Okay, let´s not kid ourselves here
relationships in greek mythology are almost unilaterally
really bad
Zeus and Hera get some flag for Zeus´ non-stop adultering
with extremely unwilling mortals
and Hera subsequently punishing the innocent mortals involved
but that´s got NOTHING on the story of their actual marriage
which I will not be recounting here
because it´s so far fron consensual
there is rally no way for me to be funny about it
and "far from consensual" is a recurring theme in the mythos
Zeus, Poseidon and Appollo especially tend to
default to kidnapping when a pretty mortal
catches their eye
sometimes combined with their whole devine shapeshifting dealio
to trick or coerce these mortals into banging
If the mortal is lucky
they survive the process
and gain some superpowers or kick off a lineage of heroes
if not
they usually die horribly
SOme of Appollos famous lovers died tragically
after a fulfilling personal relationship with him
but most of them died tragically trying to outrun him
That is straight up fYoshi sound and everybody knows it!
Check almost any olympian gods list of lovers
and you´ll usually find at least one character
who super did´nt wanna be on that list
Yes
Even your favorites
Yes
Even olympian softboy Dionysus
And i will be the first to admit
that i gloss over a lot of this stuff
in my videos
And i do that
because it makes me incredibly uncomfortable
Can anybody blame me?!
It´s not like i´m the only one!
I grew up with a freakin picture book
that told me Zeus was a cool guy
who had cool kids that did cool stuff
I watched a disney movie about these people!
i don´t have an easy time reconciling the fact that these shining heroic figures
that inspired incredible stories
were characterized as absolutely garbage
in several very key ways
and when i do talk about that stuff
it feels disingenuous to talk about anything else
as if that first thing isn´t very much a deal-breaker
for finding the characters heroic or compelling
Basically every modern retelling or
reimagining of greek mythology
heavily sanitizes the stories in one way or another
The greek pantheon is given the same treatment
as most beloved problematic celebrities
We love it for the stories it gave us
and we pretend not to notice the part
where it won´t stop assaulting underage fans
Because that behaviour doesn´t fit the image
we have of it
And that´s because we, as a collective audience,
are primed to think of gods as good guys
And good guys don´t
do that kind of thing
that would make them
Bad Guys
And that is excactly why only one greek god
gets consistently held responsible for
these problematic behaviours
None other than Hades:
Lord of the dead and unjustified satan analog
most of our cultural bises,
which come from a pop-culture understanding of
christianity
which is the same source for the
"gods are necessarily a good thing"
our modern audience starts of
primed to hate this guy
Lord of the Underworld?
We all know what that means!
Cartooon-Lucifer, King of Hell,
token evil divinity, blatent bad guy!
easy -peasy
And he kidnapped his wife ?!
What an asshole!
No wonder nobody hangs out with this guy
MAn, what a jerk
Anyway
I just love Apollo!
He´s the hottest thing since hotness
And isn´t it tragic how many of
his ture loves die
...wonder why that keeps happening
When retelling, or reinterpreting ancient stories
in a modern context
we almost always end up cherrypicking the parts that make the most sense
to our modern worldview and sensibilities
and working around the parts that
suffer from the worst parts of the
culture clash
Ancient greek was pretty cool about a lot of stuff
but women for example
were not on that list
so from the modern perspective
when we look back at these original tellings
it´s very difficult to see Zeus doing his thing
and conclude anithing other
than that the King of the gods
is an ??? serial r*pist
who leaves a trail of shadowed lives
and bastard children in his wake
and this pantheon is a f*cking nightmare
But that is not the perspective
a contmeporary athenian would have had
it´s not the impact
contemporary storytellers would have
wanted to produce
and it is NOT the image most
modern writers want to attach to their
skyfather of the gods hero character
the idea that gods are supposed to be good
is coparatively new
For the ancient greeks
gods were a reflection rather of what was true
than what was ideal or morally right
Ancient greece was terrible to women
so that was reflectet in the gods
But to us
and our prevasive pop-culture christianity
deities and divinity adjacent figures
are more of paragons:
idealised representaions of goodness and virtue
So, when we try and applie this moralised perspective to the greek gods
we get some serious cognitive dissonance
so the adaptations usually end up buffing it out
Sure
in all but the most squeecky clean versions
Zeus is usually still cheating on hera
which from our societal perspective
Is typically seen as a much more forgivable crime
Especially if you also rewrite Hera
to be as deliberately unlikebly as possible
+ coughing*
The Romans
but most of Zeus trysts
get rwritten as affairs of the heart
because those are almost universally seen as
significantly less bad
than the non-consentual altenative
a distinction thaat did not exist in ancient greece
among other thing acnient greek art
used a lot of stock poses to signify major story beats
and there was literally no distinction
between the stock pose for kidnapping
and for marriage
same result, same concept
what registers as an uforgivable crime
to our eyes
wasn´t even recognised in the culture it came from
this specific culture clash is pretty significant
which is why this is the part that mostly
gets ignored, sanitized, or otherwise rewritten
for modern audiences
i mean unless you´re Hades
because fuck him, right?
We already hate that guy on principle!
There´s no need to clean up
his image so a modern audience will like him
In fact, maybe it´s bette if
we make him deliberately worse !
Just so people know who they should be rooting against !
So, with that lengthy and spicy
preamble out of the way
Let´s talk about
Hades and