Ethereal Hope

What if the children go to schools unafraid of tear gas and bullets?

What if the birds come back, and the bees are healed, and every species moves from endangered, to threatened, to thriving?

What if the rainforest ADVANCES?

What if every parking lot had solar panels? What if every structure had solar panels? What if we built climbing gyms and terraced gardens in the skeletons of old coal power plants?

What if you baked your neighbor bread, and they shared their home-grown blackberries?

What if every person who needed a home, had one? What if every person who needed healing was healed?

What if every body was treasured for what it was, not what it should be?

What if every trans child's parents attended their graduation, their wedding, their new-name-day?

What if every warehouse became a closed-circle repair station? Goods flowing out, and back, and out again? What if landfills started to SHRINK?

What if the water and air were clean? What if there was enough public transit that the cars dwindled, leaving the streets safe for kids on bikes, evening deer, midnight cats and foxes?

What if we win?

The condors are back. The whales are saved. The sea turtles are no longer endangered. The cranes are back. The bees are recovering. The air in LA and Tokyo and London is clean again. The aquifers in the LA Basin are refilling.

Children are kinder than previous generations. Parents are stopping the abuse cycle. Being trans and queer is more acceptable than ever on a ground level.

It's hard to see if you're young, if you don't know how to step back from social media and the news. But remember--bad news sells, and the algorithm knows despair keeps you scrolling. It's a skewed lens.

We are fighting and we are winning against this adminstration's bullying. We are coming together against the bullies and they are running away scared because they don't understand that we will do that.

People are working hard every day to find ways to make sure fewer animals get hit by cars and planes and rockets.

Maker spaces are more common than ever. Solar and wind are more common than ever. Coal plants are shutting down every day.

Unprecedented numbers of acres are being bought back or given back to their rightful stewards, and the world heals because of it. People are working hard every day to learn how to help a forest recover faster.

We are not at zero. We are at decades of effort to heal the world. We've come SO far.

In 1982 there were only 22 California Condors left in the world. In 1992, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), with its public and private partners, began reintroducing captive-bred condors to the wild. In 2001 the first wild nesting occurred in Grand Canyon National Park since re-introduction. In 2002 there were only 8 pairs of wild nesting birds population-wide. In 2008, for the first time since the program began, more California condors were flying free in the wild than in captivity. Today there are nearly 500 – more than half of them flying free in Arizona, Utah, California, and Baja Mexico.

When I was born, there were no condors in the wild. I'm 37 now, and there are over 250 condors flying free.

When my mom was born in 1955, there were days when she wasn't allowed to go outside to play, because of the air pollution. When I was born, that never happened anymore.

When I was born, humpback whales were critically endangered, and people thought they were going to go extinct. Today, they've recovered to exceed their recorded numbers. Other whales too!

We fixed it.

It's still far from our reach.

In addition to all that was mentioned above:

The likelihood of dying in infancy or childhood--or losing a child--has plummeted just in my lifetime. The likelihood of dying in a natural disaster is the lowest in recorded human history. Yes, even with the uptick in natural disaster intensity from climate change!

Humans alive right now are more likely to have access to healthcare, electricity, education, birth control, clean water, and nutritious food than at any other point in human history. There are so many diseases we can treat now that were a death sentence for 90% of human history.

This is not by accident. This is because generations of humans put in work to make life better for their communities.

Some of our solutions had the side effect of creating other problems--better access to electricity that ultimately made people's lives easier and safer led to pollution and climate change, for example--but we are tackling those knock on problems too. Our generation's solutions to our current problems will probably create their own less-bad side effects for the humans after us to deal with.

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.

people look at wheelchair users and think "well you're sitting down all the time that doesn't take effort" no actually it does. pushing a manual chair takes a lot of fucking effort, especially without a power assist. repetitive stress injuries are a huge problem manual chair users encounter all the time. going up hills and ramps is so deeply fatiguing.

this doesn't just apply to manual chair users btw. power chair usage can also be really exhausting, especially for people with complex seating needs. going over bumps and cracks can trigger many symptoms such as spasticity, pressure sores are common, even just sitting upright can be exhausting for many people.

Like have people who think this way never taken a bike up a hill? Or do they think that arms are just super powered and don't take strength to use? (Sure hope they can all do a chin up with ease since you don't need your legs for that either)

They say that he's boring and has no real interesting story, and I have to point out that 1. that's wrong, just inherently so, and 2. okay, so why is it not suspicious to you that the one Black companion in the game is painfully underwritten? Also, Wyll not having as much of a storyline as the rest of the companions isn't an excuse when I've seen white fandom make mountains out of lesser molehills! I've seen, time and time again, white fandom create whole rich worlds and stories for background characters with one line, or side characters with even less to work with than Wyll! They can invent story threads and motivations for a pocket of lint, but not this one Black character?

When they say that his whole hero thing and general kind and romantic nature makes him less interesting or annoying, I can't help but think that that would not be a problem if he were white, or if his personality and questline were transferred to a white character. For God's sake, there's a mod that takes Wyll's dance scene and replaces him with Astarion (which is an issue in and of itself but that's another post for another time)! That's all I need to know about where people's heads are at!

I've even seen people writing angry screeds demonizing Wyll for making the deal with Mizora. I'm sorry, was 17 year old Wyll just supposed to sit back and watch everyone die? Would a white hero faced with this kind of dilemma be received so poorly by fandom? I think not!

It all comes back around to antiblackness, and I always feel like I'm the crazy one for noticing it!

The problem here is that people love heroism, but only when it's a white character. When heroism wears the face of a Black person, then suddenly it's cheesy and boring and evil and all the bad things in the world.