Epic: the Musical: the Curated Fanimatic Series (continued even more)

20. "Monster"

Animatic by Gigi

A few years ago, I ended up in a conversation with a regretful ex-Trumper. He was an Iraq War veteran, and claimed that he'd been foolishly pushed right by demonizing anti-military rhetoric he'd heard from the left. We were getting on fairly well, for a while. Then the subject of Guantanamo Bay came up, and...he suddenly took a very sharp, very sudden turn. If someone is in Gitmo, he told me, then they deserve to be there. Full stop. No exceptions. I pointed out the very well-substantiated accounts of rape, torture, and indefinite detention with no legal process and very minimal probable cause. He said, and I quote, "Then let me be evil."

So. This next track.

Odysseus has an introspective moment, as the rocks of Hades show his reflection from a number of angles (any excuse to do that, Gigi. Any excuse). For a moment, he wonders if the problem has been himself all along. What if, were he to come back to Ithaca right now, it would be he who put those close to him in peril, on account of the monster he's allowed himself to become?

Then he shifts gears, reverses course, and declares that yes, he has been a monster...to his own crew, out of a misguided desire to try to be good. If he wants to get home, he needs to become the other kind of monster. A PROPER monster. One who doesn't make dumb mistakes.

The most tragic part of this is when - while convincing himself of the cruelty of the world and the necessity to be at least as cruel as it is - he goes through a list of opponents he's faced, all perfectly happy being ruthless monsters, and mentions Circe.

"When the witch turns men into pigs to protect her nymphs, is she going insane? Or did she grow cold as she got older so now she can save them the pain?"

Yes, Odysseus. Yes, she is experiencing guilt and regret for doing this. That's why your men aren't pigs anymore. That's why you're visiting the underworld. You literally just learned this.

A deepening final verse, with an ominous backup-choir of his crew, has Odysseus declaring that he will be a true monster now, as the world requires of him. And this way, he WILL get back to his wife and son, no matter what anyone says. The animatic represents this as him shaking hands with a black shadowy version of himself wearing full armor and helmet, like he wore during the final battle of Troy.

I'm sure this will work out for him just perfectly.

...

Also, apparently there were a lot of people who expected the god Hades to make an appearance while Odysseus is in his realm, even though he didn't do so in the Odyssey. He didn't, but some wise soul has taken it upon themselves to correct this.

I say it's canon.


21. "Suffering"

Animatic by Gigi

This song is a very strange kind of genius. It's not one of the bests of the album, but it has one of the cleverest constructions. Part of the strangeness is down to at least parts of "Suffering" being bad on purpose.

We open in media res sometime after the return from Hades, in the middle of Odysseus' encounter with the sirens. Since we're coming in mid-action, there's no scene-setting or explanation. Instead, someone who looks and sounds like Penelope (we've heard her voice in dream and memory sequences prior to this) is trying to convince Odysseus to jump overboard and take a swim with her, and Odysseus seems to be considering it.

In contrast to Circe, this is a part of the Odyssey that "Epic" is making much darker than it was in the original.

The voice of "Penelope" is autotuned to the point where it almost sounds robotic, hitting each note with mechanical stiffness as it tries to lure Odysseus in with badly garbled details about his wife and home (she seems to think that they have a daughter instead of a son, among other discrepancies). Meanwhile, the techno trance-music background (heh, appropriate choice of genres there) has these breathy vocal sounds mixed into it that seem much more alive and organic than the singing voice does. Like I said, it's bad on purpose in a way that's just genius for the auditory storytelling.

We eventually learn what's really going on here. Odysseus and his men knew there were sirens prowling this area, and preemptively plugged their ears, causing the sirens' illusions to go haywire against them and have no hypnotic effect. Odysseus is pretending to be under their spell while he - using the lip-reading skill he's honed in his years of cooperative boar hunting and infiltration ops - plies them for information about the ways of the undersea gods and monsters to see if there's a way of avoiding Poseidon.

