YMMV / Euripides

• Fridge Brilliance: Why did he feel the need write an Author Tract about Human Sacrifice? Because the Celts were on the rise in Europe.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: According to Plutarch, after the Athenian invasion to Sicily failed, a lot of the captives were released for teaching the locals what they remembered from Euripides' plays.
• Genre Turning Point: He pioneer many stage and narrative techniques for tragedy. In fact, it was his plays that were studied by scholars that led to the birth of the Renaissance as a whole and tragedy in particular. Some notable techniques that he introduced and was hugely influential included:
  • The framing of heroes as ordinary, relatable people under extraordinary circumstances.
  • The focus on female and minority characters as figures of pity and tragedy.
  • The comedic elements within Tragedy. Most notably, his main characters are as equally be the butt of a joke as everyone else while his contemporaries if they employ comedy within tragedy is relegated to background characters.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Hera filling Herakles with a homicidal rage simply because he's one of Zeus' many bastard children.
  • Atreus feeding Thyestes his [Thyestes'] own children.
• Periphery Demographic: His plays are incredibly popular with women and especially feminists. Not surprising considering the fact that, unlike his contemporaries, his works consistently have women of all ages and social classes in major and meaty role with complex personality and relatable characters flaws. And of course, one of the most famous tragic heroines is from one of his works.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: His play The Trojan Women did this to many of the (flat) background female characters of the Trojan war mythology while boosting up the popularity of old favorite Cassandra. The most prominent examples are Hecuba, Andromache and Helen who went from Satellite Character to the lead in their titular plays.
• Values Dissonance:
  • The satyrs think nothing of gang-raping Helen. This is played for laughs.
  • Believe it or not, he was considered a misogynist according to his contemporaries.
• Values Resonance: His extensive focus on female characters (specifically minority and low-born women) and recognize their tragedy as heroines or villains have earned him a lot more popularity to a modern audience compare to his contemporaries.
• Vindicated by History: His work was very divisive among his contemporaries due to his frequent subversion and deconstruction of established convention (he added a third actor on-stage) and unusually prominent female characters, not to mention frequently calling out his current government and culture for their treatment of women and minorities. His having eighteen-nineteen plays survive, compared to the seven each to Aeschylus and Sophocles, indicate that after his death Euripides was more popular than the playwrights he frequently lost to. In the modern times, he is often celebrated as one of the more-modern playwrights of his time, and his values seen as more progressive than many of his contemporaries.
• The Woobie: This is Greek mythology. Woobies are twenty an obolos.