#Hades

The future of Greek Mythology

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The concluding chapter of my manuscript THE INVENTION OF GREEK MYTHOLOGY involves the future of Greek Mythology.

If, as I argue, Greek Mythology is endlessly inventive of itself, what new things will it create as we go into the heart of the 21st century?

That led me down the rabbit hole of the Hades video game and its twitch.tv streamers.

It’s not exactly the future, because this is a trend that has gone on for some time, but it is noteworthy that video games include some of the most intricate storylines you’ll find in modern American entertainment.

And Twitch is a fairly new phenomenon, where you watch streamers with impressive multitasking skills play various games online. You can subscribe (for a fee) to their channels to interact with them as they stream.

In the Hades game, you become the character Zagreus, the son of Hades, who as a kind of rebellious adolescent wants to escape the Underworld and venture all the way to Mount Olympus.

Hades is definitely one of those games where you spend a lot of time as Zagreus shooting things and making them explode, aided by a number of different special abilities and artifacts gifted by the Olympians, who are rooting for Zagreus to escape his father’s control.

The graphics are pretty spectacular, though I will confess it looks a little like an arcade game I used to watch people play in college, a 2-D alien invasion game called Defender.

It’s a stretch, I know, but you can see the evolution.

I was first introduced to Twitch through the chess channels of Ben Feingold and John Bartholomew. I love watching people play chess online because there are no bright lights, sounds of explosions, and other things that addle my brain.

I can’t take a whole lot of actually watching Zagreus shooting people with kickass bow and arrow and lightning bolts borrowed from Zeus. But the streamer Courtney Viney has also got an amazing gift of gab and is a minor celebrity in the Hades universe, having provided voice-overs for two of the characters.

Beyond Twitch, there are other compelling things about the game.

Zagreus is not a mainstream Greek mythological character, nor is he easy to pin down in any genealogy or taxonomy of divinities from ancient sources. He is alternatively a son of Hades, son of Persphone and Zeus, and, in a few places, another form of Dionysus.

In the game, he is the son of Hades and Persephone, which finesses the mainstream view that Hades, being a god of death, is not going to create new life with his wife. Persephone also is seen in early Greek myths as perpetually a teenager just on the verge of getting married. She is not seen as a mother in any of the mainstream sources.

So there are liberties taken by the game creators. But lack of consistency in stories, names, and roles is completely normal—as we see from the various differing uses of the Zagreus name even in ancient times.

Greek myths riffed off of themselves. So if the future is more variability, it will simply be a continuation of the past.

And there’s one more thing that points to the future: diversity.

You have to be a little disappointed that, as usual, the hero of the Greek Mythology story is a white man with a British accent.

But, as gaming journalist Ash Parrish points out, there is actually quite a bit of diversity in the game:

Athena is a dark-skinned Black woman. Dionysus is south Asian. Hermes is east Asian. Eurydice, my favorite, is a Black woman crowned with a beautiful afro made from the branches and canopy of a tree.

The creators of Hades very deliberately decided on this type of setup, again, according to Parrish:

“We knew going into Hades that we wanted this to be the story of a big dysfunctional family set in the Underworld of Greek myth, told from the Underworld’s point of view… As we discussed and researched the Olympians from canon sources, something stood out that in retrospect was obvious: They’re called the Greek gods because they were worshiped in ancient Greece, not because they themselves are ethnically Greek.”

Parrish goes on accurately to note the multicultural aspects of the Greek world:

Greece sits in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. Through trade and war, ancient Greeks came into contact with all sorts of ethnically diverse people, with Africa to the south and Asia to the east. Cultures blended, as did religions and families.

Spot on, Ash!

There’s another reason why it makes sense from an artistic point of view for the characters in the Hades game (and all interpretations of Greek Mythology) to be diverse: Shakespeare.

For a very long time now, Shakespeare’s plays have been put on with scripts that are more or less faithful to the original, but which have casts, settings, and costumes that depart radically from the old Globe Theater’s “men in tights” origins.

Shakespeare’s stories are considered “classic,” “timeless,” “universal,” and many other adjectives that are also applied to Greek Mythology. Shakespeare is all about the essence of humanity. So there’s no reason why anyone should object to the casting of any race of person or any setting or costuming that makes sense for the story. 

Same for Greek Mythology.

When there is a big-budget film of the Iliad that has not only the gods and goddesses as people of color (as in Troy, Fall of a City) but also the human characters, then I think we will see something of the full potential of Greek Mythology as the universal, timeless set of stories that belong to all of us