Wis. Stat. 101.58 (2) (j) 2. f.

I get the desire for a story about war and what comes from it, to look at PTSD and trauma and how senseless such conflicts ultimately are. But in a very profound way, so did Homer. It's just that he explored those themes in the Iliad, not the Odyssey. That's why it focuses on both sides of the war, why Hector and Achilles are so often contrasted in their desires and actions — because it begs the question of what a hero, a general, a warrior, really is.

You want a story about the kind of atrocities men at war can commit? You want to cast Agamemnon as the villain? You want a protagonist who's big and strong and does awful things he must learn to regret? That's Achilles' story! Not Odysseus'!

Odysseus is wily. He's a trickster. He's a liar and schemer and talker and thinker. He's also a phenomenal fighter, sure, but that's nobody's first impression of him! His primary epithet is polutropos: literally a man of many turns, many tricks, many tongues.

And that's nowhere to be found in Nolan's Odyssey, which means...it's really not a story about Odysseus. He's not winning the day with wits and tricks and disguises — he's certainly not Athena's chosen champion. Nolan wrote a story about a completely different man than the titular protagonist of the original myth. That doesn't change just because he borrows a small handful events from the Apologoi and a few more from the Telemachy and Mnesterophonia with a completely protagonist and focus and moral.

But we all know Nolan loves his tortured, tragic, angsty powerful male heroes. And one of Homer's epics did contain that — it just wasn't the Odyssey! The Iliad would've worked so much better, because Achilles at his core is the kind of character Nolan likes to write. He's angry and scared of his own mortality and constantly worried about his own legacy and driven to do terrible things at war due to grief and love!

Nolan presents Odysseus' trick with the Trojan Horse as though it was some kind of Ancient War Crime, but the Greeks would not have given a shit and certainly wouldn't have considered it a violation of xenia (which the film incorrectly called "Zeus' Law" — more on that here).

But you know which Homeric protagonist did do something that the Greeks considered horrifying and a violation of honorable combat? Achilles! When he desecrated Hector's corpse because the guy had killed his lover and best friend.

There’s discourse (not just among modern academics, Plato’s Hippias Minor is too) about whether wits and tricks should be held as more respectable or valued than pure martial strength in Homer’s eyes — whether Odysseus or Achilles is the greater Homeric hero. Nolan's Odyssey claims to be about Odysseus, but its values clearly state that Achilles is the better hero and protagonist. This movie gave almost zero credit to tricks and wits and disguises and lies, instead focusing on his sense of duty towards his men, his martial strength, and his leadership.

The latter is notably distinctly missing from Odysseus' canonical journey; his relationships with his comrades (summachoi) are almost completely absent, because the Odyssey is instead a story about marriage, about partnerships between men and women. (Circe, Calypso, and Nausicaa are all notably love interests for Odysseus whom he rejects in favor of Penelope; the former two are too dominant and powerful, the latter too young and impressionable. The woman he loves is his equal partner — by Greek standards — Penelope.) But Nolan's misogyny means he was never going to correctly rate the significance of the female characters in the Odyssey correctly, which further hampers the film. He'd likely have done better with the Iliad, where Chryseis and Briseis simply have to cry beautifully and he can paint Helen as a bitch or whore and Andromache as the tragic wife, like he prefers.

And if Nolan really wanted to get into the horrors of war, the things men can do when convinced of their righteousness and their strength is unchallenged...Neoptolemus in the Aeneid would be a fantastic lens to view that through. The Iliad is the war itself, and I think Nolan would prefer the battles to their aftermath, but you can look at the trauma and abuse that occur at war through both the spear-wives of the Iliad and the entirety of the Aeneid.

The largest dam removal in U.S. history. So successful that the salmon that haven’t run freely in the river for literally over a century came back the next year. Not steady progress over a decade as expected, the very next salmon run they came home. No one alive saw salmon in that river outside the hatcheries kept by native’s tribes and the Department of Fish And Wildlife scientists desperately trying to save them. One of the activists who helped bring the suit spoke of their dying grandmother making them promise to bring the fish home, and they didn’t know how that was possible, but they spent decades doing it.

The legal basis for successfully suing the power company who owned the dams was Indigenous treaty rights to eat the fish. Eating the fish was the one thing in a century that succeeded in being a clear and legally binding right that superseded the desires of white capital and industry. I have been going to the public interest environmental law conference off and on for 20 years where a lot of organizing for Undam The Klamath happened. I’ve heard updates about every legal tact they tried as they happened, and they tried everything.

There are healthy, thriving salmon, trout, and lamprey in a rewilding and recovering Klamath River right now as a direct result of Indigenous people eating them. Of their legally binding right to eat them. They sure as fuck care more about those fish than any white vegan ever could. They are salmon people that the Creator sent Salmon to feed, while charging the People with protecting and stewarding them. It’s not possible to learn about salmon and trout in the Pacific Northwest without learning this, and it’s unambiguously racist to dismiss this symbiotic relationship.

The white vegans are trying to get all hunting and fishing banned in Oregon, and that’s quite possibly the single most catastrophic thing that could be done to the animals here because we killed off all the major predators of creatures like deer and without anything hunting them their numbers will explode, eat all the vegetation, destroy the ecosystem, and then die along with everything else in that failing ecosystem. Controlled hunting of deer is vitally necessary for the deer to survive. This is something Native people know, but patronizing racist savior-complex white people refuse to listen to.

I have a whole collection of Oregon’s Public Broadcasting’s documentaries about Klamath River or the larger story of fish and people in the region. If you watch nothing else, watch Klamath Dams Are Coming Out, First Salmon Ceremony, After The Dams, and First Decent (Native made). It could not be clearer that the salmon are being protected and nourished by the people who eat them, and that stewardship is a massive part of their creation myths. But it contradicts political vegan dogma so they don’t listen.