The Strand | Vol. 69. Issue 1 by The Strand

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VOLUME 68 • 2025-2026

02 NEWS & POLITICS

EDITOR | ETHAN CHAN NEWS@THESTRAND.CA

The president’s odyssey: navigating the future of education Interim President William Robins shares his vision for Vic’s next great chapter and the personal journey that shaped his leadership LEANNE RAMBALI CONTRIBUTOR

The 2026-27 academic year marks a significant moment for Victoria University as Dr. Rhonda McEwen concludes her tenure as President, transitioning to the University of Victoria in British Columbia. Stepping into the role of Interim President is Dr. William Robins, Professor of English and Medieval Studies. He previously served as President and Vice-Chancellor of Victoria University from 2015 to 2022. victoria college website, “office of the president” The following interview is designed to help students get to know President Robins as he leads Vic through the upcoming school year.

Coming back home and being welcomed by staff, faculty, and students has been meaningful. At the end of The Odyssey, there is a prophecy that Odysseus will embark on a second journey. It feels like both a homecoming and setting off on a new adventure. This brings to mind the opening lines of the famous “Ithaka” poem by Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy (1911): “As you set out for Ithaka / hope your road is a long one, / full of adventure, full of discovery.” The poem teaches that the real value lies in the journey itself, not just the final goal.

The Strand: Your academic speciality is 14th-century medieval literature, an era defined by stories of pilgrimages, quests, and epic journeys. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales features challenges and choices that the characters must overcome. During a quest, the adventure is rarely linear or sticks to a plan: knights get lost, travellers take detours, and new paths emerge. Considering the The Strand: Hi President Robins, thank you for being environment Vic aims to create for sparking student curiosity, willing to be interviewed today. It’s nice to see you again. what kind of journey or transformation do you hope students Interestingly enough, we met at the Vic bookstore within the E.J. undergo during their time at Victoria University? Pratt Library, a place where many stories and journeys on the page take place. Would you like to start off talking about your I see rites of passage as analogous to questions and journeys in own personal odyssey? literature, where the hero’s identity is at stake and they develop their understanding of how to make a difference in the world. The years at Dr. William Robins: Before moving to the Office of the university are like a rite of passage; students are not yet in the years President, I started as a teacher. I liked the small classes because they where they will shape in the world, but they are discovering who they helped me get to know students personally. I became interested in are and how they want to contribute to making a difference. At Vic, we widening the ways I could make a difference alongside teaching small aim to help students discover their own intrinsic talents, tackle some seminars, such as the first-year course ENG150 where we covered of the world’s greatest problems, and begin the process of matching The Odyssey. Widening ways to make a difference also led to moving their talents to the issues in the world they care about. Circling back through administrative roles that influence structures of teaching and to the first question, we are interested in supporting students through learning. Some of the main goals on a larger scale include enabling these transitional stages with programs such as the Vic One Program, undergraduate research, where we started the Scholars-in-Residence Study Abroad opportunities, and Capstone seminars. These all lead program; connecting students, which led to launching the Vic- to transformational moments, and we continually focus on thinking Ready Program; deepening instructional understanding, especially about what we can do at Vic to help students through them. surrounding Indigenous issues; and expanding inclusivity and accessibility through Opportunity Awards. After that, I felt that it The Strand: Perfect. Thank you very much for your time was time for a new president, President McEwan, who could continue today and best of luck on this new adventure. finding new ways of making a difference, and I returned to teaching. This transcript has been lightly edited for readability and length while The Strand: In classic epic poetry, returning home often preserving the speaker’s original intent and tone. brings new perspectives on familiar places. In the spirit of an odyssey, coming back to the presidency, what is it like to return to a familiar ‘homecoming’ after time away? What has the journey back to this role been like for you, and how did it feel to step onto campus as president again this term?

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NEWS & POLITICS 03

The smoke that drifts from Polyphemus Ontario wildfires and forms of resistance to Bill 5

MIKHALA JANE ENNS CONTRIBUTOR

This July, Torontonians woke up to a dystopian view outside of their apartment windows; orange, hazy skies held thick smoke over the city skyline. Headlines on phones and computers read that “Toronto’s air quality has ranked the worst among all major cities in the world.” Environment Canada issued warnings that the Air Quality Health Index had reached over ten, asking people to limit their time spent outdoors. Many took to social media, trying to figure out what was going on, with hundreds of comments flooding Reddit threads with concern and suggestions. News stories have focused on statistics showing that Toronto’s air quality ranked worse than that of New Delhi. Toronto is a less populated and typically less polluted city than New Delhi, so for it to have the worst air quality in the world signals the growing frequency and thus impact of wildfires. For most Torontonians, wildfires have never impacted their daily life so intensely. However, in more remote areas, wildfires have demolished entire communities and caused thousands to be displaced this summer alone. For years, wildfires have disproportionately uprooted the lives of First Nations communities in Canada; these same communities are not given enough agency in crucial climate decisions even though they are often primary stakeholders. Wildfires and First Nations in Canada People around the world were connected with these remote communities when a video went viral of train conductors surrounded the globe and mail [Aug. 6, 2026], the canadian press, darryl dyck by flames near Armstrong, Ontario. In Northwestern Ontario, the fires have been especially bad this year. First Nations communities near Thunder Bay, Sioux Lookout and Dryden have been evacuated from massive approaching fires. More than 1600 people from these communities remain displaced. Though the extent of wildfires in Ontario this summer might be exceptional, the disproportionate evacuation of Indigenous people in Canada is not a new trend, and is becoming worse. Though First Nations people are about five per cent of Canada’s population, they make up 42 per cent of wildfire evacuations. Government statistics also show that the wildfire impact on First Nations reserves is increasing significantly each year. Democracy and Climate Policy Recently, protestors in Toronto celebrated the success of the NoJetsTO movement; Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s plan to designate Toronto’s waterfront as a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) to accommodate jets at Billy Bishop Airport was undermined. Premier Ford’s plan for Toronto’s waterfront was made legally plausible by the passing of Bill 5 in June, 2025. This bill allowed for the establishment of SEZs; regions hosting infrastructure projects that the province can deem exempt from municipal and provincial regulations in order to speed up the development process. Within weeks of the passing of Bill 5 on June 5, 2025, Webequie First Nation was nearly burnt down by a wildfire. For Chief Wabasse of Webequie, this incident only emphasized the benefits that an all-season access road would bring for his community – a region over 500km north of Thunder Bay that was only accessible by land via a winter road. Webequie, alongside Marten Falls First Nation signed agreements with the provincial government in the fall to build access roads adjoining the Ring of Fire mining project. The Ring of Fire, a critical mineral-rich area in Northern Ontario, has been one of Premier Ford’s major SEZ designation targets, which has been heavily disputed by surrounding First Nations. Fourteen First Nations have joined a legal challenge of Bill 5 altogether, with Neskantaga First Nation physically blocking the construction of the Northern Link access road. Crucially, even though Premier Ford repeatedly included Marten Falls in the group of people who want to “get it done” when it comes to SEZs for mining the Ring of Fire, Chief Bruce Achneepineskum explicitly responded that he was “not OK with [Bill 5].” The leaders of Webequie and Marten Falls were caught between the economic benefits to their communities and risking environmental damage to the land that surrounds them. However, since signing Ring of Fire agreements, these Nations have taken environmental regulation into their own hands, with Webequie leading their own environmental impact assessment for the access road. After the success of the NoJetsTO movement, Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow commented that “democracy matters, those voices matter. And when they spoke with one voice, don’t touch our waterfront, protect it, it matters.” For Indigenous communities that have been disproportionately damaged by the impacts of wildfires and climate change, the relationship between environmental regulation, democracy and socioeconomic prosperity can be complicated. Bill 5 has been heavily protested in Toronto, but resistance to Bill 5 up north has taken place not only through law, but also through independent environmental assessments and blockade village-building.

