Assigned Wei Wuxian by Friends

They shot in the illegally occupied Western Sahara as reported by Middle East Eye (thanks to @fuckyeahdavidandyonatan for bringing that up)

They dumped their props into a protected area of the Italian sea after shooting (thanks to @godslop for finding the article in English)

Zendaya wearing looted 3000 years old Iranian earrings for the premiere of the movie + having her stylist fly on a private jet just to get her a dress for the premiere in London

No Greek actors in a movie about Greek heritage

While people mentioned that Anne Hathaway was flown in to the set every day, apparently it was not on a private jet but on a helicopter that was being used anyway to fly in equipment.

None of these things are new in Hollywood or exclusive to the Odyssey, its director or its actors, but I do think we as audience should start holding Hollywood accountable when it disrespects our culture, heritage, environment, especially when it's movies that are this big and have a huge budged that would allow for more conscious choices.

Still, if they were filming Beowulf and the cast was a bunch of Australians? I think the nords could survive such a wound.

So unless Greece is really starved for a win right now, which it very could be since my only reference for Modern Greece is 20th century civil wars and an apparently plummeting GDP, I think a swing and a miss for the Greeks on Nolan’s behalf is just going to have to be a bummer.

Yes, there are racists making a big deal about how the characters and text are Greek, but a) they don't want an all-Greek cast either, they want an all-white cast, they're fine with all-Anglo representations of Greek people, and b) the complaint isn't about what the entire cast should be anyway. Nolan et al. didn't have to choose between Lupita Nyong'o and Any Greek People At All. That's a pure derailing tactic to trivialize the actual criticism and conflate it with something much easier to dismiss.

It's about the defense that it's representing the entire modern world while managing to exclude Greek people from their image of the modern world in a specifically Greek context— something that goes way, way back, because the ongoing existence of actual living Greek people rather than a long-lost fallen civilization whose works and artifacts are a common property of the world has frequently been deeply inconvenient to broad Western narratives and politics around it.

to explain what i mean by "coerced":

i think doing things that are morally bad is also bad for the individual. people shouldn't be forced to do things in general, but its especially bad to force someone to do something morally bad. its also bad to coerce them into doing that. and its quite horrific for a system to embed within someone a worldview which habitually leads them to do bad things, and a social system which incentivizes people to do bad things.

this post is in part inspired by reading the book Dirty Work which talks about moral injury & people (largely marginalized people) who do work that is seen as morally "dirty" in society. and specifically the chapter on people who work with drones for the US military (in a variety of ways). one of the major figures was a woman who grew up in poverty and was terrified of dying that way, went to join the military to get to see the world, and ended up working a job requiring her to watch hours and hours of drone footage, including hours of people living their lives, their gruesome deaths, and their families trying to collect their body parts in the aftermath. she recounts how much this weighed on her psychologically and morally, but not only her fear of poverty but also being court-martialed or otherwise subject to punishment if she spoke out or did anything, and her anger at protestors who seemed to be largely middle-class women who directed their protests at individual workers like her. she eventually did become a whistle-blower and says she experienced backlash from the left as well as the right because of her job.

now, this was a difficult read for me. it can be frustrating to read a whole chapter on the suffering of drone operators when so many people in the US don't give the beginning of a fuck about the people who have been getting bombed for years. the trauma of entire countries doesn't outweigh the trauma of a single US soldier. how can we talk about her anger at women protesting drone warfare because it hurts her feelings when we are still having to protest drone warfare that destroys entire families?

and yet. i think that reaction is partially an attempt to avoid the discomfort of how fucked the situation is holistically. the woman clearly had internalized plenty of dehumanizing, imperialistic, racist, and likely Orientalist beliefs and values. but this was hardly something she consciously chose. its easy to say "never join the US military" when you are someone who 1. already had the time and chance to develop a sense of how evil the US military is (not everyone necessarily does) 2. was not and is not in the position of being 17 and worried you'll die of a fentanyl overdose in the next five years like multiple of your classmates and desperate for any opportunity out.

does it make her decision better morally? i don't think so. but why was it a decision she had to make? why did she have so few options? why did things feel so desperate? why did a certain decision seem better and more accessible than others? if we are going up the line of responsibility here, the reason this harmful, morally bad action took place at all is because of the system of US imperialism and capitalism.

the problem is, that answer does not give us A Person To Punish. which we, as people socialized into a worldview of punitive justice, have been taught to want. transformative justice isn't just switching to A Person To Fix, its directing our energy towards social change and collective thinking and acting. that doesn't ignore the individual, but it always sees the individual through a social lens. the ultimate goal is a system which incentivizes the morals we want to see just as much as the current one incentives individualism and authoritarianism and puritanism and imperialism.

i think the perspective that we are coerced, by social systems like imperialism, patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy, etc. into acting immorally and harming others and ourselves, more naturally invites people to see their own racism, sexism, orientalism, classism, etc. as both morally bad and yet not a sign they are bad. it directly counters the idea that saying "the thing you did is racist" means "YOU are racist and EVIL and CONSCIOUSLY DESPISE PEOPLE OF COLOR"*; the point is that the thing you did is racist, and if you don't want to do racist things, then you have to unlearn the shit you were socialized into believing. "coerced" keeps in mind that there are people who benefit from keeping this status quo. if racism is evil, and white supremacist culture means everyone has internalized racist beliefs, that doesn't mean everyone is evil. it means we have all been coerced into participating in evil, and we are demanding an end to that coercion; that is (one form of) accountability.

this perspective can't exist alone, either. it must be paired with a devotion to the victims of these systems. this is why it is a process. the back-and-forth has to be put into action to get a balanced solution. what is best is what practically creates system change, and having process for (again, social) forgiveness is a practical necessity.

You will however, understand exactly what they’re saying from the context of the video

And you will get to hear this person’s wonderful laughter

I might translate this article later today. This one was the most complete one, even in Italian news it's not talked about that much.

Body Horror: Things that cannot happen in real life. EX: The Thing, stomach mouths, eyes on hands, etc

Gore: Fresh injuries, often severe. EX: Severed leg, gutspill, deep gashes, etc

NEITHER: Healed injuries and burns, congenital differences, missing appendages, etc. If I could theoretically go to the store and see that character browsing the isles- It isn't body horror or gore. That's just a person. *AND the amount of people that tag, not just fictional characters, but real human beings as body horror is staggering. Its not solely a fandom issue, ableism and bigotry against anyone that looks sufficiently "different" is prevalent in real life and has devastating consequences.