Transcript for:
Greek Mythology in Hades Game

there's always been a lot of crossover between video games and mythology and i don't think i've ever come across a game that manages to bridge this gap nearly as well as hades if you've come here wanting to know if hades is good i can answer that one pretty quickly yes it is however this video isn't going to focus at all on any of the more stereotypical reviewable aspects of the game and instead we're going to focus exclusively on the mythology that it's based upon and all the lore surrounding it very simply in this video we're going to go through virtually everything that hades has to offer bit by bit really looking into the actual tangible mythology behind each individual element in doing this i'm hoping to achieve three things one that we'll be able to really gain a comprehensive understanding of what informed the choices supergiant made in their creative process two we'll be able to see how closely the myth in the game matches pre-existing established mythology and most importantly three we'll hopefully learn a fair bit of fun stuff along the way too so think of this video as like a hades specific greek myth crash course if you played hades and at any point wondered at all about any of the stories characters locations or weapons depicted in it my hope is that you'll be able to find all the info you would ever need right here in this video that being said i'm sorry to keep you waiting but there's just a few more things i need to mention before we dive in firstly this video will contain spoilers i don't think we can consider any of the mythology itself as a spoiler really but hades has an exceptional narrative that is definitely worth experiencing for yourself and this video will spoil the events of that narrative in order to adequately cover every topic so if you don't want to be spoiled here's your warning secondly i'd like to set out the structure of the video to make it a bit easier to understand as you'll know if you've played hades there's an in-game codex providing a wee bit of additional info for everything you come across as you play i'm going to be using this codex as a guide meaning that for the most part i will cover topics in this video in the same order in which they appear in the codex as you can see this video is pretty long and as such each individual part will be time stamped in the description meaning that if you want to skip through only watch certain bits or even re-watch a previous bit after learning about another related piece of myth the option is there to make it a bit easier for you it's also worth noting that canonically in the game all the codex entries are written by achilles but we'll learn more about that later anyway sorry to keep going on but i need to bring up two more things firstly i need to mention how i'm going to approach the analysis and say ahead of time that it's all going to depend on context nearly everything i talk about will be based at least initially upon material that exists within the game but when we come to external resources we'll be looking at some more kind of ancient sources some more informal stuff and even other more contemporary iterations of the myths in question it will all depend on what's being said so no two sections will be the same and finally i need to clarify that i am not an expert or an academic i do have a real interest in this stuff and i spend a lot of time reading about it but there's every chance i'm wrong on certain bits here and there i've researched everything to the best of my ability but if there's any mistakes or i missed something out i'm sorry about that anyway i think that's it i appreciate your patience in letting me get all let out and now we can finally jump in and get started it's only appropriate that our analysis begins with the game's very own namesake hades so when i'm looking at a character like hades there are four main things i'm interested in all of which are based on what you can find in the game one this is the most basic one who are they what are they like two appearance and design are there any aesthetic elements worth mentioning any sort of iconography specific to that character that you can find in the game's art three the information given in the game regarding that character be it dialogue relationships with other characters or any allusions to myths or stories throughout the narrative relevant to the character in question and four this is the crux of the whole video how well does all of the above stand up to the actual mythology are the portrayals accurate or not do they line up with our collective understanding of that character and ultimately for every point made is their mythological precedent for what's brought up so who is hades in greek myth hades is the god of the dead the king of the underworld he isn't the god of death however that's thanatos but we'll get to him soon the game depicts hades as being pretty grumpy if we're going to put it nicely he's short with everyone around him better his endless workload and unless directed at persephone has a disregard for affectionate behavior as evidenced by his reaction here is zagreus pets cerberus this lines up pretty nicely with the ancient understanding of hades 2. the game states that his name inspires fear and penitence which is totally true because back in the day it was pretty common to euphemize in order to avoid invoking his name directly two examples for you the first is polydagmon sometimes rendered as polydectes meaning something like one who receives many you might recognize the poly at the beginning which is used all the time in english to have the same meaning of many like in polygon polytheism and so on this was arguably most famously used by eascalis and his tragedy prometheus bound but it still isn't as well known as the next euphemism which is pluton essentially meaning the wealthy one this one always seems to bring about a bit of confusion nowadays because it's so similar to the name of another god plutos who was the god of wealth in greek myth but it is worth reinforcing that at this point these two were not yet the same god by the time we got to roman myth and hades became pluto the line between pluton and plutos was much more blurred in the game there are a few instances in which hades possessing enormous wealth is brought up and you can see in these two examples one saying he has wealth beyond imagining and the next calling hades god of the dead god of riches this last one is tricky because you could argue if you were being predicated about it that hades wasn't technically the god of riches as we've just discussed but i think that's being a bit harsh because he did still have dominion and possession over everything within the earth otherwise he wouldn't have been named pluton plus by all accounts this name was in pretty regular use when discussing hades probably the most commonly used euphemism for him starting around the 5th century bc and even being used in the works of plato and sophocles so it's fair to say that his wealth was a well-ingrained part of his myth but anyway back to the original point it's a relatively throwaway phrase but the game is literally dead on the name of hades itself was enough to inspire fear it's worth mentioning though despite having some antagonistic traits hades isn't inherently evil in mythology or in this game i think the depiction of hades and disney's hercules did the collective understanding of the character absolutely no favors in that regard because hades in mythology was all about balance rather than vengeance that isn't to say that there isn't precedent implying that hades was displeased at his lot in life and in game megara does mention the bonds between hades and the other olympians as fraying we'll discuss how hades ended up in the underworld a bit more in the poseidon section anyway having just discussed his wealth let's look closer at his design because the link there is clear he's covered in gemstones we don't need any additional analysis there we already get that two things that are worth mentioning though are his beard and the skull on his shoulder let's start with the beard specifically the shape of it the iconography here is probably the most ubiquitous within the game the logo if you will that is specific to the underworld and hades in particular looking at the keepsakes i think we can just call it the sigil of the dead to make it a bit easier you can find it everywhere in the house of hades on achilles clasp on the coins you pick up and i'm pretty sure that's just made up for this game in the sense that you won't find this particular piece of imagery in greek mythology that being said i'm almost certain it's supposed to represent the weapon most associated with hades in myth the bident it's a weird word much less common than trident but it's as it sounds it's just a two-pronged spear look at this artwork for example it's technically of pluto but the point is the same he's depicted specifically with the biden some people also think this might be the reason why the devil is sometimes depicted with a pitchfork one mythology bleeding into another but i don't have anything concrete to back that up it's just cool to think about i really like that they chose the biden to represent hades in the game especially considering it's what he wields when you fight him and it has a definite historical precedent as for the skull on his shoulder we're gonna slightly veer off the hades path and discuss something else super interesting typhon zagrius asks hades about the skull and he replies that he did not chronicle all typhon's wretched offspring and shortly after zagreus calls him the most hideous monstrosity of all time which isn't the glowing endorsement typhon was hoping for so let's digress a bit it's not about hades but it's far too interesting not to mention although i'll try to keep it shortish who was typhon according to hesiod a greek poet who will come up a lot in this video typhon was the child of the primordial gods gaia and tartarus we'll discuss primordial gods in the next section and is for sure considered one of the most mental monstrosities ever to show up in greek mythology there are too many varied descriptions of his appearance to conclusively make a point about it but my favorite description is from apollodorus who said typhon was so huge that his head brushed the stars that dragon heads protruded from his hands and vipers coiled his thighs here's a piece of art from 1619 that gives life to this description typhon was nightmarish enough on his own but he was also famous for consorting with fellow monstrosity echidna yes the animal is named after her by the way and producing pretty much every fearsome creature in the entirety of greek myth this is what hades was referring to it's a bit harsh of him to call all their offspring wretched especially considering that his wee dog cerberus was also one of their children as for the specific creature the skull came from i don't know because i highly doubt that it's based off an actual monster nonetheless i love the reasoning behind the design and it's really fun to bring typhon into the mix narratively considering the importance of the parts their monstrous children play throughout greek myth the only other main thing about hades that i haven't discussed yet and that won't come up later is the helm of darkness you only see this when you're about to fight him and zagreus mentions it the first time you reach the hades fight saying that he's touched that he would dust it off on his account the helm of darkness almost sounds too high fantasy to actually be in greek mythology but it is it's just sometimes called other things like the helm of hades or the cap of invisibility which does exactly as it says on the tin and is the reason why sometimes during the hades fight he just vanishes for a few seconds according to the biblioteca a compendium of myths compiled either in the centuries before or after zero a.d depending on who you ask the helm of darkness was made for hades specifically by the cyclopes to aid in the titanomachy which is the name for the war between the titans and the gods again something we'll discuss in a bit more length later on it's pretty interesting to think about mythological artifacts like this and the knock-on effect that they've had through the medium of storytelling the helm of darkness is pretty cool and has likely influenced magical headwear through the ages as silly as that sounds from other mythologies to modern day fantasy a more concrete example of this happening can be found if you look at the ring of jaijis a magical ancient artifact brought up chiefly in plato's republic which would grant the wearer invisibility just like the helm of darkness i don't know if there's a link between the two but there might be does that sound familiar though a ring granting invisibility whether or not there's a link between tolkien and plato is up for debate but here's something else worth considering it's well known that tolkien was an expert in old norse and based a lot of his writing on that branch of myth if we're still talking rings the one from norse mythology that pops into my mind is the anveronite or andvaris gift a cursed ring that would bring misfortune upon its bearer again i'm not saying there's definitely a link but it's worth thinking about right this is why mythology is so fascinating anyway i think we spent more than enough time with hades i should move on or this video will literally never end i see i appreciate your candor nevertheless i thank you i do not know how you accomplished what you did but know that i'm grateful for the outcome even if i fail to act like it most of the time next up is nyx easily one of the best characters in the game and almost definitely my favorite design as her description makes clear nicks is knight incarnate a physical embodiment of the concept of knight you would describe nyx as a primordial deity pretty much all of whom represent a realm or at least some sort of large-scale idea the first primordial deity was chaos who has a whole section later on from chaos sprung nicks gaia the earth and also tartarus and erebus who as you know if you've played the game are better known as locations but we'll get to that further down the line there's a bit more to it than that these primordial gods as the name suggests predate the gods that make up the olympian pantheon that most people are familiar with by a long while essentially having been around since the dawn of time this is something the game brings up a fair amount and can be seen in how hades and nix interact hades may be in charge but by no means is next lesser to him than she is not to be trifled with lines of dialogue like this are why she's such a good character interestingly it isn't brought up in the game but this formidable nature of hers also extended as far as zeus the king of the gods who feared and revered nix but we'll get to that when we discuss hypnos one other thing worth bringing up is another word to describe all of the gods in this first section which is cathonic this gets used plenty in the game because a fair few of the people who kick about your house are catholic deities this word comes from the greek c'thon which i've almost definitely pronounced wrong and basically means of the earth if we're really simplifying it the best way to understand what a sonic god is is just to think about whether or not they predominantly hang out in the underworld a few of the catholic deities you meet in this game are actually nix's children as you can see in the codex description it's also worth bringing up that the game hints at a disconnect between the catholic gods and the olympians in this piece of dialogue from athena it's hard to say how much this is based in truth though the success of the game's narrative hinges on tension between the underworld and the olympians but even though you get infighting amongst the gods in mythology i don't know if there's much to suggest a divide like the one depicted in this game that's fine though you can take liberties with mythology half the joy of it is seeing how depictions differ and evolve over time anyway back to next as much as her design is excellent i don't think there's actually really anything to discuss for a pretty good reason there's not much to base her off you're hardly going to struggle looking for historical depictions of hades but nyx is to be honest a minor character in comparison and one who has been personified in art and sculpture as you can see albeit not frequently enough for a preconceived idea of her appearance to exist in our collective subconscious in the excellent set of no-clip documentaries covering the development and release of hades greg cassaven the creative director for supergiant games said this now that the game is out there and um folks have played it and seen what it's like i i get to talk a little bit more openly about one of the aspects of the world building and and uh the story that i've been so excited about which is that we get to depict some of these characters from greek myth that i don't think have ever been rendered in like modern media before hypnos or nyx or certainly zagreus is not a character you have necessarily learned about in your one you know greek mythology session in elementary school because of this dearth of reference points supergiant used what little info there is on next to build a character for example she's the mother of half the underworld figures you'll come across so making her motherly having characters call her mother necks all makes sense that sounds almost too obvious to bring up but details surrounding any personality she may have had are so scant design wise the starry effect in her hair the lunar pauldrons they all look amazing but are basically just modern creative control and realistically there was nothing else they ever could have been heading back to her maternal nature there's one more thing worth talking about in that regard in a conversation with achilles he mentions a few other of her children strife misery and doom technically we'll discuss strife later but the point is that a lot of nexus children are best described as personifications of concepts even hypnos and thanatos are just meant to represent and explain the phenomena of sleep and death so it's similar in a way to the primordial gods but on a smaller scale i guess you get an amazing list of some of these personified deities in book six of virgil's aeneid which although written in roman times not greek is still an amazing mythological resource book six in particular as it's entirely based around the underworld and as a personal favorite of mine it's going to come up a fair few times in this video anyway look at these four lines taken from the really excellent 2020 translation by shadibarch at the entrance in orcus's very jaws grief and vengeful sorrow made their beds and pale diseases sad old age and fear and ill-advising hunger and shameful poverty this list does actually go on a wee while longer but i think that's enough for now this is from the part when aeneas is entering the underworld and these are all the things he sees around him none of these are strife misery or doom but some of these are also considered nexus children old age or geras being perhaps the most prominent of them the point is though that this is fascinating because it's an insight into how scary and nebulous concepts used to be rationalized and explained which with modern retrospect is hugely common in greek myth even nyx was simply a way of rationalizing the night time just as her daughter hemera was a way of rationalizing the daytime therefore the fact that the supergiant managed to give nick such life to make what was previously little more than a concept so interesting is astounding a reasonable guess and not without some truth to it but no my child my reason for helping you is simpler than that it is because i love you you may not be born of me but i raised you like one of my own and i have cared for you as i am capable next i love you too thank you for everything next we have the main character the guy you play as zagreus zagreus is maybe the most complex character to discuss because the myth surrounding him is all a bit jumbled there's more than one version of him and i don't think knowledge of him is at all common so i guess what we're looking to find out is if his portrayal in game matches any of these esoteric myths let's have a look then firstly what is zagreus the god of in game achilles writes in the codex that he thinks zagreus is the god of blood of life as a way of explaining the link between him and thanatos two opposites inexorably drawn i think this is really cool because greek mythology doesn't really have a god of either blood or life and it makes sense within the context of the story especially if you look at blood as having both a literal and more symbolic meaning the former is obvious to look into as he seems to be the only god who bleeds red alecto calls him red blood consistently