I really have to hand it to Rivera-Herrans here. This demonstrates the cunning of Odysseus in a way that his original solution to the sirens didn't, and it feels like something an actual Greek hero would have done to deal with a monster, even if it wasn't part of the story of this Greek hero and this monster. The details of how he actually pulled it off aren't revealed until the next song, which puts the audience almost more in the sirens' shoes than the humans' for now as Odysseus works them over.

We transition to that next song when Odysseus, after learning all that he thinks he can, makes to jump into the water like he promised...before suddenly putting an arrow in "Penelope."

Also, I love Gigi's opening shot of the back of the siren's head as she's just starting to take on Penelope's appearance while the opening trance notes are coming together.

Gives the piece a strong visual intro.


22. "Different Beast"

Animatic by YourLocalAnimations

And here's where we get the payoff to "Monster." This one is less of a musical standout, and leans heavily on repeated motifs from previous songs. Particularly "Monster" and "Full Speed Ahead," the latter of which have recurred multiple times between their debut and now.

Anyway. While Odysseus was plying the lead siren for info, his men were stealthily casting nets to scoop up her backup singers with. Odysseus and his sailors explain that they are Done with taking shit from supernatural beings. And, frankly, they're doing a favor for the next group of sailors who might try to pass this way. The captured sirens autotune a plea for mercy, but it isn't granted. The visuals of this animatic foreshadow at this point that while Odysseus showed admirable cunning and resourcefulness just now, the other shoe is about to drop.

Ominously, part of the chorus is "We are a different beast now; we are the ones who feast now." Ominously, because Odysseus commands his men to chop off the sirens' tails and throw their upper human halves back overboard so they can slowly bleed and drown to death instead of just killing them quickly and pragmatically. He does not specify what is to be done with the fish halves.

Wish you could be part of that world, mermaids? Hehehe, well, half of you will!

Amid the autotuned screams of the sirens, the final chorus has the soldiers shift from referring to themselves as "men made monsters," to Odysseus specifically as one. Implying that even they are kind of uncomfortable about this. He's kinda pissing in their caviar at this point, y'know? Giving them a little too much salt to swallow.

In other news, after today I will no longer be writing reviews. Just jokes about eating mermaids.


23. "Scylla"

Animatic by Gigi

The sirens told Odysseus that there was one place in the ocean where even Poseidon fears to go, and that passing through it has a good chance of losing him. That place being the grotto of the monster Scylla. So, that's where they're headed now.

The last few tracks have been getting more synth and less classical, but this one is where the advertised videogame music influences start to REALLY be clear. The background sounds like it could be the theme of an underwater level in a game, and the high energy final section is equal parts "heavy metal," "dark operatic," and "boss music."

And, if there is anybody in this story besides Poseidon who merits boss music, it's Scylla. Especially the way Gigi portrays her. Holy fucking shit.

You think "360 degree spin" is something? Try "360 degree spin around a ship lit by torchlight while giant moray eel heads are snatching sailors off the deck."

Ngl I mostly like it because it has moray eels in it, but there's other stuff to talk about too I guess.

As they enter the grotto, Eurylochus finally makes a confession that he's been trying to pluck up the courage to make for a while now. Specifically, that he's the one who opened the bag.

I'm not sure what kind of response he was expecting, but Odysseus just gives him a moment of silence before saying "Light up six torches."

Scylla has six heads, and each of them takes a little while to swallow something after grabbing it. Light draws her attention. Odysseus didn't want to choose who would be sacrificed to get the rest of them through, but now he's sure that at least one of the six will have to be Eurylochus. And Eurylochus can have the job of picking the other five too while he's at it.

