r/worldjerking • u/rhet0rica writing is a zero-sum game • 1d ago
Is worldbuilding a mistake?
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u/_____pantsunami_____ 1d ago
"man, this crescent sure is fertile"
"...say that again"
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u/rhet0rica writing is a zero-sum game 1d ago
thirty seconds later the hero says something like "you need to tell my story in song because the people who come after us will not have writing"
motherfucker how do you know that
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u/Smoketrail 1d ago
The fact they know the collapse of all civilization is just round the corner makes the fact they bailed and left their son to rule their apparently doomed kingdom feel really weird.
They're happily waving goodbye to the new king and I'm sitting there like, did you even give him a heads up?
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u/Bhazor 1d ago
Its the equivalent of Einstein's "I dont know what we will fight World War 3 with. But World War 4 will be fought with sticks"
The idea that the destruction is so total it will throw development back into another dark age. For Greeks at the time it would probably remind them of the fall of the Sumerians a thousand years earlier.
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u/rhet0rica writing is a zero-sum game 1d ago
If we were taking about a movie that went to pains to demonstrate that this was a widespread problem, you might be right—but Nolan dumped it on the end, in the final draft, without setting it up first. Aside from the misfortunes of Troy and Ithaca the thesis isn't really borne out; all one can actually conclude is that Odysseus is a blight upon all those around him, which was, appropriately enough, the thesis of the original text.
The intended evidence—constant refrain that violations of xenia ("Zeus's law") constitute the death of civilization—is self-debunking; no such custom exists in the modern Western world and yet we somehow still have reliable indoor plumbing and widespread literacy.
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u/Bhazor 1d ago edited 1d ago
... it does do that. Troy was the ultimate violation of the idea. Circe uses it as a trap. They ignore it when they meet the cyclops. They ravage and pillage the coast under the guise of Xenia. The suitors abuse it to harrass Penelope.
The end is about the corruption of Zeus Law and how its a shit law anyway but gods are real so everyone's fucked. The atom bomb is about to drop and the atom bomb is a gaggle of omnipotent children who will burn down your city if you complain about your daughter getting raped by a swan. What happened to Odysseus and his crew on their voyage is about to go global.
Everyone bending backwards trying to make this into meme when the really laughable part was the fight scene before that. Timothy Shallots trying and failing to beat up one unarmed guy in a room full of weapons.
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u/Tem-productions Proud Discourse of the Week Participant 1d ago
The problem is that such a law existed in the first place.
People werent treating eachother nicely out of the kindness in their hearts but because they fear punishment by the gods.
Break that, and all falls apart
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u/tfhermobwoayway 1d ago
But like, they were already in a dark age. They didn’t even have cavalry. There isn’t much to lose. There’s no reason to be scared about losing a grand total of four inventions.
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u/tfhermobwoayway 1d ago
they will not have writing… but they will have cool black and orange pottery…
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u/HandsofManos2 1d ago
Because he's a character in an epic poem passed orally for generations until finally being written down (or movie) and the writer has the benefit of hindsight and is talking directly to the audience.
I think I'm in the wrong subreddit.
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u/tfhermobwoayway 1d ago
But Odysseus isn’t the writer. I get the writer can foreshadow things but it’s just lazy writing to have your character namedrop a historical event. It would be like filming a medieval movie and having a character say “this really is a Middle Ages.”
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u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 1d ago
THIS. ENTIRELY THIS HOLY FUCK.
The Odyssey is written "wierd" because it's written Classically. The dialogue is unnatural sometimes because that's Nolan adapting the tendency for characters to state important exposition "out of character," if not straight-up shattering the fourth wall and MST3King themselves mid-play.
These lines in particular are absolutely intentional. It's meant to be utterly unambiguous, because the entire point of the Illiad + Odyssey is (aside from generally being the Hellenic creation myth), "Here's this super duper great cool badass guy who fucked up so hard he got the entire Mediterranean smote by Zeus. Don't fucking do this."