04 EDITORIAL

EDITOR | AMY YANG EDITORS@THESTRAND.CA

Sucking the marrow of life AMY X. YANG | EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

“These forgetful spirits hope for resurrection / into bodies. They start to want to see the sky.” The Aeneid, Vergil, trans. Shadi Bartsch It is a well-known, undisputed, oft-discussed fact that it is easy to die at the University of Toronto. When each exam season draws near, you can feel the gloomy wisps of spectres floating in the brisk winter air, lingering on school grounds, trailing your stress like tendrils of warning smoke breaching any ease of mind. But this sense of mortality is a gross injustice to how easy it is to live. The instructions, like divine messages carried on lips of wind, are whispered to you from everywhere. If you listen closely, the city and the campus are full of song. Beneath the concrete and the construction noise, there is a hum buried in the bricks of Old Vic, the tree roots sprawled under the quad, and the constant chatter of Burwash dining hall. It’s in the artists in every crowd and every corner, feeding off of each other to stay alive, and the way the libraries fill up with groups of students sticking together when times are hard. It’s in your peers protesting on King’s College Circle and the piano music that drifts upstairs from the basement practice rooms. It can be hard to hear amidst the continuous onslaught of assignments, but it is always there. Being a student here can be contradictory and paradoxical and irrational. It can feel like a dangerous odyssey, an endless voyage on a sinking ship constantly wracked by Poseidon’s fury. But the greatest thing about university is that almost everyone is suffering with you. You don’t know it, but there is a girl carrying a bouquet of funeral flowers through Robarts library. You don’t know it, but the person dancing on the table next to you is just as worried about their GPA. At the same moment you pulled an all-nighter to finish an assignment, a group of drunken firstyears will walk past you on their way home from a party. As you’re trying to sleep the night before an exam, the dorm across the hall will be throwing a birthday party for a departing friend. You go from living within two minutes of all your closest friends to living spread out across the city in your own apartments and townhouses. And among the chaos, safe harbour feels dangerously out of reach. The semesters bleed into one another, midterms to midterms to finals, then finals again. Yet, in between, there’s TIFA lectures from your favourite authors. $5 movie showings at an indie theatre. Music recitals. Operas and ballets. Shakespeare every fall in the Trinity courtyard. Medieval plays put on by the smallest performance troupes. Classrooms filled with the chants of dead languages no one cares to learn anymore. Second-hand bookshops you can pretend to have all to yourself. Hippie cafes that play enough zen music and burn enough incense to make the mediocre coffee worth it. In between, there is a guy standing outside EJ Pratt in the dead of winter willing to share his cigarettes with you. Life here is not just about the unattainable GPA or the endless research positions you never hear back from (but you will, eventually). More important than either of those things is paying tribute to your human flesh—to the air pumping constantly through your blood and the little biological dance that allows music to enter your ears and tangle in all the knots of your stressed-out student brain. Follow the hum of living things. Go into all of Toronto’s alleyways which might make you feel alive. This is how I found myself in a small seminar classroom where Emily Wilson was guestlecturing, sharing stories of a Homer re-enactor giving one-man shows to three people in his NYC basement. This is how I ended up at The Rex on a Thursday night after finals season was over, chin in my hand, two glasses of wine beside me. Through the jazz, the rhythms of brass, and the clarinet blues, one command landed in my ears over and over again: live, live, live.

V O L U M E

6 9

editor-in-chief

amy yang

managing editor

yaocheng xia

business manager

william ignasiak

web manager

maryam al-qaisy

news and politics

ethan chan

opinions

yasha haider

features

julia mccarthy

science

science@thestrand.ca

shivantika shegar and mashiyat ahmed

arts and culture

sofia terese glantz

stranded

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victoria zalewski and elizabeth scheibe

poetry

reina van leeuwen

copyediting

rowan crocker and dinah oldfield

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sophie ivanovic and tugra canbaz

photo

rose kinoshita

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jessie yang and sophie wong

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ashleigh brooks and chenchen wang

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The Strand has been the newspaper of record for Victoria University since 1953. It is published 8 times a year with a circulation of 800 and is distributed in Victoria University buildings and across the University of Toronto’s St. George campus. The Strand enjoys its editorial autonomy and is committed to acting as an agent of constructive social change. As such, we will not publish material deemed to exhibit racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, or other oppressive language.

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photograph | Amy Yang

OPINIONS 05

@STRANDPAPER THE STRAND | ISSUE 1

We cannot return to Ithaca

ATLAS CHANGULANI CONTRIBUTOR

Homer’s Odyssey and the quest for ‘normal’ at the end of the world In case you haven’t noticed, the Odyssey has been rather prominent in the zeitgeist lately. From TikTok musicals to Hollywood blockbusters, this nearly-three-thousandyear old epic has gripped the imagination of the twenty-first century. What about this story makes it so irresistible? Maybe it’s because the Odyssey is about the end of the world. The text presents us with a vision of social collapse: norms that uphold civilization are made meaningless in the faraway lands our hero drifts through. Back home, the stability of his kingdom hangs on only by a few threads. Monsters roam the land as the old world dies and the new remains unborn. The wider mythography tells a similar tale: the fall of Troy marks the twilight of the Heroic Age and the retreat of the gods from the affairs of mortals. History unveils a ghost haunting the poem’s pages: the cultural memory of the Bronze Age Collapse, the apocalypse that destroyed the Mycenaean civilization from which Greek myth originates. No wonder the poem resonates with us today. Between pandemics, climate disasters, recessions, and the rise of fascism, we, too, have spent recent years sailing from crisis to crisis in the treacherous seas of an increasingly dystopian world. We, too, are desperate for a way back home. Read this way, the Odyssey seems to be a hopeful tale of perseverance amidst crisis. After all, despite twenty years of suffering, our hero’s struggle is not in vain. Odysseus reaches Ithaca, reunites with Penelope, and defeats the men threatening his family. He makes it back to normal. It’s the ending we’d wish for ourselves. Indeed, it’s this story that adaptations give us: one man’s quest to return to his family. But the epic holds so much more: Odysseus’ personal story is inseparable from the politics of his world. His return to normal is synonymous with restoring the status quo. His reunion with Penelope

illustration |

Rose Kinoshita

is also how he regains his throne, and his quest to go back home is also a quest to restore control over his household. And doing so requires more than the slaughter of the suitors. For his house to return to order, the halls must be cleansed of all stains—literal and metaphorical. Twelve enslaved girls, themselves victims of the suitors’ lust, are thus brought forward. They are forced to clean up their corpses, wipe their blood off the furniture, take out the trash. Once they are done, every one of them is hanged. That is Ithaca’s return to normal: dangling from a noose for all to see. Three-thousand years onward, is our own state of ‘normal’ really any better? The pandemic is over only on paper. People continue to become infected, acquire disabilities, lose their lives; the world has simply stopped pretending to care. The climate crisis similarly rages unabated, its devastation deemed an acceptable price for ‘business as usual.’ Even now, normality remains a noose tied around the throats of the disposable. But unlike most adaptations, Homer’s Odyssey does not actually end when Odysseus reclaims the throne, or when he reunites with Penelope, or when the slave girls are hanged. The story continues: the families of the slain suitors demand retribution, igniting a civil war halted only by Athena’s intervention. It is here that the epic ends. Though Homer does not tell us what happens next, we know Odysseus’ journey is far from over. He must leave Ithaca for one last quest: to carry an oar inland until he encounters someone who mistakes it for a winnowing fan, for only by completing this impossible task can he appease Poseidon. In some later mythic traditions, he’s exiled for slaying the suitors; in others, he is killed. The details vary but the pattern does not. Odysseus arrives home, but he does not get

to remain. It’s a cruel end. Not only because our protagonist might deserve better, but also because of all the lives his homecoming has cost: the crewmembers who never made it back to Ithaca; the young men slaughtered in his hall; the enslaved girls hanged in the courtyard; the countless innocents murdered at Troy. All this bloodshed ultimately proves meaningless. Perhaps, the epic wishes to say that the world Odysseus knew was marked for death the moment he sailed for Troy, and no amount of violence now can stay the course. Our heroes can pretend for a while, but the world is ending all the same, and its burial shroud can be woven and unwoven only so many times. One shudders to think whether our world, too, may be past such point of no return. Yet the world has ended before. Through warfare and genocide, through famine and plague and flood, through chain reactions of violence set off by empires convinced of their own permanence, the world has ended a thousand times over. Yet it still keeps turning. People keep living. Barbarity does not follow collapse: time and again, people respond to disaster with solidarity and collective care. They come together. They innovate, rebuild, tell stories, sing songs—even in the dark times. The Odyssey is proof: it may preserve memories of Bronze Age civilizations, but the tale itself arose from the songs of countless poets in the ‘Dark Ages’ that followed. A thousand civilizations have collapsed, but a thousand worlds have flourished in the spaces between. Which brings us here—at the precipice, perhaps, of another world’s end. What has been lost cannot be restored, and much of the sorrow yet to come may no longer be preventable. Limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees may now be impossible and the long-term public health consequences of the pandemic must be reckoned with. The institutions meant to protect us are abandoning us one by one— retreating, like Olympians of myth, from the affairs of mortals. No divine intervention will hold our world in stasis; Athena will not help restore it back to normal. All we are left with is each other. Perhaps that is enough.

OPINIONS 06 FEATURES

IANNARILLI YASHA HAIDER EDITOR | LIA FEATURES@THESTRAND.CA OPINIONS@THESTRAND.CA

HELP! I’m a robo-zombie EAT. MORE. PHONE.

