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Myths are important to me. Growing up, we had the Jujuboori and Flim-flam, two creatures my Dad made up to get us to behave in the car. To me, I saw the former as a fox, the latter was a giant dragonfly. My sisters and brother probably had entirely different interpretations of what these creatures were, but it doesn’t change the fact that still to this day they live on in our imagination, connected by memories. (Aside, my Dad gets bonus points for inventing a made-up creature called the Flim-flam, a phrase which means nonsense, convincing enough that I’m even writing about it today.)
The reason I’m bringing up these childhood memories is because Hades 2 just launched into Early Access. It’s intoxicating, genre-defining, bold, and entirely itself. Yet for some reason there’s a whole bunch of people out there castigating it for alternative character design choices, turning their noses up at the fact that Hestia is a black woman or yapping that the game’s disregard for Greek myth is queer propaganda.
I’ve already said my piece about these buffoons, which lets me focus on the ‘disregard for myth’ bit. I raised a point earlier about a shared mythos because the characters of mythos are not real. Zeus did not birth Athena from his cracked skull, Heracles probably didn’t capture Cerberus, and there’s only a slim chance that Chronos ate all of his children before castrating himself. Like those tales, I know my Dad’s creature myths are not real either, but they very well live on for those who heard them.
The reason a myth resonates is not because Odin’s eyepatch is cool, nor is it that Aragorn has a swanky sword, but it’s because these are very real archetypes that are hard to ignore. Let’s look at Hephaestus, for example. The God of Smithing is often depicted as commandeering, strong, and stern. Like the rest of the Olympians, he’s often more ripped than a Rob Liefeld character, and at this point, is often indistinguishable from the rest of the gods save for his hammer.
Compare that then to how Hephaestus is depicted in Hades 2. He’s tender, uses a wheelchair, and is larger than others. You are right, this isn’t how the myth is normally presented. And that’s the reason it works so well.
If Supergiant Games wanted to make their characters generic and boilerplate (forgettable, in other words) they wouldn’t have made Hades 2. Instead, they would have turned it into a live-service shooter. The design behind all of the characters in Hades speaks to a new myth of gods, Olympians who reflect the people of our time, rather than the people of old. Supergiant’s Hephaestus design does exactly that, and then some. He’s also got a fantastic Yorkshire accent, and is adorned with a prosthetic leg fit for a god.
The Hades 2 interpretation of Aphrodite also has its own flavour. One thing I’ve really appreciated so far is that she has a thing for Charon, the Ferryman. This is a tiny addition, but it adds to the texture of the game in a way that sticking to the source material could never have allowed. Before, she would have been the Goddess of Love, but now she’s the Goddess of Love Who, Ironically, Wants Someone She Can’t Ever Have.
Myths are not a rule to be abided by at all times, but a framework of storytelling that is meant to be shuffled and distorted. Take Neil Gaiman’s American Gods as another example, in which Odin is a heavy metal biker with a foul mouth. This directional change, like six-pack Hecate or the older interpretation of Hestia, lets the characters become something new entirely, devoid of the sanctions and regulations of traditional myth.
If the importance of new myths is still under question, just take a look back at all the media throughout history. There’s enough versions of the Olympians out there for you to enjoy the typical myths already, though now we’ve got a version we haven’t seen before. It’s attractive, refreshing. It’s definitely iconic. And on top of all that, it plays out in emphatic fashion. Oh, and there’s no incest.
I’ll bring it back to the point I made about my Dad’s myths. If I was to call up my older sister now and tell her the Flim-flam was a rabbit with daggers for teeth, she would probably believe me. The myth wouldn’t change, though. It would still mean the same thing to her, just as it does to me. You can rewrite a myth as much as you want, just as Hades 2 does, but at the core of it all the archetypal stories remain unchanged, and that’s why the game works so well.