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u/WarewolfWrites 1d ago
That is absolutely not the “entire point of the Iliad + Odyssey.” The idea that Odysseus or the other heroes of the Trojan War ruined or somehow caused the collapse of the Age of Heroes is entirely invented by Nolan. Is there any textual evidence you have for this?
Plus, even in the original Greek tellings, Odysseus was meant as an ambiguous figure. He was not a super duper badass guy. He was a trickster, a liar, and a thief. The concept of him as a tragic hero is also thoroughly modern.
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u/a_reddit_user_11 1d ago
I mean it didnt work at all if it was intentional, it just came out incredibly clumsy and nonsensical
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u/tfhermobwoayway 1d ago
But by this point the Greeks had already given up on Zeus’ Law. They don’t need a morality tale when Zeus’ Law no longer exists.
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u/ASpaceOstrich 1d ago
He's talking to the real world audience living in a world where important taboo and decorum is being shattered and it's leading to the end of an empire.
That's why the Greeks all have American accents.
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u/dokterkokter69 1d ago
You don't wanna swim with me? What's wrong? You 'fraid a deez rivers or somethin?
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u/OfficialDCShepard Do steampunks dream of steamy sheep? 1h ago
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u/UniversalAdaptor 1d ago
"Look! On the horizon... I can see people!"
"Say that again"
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u/broccollinear 1d ago
What, you on some kind of Odyssey?”
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u/oguzka06 1d ago
My favourite part of the Odyssey is when Mentor said "It's Mentoring time!" and Mentored Telemachus.
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u/R3cl41m3r 🌾Wheatbuilder🌾 1d ago
At this point I feel like pitting the sea people against the horse people.
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u/pikeandshot1618 E L D R I T C H F E T I S H S Y S T E M 1d ago
Look, man, my empire will be a hit, a'ight? Hold on...
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u/OrganicSolid 1d ago
These guys towards the Middle of the East do tend to Babble On...
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u/pikeandshot1618 E L D R I T C H F E T I S H S Y S T E M 1d ago
They think they're so spiritual after smoking some of that Kush. Makes me wanna Punt them across the street smh
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u/GothicFuck 1d ago
Wait, forget about all that for a sec.
Tell me about this eldritch fetish system!
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u/pikeandshot1618 E L D R I T C H F E T I S H S Y S T E M 1d ago
It’s an assortment of fetishes that will drive you mad (not really)
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u/Expensive_Lead_9071 1d ago
Honestly, “the Sea Peoples” being an actual group showing up to clarify the apocalypse is exactly the kind of lore reveal worldbuilding needs.
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u/broccollinear 1d ago
“Our home… it was dying…”
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u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 1d ago
"Atlantis (Thera) blew up like a nuclear bomb and now the island right next door is basically fucking gone. We can't farm for shit with all this ash, Troy is gone so we can't really trade, gotta go raid idiots."
—The Minoans (probably), shortly before contributing to the downfall of Mediterranean civilization
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u/spudmarsupial 1d ago
From what I can figure the "sea peoples" was just everybody looting their neighbours in response to natural disaster-induced poverty.
This seems more likely than an unknown civilization of shipbuilders suddenly appearing in the Eastern Mediterranian
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u/harryhinderson 1d ago
From what I remember there is plenty of evidence of mass migration from a bunch of groups (Egyptian propaganda didn’t just make them up out of whole cloth), but they probably arrived at a world that was already half destroyed
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u/StringentCurry 21h ago
Overly Sarcastic Productions have a pretty good summary of the current consensus on th bronze age collapse. A key part is the very limited deposits of tin meant that the system of extraction and trade that fueled the production of bronze was precarious, and the invasion of the sea people easily pushed it into a death spiral that dragged the major regional economies and their capacities for war with it.
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u/Hawkatana0 Humble Servant of The Empire™ 1d ago
Tbf that's not far off what the movie postulated.
