While reading Oedipus one of the main things I kept thinking about was how Oedipus was able to do so many horrific things and still mostly everyone ended up feeling sorry for him instead of hating him. First of all, he kills his own father. Oedipus goes off and kills his father along with many other people on his way to Thebes and nobody even looks for him because they are worried about something more important at the time. He also ended up sleeping with his mother, he may have not known, but in those times I am sure there was some sort of punishment for incestuous behavior. Nonetheless, when everyone found out it was he that put punishment on himself and I don’t believe they would have done anything if he hadn’t just because he was the king.
This is one reason that makes me not think of Oedipus as a superhero because I think that when a superhero does something wrong he would be looked down on by not only himself but also his entire society at least for a while. In most superhero movies I have seen the superhero has great amounts of followers, when he does something wrong they turn against him, but he ends up redeeming himself by doing something great. Oedipus never did that; he gave up. I do not think that superheroes ever give up even in the worst cases and that is another reason I do not think of him as a superhero. I think that this has a lot to do with the type of poem this is; the most epic tragedy.
If I understood correctly from what we talked about in class this is the greatest tragedy because of the fact that there is no happy beginning, no happy middle, or happy ending; it starts off bad and ends bad. I think for there to be a superhero someone would need to end up happy or there is not anything there that can be considered “super”.
In the end I really enjoyed reading this story but I would not consider Oedipus a superhero and I do not think his constituents did either. He killed his father and many others, slept with his mother, blinded himself, and never really did anything good for his people (nothing that was mentioned anyway). I would agree this is a great tragic story but a horrible superhero story.
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He actually starts out pretty good. Granted, there's a famine in the land but it seems like it'll be a pretty easy fix until it all goes spiraling out of control. I mean, he's king of Thebes, beat the sphinx and has a hot wife and kids. This is all good stuff, right? It really is until he finds out who his wife is and how he became king. Starts well, ends in the crapper.
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