Can I just go ahead and complain about something?
I don't like that Epic the Musical made Odysseus do/be responsible for so many things he didn't.
Like tossing Astyonax off the wall. You can argue he didn't stop it, but it wasn't Odysseus who did it. He wasn't even the one to give the order, and ultimately Agamemnon would have ordered Astyonax killed along with the rest of the sons of Troy.
And then the Cyclops. In Epic, not killing the Cyclops was a choice Odysseus made. But in the original story, killing the Cyclops wasn't even an option they had. Even blinding the Cyclops was fantastically difficult and dangerous. Even blinded, they had to hide from him by hanging onto his sheep's bellies as they ran out to graze for the day.
So you have songs where dead crewmembers are angry at Odysseus for not killing the cyclops "Ruthlessness is mercy." But that's not the mistake Odysseus made. His mistake was hubris.
After they escaped the cyclops's cave, he called back his real name to Polyphemus, allowing Polyphemus to call on Poseidon to curse Odysseus. Before that, all Polyphemus knew was that a man named Nobody was responsible for hurting him. So Odysseus did make a stupid mistake out of pride.
It seems like the writer is trying to connect the Cyclops back to Troy in a way that doesn't really fit. Especially with Zeus's argument that Odysseus has to kill Astyanax to preserve his own house. And thus, by making "sparing" the demigod son of Poseidon his mistake, he retroactively justifies killing an innocent infant by dropping him off a wall.
Polyphemus is not Astyanax. Polyphemus was a deadly threat, even "defeated." Astyanax was an infant. An innocent baby whose only crime was being born to the wrong family. He was not a threat. And given how thoroughly Troy was destroyed, even if he did grow to be a man consumed by vengeance, it's highly unlikely he could have ever been a threat.
By conflating these two, the writer is justifying Astyanax's death by counterposing it against Polyphemus's life. The conclusion that the reader is forced to draw is that killing Astyanax was okay because sparing Polyphemus was a mistake.
This seems to be drawn from the unnecessary portrayal of Odysseus as a good person, heroic even. Epic has wiped out most of Odysseus's bad acts, replacing and rewriting them to create a narrative that isn't necessary. Odysseus in the myth does not have to be a good person and in fact, he is a really, really bad person.
In trying to reform Odysseus's image from dark main character to gold-plated hero, the writer has weakened his own message and the Myth's.
Edit: To make this clear, I understand this is a derivative work. I don't mind that it doesn't follow the exact events of the Odyssey. I specifically disagree with the choice to make Odysseus responsible for Astyanax's death and then to retroactively justify the decision instead of forcing the audience to face the brutality of war and the needless death of innocents it causes.
