The Orpheus Myth is easily one of the sweetest in Greek Mythology. You’ve got a devoted husband willing to do whatever it takes to save his wife. But one often overlooked fact is that his wife was past saving. She wasn’t injured and waiting on a cure, she died and had found her place in the Underworld when Orpheus came and tried to bring her back to the living realm.

Like the Persephone myth, we never get Eurydice’s perspective here. Was she hopeful? Devastated when Orpheus glanced back at her? Would she have wanted him to risk everything to bring her back? Unlike the Persephone myth, I don’t have an issue with her lack of perspective because it makes the myth all the more realistic. When we lose someone, our thoughts and desperation and wishing for their return is one sided. We can speculate on what they would want us to do, but we’ll never know. Grief is for the living. Letting go isn’t about the other person, it’s about coming to terms with your own feelings.

He’d gone through hell for her, literally, only to mess up at the last second. I closed my eyes. Poor Orpheus.

Half-blood characters with super human characteristics have been a staple in mythology since the beginning of time. We used to call them demigods, but that’s not the only name they go by. Here’s a few other examples of my favorite semi-divine characters when I was growing up.

Super Heroes

Our modern equivalent of demigods. Think about it, they have an inmate sense of justice, their struggles impact the world at large, and they accomplish their goals with super human abilities. Even if they go by mutants or aliens or were bitten by radioactive spiders, some larger than life force set them into play. You could make the argument that superheroes are our modern pantheon. Especially with groups like the Avengers serving justice from their plane on high. There’s even classes (the actual avengers versus agents of shield), but I maintain they serve as demigods because most heroic origin stories show they are being moved about like pawns on a massive playing field by some higher power and they fight other beings or their monsters with even more divine powers. That the higher power is most often parents only goes to further serve my point.

Vampires

Vampires were kind of a huge thing when I was growing up and the demigod mythos made its way into a lot of stories. You’ve got Blade, half human, half vampire and divinely gifted with characteristics neither class had, you’ve got Buffy, a human gifted by a higher power to be stronger, faster, and overall more awesome, you’ve got the vampires themselves, which in a lot of versions of vampire stories were half human, half demon or some other larger than life force. And just about every book on vampires emphasized that they were in fact half human. It was the other that made them special, the humanness that made them relatable.

Fantastical Half-Breeds

I grew up on Dragonlance and Tanis Half-Elvin. In fantasy books there’s almost always a character that is half human, half something special. They don’t fully understand or fit in to either world, but they end up being highly influential pawns to both. Like vampires or super heroes, the human side of these characters and their struggle to fit in and find meaning resonate with us while the fantastical side of their genome fascinates us. It’s no wonder halflings are so popular in fiction.

The evolution of demigods in modern media is a really interesting one. It’s worth noting that Greek mythology didn’t often focus on the demigods struggle to fit in. That’s a modern inference that give the myths more meaning to us. I think it’s really interesting how we’ve adapted the myths to reflect that sense of isolation and alienation that almost everyone can identify with. Another fascinating thing to consider about our super-humans is what their super powers are. The traits we choose to make super human in our stories says a lot about the traits we value as a society. It used to be super strength and cunning was the standard. Now, many of our heroes are super wealthy, super intelligent (without the strength), super innovative (turning a perceived weakness into a strength), and super friendly (the role of friends and social support in our super stories is definitely a modern addition. Hercules and Achilles had friends, lovers, and families, but they didn’t play the same role in the stories that we focus on if we retell them.) What characteristics are you seeing in super beings of today and what do you think it says about our values as a society?

I get a lot of praise in reviews and editorials for how I handled the age difference between Hades and Persephone. There’s a reason. I lived it. My husband is five years older than me. We started dating when I was sixteen.

Yeah.

My husband and I work on a lot of levels, even more so now, but even back then we just clicked in ways that are hard to explain. At sixteen, I would have said it was because I was so mature when we met. I had a job that I balanced with my regular high school classes as well as the college courses I took at CSU. My mom went out of town for days at a time so I was completely responsible for getting myself ready, fed, and taken care of. I was responsible. I literally never drank, did drugs, smoked, partied. People called me mature and I believed them.

Then I turned twenty five and looked back. I did balance all of those things but I was also an entitled, bossy, brat who was way too stubborn, had an incredibly narrow perspective in life, believed everything was black and white, and expected way too much out of the people closest to me. I literally cringe when I think of myself back then. I don’t like the person I was much but I can’t regret her because that stubbornness, that inflated self worth and entitlement is actually probably why I didn’t collapse under the self doubt that dating someone older creates.

My husband and I worked. We balanced each other out. I was driven where he was aimless, he had perspective where I didn’t. My every fault seemed to be his strength and vice versa. But our relationship was by no means a walk in the park. The age difference came up. A lot. And not just by well meaning family or friends. But in literally every argument we had. I don’t remember how often I had to point out that no, fill in the blank (issue changed frequently) wasn’t stupid, or silly, or unimportant to me. Maybe I’d be past it one day but I wasn’t there yet and belittling it wouldn’t make that day happen faster it would just make me doubt myself. He was awesome about realizing that, by the way. It still came up a lot but he was at least aware of what he was doing and constantly self-correcting. And there were tons of issues where he had to point out, yeah, this is actually important, it just doesn’t feel like it to you yet. But we were lucky because we took the time to have those fights and come to those conclusions. But it was really hard to suss out which issues we were fighting about because of age and which issues we were fighting about because we actually did have completely opposing values and opinions on them. It took years. But that constantly having to defend yourself and analyze whether or not you’re upset about something because you’re being “immature” can crush you and it did crush many of my friends who dated older guys. Their every thought and feeling was constantly being invalidated by their more experienced counterpart. Their boyfriends weren’t being evil jerks, they weren’t trying to crush my friends’ confidence. They probably still don’t realize they did it. Go have a conversation with someone in a completely different life stage than you. Watch how long it takes for you to do the same thing or feel the same way. I’ll wait.

