This Is How It Feels to Take a Fall

So Daedalus is this amazing inventor - he has a knack for building the most amazing things. When Daedalus realizes that his nephew, Talus, might be a better inventor than he is, he pushes him out the window and kills him - though according to the legend, people aren't sure if he died, or turned into a partridge on the way down. Either way, Daedalus had done A Bad Thing, so he flees from his home to live on Crete, where he strikes up a friendship with King Minos. Daedalus continues to build and invent things while he is there, including things for the royal family. One of these things that he built was a a cow suit so that the Queen could...well... have relations with a bull. These relations resulted in the horrifying half-man-half-bull creature known as the minotaur. King Minos then asks Daedalus to build a labyrinth in which to hide the bull-human thing, and every nine years the king sends seven young men and women into the maze as sacrifice to his step son the half bull thing.

(Is it just me or does King Minos take this entire situation incredibly well?)

Anyway, one of these heroes who gets sent out into the labyrinth is Perseus, who the king's daughter, Ariadne, was in love with. Because she didn't want him to die in the maze, she begged Daedalus for help in saving him. He then gave Theseus a ball of yarn with which to use to get back out of the maze. So Theseus kills the minotaur, uses the yarn to exit the maze, and then he and Ariadne escape Crete together. King Minos is outraged that Daedalus would help him, so he locks him and his son Icarus up so that they can never leave Crete. Daedalus the magnificent inventor uses twine, wax and feathers to build large wings for him and his son so that they can escape by air aka the only escape route Minos can't guard against. Before giving Icarus his wings he warns him that he has to fly at medium height - if he goes too low then the ocean water will dampen the wings, and if he goes too high then the heat from the sun will cause them to melt. With that warning, they both strap on their wings and take off, amazing the people of Crete with their godlike ability to fly. Icarus enjoys flying too much and gets too cocky and so ends up flying too high, and like his father had warned him, his wings melted and he plummeted into the sea. Daedalus had to fly on until he eventually lands in Sicily, where he mourns his son and builds a temple to Apollo.

One reason why I wanted to do this story was because I really like the song Icarus by Bastille, which takes the common approach of cockiness and how Icarus was sure he'd be fine, even though his father had warned him not to fly too high. Most of the song doesn't refer directly to the story of Icarus, but rather can be taken as talking about people taking unnecessary risks and generally just living with what seems to be reckless abandon. I won't pretend to know everything that the song is attempting to convey, but it does seem to address the idea of risk. Obedience, however, doesn't play as much of a role in it, mostly because when I think of the story I don't really think of it as being in regards to how Icarus was disobedient to his father - I think of it as him being so taken with his ability to fly that he thought that anything was possible. While there is disobedience, as he didn't heed his father's warnings, it was also just the childish thought that nothing could happen to him. He was flying high - quite literally - and the idea that anything bad could happen to him was far from his mind. So he wasn't really trying to disobey Daedalus - even if he did. This feeling is something that many people share, especially as teenagers. Bad things may happen, but we're on top of the world and the idea that our actions could have consequences is not something we think about.