"With great power comes great need to take a nap"

Just to elaborate before people get mad: we as a society need to stop prioritizing written work as the be all end all of validity and we need to stop constantly discrediting and erasing orality. do you know how fast language change occurs!? (Very quickly). As in for the decades, if not centuries, of the stories of the odyssey being spoken aloud and told across the various communities that held that lore, there was very likely significant language change in how it was told. Literally each person that told the story probably had a way of telling it that was meaningful to them/to their culture. If it had continued to be an oral tradition who knows which languages would be used today to tell it. It happened to be written down in what we refer to as “Ancient Greek”. But within what we call Ancient Greek is probably hundreds of dialects or variations that are all distinct but still equally valid and all contained elements of the story in their oral tradition tldr: just because Homer wrote the Odyssey in a dialect of language that was meaningful to them at that time, that does not mean that’s the only valid form of language to communicate the story in.

Broadening the pool of villains to include complexity and push people to think more about the nature of evil is important even if you’re not able to comprehend that yourself. Yes some people are just evil but teaching kids to question what makes someone do hurtful things and learn to see things from other perspectives and have empathy is an incredible meaningful lesson. its pretty embarrassing y’all didn’t seem to get that lesson when you were young. And that doesn’t excuse the hurtful things or say it’s ok that they happened, it says that healing is about moving on from those things and letting go. What kind of lesson is it to teach kids that everyone who is against the hero in some way must just be a bad person/villain? Some people want to see more representation of family dynamics in which the main character has to cut off abusive people and if that would be healing than sure. But don’t discredit the significance of representations including the navigation of complex family dynamics. People heal in different ways. While some people are better off just finding a new family, or being independent, there are plenty of people who are healed by working through the trauma with the people that hurt them and they’re able to establish healthy boundaries because they learn to communicate. Neither cutting people off nor working through it with someone is inherently wrong or problematic to portray, or teach kids about. It is especially important to show kids examples of all these things so they learn how to do it better.