Miscellaneous Myths: Hades and Persephone

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