Chaos on Repeat

no, royalties are not a significant source of income for most authors. if you wrote something like Project Hail Mary, then absolutely, the royalties would be substantial! but that's like winning the lottery. Ryan Gosling is not starring in the movie adaption of most books.

when you sell a book to a publisher, you get what's called 'an advance against royalties'. it's usually split into multiple parts, so you might get one third for the initial sale, one third for the final revised manuscript, and one third on the publishing date.

an advance against royalties is the publisher saying "we believe you will eventually make X amount in royalties, so here it is ahead of time." and then you don't actually see any money from royalties until the advance is paid off. most books do not make enough in royalties to pay off the advance (I have two children's books and one fiction book, and have yet to see royalties for any of them).

advances are still great, but you need to make them stretch! for instance, last year my net income was about 30k Canadian (21k USD), which is fantastic when you consider that I mostly made it through writing. but I'm definitely not a millionaire. I can live off my writing (not trying to undersell that!) but I'll probably remain in a low income bracket for the foreseeable future.

this isn't me making a fuss about pirating (I've pirated way too many shows to run my mouth on that lmao), but there IS actually a financial incentive to having people buy your books!

buying books shows the publisher that they can make money off you, which means they're more likely to give you advances for future books. and advances are what authors live off (if they don't have a side job). that's why I always push pre-orders so hard! you have to be a racehorse worth betting on, or else they send you to the glue factory....

did I hate it? Idk. I get why others hate it. I’m not a HUGE Greek mythology buff but I used to be and my little sister still is so it was a bit disappointing

HOWEVER

I don’t think it deserves ALL the hate it’s getting (wow racism literally die Lupita Nyong’o is fucking gorgeous don’t even come for my girl) I mean it’s an interpretation that obviously mirrors the trump administration I mean the whole “i burned down the world we knew and now I’m reaping the consequences” I mean come on

I did miss a lot of the classic scenes, though.

BUT CAN WE TALK ABOUT AGAMEMNON PLEASE

One. The helmet. It’s gorgeous. It’s iconic. It’s foreboding. It shows that he is the spine of the war, he is the one reason it still is standing, he doesn’t care about Helen, he wants to sack Troy for the money. His armor is far better and larger than any one else’s, making him wayyyy taller than everyone else and making him seem more intimidating and we love that. The part where they finally open the gates and Agamemnon is just standing there as the rest of the soldiers flood in around him? The way he waits for others to draw blood before he starts? Beautiful. No notes.

two. The speaking and the helmet. He barely speaks until we see him in hades. It makes him scary, almost like a figment of Odysseus’s imagination, but he’s not. He’s real. And we never see his face fully. We see the back of his head during his monologue about his death, but we never see his full face and I love that because it shows that he is emotionally distant (he sacrificed his fucking daughter I mean how could he not be) and hides behind masculinity and intimidation and it’s just gorgeous and then after the flashback we see him lean down to advise Odysseus and we see his eyes and they just look so full of grief and regret and anger and it was great I loved it.

Three. Clytemnestra. The fact that the face of Helen, the woman he used as an excuse to sack Troy, his political pawn, his sway over his brother, the woman he couldn’t give less of a shit about, is the face of the woman who murders him is just great. I know a lot of people are mad that they used the same actress for the sisters and didn’t even try to change their styles much, but I liked it. It gave meaning. Agamemnon hadn’t seen his wife for 15 years, when his last sight was the shared face of Clytemnestra and Helen, he probably thought of Helen. Also, the whole style variation thing is stupid because it was Ancient Greece, they didn’t have a whole lot of options.

and yes, the costuming and period accuracy and loyalty to source material was buns,but I enjoyed this one character and his stuff, so idk

The Greeks used the excuse of a woman and the war of gods to wage war with an economic competitor, then showed up on their enemy's shores and broke their own laws of hospitality to win the war and ransacked the city and its people. The story of those actions traveled the world, making everyone afraid of the "people from the sea," even the Greeks who WERE the people from the sea.

The suitors cried about the laws not being upheld for them but were unwilling to uphold them themselves. The same society was terrified of this invisible enemy that would invade because of their lack of morals, unaware that THEY are the ones who broke the laws first. They are their own boogeyman. The fear of foreignors was never about the actions of foreignors but their own actions.

The gods haunt the narrative as an ideal. If they were confirmed real, then this movie becomes a warning against breaking away from "the correct religion." Instead, it is a warning of how mutual care and respect for your fellow man, whether gods exist or not, is the backbone of society, and without it, morality becomes something to twist and fear monger.

The gods couldn't exist in this adaptation, so a lot of the plot points involving the gods had to be changed or left out. "Nobody" only matters if Odysseus doxxes himself for poseidon to punish. (The crew members insisting that they definitely heard the cyclops say posiedon and jumping to the conclusion that he was poseidon's son and they were cursed was a great change in my opinion.) The wind bag can only exist if the gods exist. Athena can only guide Telemechus and Odysseus if the gods exist. ("Athena" potentially only being Odysseus's guilt for the preistess he let die who only shows up in times where his actions in Troy are thematically important was *chef's kiss*.) The Trojan War is only a war sanctioned by the gods if the gods exist. Odysseus being stuck with Calypso for so long needs another reason (the lotus) if it's not by the will of the gods. What would Circe and Calypso be like if they weren't eternal goddesses? Did the crew go to Hades, or did they just perform a spell that raised the dead?

Magic and Monsters can still exist without the gods, and everything else can be explained by superstition, nature, and bad luck. The ideal of the gods haunt the narrative so wonderfully.

I'm not a fan of Nolan's directorial aesthetic, but for the themes he wanted to explore, I think this was a fantastic retelling of the original. Accuracy isn't and shouldn't always be the goal. Sometimes, taking an existing story and making something new in order to speak to a different aspect of humanity is all we can really hope for.

Then there's the "normal" that means that the thing predictably Just Happens, nobody has to do anything wrong or weird to make it be like that. It's normal in the sense of being a morally neutral, expectable thing.

Then there's the "everyone poops" level of normal. For the kind of things that are literally so normal that it would be really fucking weird if there was somebody who has never encountered it.