and hades even calls it an aberration at one point which is a bit harsh but pretty on brand for him bleeding red definitely seems normal but in greek myth gods actually bleed a special kind of blood called icor in popular culture it seems that icor is generally considered to be gold but i think that that's mostly because that's how it's described in the percy jackson books although that isn't without precedent gold is the colour associated most frequently with power and immortality in greek myth as evidenced by things like the golden fleece or the apples of the hesperides but there isn't really much in ancient sources that i can find to suggest that icor had a specific color it's possible that his blood is red because in the game he is still partly mortal persephone his mother is half god half mortal in the game so that makes zagreus quarter mortal too his parentage manifested in his heterochromia one eye representing each parent so it isn't outside the realm of possibility that he could bleed normally if taking after his mom's side the other more conceptual side of blood relates to the idea of family which is the game's most prevalent overarching theme the whole thing is about finding persephone developing bonds with others helping to settle old scores fostering an environment in which healthy relationships can bloom and blossom the closest thing greek myth has to a family god is probably either hira or hestia both of whom we'll chat about briefly later on but the kind of stuff we just mentioned above wasn't exactly in their remit it's connected to what i said earlier greek myth doesn't have a god of blood or life but does sometimes consider zagreus to be the god of rebirth goes without saying that that fact makes the roguelike genre seem like the only choice for this game rebirth definitely has a link to blood and life and arguably was also taken into account in the game when you learn that zagarius was stillborn but revived most of the zagreus rebirth stuff is pretty confusing though and makes zagreus have a very different background than what you see in the game so we'll actually discuss that stuff when we get to dionysus later on essentially the latter half of that section will end up being zagreus part two as for other elements of godhood we can bring up in this part one zagreus is also considered a god of hunting just like artemis and speaking of artemis she actually tells zagreus that his name means great hunter unsurprisingly supergiant have done their research as you can see on screen wherever possible i'm going to try and avoid pronouncing greek to preserve what little of my dignity remains there is actually another possible etymology but both are clearly based on hunting so there's not much to argue about i guess this is possibly transposed into the game through his extraordinary martial prowess but for the most part i don't think this element of his mythology actually plays much of a role probably my favorite thing about how zagreus is depicted in hades actually comes from two offhand remarks that seem to reference how niche a character he is he says to eurydice that he's surprised she's heard of him at all and theseus calls him a nameless long-forgotten minor god born of the depths which just seems like an insult but i'm convinced that these were written into the game to reference how arcane ambiguous and little-known zagreus is in greek mythology here's an example during a supergiant panel at pax west 2019 greg casavin says this wait what if we start in the underworld and it's about getting out of hell instead of going going down into hell and you're you're the son of freaking hades because there's like a scrap of mythology suggesting that he has a son um and we're all like wait that sounds pretty cool if you're interested the scrap he mentions is most likely from a fragment of a lost play by iskles so yeah even in research the character of zagreus was essentially built off scraps but that in a way is perfect for pretty much everyone who plays hades zagarius is going to be a blank canvas because unlike characters with more comprehensive mythologies and more established traits and personalities from other modern media supergiant were able to basically make zagreus whatever they wanted without really having any baggage around making him a certain way and this worked strongly in their favor like nyx it's tough to fact check some characters because of how much creative license had to be taken for example in-game zagrius has fiery feet and i have not found a single iota of evidence that would have informed this choice from any myth not just in zagreus specific stuff but that's okay zagreus as a character is still deeply steeped in pre-existing myth some of it just happens to be a myth that isn't as much to do with him but that's still just as valid as anything else the bed chambers of prince zagreus lie in a perpetual state of utter disarray despite his lord and master of the house repeatedly insisting that he pick everything up oh come on it's not that bad is it following on from zagreus we have charon you can see charon's descriptor as stygian boatman just in case you don't know stygian is the adjectival form of sticks referring to the river sticks which is the river that leads into the underworld we'll chat more about the sticks later on charon is really interesting he's one of nix's children and as such is technically a god but to me he's never seemed like one this might sound weird but i think it's because he's so exclusively associated with his work more than any other deity i can think of in greek myth there is no care on without his boat and essentially no context that i can find in any myth that isn't linked to him ferrying people back and forth it almost seems an ignoble job for a god but there is no indication of care on expressing discontentment for it in the game nix mentions that charon has always been among the least dependent of her children and that he is always content to steer his boat she also mentions that carom serves only this realm and that seems to totally line up with actual myth he ferries the dead to the underworld and minds his own business what a guy there's actually a word to describe characters like charon figures in mythology whose job it is to help facilitate the newly deceased entering the underworld and that word is psychopomp it's absolutely an incredible word i mean sounds ridiculous this actually has no real link to the game psychopomp as a word is never mentioned in hades as far as i know but i have to tell you about it because not only does it sound hilarious it has the coolest etymology of basically any word ever as you can see on screen it means soul conductor it's just amazing but there's actually basically no better way to explain what chiron does and let's look a bit deeper into the logistics of what that actually entails in the game charon runs the shop unsurprisingly he did not run a wee riverside stall in greek myth but care on handling the money matters in this game is definitely the most logical choice looking at his design you can see all the coins hanging from around his shoulders these are called oh balls basically the idea behind this was that when you died in ancient greece you needed payment for charon to ferry you across the sticks to the underworld and as such an oboe was placed on the tongue of the deceased prior to burial and it was believed that this would be used to secure passage this is referenced in the game skelly has the oboe still in his mouth for example and you can also see a coin in the mouths of these skulls that appear just above the death screen on top of this thanatos mentions to zagreus that everything is in exchange with charon so even though we never really seek hair on ferry of the dead in hades there are sufficient references to that element of his job although i don't think there's much in mythology to support the fact that cairo hoards the money he collects as the game suggests as for cairo's appearance there is no avoiding the fact that he is creepy as [ __ ] and that in hades everyone also thinks he is creepy as [ __ ] ares calls him that foul boatman poseidon calls him disturbing and even the fearsome cerberus keeps his distance from cairon caron in mythology was also a wee bit creepy but a bit less so than in the game for starters a lot of ancient sources describe his facial features which are mostly obscured in hades as an example if we head back to the aeneid you get this description a sworded god down from his hairy chin a length of beard descents uncombed unclean his eyes like hollow furnaces on fire cairon was also depicted in art quite often which lets us get a few different ideas about what his appearance could have been looking at these two he mostly just looks like a normal old haggard guy which again has definite preston he was mentioned as being old and works by both euripides and seneca and to be honest loads of others too that being said i think the way heron was depicted in hades is actually my favorite version i've ever seen and sums up the enigmatic nature of the character better than any other iteration there's only one last thing to bring up here though which is that he doesn't really speak in the game he just kind of moans at you achilles writes in the codex that charon isn't much for conversation and nick says to zagreus that he should not mistake his lack of speech for lack of cleverness this is a cool aspect of his character that totally works in the context of the game but i'm pretty sure it's just made up i don't think charon is the chattiest personage in greek myth but when depicted in ancient history poetry or theater he still spoke he has a speaking part in the aristophanes comedy the frogs and heading back to the aeneid he shouts aeneas and the sybil demanding to know why they've come to his riverbank considering they aren't dead so yeah when it comes to cairon it's a mixed bag accuracy wise but thankfully there isn't much correlation between accuracy and quality it's like i said in the section about nix and will doubtless say later half the fun of mythology is seeing how things evolve and the chances are the depiction of charon in hades will genuinely have an impact on future iterations of the character in other media which is pretty incredible to think about care on mate as a longtime customer i just wanted to take a moment to thank you again for your invaluable service as a part of my repeated attempts at getting out of here or what i have done without your wares all these many times besides dying a lot faster well i meant every word this section is going to be a bit different to the first four because here i'm going to basically discuss two characters at once those two being hypnos and thanatos that might seem a bit weird but i think it makes more sense to be totally honest although hypnos and thanatos seem like they play a pretty substantial role in how the underworld functions in the game they are minor gods in comparison in actual mythology and on top of that they tend to be linked with each other as such i'll cover them both together so hypnos is sleep incarnate and thanatos is death incarnate peaceful death to be specific achilles mentions in the codex that it is said that sleep is the cousin of death by which he was most likely referring to the lyrics of new york state of mind in which naz uses this phrase can't be a coincidence that you get the word ill in both achilles and ilmatic kidding aside they're actually brothers not cousins and are inextricably connected unsurprisingly there are a few ancient sources which discuss the closeness of these two as you can see on screen at the moment and you can even find mention of this in shakespeare during hamlet's famous to be or not to be soliloquy you'll find to die to sleep twice within a few lines it's also worth bringing up this painting by john william waterhouse sleep and his half-brother death you can see that despite the closeness of sleep and death being an ancient idea it's persisted in art to this day really which is also why i found it interesting that they made hypnos and thanatos so different in hades in a second we'll discuss each of them individually but when it comes to mythological precedent for how they interact together the general vibe you get is efficient teamwork the best example of which is probably to do with the death of the hero sarpadon who fought on the side of the trojans during the trojan war i won't go into trojan war stuff now obviously we'll discuss that more when we get to achilles and patroclus but the point is that after sarpidon was killed in battle his corpse was recovered by apollo and given over to hypnos and thanatos who together transported him to lycia his homeland for burial this all happens in the iliad and is famously depicted in this fuzz painting you can see them both on either side carrying the body hypnos and thanatos were generally pretty benevolent gods so this isn't a surprising scene when it comes to in-game interactions between the two the dynamic is pretty exclusively hypnos being a klutz and thanatos and everyone else being annoyed with hypnos nix even checks with zagreus if hypnosis disposition bothers him and thanatos also says that he doesn't know what's worse dying repeatedly or hypnos obviously by the end it's clear that the two brothers love each other and that the reasoning for the in-game dynamic is just like with the other characters who are based on insufficient or fragmented myth it just makes it interesting hypnos and thanatos honestly barely get a mention in greek myth compared to a lot of the other characters you'll see in the game so i like the dynamic they ended up going with having sleep be all goofy and deathbeal serious makes total sense now though we'll discuss a wee bit about them individually starting with hypnos two main things that i'd like to bring up firstly i mentioned during the next section earlier that there was some drama between her and zeus and then i'd mention it here basically there just isn't much to talk about regarding hypnosis portrayal in the game so i'm just gonna go into an interesting myth involving him so zeus and hera are the king and queen of the gods but they don't have the best relationship hiro wanted to trick zeus and as part of her trick asked hypnos to make him fall asleep so she could wreak a bit of havoc when zeus woke up he had a proper tantrum and tried to hunt hypnos down but hypnos took refuge with his mom nix this ended up being a great plan because even the all-powerful zeus was too scared of nix to start any [ __ ] with her so he basically had to give up on his revenge which is pretty much the only time that ever happens there's no real analysis to be had here regarding the game in fact hypnos even mentions that nix never spends time with him so i guess there's that it's just a fun story we will look at one more thing regarding hypnos in the game though and that's his appearance we've already looked at an ancient vaz painting and a more modern painting depicting hypnos neither of which share any obvious likeness with the hypnos and hades but the one thing i think was a really great but subtle touch was the poppies on his belt if we actually look back at the painting i just mentioned you'll notice poppy's there too in his hands and on the wee table in the foreground hypnose was always associated strongly with the poppy because of its soporific properties not a surprise at all and it was also said that the entrance to the cave hypnos lived in within the underworld was lined with poppies this is also likely the reason behind his red color scheme a really cool detail as for thanatos there is a story regarding him that we'll chat about briefly when we get into the sisyphus section but here the main things i want to go into are also aesthetic firstly i want to discuss the big scythe he has i might be wrong so let me know if i am but i don't think there's a single record of thanatos ever wielding a scythe if we're talking scythes and greek mythology you can't look past the one used by kronos lord of the titans which we'll chat about in the next section however in this instance this is obviously meant to be a reference to the grim reaper nothing to do with greek myth but still a sensible choice the grim reaper is another example of a psychopomp like charon and in a way thanatos is too the grim reaper and thanatos are both just personifications of death so giving in-game thanatos the weapon most commonly associated with death nowadays is just the obvious thing to do although it isn't something you'll find ancient precedent for the other thing i wanted to mention was to do with butterflies the keepsake he gives you is a butterfly and i just thought it'd be interesting to look into what that represents the ancient greek word for butterfly just so happens to be something we've already looked at in this video and just mentioned a few sentences ago psyche which also means soul these aren't just accidental homonyms the connection is intentional as the ancient greeks definitely conflated the two and believed that butterflies represented the soul psyche was even the name of a character in greek mythology who although once mortal became the goddess of the soul and was often depicted with butterfly wings there is even more reference to this idea in-game as you can see here in the codex when you look at the soulcatcher enemy which is surrounded by butterflies given thanatos's role as death incarnate and potential psychopomp associating him with the soul makes perfect sense these two gods are tricky to look into because there are bits and pieces that link to mythology but like nyx and zagreus most of who they are is modern creative control however looking into it a bit deeper you can tell that supergiant knew what they were doing and integrated what they could you need to focus brother or it'll be lord hades reprimanding you again and that is not something you want oh i don't know about that last time i talked to master he made pretty clear he never wanted to speak to me again oh sorry hypnos similar to how we've looked at hypnos and thanatos as a duo we're going to look at our next set of characters the furies as a trio that is i'm going to discuss them as a group and then look a wee bit at them individually just like the last entry so who are the furies in the game they're called megara electo and tessephany which is exactly what they're called in mythology how's that for some incisive analysis the furies were essentially the catholic embodiments of vengeance and retribution with each of them focusing on punishing a specific transgression which we'll get into but you get the idea meg even says here that the furies aren't much for forgiveness or apologies there's definite overlap here with nemesis another goddess who exacts retribution but their remits are slightly different i'd also like to just say that although calling them the furies is totally fine it's arguably not the most correct word to use that award would go to the difficult to pronounce erenese which is mentioned a few times in the game actually as you can see furies is a bit easier to say and spell so there's nothing wrong with hades using that instead one other really fascinating euphemism for them was the humanities meaning the kindly ones which definitely seems like a throwback to the alternate names for hades from earlier you know the whole trying not to say the name of the scary god thing you can see an example of this looking at the title of the third part of the oristera written by aeschylus this was a set of plays based upon the story of orestes a character from greek myth who had a famous run-in with the furies i won't go into the story fully here but here is a painting depicting the bit where orestes kills his mom anyway that name for them isn't used in the game but it's interesting so i thought it was worth bringing up next up is the question of their parentage which is kind of up for debate some ancient sources claim nicks as their parent like ovid and virgil but the game sides with the version that i learned as a kid the much more metal version of the myth into symphony's codex entry it mentions that the furies came from the spilt blood of the eldest of the titans the eldest titan in question was uranus the primordial deity representing the sky uranus the sky and gaia the earth were parents of the first proper generation of titans which i guess is why he's referred to here as the eldest of the titans one of these titans was kronos who according to hesiod's theogony conspired with his mother gaia to kill uranus and take over as ruler so he took his scythe that i mentioned from when we discussed thanatos and with it castrated and thus killed his father oronos blood fell to the ground and from it emerged the erenese embodiments of vengeance born from patricide there's another bit of dialogue where meg references this saying that she's born of titan blood we'll get more into titans soon by the way if you're a bit confused about who exactly they