It was a dimly lit street lined with cobblestones and bustling with handsome, linen-clad men. As they usually are in Europe. “Let’s go in here,” my friend Ellé said. We met the lively bar eagerly, vines protruding across the ceiling edges, and in the corner of my eye sterile lighting teased the bathroom. The world was ours to dance in and feel free. “I have to yak,” Ellé groaned. For the first time all night, my focus was solely on her. While being a good friend to Ellé, I was also dealing with what many would consider their worst nightmare: a stolen phone while travelling. And there I was, suddenly awakened from a deep slumber that had quietly progressed over many years. I had been a literal robo-zombie. Without my phone, however, I learned how to feel again. For the first time in years, I heard the world without the deafening drone of constant digital interaction. I saw my surroundings from a perspective untouched by current reels or media algorithms. I was changed. This shift led me to a concept defined by the Chicago Architecture Centre in their article “FAÇADE:” “facading.” In architectural terms, a façade refers to the exterior face or frontage of a building. It serves both aesthetic and functional purposes, shaping a building’s visual identity while contributing to the cityscape’s overall character while housing the structural reality within. The ‘robo-zombie culture’ of UofT students aligns with this idea. On the surface, our visual identity is composed of stylized choices inherited from social media. We chase ‘vintage’ aesthetic and functionality without adhering to the same morals or principles of the past. Environmental Health News actually

published an article describing this phenomenon as “nostalgiacore,” the anxious response to the growing climate crisis through nostalgia-driven resurgence like Y2K gadgets, retro fashion, and vintage media. As Britt Wray, director of Stanford’s CIRCLE initiative, noted: “whether people are doing it consciously or unconsciously, [nostalgiacore] is partly a form of yearning for temporary relief from the affective experience of living in dangerous and complicated times.” In many ways, we as students live a contradiction. Our generation takes comfort

illustration | Yaocheng Xia

behind the façade of loving vintage things— from film cameras and digital point-andshoots to retro art. Behind this public face lies a simpler truth: crippling feelings of anxiety and an impulse to conform to social trends. The façade is our most prominent side: it is what we control and present to the world. Through what we wear, buy, and post, we build a carefully curated visual identity. We claim to value real-world connection, yet we spend hours on social media curating a profile, desperate to be seen.

SARAH SHAH CONTRIBUTOR

As for our structural integrity? We are barely fragments. We are robo-zombies living in a dystopian movie about a technological takeover, trapped in an exhausting cycle of doomscrolling and constant screen engagement, even in lecture halls. Yet simultaneously, we romanticize an era when people spoke to each other before lectures began. We long for a time before dating apps, when connections happened naturally and strangers weren’t afraid to say hello. We crave that simplicity because we bear heavy burdens inherited from previous generations: an uncertain job market competing against AI, an ongoing climate crisis, and a desensitization to violence pushed by profit-driven technology. Ultimately, it is our duty to question what we contribute to our collective environment. The qualities we bring as students in this specific moment are becoming increasingly rare. We are among the last to experience high school before generative AI became embedded in daily life. We carry a fundamental responsibility, not only to ourselves but to future generations, to embody the values we like to project. The system works against us, so we must actively work against the system to develop true character rather than a hollow, thoughtless exterior. We sit at a critical junction where we can either lose our humanity or take charge of our destiny. Six years ago, philosopher Nick Bostrom warned that humanity risks reaching a technological breakthrough that could destroy us all. Where are we now? We remain the world’s hope for a human-centred future. As UofT students, we are most definitely capable of making a meaningful breakthrough. First, we have to tear down the façade.

On the odysseys across the Serengeti

Across the savannah, animals seasonally engage in a long migration journey across the 30 000 km stretch of Tanzania and southwestern Kenya known as the Serengeti and the Masai Mara. Gazelles, wildebeests, and zebras represent what remains from a dwindling migratory species population. Animals like Thomson’s gazelles are one of the best known species of gazelles and named after the British geologist and explorer Joseph Thomson. They navigate the fluctuating climate to create patterns that ecologists are interested in mapping and predicting. Savannah ecologist T. Micheal Anderson attempts to interpret the movement of several gazelle populations to introduce a MARYAM AL-QAISY | WEB EDITOR more scientific reasoning to their ambiguous nature. By merely observing the ascension of the migratory population from the Serengeti, the ecologist describes it as “breathtaking.” Do Thomson’s gazelles and other species follow their instincts as their natural compass? Is making the long and uncertain trek across African savannahs in search of rich grassland the target of this journey? Or is it the search for a pack that will defend individual gazelles against predators? Observing Thomson’s gazelles in the Serengeti was the first thing ecologists did to predict their transition to areas with abundant rainfall against the changing climate that started shaping the biodiverse savannah landscape. Ecologists documented several confrontations of Thomson’s gazelles with predators, droughts, and resource scarcity, and their response as a pack. Their effort to track gazelle’s mobility was made possible by using GPS trackers on the animals, as well as collecting feces to study how their diet influenced their trajectory. It turns out that the gazelle’s population size and diet predicts their movement across the great landscape.

A story of survival for Thomson’s gazelles

Tall grass or young herbs... As the dry season arrives, the availability of grazing land in the Serengeti declines. This drives Thomson’s gazelles to migrate toward the

FEATURES 07 OPINIONS

@STRANDPAPER @STRANDPAPER THE 1 THESTRAND STRAND| |ISSUE 21 AUGUST 2025

Do you want me for my looks or my voice? OLENA ZSOLDOS CONTRIBUTOR

Marginalized people have a unique perspective primed for storytelling. Why are they still accessories for the ones white people already tell?

What do we want from stories: originality or universal themes? Paradoxically, audiences seem to want both at once, and impressively, sometimes storytellers manage to deliver. Severance, for example, is widely praised as fresh and exciting even though it centres on painfully average, cubicle-ridden office workers. The first season of Arcane also meets the originality mark despite being a spin-off of a generic battle arena game. On the other end of the spectrum, Disney’s live-action remakes of repeatedly-rehashed fairytales continue to top box office charts even amidst rather brutal backlash, and classics are, as the saying goes, classic for a reason. Before the written word, all storytelling was iterative due to the limits of human memory and the whims of each subsequent storyteller. However, in our modern age of information everything is recorded, which opens the door to judgmental comparison between past and present versions. The accessibility of online archives and libraries also makes it easier than ever to preserve and translate texts faithfully and to recreate historical settings accurately. Yet accuracy is not always the goal. In fact, the purpose of fiction is to rewrite reality. The question becomes: what do we rewrite, and how? Take the works of Jane Austen, which have retained their popularity due to their evergreen themes such as familial duty and successful or unrequited love. Emma (2020) is a historically faithful recreation down to the hand-embroidered buttons on its costumes, but it is not inherently “better” than Clueless, which references the original book about as closely as The SpongeBob Squarepants Movie (2004) follows the Odyssey. Our politically polarized world is filled with heated debate around racialized and genderbent versions of classic characters. Some defend movies like The Little Mermaid (2023) as good representation, and while it’s true they provide roles for marginalized actors beyond the work they’re usually typecasted for, the characters, settings, and stories are not really made for or about them. Often, casting a person of colour in a role originally played by a white actor only conceals the real history of the racialized group. Similarly, casting women to play

previously male characters defined by their brute strength and stoicism reaffirms the harmful ideas that masculinity is more desirable than femininity, and that women find success by “leaning in” to masculine norms. Therefore, it is more valuable to tell stories written by marginalized voices as opposed to exchanging authenticity for visibility. Stage plays are a notable exception because they exist to be reproduced: night after night, production after production, century after century. The prestige of a Shakespeare play cannot be rivalled by a modern one, so while expanding opportunities for new playwrights and directors is important, it is not defensible to reject an actor from a Shakespeare role on account of their race or gender. A higher degree of suspension of disbelief is required in the theatre than in the cinema: if we can accept that a few carefully rigged pieces of particle board are roiling ocean waves, why can’t we accept that an African man is playing a Danish prince? I can’t even see his face from the balcony. But when an actor’s face is blown up onto a high-fidelity screen, the details become so tangible that we are convinced the screen shows reality. We are not suspending our disbelief—we are simply believing. In recent years, studios have been trying to push audiences towards passive consumption in a new way. The new target demographic is not an unthinking one, but one who’s not even paying attention. Writers and showrunners receive critiques from studio executives that their stories aren’t “second screen enough.” Nuanced, carefully crafted shows are remade into uninteresting, over-explained slop—Avatar: The Last Airbender comes to mind, where ‘tell, don’t show’ seems to be the guiding principle. All subtleties of the original’s meticulous storytelling are abandoned to accommodate a distracted, apathetic audience. I believe this assessment of viewers is unfair. They cannot be blamed for losing interest in media designed as “background noise,” especially in a world where mobile apps profit off shortening our attention spans and lowering our cognitive willingness. So long as viewers are treated this

illustration | Olena Zsoldos

way, we are in danger. Seeing this vicious cycle of diminishing audience attention, what’s to stop studios or streaming platforms from going one step further? They may not see the point of creating anything original when generative AI content like Fruit Love Island sees widespread success. A studio that sees diversity as a checklist could efficiently fulfill their quotas without employing marginalized creatives. In the music industry, AI ‘singers’ represented by racialized virtual avatars are already prevalent. Failures such as the Stranger Things finale have prompted the internet to wonder if they were written by ChatGPT. While these accusations are usually unprovable even if true, they represent a larger complaint: the media industry is prioritizing appeal to a common denominator over original content. It is far more profitable, after all, to make a broadly sanitary and crowd-pleasing movie than a well-crafted but niche one. Power structures in the media industry are frequently horribly unfair. News stories about predacious executives and underpaid writers circulate constantly, including the famous SAG-AFTRA labour strike in 2023. However, we as the collective audience ultimately decide whether to consciously consume original, narratively stimulating stories told from marginalized perspectives, call out injustices when we see them, and boycott creators of soulless content. We are a diverse audience deserving of diverse stories told by us, about us, and for us.

