Reacting to 1 reviews of The Odyssey

[00:00:00]In celebration, if celebration is the right word, of Christopher Nolan's film adaptation of The Odyssey coming out, I have been enjoying Emily Wilson's celebrated translation of Homer's Epic.

[00:00:13]Look, I I used to be a fan of Christopher Nolan. Sure, there was a time when I appreciated his films, but these days, I look back on everything he's ever made, and it feels so lifeless and soulless and bland and gray and drained of color, drained of heart.

[00:00:28]They're technical marvels, but they're so lacking in soul and passion. And I'm going to do a video about Christopher Nolan on my second channel. This is not the space for it. And in case you're not subscribed, go to my second channel. I talk about films there. And since I've been reading Emily Wilson's incredible translation of the Odyssey, I thought doing a review of it would be the right thing to do. But reviewing the Odyssey feels weird. I mean, maybe I will. Maybe for my next video, I'll decide I'm going to review the Odyssey after all. But it's 3,000 years old and [gasps and laughter] I just don't really know what I'm supposed to say about the Odyssey. I don't know how to review it if I'm honest. Maybe I'll try. Let's see. But instead, for this video, I thought it would be more fun to go through some one-star reviews of the Odyssey and just have a good laugh. So, let's do that. One out of five stars.

[00:01:18]Genuinely the most confusing book I have ever read. Then some pretty stars and hearts. For some reason, I would only recommend this book to people who are super academically into mythology and gods. This is a very bizarre take to me.

[00:01:34]And I confess, Emily Wilson's translation is the only version of the Odyssey I've ever read. I remember my history teacher in high school sort of relaying us the entire story like an audio book. Instead of putting a film on at Christmas, he said, "I'm just going to tell you the Odyssey." So, that was pretty cool. But I read Emily Wilson's translation back in 2018 when it was first published. I was living in Korea at the time and I was very excited that I managed to find it in an English bookshop. And so now I've read it twice and maybe other translations of the Odyssey are more confusing. Maybe the language is stuffy and slow and old and lifeless. Maybe maybe there's something more confusing in the formatting of other translations. I don't know. People who've read them, let me know. But I don't understand how this is confusing.

[00:02:19]And I don't mean to patronize. I just don't relate. I do not understand. The only thing that's weird about the Odyssey versus adaptations or versions of it you might have heard of or read or whatever. It's been adapted a thousand times. The only thing that adaptations never cover is the fact that we get a lot of Tmacus, Adysius's son. For the first few chapters or books of this story, you follow Tmicus for a good while. For the first like 100 pages of this 500page epic, you follow Tmicus through his eyes. We find out what's going on on Ithaca. We find out about Penelope and the fact that she's weaving her shroud and dozens of wannabe suitors are vying for the throne and for her hand in marriage. And Tmicus decides to sail off with Athena in disguise as his compatriate as they learn about where Adysius is and if he's dead and if he's coming home, etc. And I guess that's confusing, but it's kind of like a prologue. And then we seamlessly move into the narrative of Adysius and we also get the perspectives of different gods and we flash back to Tmicus. And I guess that's the thing that could be confusing, but it isn't. And with Emily Wilson's translation, there's nothing confusing in the language. It's incredibly modern. It's vibrant. It's action-packed. It's exciting. It's full of lively, witty dialogue between characters. She gives so much agency and power and style to the female characters in this story. It's so much fun. I I I don't understand how this could be confusing. I don't understand how it's only fit for academics. I'm not an academic. I just like to read and I love to read this. The Odyssey is fun. It's action-packed and it's full of really fun dialogue. Something confusing in it.

[00:04:04]I have no idea what someone means when they say that. Too many sexist white men. Rick Riordan tells Greek mythology better. [laughter] That is that is so weird. Now, this one has comments. I have to read the comments. One person said, "You realize that the ancient Greeks weren't actually white, right? Their skin tone was somewhat like ancient Egyptians." Now, I'm not an anthropologist, and I don't want to throw my words around and say something ignorant, but I don't know if ancient Greeks were counted as Caucasian. I honestly don't know. But I think I could safely assume they weren't very pale. Am I wrong? Were they white?

[00:04:41]Were they counted as white? Were they considered Caucasian? I don't know. And by the sounds of it, I don't think this person knows either. So rather than saying I don't know, they've just confidently gone white people.

[00:04:51][laughter] And like I agree with the sentiment of gh white people. Absolutely. But I'm not sure they were. Another reply says Rick Reordan wasn't there. Homer was. Now that is technically true. There is debate over whether or not Homer was actually a real person. But when I say it's technically true, what I mean is, yeah, he was there in ancient Greece, but and I don't mean to be a skeptical atheist here, even though I am one, but I would assume he didn't actually meet any gods or monsters. So yeah, he was there at the time, but he didn't live through mythology. Still, to the ancient Greeks, the gods were a matter of fact.

[00:05:26]It was not up for debate. Their entire culture was built around the fact that the gods existed. So that's kind of a murky thing to talk about. It It's complex. When you're talking about cultures like that of ancient Greece, you can't really talk about religion as a matter of faith because it was a matter of fact for them. This is a good demonstration of like a person saying a stupid thing. And then the replies disagreeing with that person but not really being any smarter. Like one person said, "So your racism stops you appreciating their sexism." Interesting.

[00:05:54]This could easily be a white person being annoyed at anti-white racism, which was not a thing. But I think this embarrassing review and the cringe comments on it demonstrate the fact that Goodreads is a dumpster fire of a place. Just full of people saying bad things on all sides of any argument. At least this next guy is saying it like it is boring. My farts are more entertaining than this overrated piece of turd. That comment was left all the way back in 2012. And I feel like piece of turd is a very 2012 kind of thing to say. [laughter] I I don't know. It was the YOLO era piece of turd. Sh. Yeah.

