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chocolatepotI started watching this show, Kaos, which is a show retelling Orpheus and Eurydice/general Greek myths/the Iliad and Odyssey. I picked it up because it stars Jeff Goldblum as Zeus, which struck me as bizarre and interesting, but it's actually brilliant. Well, I mean, the show is brilliant. (Goldblum might also be brilliant! Did he just force an eyebrow twitch?!)
There's a lot of fiction based on Greek myths, where the gods are real and the hero has to interact with them and all that. They never feel quite right to me - a lot of the time the conflicts between the gods are treated as very serious wars, and the gods themselves are pretty serious individuals. Or else they're Just Dudes. You either get the sense of their power, or you get the humanity. In Kaos, you get the sense of these very human foibles and weaknesses but also the power, both in terms of what they can magically do (Hera makes Zeus' lover's pregnancy fully develop in seconds and pop out a kid, then she turns the woman into a bee to add to her hives) and their aesthetic similarity to the ultra-rich.
It's also set in a modern fantasy world, rather than either here'n'now or ancient Greece; it reminds me of Kings in that way, if you remember that show? This is a highly believable and recognizable world where people worship the Greek pantheon with tongue-cutting-out and human sacrifice.
(Now I want something that goes in the other direction and acknowledges that the modern conception of Greek religion as a unified set of myths and a belief in The Pantheon is anachronistic in order to complete the spectrum.)
There's a lot of fiction based on Greek myths, where the gods are real and the hero has to interact with them and all that. They never feel quite right to me - a lot of the time the conflicts between the gods are treated as very serious wars, and the gods themselves are pretty serious individuals. Or else they're Just Dudes. You either get the sense of their power, or you get the humanity. In Kaos, you get the sense of these very human foibles and weaknesses but also the power, both in terms of what they can magically do (Hera makes Zeus' lover's pregnancy fully develop in seconds and pop out a kid, then she turns the woman into a bee to add to her hives) and their aesthetic similarity to the ultra-rich.
It's also set in a modern fantasy world, rather than either here'n'now or ancient Greece; it reminds me of Kings in that way, if you remember that show? This is a highly believable and recognizable world where people worship the Greek pantheon with tongue-cutting-out and human sacrifice.
(Now I want something that goes in the other direction and acknowledges that the modern conception of Greek religion as a unified set of myths and a belief in The Pantheon is anachronistic in order to complete the spectrum.)
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Date: 2024-09-14 04:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-09-15 06:59 pm (UTC)