08 FEATURES

EDITOR | JULIA MCCARTHY FEATURES@THESTRAND.CA

Will guilt ridden men always save the day? KALYNA MONAGO YAROSH CONTRIBUTOR What do two of Christopher Nolan’s most recent films, The Odyssey and Oppenheimer Oppenheimer,, have in common? Aside from Nolan’s directorial goal of making the loudest movie possible, both films seem to revolve around the male protagonist inflicting unprecedented amounts of violence before eventually being absolved by his guilt, while also displaying a serious lack of strong female characters. Nolan’s depictions of violence in both films possess unrealistic levels of beauty. One could argue that this beauty leading to mass destruction almost loses some of its emotional weight and social implications in Nolan’s aestheticism. The real issue with Nolan’s depiction of violence is not necessarily its beauty, but instead how he portrays the aftermath of its occurrence. In both films, the leading men seem to realize the mass destruction they have created. Examples include when Odysseus laments to Penelope about Troy and when Oppenheimer’s speech to the auditorium turns into a personal reckoning with the consequences of the atomic bomb. These instances, while emotionally important to the audience, seem to have little influence on the future actions of the characters. Odysseus still goes on to slaughter his wife’s suitors, and while Oppenheimer takes actions to prevent nuclear weapons, he still seems to be punished more by McCarthyism than the extent of his destruction. Nolan’s depictions of guilt in these characters begs the question: what are the boundaries to violence? The director’s messaging is mixed in this regard. Odysseus does not repent for his actions against the cyclops, who, while a monster, is still an innocent creature tending his sheep, or even for the men lost on his journey as a result of his leadership. Even Oppenheimer, while acknowledging the number of lives lost due to the Manhattan project, never fully acknowledges the tremendous fatalities of his bomb. Instead of exploring the impact of the violence exacerbated by his leading male characters, Nolan scratches only the surface of their personal guilt. While it is important to show that characters possess guilt and aren’t completely cold-hearted individuals, Nolan’s depiction of guilt does not necessarily cast a moral judgement against the violence that his characters inflict. His presentation almost switches the focus from a broader discussion of the consequences of violence to focus on the mindset of a single,

The Odyssey + Oppenheimer: a comparison guilt-ridden man. Ultimately, Odysseus gets to ride off into the sunset with his wife, and Oppenheimer receives national recognition and awards, leading me to question whether Nolan’s films imply that one can be absolved of violence if they eventually show guilt. In both films, Nolan’s inability to write female characters is stark. Women are used simply as pedestals to support their male counterparts. Kitty Oppenheimer is portrayed as a harsh and unsympathetic alcoholic mother who seems to care little about her work as a biologist once she (in her own words) “graduated to housewife.” Oppenheimer then seemingly gets to play the role of a responsible and multitalented husband, father and genius scientist while she stays hidden in his shadow. In reality, Kitty Oppenheimer was a successful biologist and worked as a lab technician while at Los Alamos for a year, a fact which Nolan completely glosses over in his movie. The other leading female character, Jean Tatlock, is also reduced solely to her role as a sexual object for Oppenheimer, nevermind the fact that Jean actually met Oppenheimer while studying at Stanford Medical School. Nolan does, however, include plutonium expert Dr. Lilli Hornig in the film, and attempts to address the struggles faced by women in science with a brief, generic comment by male characters expressing concern for her reproductive system being exposed to plutonium. With her presence in roughly two scenes in the entire film, this representation feels very performative. Dr. Hornig also only gets this job from Oppenheimer himself, which seems to reinforce Oppenheimer’s own heroism and perpetuate the notion that women must rely on the saviour male protagonist for support. While the original Odyssey is not a feminist poem, the female characters still possess much more depth, personality, and strength than what Nolan grants them in his film. Penelope and Odysseus are supposed to be each

other’s equals, both cun-

ning, employing trickery to get what they want. Anne Hathaway’s Penelope is resolute, yet spends a majority of the movie as a passive character with her major screentime revolving around the principal males of the film; grieving over her lost husband, arguing with her son, or resenting her suitors. In the original epic, Penelope conducts multiple tests to ensure her husband is exactly who he says he is upon his return, including the famous trick of moving their wedding bed, which is built out of a tree. Nolan’s exclusion of this scene and much of Penelope’s own story from the movie cements Penelope’s role as secondary to that of Odysseus. This is similar to the representation of the other female characters in the story: Helen, Clytemnestra, Athena, Circe and Calypso. These film adaptations serve as shallow reflections of the Homeric characters and their rage and smarts obscured and lost in Nolan’s quest to portray Odysseus as the ultimate hero. Even Zendaya, portraying Athena, the literal Goddess of Wisdom, the one who guides and provides knowledge and protection to Odysseus, somehow became a forgotten character in the background of this film. In the words of Oppenheimer himself – is anyone ever going to tell the truth about what’s actually happening here? Nolan’s misogyny is veiled under a guise of toxic masculine heroism, and perpetuates this age-old narrative of women leaning on guilt-ridden heroes to save the day. Ultimately, both films left me feeling unresolved. While Nolan definitely deserves cinematic praise for his lack of CGI use and sweeping scenery shots, his movies lack in emotional depth, leading to unresolved questions and gaps in understanding, not only of the characters themselves, but of the overarching themes of his pieces. His films diminish the presence of female roles while uplifting the male protagonists men who seem to be ultimately absolved of any wrongdoings after displaying some form of guilt.

Odysseus, IMDB, Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Studios

FEATURES 09

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Avant tout, soyons canadiens The odyssey of the Franco-Canadian identity Over the course of the past month I spent overseas, and especially upon returning home to my small Canadian hometown, I’ve been contemplating what exactly the intersection of my Franco-Canadian heritage means. As a child growing up in the French school system, I was rooted in strong traditions of Franco-Ontarian slang, music, recipes, and literature. My school was planted in the middle of a quaint farming community, where there was very little spoken English. Surrounded by a distinct Métis (Indigenous and French) and Franco-Ontarian culture, students had no choice but to use this language and expression. My childhood memories of playing hide and seek around the apple trees on the perimeter of our playground, learning Métis words from my friend as she explained how to wrap a ceinture fléchée, and my uncles teaching me to play the spoons while keeping in time with the fiddle were crucial to my understanding of just how complicated—or even endangered—this culture is. Although my maternal family is of French-Irish descent, their spoken French is completely attrite. My mom recollects her grandfather offering her “des bons bons” (candies) as a little girl, or bedtime stories being told by her father, my “papa” (my grandfather), in French. However, the usage of French at the farmhouse was strongly discouraged by my late grandfather’s Irish mother. Though the Irish and French who settled in Ontario usually shared the same Catholic faith, their rivalry in the early eighteenth to nineteenth centuries as distinct cultures desperate to survive in a foreign place is embedded into Canadian history as well as the fabric of my family. Losing a language meant that recipes, stories, jokes, and traditions were either naturally forgotten, or grouped into Anglophone or Irish family sentiments. Strangely, Franco-Canadian culture survived in the music and jigs, where the fiddle, silver spoons, guitar, and piano still echo conversations and cultural memory without using language at all. Reclaiming language was, for my parents, the first step in allowing my siblings and I to reconnect with this heritage and rebuild what was lost. We endeavoured to immerse ourselves in an environment where French grammar, pronunciation, dialect and vernacular were everyday practices. There are still

many days when I feel like I live in between both worlds, unable to express myself fully without using both languages. Once, an old schoolmate and I joked about the struggle of doing math in English. When her teacher told her to use the Pythagorean Theorem, she was terribly confused before realizing that it was “le Théorie de Pythagore” that she was meant to use. We laughed that I still had trouble pronouncing “equilateral triangles,” and frustratingly would refer to them as “triangles équilatéral” around my teachers throughout high school. Though seemingly small examples, this dizzying mental exercise is something most individuals using their second language suffer from. Even something as miniscule as differing pronunciation between French and English, or even different French dialects, can feel isolating. While in Europe, I was eager to get away from Toronto—where most have to compromise their first language to speak English—and be immersed in a place where French was not only spoken everyday, but lived.. I was delighted to talk politics, sports, lived and history in a language I felt at home in. But something still didn’t feel right. As I was lightheartedly teased in most settings for my Québecois accent, I felt ashamed, like my vocabulary had to better reflect the ‘French from France,’ which most French colonies have been told is the ‘proper’ form. Academia now tells us that there is no ‘best’ French dialect; in fact, the French that exists in Québec is perhaps the purest and most well-preserved form, since it has not been subject to as much change as French in France. So why did I feel so compelled to toss out my Franco-Ontarian vocabulary, why did I feel so guilty every time an “ain “ain”” sound slipped out rather than an “ent “ent?” ?” It wasn’t until I got home and heard that sweet sound of “en’tous cas”, cas”, rather than “d’qoup”,, when I felt like I could fully under“d’qoup” stand and be understood. I, for a long time, felt like I was too French for Canadians, and too Canadian for the French. Like I can’t belong to the Québecois national identity, despite descending from there and having been taught by Québecois teachers, because I was not from there, nor have I ever lived there. Like I can’t fully call myself “Franco-Ontarienne,” despite being raised in the dialect and the traditions, because my family is disconnected from the language.

