: Re: How can you be "faithful" to a mythology without adapting its value system? Following my sword and sorcery questions, I remembered I actually used to watch one and actually enjoyed it, despite

@Cooney417

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It seems to me that there are two issues you're dealing with here. First, there's your personal 'Hayes' code, which keeps you from discussing certain behaviors. That isn't much of a problem, really; proper use of indirection, allusion, euphemism and other forms of ellipsis can let you skirt topics you don't want to deal with, at the cost of making your writing a little more flowery (the typical result of tiptoeing around subjects).

The other problem — the issue of applying modern values to ancient mythology — is merely a matter of perspective-taking. XWP intentionally broke the value-systems of ancient myths, because the show wasn't really about those myths; it was a pro-feminist modern myth using tropes from ancient mythology. If you want to preserve the sense of the ancient myths then you have to go beyond the mere actions presented in them and look at the relationships between people that the myths try to present. Greek mythology in particular is psychologically complex. A Greek hero is someone who is placed within an 'impossible' situation — one that is physically and/or intellectually challenging, and riddled with moral conflicts — and has to work his way out through his own strength, intelligence, and wisdom. The gods are (often as not) foils who trap the hero into these impossible situations, and the hero's success or failure at navigating these impossibilities marks the difference between a heroic and tragic tale.

The story of the Minotaur is a perfect example. On one hand you have Minos, who is cursed with a son who is a monster (through Minos' own fault, because he refused to sacrifice a bull that a god gave to him explicitly for sacrifice). He cannot kill his son, but cannot allow the monster his son has become to go free, so he built the labyrinth to contain the Minotaur, the way a rich modern family might hide a child who commits murder from the police. On the other hand, you have the king of Athens, who is forced to pay tribute to Minos, because the Athenians killed Minos' other son, Androgeus. In some versions of the story Athens is forced to pay tribute because Minos attacked the city in retribution for Androgeus and won the war; in other versions the gods subjected Athens to a plague unless they sent tribute. In either case, the tribute was seven young men and women who were to be killed by Minos' remaining son, the Minotaur: the bloodline of Minos taking vengeance.

Into this absolute moral morass steps Theseus, who tries to chart the only course that can resolve the problem: he will slay the Minotaur, ending the curses that have been afflicted on both Minos and Athens, and saving the lives of other young men and women of his city. It's not an elegant solution or a perfect one, but it's the only solution in a world where snippy, squabbling gods place everyone between a rock and a hard place. Theseus doesn't have the luxury of worrying whether he is slaying Asterius (beloved son of Minos) or the Minotaur (horrible, murderous monster); he cannot worry about whether the creature is guilty or guiltless, because the creature is a curse on two cities, and the curse has to end. Worrying about such issues (from the Greek perspective) would be selfish and virtueless.

Of course, the modern Christian mythos wants to say there is a non-violent solution, because it has inverted the heroic trope into heroic sacrifice: "this is my body, to be given to you...". God's love is the solution to all moral dilemmas in the Christian worldview, because Christians break the moral universe down into one single source of 'good' and (possibly, depending on sect) one single source of 'evil.' The Greek world populated the cosmos with numerous powerful, competing, and morally ambiguous forces, so heroes in the Greek world had to be foxes; they couldn't afford to be sheep. But as long as you capture the sense of the relationships these ancient stories portray, and the moral dilemmas those relationships raise, you won't stray too far from the stories' original intent.

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