Back to those well meaning family and friends. That’s a whole other layer of pressure that you don’t want to add to a relationship. I’m not even going to pretend to speculate on the impact constantly having to defend himself against really horrible accusations had on my husband. I couldn’t vent about fights with my boyfriend for fear of getting an “I told you so.” I couldn’t ask advice. I couldn’t talk much about it at all. So guess who I could talk to? My older boyfriend. That put an entirely different level of strain on our relationship and it was isolating. Friends are a huge part of having a successful relationship and being a happy person. I’m part of a mom’s group now and I have a great circle of friends that I can talk to, vent with, and connect with on a level that you just can’t with your boyfriend or husband. It’s important. And I can measure how important having people to talk to other than him was to me as a teenager because after about a year about half of my friends who’d been so worried about me started dating older guys. So I had people to talk to about my boyfriend again.

But most of them weren’t so lucky. I’d only identify one of my friends boyfriends as a predator. The rest were just people. They weren’t sitting there, rubbing their hands and going “mwah-hah, I’m going to corrupt that one.” They didn’t seek out a relationship with a teenager. It just happened.

One of them ended up in an abusive situation, others slowly had their confidence eroded, a few ended up on the opposite side of the spectrum. Their boyfriends might not have made them feel small for being younger, but they spent their entire time in high school stressed to the breaking point about finances and jobs and professional relationships and in some cases kids. And I know there are a lot of high schoolers who have to worry about stuff like that and even more complex, adult issues in high school. But not because of a relationship.

Dating an older guy when you’re a teenager is complicated. People like to reduce it to extremes. Guys interested in teenagers are predators, plain and simple. There’s a reason they’re interested in someone so much less mature. Evil guy, girl victim. And I’m not saying that doesn’t happen. And it is absolutely something girls should be wary of and watch for warning signs. My point is even when it doesn’t. Even when the older guy is a genuinely nice human being who genuinely cares about you, even if every bit of your relationship is one hundred percent real, even if you are the mature and smart and strong and amazing person everyone keeps telling you that you are (by the way, all of my friends were all of those things), age differences make a relationship complicated. And I hope, I really, really hope, that I captured that in Persephone.

Hades gets a bad wrap in most retellings, and it’s easy to see why. Death and all that’s associated with it, make people uncomfortable. And to be fair, on a modern level, the myth most people know involving Hades features him kidnapping a maiden and bringing winter on the world.

But in Greek Mythology, Hades was actually a pretty nice guy when compared to most of his Olympian brethren so long as you didn’t try to mess with his realm or his wife (the Pirithous thing was an actual myth).

The portrayals of Hades that most likely influenced my writing were his counterparts in the Persephone retellings I wrote about before. But those are never explicitly Hades, so I’m sure these guys had a major influence on my version of Hades’ dark side.

Every Hades figure in every retelling I mentioned in this blog. It would be cheating to give you a list of all the exact same books and movies, but these were seriously the biggest influences on my perception of Hades growing up.

Disney’s Hercules

Smart, sassy, and undeniably evil, this version of Hades is like a more charismatic version of Scar from The Lion King. He was everywhere in my childhood. Hercules the movie, Hercules the TV show and just when I’d lost interest in those, he showed up as a recurring character in Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2. By far the most entertaining version of Hades, he’s still leagues away from the myth.

Satan

I was raised in the bible belt. When learning about Greek mythology, Hades was often compared to hell and its ruler to the devil himself. The two are linked in my mind and obviously the minds of many others, otherwise Hades wouldn’t feature so frequently as the primary antagonist in so many modern retellings.

It’s actually kind of interesting that Greek mythology’s Hades merged with the Christian devil because you see that happen so much in religious stories. Even in Greek mythology the gods are combinations of the Greek versions and the belief systems that predated them. Demeter is a great example of this, as is Pluto (the Roman “version” of Hades).

In that vein, Lucifer of Paradise Lost and of Dante’s Inferno. I majored in English, I had to do a lot with these two particular works. You can see my review of Paradise Lost here. I never got around to writing one for The Divine Comedy. Milton’s version of Lucifer was almost a sympathetic, highly intelligent, and somewhat sassy (for Milton) character. It’s easy to see where that influenced Disney, and to some degree me. Inferno used Hades for the underworld, borrowing very heavily from Greek mythology. The connection was very apparent and absolutely in my mind when I sat down and wrote Persephone.

The Justice League

Hades makes a few appearances in The Justice League. He’s pretty similar to Disney’s version with a bit of the devil from Dr. Faustus thrown in. He rules the Underworld as a punishment, is screaming and manipulative, loves to make tricky deals. Ect. Ect.

It’s no wonder when Clash of the Titans was rebooting they made Hades the antagonist. It’s no wonder when retelling myths so many portray Hades as the bad guy. And by the way, there is no wrong way to interpret Greek mythology from a modern lens. We vilify things that the ancient Greeks never would have and we praise things that the ancient Greeks never would have. We have a different perspective and a different cultural context. We don’t live in a vacuum, everything we see and hear influences both our telling and our reading of a story. So evil Hades isn’t actually inaccurate. He demonstrates a worldview we have when looking at the myths as do the retellings that feature him as a good guy. They’re all part of a puzzle that can be used to suss out the values and beliefs of the person telling the myth.