JULIA MCCARTHY FEATURES EDITOR

Home means more to me now than ever, because of all the places in the world, it best encompasses this context. I feel proud knowing that there is no Canada without its French influence, and that the French North American resilience is not possible without Canada. I, like my old classmates and enduring French communities, am only a small piece of this evidence, only a small part of this tapestry. French survival in Canada has not been an easy journey; in many ways it is a miracle when we consider our nation’s history. Today, French culture and language dissipate rapidly. But the odyssey of this identity continues and we find ourselves here; we find its vitality in its uniqueness and importance to our nation. After all, it belongs to all of us who call Canada home. Canada, a wonderful kaleidoscope of identities. No matter who you are, or where you’re from, let us protect our individual and collective heritage. In the words of the pioneering father of our Confederation, George-Étienne Cartier: “avant tout, soyons Canadiens.”

10 SCIENCE

EDITOR | SHIVANTIKA SHEGAR SCIENCE@THESTRAND.CA

savannah plains that offer abundant foraging area fostered by seasonal rainfall. Seems simple, but the herd may encounter further obstacles, including finding enough quality nutritious plants to feed the pack. Compared to wildebeests and zebras, gazelles’ small stomachs and slow digestion force them to prioritize quality over quantity — the quality grass is young herbs that sprout after rainfall. To make their journey even longer, gazelles target areas with abundant young herbs with large quantities sufficient to feed their large pack. With varying degrees of vegetation across the savannah, they cannot find a good place to end their journey, which explains their constant mobility across the grassland. Growing the herd...

illustration | Yaocheng Xia

It is a gazelle’s priority to be part of a large herd. By ensuring a place within a sizable population, gazelles secure protection against predators who become overwhelmed by the size of the herd, leaving the gazelles to graze in peace. In this game, the prey outwit their predators because collaborative grouping and teamwork enables them to detect dangers easily. Yet, their size simultaneously compromises their camouflage and makes it easier for predators to spot them in the wild. Not to mention how they can outnumber the available quality herbs and may fall short on resources. Here, Thomson’s gazelles embark on a new journey where they target safer plains with no obvious predators and promising vegetation. To coexist with others... In the absence of fires, Thomson’s gazelles travel jointly with wildebeests and zebras. Zebras and wildebeests begin consuming the tall grass and leave more promising herbs within the reach of gazelles who lack the freedom to choose their meal. Following in the footsteps of other herbivores may reduce the risk of predators’ attacks. However, climate change has created more fires, which change the available vegetation, thus changing the dynamics between different herbivore species. This makes the Thomson’s gazelles less dependent on large-sized grazers, which threatens the biodiversity species thrive on as they make seasonal odysseys across the land.

A home on fire

SHIVANTIKA SHEGAR CO-SCIENCE EDITOR

You could say Homer’s The Odyssey is a story of human might; of conjuring the will to brave the most monstrous of obstacles, the most savage of storms. Or you could say it is a love story, that at its heart is Odysseus’ longing for Penelope, his desire to return to her. But one thing you can’t deny is that The Odyssey is about a voyage, and one that is familiar to us all: The journey back home. Home, really, defines who Odysseus is; without his household, kingdom, and family, he is a nobody, a wanderer with no fortress or name or purpose. But here is a question: what becomes of a person when there is no home left to return to — when it has been burnt to the ground? It is unfortunate, then, that we live in a world that is constantly on fire. In particular, an analysis conducted by Imperial College London’s World Weather Attribution noted that more than 3.8 million hectares of land (with over 73 000 hectares being in Ontario alone) have burned in Canada in 2026. Furthermore, it was found that, as of this year, Ontario has reached its highest-ever recorded area burned in recent history. It is no secret that this is mainly caused by human-caused climate change; as the planet warms, winter snow melts earlier, and summer rainfall decreases, fire activity increases and burned land area increases. Cyclically, wildfires are a major source of carbon dioxide emissions, setting off a horrific feedback loop. In July 2026, Namaygoosisagagun First Nation (also known as Collins First Nation), an Ojibwe community in Northwestern Ontario, received suspicions of a possible forest fire. This was due to a wall of smoke, one that appeared dangerously close and perilously thick. However, when this was brought to their attention, the Ministry of Natural Resources responded that there was no immediate danger. Hours later, residents were forced to crowd into old aluminum boats and speed across Collins Lake, narrowly escaping a sizzling wildfire. Namaygoosisagagun First Nation resident Chief, Helen Paavola, was not in the village when the fire ignited, and remembers the pure agony she felt while watching from the sidelines. “All I could think was… they’re gone. My children are gone. My community is gone. There are no words to explain the relief that I felt when I knew everybody was out.” But while the residents of Collins had escaped, their homes were left burned, blighted, along with their possessions, and, in some family’s cases, their pets. It had all been lost — their land, and the stories that thrummed beneath it. After the event, First Nations leaders have called for an investigation into the Ontario government’s emergency response

to the wildfire. According to Wilfred King, Chief of Gull Bay First Nation, “The lack of communication and evacuation support should horrify all Canadians, and our community was on its own.” The destruction of Collins is a dire demonstration of governmental idleness and dismissal of specific groups or communities. It is also a demonstration of a strange, yet long-running notion: that some homes (and the people they carry) hold more value than others, and that some homes may not deserve to be saved. Perhaps this ongoing governmental inertia is why several communities have taken matters into their own hands. Indigenous forest stewardship, a historical practice in which traditional land management techniques are utilized to maintain ecological balance, is now being recognized for its effectiveness in the reduction of wildfire reduction. A large sector of forest stewardship revolves around cultural burning: the deliberate creation of small, controlled fires in forests to reduce flammable fuel loads, promote biodiversity, and improve wildlife habitat. This is a technique that has been practiced for thousands of years; when performed in cooler, wetter periods of the year, they help prevent possible buildup of dry, flammable vegetation that could promote wildfire activity. First Nations-led fire crews in British Columbia have helped introduce minor forest burns to improve deer habitat and reduce flammable debris. Additionally, fire brigades in the Xingu Indigenous Territory currently combine traditional wildfire management methods with satellite imagery to safeguard their villages, crops, and forests from wildfires. Forest stewardship, then, could be evidence of something strangely sanguine: A home on fire might not be equivalent to a home that is lost. The act of using little fires to fight large, all-consuming ones is a powerful metaphor, one that echoes the histories of small, marginalized communities rising up to challenge the ‘mighty’ and the ‘great.’ Perhaps one day these little fires will triumph against the vast ones. Perhaps they won’t. But why not light them anyway? Why not view the world through the lens of something other than despair, as Chief Paavola did, surveying the destruction of Collins First Nation. “We are going home,” she said to those listening, her words burning with defiance, burning with hope. “We’re going to rebuild, and we are going home.”

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SCIENCE 11

Tripping into a psychedelic state of mind A new Royal Ontario Museum exhibition unites diverse perspectives on the MASHIYAT AHMED scientific and cultural odyssey of psychedelics CO-SCIENCE EDITOR My curiosity with magic mushrooms and the ‘psychedelic experience’ (I would like to preface this by pointing out that there is no universal or even expected experience that acts as a proper reference point) really began after I experimented with microdosing — consuming small doses of psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms, once or twice a day. It is not enough to trigger any substantial hallucinations or a ‘psychedelic trip,’ but may still elicit certain cognitive and emotional changes. For me, these small changes manifested as noticeable yet manageable bursts of greater social desires and less social anxiety: think talkativeness, longer social battery, and more motivation — which is surprising because I have a terrible habit of cancelling plans last minute due to my 4 pm energy crashes and low social battery. I’m a neuroscience student, which means that beyond my recreational experimentations with psilocybin, I have also encountered research on recent scientific breakthroughs in depression treatment and psychotherapy literature about the emerging potential of psychedelics and their impact on our health. But the story of psychedelics noted for their ability to trigger non-ordinary mental states characterized by changes in cognition, emotion, mood, sensation, and consciousness,often begins and ends with the question of their burgeoning scientific utility. Rarely are these conversations about their profound cultural, spiritual, or ceremonial history — especially as it relates to Indigenous frameworks of healing and knowledge — a part of mainstream discourses. This is specifically relevant within Western institutions and classrooms. Right across from U of T students’ beloved Queen’s Park, the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) currently runs an exhibit titled Psychedelics: Art, Culture, and Science. whose goal it is to provide an immersive insight into the unexpected and curious ways human cultures have coexisted alongside these substances across continents, spanning back thousands of years. The exhibit is encased within walls and small rooms curving and swaying into one another, with each wall representing a different piece of the psychedelic puzzle: from their spiritual and ceremonial significance through Indigenous communities in the Americas to artistic renditions which sensationalize what a hallucinatory psychedelic trip may feel like. An insight into healing and the brain-mind connection

