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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23575 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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Cultural war and cultural revolution continues, as it should.

Revolution has a beginning, but it has no end.

And the newest battle is the most ancient, Homer's - and Christopher Nolan’s - Odyssey.

Many are happy, many are unhappy, and among the latter is world's richest man, as expected.

Elon was unhappy so much that he promised to rifle through his pockets for some spare change and give Mel Gibson $100 million to remake Odyssey in fully authentic and historically accurate way, with Greek actors and spoken in proper Homeric Greek.

Then, the next day, he changed his mind. Directors - and actors - are as obsolete as draft horses, Grok can do it all alone and cheaper.

If it happens, would it make a difference? Elite Mottizen human capital had been talking and daydreaming for a long time about potential of money to change the world. If only we were rich men!

The real life billionaire and centi millionaire activism is not encouraging but we can always dream how we will do it right!

edit: links

My hot take is that The Iliad and The Odyssey just aren't very good. I'm sure they were great works for their time, but we are so much better at storytelling nowadays. Not to mention that poetry in translation is uniformly awful.

The iliad and the odyssey are fine, but nobody wants to watch a movie of a faithful adaptation. It'd be seven hours, nc-17, and an art film all at the same time. The Iliad is better, I guess, but still.

The iliad and the odyssey are fine, but nobody wants to watch a movie of a faithful adaptation. It'd be seven hours, nc-17, and an art film all at the same time.

People watch marathons of the extended editions of the Lord of the Rings movies. I think truly epic and faithful adaptations of the Odyssey have the potential to be perennial favorites for some people.

Honestly, if I had one complaint about Nolan's Odyssey, it is more about it not feeling epic enough. Lord of the Rings mastered the art of absolutely massive battles with thousands of combatants, but the Greek and Trojan armies felt surprising small throughout the film. Not a deal breaker, but definitely a bit odd when Hollywood already had so many examples of massive fight scenes in film epics.

You know, Mrs. FiveHour watched The Big Lebowski recently, and I was struck by how much the quirked-up aesthetic has influenced everyone since, and how it must have hit when it first came out, but now it just kind of feels like everything else but a bit better.

This is true if your metric for being better at storytelling is entertainment. The attention market optimizes for that. But maximizing story entertainment at all costs is at odds with making stories that are worthwhile in other ways, and probably doesn't even increase the overall happiness derived from stories.

I think the Illiad is pretty hard to get into, but I actually think the loose adventure structure of the Odyssey actually keeps it pretty fun and engaging in the modern day.

It's part of why the Aeneid kind of sucks as well. The Odyssey-like part of the Aeneid just has worse episodes over all ("Ooh, some spooky ghost reeds say you have to go and found Rome"), or straight up retreads of parts of the Odyssey (like the guy Odysseus left behind on the cyclops island.)

Unironically they are mediocre stories and don't follow what's recognised as good modern storytelling. The iliad for example is about a month during the Trojan war, and the first 10 days of that is about a plague because Agamemnon was lecherous and wouldn't let go of a war sex slave he'd captured. The famous trojan horse story isn't even present in the Iliad, it ends before that point and just goes up until Hector is buried. Nor is the death of Achilles part of the Iliad.

It is very weird yes, and the Odyssey is only slightly better, the focus of the action and how much time is spent on different events is very weird and inconsistent according to modern tastes: Odyssesus nearly returns to Ithaca very early on in the story to the point where the people in his entourage can see it on the horizon, but then some asshole opens a bag full of stormy and dangerous winds that they have been explicitly told to never open (just put the bag tightly sealed in a chest and send it to the bottom of the ocean) and then they get blown back basically to their starting point. That bit reminded me of the Father Ted scene where Dogual presses this big red button on the airplane with a massive "Do Not Press" written right above it.

(just put the bag tightly sealed in a chest and send it to the bottom of the ocean)

Not much good to do that when you need those winds to fill your sails, just don't open the bag and let them all out at once, but of course some idiot does that.

