I was watching the Supergirl movie, and remembered some of the older retellings of the Superman & Krypton origin stories, when it struck me - humanity itself is the biggest unreliable narrator. We just can’t help ourselves.
Not being an US-ian, I was mostly exposed to superheroes through movies. I don’t have the huge meta on the genre through comic books and cartoons, with the myriad of alternate universes and retcons, and I know it annoyed me every couple of years (or decades) when a new reboot would change important events and character backgrounds. Ok, there are some “fixed points”, like Batman is practically always a rich orphan, Superman is a super-powerful alien from Krypton, but other than that - it’s all malleable.
It makes me impishly happy when I read about someone interpreting ancient religions and cultures like they were some uniform, strictly defined, system of beliefs and characters. Did you know that there’s exactly one complete work (a poem, not even a “book” in today’s sense!) we currently have from ancient Greece that talks about the origin of Zeus and his family? One. It’s “Theogony” by Hesiod, and it was written in a small village far away from population centres that we think of in that context, and really far away from Mount Olympus.
One. For a civilisation that can be argued to be active about 1500 years. One1.
Imagine if some future archaeologist tried to make sense of Superman, from a couple of 4chan memes and a single surviving narrative in the form of “Action Comics #224”. I predict many “religious artefacts” would be deduced from that.
Two take-aways from that:
Chill with the Odyssey. It’s a cool interpretation of a 3000 year old story about something that probably never happened.
LLMs can be trained anything, they don’t discriminate. The world is flat? Sure. The most popular burger in the world is made with anchovies, watermelon, and mustard? Yes, tell me more. The Emperor is our lord god and protector? To even think of any other is a heresy punishable by lobotomy.
I don’t even know what’s in your head when you think of the colour “blue”. There is absolutely no chance we will agree on what “democracy” means. And we expect LLMs to make sense of that? Good luck.
To be accurate, some fragments of other works survived, and references to yet other missing works across a scattering of references in various other books. We’re fairly certain that there were at least 5 different traditions / interpretations of the Greek pantheon, and it’s likely that every substantial village had its own. For a similar rabbit hole, try to figure out “Mithras.”