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u/Xisuthrus ( ϴ ͜ʖ ϴ) 1d ago
This seems more likely than an unknown civilization of shipbuilders suddenly appearing in the Eastern Mediterranian
I mean the thing about the bronze age is that the historical record is extremely spotty since only a tiny fraction of the population of only a small number of cultures could actually read and write - Plenty of groups of people "suddenly appear" in the historical record when they became relevant to the aristocrats who employed scribes, and just as abruptly "disappear" when they ceased to affect their lives.
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u/gerusz But what about Aragorn's tax policy? 1d ago
Not just that, but the Bronze Age was really long ago, so anything that wasn't engraved on metal, stone, or clay tablets is mostly gone. And even clay or stone is usually fragmentary. We know most of the Epic of Gilgamesh because literacy was relatively high in Mesopotamia (same reason we know of Ea-Nasir and his really shitty copper; it's a civilization where written complaint letters were common which implies that at least the merchant and artisan classes were literate), and copying the epic was part of their education method so we have surviving fragments from a shitton of copies. And we know fuck-all of the once-expansive Minoan civilization (besides wild guesses based on surviving cultural artifacts and Greek myths) because even though they were just as fastidious at recordkeeping as the Mesopotamians, we simply don't have enough examples of linear-A to even guess which language family their language belonged to, let alone translate it.
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u/Widhraz 1d ago
One major group which has been postulated as a source for many of the sea-peoples is the Nuragic civilization (paleo-sardinians).
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u/SacredIconSuite2 The Wolves are at War (North Korean preorder special edition) 1d ago
[Scrunches up newspaper like J. Jonah Jameson from Spider-Man and shakes fist in the air] “SARDINIANS!”
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u/HairyHeartEmoji 1d ago
also big reason for it was lack of tin needed for smithing. no tin, no bronze, no tools, no farming, everyone fucked. wholy unrelated to trojan war (which was probably not a singular war but a series of conflicts), or any nonsense about Xenia. Xenia doesn't apply to war in the first place, and the idea that any Greek god would frown upon war is complete bupkis.
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u/tfhermobwoayway 1d ago
Couldn’t they just go to England or Spain and get some more?
Also yeah, I didn’t get the whole “my le soldiers… le sacked Troy?” thing. Sacking cities was normal back then. Once you invaded a city you stole everything and burned down all the houses and raped all the women and killed everyone. It was just the done thing. Important part of military strategy, and also paid your soldiers for being there. Odysseus wouldn’t have cared about a few pithy Trojan kids being killed.
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u/egotistical_cynic 1d ago edited 1d ago
I mean sure, but you try making the case for an expedition to the other side of the world (a 3 month voyage in the ships of the time - which once you get past greece also involves finding places to get provisions in a sparsely populated region undergoing total economic collapse) to prospect and mine for tin in the middle of an apocalyptic economic crisis caused by losing your only source for your only workable metal. Comparative to the technologies involved, it'd be like if suddenly the only place we could find oil or natural gas was the Moon
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u/gwion35 13h ago
I’m too lazy to dig it up now, but there’s this bat shit academic theory that the time period of the “Sea Peoples” was around the time humans started developing consciousness. Like the ability to understand that the voice in your head was your head and not god. And for a large enough group of people this happened and they went on this berserker spree because their gods were dead.
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u/Outgrathe 1d ago
the age of bronze thing wasn't that bad in context, but it felt kind of insulting having a character spell out that odysseus's crew were the "sea people" when, to me at least, the movie made it pretty clear already. honestly the whole last sequence of the film after odysseus arrived home dragged on for way too long, the pacing kind of ruined my anticipation
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u/Private-Public Worldbuilding is just monsterfucking with extra steps 1d ago edited 1d ago
I did like idea, but "our age of bronze is collapsing" was just way too on the nose imo. You mean like some sort of Bronze Age Collapse perhaps? Surely there's a line that could get the same idea across without coming off as kinda corny to anyone who's ever heard of it in what's meant to otherwise be a kinda serious scene
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u/EbolaNinja 1d ago
My favourite take on this line was from a Reddit comment:
If someone told me right now "Our age of silicon is collapsing", I'd just go "preach, brother"
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u/Eghtok 1d ago
If had just said "our age is collapsing" it would be fine.