The Odyssey makes for a bunch of great stories - tricking the cyclopes, the danger posed by lotus eating, having to pick between a rock and a hard place scylla and charybdis. There are important truths in there which can be edited and revamped for kids and teens to enjoy and learn from.

The problem is when you put it all together it is a jumbled mess that leaves you wondering what the point all is, if you're a modern person with modern sensibilities. Classicists like to study them because they provide a glimpse of what ancient people valued - how different these biologically similar people were! It's hard to believe that Odysseus didn't really seem to care that all his crew died.

Speaking of storytelling, have I ever posted my "modernism is self-limiting" take on the declining quality of art? The reason modern stories are bad is exactly because we are so much better at storytelling nowadays.

I don’t recall, but I agree, so link to it or post it!

Since the search turned up nothing, this is the idea in a gist:

Premodern people were unselfconscious creators. They drew images, told stories, played music without thinking why one work was better than the other. Memetic evolution ensured that only the best examples survived till present.

Later, people started thinking about art on a meta level. Call this change the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, or modernism, but no matter the name, people started thinking about their cultural output in terms of analysis and synthesis. What are the common traits all these stories have? Why is this image more lifelike that that one? What makes this song so catchy? Why does every culture have fertility rites? You tease apart works of art, you learn their overall structure, the nature of every link, and then you can create the best story or song or image ever by picking the best option at every stage.

This approach identifies the truth, but not the whole truth about the quality of art. This is why, when you consciously maximize the quality of each part of your movie, you first end up with Star Wars, and then with a summer blockbuster. Can you make a better movie than the latest capeshit? Sure you can, but you can't do it by consciously following the same blueprint.

Postmodernism is the highbrow answer to this problem. Instead of trying to write a 99.99% perfect story to top a 99.9% perfect story, you simply write a story that is deliberately, obviously imperfect. You take the same blueprint that everyone uses, and remove something previously considered load bearing. Bam, you've masterfully executed the blue ocean strategy, your work of art is now completely novel and novelty is as good as quality these days.

Where does this leave us? Our only hope is people that don't know what they are doing, that don't follow existing paths or deliberately tread on the grass. They simply create what they want, and the result might be a point in the space of possibilities that is both good and hitherto unexplored! Can art theorists come up with a new theory that lets us identify these points in advance, some kind of TRIZ for art? I don't know, but I want to see them try. If they succeed, we'll be able to use AIs to create truly novel and good art, instead of them trying to climb the same mountain of modernism as humans.

Related: my opinion that GRRM's failure to end ASOIAF undermines his positioning the work as a critique of Tolkien. You can write the beginning of an interesting story that deals with "Aragorn's Tax Policy" and the grimdark of a fantasy setting...but you can't write the ending, because a satisfying ending to the work GRRM began is impossible, it's ultimately sterile in that way.

You can write the beginning of an interesting story that deals with "Aragorn's Tax Policy" and the grimdark of a fantasy setting

Yes. The peasants of Gondor are revolting due to heavy taxes, and the protagonist, hard working King's tax collector, desperately tries to explain to these dumb rednecks that Sauron is real and is really coming with giant orc horde.

I think the natural ending is "Winter comes, the civilisational cycle for the humans on Westeros goes into decline and the non-humans take over and expand into that niche, and for however long it lasts this is how it goes".

How the warmer lands fare in that, I don't know (because I haven't worked out the geography, geology, and the entire rest of the worldbuilding). Probably something like a massive, centuries-long Ice Age that means humans can only live in a small band of what is now temperate climate territory, until the stellar orbit swings round again to gradual thawing and civilisation advancing again.

