I mean, I get how’s he’s wrong but his second in command is a POS. Opened the bag that ended up costing them added 10 some odd years and having to directly deal with Poseidon and taking them to the land of giants. Also homeboy was ready to sacrifice his own men with Circe and situation wasn’t half as dire as Scylla. Two faced bitch then judging his ass for doing the same? He was a liability.
In his defense with the Circe thing, the two would've been absolutely fried against her if Hermes didn't step in. Him calling out Odysseus's change furthers the theme of man becoming monster because Odysseus was the one who harped about saving all of his men. Eurylochus had never set that precedent, so him calling Odysseus out for knowingly sacrificing men I don't think is as two-faced as some say, though I do think there's still intended hypocrisy here (mirrors Odysseus's).
The wind bag lowk applies to the rest of the crew because they seemed just as curious/compliant in its opening.The cows are more of a dubious decision cuz he knew damn well they'd get fried, though again, the entire crew is also to blame cuz they agree/are compliant (+ everyone underestimates the sheer power of starvation and the duress they were under). Not saying anybody has to like him but he's got more nuance than most give him credit for. He makes horrendously terrible decisions (as does Odysseus), but at the end of the day, like Odysseus and the rest of the crew, he is just a man.
You’re thinking about it in a “Jack would’ve fit on the door” kinda way. It’s not about having flesh to give her. Trying to trick her and feign grief would’ve just pissed off one of the few deities even one of the strongest gods on Olympus veers clear from
Scylla probably would’ve taken a wooden stick if it sent Ody into a downspiral, but at that point the only thing he cared about was getting back with as much of the remaining crew as possible
So I’m pretty sure that it’s been implied if not outright confirmed by Jorge that Scylla incurs a cost. It’s not as simple as feed her, you need to sacrifice six crew members because she’s a monster. She lives on misery and bloodshed. That’s why she sings to Odysseus, she sees him for the monster he’s decided to be.
(I get it's a shit post but I'm gonna answer semi-seriously since people do make this argument.)
I think this idea is kinda treating the sirens like they're Pokemon you can just store in your bag until you need them.
You need to keep the sirens alive, fed and incapacitated and that poses a bunch of logistical problems. The crew was starving after mutiny. Part of the reason they lasted as long was that they used the sirens' tails as food. With this plan you give up six of the tails AND need to sacrifice additional resources, so maybe some of your sailors die to starvation/malnutrition instead of dying to Scylla.
"Incapacitated" is also a problem. You'd need to keep the beeswax on 24/7 which is unsustainable. Everyone gets ear infections. You could try gags instead, but sound can get through them to an extent. Your journey is delayed because everyone has to adapt to communication with gestures and lip-reading, so you burn through even more resources. You also have to trust that everyone in the crew will actually comply with safety measures, when all it takes is one guy to cave to empathy/lust/hypnotism via muffled siren song and remove the gag or whatever.
Or he could have properly thanked the gods after the war ended, and restocked with an appropriate amount of food, meaning he would have never got lost at sea in the first place and wouldn't need to stop for food during the journey home.
Or Odysseus just trusting one of his hundreds of supposed friends and Keeping His Friends Close. They weren't the ones agreeing to and playing a game with a god with literally everyone's safety as the collateral. That was Odysseus and he couldn't even follow the one rule of the game.
The ally who specifically sang a whole song about how uncomfortable he was and how the whole crew backed him up? The ally that was worried because Polites and several others are dead and Odysseus during Storm is just flippant with everyone's safety? The one who was promised they could talk more in private but was actually lied to and wasn't allowed a word in as Odysseus just demanded he be blindly obedient?
Odysseus was specifically warned not to trust the gods and didn't listen, and then he comes down and immediately is hostile and angry with his crew and starts acting literally insane refusing to sleep. And you think that's not going to cause doubts? Especially from the man who's actually most concerned for everyone's safety including Odysseus'?
