Metroid and the Iliad
“The two wept bitterly - Priam, as he lay at Achilles’ feet, weeping for Hector, and Achilles now for his father and now for Patroclous, till the house was filled with their lamentation.”
Game Maker’s Toolkit, hosted by Mark Brown, is one of my favorite YouTube channels. Mark does a really amazing job of analyzing different video games, figuring out why he likes what he likes about them, and explaining the mechanism behind the games in a clear way. For example, he has a series called Boss Keys, and in the first season he analysed every dungeon in each Legend of Zelda game. He mapped out how all of the dungeons work, and used the maps he made to explain why he likes some dungeons better than others. In the second season of Boss Keys, Mark did the same thing but for different Metroidvania games (games that look and feel like games in the Metroid and Castlevania series). In Metroidvanias, he loves how items act as keys that unlock earlier parts of the game. What Mark really loves in Metroid games got me thinking about how to interpret literature.
Recontextualization is the name of the game for Mark. New items aren’t just keys, they change how you think about the world you’ve already been through. Well, let's backup. Metroid is a series that follows bounty hunter Samus Aran. Samus is usually exploring tunnel complexes on different planets, trying to achieve different missions like killing Space Pirates, or the titular Metroid. Combat is an important part of the game, but what’s more important for Mark is the puzzle-like navigation. Almost immediately when you arrive on the new planet, you run into locked doors and dead ends with the promise of further progress tantalizingly out of reach. To open these locks or get past the dead ends, you need new powerups and items, like morph ball, bombs, or missiles.
This network of locks and keys is what Metorid is about to Mark. And the joy of Metroid is the recontextualization of the world via the powerups that act as keys. When you get a new ability, like double jump, you remember all of those ledges you just couldn’t quite reach and all the gaps you just barely couldn’t clear. But with the double jump, the world is different now. Those locks and deadends are now gateways to new exploration and adventure. You race back to where you remember you were stymied earlier, because now you can bypass them with ease.
Weirdly, this reminded me of the end of the Iliad by Homer. Often the ending of a narrative acts as like a key. Instead of missiles or bombs, you come away from the ending with new knowledge. That knowledge, especially when you didn’t expect it, recontextualizes everything that came before. All the deadends and challenging passages are now understood completely differently in light of the ending. For me, the end of the Iliad is like the twisting locks and keys that Mark loves about Metroid.
I didn’t expect the Iliad to end the way that did. This shocked me. The Iliad is one of the oldest stories in existence. I like to consider myself informed, but somehow, everything I thought happened in the Iliad actually doesn’t happen in the Iliad. Achilles never gets shot in the heel by a poison arrow. He doesn’t die (which I was hoping for the whole time because Achilles sucks). The Greeks don’t fake surrender with the Trojan horse, and they don’t jump out at night to sack the city. The most famous parts of the Trojan war aren’t in the most famous poem about the Trojan war. Most of those things aren’t recorded by Homer, but rather by Ovid and Virgil. Instead of all of the things I expected to happen, the book just stops in medias res. Priam, the King of Troy, asks swift Achilles for the body of his son, Hector.
The whole time I was reading the epic, I thought the Iliad was about winning glory in war, a shockingly brutal war. Even with all the probably thousands of deaths I’ve seen depicted on screen and in video games, the Iliad is arresting in its violence:
First Antilochus slew an armed warrior of the Trojans, Echepolus, son of Thalysius, fighting in the foremost ranks. He struck at the projecting part of his helmet and drove the spear into his brow; the point of bronze pierced the bone, and darkness veiled his eyes; headlong as a tower he fell amid the press of the fight, and as he dropped. King Elephenor, son of Chalcodon and captain of the proud Abantes began dragging him out of reach of the darts that were falling around him, in haste to strip him of his armor.
It is unflinchingly straightforward in description of the killing and the scrabbling over the dead. This paragraph begins a litany of death, leading to retaliatory death, leading to retaliatory death, until “the earth ran red with blood.”
Reading these long and gruesome passages was a dead end for me. I couldn’t understand how this book, which revels in the gory glory of war, could be one of, if not the, foundational text for the highly touted Western Civilization. The text is driven by Achilles sitting out of the fight. And the ‘heroic’ Achilles refuses to fight exclusively because his high King, Agamemnon, stole Briseis, the woman that Achilles had claimed for himself by killing her family, from him. In other words, Achilles is throwing a tantrum because someone stole his sex slave. When he does fight, it's only for vengeance. He fights only to kill Hector, who killed his friend. And when he does kill Hector, he desecrates his body. This is why I was waiting the whole time for Achilles to die. I wanted him to get what he had coming. I couldn’t see a way forward, and I was left asking how could anything good come out of a civilization where Achilles is a hero?
But instead of Achilles dying and Troy being destroyed, the story ends with Priam, cloaked and under the cover of darkness, coming to Achilles and asking him for the body of Hector, his son. This is the moment of recontextualization. This ending stands the epic on its head. By ending with a tired, old man begging to bury his son, the Iliad becomes a story about grief.
Thus spoke Priam, and the heart of Achilles yearned as he bethought him of his father. He took the old man's hand and moved him gently away. The two wept bitterly - Priam, as he lay at Achilles' feet, weeping for Hector, and Achilles now for his father and now for Patroclous, till the house was filled with their lamentation.
Priam is the key to unlocking the dead end of the Iliad. The whole epic looks like a story of Achilles frustrating victory over the Trojans, but knowing that Priam will weep and ask for Hector’s body recontextualizes all the killing that came before. Those deaths were not victories for Achilles, but defeat after defeat for all both Greeks and Trojan, for both the soldiers and their loved ones. As Achilles considers Priam as his own father, weeping over him, we now think of the fathers and mothers of all the soldiers, each of whom is named as they die:
Forthwith Ajax, son of Telamon, slew the fair youth Simoeisius, son of Anthemion, whom his mother bore by the banks of the Simois, as she was coming down from Mt. Ida, where she had been with her parents to see their flocks. Therefore he was named Simoeisius, but he did not live to pay his parents for his rearing, for he was cut off untimely by the spear of mighty Ajax, who struck him in the breast by the right nipple as he was coming on among the foremost fighters...
The grief of Hector’s wife, Andromache, and of Briseis, who having lost her family, becomes a pawn of the Greek heroes. And we can now feel sympathy for Achilles, because we know he will die, and Achilles’ father will join Priam in weeping.
As we read, and usually when we learn more about people in our lives, what we learn changes how we interpret came before. Like Samus, new understanding lets us go back and revisit old locations with insights that make them completely new and exciting. And In the end, the Iliad is not an epic about war, but about the destruction wrought by it. It is not about glory, but about family, love, and loss. In a ending which unlocks everything that came before, the Iliad is not about wrath, but weeping.
