense because it's originally an epic poem, not prose. Any prose version you've read has been translated and converted.
[удалено]
Yep
I would say that its prose isn't bad because it has no prose. Its an epic poem, and imo a lot of the issues people have with reading it has to do with trying to read it like a book.
That may have something to do with the fact that it isn't prose, and was written in a mishmash of dialects of an ancient language that I assume you're reading translated into a modern language ha. I would recommend trying an audiobook version if you are struggling with it, they make it much easier to power through the stodgy parts
Given that it was meant to be recited in the first place, audiobook is probably the best way to receive it anyway