Schliemann dug straight through the actual Troy that he was looking for, destroying a huge chunk of it to get to an even earlier settlement in the strata beneath that he decided to call Troy. His "method" was essentially do dig a trench all the way to the bottom, assuming that the oldest level would be Troy. (Yes...he was that stupid).

It was only afterwards that other, actual archaeologists placed the proper stratum that the homeric Troy would have existed in. And by then, much of it was already obliterated.

I majored in Near Eastern Classical Archaeology with a focus on the Bronze age (Hittites, Minoans, Mycenaeans, Babylonians, etc...), and lesson one may as as well have been titled "Why Heinrich Schliemenn was an asshole."

This is an incredibly disingenuous reply so I'm not even going to do it the dignity of a fully-fleshed response.

All I need to say is that if you seriously read my comment as saying that the Odyssey is completely reliable history with little to no flaws or embellishments in its writing, then it sounds like you should take a course on media literacy.

I’m going off of what real historians have hypothesized, not just baseless rhetoric. Nor am I claiming that the legends themselves are wholly factual (though as I’ve said it’s definitely possible to be partly the case). Feel free to read the Wikipedia article on it and draw your own conclusions.

Personally, I think it would be absurd if it were the case that in Late Bronze Age Greece — in or around the Bronze Age Collapse — they chose Troy (evidently not even a Greek setting) specifically to be the setting of an oral war story without there being a material reason for it, however minor. But that’s just me obviously.

Addendum (This is somewhat unrelated but still important to bring up): I think it's honestly quite offensive to compare an entire cultural heritage's creation to relatively simple blockbuster films made not even a couple decades ago. You're comparing a cultural creation brought about in the midst of an entire mythos, through countless generations, to a few simple narratives; the origins of which can be found not even a century ago. Not only is it a false equivalence, it's downright ignorant if not explicitly ill-intended. One was made through the contributions of several minds over hundreds of years through the sole intent of participating in a rich communion of ideas; the others were made, fundamentally, with the intention of turning a profit. It's belittling and ethnocentric to pretend that they're equivalent in any form.