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Showing posts with the label trauma

Some Odyssey thoughts (part 1?)

Here is what happens to Odysseus: Right before the Trojan War, O and Penelope have a son, Telemachus. Penelope doesn't want O to go to war, and instead asks him to sail with her into the west. We learn that Zeus's Law is the golden rule, and binds a host's conduct to a guest, and vice versa. The penalty for breaking Zeus's Law is death or exile.  O makes a cunning plan to give the Trojans a gift, you know the one, which will violate Zeus's Law and defeat the Trojans. He tricks Eliot Page, who is on his side, because Eliot "needed to believe it", that the gift really is a gift. Eliot Page dies. Once O is inside the city, he lets Agamemnon and the Greeks into the city, and follows behind Agamemnon. The Greeks massacre the Trojans, including, especially, noncombatants and priests. O realizes he has broken Zeus's Law for everyone forever. He no longer wants to return home. He sees himself as a follower of Agamemnon, which makes him sick, and also as a sui ...

Godzillas: Shin Godzilla (2016) and Godzilla Minus One (2022)

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Watched those two movies this week. Never saw any of the Godzilla movies before. Damn this post would be better with pictures but it's low-effort late-night blogging and you get what you pay for. In Shin Godzilla, the monster just walks. People say this a couple times through the movie, and it's a great line, so it's worth repeating. The monster did all that... and it just walks. It doesn't want anything. It isn't angry and it doesn't hate you. It's not trying to hurt you. It just walks. That's a fantastic(al), alien portrayal of a monster. Monster as natural disaster. (Everybody else has already made the comparisons with the tsunami and nuclear incident, which is intentional, but none of the reviews on wikipedia talk about how the monster just walks.) (Ok it smacks people and shoots lasers when somebody is attacking it, but that barely counts.) Still from Shin Godzilla; the monster's first form, adorkable! I love how fishy it looks The monster is to...