Heroic BSOD/Myth, Legend and Folklore

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


When the gods themselves have a Heroic BSOD, we're all in trouble...

  • Achilles gets two of these. In The Iliad, he mopes around mourning for his BFF Patroclus until the ghost of Patroclus has to tell him to snap out of it and burn his body on a pyre. Later in the Trojan War, Achilles kills the Amazon Queen Penthesilea and then falls in love with her corpse. He is inconsolable for a while until he finally burns her body as well.
  • The oldest and probably most famous example of this is Arjuna, from the Mahabharata. He stops in the middle of the battlefield, overcome with distress that he is fighting against his own kin, and has to be talked out of it for hours by Krishna, who is his charioteer. This event forms the basis of the Gita, of course. Given that the battle involved approximately four million combatants on either side, that's pretty damn dramatic.
    • By some accounts Krishna STOPPED TIME during this occurrence and this is also considered by Hindus the moment where he reveals his divinity.

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