illustration | Yaocheng Xia

Since the 70s, scientific, commercial, and recreational psychedelic use has remained illegal, heavily controlled, or scrutinized in Canada and the U.S. — and with this prohibition, research into the potential therapeutic benefits of magic mushrooms and other substances for treating treatment-resistant mental health disorders has only begun to emerge in the last decade. Studies show that combining personalized psychological support therapies with a medium-to-high dose of psilocybin can have positive mental health benefits for depressed patients. The exhibit also stressed the importance of set and setting when undergoing psychedelic treatments or recreational use: negative emotional states, such as being plagued by feelings of anxiety or a precarious setting (like lack of safety), can compromise the mind’s ability to reap the psychological benefits of a trip. The exhibit also shines a light on leading theories behind how psychedelics interact with the human brain. Disorders such as depression and anxiety often involve rigid and repetitive thought-patterns that are difficult to break. Through illustrations, the exhibit helps explain the Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics (REBUS) model of how psychedelics impact the brain. REBUS suggests, among other things, that psychedelics can promote greater flexibility and cross-regional communication between brain neurons and regions. This temporary loosening of the normal pathways neurons communicate information through could, in theory, allow maladaptive or negative beliefs to change. This potential for change highlights how the mind-brain connection — a theoretical perspective within neuroscience that posits that all mental activity — can ultimately be traced back to a physical source, such as the interaction between neurons and brain regions. What’s next for the psychedelic odyssey? What I loved about this exhibit was its emphasis on how multiple voices on psychedelics are important to acknowledge; not just the scientific or clinical. While the explosion of scientific and commercial interest into psychedelics is undoubtedly making policymakers, governments, and the public rethink these substances, it’s crucial to tell multiple stories of how these substances function and why they are so important towards a holistic understanding of the human condition. From featuring yarn artworks that render the complex cosmic mythologies of Indigenous communities and the ways psychoactive substances fit into existential worldviews and storyboards about spiritual practices across Africa, the exhibit helps complicate the story of these substances and their Indigenous roots in a world where they risk becoming commodified and objectified through over-harvestation, commercialization, and the continued neglect of Indigenous knowledge in research. Psychedelics included an immersive, kaleidoscopic experience where I entered a dark, enclosed space where the walls dance with projections designed to imitate the visual hallucinations one might experience on a trip. Abstract and curiously shaped black and white contours flashed and swirled on the walls , and yet, as someone who has been on a real magic mushroom trip lasting approximately 2-4 hours, I would say this immersion was rather inaccurate. While some visual features may be common, everyone’s psychedelic experience is unique and having a suggestive and immersive booth filled with exaggerated visualizations may defeat the recognition that there is no universal psychedelic trip as well as create a misleading and/or negative perception of the drug. Who knows what’s next for the psychedelic odyssey? Maybe it’s more studies or perhaps a new UofT course with an unnecessarily long title. But for now, the ROM’s exhibition stands as a solid jumping off point to learn more about the fascinating and mysterious world of psychedelics… as long as it’s taken with a grain of salt.

12 ARTS & CULTURE

EDITOR | SOFIA TERESE GLANTZ CULTURE@THESTRAND.CA

Clashing formats

The failures of the Hadestown proshot JUBRAN MANSOUR CONTRIBUTOR

It is commonly understood that a proshot (professionally filmed theatrical production) can never recreate the experience of actually being at a musical. The creators of the Hadestown proshot decided to eagerly lean into this fact throughout its production, distinguishing it from other famous proshots (think Hamilton) by the freedom it gives the camera. It is defined by sharp cuts, close ups, and even shots of parts of the stage an inperson audience wouldn’t be able to see. What makes Hadestown great is its universality. Even though it was written in 2006, it feels more relevant to the issues of today than it must have been to an audience 20 years ago, and that feeling is the whole point. A prime example of this is the wall that Hades — who is presented as an oldtimey, Southern industry tycoon — has built around hell/his company town to preserve the “paradise” he has built for his workers. The setting reminded me of Trump’s wall and its rhetoric, as well as Amazon’s creation of modern “company towns.” Since the musical precedes these events, I was forced to reflect and remind myself that demarcating walls, xenophobia, and company towns are not new ideas. According to Hadestown, they are as old as myth itself. There are countless examples of this, big and small, throughout the musical. By relating Hadestown to our modern problems, the audience of Hadestown inadvertently proves the musical’s own thesis: that the trials of today are echoes of trials passed. This also allows it to present its message of endurance — of “singing it anyways” — more profoundly, since they become connected to the show’s universality. Hadestown presents a cyclical link from the present to the deep past by using the American South as an aesthetic bridge for modern, western audiences to easily grasp the themes of ancient myth. There are aspects of modernity within the dialogue, but it draws sonically and aesthetically on the Deep South, the Great Depression, the old American railroad, and New Orleans Jazz. To a Western

audience, this presentation reflects a nostalgic piece of our cultural ethos. Then, of course, there is the unfamiliar: the ancient Greek myth that the musical retells. My sense of immersion watching the proshot was unique. It felt like I was being pulled out of my own time. In acts such as “Chant”, I felt as though I had been drawn back into history. The symbolic connections between capitalism, hell, the South and the

illustration | Sophiie Wong

Great Depression, were not just seen but felt. Most of the time, however, I felt a vague sense of alienation which disrupted my engagement and made me feel like I was not having the full experience. “Chant” has many glaring examples. Its chorus features about 8 “workers” walking in a circle, crouched down, moving against the musical’s iconic turning stage. As they move, they sing “Oh, keep your head / keep your head low”, a recognizable earworm from the musical. Then Hades sings, but does not come into frame. The camera does not pan out. Instead, the switch back to him is defined by a sharp cut. Because of this, much of the scene’s symbolic impact (Hades preaching about the paradise he’s built while his workers worry and suffer) is lost. Perhaps this, like many of the other cinematographic decisions, works better for those who have seen the musical in person, but in isolation, it only disrupts the experience and reminds the audience that they are in fact in a movie theatre, and this is just a proshot. The emphasis on close-ups also isolates the

Does reading the text of Homer’s epic really help us Ody-See more clearly?

audience from other aspects of the musical by blocking out the full set, the orchestra, and the lights. Proximity to the characters did not make up for the fact that huge parts of the creative vision for the musical were lost. There was also a lack of gradual transitions. There were many times where a pan out or a slow shift would suit the scene better than a cut. It felt as if, instead of the shoot being carefully planned, cameras were thoughtlessly installed in different places and the musical was cut and reconstructed in an editing room. In trying to shoot every scene, every solo, every conversation from where the producers felt it would be experienced best, the musical lost a lot of its shape. Choppy, impersonal editing also contradicts the point of the musical. The timeless, immersive experience of the live show is not just disrupted by bad camera work, but also the modernity that camerawork evokes. The audience is not just reminded they are in a movie theatre, but they are reminded they are in a movie theatre in 2026. The sudden, sharp reminders that what you are watching is filmed did not just disrupt space, but time. The film is undeniably, wholly, an invention of our time. Although playing into the advantages a film gives you is understandable, the “advantages,” in this case, supersede the message of timelessness the musical tries to deliver. The goal of this proshot should have been to make the necessary film elements as subtle as possible. Other aspects of the musical try to do this: lighting is sparse, with an emphasis on shadow over colour, and technical effects are limited. While I enjoyed the proshot of Hadestown, I left the theatre with an empty, dissatisfied feeling. While, as acknowledged, there is par for the course with a proshot, it was profound here. When I left the movie theatre, I was not compelled to contemplate on the musical itself, but rather, my own confusion. I had paid attention the whole time, I knew the history of the American South, and was familiar with the myths musical retells, so what had I missed?

Epic poems or epic fail?

