This is Stuff You Like and as much as I love Portal 2 I'm not really that up on
my Greek mythology, so I brought in some help. I hear when you're not reviewing
musicals you're pretty hot on Tartarus? - no I said I was hot *in* Tartarus; but I
knew my way around the Olympian Pantheon before Percy Jackson made it cool. Also
apparently I'm fated to be dealing with Portal related media at this particular
point in time. - Ladies and gentlemen, Diva; Diva, everyone. - greetings mortals!
Let's do this. Portal was a big success and with that came the clamoring for a
sequel. But how to follow up this weird short puzzle based FPS but not? Greek
mythology and a hero's journey and Prometheus in a potato. Seriously you can
play Portal very comfortably in less than a day and while its storytelling is
excellent it's... brief. It asks more questions than it answers and it implies
more than it says and it leaves you wanting more. Portal 2 also asks more
questions than it answers but it decided that everyone's favorite villain (and yes
we talked about this in a previous episode) needs a tragic backstory. So the
plot of Portal 2 goeth thusly: you, Chell, wake up from your stay in the Aperture
relaxation vault after everything has gone a bit wrong. You meet Wheatley, a
personality core who is terrible at everything including keeping people
alive it seems. You and Wheatley travel through
the ruins of the Aperture Science Laboratories trying to find a way out
and instead accidentally manage to reawaken GLaDOS. Nice job breaking it hero.
You are immediately thrown back into testing you swap Wheatley into the
computer instead of GLaDOS, predictably Wheatley immediately goes mad and throws
you and GLaDOS who is now in a potato battery down into the bowels of old
Aperture through which you must journey to get back up and defeat Wheatley and
yay you won and now you're in a wheat field? OK... And GLaDOS has a tragic
backstory and you guys kind of bond and I love it. So what does this have to do with mythology?
well there are a bunch of hints as to the direction you should be looking
including a portrait in old Aperture of Cave and Caroline and... is that Aeschylus?
as in the writer of Prometheus Bound Aeschylus? - Well it may have been written
by his son so possible writer. - yeah, him. Well... could be because it turns out
the non-human characters seem to be very much modeled on some of the Titans. There
are a lot of Titans in Greek mythology but in this case I'm specifically
referring to Prometheus Epimetheus Menoetius and Atlas. - Quick mythology 101
recap: the Titans were the children of Gaia the earth and Uranus the sky who
overthrew Uranus and were in turn overthrown by Zeus and his posse who
were the children of head Titans Cronus and Rhea. Overthrowing parents being
something of a family tradition among Greek deities. - GLaDOS is Prometheus
Wheatley is Epimetheus Atlas is obviously Atlas and P-Body is Menoetius. Atlas and
P-Body, for the uninitiated, are robots that you can play in the cooperative
testing chambers. the Menoetius connection to P-body is the most
tenuous but it's in here for completeness. It seems logical because
he's the fourth character and kind of the odd brother out also because he
hangs around with Atlas and in mythology they're kind of a team until Zeus
gets mad about that whole war thing. - you don't hear much about Menoetius, mostly
because his main claim to fame is getting incinerated by Zeus's lightning
bolt during the Titanomachy; the
aforementioned overthrowing of the Titans by the Olympians. The name
Menoetius means doomed might and he's usually represented as an embodiment of
hubris which is responsible for approximately 40% of the bad things that
happen in Greek mythology. The other 60% being various gods getting pissed off at
and/or horny for some mortal or another. And it's also basically aperture
Science's corporate culture. - Atlas is self-evidently named after the Titan who
holds up the sky and... that's a celestial sphere and not a globe right?
That's correct! Atlas was the strongest of the Titans
which is why he was forced into this position instead of being cast into
Tartarus with the rest of his family. He was also not very bright. In his
penultimate labor Heracles needed atlases help to pick some golden apples
(it's mythology just run with it) and so temporarily relieved the Titan of his
burden. Atlas naturally sees this as an opportunity to make good his escape but
Heracles - who it must be noted was not exactly known for his mental prowess
either - just goes 'well shoot, you got me, guess I've got to hold
up the sky now. But would you mind taking it off my hands for just a second so I
can pad my shoulders?' Atlas falls for it. Yeah. - Yeah. OK, those two minor
characters out of the way let's get to the meat! So to speak.