are regardless i'm dead chuffed that the game elected to go with this version of the myth but not surprised i feel like despite plenty of other contrasting sources existing this is generally considered the default version anyway moving on the design for these three is excellent and they all look kind of similar that is they share certain features like their one wing their whips obviously they each have a color blue red and green but i'm pretty sure this is just to differentiate them i don't think there's any literary basis for that as for their wing some myths say that they have bat swings which is where that comes from and why mega is catholic companion is a bat i'm not actually sure why they only have one wing each you can see in this indian translation that it definitely says wings but if i had to guess it would be intended to signify incompleteness perhaps not being at full power each sister has one wing and although they don't initially get on through zagreus they come to understand each other a bit better this also links to the god of blood thing from earlier so yeah maybe it's something to signify that they aren't at full power alone and are all stronger together but to be fair i'm just making this up so that could be totally wrong as for whips there is actually precedent for this with there being mentions of them wielding whips in seneca's hercules furens and nanus's dionysiaka both of which you can see on screen at the moment but to be fair given that the furies are supposedly meant to punish and torture wrongdoers a whip just seems like the sensible choice precedent or not my personal favorite piece of appearance specific info in the game though is just an offhand comment from poseidon where he calls megura an old crone which she very clearly isn't this is just a tongue-in-cheek reference to what the furies looked like in most ancient sources which is pretty much half crony half demonic and serpentine we'll bring that up a little bit more when we talk about tessephany so now we know a bit of background info about the furies let's learn a tiny bit about each of them megara is one of the major characters in the game but like a lot of the other catholic gods isn't exactly a household name nowadays hearing the name megara i think you'd be more likely to think of this character again from disney's hercules there's a slight spelling difference to differentiate them though anyway the main thing i want to specify when it comes to each fury sister is just whether what they punish in the game lines up with what they were supposed to punish in the myth meg says that she flays oath breakers and liars and zagreus at some point later adds traitors to that list this is pretty much dead-on if i had to sum it up in one word i would say that what megura focuses on is betrayal her name actually has an interesting etymology and stems from this ancient greek verb meaning to begrudge or to envy so there is overlap there with what she focuses on although i'll be honest it's much harder to find evidence for what she specifically punishes than for the next two in my opinion next up is alecto whose we descriptor is tormentor of passions which is basically what the codex says as well that she punished people who committed wrongful acts at the behest of their impulsive passions i found her portrayal in hades really funny in a good way because what she predominantly focuses on punishing is actually crime committed through anger her name literally means unceasing in ancient greek and it is generally agreed that anger is what is unceasing like an invisible we extra definition so she's true to her namesake because she is easily the most persistently raging and aggressive character in the whole game there is a slight bit of amusing irony in her punishing the very same thing she exhibits the codex also mentions that she's not allowed in the house of hades because of insubordination long past as for what that could be referring to i'm not entirely certain the only thing that possibly springs to mind is something electo does in the aeneid in book seven juno the roman version of hira basically asks alecto to help incite a war amongst the trojans virgil describes alecto as really horrible even her father pluto and her hellish sisters hate this monster so many are her awful forms and then a few lines later she does this now alecto flung a snake from her black hair it pierced amata then plunged deep into her heart to derange her into ruining her own home basically electo goes on to do some pretty naughty stuff and maybe this is what the game is trying to allude to because the blood loss that electo inflicted a mata with was not retribution but instead the first strike the very antithesis of what she's supposed to do i have no idea if this is correct and if this is the insubordination she was punished for but i'm going to see it as canon why not finally to syphony her motivations are the easiest to figure out considering 99 of what she says is murder or murderer the origin of her name is just like the other two linked to her duty but hers is actually a compound word of vengeance and murder the main thing that differentiates to symphony though is how much scarier she is than her two sisters how sunken and inhuman she looks there isn't really any convincing ancient precedent for this unfortunately the closest thing i could find was this mention of tessephany from status's thebaid where he says the cruel goddess turned her grim visage but that's about it when you look up the furies the most consistent feature you actually seem to come across is them having snakes for hair it was mentioned in that short passage from the anead we just saw the one about alecto and there's another example on screen here greek myth to be frank just loves putting snakes on stuff think back to typhon right at the start of this video his limbs coiled with snakes obviously the biggest culprits here are the gorgons but we'll get to them later on but yeah in the actual myth there's a lot more to tessephany than just saying the same two words and looking terrifying but if i went into absolutely everything about every character we'd be here forever so let's just move on to our final catholic god chaos um hi [Music] no wait just the first part no murderer just zagreus or let's see how about happy can you say happy that's not happy this was a weird one because writing about chaos is simultaneously the hardest and easiest thing in this entire video it's easy in the sense that there isn't actually that much to talk about and difficult in that exact same sense chaos is described as the primordial originator the source of all things the progenitor of literally everything and there isn't much more to it than that for a bit more context here's another wii snippet from the noclip documentaries in which gregor savin and darren corb audio director of supergiant discuss chaos so i had to trace that all the way back all the way back down their family tree and it ends with primordial chaos there's nothing before that so it was it felt really good to be able to take this character come up with our take on it and uh on them i should say and and put them in our game it's early but it's pretty sweet yeah i'm basically like oh it's like super messed up it's a it's a it's like a final fantasy the last boss yeah it is i'm done with that oh i'm so down yeah it's gonna be wild right yeah it's gonna be awesome [Music] describing the appearance of chaos as being a final fantasy end boss is pretty hysterical and totally accurate but how much does chaos's appearance actually match up with mythological precedent the answer is i don't know i have no idea i was not able to find more than one shred of evidence that chaos had ever been personified or given a proper physical description and as such it's basically impossible to say the same goes for modern interpretations too there's virtually nothing the only thing that may have even slightly informed the design choice is this section from ovid's metamorphoses when he sort of explains chaos he says it was a rude and undeveloped mass that nothing made except a ponderous weight and all discordant elements confused were there congested in a shapeless heap to put it in delicately chaos does look pretty batshit so it's possible that this vague description served as inspiration but what they ended up coming up with is pretty astounding like cast your mind back to the next section when i first discussed that primordial deities normally represent a realm chaos is one of those who just always stayed as a realm or a concept in contrast to figures like gaia and perhaps even eros who have been depicted in art and myth much more frequently thus with chaos there's no precedent for their personality their relationship with nyx or zagreus anything like that so here my format kind of falls a bit flat but there is still one thing that i'd like to discuss and it's the moment in the game where zagreus asks chaos what came before them chaos mentions that everything simply came to be and so did they presumably after a former time had reached its end chaos also mentions later in reference to what they just said that perhaps they too had just expired only to reawaken what i'm struggling to figure out is if even just tentatively this is linked to the trinket that chaos gives you the cosmic egg believe it or not the cosmic egg also known as the world egg is an integral part of creation stories and cosmogenies the world over to really oversimplify it it's a motif in which an egg or something egg-like represents the beginning of a universe and a primordial being or something similar hatches from it and thus creates the world i find it weird that chaos would give you a reference to creation myth that he himself is not part of maybe i'm getting this wrong it isn't something i know too much about but applying pre-existing creation myths to chaos there are two options and neither are the egg one the first based off the myth alone would imply ex-nihilo creation creation from nothing suddenly chaos just appeared and there was nothing before him pretty much like what happens in genesis i guess what chaos says in the game however about a former time reaching its end or him being reborn seems to line up mostly with emergence as a creation myth the idea of well emerging from a previous world into the current one i'm not really sure but i don't get the link between him and the trinket he gives you i'm a bit out of my depth here to be entirely honest it could totally be the case that there's a link between chaos from greek myth and the cosmic egg creation myth that i'm not picking up on i mean if you know about this kind of stuff please let me know in the comments below i would love to hear a bit more about this anyway let's move on this section was a bit shorter but looking at the length of the video i don't think that's an issue now things get a bit easier though because we're not really dealing with obscure deities anymore it's time to have a look at the olympians have we met wish to leave this place and it is my wish to make your doing something a little bit more interesting and if you encounter the olympians sunday do give them my regards it only seems right to start with zeus the king of the olympians zeus was the almighty god of the sky the fearsome god of thunder hence the thunderbolts he wields and his cloudy beard but by all accounts he was not the nicest guy hades calls him a blasted little brat at one point which is probably a good way of summing it up zagreus also notes that zeus acts impulsively at times and deals with the consequences later which is also the perfect way to describe who he is in mythology the word impulsive in particular it seems that nowadays one of the things most people seem to know about zeus the most prevailing fact is that he was famed for his promiscuity in myth you tend to get the impression that his philandering was supposed to be regarded as playful almost comical this is because in greek mythology there is a weird sort of uncomfortable grey area where stories tend to conflate or perhaps equate seduction with rape but this isn't that surprising considering ancient greece was a deeply patriarchal society what a large proportion of these stories come down to is a woman either mortal or divine minding her own business when a man usually divine and usually zeus is rendered helpless by her astounding beauty and decides that he must act on that initial impulse usually against the will of his victim the story is often framed so that the female figure in question was so entrancing that he just didn't have a choice some unfortunate modern day parallels there don't you think there are so many examples of this with zeus that are worth looking into the stories of io alchemy leader europa i mean zeus capture of europa is on the [ __ ] 2 euro coin in greece which is absolutely mental you'll get some people who say that the women in these stories were honored to be courted by the king of the gods but let's not forget these stories were written by blokes not just originally but in translation too and you can tell let's look at a few examples the main thing worth discussing here is homer's odyssey the classic to end all classics the odyssey has been translated a billion times and every time it was translated again it was translated by a man it was 2017 before an english translation of the odyssey written by a woman was published by classicist dr emily wilson and she brings to light some really interesting points about how parts of the story have been historically translated with a definite male bias dr wilson made an excellent twitter thread explaining this which i'll link to in the description because i'm only going to speak about a small section of it and it refers to book 22 of the odyssey and specifically the slave woman killed by telemachus under the orders of odysseus his father she goes on to explain that originally the words used to describe these women were not inherently misogynistic but almost all translations tend to be so anyway the fagles version she mentioned is the first one i ever read and uses the terms slots and [ __ ] where there was frankly no need to that one was only translated in 1996 by the way it isn't like it's old and you can see in the other translations too slots creatures all placed there when the original term didn't carry that implication that was added somewhere along the way and perpetuated until the original meaning became lost the other thing she adds is the element of victim blaming that we were just discussing she mentions that it's portrayed as if it's their own fault they've been killed despite not doing anything wrong as if treatment like this is normal casual even i'd recommend reading the rest of the thread because she gives further examples of how the translations victim blame better than i ever could so i'm just gonna move on to one more example of this sort of ingrained misogyny within the mythos but it isn't to do with zeus instead it's the story of apollo and cassandra told an eascalista's tragedy agamemnon the real basics are that apollo was smitten with a princess named cassandra and said he'd give her the gift of prophecy if he could sleep with her she accepted but then decided against it apollo was furious at being spurned so he cursed her and made it so that no one would ever believe any of her predictions despite the truth behind them the way this story is told and positioned often makes it seem like she's in the wrong that she deserves the punishment and this is an upsettingly ubiquitous element of greek myth going back to hades supergiant have done an excellent job of eschewing this pattern of misogyny and instead condemning it this is how they did it throughout the game you don't find too much misogyny save for zeus and poseidon zeus calls nex a catch and a concubine which is funny considering the myth we looked at in the hypnose section he also dismisses aphrodite out of hand in this example on screen as if she can't handle the situation we'll learn about this when we get to the aphrodite section but nicks and aphrodite are compared to zeus elder gods but to him they are lesser partly in station but mostly by way of their gender however the manner in which zeus has been written in the game is that he has absolutely no self-awareness that he's pretty impetuous and that although he's in charge he's not really worth listening to as heidi said he's a brat the point is supergiant were really smart about it and did a bit of much needed modernization they made zeus an oblivious self-aggrandizing sexist bigot which is pretty much the perfect way to portray him because it makes you treat his mythologically accurate misogynistic outbursts as they should be treated with nothing but disdain i suppose even down in the underworld you would have heard such tales of me young man they're all untrue except the tales of my bravery those are completely accurate though all too modest in most cases i must say so in preparation for this video i rewatched my entire playthrough of hades over 100 hours worth taking notes on the dialogue and things i could discuss when it came to each specific character i'm not sure how this happened exactly but i barely wrote anything down for poseidon way less than for anyone else i'm not sure why this is maybe it's because a lot of the stuff to do with him ended up being more pertinent to other characters but what we're actually going to do for this section on account of exiguous note-taking is discuss poseidon a little bit and then discuss a bit about the titans because poseidon is directly connected to that although he doesn't personally bring it up much compared to zeus so that part will also be a bit of a continuation of the zeus section i think i'm over complicating things here anyway poseidon who is he he is as you likely already know the god of the sea he is also the god of earthquakes which is why the codex calls him the earthshaker there is actual precedent for this specific name though kind of like the hades euphemisms you would also find epithets referring to poseidon you can see two of the most common ones on screen both of which pretty much translate as earth-shaking he was also called earthshaker in the percy jackson books so there's similar ground there but where hades and percy jackson differ is how poseidon is depicted personality-wise in the percy jackson books probably the media in which poseidon has been most prominently featured in recent memory he is ultimately a nice guy still a distant parent still with unsavory god-like traits but all in all he is very far from being willfully cruel or villainous hades understandably paints a less complementary picture of poseidon with artemis calling him a big fat oath and chaos calling him boastful and belligerent there's a lot in common with zeus and poseidon both in the game and in the mythology so it's no surprise to have them both portrayed like this although it's not strictly accurate if you want to get a grasp of what poseidon was like in mythology try to think of him as being like diet zeus that's one of the easiest ways to get the idea into your head for example we have the list in the last section with io europa and so on and it's pretty easy to do one of those lists for poseidon 2 and a lot of other gods to be fair but you get the point again the codex says that hades equates the two of them and they are both proud impulsive and pretty pig-headed so i think that's a pretty legit reading design-wise poseidon looks excellent as all the characters do he looks nothing like zeus really but they share features like their godhood manifesting in their hair and beards which is pretty cool he's covered in wave and shell kind of patterns to reference the sea obviously but the most interesting of these oceanic elements is easily the horse seahorse crown he wears again something you'll know if you've read the percy jackson books that seems a bit weird if you only know that poseidon is the god of the sea is that he is also the god of horses now pinning down myths around this topic is actually quite difficult despite the fact that there are loads of references to horses being connected to poseidon and mythology it's just that there's often a bit of disagreement when it comes to the details for example a really famous myth featuring poseidon centers around athens and which god would become patron of the city it was poseidon and athena who were vying for patronage and from the name of athens you can tell who won basically they both presented a gift to the city and whoever's gift was deemed most useful was the winner athena invented the olive tree as a gift and depending on the version of the myth poseidon either created a saltwater spring in the town which wasn't useful because it was salty water or created the horse in other stories he directly fathers horses as opposed to inventing them and these included the famous steeds aryan and pegasus although pegasus was actually a bit more indirect as we'll see when we talk about medusa