EMMA BRAHO CONTRIBUTOR

Sing to me muse, of a buy-one-get-one-free hardcover book deal. Bookstore sales of The Odyssey have skyrocketed recently; overall annual print sales of Homer’s epic have increased by 76% in the United States. Sales for copies of The Odyssey, along with its brutality-laden brother, The Iliad, have contributed £980 000 (over $1.8 million CAD)

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in poetry sales so far this year in the United poem, of which there are many. Processing and Kingdom. Now, this spike in popularity for a reflecting through the act of reading enables book that is the basis of what is, undoubtedly, agency and time to exercise the imagination summer’s biggest blockbuster, might not seem and critical engagement muscles, and with notable. But for a nearly three thousand-year- all the tale’s complexities, it’s a pretty good old epic that’s just over 1200 lines long to sell literary workout. that many copies at a time when fewer adults Firstly, just because you’re not are reading any book recreationally? Those experiencing The Odyssey right next to a are some pretty impressive statistics. With so whole audience of popcorn eating, IMAX many new readers welcoming copies of The enthusiasts when you read it, does not mean Odyssey to their shelves, it begs the question: you are reading it alone. The Odyssey has been Is the original story really any good, especially entertaining audiences for millennia because when compared to Chistopher Nolan’s humans across the history of literature have behemoth of a movie? If Nolan’s film is the taken the time and the care to preserve it and island from which readers are sailing into the care about both its form and its content. Each waters of The Odyssey, just how smooth will reader of The Odyssey travels back across the their literary trip home be? waves of time and connects to the people of While many of the challenges Odysseus antiquity and every reader that has come after, and his men face are depicted in Nolan’s movie, any literary translation of The Odyssey features even more elements of the story. These elements are so prime for the imagination and fantastical that they can’t necessarily translate directly to the silver screen. This gives the reader the ability to conceptualize aspects of the story in their own way, without external obligations to actualize them. This is also true for the more reflective and emotional moments of the raphael school of athens, public domain image, wikimedia commons

ARTS & CULTURE 13 who, despite being temporally removed, are not that dissimilar to us at all. In fact, it is that notion of connection across supposed divides that makes reading The Odyssey beyond the trend of the day, but as a start to reading other great epics of the world, that can be the most rewarding. By expanding the scope of study and reading ancient epics of the eastern world, like ancient Mesopotamia’s The Epic of Gilgamesh (which predates The Odyssey by approximately 1000-1500 years) for example, we come to understand how the structures of and innate approaches to stories and poems differ around the world. In doing so, we all become increasingly able to contextualize literature on its own and within greater global and cultural contexts, which are essential skills to understanding our increasingly global world. There are so many stories that we will never hear. But, seemingly against all practical odds, The Odyssey not only lives, but thrives. Across mediums and eras it continues to excite, to move, and to provoke. By not letting The Odyssey be the end of our exploration of ancient epics, we keep finding reminders of our shared humanity by returning to a return and by caring for words, stories, and the gaps between them.

Did The Odyssey really need to happen? The value of sequels today and in BCE

NATASHA UZDENSKY CONTRIBUTOR

EDITORS NOTE: May contain spoilers to Spider-Man: Brand New Day A week ago, I spent 45 minutes bawling my eyes out with my friends and 30 strangers. Spider-Man: Brand New Day was spectacular, despite having not watched the Spider-Man franchise since Tom Holland was a fresh 21-year-old, oblivious to all the heartbreaking Zendaya-brainwiping context. Spider-Man: Brand New Day stood out as a sequel – complex, thoughtful, and well-made, as if it was the filmmakers’ only child. In a cultural world inundated with sequels, why do some feel lazy and stale, while others draw us in, compelling as a whole new world (or rather, a Brand New Day)? Analyzing the original sequel, The Odyssey, may help answer this question. The Odyssey follows Odysseus after he has won his battle and faced his enemy. So, what makes the epic so fascinating, so worth spending ten years of the protagonist journeying home over? What makes The Odyssey arguably more significant than The Iliad? The answer may lie in the fact The Odyssey was always meant to exist. It wasn’t a tack on just to extract more money by recycling recognizable characters. The classical world took it for granted that both tales were composed by Homer, interpreting stylistic improvements as a result of his progress as a storyteller over time. However, scholars today hypothesize on the answer to the so-called ‘Homeric Question’ that both Trojan-War-themed stories arose independently through oral tradition, supported by the fact that they follow different characters. The answer to why a chronicle of what follows the climax of events in the Trojan War can still feel as significant as the conflict itself isn’t so easily answered. The Odyssey is about ‘nostos,’ or home-coming, after Odysseus has already been battle-hardened and character-developed. In The Odyssey the hero’s journey doesn’t start in the ordinary, it starts after he has already proven himself an extraordinary hero at Troy. Yet, it is precisely because the expected character arc has been realized before the events of The Odyssey that what remains — an exploration of the protagonist’s emotional complexity — has allured us for 2000 years. The Odyssey focuses on Odysseus’ human relationships, identity, and who he is a person (evidently, a pretty bad husband). Maybe the Trojan War was a dramatic conclusion, a victory to provide closure? But in reality, no one event lasts forever, no rush of energy halts at the climax, frozen in an image of glory. Life continues on, there is never a true culmination, and losing oneself in action is infinitely easier than finding one’s way home. Therefore, it is just as enthralling to see how Peter Parker adjusts to his life without MJ as it is to find out how he got there. It is not only the events, but their impact on the psyche that we are drawn to in stories. These well-crafted sequels stand out amongst the plethora of sequels that don’t really need to be there, not because they introduce another battle, but because they give meaning to the fight.

14 POETRY

EDITOR | REINA VAN LEEUWEN POETRY@THESTRAND.CA

Calliope Voice like a salved bruise, I sing atop the heavens, Chanting a sweet breeze

Agalope Echoing the western sea, The victor of song mocks me

Leucosia This golden goddess This winged sage to brave men, This pure counsellor,

Ligeia Recites tales of our defeat, Voyagers breaking our siege

Calliope Avert the poison, Seeped in those cold melodies, Await such tainted fangs

Ligeia Sick serpents playing women, A horror of claws and tails Calliope Firm wax in your ears, Wring your bows and wield your spears, Cease their instruments Agalope Tread the path of a temptress, Ensnare them in azure waves

Ligeia My sisters, listen only to the rush of the falling tides

Calliope Heroes, beware of their cold, saccharine voices, Piercing your chest

Agalope Afraid the Muse speaks the truth, We only sing empty notes

Leucosia No warm honey drips, Only pastiche harmonies Leak from our barbed throats

Ligeia Defiled maidens in your dreams, More licentious than Cypris

Calliope Slay these vile harlots Mermaid, lover, fellow muse, They pose for your lust

Agalope For the gods never declared Which body belonged to us

Sing to me, oh Muse of a child so cherished in her world set to perish, Hades’ eyes dark and bruised. He watches, weeping, ignoring the man who stands still on black sand, her eyes closed, sleeping.

illustration | Yaocheng Xia

Iron tears from a lyre sung — a lonely breath a time to come — shed for her, who has lost her sun. Her skin stays warm in her mother’s cooling sheets. This last time she feels her heat, with tomorrow’s wake, forlorn. Greeted by Charon, he cannot look her way — for the tears of Hades’ dismay. Wait for the horizon to be drawn to tell in hues of pink, turned grey, the beginning of a child, grown before her day.

Loyalty, thy name is woman! Tell him, O Muses, of how I toiled and longed for thousands of days. Awaiting a battered figure, a king I forget was crowned. Over the sea, I cast an empty gaze. Stories travel across the land about islands of innocents set ablaze.

Ligeia Rip us with pointed weapons, Sharper than those iron spears

Agalope Chaste Calliope, You defied Kronos and Mourai, To sing these warnings Ligeia Oh Muse, turn your gaze Upon these wayward women For once, hear our tune

AYLA BARKER CONTRIBUTOR

Ligeia Seduce and live again, My son grows into something familiar, rising to the Dawn as I shrink to the ground. Or perish in blue abyss Tell him, O Muses, of how I toiled and longed for thousands of days.

Agalope Our bare breasts and hair unbound, Our soft lips part, mouths unlatched

Leucosia Ready to feed on These weary, calloused bodies, Or they will feed on my own

Beginning of a Child

SABRINA JAGNARINE | CONTRIBUTOR

Leucosia Pale, dark, tan, olive Washing off our scaly skins, To catch their wary eyes Calliope Brave Odysseus, Rally your barbarians! Dye this sea crimson!

GRISHA. S CONTRIBUTOR

Agalope She thunders above the ship, Laden with hungry bruisers

Leucosia With our morphing skin, Deems us courtesans of death, Lurking monstresses

Leucosia Trap their paddling oars In moss and anemone Leave only torn skin

Calliope and the Sirens

Leucosia Entitled us impure beasts To be massacred and shamed

Agalope/ Leucosia/ Ligeia If only you’d sang to us, If only you’d warned me.

Calliope …

The bard sings of a warrior at sea—how his body remains, yet his mind decays. They know little of this shroud, what I would sacrifice to travel until I drown. Over the sea, I cast a stormy gaze. I have long given up on the gods, but tell him how a woman with one duty prays. Through this empty home, my cries still resound. Tell him, O Muses, of how I toiled and longed for thousands of days. The girls sing me words of praise, While I dream of sailing to Troy’s forsaken battleground. Over the sea, I cast a coveting gaze. The drunks and cowards lack insight beyond their gluttonous ways. Yet I remain shackled while my king remains seabound. Tell him, O Muses, of how I toiled and longed for thousands of days. Over the sea, I cast an empty gaze.

