Jun 28, 2026 · 38 min · 12 segments
Tansy’s Hot Cup of History essay series continues with the real history behind some of Xena’s greatest hits. This month, to prepare yourselves for Christopher Nolan’s *The Odyssey*, we have a…
Tansy Rayner RobertsHostI'm, and even more so as a teenager, I was one of life's list makers, rule followers, continuity questioners.
So the idea of deliberately allowing a chaotic montage of ancient world stories to just happen in no particular order, it was upsetting.
I kind of wonder what direction I would have gone in as a writer if not for the winning appeal of Xena.
Because it did, yeah, it challenged me at just the right time to question a lot of things about what is set in stone and what is not.
And now, as many of you may know, I am a creator who takes extreme liberties with classic stories on a regular basis.
Sometimes you have to throw out accuracy and lean into vibes, especially when the task is as impossible as make a coherent timeline out of a story cycle that was never intended to be coherent.
So one of the equivalents I often fall back on when talking about ancient myths is the other big shared story universe, or the two of them in our pop culture world, DC and Marvel Comics.
Except, of course, that there is at least an attempt for coherence to some extent with the comics companies, being that there's a level of control over what they publish.
Though I do enjoy that in recent years DC Comics has thrown it all out the window and just, yeah, covered their chronology with shrug emojis.
So how DC Comics used to handle this was by rebooting its universe every 10 years to try and make sense of things.
And generally what happened was that it flattened out the stories and took away the interesting bits.
Marvel comics, you would compress time to pretend that the characters really do have 50 or 75 years of relationship history while never getting older than 30.
A sprawling mythical universe can't be expected to follow the same rules as an original story that follows maybe one, maybe ten characters.
So, the mythic shared universe of ancient Greece was built ad hoc over centuries by countless storytellers, sculptors, playwrights, painters of pottery.
Of course, you can't now tame it into a coherent single-line narrative, not without losing most of what makes it awesome.
I'm, and even more so as a teenager, I was one of life's list makers, rule followers, continuity questioners.
So the idea of deliberately allowing a chaotic montage of ancient world stories to just happen in no particular order, it was upsetting.
I kind of wonder what direction I would have gone in as a writer if not for the winning appeal of Xena.
Because it did, yeah, it challenged me at just the right time to question a lot of things about what is set in stone and what is not.
And now, as many of you may know, I am a creator who takes extreme liberties with classic stories on a regular basis.
Sometimes you have to throw out accuracy and lean into vibes, especially when the task is as impossible as make a coherent timeline out of a story cycle that was never intended to be coherent.
So one of the equivalents I often fall back on when talking about ancient myths is the other big shared story universe, or the two of them in our pop culture world, DC and Marvel Comics.
Except, of course, that there is at least an attempt for coherence to some extent with the comics companies, being that there's a level of control over what they publish.
Though I do enjoy that in recent years DC Comics has thrown it all out the window and just, yeah, covered their chronology with shrug emojis.
So how DC Comics used to handle this was by rebooting its universe every 10 years to try and make sense of things.
And generally what happened was that it flattened out the stories and took away the interesting bits.
Marvel comics, you would compress time to pretend that the characters really do have 50 or 75 years of relationship history while never getting older than 30.
A sprawling mythical universe can't be expected to follow the same rules as an original story that follows maybe one, maybe ten characters.
So, the mythic shared universe of ancient Greece was built ad hoc over centuries by countless storytellers, sculptors, playwrights, painters of pottery.
Of course, you can't now tame it into a coherent single-line narrative, not without losing most of what makes it awesome.
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