later as a little tangent if you've ever seen disney's hercules which we've already mentioned twice you'll know that hercules rode pegasus but that actually has next to no mythological precedent pegasus was actually predominantly associated with another greek hero called bellerophon but anyway there's more to poseidon than horses but we'll stop there let's move on to a topic that gets brought up a lot in hades but never really gets explained the titans we're gonna get a grasp of the basics here but not go into too much detail it's just nice to have a bit more context surrounding the events of and the characters in the game so in the titan specific dialogue you'll find in game you'll get moments where zeus brings up that he and his brothers prevailed in a war against the titans hades actually brings it up too but credits his sisters on lexus typical titan blood as an item also plays a role in the game and the codex mentions that the titans once ruled all between heaven and earth but they were dispatched by their offspring the olympians this gives you an idea of what happened but it's going to be made a bit easier if we look at a family tree quickly we've mentioned gaia and uranus already in the earlier sections the primordial gods representing the earth and the sky they had 12 children called the titans but don't get too caught up in the name and start thinking that they were different to the gods because they weren't really that different they were just a set of gods that came before the olympians if you remember from when we discussed the furies one of these children kronos conspired with his mum to kill his dad and thus came the age of the titans it was a simple transfer of power as you can see from the diagram kronos and his sister rhea went on to have six children three of whom we've already looked at however it had been prophesied that just as oronos had been deposed by his own child so would kronos be opposed by his own and as such he took to an unusual habit eating his kids there's a good chance you've seen the goya painting depicting this really what he did was swallow them whole according to hesiod's theogeny it would have been a bit grim even for greek myth for him to properly chew on his babies but he thought that if he did this his power would be secure that is until child number six zeus ria fooled chronos by feeding him a swaddled rock instead of a child it's mad to think he didn't notice this but this is another really iconic scene as you can see in these ancient urn paintings and carvings this stone was later known as the omphalos stone and was eventually placed at delphi believed in ancient greece to be the center of the world although more importantly it became a major plot point in god of war iii that was pretty good anyway zeus was raised in secret maybe by a goat called amalthea maybe not i'll let you look that up yourself eventually he came back confronted kronos made him regurgitate all his kids who were now fully grown because they were immortal and this helped instigate the titanomachy a decade-long war for power the younger generation won disposed of the titans in tartarus and started fixing up the place what zeus poseidon and hades decided to do after that was draw lots to decide who had jurisdiction over what this is mentioned in the game by both zeus and zagreus zeus says that hades got the short end of the stick which sounds more like a metaphor but it's actually pretty literal zagreus also says that they drew lots which considering the importance of the situation seems a bit hasty anyway i'm sorry for going on for so long but this is how zeus ended up with dominion over the sky hades with dominion over the underworld and poseidon with dominion over the sea and with that let's finally move on i dare say little hades you have some spunk in you why i think you take after me more than my trusty elder brother we'll get away from that old carter yet now we'll have a wechat about athena athena is most well known as being the goddess of wisdom but she's also the goddess of other things such as crafts which included things like weaving and pottery but most notably she was also the goddess of warfare you might be thinking if you played the game or know a bit about mythology that ares was the god of warfare not athena the actual answer is that they are both war gods but ares is a bit more infamous one way to explain it is that they both represent different elements of war ares representing bloodlust and slaughter and the wise athena representing strategy and tactics looking at homer's iliad quickly here's a moment that illustrates this difference in personality quite nicely focusing on aries the iliad basically deals with the trojan war and in this war ares eventually starts helping out the trojans directly having a hand in the war effort the trojans drove the strength of their hands straight on as violent ares defending the trojans mantled in dark knight the battle and passed everywhere athena also plays a role in the iliad both hands on and tactically but is arguably best known for assisting in the creation of the trojan horse the means by which the greeks infiltrated troy under the guise of a gift the aeneid is actually more explicit about this than the iliad although they are discussing the same topic so here's a quote from the aeneid after many years have slipped by the leaders of the greeks opposed by the fates and damaged by the war build a horse of mountainous size through palace's divine art so that's pretty cool keeping that quote in mind though i was pretty excited to see the game reference the term palace to refer to athena achilles uses it in the codex to describe her and the way it's written palace athena is a remarkably common way of referring to her i might be wrong but i think the only mention of it is in the codex regardless it's a really cool detail where does it come from though why does achilles call her that it turns out that's a complex question to answer because there are plenty of potential reasons firstly the epithet could be based on the ancient greek verb palo which i'm sure i've said wrong again look at the wiktionary definitions for this the first one is where the epithet may stem from with her being a goddess of warfare but if you've played hades you'll know not to disregard the importance of an athena dash this would maybe seem like convincing reasoning though if not for the name palace turning up loads of other times too some myths make palace a childhood friend of athena who died while they were sparring and athena took up her name as a sign of respect and grief in other myths athena defeats a giant called palace and flays his skin off to make a cloak the point is i'm not sure what's right and there are even more options that i haven't mentioned but ultimately i just think it's cool that it was mentioned in the game at all i would like to go back to look at the cloak i just mentioned though although how i get there might seem a bit indirect because what i want to do now is quickly discuss athena's appearance the main thing to note is that athena is fully armored standing proudly interestingly she was born fully grown and fully armored which is a funny story i'll let you look into the details more yourself if you want but the basics are that zeus had a headache hephaestus split his head open with an axe and athena popped out of his skull ready to go the game does mention this demeter brings it up directly and are put down to zeus and athena also alludes to her birth being unusual saying she was born and raised under the strangest circumstances anyway there are two other elements to her appearance that are noteworthy the first being the owl she's carrying we've mentioned palace but another epithet commonly attributed to athena especially in the epics of homer was glaucopus meaning something like bright-eyed what's interesting about that though is the link between the epithet and an ancient greek word for owl which is as you can see on screen specifically this refers to the little owl which was historically associated with athena you can even see owls being associated with athena on this athenian coin also featuring an olive branch which ties into the poseidon vs athena story from the last section really the question here is whether owls are considered a symbol of wisdom due to their association with athena or whether owls are always considered wise and as such were associated with athena i'm not really sure which it is but ultimately it doesn't really matter the point is that the game has depicted her with an owl and very often in ancient art and myth she is depicted with an owl so supergiant have done as well as they could there the final thing i wanted to mention was her shield which again you'll recognize as being the wii icon thing that represents her in the game just like zeus has the lightning bolt and poseidon has the trident given what we know about athena that she's the goddess of military strategy and forethought it's not surprising that she would wield a shield a defensive piece of equipment believe it or not this is where we link back to her cloak from earlier i told you it would be indirect alongside the owl the main piece of iconography you would attribute to athena would be the aegis her shield it's worth at least briefly discussing the appearance of the shield which in the game is quite nondescript compared to some mythological accounts virgil says the shield has golden serpent scales and the shield athena wields in-game is gold and then goes off-piste and says that the shield features a headless gorgon still too grim to look at this was maybe the most common appearance for the aegis having a gorgon head depicted on it but depending on the source in question the aegis wasn't even necessarily a shield it could also be a protective cloak maybe one fashioned from the skin of a goat or in some stories the skin of a giant look at these two artworks for example this sculpture of athena features something cloak-like wrapped around her with a gorgon head on it this next one isn't of athena but alexander the great with his armor also featuring a gorgon head i'm not trying to say all depictions of the aegis have these faces on it was just a very common concept personally i'm totally cool with athena's shield being more simple because the game didn't totally give up on the idea of having a terrifying face on a version of the aegis as we'll see later but yeah i think the game did an excellent job with athena again i've not said everything there is to be said about her not even a fraction to be honest but she's really fascinating both in the game and in the myths so it's really satisfying to see supergiant do her justice i have a simple token for you goddess although it's insufficient thanks for all the age you've given me your most gracious cousin to extend this offering you honor me yet i would ask you think of your well-being for the time not mine next up we have aphrodite who unsurprisingly is pretty different to athena you can tell from this dialogue here that they do not get on this makes sense though where athena is reserved aphrodite isn't she's the goddess representing love beauty passion sex all that kind of stuff this is to a degree why she's naked obviously in game there's jewelry and conveniently placed locks of hair but it actually makes sense for aphrodite not to be wearing anything because that is how she was most commonly portrayed in art and sculpture part of the reason for this is because of the sculpture you can see now this is the aphrodite of nidos fashioned by the athenian sculptor prax italy's the cultural impact this sculpture had was enormous believe it or not they set a trend for nude sculpture of the female form as most nude sculpture up to this point depicted men i would argue that the two most famous pieces of art depicting aphrodite are these two firstly the venus de milo created about two centuries after the aphrodite of nidos and secondly botticelli's the birth of venus which was painted over 17 centuries after the aphrodite of nados and for the eagle-eyed amongst you you may have noticed the similarity of hand positions between the two in the botticelli piece not identical but there's no doubt some influence here and this influence extends to hades too which is really cool going back to botticelli for a second though it's worth looking at what this painting actually supposedly depicts the birth of venus by the way just in case anyone isn't sure venus is just the roman name for aphrodite they're ostensibly the same back when we discussed the furies we chatted about how they were born with the blood from uranus freshly severed genitals hitting the ground and also when we discussed zeus i brought up the aphrodite was an elder god compared to him so how was aphrodite born according to multiple sources from hesiod to ovid to nonis she was born when uranus ball sack was chucked into the sea the sea around it began to foam and from that sea foam aphrodite emerged the painting we've just been talking about actually depicts the moment where she arrives on land after popping out from the film if you're interested the point is though that if you take hesiod's word for it aphrodite is the eldest olympian comfortably predating any of the others i think that the game actually references aphrodite's both when she mentions knowing a thing or two about megura given that they were born at pretty much the same time from pretty much the same source but then again it could also just be a hint towards zagreus and mega are having feelings for each other as far as i know aphrodite's birth isn't mentioned anywhere else in the game although i definitely could have missed something but on top of that the game does call demeter the eldest olympian which we'll get to when we reach her section so i think supergiant just elected to emit any blatant references to aphrodite's birth so that there wouldn't be any undue confusion on that front no crossing wires from a narrative perspective personality-wise aphrodite is interesting she is charming sultry speaks mellifluously and simultaneously is capricious cruel and a bit sadistic in the codex achilles calls her handiwork not as pretty as she is saying her power is the most terrible in all the world you see this a bit when you reject her in those rooms where you have to pick one of the gods first but this video is about mythological precedent is there any unsurprisingly yes there is the trojan war is probably the best example you'll find of aphrodite's nastier side there are plenty of moments in it we could discuss but what we'll actually chat about here is that you could argue that the trojan war only happened because of her these are the basics paris a trojan prince was forced into a situation where he had to decide which goddess was most beautiful between hira athena and aphrodite to make things worse for him he had to decide this in front of them which would be pretty scary they all attempted to sway his choice by offering him things hira offered him power athena offered him military glory and aphrodite offered him the love of the most beautiful woman in the world who happened to be a certain someone called helen the queen of sparta later known as helen of troy unsurprisingly he thought with his deck chose aphrodite and went off to get helen the nature of how he seduced helen is as we chatted about in the zeus section ambiguous at best but the poet sappho in the few lines that you can see on screen claims that helen willingly left her family to go to troy with paris the greeks were mad that the trojans stole helen and thus started the trojan war i know that was still quite a lot but that's the basics of the situation and i mean the real abridged basics the point here was that arguably the most famous war in greek myth was actually instigated because of love and desire and ultimately aphrodite's need to beat her competition regardless of the consequences one last thing kind of relating to aphrodite that was brought up briefly in the game is the seven types of love aphrodite herself mentions it to you and later on zagreus brings it up again what this is referring to is the idea that ancient greek had multiple words for love but all of them slightly differ in definition here are the ones i've found more than seven and if you've played final fantasy 14 shadowbringers you might recognize a few of these terms as a concept i had never specifically heard of there being seven types of love and i'm not entirely sure it's an established idea like the game makes it out to be the closest thing to a theory involving these that i found was this love color wheel made by canadian psychologist john allen lee in 1973. this only has six types or nine depending how you look at it and the list i had up earlier had eight types so i'm not really sure what's going on nonetheless it's pretty interesting to look into this and see how it links into the overarching narrative of the game we talked about zagarius being the god of blood of relationships and i think that plays into this idea you'll find a few of these different kinds of love portrayed in the game and even though there might not be a set seven types of love taught in the underworld i think it's nonetheless a fun addition to world building in hades and with that let's see who's up how you must yearn next reach the surface little goblin it likewise stirs in mia yearning to assist you by all means at my disposal now it's time to have a look at artemis goddess of the hunt and protector of the wild like athena before her and like the next three gods we'll discuss artemis is a child of zeus and she's also a twin her brother apollo plays a pretty big role in greek myth but didn't quite make the cut for this game so it's pretty interesting seeing artemis without him it would have been interesting to have their personalities play off each other because where apollo is brash and ostentatious artemis is for a deity at least reticent and withdrawn the codex mentions artemis's ambivalence towards human admiration and her commitment to her role as a master of the natural world and she herself brings up that even despite being around her family she always felt alone there is ancient precedent for this idea kind of the greek poet callimicus wrote a hymn to artemis in which she says this in describing her duties for seldom is it that artemis goes down to the town on the mountains will i dwell in the cities of men i will visit only when women vexed by the sharp pang of childbirth call me to their aid here you can see that she doesn't get too involved with the affairs of people but does get involved with childbirth which is pretty interesting and a smidge ironic perhaps because artemis is probably the most famous example of a virgin goddess this is kind of referenced in the game however when i was going through the footage taking notes this is the one instance in which i wrote a note about the relevant piece of dialogue and forgot to write the timestamp so you're going to have to take my word for it that at one point in the game poseidon tells artemis that she won't easily attract a mate with such a sour look about her this is funny dialogue if you know that artemis is a virgin goddess mostly because it plays into what we discussed about poseidon being an absolute muppet there is also reference to athena being a virgin goddess which she is when poseidon mentions that she's childless as you can see here i've always found the virgin goddess thing a bit strange because i can't think of a male god who has been afforded that trait as a defining part of the personality and when you think of the main female deities in the greek pantheon a lot of them have been constrained shall we say artemis athena and hestia are all virgin goddesses hira isn't but being the goddess of marriage she only has children with zeus a concept that he does not reciprocate interestingly you might recognize the phrase vestal virgins either from use in pop culture or from being in the second verse of proclaram's best known song a whiter shade of pale vesta was actually the roman equivalent of hestia whose followers had to abide by a strict oath of chastity that's where the phrase comes from why i bring that up is because it was pretty much the same with artemis and her followers part of artemis's remit alongside hunting and all that was that she was also the goddess and protector of young girls and women and as such she had a retinue of followers almost all maidens or nymphs who had to abide by her rules of chastity or face punishment even if it wasn't their fault enter who else but zeus artemis makes reference to only one member of her mythological gang by name during her dialogue in hades and the person in question is callisto artemis mentions her on a few separate occasions but the first time she says that callisto is a woodland nymph who goes hunting with her a nymph by the way is just a very minor female deity associated with some aspect of nature we'll chat more about them later anyway callisto