It was creepy that Frank Miller felt it necessary to make the traitor Ephialtes a "freak." (There was a real Ephialtes who led the Persians to the goat path that allowed them to outflank the Greeks, but to my knowledge he was a peasant, not deformed.)
I wish there had been a little more attention paid to the significance of Ephialtes's story in 300. Being in the Phantom of the Opera fandom has really sensitized me to how issues of deformity are shown in films and other stories. Basically, Ephialtes is an "infanticide survivor," whose parents refused to kill him at birth even though he was seriously hunchbacked.
It's Leonidas's rejection of Ephialtes - and Ephialtes's acceptance by the Persian king - which leads to the Spartans' defeat. There was no room for Ephialtes in Spartan society, and yet the contradiction (fighting for "freedom," yet killing "the weak" at birth) isn't anywhere explored. In some ways raising the point and not running with it is worse than not raising it at all.
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I wish there had been a little more attention paid to the significance of Ephialtes's story in 300. Being in the Phantom of the Opera fandom has really sensitized me to how issues of deformity are shown in films and other stories. Basically, Ephialtes is an "infanticide survivor," whose parents refused to kill him at birth even though he was seriously hunchbacked.
It's Leonidas's rejection of Ephialtes - and Ephialtes's acceptance by the Persian king - which leads to the Spartans' defeat. There was no room for Ephialtes in Spartan society, and yet the contradiction (fighting for "freedom," yet killing "the weak" at birth) isn't anywhere explored. In some ways raising the point and not running with it is worse than not raising it at all.