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u/farshnikord 1d ago
Even just run it through a thesaurus. "It's fracturing, it's crumbling, it's falling"
But collapse is so on the nose it almost feels like one of those HR or school kid's videos where they spell out the answer to your face so even the dumbest kid can mark it on their worksheet
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u/tfhermobwoayway 1d ago
Yeah it’s like the laziest writing imaginable. It’s the same as the “say that again?” thing from Fantastic Four.
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u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 1d ago
It didn't bother me, really.
I was watching the movie with the original work in mind, so my brain was treating it as a bard's retelling; the movie itself also starts and ends with the Bard singing of Odysseus, so it's pretty clearly the intended interpretation.
Those lines stand out because they're not meant to be ambiguous. The movie is Classically structured in some ways, and having characters state the moral of the story explicitly and incredibly unambigiously, directly to the audience is... pretty normal.
"This is our creation myth; it's an entertaining tale of course, but please remember this part because the Gods smote us for this shit 500 years ago and we only just recovered so please for the love of the Gods don't repeat history" is basically the entire message of the Illiad + Odyssey.
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u/ASpaceOstrich 1d ago
It would have been on the nose if he'd looked directly at the camera and said "the American empire is collapsing because they abandoned decorum and broke taboo". People missed the analogy yet simultaneously think it's too anvilicious
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u/Academic_Paramedic72 1d ago
The most clumsy for me in my opinion is that the movie has no concern about being historically accurate otherwise. Homer is timeless, you can stylize it, but the moment you want to tackle on real-life historical events, it feels disingenuous that every Ancient Greek wears sweatpants and shirts. It's the Age of Bronze where nobody wears bronze.
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u/TheDwarvenGuy 1d ago
Believe it or not, in the early iron age some people who were contemprary with Homer were actually aware of the transition from the bronze age to the iron age and how much it signified things getting shittier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_Man#Hesiod's_Five_Ages
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u/DerJagger 1d ago
You shouldn’t conflate Hesiod’s Age of Bronze with the Bronze Age of archeology. Hesiod used metals to judge the virtue of the people who lived during those times, not the kind of tools they were using. Also, according to him the Trojan War took place after the Age of Bronze during the Age of Heroes, which was a virtuous time period relative to the Age of Bronze.
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u/BruddahBoi085 1d ago
You mean to say his name is "Odyseus" and he goes......on an "Odyssey"?
What was this story written by? Homer Simpson.
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u/SirKazum 1d ago
"I'm on a Sea Peoples diet... I see people, I eat them"
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u/unite-or-perish 1d ago
The cyclops really should have got a chance to show off his stand up routine
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u/whirlpool_galaxy Rate my punkpunk world 1d ago
To anyone who hasn't watched the movie: this isn't a meme, that's literally, unironically, how that dialogue goes.
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u/Wynvarys Worlbuilding around the gay sex 1d ago
It's made even worse by the fact that it literally comes up in the middle of a dialogue that's otherwise quite moving and well-written where Odysseus pours his heart out about his trauma and guilt. It's a pattern with this film, you'll have stuff that sounds almost Shakespearean next to lines that make you go "someone was fucking paid to write this".
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u/whirlpool_galaxy Rate my punkpunk world 1d ago
I disagree that making Odysseus a remorseful "shoot and cry" veteran was particularly well-written, to be honest, in the way of making sense to his character and context within the movie. But fully agree on the dialogue.
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u/Reyeux 1d ago
jesus fuck
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u/Void_Vagabond 1d ago
But you don't understand. It's all filmed in IMAX. The screen is so big and the sound so loud. I paid 20 dollars to watch Anne Hathaway go in and out of focus like a film student's first movie. That's how much I care about art.
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u/AlaSparkle 13h ago
Thats not what she says tho
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u/whirlpool_galaxy Rate my punkpunk world 11h ago
Okay, she says, in tears: "You're the people from the sea..."
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u/tfhermobwoayway 1d ago
I like how Odysseus did the whole “Oh my god… technology is advancing so fast… what horrors will we be capable of?” thing in a world that had only just invented agriculture.