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@STRANDPAPER THE STRAND | ISSUE 1

A commuter’s epic

EMON HOSSAIN CONTRIBUTOR

To those who take an odyssey, five days a week

Tell me about a complicated scholar. Tell me how they wandered and were lost when they departed from the campus of Saint George. Where they went, who they met, and how they worked to bring themselves back home. Now, Domesticus, resident of Saint George, learn of their troubles. Find the beginning. At nightfall, Commuterus set their course eastward to return to Scarborough. Arriving at the Gateway of Saint George, Commuterus unsheathed the PRESTO, a divine tablet granted to those who swear faith to the Temple of Transit Celestials (TTC). But Commuterus failed to see what Fate lay before them when a blood-red aura doused their eyes. It was clear: all their wealth had been lost to the purchase of overpriced parchment and beverages from the merchants of Tim Horton. Those without wealth to sacrifice could not enter the TTC’s domain. photograph | rose kinoshita Commuterus shuddered. How could they return? They turned back to the Gateway and observed its structure. Seeing no guards and a Gateway smaller than a child, they vaulted over with a leap. It violated sacred law, but failing to return home was no better. As Commuterus arrived on the platform, priding themself, they heard a voice booming, “Present your PRESTO!” Commuterus turned in horror to see one of the Inspectores, who enforced the sacrifices to the TTC, staring down at them. Commuterus asked, “What for? I have sworn my faith to the TTC!” The Inspector merely said, “No man or woman can deny an inspection!” Commuterus reached for their pocket when a glint appeared in their eyes. They looked to the Inspector and said, “I am no man! And I am no woman! How dare you force me into these roles?” The Inspector, fearful of being banished from his post for this cruel act, apologized and scurried off just as a carriage pulled in. But while Commuterus had caught the Inspector’s wrongdoing, they failed to note their own. In the carriage, they heard the voice of Intercomena, a goddess of the TTC, who announced the upcoming Gateways to guide travellers. However, she only brought dread to Commuterus as they heard her voice ring out: “Our next Gateway is Spadina. Gateway of Spadina.” Commuterus wished to cry oceans of tears. They had foolishly guided themself to a westward carriage, taking them further from home. At the Gateway of Spadina, they rushed to the eastward carriage, but it was too late. The carriage had departed, with the next not arriving for long. Commuterus’ eyes sagged from the disarray. They wondered, “Who can continue to burden me?” Several answers came forth. A nearby woman was berating her husband for crashing their chariot. Commuterus attempted to endure this, but soon ran off. However, trouble struck again when they stumbled upon a cloaked figure who turned to them, enraged. “Who imposed a pest like you to spoil my day? Stay over there, not near me, or you can get lost!” Commuterus shouted, “And get lost, I shall!” as they dashed for the carriage, which had finally arrived. As they began to pass Gateways, it seemed peace had arrived, but suddenly, the voice of the carriage’s driver echoed: “An emergency has befallen us! You all must depart at the next Gateway and take a chariot, or wait until the delay clears!” The choice was grim, but upon observing the stars, they realized midnight was approaching. So, Commuterus stepped into the chariot, suffocated between a couple in an intimate embrace and a stranger whose fingers disappeared beneath their garments. Upon reaching the next Gateway, Commuterus descended onto the platform, but just as they boarded the next carriage they overheard an Inspector state, “How sorry I feel for these travellers! The emergency was resolved seconds after they left. If only they had waited…” Commuterus sobbed in agony. The misdirections. The commotions. The cruelties. The delays. All had shattered their spirit. They prayed that someday they would live on the campus, the horrors of travel never to befall them. Yet, as the Creek of Taylor appeared, their tears of agony turned to tears of joy. The carriage halted and Commuterus took a breath of fresh air. They were home. Commuterus stepped outside… …Only to have their foot trapped between the carriage doors.

Excerpts from an alternate ending to The Odyssey Odysseus lets the sound of the bow snapping back reverberate for a second too long before trying, again and again, to bend it in place. He can’t get it up. We close in on his fingers, all slippy and sweaty. Gross. Odysseus: I swear this has, like, never happened to me before. *** Someone goes to get the bow and Odysseus kind of leans back. He laughs, but he’s also not letting go. Suitor #3: Come on, man. Don’t make it like this. *** Odysseus: Wait. Is this the right bow? Yeah, no, this isn’t it. Mine had a little

You’re…Odysseus?

Athena carved into the bottom…oh, nevermind, sorry, it’s there. False alarm, it’s there. *** Odysseus asks the suitors to turn around. He can’t do it if they’re watching. *** Odysseus: Wait, one last try, one last try….Okay, one more try, one more try. *** Oh, I think he’s…crying? Tearing up a little, for sure. Do we…do we pan away? *** Odysseus, in the corner of the room, face pressed to the wall, mumbling but the suitors can still hear him.

VICTORIA ZALEWSKI | CO-STRANDED EDITOR

Odysseus: It was gonna be epic, like actually fucking epic. *** Asks a suitor if he thinks everyone saw that. Odysseus: I’m not usually like that. Suitor #1: For sure, man. Odysseus: I’ve hardly slept. Last night was a poem. You don’t even know how much lotus I took. And it might be the heat, locked up in here – (calling out) hey, could we chisel out a window or something?! Suitor #1: (lightly sweating) For sure, man. Everyone probably saw that. *** Penelope: Please, like, he’s my husband.

16 STRANDED

EDITOR | VICTORIA ZALEWSKI - ELIZABETH SCHEIBE STRANDED@THESTRAND.CA

Q & A outside Cineplex: The Odyssey A professor and a student walk out of a movie theater

DORI SEEMAN & NOOR ANSARIAN CONTRIBUTOR

Everyone’s talking about the latest Odyssey adaptation, and I’m here with the established Professor Squidward as well as Alex: aged 15, part-time high school student, full-time weightlifter, and 2023 national League of Legends semifinalist. Spoilers included. So, first question: How well does the movie adapt the source material? Professor S: It’s… not a good adaptation of The Odyssey. Nolan uses the text like using a car as a skateboard. Nolan takes the text to new places, but he interprets the material in a significantly limited way. Alex: How does he change the source material? Professor S: Well, for example, Circe. In the epic, Odysseus spends a year with Circe, and she’s portrayed as an equally complex counterpart. In Nolan’s movie, Circe is just… meh. The moment Odysseus comes to save his men, her character’s complexity just collapses into what I can only call a poor imitation of true feminist portrayals of Circe, which actually emphasize her wit and power. In the actual Odyssey, Circe gives no such “men are terrible” justification and Odysseus isn’t so direct. It’s much more subtle. Alex: Who was Circe again? Was she the one in fishnets? What did you think of the cyclops scene? Alex: It was totally gross and definitely awesome. I totally could have gotten out of there without the cyclops realizing, though. I feel like it couldn’t have been that hard. Professor S: I thought it was really interesting that Nolan introduced a language barrier to the interaction. It could have created a commentary on how people are dehumanized for speaking foreign languages, tying into themes of colonization. I wish Polyphemus had more scenes where he looked thoughtful or more intelligent. At the very least, Nolan could have shown that despite speaking and looking differently, both Polyphemus and Odysseus are intelligent beings able to communicate and trick each other. Instead, the foreigners are wholly monstrous with freaky eyes. Was the movie missing anything? Professor S: I was really happy with the inclusion of parts of The Iliad. The Odyssey is very much a sequel to The Iliad, and the fact that the story continues from after the Trojan War is very significant because scenes in The Odyssey relate directly back to The Iliad and refute things in it. Alex: Wait, there was a prequel? A lot of people online are discussing the inclusion of “Zeus’ Law” and Xenia. How does the online discourse impact your viewing of the film? Down Alex: Not at all, because I’m way too busy downing creatine and taking names to get involved in online dis- 1. Athletic games named for course. Mount Olympus Professor S: I wouldn’t have minded Nolan’s adaptation of Xenia into Zeus’ Law if Nolan hadn’t used the literal 3. Cornell’s city, said to be an kindergarten definition of empathy throughout the whole movie. We’re not back in kindergarten. Find a better way epic destination 4. Marge’s husband, or a to say it! “Act as if anyone is a god in disguise. Act as if gods are among you.” Something that sounds cooler! famous blind poet Alex: I totally agree with you, Professor Squidward. This Zeus guy sounds like a nerd. 5. Ancient Greek seminar leader

Crossword Puzzle: The Odyssey A puzzle to do during your awkward one-hour breaks in between classes ELIZABETH SCHEIBE CO-STRANDED EDITOR

10. Sparta, e.g. 12. Few can resist her call 14. Neptune, in ancient Rome 17. One taste makes home seem forgettable 19. Saga, in verse Across 20. Time, to 2. Setting of the Homer fourth Percy Jack- 22. First female son novel English translator 6. Platonic ideal of the Odyssey, 7. Penelope’s suit- 2017 ors fail to string 23. A popular this weapon female name,

or Greek for wisdom 25. Where one might find Calypso 26. Everyday wear for the ancient Greeks 31. 20 years later, he still recognized his master 32. God worshipped in the Edward Johnson Building 34. End of a university student’s

8. Helen’s city 9. Poetic tribute 10. Actor who moved from Forks to Ithaca 11. Moral principles central to Greek thought 13. Oscar-winning director, 2024 15. A student’s favourite deity after a long semester 16. Tutor of Alexander the Great 18. A commuter student’s modern odyssey, underground 20. Precursor to the Greek cosmos, visualized as fractals 21. A new student’s first campus adventure 24. Irrational Greek letter 27. Madeline Miller’s second novel 28. Beer is the specialty of this Greek student organization 29. Telemachus’s actor, or a region in the Netherlands 30. University student’s second home 33. By way of