Once again, the project leader gave a tip to the animatic artists in advance of this song's release. In fact, by this point Rivera-Herrans seems to actually be depending on these artists to do part of the storytelling for him, because there's an important plot point that he seems to have outsourced to them instead of suggesting in the music itself. I guess that makes the animatics the primary medium, in a weird way. But anyway. Eurylochus realizes what's going on during Scylla's attack, and tosses his torch away. Causing another random sailor to get eaten instead of him. I checked around, and other animatic artists actually have him *handing off* the torch to another sailor at the last second. Great guy, that Eurylochus. Truly the hero we all need and deserve.

Lastly, I want to talk about Scylla's voice. She sings her own, quite substantial, portion of this song (she even gets an echoey harmony effect when more than one of her heads are above water, no less). I wouldn't call her VA one of the best singers of "Epic," necessarily, but she specifically was chosen for this role due to her impressive range. Unlike with Polyphemus, "Epic" doesn't rely on distortion effects to make Scylla sound monstrous (except for the one word "hello" that she just speaks instead of singing); it's all natural. When she's stalking the ship at the beginning with only her "sea nymph" parts showing, she has a cool, haunting alto. During the attack, she suddenly does six lines of this deep, roaring, throaty...like I said, it's almost heavy metal.

She then ends on the haunting alto again, as she tells a departing Odysseus that she can relate to him; there's nothing too low for either of them. He harmonizes.

In a sick way, Scylla might be another (even darker) foil to Penelope. She's easier for "monster" Odysseus to relate to now, and he better belongs in a cave with her than on an island with Penelope.

...

There's another detail in here that requires going outside of the Odyssey itself, but might still be relevant. I'm sort of 50/50 on it.

According to some later sources, Scylla was once a nymph who was cursed into a monster by Circe. Which puts the lie to Circe's claim to do everything she does for her people. She'll throw them under the bus and inflict horrible fates on them for her own interests just as she'll kill outsiders for the nymphs' collective ones. And here, Odysseus puts the lie to his "let's be monsters to everyone but us" claim by sacrificing five of his precious soldiers and Eurylochus. A man willing to kill outsiders for his ingroup is also, when it comes down to the wire, likely willing to kill members of the ingroup for himself. While still clinging to them as justification for his ethos. Scylla was hidden beneath Circe's philosophy all along.

On the other hand: in the aforementioned later stories, Scylla wasn't some ultimate abomination that even Poseidon fears. "Epic's" version of Scylla seems like she's considerably above Circe's pay grade.

Hence, I'm 50/50.

...

It's not the best song of the lot, and it might not be the best animatic overall, but as a whole it's the best audiovisual synthesis and the strongest holistic piece of this "Epic" video playlist.


24. "Mutiny."

Animatic by Riley G

When they're back out in the sunlight and Scylla is wondering where these humans got such a fishy flavor to them safely behind them, the crew turn on Odysseus. He's not the only one with a wife and family to go home to, but he decided that his were more important than six of theirs. Riley G's animatic captures the feelings of mutual betrayal well, especially Odysseus' final despair once he takes a dagger to the back and realizes that it's actually over, he's no longer king or captain, he's nobody.

The irony? The mutiny leader is Eurylochus. The guy who also (ambiguously depending on the animatic, to be fair, but still) sacrificed another soldier to save himself, but did so in the darkness when no one could see it. And he has the gall to be self-righteous about this now.

This fucking guy.

...

It occurs to me now that Aeolus' "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer" might not have been general game advice. They might have been specifically trying to warn Odysseus about Eurylochus. His closest remaining friend aboard ship was the one to beware of.

I will get back to this in the conclusion.

...

There's a reprise of the amazing piano cycles from "Luck Runs Out" as Eurylochus leads the crew in announcing their loss of faith in Odysseus. And then, in a part two of this track, they reprise it again when they hit their next pit stop and encounter another recurring motif of this story: specifically, do not eat the suspiciously abundant farm animals.

I'm not sure why the crew bound Odysseus' stab wound and kept him alive and tied up this long. But, this part of the story works much more exclusively on allegory-logic than most of it. Odysseus sees the cows that the men are about to butcher, and sees the statue of Helios standing over the herd like a mark of claim.