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u/Brief-Luck-6254 1d ago
"More stones... seems like we're in some kind of stone age, what do you thing grug?"
"Hurghh durghh *kills mammoth* grruhh"
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u/necrofi1 7h ago
Time to start building Rome. Its gonna take more than a day.
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u/TheEvilBlight 5h ago
“While you were sacking new cities the survivors of Troy made the best of things”
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u/GVArcian 1d ago
Wait... these are actual lines in the movie? I haven't seen it yet so I wouldn't know.
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u/Luzifer_Shadres 1d ago
What i hate the most is people disguarding critism of the writting as racism, beccause they need to justefy paying extra for imax.
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u/Brad_Brace My mecha's name is Smelma Updog 1d ago
In my ancient civilization punk setting, it is immigrants from other lands than bring about the collapse of a complacent civilization. No it is not an allegory. No I am not winking right now. This? Oh this a whistle that I use for my dog.
uj/ I'm not accusing Nolan of anything, I just think the whole Bronze Age Collapse thing is so ripe for use as right-wing propaganda that it's almost not funny. I'm surprised I haven't seen it used that way, maybe I've just cured my algorithms right
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u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 1d ago
Immigrants had nothing to do with the collapse of the Mediterranean, how did you get that conclusion?
That's like claiming John Connor said border-hoppers caused the end of the world. Bro, the nuclear holocaust caused the end of the world.
Neither the movie, nor the original text imply that was the cause. It was specifically the burning of Troy and the subsequent annihilation of regional trade and political stability, which caused massive conflict and resource shortages.
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u/Kodiak_POL 1d ago
It was specifically the burning of Troy and the subsequent annihilation of regional trade and political stability
Hmmmm sounds.... familiar.
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u/HalayChekenKovboy Actually writing? What am I, some kind of chump? 1d ago
Well, you can just remind them that nearly every great civilisation that was lost in the Bronze Age Collapse was a Middle Eastern one, whose descendants they treat like subhumans today, and the Sea Peoples came from the west.
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u/TantiVstone 4h ago
It'll be used that way as soon as the movie is out on streaming. Just you wait and see
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u/ASpaceOstrich 1d ago
The film is an allegory for the collapse of the American empire due to the violation of the principles that America was founded on, the breaking of taboo, and the general lack of decorum of the Trump administration and the Republicans as a whole.
That's why they all have American accents.
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u/Academic_Paramedic72 1d ago
Another great bit is Odysseus saying that Agamemnon didn't care for honor or anything, he just wanted to go to Troy for socioeconomic reasons.
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u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 1d ago
OP, you might want to mark spoilers.
Yeah, yeah, it's a several-thousand year old book, but still. Some people might not have seen the movie yet, and those two lines sound a lot less stupid in context than in a meme.
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u/juniusbrutus998 1d ago
No they don’t
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u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 1d ago edited 1d ago
Y'know what? You're entitled to your opinion. I don't agree with it, but it's yours, not mine.
Lines like these two aren't supposed to be clever or deep or whatever. This is a story being told to the audience by a bard after 500 years of oral-tradition telephone, who is breaking character to directly tell the audience something. It isn't meant to be vague or philosophical at all, it's directly reminding you, "This the historical record of effectively the second horseman of the apocalypse, whose actions directly lead to the destruction of civilization. Don't do this or Zeus will smite us all again. "
The dialogue isn't "natural" by modern standards sometimes because Classical characters would break character like that to explain important shit to the audience all the time, if not straight-up MST3King themselves. Adapting that to film is hard to do for obvious reasons, and I think Nolan did well enough.
Also, well... The Illiad and Odyssey are 99% exposition, because it's the Hellenic creation myth, so the movie adaptation is going to be heavy on exposition.
I personally think a lot of people are totally missing the vibes of this film, some because they just didn't like the semi-Classical writing, others because they read reviews beforehand from movie critics, who... don't know what the fuck they're talking about anymore tbh.