Of course, that's the SF-style explanation à la Brian Aldiss, and Tolkien managed to work out what a year in Middle-earth would be (can't remember where I read it, but he mentioned somewhere, or maybe Christopher Tolkien put it into History of Middle-earth, how he worked out the Middle-earth year/Númenorean year to be just slightly better than our Gregorian measure) , but Martin apparently says it's all to do with magic? Which makes it an even shittier explanation in the light of him going off (admittedly a jokey line) about tax policies. So he's writing grimdark Low Fantasy ripped off from his notion of the Wars of the Roses, but it's also post-apocalyptic in some fashion since there's references to lost higher tech with survivals from the past, which puts it in science fantasy territory, but he doesn't bother explaining anything (unless this is all tucked away in notes from decades past) so it's all put down to magic which doesn't seem to have any particular basis in his worldbuilding (is it the gods? natural force similar to non-magical energies like electricity? spirits? deals with the Devil?) and seems to come down to "whatever Martin wants it to mean, so it lets him have dragons but religion is just priestcraft").

R. Scott Bakker did a spectacular work as a critique of Tolkien in a very dark fantasy setting. The ending was fine, if depressing. I think this is just a GRRM problem as an author.

I disagree. Joe Abercrombie did it (and then he wrote three superb follow-up spinoffs, and then for an encore he did it again). I think you could argue Tad Williams did it before Martin ever put pen to paper.

I think the actual problem is that GRRM is just undisciplined and demoralized (and tbf, if I was in his position I would be as well), having written himself into a much more pedestrian corner involving too many loose plot threads rather than anything to do with the thematic aspect of his work. Another problem is that GRRM isn't actually all that grim dark. ASOIAF can be quite cynical and/or "realistic" at times, but it is shot through with a heavy strain of romanticism and that undermines critique-of-Tolkien angle. He can't square the circle between what he wants to write and what he has written thus far implies.

Another problem is that GRRM isn't actually all that grim dark. ASOIAF can be quite cynical and/or "realistic" at times, but it is shot through with a heavy strain of romanticism and that undermines critique-of-Tolkien angle.

Yeah, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms really made me take a step back and realize that GRRM is actually incredibly idealistic as an author. He kills off characters like Ned Stark or Baelor Breakspear, in order to show that in the long term their values are actually correct and will ultimately win out in the end, even if it might take a long time in the broken world they inhabit. They serve almost as "martyrs" for honor, virtue, and honest dealing, and inspire their successors (the Stark kids, and Sir Duncan) to carry on their values to victory.

I think he had an idea, back at the very start, of what he wanted to do and where he wanted to go. Worldbuilding is not his forte so he didn't stress too much about "how do seasons/dragons/magic work?"

Then as he went along over the years, he started writing side-quests and new characters (because I do think he gets bored trying to stick to the outline) and that meant he wrote himself into several corners, with no idea how to get out of them, and the original ending is now badly outdated but he can't create a new one because he's tangled up with too many plot threads and new characters.

He did give an unmerciful hostage to fortune with that crack about Aragorn's tax policy, even if it was meant as a joke, because dude. You can't even figure out how your damn seasons work, and that's more important than tax freakin' policies. He was trying to say he would be more realistic (translation: write the smexy with rape and incest and bare boobies all over the place and also gory violence and torture, just like Real Adult Writing) than Tolkien's work, but that only works if you the reader need descriptions of bare boobies and gut-ripping every five pages or you get bored.

a satisfying ending to the work GRRM began is impossible

I don't think so. Quiet Flows the Don, to take another epic novel, doesn't have a big climax, it fizzles out, but this is thematically appropriate and I don't mind the ending. Sure, GRRM has set up too many plot lines to resolve them all in a satisfying way, but that's a failure of this specific approach, not of his critique of the war as a noble struggle of good vs evil.

I think to some extent it does undermine the critique. The contrast asks the question: ok, cool, smart guy, you can critique the noble war made by noble warriors, the noble men obedient to and believing in a noble king, but can you come up with something better? You can critique, but can you build? Which approach is better if one can build an ending, and the other cannot?

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