Klaus has a couple of interesting mythological parallels that we can draw
but the most obvious one is prometheus like they don't even screw around they
just give you that one directly the Oracle turret is a defective turret or
possibly Cave Johnson mid metal if you believe the fan theory that you meet
with Wheatley early on in the game but then again when you have the option to
save it from the incinerator doing so unlock see no hard feelings achievement
but even better it critically tells the important plot details away before they
are revealed to you in the story because turret among other things would like to
tell you about prometheus prometheus is the creator of humanity and the
trickster archetype and Greek myth for example when Zeus decides he wants
mortals to sacrifice a portion of their livestock to the gods
Prometheus creates two piles one of good meat hidden by awful and another of
sinuan bones covered by a thick layer of fat then he says to Zeus okay you pick
which one you want for the gods Zeus being Zeus doesn't take it so well when
he finds out he's been had and withholds the gift of fire from humans
Prometheus being Prometheus just go screw that and steals fire back for the
people at first glance GLaDOS seems like an odd choice for a Prometheus allegory
since Prometheus is the creator and benefactor of humans and GLaDOS very
much isn't but it works on a metaphorical level Prometheus bringing
down fire from Olympus is the symbol of the quest for enlightenment of breaking
boundaries in the name of progress for science you monster
but as is always the case defying the gods comes with a very high price for
Prometheus the price is being changed to a rock and getting his liver eaten daily
by an eagle for GLaDOS it's getting imprisoned in a potato and also getting
pecked at by Birds Whateley the intelligence dumping sphere represents
her foolish brother Epimetheus tightness hindsight and Chell well Chell is
Dora and Heracles rolled into one dangerous mute lunatic package so most
people are familiar with the image of Pandora the woman who unleashes all evil
into the world due to her insatiable curiosity but what's not as well-known
as that from the gods perspective this was a feature not a bug see after the
business of Prometheus giving fire to mankind which at that time was literally
mankind as in y-chromosomes all around Zeus decides mortals need to be taken
down a peg so the gods fashioned the first human female and gave her beauty
and charm and grace and a bunch of other neat stuff and so she was called all
gifted Pandora Zuzu's contribution to Pandora's gifts
were her curiosity and the box which she was never never never ever supposed to
open under any circumstances ever no really don't do it wink wink
and then she was presented to Epimetheus as a wife and because Epimetheus is
literally the embodiment of acting before thinking he goes sure I'll take
this beautiful creature fashioned by the gods that my brother only just recently
pissed off what could possibly go wrong moral of the story everything sucks not
only because women exist but because a man let himself be charmed by a woman in
the first place Greek mythology has special-edition
double-size issues when it comes to relationships between the sexes Pandora
and Epimetheus or Chell and Wheatley are responsible for opening the box by
bringing GLaDOS back to life and she's certainly the source of all of the evils
in Chells world Epimetheus is prometheus is dufus relation and honestly the
analogy holds quite well however a moral or murderous GLaDOS is one thing she
isn't is incompetence whereas being incompetent is literally Wheatley only
functions he tries to turn on the lights and instead manages to wake a monster
because of course he does and then it just snowballs from there
Chell replaces Gladys with Wheatley which unleashes more trouble and sends
her on a journey through the underworld like every proper hero and Wheatley gets
all into the aperture systems and messes them up to the point where the entire
facility is threatened with destruction it's like a
matroyshka doll of Pandora's boxes speaking of heroes journeys I said Chell
was like Pandora and Heracles like a lot of Greek heroes
Heracles is the son of Zeus and the mortal woman Zeus wanted to get into the
pants of at the time and because of that he's an avowed nemesis of Greek
mythology's favorite jealous wife Hera Heracles is morally complicated he
performs mighty deeds of strength and heroism but more often than not he gets
himself into trouble with his bad temper and occasional bouts of mental
instability the 12 labors Heracles most famous run of heroic derring-do were
undertaken as an atonement for slaughtering his wife and children a
situation that shell who ends up tackling yet another series of test
chambers by inadvertently reactivating GLaDOS can probably relate to we also
layer on the Heracles Prometheus symbolism by having chelsa flatus okay
remember that thing about meeting Atlas has helped to get some golden apples
while on that quest Heracles comes across Prometheus kills
the liver-eating bird and in some versions unchanged him as well all this
is done with Sadducees go ahead because parental bragging rights outrank revenge
I'm after jail defeats Wheatley and sent him to the moon because portal 2 also
loves a good space moon astronaut motif GLaDOS sends her to some singing turrets
and then into a wheat field so basic overview on the afterlife according to
the Greeks you have to be on the extreme ends of the moral spectrum to married
any particular reward or punishment most Souls wind up in asphodel which is kind
of this endless meadow of lethargy and forgetfulness it's pretty boring if
after life's go the wicked are cast into Tartarus which is the underworld of the
underworld and the punishments there tend to be of the extremely frustrating
variety which again Chell and GLaDOS can probably relate to pushing a rock up a
hill only to have it roll back down again
trying to fill a bath with a sieve or perhaps orbiting around the moon with an
extremely talkative yet strangely single-minded companion of course since
challenge levels have been their own ready the virtuous heroes go to the
fields of Elysium Hades a delegated community
but there's another wrinkle here in that shell is also Heracles one of the few
heroes to enter Olympus after his time on earth and fittingly her final journey
is an ascent with turret Opera the ending in Portal 2 has been hotly
debated if Chell actually dead is this like a symbolic thing is she really just
in a wheat field and heck why did plateaus let her go if you let her go at
all thing is the relationship between Chell and GLaDOS is complicated but
because of this it's also fascinating GLaDOS in her potato stage and
afterwards has at least two conflicting sets of feelings like Chell cave Jonson
the world and everything else frankly first there's the highly competent Sarki
murder bot we've come to know and fight which is a very Hara and Heracles
dynamic like Chell and GLaDOS Heracles and Hera are inextricably linked through
their animosity in fact the former's name is most commonly translated as
Harrah's Lori and then there's a kinder more human side which is obviously a
remnant of Carolyn who GLaDOS tries to delete at the end there's also a popular
fans area that Chell is the daughter old cave johnson or Carolyn or both which
would also fit in well with the Heracles myth because Heracles is the son of a
mortal woman named Alka Minnie and Zeus who seduced her by disguising himself as
her husband which when you consider that other conquests involved him turning
into a swan a bowl a shower of gold is actually on the lower end of Zeus's
creepy meter man Greek mythology is weird but then again so is cave Johnson
so it's maybe not too much of a stretch to imagine him as chels
daddy dearest and the source of the stuff from dad's work that made her
Science Fair potato grow into a monster plant it was already implied in portal
that Chell is the daughter of at least one Aperture Science employee remember
bring your daughter to work day as the perfect time to have her tested so why
not the daughter of founder and his secretary and cape Johnson does work
quite well as a Zeus allegory his remote authoritative persona communicating his
demands from on high his capricious whims and unpredictable temper and of
course the little matter of binding our Prometheus. valve and mythology go hard
go home after all that I have to ask who did the
space court represent maybe there are some things woman was just not meant to
know. maybe. Thank You diva you're welcome now back to embarrassing dance numbers and criminal