He sees the same ruinous pattern of behavior about to repeat (the elements of this part having been copied and backported into the Polyphemus scene ended up serving a purpose. I was half-expecting Epic to skip this entirely due to having worked elements of it into Polyphemus, but nope!). He sings out, "please don't do this," to the same tune as his "please don't MAKE ME do this" from before the baby-killing. Actually, there's an entire section of the song that reprises the tune of "The Horse and the Infant." Then, the crew's final reprise of "how much longer..." emphasizes that they're beaten down, they've given up, they don't think they can do anything other than this. They are, each of them, Just A Man. And Odysseus has his hands tied when it comes to stopping them.

The rumbling electro-metal that cuts in once they've slaughtered the first cow (which proves to have golden blood; Helios' golden cattle and his protectiveness of them are elements of several older stories than the Odyssey, and this makes it clear that Odysseus was correct about what they've stumbled into) announce that it isn't Helios who will be coming down on them for this. He's decided to make this a PROPER divine judgement, dotted i's and crossed t's, and turned it over to his father. The one authority even higher than Poseidon's is now coming for them too.


25. "Thunder Bringer" (alt)

Animatics by NealIllustrator and AnniFlamma

I was told to look at two different animatics for this one. AnniFlamma's is still incomplete, but viewable in part. I can see why @Kaiya asked for this, since the two have very different relative strengths. NealIllustrator's take has more interesting scenery (they're still on the cow island with the statue nearby) and a much more imposing and accurate-to-ancient-Greek-artwork Zeus. AnniFlamma has less going on with the setting and a really weird look for Zeus, but she does much more with the human characters, particularly Odysseus himself. If I could just put Neal's Zeus in the same vid as Anni's humans, it would be perfect.

Zeus' voice is great too. We heard him a little bit as the prophetic/cynical voice in "The Horse and the Infant," but that song didn't let him go all out like this one does. If he'd sounded like THIS at the time, there'd have been no doubt in my mind that yes, this is Zeus talking.

Also? Singing about the folly of pride and hubris entirely in rape metaphors is just so on-brand for Zeus. Perfectly awful, but kind of hilarious despite that.

There's an interesting double-edgedness to the choice Zeus gives Odysseus here. On one hand, it's a reprise of the horrible choice he made at the end of the Trojan War (he once again repeats the "please don't make me do this" line, sounding more desperate and in pain than ever before). On the other hand, giving a commander the opportunity to fall on his sword for crimes committed by men under his command is...sort of SOP for the ancient world, I think?

There's also an important aspect to the choice Odysseus ultimately makes, withdrawing his responsibility and letting the mutinous men fill the graves they dug for themselves. Something that connects to the subtext of what went on with Eurylochus in the "Scylla" number. I'll get back to this.

The bleak takeaway from this song's ending, of course, hinges on Zeus' line "I'll show her what she can't conceal, as true natures shall be revealed." A man willing to kill a baby to prevent a potential longterm threat will probably also kill a few of his friends to hopefully save others. A man willing to kill a few of his men to save others will probably kill all of his friends to save himself. The crucible of Zeus burns away the outer layers and leaves only the core essence, the real operating principles, bare to the world. Not a merciful man earnestly trying to do right. Not a monster "to everyone but ourselves" in a loyal, tribalistic way. Not even an impressive, scary monster like Scylla. Just a simple brute with no self control, no ability to avoid repeating known mistakes, and either no interest or no ability to improve.

The mutineers are incinerated like a siren tail left on the grill. Odysseus is left, alone. His force reduced from 600, to 593, to 43, to 37, to 1. No closer to home. No ship. No hope. Empty.


Since someone else has chipped in for it, I'll be able to write a separate final analysis post about my interpretation of "Epic" as a whole, at least up to the point I've seen. The details I've told you all to put a pin in until later will be coming home to roost.