Meg's Mumbles

Hanahaki, but it's someone whose friends have started ghosting them.

Hanahaki, someone's wife is cheating on them.

Like when Gandalf spent literal PAGES trying to figure out why the vibes were off in Moria and Legolas chimes in with just "it's a balrog :) that shit's evil :) we're so fucked :)" like what do you MEAN you knew already and just didn't tell him??

Or at the beginning of Two Towers when Aragorn thinks there's something nearby so he puts his ear to the ground to listen, and then like 10 minutes later is like "hmmm i hear horses" and Legolas is just like "mm yep. there are 105 blond bitches with spears" like you just let your friend put his face in the dirt and you can SEE them??

gandalf is scratching his head in moria, and legolas is thinking "oh man, the wizard noticed something off *besides* the obvious balrog that we all are aware of??"

Penelope doesn't need to prove to herself that Odysseus is really who he says he is in this version. She needs to prove to him that he's still the man she loves, still someone who can be loved, not the monster he fears he is.

The "waiting Waiting - Penelope - WAITING WAITING - Penelope! - WAITING WAITING WAITING! is her more or less shouting him down as he tries to find fresh reasons that he's awful and unlovable and should go die in a ditch or something because she needs him for once in his life to shut up because he's being dumb and trying to take himself away from her again when she's been WAITING FOR 20 YEARS and she's not having it, she's going to shout at him until he gets that he doesn't get to run away now that he's back

Just a Man is playing in the background at the end because after all of that, all of the fighting and dying and horrors, he finally gets to be just a man, not a monster, not the thing Poseidon and Zeus and arguably Athena tried to make him into. He fought for his life AND HE WON.

We open our scene on this man when he has been at war for ten. straight. years! The PTSD is running rampant already, the moral wound has been dealt, what in the fuck did you think Open Arms was about? We have no idea what he was like when he left Penelope, we never meet that man! He turns away from killing Polyphemus not out of hypocrisy or stupidity but because he's trying desperately, futilely at that moment, to reconnect with the man he was, he turns away precisely because killing that infant is the height of his own depravity and he knows it and he feels utterly horrified because he's still fucking human despite that! He still wants to be gentle!

Him refusing to kill Polyphemus is him drawing a line in the sand (one that he proceeds to stride over in Different Beast). He's looked in the mirror and the man he sees is someone he's scared of and that's the point. Epic is him learning to look that man in the face and NOT be scared, and it's a tragedy because he should be frightened, he should be allowed to be horrified, and he’s denied even that and that's. What. War. Does!

And that's why when he goes back to Penelope, the real challenge is not for her to physically recognize him, it's for him to be able to believe her when she says he's still the man who left twenty years ago and that she can fall in love with his trauma too but he doesn't get to run away out of shame.

Don't think about Menelaus, whose wife is stolen from him, who wages a ten year war to get her back not just because he wants his wife back but because he couldn't really have avoided that war if he wanted to (thanks, Odysseus). Menelaus, who wins that war, finds Helen and forgives his wife/figures out that Aphrodite basically signed her up to be raped and kidnapped, and then leaves Troy - only to get stuck far from home for another eight years because the gods are still vengeful, still not done with them, and their daughter is at home but they don't get to raise her, and that's got to be killing both of them the entire time. And then - and then. Just to add extra heartbreak as if they hadn't been through enough. Menelaus talks to Proteus the seer, and finds out that his brother Agamemnon has been murdered, and his best friend, Odysseus, the person he'd sworn to found a city for so they could hang out more, the person who'd helped him rescue Helen - is now missing, kept by Calypso, in more or less the exact situation that Helen had been in only Menelaus can't. save. him.