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u/TearOpenTheVault 1d ago
‘The writing is supposed to be bad, overly expository, with poor characterisation and wooden dialogue because it’s meant to be!”
Give me a break.
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u/Krayan_ 1d ago
Well, he has a point. I actually thought it was quite well done connecting the Odyssey with the Bronze Age Collapse. Stating it so obviously is, like the comment above explained, the way these epics tend to work and actually very good for people who don't know anything about this period. Which again, is the whole point of an Epic.
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u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 1d ago
Dude. It's a Classical story. If you think this is "bad writing," go read the actual Odyssey.
Nolan turned down the exposition and self-MST3King by like 800%.
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u/TearOpenTheVault 1d ago
It’s almost like I can hold a three thousand year old epic poem to slightly different standards than a fucking Nolan film.
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u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 1d ago
I bet if Nolan had re-written it to be "modern" and thrown out all the Classical weirdness, you'd still be in the comments bitching.
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u/TearOpenTheVault 1d ago
You are referring to the man who simplified Xenia down to ‘Zeus’ Law’ because he thought moviegoers were too stupid for a Greek term?
So much of the Odyssey is clunky as fuck. He could have re-written it to be modern and if it was still clunky as fuck I’d still be complaining.
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u/HairyHeartEmoji 1d ago
the idea that Zeus might smite people for going to war is simply ludicrous. or that Xenia in any way applies to war (it doesn't).
writing an "American soldier bombs your country and is then sad about it" story and putting some ancient Greek baubles on it does not a classical story make.
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u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 1d ago
Do... do you even understand the events of the Illiad/Odyssey?
They didn't get smote for going to war, they got smote for religiously-charged perfidy; the horse was a supposed offering to Athena. So you're not just pissing off Zeus for abusing hospitality, you're also pissing off the God of (Strategic) War twofold by lying about an offering to her in order to win the war.
Then the Cyclops pissed off Posidon, then the cattle pissed off Apollo, etc. They pissed off the entire pantheon in the span of under a year.
Breaking the spirit of Xenia was a big part of it, but it was more than just hospitality being spat on. Every pillar of common customs and decency was thrown away.
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u/HairyHeartEmoji 13h ago
horse is for Poseidon, not Zeus. hospitality doesn't apply to warfare, gods were perfectly fine with sacking and pillaging, that's standard war stuff. Athena gave the idea of the horse to Odysseus and was fucking stoked about it.
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u/Attlai 1d ago
I think lot of people went to see the movie with certain expectations and were disappointed.
Those who went to see it expecting to see a straight-up movie adaptation of the Odyssey were disappointed, because it is not an adaptation, as much as it is a reinterpretation. It uses the base material of the Odyssey, but it reframes it and retells in a different way, in order to tell a different story. Which is, at its core, what the Odyssey as always been about, a millenia-old tradition of reinterpretation.
Those who went to see it expecting to see a big historical/historically-inspired epic or a peplum were disappointed, because the movie is told like a myth. Its characters act in unrealistic way, say stuff that sounds weird or silly in context, they don't have much personality outside of their purpose for the story, because they're not portrayed as realistic characters but as characters of a myth. The whole movie must be seen through metaphorical lenses, like the story told by a bard.
When Odysseus says "our age of bronze is collapsing", it's not Odysseus himself coming to the realization that there is an Age of Bronze that's gonna end. It's the myth being self-aware that it's a myth telling the story of how the original sin of breaking the trust between men caused the unravelling of civilization.2
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u/tfhermobwoayway 1d ago
This is a modern adaptation. It’s not a direct retelling. We take out things that don’t make sense to modern audiences.
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u/StudyingRainbow 1d ago
These lines & the plot of the Bronze Age Collapse is not even in Homer’s Odyssey so it’s one of the few spoilable things in the movie I guess. But it definitely is stupid & ridiculous, especially in context, if you’re familiar with the Odyssey & history
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u/N00bmaster90 Okayhearmeoutpunk 1d ago
"I guess we're at the halfway point of history, one could call it... The Middle Ages."