[00:06:32]Now, I do think this guy is right. At least from his own perspective because there are definitely teenage boys out there who've been put in a situation where they've been told to read the Odyssey for school or something and they've fallen asleep and they've hated it and they've ripped their hair out with boredom and then they've done a fart and they've laughed. And thus, true enough, that fart was more entertaining than the Odyssey, at least to them.

[00:06:54][laughter] And I honestly think Homer would appreciate that. All right, what have we got here? I understand that this book is known as a classic and that it's one of the most famous pieces of literature of all time. What I don't understand is why. I get that the plot and the vocabulary is of its time, but I found this book to be utterly and incredibly boring. I could hardly get through a few pages without wanting to take a nap. There was not a single character that I was rooting for or sympathized with. Adysius was not a hero. He was a guy who disrespected the gods, outsmarted them eventually, and in the midst of all of that, cheated on his wife on several occasions. There is nothing heroic about that. Oh, calm down. Stop clutching your pearls. Jesus Christ. This puritanical, holier than thou I'm so sick of it. I have spent so much of this channel's history telling people they're wrong for disliking a book with an unlikable protagonist. It's juvenile. It's shortsighted. It's embarrassing.

[00:07:55]Literature and storytelling exists as a way of expressing and wrangling with and having a dialogue with the complexities of human nature. And it is a sign of a person's maturity. if they can read a book that features a difficult protagonist who is morally complex, who does bad things, who is outright bad, who is not there to be rooted for, but rather someone who is there to be considered as a human being as a manifestation of certain aspects of humanity. A bad protagonist does not a bad book make. It is so weird the idea that we need some sort of morally pure protagonist to inspire us to heroic acts or whatever. And you realize the amount of literature that includes great heroes and not just literature, films, video games, and so on. The amount of stories that exist that feature heroes who do terrible things but that aren't depicted as terrible because of the angle they're told from. Say for example, an American war hero in a Vietnam story. The US were not the good guys in Vietnam. Or Nathan Drake in the Uncharted games. A guy who just ms down hundreds upon hundreds of nameless people, most of whom are not white Americans like he is. And he's depicted as this wisecracking Indiana Jones protagonist. It it's it's cringe.

[00:09:19]My point is that a character that charms you isn't necessarily a good person. And a protagonist who is clearly not morally perfect is not necessarily a bad protagonist. A protagonist who's a bad guy is not a bad protagonist. And Adysius is not a bad person. Or is he?

[00:09:37]Maybe you can argue he is. Okay, great.

[00:09:39]Let's have a discussion about her. Isn't considering and deconstructing and talking about all of that more interesting, more valuable than just going, "Adysius is a that I don't like and therefore the book sucks."

[00:09:51]Like, that's juvenile. It's It's shortsighted. It's embarrassing. Are you not embarrassed? I swear. I sw Why am I on Goodreads? Because this is where the bad takes and that's the whole point of the video. Willow. Suffer. Suffer for entertainment. So, I just scanned through a bunch of other one-star reviews on Goodreads and I have noticed two trends. One, people complaining about the language, the language being repetitive or old or boring or lifeless and that kind of thing. and all the reviews complaining about the language were published on Goodreads before the publication of Emily Wilson's translation, which in my opinion is not any of those things. So, I can only assume that people are reading older versions that just haven't been very well translated or have aged poorly in their translation and so on. So, I kind of feel bad for those people because Emily Wilson's translation is so electric. It is so fluid. It is so lively and colorful that I can't imagine having those kinds of complaints about this version of the Odyssey. It just wouldn't happen. I wish that those people had read this version instead, but oh well, what are you going to do?

[00:10:54]And the other trend is with the misogyny of it. People constantly complaining that Adysius is a bad guy and that he cheats on his wife. One person said #team Penelope. Like, oh my god. I didn't check, but I assume that review was left in 2008 and that person was like 15 at the time. I don't know what to do with these kinds of reviews. I hate the idea that people are leaving one-st star reviews on a book because the protagonist behaves in a certain way. And like I have criticized books for being misogynistic. Absolutely. I have repeatedly made jokes and comments about the horrific misogyny in the works of Hurki Murakami, for example. But context is very, very important in Murakami's fiction. At least it's not his protagonists that behave in a misogynistic way. I mean, it is, but it's also the narration. It's the framing of the story itself that's misogynistic. Omnisient third person narrators in his stories will spew out misogynistic opinions. And I can only assume they are the opinions of the author who has come under fire repeatedly for misogyny in his fiction.

[00:12:03]Perspective and context is all very important. The Odyssey, however, is a 3,000-year-old work of epic poetry that one, these readers are expecting to align with their present modern-day morals in 2026, thus catering to them specifically, and two, as I've already said, Adysius being bad doesn't make the story bad. Adysius does bad things.

[00:12:27]Absolutely. That is part of the discussion. This is why it's so important to talk about the fiction that we read, to discuss things with our friends, to have healthy conversations and debates about the stories that we read and the actions and words of characters because you get to discuss what Adysius was, what made him a hero or didn't, how he succeeded, how he failed, what his moral failings were or his moral successes, and so on and so on and so on. When people just put one star, Adysius was a misogynist. There is nothing you can do with that. It's not that clear-cut. It's not that simple. It is, as I said before, massively shortsighted. And I I just don't know how people I don't like it. And now there's a lawn mower. This was not as fun as I hoped. This was mostly annoying. It I'm done. Subscribe for bags.