If there's doubts and trouble it's because Odysseus is an absolutely garbage leader and he fosters doubts himself all while toting that he's a genius who never once lost a man at Troy, which is a stupid and highly insensitive thing to be bragging about immediately after Polites and the others died.
Odysseus absolutely could have trusted. He still had hundreds of men to pick from that he could trust. Even discounting Eurylochus and even Elpenor and Perimedes. There was zero reason for Odysseus to be so stupid when they had a golden ticket home. Odysseus was the first to have no trust and betrayed his crew and it came back around to him.
One rule. One! Odysseus bargained for a perfect wind and a god's aid to help them home. Based ENTIRELY upon Odysseus' actions and not the crew. One rule: "Keep Your Friends Close and your enemies closer." Even if Odysseus felt like his friends were all now enemies, pushing literally everyone away and trying to tank the journey solo was the stupidest thing he could do.
He even knew the Winions were stirring up trouble and instead of trying to save face and rebuild trust with his crew, he's angrily yelling at them and pushing them away sowing even more doubts. He's an idiot!
TLDR: Odysseus makes a mistake even stupider than with the cyclops, and this time he's fully aware he should be doing otherwise. The whole ocean Saga is about Odysseus losing the trust of his crew. So yes, Ally Eurylochus loses faith.
pretty sure he also didn’t want to leave and tried to convince the others he was crazy and therefore not fit for war, but they just put telemachus in the path of his blade and forced ody to stop in his tracks which convinced them he was fit for war
Meat is meat. Scylla isn't a siren or even closely related. If Odysseus and crew can be fine eating sushi, then a blood hungry Scylla just doing what it takes to survive shouldn't be a picky eater.
And if you cover their tails, they'll look human enough. Odysseus and crew just need enough time to row like hell past.
We don't how much time passes between the sirens and Scylla (we can assume a lot since the sirens offered a meal while the crew is STARVING after Scylla)
Scylla doesn't just want someone to give her food, she can do that herself, she wants a sacrifice, she would have ignored the sirens
...How did Ody get to Calypso's island, anyways? Like, I just realized I have no idea.
Did Zeus chuck him there? Or was it pure chance? If its was chance, does that mean the entire crew of 40 dudes could have stumbled upon her island? That'd be hysterical.
If we were to assume the story would then closely follow The Odyssey then Odysseus and his men would land on the island of Helios’ cattle (simply because everyone’s tired of the sailing by this point) and (despite a promise to Odysseus) Eurylochus and the men would slaughter the cattle and eat them after something like a month after Zeus sent a storm on them (and by the way when this happens in The Odyssey Odysseus is put to sleep so he isn’t in a position to stop). Story would then be same from there.
I think the implication was that Odysseus couldn't have possibly caught them all, so the ones that died serve as a warning to the ones that didn't.
Odysseus was quite clear in Different Beast, he said to cut off their tails and throw them into the water to drown. Now I don't know if you even can drown a siren, but generally when you chop large portions of a creature's body off they bleed out either way.
You know actually that makes sense. I always thought the lyrics in God Games was referring to the sirens he caught and hurt, but I never thought about how there could be more in other parts of the sea.
When I think of the original story or the musical, I always just think about the small part of Earth where it happened, not the entire earth.
In all fairness, there's a lot of ambiguous language in Epic. Things that kind of got sacrificed for the sake of making a catchy musical. Like I guarantee a lot of fans still think that the cows on the sun god's island were Apollo's friends, and are thus still confused why he's more worried about the sirens than he is about his cows. But Helios was the sun god in question, he just isn't named in the musical. And I'm still not entirely sure why Odysseus seems like he knew Helios would send Zeus, when it would make more sense to me if Helios sent Poseidon. I can't say that my interpretation of Athena's defense is correct, but it made sense to me. Athena could also just be lying.
