In Reply to: On track for 260 million globally posted by DSCBruin on July 18, 2026 at 21:03:37
This is a long video but this guy (who normally discusses what you can roughly call "world music" tonalities, etc), and there is some repetition in it, but it's a good analysis of how northern and western europeans have appropriated what essentially is a decidedly eastern mediterranean civilization that, at the time, shared more cultural and ethnic features with the people of the Levant, Mesapotamia, and Egypt, and arguably still does. He looks at how this appropriation ultimately undermines the cultural realness of ancient Greek stories and mythology in the lives of modern day Greeks. (At least half of Ancient Greek civilization took place in Anatolia, for one thing, including Homer himself.)
His take is to say that just as there are left-coded "woke" choices the movie makes in casting, it also makes a lot of choices in casting, and other things that go back to "orientalism", in so many words (choices in the armory, the use of Viking ships, etc)
Like I said, it's long and he repeats some of his points on occasion, but the core idea he lays down is worth hearing -- especially the part where he criticizes the attitude you see in the west that treats mythology as just a collection of stories in the fantasy genre but disregard the cultural weight those stories carry for the people who grew up with them. This starts around the 25 min mark and his example about the Iranian women really left an impression on me.