after mentioning her a few times artemis drops the fact that she can turn into a bear this is a more light-hearted adaptation of the actual myth surrounding artemis and callisto in which zeus seduces callisto and when artemis discovers that she is pregnant changed her into a bear and depending on the story either exiled her or killed her either way it ended badly for her and according to hesiod zeus took pity on her at the end and put her amongst the stars this was meant to explain the constellation of ursa major ursa of course being the latin for bear this next bit isn't actually linked to artemis at all but it's interesting so i'll be quick callisto is also the name of one of the four primary moons of the planet jupiter which is named after zeus's roman aspect the other three are io and europa who we mentioned briefly in the zeus section and ganymede who we haven't discussed at all and won't really although his story is pretty interesting i've just always found it fascinating that these four moons circling jupiter were all named for mythological figures that zeus took a liking for to put it nicely just a cool wee fact there's one more thing to discuss artemis wise and it's a piece of iconography you can see over her design on her chest and headpiece specifically and that is the moon artemis and apollo both took quite a lot on when it came to what they presided over and that included being gods of the moon and the sun respectively this seems to make sense and to be fair it does i mean a set of twins with one being the sun one being the moon it works out but if you know a bit about mythology you might have heard about gods called helios and celine who are also gods of the sun and the moon what's going on here and why are there two of each the game mentions helios directly calling him the sun but as far as i know never mentions celine who would be the moon like artemis and apollo helios and celine are also siblings the children of the titans hyperion and their what do you think hyperion was god of you guessed it the sun with that we have three sun gods and two moon goddesses which seems a bit silly how can artemis be the goddess of the moon when there is already another goddess of the moon apparently it comes down to a slight difference in definition for those two the way to look at celine is that she is the personification of the moon whereas artemis was just associated with the moon however it's still all a bit hazy the ancient greek geographer strabo said that both helios the sun and celine the moon are closely associated with these these referring to apollo and artemis since they are the causes of the temperature in the air and in saying this he seems to conflate them this is a really tricky one to deal with because it's really hard to get a conclusive answer but it kind of boils down to mythology changing over time in roman myth there seems to be more overlap between luna the syncretic equivalent of celine and diana the syncretic equivalent of artemis than in the greek pantheon gods would often blend into one another as centuries past and stories changed and i would hazard a guess that this is what happened here celine was the moon originally and over time people would associate artemis with the moon too then eventually people would either forget celine or conflate the two and by the time we reach the romans it's all starting to change yet again according to cicero the big man himself people regard diana and the moon as one and the same in rome it feels weird to end a section without really having made a conclusive point that draws everything together but sometimes mythology just doesn't work like that artemis is the goddess of the moon but she isn't the moon although she is eventually that's just how it goes and with you every step till you arrive then i will probably ignore you like the rest just warning you ahead of time all right next we have ares the god of war we've already had a chat about his half-sister athena and to get an idea of who ares is it's worth checking her codex entry achilles writes that he would like to think her efforts keep the violent lusting of ares well in check as i mentioned back in the earlier section athena represents the more strategic elements of warfare and ares is all about the violence the game gets this dead on and writes aerys to be almost concerningly sadistic he tells zagreus that he looks forward to the pain he shall inflict this time around and athena tells you that she has always found his conduct quite disturbing this has some really specific mythological prestin this line in the iliad where athena says this of ares violent ares that thing of fury evil wrote that double-faced liar but to be honest there isn't too much more to aries as a character than that he represents a more violent less inhibited side of the human condition and the game shows him as being exactly that i'm not meaning to be reductive he just isn't that complex and myths surrounding him tend to either focus on him being violent like the game shows or him being humiliated which we'll discuss later for now though i'd like to chat about his appearance because there's a few things here worth mentioning first things first his helmet throughout ancient greek history soldiers wore a few different kinds of helmet as you can see the one that ares is carrying seems most similar to a corinthian helmet the one depicted in his design isn't plumed but you can see that often in ancient art it was and in artworks depicting aries specifically the statue for instance you can see that it does look like a corinthian helmet but with a plume as for why his helmet doesn't have a plume in the game i'd hazard a guess that it would have been a nightmare to draw if he was holding it under his arm either way i don't think it matters the fact that it's a corinthian helmet is a cool enough detail especially considering it's linked to the spartans according to the greatest source in the world wikipedia the spartans would often wear the corinthian helmet until they changed their mind and started wearing this pointy monstrosity i'm not saying that it's entirely accurate but the 2006 film 300 is probably the piece of media surrounding sparta that has had the largest recent cultural impact and you can see them wearing these helmets in the film why this perhaps matters is simply that there's a connection in myth between ares and sparta in contrast to most greek societies where he wasn't the most popular god ares was supposedly venerated by the warlike spartans most of the evidence for this comes from the accounts of the ancient geographer pausanius who said this in reference to ares and at sparta where there was an ancient statue representing the god in chains to indicate that the marshall spirit and victory were never to leave the city of sparta i think the chances are that ares in the game has that specific helmet simply because he's often depicted with it in ancient art but his connection to sparta is nonetheless interesting and i think it's fun to open up the possibility that he has this helmet in the game as little nod to that element of his history the other thing about his appearance that i found really fascinating was the avian iconography it's hard to avoid the enormous bird skull on his chest and i'm pretty sure that it's meant to be the skull of a vulture if you have a look at one here i think there's a definite similarity and there would be the tiniest degree of precedent for it given that vultures are scavenging birds they were supposedly strongly associated with ares of the war god doing his utmost to leave a slew of bodies on the battlefield you'll find loads of stuff online saying that vultures and ares were linked but i've actually found it really difficult to pin down some sort of original ancient source that explicitly says that so i'm not too sure usually i try to back up pretty much everything i'm saying as i'm sure you've noticed but i'm not finding anything for this apart from an obscure story where ares and hermes turn someone into a vulture there is one more bird related thing i noticed regarding his design although i'm not certain that it's actually a reference to what i'm gonna bring up i think that the spikes coming off his pauldrons may be a reference to the oronithes aryoi also known as the birds of aries birds made of metal that guarded a shrine to aries the argonauts came across them during their quest to find the golden fleece sometimes these birds are conflated with the stemphalian birds man-eating birds that heracles or hercules had to defeat as part of his twelve labors the point is that the feathers of these birds were made of metal and could be shot like arrows apollonius of rhodes talks about this in his epic poem the argonautica they suddenly beheld the war god's birds which haunt the island darting through the air flapping its wings over the moving ship it dropped a pointed feather down upon her the plume struck the left shoulder of noble oilius who let his oar fall at the sudden blow while the rest looked in amazement at the winged dart basically i think there's a chance that this myth influenced his design or at least i hope it did one last thing to talk about regarding ares and it's as much to do with aphrodite as it is him you'll notice in hades that when the olympian gods speak to one another ninety percent of the time they're not nice to each other almost every quote i've brought up from them in this whole video has been at least one of them being horrible the weird exception to this rule is aries and aphrodite who get a fair amount of dialogue together here you can see arie saying love and death together hand in hand sounds most agreeable to him and you also get to see them discussing the idea that love and war although it sounds surprising also go hand in hand to which ares adds that they are both passions so it makes sense i love the dialogue between them because it's a really clear reference to the fact that aries and aphrodite had arguably the most famous long-standing affair in the entirety of greek myth aphrodite was married to the god hephaestus which she wasn't best pleased about i really wish effectus was in the game by the way it would have been really nice to have a bit of disability representation and it could have been a pretty cool alternative to the upgrade system with the deedless hammers anyway aphrodite mentions in the game that she's married and that her husband is always busy which gives her plenty of time to hang out with aries earlier i mentioned that ares quite often got humiliated in greek myth and this is the prime example of that hephaestus was wise to what aphrodite was doing because he'd been informed by helios the sun god we mentioned in the last section so being the god of blacksmithing and metalworking he created a net to catch them ovid's take on the story is probably the best at once he forged a net a mesh of thinnest links of bronze too fine for eye to see a triumph not surpassed by finest threads of silk or by the web the spider hands below the rafter's beam he fashioned it to respond to the least touch or slightest movement then with subtle skill arranged around the bed so when his wife lay down together with her paramour her husband's mesh so cleverly contrived secured them both and snared as they embraced straightway hephaestus flung wide the ivory doors and ushered in the gods the two lay there snarled in their shame so yeah there's definite subtext in the game that alludes to this famous tryst so i'm proper pleased they added that that's just done for ares now though now to know that i dionysus your lord father very much for his grim work let me continue mine i trust that one day you shall settle your dispute dionysus is the god of wine you might remember when we chatted about zagreus near the beginning that i said that some of this section would end up being zagreus part 2. there is still some stuff to say about dionysus but after that we will be chatting about zagreus hopefully it will make sense why when we get there first off i'd like to look at his appearance like most of the characters there are often little clues and references to their mythological background in their design and with dionysus there are two worth mentioning obviously the grapes and wine are pretty self-explanatory so i'm not going to bother with those the first thing is the leopard pelt that he has draped around his shoulders often when you see ancient art of dionysus he'll be accompanied by a leopard or a panther sometimes as you can see he even rides them there is ancient reference to this association with the animal back to ovid as usual he says this referring to dionysus and at his feet fierce spotted panthers lay tigers and lynxes too in phantom forms i'm not actually sure why leopards and big cats are so strongly associated with dionysus it's likely there's a source somewhere that elucidates that but i don't know it my personal theory is that it's because they're pretty dangerous wild animals alongside being the god of wine dionysus is also the god of madness which is actually mentioned in the codex therefore i think it would make sense that he would have a way with the untamable either way it's a neat detail the other thing that's a neat detail is the staff he's holding that has a pine cone on the top this is a vital piece of iconography when it comes to dionysus and bacchus his roman equivalent and it's called a thirsus again like the leopard skin you can find myriad ancient artworks in which he's depicted with this thirsus as for what it represented let's look at it this way dionysus was the god of wine and madness so it's no surprise that he had some pretty interesting followers there were cults that worshipped dionysus and they got up to some pretty crazy stuff a lot of it of a sexual nature it's generally agreed that thirsus is meant to be phallic and represent fertility the pinecone bit in particular obviously an additional bit of dialogue with dionysus in the game mentions that the satyrs you fight aren't like his crew which refers to the fact that satyrs and dionysus are also inextricably linked in myth satyrs are basically male nature spirits like nymphs but more degenerate i won't really go into it here but sators were essentially sexual deviants and an intrinsic element of cult worship of dionysus the point is there's more of a link between sex and dionysus than it might initially seem but that might not be too much of a surprise depends on what you expect from the god of wine really one tiny thing left to discuss and that's the story of dionysus's birth the codex mentions that he has mortal blood in him so let's look into that in the story this is referring to dionysus's mother was a woman called cemely who was indeed mortal her mortality is actually the crux of the story zeus was quite taken by semele unsurprisingly and got her pregnant hira zeus's wife disguised herself and told semille that the person who got her pregnant was zeus himself semilly confronted zeus about this and made him promise that he would prove who he really was in greek myths gods have a true form which mortals cannot witness without disintegrating and zeus revealed this true form to the pregnant semilla and she died zeus then somehow retrieved the yet unborn dionysus from her corpse ashes whatever and then sewed the fetus into his thigh a few months later who pops out but dionysus greek mythology is very strange but this is a pretty interesting story so i thought it worth telling also talking about the birth of dionysus segues nicely into us starting to talk more about zagreus again according to some schools of thought within ancient greek myth the birth we've just discussed is actually the second time that dionysus is born i'll be honest this is all pretty complicated so i'm going to simplify it as much as possible by saying that the first dionysus was actually zagreus in the game there are a few moments when dionysus and zagreus decide to prank orpheus by telling him that they are actually the same god the same person orpheus believes this and writes a song about it this is a really cool detail that supergiant put into hades because the set of myths in which this story belongs is the orphic myths orphism was a set of beliefs informed by the writings of orpheus who we'll chat about more later on and this belief system pretty much centered around the idea of this first dionysus the dionysus zagreus being killed and reborn so what i'm going to try and do here is look at some of the key lyrics in the song that orpheus writes in the game which is called the hymn to zagreus and see what lines up with the ancient myths on this so here we have two we verses dionysus zagrius was indeed born of zeus and persephone interestingly so she's still his mum in this version of the story too as a serpent refers to the fact that zeus had transformed himself into a snake to seduce persephone which apparently worked somehow in spite of queen hira is the same thing we're used to hearing hiro was mad at zeus for cheating and tried successfully to have the baby dionysus sagrius killed by the titans as you can see in torn to shreds this part is actually the most important that he was torn apart there's a word for this sparagmos literally referring to the act of something being ripped apart or dismembered specifically in this kind of context too this verse refers to zeus obliterating the titans after they have murdered and in some accounts eaten his child according to some sources athena was able to recover dionysus zagrius's heart and his heart was used to revive dionysus into his more recognizable form zacharias actually says this exact thing in the game this is literally the most simple way to talk about it that i can think of there is more to it but i don't think it's worth going into because it gets a bit silly all this is really trying to say is that in some versions of greek myth the name zagreus was sometimes conflated with this proto-dionysus and i think what hades does so well is reference how niche and esoteric and tricky to follow the whole thing is after you prank orpheus in the game and actually speak to dionysus himself he says he's got this entire ballad now about how you are really me or maybe it's the other way around i have no idea which i find really funny because it's so self-aware from a writing perspective canonically in the game zagarius and dionysus just made up the most mental [ __ ] they could and the game has used that as a basis to try and explain how bizarre some of the orphic myths are it's complicated but this is one of the best examples in the whole game of integrating an obscure aspect of mythology into the narrative it's incredible stuff hey zach you ever seen a fellow by the name of orpheus down there you ever heard of him i bet you have and i have had a funny thought a little just that maybe we could try if you'd be up to have a little harmless fun harmless fun at the expense of orpheus you have my full and complete attention dionysus mate up next we have hermes the penultimate olympian on our list his descriptor is god of swiftness which is an interesting one because he can move very quickly but as far as i know he isn't the god of swiftness like poseidon is the god of the sea if that makes any sense the codex calls him patron to travelers traders and tricksters which is a bit more accurate but to be fair hermes is the god of a lot of stuff but more commonly known than any of that stuff is his job which is being the messenger of the gods let's look at his design and see if we can glean any fun bits of information out of it being the messenger of the gods it's no surprise that he's got a wee bag of mail ready for delivery and if you look really closely you can actually spot the head of a tortoise poking out from amongst the letters and scrolls this might seem like a funny tortoise-in-the-hair kind of reference with him being really quick and having a really slow animal as a pet or something but it's actually most likely a reference to a myth regarding hermes as a baby the homeric hymn to hermes alongside being a cracking bit of alliteration is the best source of info regarding his early life it turns out he was a pretty precocious baby and shortly after being born came across a tortoise and according to our sources took up the tortoise in both hands and went back into the house carrying his charming toy then he cut off its limbs and scooped out the marrow of the mountain tortoise with a scoop of grey iron this is pretty grim but we aren't quite done yet he cut stalks of reed to measure and fixed them fastening their ends across the back and through the shell of the tortoise and then stretched oxhide all over it by his skill also he put in the horns and fitted a cross piece upon the two of them and stretched seven strings of sheep god you may have figured out that what hermes is doing here is creating an instrument this is the origin story for the liar but more specifically for the kellis an ancient liar which was often made using tortoiseshell and