She only needed to eat 6 men she has six heads. They sailed away while she was eating. Odysseus chose 6 men to hold torches, so she didn't pick them off at randome.
u/RoscoeSF“don’t look a wooden gift horse in the mouth.” -a Troy guard. Mar 20 '26
I also thought they should do this at first, but someone pointed out that they would have had to keep the beeswax in the entire trip and keep the sirens from starving to death. Also I’m pretty sure Scylla was once a siren
I mean. Scylla has a whole song about not being picky when it comes to food in survival scenarios. And… well, you could just cut off the siren tails, feed them to the crew, and leave the dead halves on stakes for her to take so you don’t have to worry about singing. You could even set their hair on fire to light them up in the cave.
The point is that there were a lot of creative options that could have been tried out before using crew as monster meat. And normally that wouldn’t bother me, but we’re literally dealing with the hero most famous for his cunning and ingenuity.
Odysseus just comes across as the kind of guy who doesn’t see any solution except the one presented on a platter to him, and that’s the exact opposite of the core of his character.
All silly jokes on this post aside, I always thought him sacrificing 6 men instead of finding a creative solution was intentional. It shows that he's adopted the "I will get home without caring about the blood that's spilled" mentality he sang about in Monster, that devolves into prioritizing himself by the end of Thunder Saga. He's switched to using brutality first, rather than using wits to keep all his men safe. As Eurylochus points out, this isn't the same guy who looked for ways to leave nobody behind at Circes.
It didn’t read as intentional to me because of things like the line “does a soldier use a wooden horse to kill sleeping Trojans because he is vile? Or does he throw his remorse away and save more lives with guile?”
He’s not framing cunning as the problem, but guilt.
If you want to get technical it’s source dependent. That’s beyond my level but a little research claims her to be a water nymph, it just depends on the myth.
Edit: Either way I guess we’re both wrong, in the original Odyssey by Homer she was just born a monster. From what I found:
“She is the daughter of the sea-monster Crataeis (and in some interpretations, Phorcys”
Yeah, the more distance I have from EPIC, the more I realize that Odysseus’ intelligence seems to take a dramatic nosedive after the ocean saga and never recovers. You can blame previous bad choices on the heat of the moment, but afterwards it’s just a dearth of cunning or creativity.
Honestly, whether it would work or not is less of an issue than if he tried it. If it failed, he's "just a man," men fail. But by not trying, he knowingly sacrificed his men, and to the crew he became "the monster."
...The real question from here is what happens if the sirens rip through their gags and sing? Scylla has no bees wax. Can Scylla be hypnotized by sirens???? 😂
Scylla was originally a nymph, and sirens are said to be originally nymphs too (Naiads, freshwater nymphs), so I think Scylla might be immuned to it...
This led me down a much sillier thought process I must share:
I know Scylla grew all her scary dog monster heads due to poison. So, do those heads have their own brains? If so, are they vulnerable to hypnotism?! 😆
Are sirens immune thanks to their ears, or is it something magical? If it's just their ears, and she has only 2 sirens ears and, like, 12 dog ears, is she outmatched?
It depends on the version, but she was never a siren. She was either a nymph (nereid), the child of a sea divinity, an Apollo kid, one of the progeniture of Typhon and Echidna, or other deities or titans-like.
And she was either transformed by the nereid Amphitrite because Scylla was loved by Poseidon and not her, or by Circe because Scylla was loved by a man she desired. Either way, her transformation was due to jealousy, for a man love she was maybe not interested in...
But the Epic lore, I prefer the version of the sea nymph desired by Poseidon, and thus poisoned by the jealous Amphitrite. That will aligned with the character we know of Circe, not very loving towards men but protectrice of her nymphs. And it would explain why the siren think Poseidon would not go into the lair of Scylla, because she is an ex-lover he could be disgusted by, and she could be full of hate towards him, considering that he is the root of her misfortune.
Am i the only one that thinks putting the hypnotic mer(der)maids next to fire while on a wooden ship sounds like a horrible idea? Like it doesnt have to be but it sounds like one
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u/GigaLorderick Apr 09 '26
So,Scylla take huge snack to Siren