I'm apparently still irritated about bad characterizations of Hades

Am I the asshole? Well, OK, yes. But—but—

I feel bad for how I unloaded on a friend recently. I don’t need to ask, “Was I the asshole?”, because I’m pretty sure I was. Or at least, I was certainly the pedant.

Ordinarily I don’t have a lot of patience for pedants. Lighten up! Fandom is fun. (For it was in the subject of fandom that this debate took place.) But when it comes to this particular subject…well.

OK. Instead of converting it all into an essay, I will simply give you the pertinent portions of our conversation, as we each wrote them. I’ve been corresponding with this friend, who we’ll call A, for a couple of decades now. A is a professor and a world traveler, and smarter than me on just about everything, and we like to geek out together about fandom and travel and politics and writing. On occasion, though, we stumble into a topic that gets one of us all up in arms.

Here is what went down, excerpted from our emails.

A: I think it must be a lot of fun for actors to play characters (especially villains) when the characters are already so hammy themselves that there are no limits on how over-the-top hammy the actor can be. Look how every actor who plays Hades seems to be having a wonderful time.

M: Funny thing about Hades as a role is that all those hammy actors are doing it wrong, in terms of actual Greek mythology, in which Hades is depicted as taciturn and somber but, on the whole, a lot more reasonable and less bloodthirsty than most of his siblings. But yes—pagan gods in general usually do get to be gloriously over-the-top!

A: I don’t know if there is a canonical way to play Hades. The figures of Greek myth were something like the characters of the Marvel universe, going through multiple iterations and versions in multiple media. Imagine, instead of a bit over half a century for the Marvel characters, you have half a millennium to work with (more, if you count the Roman versions), and you can play Hades pretty much however you want. Artistic freedom!

M: I was super shorthand in my assessment of “playing Hades wrong,” because I spent probably ten years of my life immersed in Greek (and Roman) mythology, with a focus on Hades, Persephone, and the other Underworld folk. I’ve written reams about it already. But to go longer-hand:

You are correct that there’s no one “original myth,” and I’ve gotten on people’s cases before for trying to say there is. Which is why I didn’t say “in the original myth”; I said “in actual Greek mythology,” by which (and this was definitely not clear in my shorthand) I meant “all the ancient mythology we know about,” and yes, I do in fact include the Romans in that. The majority of famous figures in Greek mythology are decidedly drama kings and queens—or both [or yet a different category], if you’re Tiresias or Hermaphroditus—but Hades pretty much never is.

But why take my word for it? Behold Theoi.com’s splendidly thorough file on Hades, a compendium of quotes about him from all the ancient sources, ranging from 8th century BC Greek to 2nd century AD Roman. Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Plato, Ovid, Seneca, and lots more. Nowhere in that entire file does Hades cackle like the Wicked Witch of the West, babble gleefully like the Mad Hatter, or have blue flames for hair.

Disney has a lot to answer for. (Their version of Hades, in Hercules, who later became the model for their version of Hades in Once Upon a Time and other media.)

He is portrayed in a remarkably consistent way over all those sources and centuries: quiet, somber, scary (to mortals, because he can punish the dead), powerful, and overall something of an enigma. Or a taboo—in some of those times, no one dared bring him up (nor Persephone) because they didn’t want to attract the attention of the gods of the dead. (Though note he isn’t the god of Death, aka the actual personification of death. That’s Thanatos. Hades is just the god of The Dead, and of The Underworld.)

Yes, totally, you can play Hades any way you like, legally speaking. The whole mythology has been public domain forever. But if you change his essential personality, you’ll have people like me being annoyed that you seemingly didn’t do your research. Or else did your research and then went, “Nah, I’m disregarding all that and going a different direction.”

TL;DR: Hades actually is pretty consistently characterized throughout all the known Greco-Roman mythology, and that characterization is not one that chews the scenery like the over-the-top interpretations do.

I guess there’s a continuum every person falls somewhere on, regarding how faithful to canon it’s desirable to be, when writing fanfic or retellings. In my mind, if you’ve entirely changed the character’s personality, then it isn’t even the same character anymore. It’s just a new character who happens to have the same job and the same name as the canon character. Which isn’t flat-out wrong to do, but…I feel some footnotes are in order regarding the changes made.

A: Oh dear. I am a mere Hades amateur!

M: I’m a generalist rather than a specialist in almost all ways; a dabbler in nearly everything. But Hades and Persephone and their colleagues are one of the few subjects I’ve gone fairly deep into research on—and I did so, before writing my trilogy* about them, precisely because I didn’t want people who were experts in the subject matter to read it and think, “This author didn’t even do her research.” 😄 Even so, I’m sure some people who read my books did think my versions were out of character, by their standards. Thus I find it an interesting question: what counts as authentic in retellings, and how much leeway each fan is willing to give.

I think it also has a lot to do with how much each fan cares about (or knows about) the canon. I didn’t mind all the changes the show Lucifer undoubtedly made to biblical canon, for instance, because I really don’t care that much what original biblical canon says (not that anyone can agree on what original biblical canon even is). But I have a deep fondness for the Greek myths and their archetypes, which makes me pickier about how people characterize those.

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There ends our discussion, for the time being. Today I’ll add this much, now that I’m thinking further about it:

The reason people just swallow these sly, evil, unhinged (incorrect) versions of Hades is, I believe, largely because of the heavy Christian bias in our culture. A god who lives under the earth in a gloomy cave with the souls of the dead? If you don’t happen to know Greek mythology very well, then, hmm, who does that sound like?

Dana Carvey as the Church Lady on Saturday Night Live: “Could it be…SATAN???”

This has been driving me crazy for years.

Hades is not Satan. Not even close. For one thing, he’s not evil—or at least, no more evil than the other Greek gods, and arguably even better behaved than most of them. He doesn’t cause the evil that happens on Earth, either. In fact, he rarely interferes with the living at all, which is far more than we can say for just about every other Greek deity.

For another thing, the Underworld is not hell—or at least, it’s not JUST hell. Hades receives all the dead, from heroes to villains, royals to servants. The Greek equivalent of heaven, hell, purgatory, and all the other afterlife options are contained under his roof (though the geographic features of the Underworld do not actually make for tidy Christian analogues either). He is the king of the Underworld, but he is not the devil. You want horrific behavior more akin to the usual view of Satan, look to Ares (god of war), or even Zeus, king of the gods and seemingly also king of raping everyone he fancies, lying about it, and not caring if they die as a result, all of which happens a disturbing amount in the myths.

So yeah. Disney (and others) have a lot to answer for in their characterization of Hades, and apparently I’m still ticked off about it. But I guess I have been pedantic enough on the topic and can stop now. For this week, at least.

What do you think? Not about me being a pedantic asshole—that much is established—but about how much a retelling is allowed to change a canonical character’s personality. Is there a point at which it’s no longer the same character? Does it matter if they go that far, as long as the result is enjoyable?

* My trilogy of novels based on Hades and Persephone: Persephone’s Orchard and its sequels