that word also actually means tortoise an ancient greek interestingly enough pretty literal way of naming the instrument as for instruments in hades orpheus is the court musician and plays the liar hermes actually has a little bit of dialogue where he mentions that orpheus is pretty decent with that liar of his i don't know if this is some sort of reference to hermes having created it but no other god mentions orpheus's liar so i'm gonna count it two more things worth mentioning briefly the first is the staff he's wielding which is called a caduceus and is one of the objects most directly associated with hermes and mercury his roman equivalent the caduceus is a staff encircled by two snakes you can see the snake-like figures on the sides of the staff he carries in the game and there are a few different depictions of it on screen now there's a chance this might look a bit familiar to you and i'll explain why this symbol is often used as a piece of medical iconography so you may have seen it before in that kind of context what makes this interesting is that there's another staff with a really similar design that you may also have seen in a similar context called the rod of asclepius which only has one snake encircling it esclepius was the greek god of healing and medicine so it makes sense as to why that would be present in a medical setting so why is the caduceus there simple answer it was a mistake they're just really similar there was a survey taken in the us in 1992 regarding this which detailed that 62 percent of professional healthcare associations used the rod of asclepius as their symbol and that 76 of commercial healthcare organizations used the caduceus symbol this was one of those moments where the most interesting thing surrounding an ancient piece of iconography was actually modern rather than older and what's particularly interesting is how far removed from hermes its current usage is how fallaciously and erroneously it's put into place the last thing i wanted to mention was the wings on his shoes they're on his head too but we're focusing on shoes first i'm not going to say much about them because this is the most ubiquitous thing you'll see in any iteration of hermes as a character all i'll say is that these do exist in myth although more concretely in roman myth and art than in greek the latin word for these winged sandals was tellaria or tellaris and the singular they help him move quickly in some myths perseus uses them in his quest to kill the gorgon medusa there's not much more to say about them honestly as for the wings on his head the origin of this is as much an etruscan thing as it is a greek and roman thing basically the etruscans were people who like the romans also lived in what is now italy who benefited from a back and forth relationship with the ancient greeks in the early romans in terms of religious and artistic influence that is the etruscan equivalent of hermes and mercury was called terms it was often depicted with a winged cap i might be wrong but i feel like hermes wasn't depicted with a winged cap that regularly in ancient greek culture like with the sandals therefore it's interesting to consider if terms will have had an influence on artworks of mercury who from roman times onwards was often depicted with a winged cap nowadays smiths have conflated a bit and it's common to see hermes with a winged cap in modern depictions despite it being a seemingly less common piece of iconography in ancient greece moving on there's actually one more we topic the main thing that hermes talks about in the game apart from being fast is actually charon and the fact that he's a bit different to the other gods because he's the only one who busies himself with underworld stuff in some greek myths hermes was often considered a catholic god because of this for example the epithet catholius however you want to spell it was often attributed to hermes here's an example from aeschylus supreme herald of the realm above and the realm below oh hermes cthonius come to my aid summon to me the ancestral spirits beneath the earth to hear my prayers the game does detail what the brunt of his job was regarding the underworld with zagreus saying that he brings souls of the departed to cairo's boat and hermes himself saying much the same thing he brings them in cairo takes them down he also calls care on his professional associate which there is some artistic precedent for if you look at this urn painting here you can tell it's hermes because of his staff which is meant to be the caduceus alongside charon in his boat so it turns out that a working relationship between hermes and charon definitely has a basis and i think we'll call it there for hermes next up is our final olympian demeter another message here it says once tablespoon dried oregano two spoons extra virgin olive oil one large onion minced a batch of salt to taste wait this isn't for you though you should try it sometime if you ever make it out the goddess of seasons is the last olympian god you'll come across in hades and last on our list in hades there are a few ways in which demeter differs from her fellow gods and goddesses so let's have a look at some of these starting with her age demeter is visibly older than every other god in the game some gods like zeus don't exactly look young but it isn't nearly the same things with her this brings up the question of whether or not she directly controls her appearance there are myriad examples in mythology of god's changing shape taking up disguises all just at will so i don't think it'd be mental to assume that in this game the gods could do the same if they wanted gods don't age in the same way as humans so what's happened here is that demeter has almost definitely chosen to appear as older there's a bit of dialogue where she says that she believes that true wisdom only comes with age for example she also looks decidedly wintery for being the goddess of seasons but we'll chat about that when we get to persephone as far as i've found there aren't really many if any ancient sources that would back up these aesthetic elements so what's going on here this is where the structure of this section gets a bit trickier because for the most part it's been looking at the game and seeing how well it lines up with mythology demeter is the first character we've really come across where things intentionally don't line up with established myth if you cast your mind back to the aphrodite section i mentioned that technically she was the eldest olympian but the game as you can see here in the codex calls demeter the eldest olympian why is the game knowingly going against established myth when we chatted about poseidon we dove into the titans a little bit i mentioned that zeus was the sixth and final child of chronos and rhea but i didn't really mention who children one to five were the theogony puts them in this order hestia first then demeter then hera after that were the boys hades then poseidon in mythology zeus and the other five we just mentioned were all direct siblings there isn't really any other prevailing piece of myth i know of that refutes this this is why i found it really strange when the game told me that demeter had different parents at one point she says she's sprung from there and at another point she is daughter to hyperion hyperion and thea were siblings of chronos and rhea and you'll have seen them on a family tree earlier in the video it's on the screen now just for a wee refresher though there is not a single iota of evidence either mythologically or historically that demeter is the daughter of hyperion and thea as you can see though helios and celine are who we mentioned in the artemis section as well as eos who represents the dawn there is dialogue in the game in which demeter mentions that helios is her brother so supergiant obviously looked into who hyperion and thea's children actually were so why add demeter into the mix here well to be blunt i'm almost certain that it was just to avoid the story being too incesty in hades you play as zagreus your parents are hades and persephone persephone's mom is demeter but demeter is also the sister of hades according to conventional myth this would make demeter both aunt and grandmother to zagreus these kinds of complicated family trees are poor for the course in greek myth but i'll be honest it doesn't go down as smoothly nowadays if they stuck with the mythology we recognize then we'd have to reconcile with the fact that in the game hades is married to his niece despite being based in old-fashioned greek mythology hades as a game is progressive in every sense and frankly it would seem really incongruous to have the main family dynamic in the game be riddled with incest knowing this now looking at her character is a bit different before it seemed odd that she appeared old and that the game kept telling you she was the eldest olympian but knowing what we now know you can easily figure out these changes were just meant to help make the world still seem believable whilst trimming off some of the more unsavory stuff as such i have no issue with her parents in the game not being chronos and rhea because that change has purpose supergiant obviously did boatloads of research for this game and decided that the best place to drop in demeter would be with the children of hyperion and thea this is because as we've barely discussed demeter is the goddess of seasons and agriculture and the earth's bounty matching who with the deities who represent the sun and the moon concept inextricably linked to the seasons links to agriculture is really sensible and totally cogent there isn't anything incongruent about it and if you didn't know otherwise you wouldn't really have a reason to question it so yeah although demeter's background might just seem like a mistake on a surface level it totally isn't every change made to her is exclusively for the sake of increased believability regarding the narrative in the world building i've said it before myths aren't necessarily absolute and over time are liable to change this is possibly the most well thought through instance you'll find in recent media of manipulating pre-existing mythology to construct a totally convincing parallel mythology and the more i think about it the more impressed i am at how well supergiant pulled this off i've lifted the cold from the earth not as i said i would grandson but near your father's realm i have decided it shall stay the way it is bereft of warmth as a reminder to us all about all this okay so we're finally done with the olympians the next part of the codex is headed with others of note so this section deals a bit more with people rather than gods for the most part at least a lot of these people come as a pair so just like how we discuss hypnos and thanatos together and the furies we'll do that here too we're going to start with everyone's favorites achilles and patroclus for this section there's a few things i'll bring up regarding achilles small things the game refers to and then we'll discuss the both of them together there isn't really anything to say about patroclus that doesn't directly relate to achilles so achilles was a soldier mostly known for his exploits in the trojan war which we'll get into soon and is easily one of the most recognizable names from all of greek mythology although to be honest this is less because of the mythology and more to do with the fact that the phrase achilles heel is pretty commonplace in english at least and to a lesser extent you also have the achilles tendon located in the heel area too it's interesting when a character is more famous for how they died than what they actually did achilles was shot in the heel with an arrow during the trojan war and that killed him the codex makes a reference to this when discussing the bow with achilles saying for it was by the bow that my own life was ended early in a manner of debatable glory this might seem like an abrupt segway but we're going to move straight on to discussing achilles mum but i promise this does link into his being shot in the heel again because achilles wrote the in-game codex there are plenty of references to him and on a few occasions he mentions his mother there are two instances here saying my mother taught me countless water-dwelling denizens and also here saying he's seen loads of fish growing up with the kind of mother he had there's also a bit of dialogue where he says he used to pray to his mother achilles mum was called thetis and she was either a sea goddess or a c nymph depending who you ask the point is that she wasn't mortal but achilles was as such she went to great lengths to protect achilles from harm and the most famous example of this is when she submerged achilles in the river sticks holding him by his heel the stick supposedly had properties meaning that it made your skin invulnerable to harm after it touched you but the only place that didn't touch the water was the heel by which thetis was dangling him in you might have already known this but just in case you didn't this is of course where the phrase achilles heel comes from and it was really cool to see some references to thetis in the game another thing that achilles mentions that could do with a bit more explaining is when he mentions a king he used to serve there are two times i know of when he mentions this firstly in this piece of dialogue where he says the fool of a king i served i'd never take up arms for him and secondly in the codex entry for hades where he says that in life he once served someone who reminded me of him a little the king in question here is agamemnon who led the greeks against the trojans in the trojan war i won't go into any background stuff about agamemnon but he's pretty interesting to say the least if you want to look into anything surrounding him search up his name alongside either clytemnestra or ephegenia and have we read let's stick to achilles for now though in particular where he said he'd never take up arms for him this refers to a disagreement between agamemnon and achilles during the trojan war and this disagreement is actually the entire basis of the first book of homer's iliad essentially agamemnon demanded the achilles hand over a slave of his a woman called brisais and achilles was so offended by this demand that he subsequently refused to fight for agamemnon after that there's more to it than that but those are the basics let's look at the passage from the iliad that deals with this i will myself come to your tent and take the fair cheeks process your prize so that you will understand how much mightier i am than you and another may shrink from declaring himself my equal and likening himself to me to my face so he spoke grief came upon the son of peleus and within his shaggy breast his heart was divided whether he should draw his sharp sword from beside his thigh and break up the assembly and slay the son of atreus or stay his anger and curb his spirit achilles was such a fearsome warrior that his absence would leave an incalculable void in the greek offense but this is where petroculus comes into the story in hades dialogue with patroclus is where you get a fair amount of the background info surrounding the trojan war and the relationship between him and achilles as such he does mention exactly what we just discussed saying that achilles refused to take up arms after he tells you this you get the chance to have an extended conversation with achilles and going back to a screen we were just looking at he mentions that patroclus took up his armor and led their brothers into battle in his guise this is pretty much how it goes in the iliad 2 but there is one detail that doesn't get brought up in the game achilles actually supported the idea for trochleas to disguise himself petroclus says and grant me to buckle upon my shoulders that armor of thine in hope that the trojans may take me for thee and so desist from war and a few lines later achilles says but come do thou put upon thy shoulders my glorious armor and lead forth the war-loving myrmidons to the fight the game is quite ambiguous about how this came to happen and i think this ambiguity is meant to add emotional emphasis to what happened after patroclus went into battle which is of course his death zagarius brings up the achilles followed shortly in a rage which is what happens he basically storms through the battlefield in a rage and kills hector the closest thing the trojans had to achilles all to avenge patroclus this unsurprisingly leads into our final point which is how the game deals with the relationship between achilles and patroclus hades elected to take the root of their relationship being romantic rather than platonic which i think is definitely the best route to take ancient sources and some modern sources disagree on the nature of their relationship the iliad for example does not outright paint them as lovers but writers such as ischalis and plato did as we'll see in a second the game is not subtle about their feelings for one another achilles said they could have been no closer and referring to patroclus tells zagreus that his heart belongs to another for example it's hard not to immediately compare the portrayal of their relationship in the game with the portrayal of their relationship in madeleine miller's 2011 novel the song of achilles which is excellent by the way and you should definitely read it this is probably the most notable modern depiction of a romantic relationship between the two she has a q a about the book on her website and one question in particular is worth reading in its entirety most people don't know that much about patroclus and his relationship with achilles how did you come up with your theory that their friendship grew into love she says i stole it from plato the idea that petrocus and achilles were lovers is quite old many greco-roman authors read their relationship as a romantic one it was a common and accepted interpretation in the ancient world we even have a fragment from a lost tragedy of aeschylus where achilles speaks of his and patroclus's frequent kisses there is a lot of support for their relationship in the text of the iliad itself though homer never makes it explicit for me the most compelling piece of evidence aside from the depth of achilles grief is how he grieves achilles refuses to burn patroclus's body insisting instead on keeping the corpse in his tent where he constantly weeps and embraces it despite the horrified reactions of those around him that sense of physical devastation spoke deeply to me of a true and total intimacy between the two men one thing hades does really well is capture the zeitgeist and it is beyond refreshing to see the relationship between the two of them as being just as madeleine miller explained it's a true tender intimacy a love that has transcended death and ultimately in hades a source of light in the most hellish of circumstances well if it isn't the ward of achilles come to visit us i don't know how i can ever repay you stranger i'm quite sure that it isn't possible i reached more or less the same conclusion while we're on the topic of couples let's move on to our next one this time we're looking at orpheus and eurydice we'll have a look at orpheus first then eurydice a bit and then the two of them together to start we'll look at his design which is really interesting main things to note are his hair and his general depressing demeanor we'll talk about why he's so sad later but hair wise you'll not find any ancient sources that make or face look remotely like this although that's hardly a surprise it's much more likely that this element of his appearance was based on other singers thinking of iconic looks for david bowie or the cures robert smith you can definitely see similarities orpheus as you'll know if you've played the game or know the myths was a musician whose abilities went past what should have been achievable for a normal human in urissy's codex entry you see that it describes orpheus as a common mortal talented beyond compare but not a god this is interesting because it narrows down which myth supergiant used in writing the character when it comes to his parentage orpheus is usually the son of the muse calliope who you can essentially consider the goddess of epic poetry however his father is either a king called viagra's or the god of music himself apollo there's dialogue in which zagreus asks orpheus if it was apollo who taught him to sing and he kind of says yes in response to me this lines up with the version of orpheus we see in the argonautica an epic poem we mentioned back in the aries section where he isn't the child of two divinities but rather calliope and that king i mentioned and at some point he meets and learns from apollo rather than being apollo's son to be bluntly honest it doesn't really impact the game that orpheus was portrayed this way it's more interesting just seeing which takes on the myths the game considers canon or easiest to transpose into the narrative hades has eschewed the line of thought that makes orpheus the son of apollo and matched other tidbits you find throughout to be consistent with that original choice i find that really fascinating okay now a little bit about eurydice again her codex entry calls her a nymph born of the oak itself you might remember we discussed nymphs briefly in the artemis section saying that they're essentially nature spirits eurydice has a bit of dialogue explaining this nicely saying there's loads of different kinds of nymphs and chiefly that for every bit of terrain there's a kind of nymph who loves it the game claims that eurydice is born of oak which goes a long way to explain her design but does that actually hold up in any mythological sources honestly this wasn't something that i really knew off the top of my head but in looking this up i came across a reddit thread where someone asked this very question and the person who responded was actually greg cassevan the guy who wrote the story for hades his response was really interesting he said one of the fascinating things about greek myth is that it's filled with contradictions some sources about eurydice suggest she was a triad a tree spirit or more specifically an oak nymph which is the interpretation we found most compelling in developing our version of the character i've seen many renditions of eurydice in classical art and so on but none that suggest this visually we of course take licence with hades though do strive for authenticity within the mythological canon as much as possible so this detail about eurydice is very much inspired by the source material and unsurprisingly he is right he links to two sources he used examples of which you can see on screen and if you want to go look at this yourself i've linked the sweet thread in the description you can see why they elected to go ahead with a specific portrayal of eurydice because she is a tough steadfast and unwavering character much like an oak we've mentioned this already but this is what makes mythological adaptations so interesting you can to a degree pick and choose as gregor 7 said myth is filled with contradictions but from a creative standpoint that's actually more freeing than it is constraining eurydice being an oak nymph might not be the most prevailing idea in myths about her but it does exist and in this game it sets the tone for her character perfectly okay we've chatted about both of their designs briefly but now it's time to discuss them together rather than spend loads of time discussing what the orpheus and eurydice myth is i'll explain that as quickly as i can and then what we'll do is look at a few of the ways hades refers to that story orpheus and eurydice were in love and then she died heartbroken he ventured into the underworld to retrieve her hades agreed under one condition she will follow him back out of the underworld but if he looks back to see if she's there he'll lose her forever he gets most of the way but eventually gives in turns around and she gets whisked away never to return to the surface pretty sad story let's look now at some of the details firstly eurydice's death in hades she mentions that she was killed by a snake bite this totally lines up with adaptations of the story one example being in ovid's metamorphoses while through the grass delighted naiads wandered with the bride a serpent struck its venom tooth in her soft ankle and she died where stories differ is what was happening to her before she was bitten often it's purely accidental but sometimes she steps on a snake because she's being chased in some versions by a satyr and according to virgil by a minor beekeeping god called aristaeus either way the game totally lines up with the established myth next up the codex calls orpheus among the only mortals who once ventured down into the underworld and returned to tell the tale this is true but you could be a bit nitpicky about it depending on how many you consider to be among the only other mythological figures who popped in and out of the underworld are as follows odysseus pops in to have a chat with a prophet called tyresius for a bit of information aeneas does much the same but instead goes for a chat with his dead dad hercules or heracles i prefer to call him hercules though it's more well known anyway hercules went in to capture and retrieve cerberus as the last of his 12 labors which he managed to do theseus also went in and out of the underworld but his story is slightly more ignoble than the others he only got out because hercules found and freed him when he was there to get cerberus also theseus was stuck to a rock and couldn't get up when hercules freed him he genuinely ripped his arse off zagreus does mention all of these people leaving the underworld in a bit of dialogue with hades by the way anyway you get the point orpheus's underworld story is likely the most famous in greek myth but there are plenty of others a good few of which i haven't mentioned one last thing about how this myth is discussed in hades and that is that eurydice mentions that orpheus and her won persephone over with their little duet this is referring to the point in the story in which orpheus asks hades and persephone if he can have eurydice back and how he convinces them i think this is where you'd find the biggest divergence there might be some ancient source somewhere in which they perform together but i don't know of it every version of the story i've ever seen has orpheus performing alone look at this excerpt again from ovid fame declared that conquered by the song of orpheus for the first and only time the hard cheeks of the fierce humanities were wet with tears nor could the royal queen nor he who rules the lower world deny the prayer of orpheus so they called to them eurydice who was still held among the new arriving shades and she obeyed the call by walking to them with slow steps yet halting from her wound this directly refers to persephone the royal queen being moved by the music but eurydice played no part in that however that's not a problem again it's like what we've said so much throughout this video you can take a lot of creative license when it comes to adapting myths in the game eurydice performs alongside orpheus and independently of orpheus at no point whether you know the origin myths or not does this come across as incongruous it just makes sense so although there might not be precedent for it who cares it's a superior version of events after all she is meant to represent the oak and just like the oak her voice is imbued with strength stability and solidity i'm grateful that supergiant very literally gave her the voice that she'd so often been denied throughout mythology the depiction of orpheus is very good but just like what i said at the end of the charam section there's a good chance that this particular version of eurydice being as spectacular as it is could go on to be the most influential in recent memory [Music] look who orphy [Applause] [Music] is [Music] oh [Music] oh hey you're singing in the blood afro orpheus thank you for taking my request oh it is certainly my pleasure zacharias this song of eurydice and mine have a connection to it i suppose reminded me of some fond memories next on our list we have sisyphus obviously he's huge super ripped and despite the shackles he's wearing is a pretty cheery bloke you come across sisyphus exclusively in tartarus the part of the underworld where all the worst people have to deal with their sins although the codex says something interesting about that most of those who earned the highest form of punishment in tartarus committed acts i hesitate to commit to the page though sisyphus is an exception to the rule you can see in the next line that the crime he committed was cheating death arguably a victimless crime one born of hubris rather than cruelty as such he's forced to atone for this crime by repeatedly pushing a boulder to the top of a hill and having it roll back down before he gets to the top but how exactly did he cheat death you ask him about this at one point and the details he gives amounts to giving hades and thanatos the slip however i'm not sure the game ever strictly tells you how he did this so we'll go into that now the reason why thanatos dislikes sisyphus with such ardour is that sisyphus played him for a fool essentially thanatos was sent to chain him up and was tricked and ended up getting chained up himself look at this tiny extract from morford and leonardon's classical mythology to sum it up zeus sent death to carry sisyphus off sisyphus chained death and so long as he was bound no mortals could die believe it or not he actually cheated death a second time but we won't go into that here it does beg the question though what kind of person would sisyphus have to have been in order to try and do stuff like this in homer's iliad he calls sisyphus the craftiest of men and in the game sisyphus himself tells you that he wasn't much of a good man although the morals of your actions don't necessarily have the largest bearings on your position in the underworld as we'll see when we chat a bit about elysium being crafty in and of itself is not a trait that would beget eternal torture odysseus for example was a percentage in greek mythology highly regarded for his intelligence craftiness and trickery i mean the greeks even have a god of trickery in hermes but trying to cheat death that one doesn't go down so well speaking of hermes there's a bit of vague offhand dialogue where he says he took a skinny little chap down to the underworld got the business end of a sharp spear he did he had it coming though a lot of lying cheating and the like last that i heard he's still making his amends down there i can only imagine this is referring to sisyphus considering he did a lot of lying and cheating and is still making his amends also he may well have been skinny before he started having to work out for all eternity the only thing that confuses me is that i can't find any mention of sisyphus being killed by a spear however you know who was killed by a spear odysseus by his own son telegonus at least in some versions of the story this makes me wonder who hermes is meant to be talking about here because apart from the manner of death everything else matches sisyphus and it doesn't seem coincidental that the next craftiest [ __ ] in the whole mythos matches the other part i'm not sure what's going on here but this isn't the last theory we might have about odysseus as we'll see in a few sections time i'd like to briefly chat about the impact that this story has had on modern culture and i think the most prominent example is linguistic in nature the adjective sisyphean and the idiom sisyphean task aren't exactly used in everyday conversation but do exist in modern day english usage unsurprisingly it just refers to a task that either seems or is fruitless repetitive and unrewarding it's the same kind of idea for the word herculean also influenced by myth and referring to the 12 labors of hercules it means something requiring great strength and willpower i think it's really interesting that descriptive terms like this have persisted through the ages and now exist within modern language but i guess mythology is everywhere around us whether we know it or not for example you might not suspect anything mythological if you look at the verb tantalize or the adjective tantalizing but the etymology of that word is entirely steeped in myth it refers to the figure of tantalus who tried to trick the gods failed and was punished eternally by standing in a pool of water underneath a tree if he crouched to drink the water would recede and if he stretched for fruit from the tree the branches would rise out of his reach this is where those words come from it's fascinating right what i find particularly interesting about those three examples is how they all stem from struggle the most inherently human experience i can think of sisyphus hercules and tantalus all committed pretty serious crimes and as such we're all punished accordingly those aforementioned words all originate from the punishment they faced and that can't just be chance there's something universally relatable in the consequences they dealt with which has to be why those stories survived and are still retold to this day and on that note i'd like to briefly head into the final point in this section focusing on one of those retellings well kind of it's not so much of a retelling but more an essay expounding the philosophical ramifications of ceaseless punishment limit decisive by albert or just the myth of sisyphus in english predominantly the essay deals with the concept of absurdism something camus became quite well known for but the part we're interested in also happens to be undoubtedly the most famous he finishes his discussion on the issue by saying this i'm sorry for saying it in french and sounding like a wanker but honestly the translation of this one must imagine sisyphus happy does not have nearly the same impact as the original french i'm aware that makes me sound like even more of a wanker but it is true but how does this tie into hades why must we imagine sisyphus to be happy in the game there is no character more at peace with their lot than sisyphus no one really comes close to the level of acceptance and calm that he shows here's an example zacharias expresses regret that sisyphus is stuck in endless suffering and he replies saying to save those sympathies for someone else that he could have it so much worse this is interesting because when isolated this would seem like a front surely no one could actually feel that way in his situation but the more you play the more you go through your own sisyphean and herculean escape attempts the more you realize that sisyphus is being earnest and you come to understand why no character represents the ideals behind hades and the entire roguelike genre more aptly than sisyphus after all he does tell you that repetition is the key to mastery and he's right with practice with reflection and ultimately with time no hill is impossible to climb and no obstacle is truly insurmountable and no if you were wondering sisyphus and myth did not go all tom hanks and castaway and name the boulder baldi although i wish he had you're much too kind to this old soul prince said the thing is this is home for me and baldi it is what it is though knowing that the furies won't be visiting with quite their formal regularity that is a load off heavier than baldi there you mean you're really going to stay even though you don't have to is that so odd highness don't see myself vlogging all baldy out of here besides and if i were to leave why we would not be having these exchanges now and then i happen to enjoy them quite a bit now here you go and thank you very much next up is our final character pairing for the whole video theseus and asterius it's made abundantly clear in the game but just in case there's any ambiguity here asterius is the minotaur again like all the other sections that have focused on more than one person these two characters are inextricably linked and need each other for context so let's look a bit into why these two are appearing in both the game and this video there's a chance that you'll have come across the myth of the minotaur and the labyrinth even if you don't know much about mythology at all it was definitely one of the first stories i remember learning about as a kid here's the basics and then we'll discuss the two characters more individually the minotaur was a horrifying half-man half-bull creature that was contained within an underground labyrinth on the island of crete we'll go into how he got there later the point is as retribution for the death of his son who was assassinated in athens king minos of crete started demanding what were essentially athenian teenage sacrifices seven boys and seven girls how frequently this happened is debated but plutarch said it was once every nine years so we'll just go with that these kids were then dropped into the labyrinth and were consequently devoured by the minotaur eventually a young theseus volunteered to go with the intention of slaying the minotaur and breaking this sacrificial cycle he went in and killed the minotaur we'll talk more about how exactly he did that in a second but that's the crux of the story minos sacrifices for the labyrinth theseus kills the minotaur much like how we looked at the orpheus and eurydice myth let's see what scraps of info the game gives us regarding this story and see how it matches up worth saying that in the game theseus is awful totally unbearable no self-awareness absolute bellend there is precedent for him being a prick and dionysus makes reference to it when he says he doesn't like theseus because there was this nice lass who helped him out one time and he just dumped her rotten the person in question here is ariadne the daughter of king minos who fell in love with theseus upon his arrival in crete as a quick tangent ariadne is almost definitely the person featured in the cretan princess painting you can buy in the house of hades in case you got it and wonder who it might be anyway sorry this next bit is probably the most famous element of the whole myth she gave theseus a ball of thread which he attached to the entrance of the labyrinth meaning that he wouldn't get lost he would just have to follow the thread back to the entrance provided he could defeat the minotaur theseus promised ariabney that he would escape the island with her afterwards because in helping him she was a traitor to her father as they escaped they stopped on an island called naxos here theseus abandoned ariadne and left without her there are different accounts on why he left her there but the thing that seems pretty universally accepted is that dionysus found her there and took her as his bride no wonder he doesn't like theseus although some of those accounts are that dionysus made theseus leave ariadne as an offering to him in which case he'd have no reason to dislike theseus i'm not really sure but the way the game paints it is that theseus abandoned her and looking at him you can't be that surprised another part of the myth that could do with clarification is where asterius claims that theseus beat him barehanded this seems pretty unlikely but is it actually true well according to the biblioteca he killed him with jabs of his fist and then made his way out again by pulling himself along the thread there's also an account from pindar saying that theseus strangled the minotaur in a similar manner to how hercules strangled the nemean lion however there's also some sources that say otherwise here's an extract from ovid's heroities and wood that thy upraised right hand oh theseus had not slain with naughty club him that was man in part and in part bull also looking at some ancient artwork depicting the scene you occasionally see theseus depicted with what looks like a sword the point is did he kill the minotaur barehanded yes and no but the fact that there's precedent for this at all means that the game still gets it right now two brief points that i don't want to go too deep into at all but are still worth bringing up firstly theseus at one point calls himself the greatest king of athens this is kind of accurate actually theseus did become king of athens and basically liberated the area from crete and rule remember how before the athenians were kind of under the yoke of king minos theseus sorted that out this is a gross oversimplification of the matter but gets the point across i did say i wanted to deal with these points quickly next up in a bit of dialogue with poseidon he says that zeus started calling theseus poseidon's son by some accounts this is true but by almost all accounts theseus's father was actually aegeas the king of athens so how does that work it's actually a pretty old idea that you come across occasionally in greek myth and it's called telegony this idea goes back to aristotle apparently and is the concept of shared paternity that is the child exhibiting the traits of their father and also other men known to their mother it's a very antiquated idea and not one worth giving any legitimate time to but in the context of myth it's pretty interesting it's a weird one to be honest but would it be greek mythology if it wasn't weird okay minotaur time firstly why is he called asterius in the game well pretty much because that's actually his name although you never really come across it technically you see him being called asterion more than a mysterious but it doesn't really matter either way the name means starry with the aster bit meaning star something you'll recognize from words like astronomy and astrology two reasons why he could be called this firstly it was also the name of king minus's father whose relationship to the minotaur will find out soon secondly it could have some sort of link to the taurus constellation if you cast your mind back to the artemis section i mentioned that callisto was turned into a constellation around the time she died this is actually how most constellations ended up being explained some sort of mythological figure being made into stars the minotaur wasn't turned into a constellation that was the cretan bull a famous bull from greek myth that upon being killed by theseus was made into what we now recognize as taurus the painting of theseus that you get in the house of hades actually has the zodiac symbol for taurus on it as you can see just here a fun wee reference to both his connection to the cretan bull and the minotaur but earlier i said that the minotaur and his name could have some link to the constellation this is because the cretan bull is the minotaur's father let's look into that story so does hades tell us anything about this yeah a little bit and you hear the start of it from poseidon he says that the minotaur was a living testament to his revenge and then calls it a long and boring story which isn't true and a sordid story which it definitely is so what does he mean what was his revenge let's look at the biblioteca of pseudoapollodorus again for some clarification minos aspired to the throne but was rebuffed he claimed however that he had received sovereignty from the gods and to prove it he said that whatever he prayed for would come about so while sacrificing to poseidon he prayed for a bull to appear from the depths of the sea and promised to sacrifice it upon its appearance and poseidon did send up to him a splendid bull thus minos received the rule but he sent the bull to his herds and sacrificed another poseidon was angry that the bull was not sacrificed and turned it wild so that explains part of it before we get onto the properly scandalous part let's look at one more thing mentioned in the game something asterisk himself brings up he says his mother was also a queen and then says that he was treated badly by her his mother was pacifi queen to king minos let's continue on with the next bit of the story he also devised that pacific should develop a lost for it in her passion for the bull she took on as her accomplice an architect named daedalus he built a wooden cow on wheels and then after placing pacific inside set it in a meadow where the bull normally grazed the bull came up and had intercourse with it as if with a real cow pacifier gave birth to asterius and that's how the minotaur came to be obviously king mino's felt enormous shame that this had happened to him and his wife and that's why the minotaur was locked away in the labyrinth it's kind of a sad story actually but i'm really glad that the game alluded to it although you definitely would only piece the hints in the game together if you already knew the story one final thing that is worth mentioning before the next section is that theseus was actually originally intended to be the protagonist of hades before it became what it is have a listen to this but specifically we were going for our starting point was a uh theseus and the minotaur type so still greek mythology um and we were so drawn to the idea of the labyrinth as like the perfect setting for kind of a roguelike experience the shifting labyrinth i don't have anything to say about that apart from that it would have been a cool idea and that you might not have known that i'm glad they decided on getting out of the underworld as the main premise though rather than getting in these two what hope of you monster versus the blessed bonds of brotherhood [Applause] [Music] best not belittling king he is more powerful than he appears we must remain alert this time oh i am perfectly alert right now asterius and were i still alive i would be positively salivating at the thought of running through this pustule with my spear or whatever means i had available now let's go next up is cerberus who is the first and only character we'll talk about in this video who does not have any dialogue so who is he he's a vicious three-headed dog who guards the underworld making sure no one gets in or out when they aren't meant to as you'll know if you've played the game and got past elysium cerberus will be there waiting for you in every run at the exit to the underworld although he seems to spend most of his time chilling out in the house of hades most mentions of cerberus mythology have him posted at the entrance rather than cozying up by the fire at home but this is a video game and i would prefer to be able to interact with the dog in the house rather than have him be on perpetual guard duty one interesting feature about cerberus is that only his left head is amenable to pets zagarius even mentions that the other two heads are called beta and gamma which means the left one must be alpha it's pretty funny to imagine that each head is just called the greek equivalent of heads a b and c and unsurprisingly there is no precedent for this or each head having a notably different personality however i like that the game gave each had a different temperament this is such a common trope especially in modern media and does add a bit of character especially to one without the ability to speak that's enough for stuff that doesn't have precedent though let's move on to something we can see concrete evidence for the way you get past cerberus in every run is by providing him with a snack a satyr sack i mean he's a monster but he's still a dog of course he's going to enjoy eating and getting treats believe it or not there is explicit precedent for cerberus having a proclivity towards snacks and it's the single thing i'm most excited to discuss in this entire video for this we have to head back to my favorite vienered as always we're looking in book six where our hero nes ventures into the underworld now the basics of this point are as follows aeneas is accompanied by a woman called the sybil of kumai a prophetess who prepares a snack for cerberus this snack is drugged so that when cerberus eats it he'll fall asleep and they can get past him this will take a bit of explanation but it's absolutely amazing so let's have a look at this section of book six don't worry about understanding the latin by the way i'll talk you through what you need to know so the snack in question here is offham the accusative form of the noun offer which can mean something as vague as morsel or piece of food or as specific as cake or loaf it depends on the translation the point is cerberus is a greedy wee boy in the game and he's a greedy wee boy in mythology too he shouldn't be accepting snacks from strangers on guard duty but he does thus it sounds obvious but that's why feeding cerberus is how you get past him in the game however we aren't quite done here this is the bit i'm most excited to talk about and you'll have to forgive me because its connection to the game is scant at best that being said it's too interesting to not bring up i just want to pop back to the few lines of latin we were looking at a minute ago and in particular the lines after the one with offham in it just so no one's out of the loop here's a translation of this latin so this is the bit where cerberus snatched the food and gulped it down what we want to focus on specifically is the middle line of these three in particular the bit where the comma is now here's a few things we need to know for context choripit is the bit translated as snatched the bait and aque just means and it's continuing the sentence anyway you get that that part is just the specific moment where cerberus swallows up his snack one other thing you need to know is that this is ancient epic poetry and as such has meter in particular this meter is called dactylic hexameter and don't worry you don't need to know what that is just know that there are certain rules that determine how these sentences are spoken and which syllables you stress you might know about this if you've ever studied shakespeare at school shakespeare often wrote in a meter called iambic pentameter which gave his work a unique sing-song kind of rhythm this is a really famous line from romeo and juliet but soft what light through yonder window breaks and what i'm going to do quickly is scan it as you can see on screen now scanning poetry is just pointing out which syllables you stress and which you don't so that you know how to say it iambic pentameter the meter this is written in is basic and follows a heartbeat pattern of unstressed then stressed five times over scanning dactylic hexameter is a lot more complex here is that middle line from before scanned for example now one final feature i need to teach you about please stay with me here by the way i promise the payoff is worth it is illusion this happens in language pretty often and is just when one word slides into another an example in english is let's which is an alighted form of let us illusion plays a big role when it comes to scanning ancient poetry like this and you can see that the am at the end of objectam is a different colour now right this is me letting you know that we have to elide that sound combine that word with the beginning of the next word dropping that am makes it sound like object objects which you might notice sounds a bit clumsy in the middle well it's taken me long enough to get here but this is deliberate this is my favorite thing honestly this almost unnatural sounding gap between these two words created by virgil's genius use of prostate is intended to get across the idea of and mimic cerberus swallowing honestly when saying object aque there's an almost involuntary gulp as you cross the bridge between the two words this isn't accidental because it takes place at the exact point that cerberus himself gulps down his food it's just astonishing it absolutely blows my mind it's the most incredible thing i've ever seen i really hope i've got across how cool this is because it's taken me a few minutes to explain it and i understand that you might not have an interest in ancient poetic meter so thank you for letting me go on about that there's just one last thing to mention when it comes to cerberus in the game and that's a comment about him in the codex saying that tales of the number of his heads are oft exaggerated this is a reference to some versions of cerberus particularly in earlier myths that give cerberus a few more heads hesiod gave him 50 heads and supposedly pindar gave him a hundred but almost everyone else gives him the three you'd expect greek myth loves giving [ __ ] multiple heads though back in the very beginning of this video when i discussed hades himself i mentioned that cerberus was the offspring of typhon and echidna the monsters to end all monsters some of his siblings include the hydra the chimera and orthrus a dog just like cerberus but with only two heads instead of three unsurprisingly almost all of these monsters have something to do with snakes too some ancient versions of cerberus also had snakes on his neck i said it back when we talked about the furies but wow they really liked making stuff snakey back in the day too well look at you boy never seen you quite so perky relatively speaking of course big tough guy like yourself you must have missed mother just as much as she missed you well you've got plenty of time for catching up on things now the monstrous triple-headed beast of hades would perhaps be overcome with pure emotion by the joyous circumstances were he only capable of this how dare you sir speaking of snakes that's a good way to segue into talking about dusa one of two characters in this game who straight up does not exist in greek mythology kind of maybe not it's complicated let's not mince words there's a definite line of thought here that dusa is meant to be medusa the most infamous of all gorgons so that's essentially what we'll talk about here we've mentioned the gorgons a few times notably in discussion about athena's shield but in case you don't know let's just discuss what they are it's a bit tricky to pin down because sources differ so much but when people discuss gorgons they generally refer to three sisters steno urieli and medusa pretty much everyone has heard of medusa but it's the opposite for the other two you get trios like this a lot in greek myths with the furies the fates the grey eye the gorgons were monsters however horrifying to behold and in most records have snakes for hair this is the most common gorgon trait and one that you can see deusa shares other elements are more up for debate such as whether they have wings or not but the big aspect we haven't mentioned yet is the petrification thing if you looked at one of the gorgons in the eye you'd be turned to stone again this is so widespread in other mythologies and in modern media that it almost feels trite to talk about it but this is the basic idea monstrous sisters with snake-like hair and a petrifying gaze do so however is a ray of sunshine super wholesome so how could she be medusa well firstly her name she's a maid her name is dusa maidusa medusa obviously that doesn't mean she's meant to be medusa as we've just said if you want to make a gorgon reference you're stuck with medusa no one's going to catch on to a steno or uriely pun another point that maybe favors this idea is that she's a floating head i mentioned briefly in the hermes section the ancient greek hero perseus killed medusa i won't go into that story too much here but the important point is that he killed her by beheading her the gorgon head alone is pretty significant imagery and in the myth he actually kept the head and used it as a weapon of sorts because it still retained its petrifying properties so if medusa was going to exist in the game at all it would probably be without a body there's a bit of dialogue where zagreus asks dusa if she used to have a body and wings and she politely refuses to answer this rabbit hole keeps going though let's look at something else she says when zagreus asks if she's related to the hostile gorgon heads you come across in asphodel her reply is intriguing calling them relatives in the loosest sense saying that it would be like having nasty almost mindless siblings born entirely from your own blood weirdly specific now if we look at the codex entry for the mindless enemies in question we see this as the immortal eye core of the most infamous of gorgon spilled from her severed head into the earth it trickled down into the underworld and spawned a brood of vengeful offspring now if we totally ignore any external mythology it definitely seems like dusa and medusa are the same if it's her blood that they are born from and that blood belongs to the most infamous of gorgons then that kind of explains itself however is there any precedent whatsoever for creatures springing from the blood spilled from her severed head there is indeed although some of it won't be what you expect ovid's metamorphosis says this as he hovered over libya's sands the blood drops from the gorgon's head dripped down the spattered desert gave them life for snakes smooth snakes of many kinds and so that land still swarms with deadly serpents to this day so there is a basis for what the game says in a way snakes not gorgons but you get the point the real drama that came from her decapitation was that the winged horse pegasus emerged from her neck and that's actually how he was born i mentioned this briefly when we chatted about poseidon because technically poseidon is the father of pegasus but i'm not going to go into the whole poseidon seducing medusa thing that's one you can look up yourself anyway it does definitely seem like the game is giving you hints that dusa is meant to be medusa however her codex entry does say that a background check could not verify any connection to the notorious gorgon sisters of the surface which throws a spanner in the works this is one of those things where you just have to decide yourself and you could definitely go either way personally i'm just seeing it as a reference to medusa rather than her being medusa but if supergiant's intention was for her to be medusa i wouldn't be surprised ms dosa i um wanted to apologize for when i prayed about your past i just wanted to get to know you better but i was insensitive and i'm sorry [Music] come on don't even worry about it i've already forgotten really no big deal it's just the past me it's just so it wasn't even me this is me now i'm glad i'm here here we have the other character in the game who is an original creation who wasn't in greek myth and again just like with dusa it might only seem that way skelly as a character categorically did not exist in mythology and as such there's nothing to really say about him the format of this video is mostly checking if what's in the game has precedent and that's kind of impossible when the character is made up for the game what does merit further examination though is if skelly has a secret identity someone we would actually recognize from greek myth and who he might really be worth saying up front that he might not actually be anyone and i don't know if he is but it can be fun to conjecture like doosa the game leaves a few clues a wee trailer breadcrumbs for you to follow let's look at some of those clues for ages you try to get skelly to tell you his real identity and eventually he tells you that his name was skelemus captain of the cretan second fleet sailing on athens under king minos then he says they sailed into the waters of corybus we'll deal with charybdis first charybdis is a whirlpool also a sea monster but mostly a whirlpool it's a bit hard to explain but the point is that the waters of charybdis are very treacherous most often you'll find charybdis being discussed as a pair with another sea monster called cilla there's a fish you can catch called acila scion the description for which calls scilla a monstrous sea creature that achilles and his pals were very careful to avoid cilla and charybdis basically lived on either side of a strait the strait in question most likely being the strait of messina just between sicily and the italian mainland there's actually an idiom about this being between cilla and charybdis is essentially the same idea as being between a rock and a hard place both options are shite but you have to pick one anyway i could totally buy skelly coming across charybdis but not if he was a captain of the cretan second fleet sailing on athens here's crete and here's athens why would he be near sicily sure in the in-game mythos charybdis could be in a different place or it could just be flowery language implying they sailed into a whirlpool but looking at the geography it makes me doubt his testimony which is handy actually because shortly after he tells you it's all a lie so that puts you in a bit of a bind trying to figure out who he is eventually you ask asterius if he recognizes the name because after all lysterius is from crete and he says he might have heard it this just confuses things even more so you confront skelly again and he specifies that he never said he made it up just that you wouldn't believe him then he gets a bit huffy and talks about leading 50 or something sailors in a voyage across the sea in a minoan galley with nothing but the stars to guide them and here we get what i think is the biggest clue although it could be nothing zagreus says that hermes gave him the impression that skelly was somebody else nobody in particular you might have caught on to where i'm taking this now one final bit of potential evidence is in the codex these first few lines the animated skeleton and i we seldom get along he is too talkative for me and spouts such simple condescensions to all those in earshot seemingly as though he were an expert in the ways of war i disapprove of his reckless advice and am uncertain as to who he was in life to be so self-assured in death part of this backs up my theory and part of it goes against it but my vague idea here is that skelly could be odysseus i'm not saying he is but a few of the things i've listed above did make me wonder we've mentioned odysseus before but just so you know odysseus is the titular character in the odyssey arguably the most famous piece of ancient literature there is he was a hero who fought with the greeks in the trojan war so let's look at the clues firstly i think the skelemius name is a lie obviously and the details about being part of the cretan second fleet but his second outburst about this where he goes into captaining a ship with nothing but the stars to guide them does line up with odysseus it might be tenuous but odysseus is a leader the king of an island called ithaca and as such he is the main authority figure throughout the voyages undertaken during the odyssey odysseus would know all about captioning a ship but then again that doesn't actually prove anything it could still go either way what makes it seem a little bit more likely to me is that skelly brought up charybdis charybdis actually doesn't get mentioned that much in ancient sources the most prominent mention of it though you'll find in the odyssey there's a sorceress named cersei who plays an important role in the odyssey and there's also a very good book about her also written by madeleine miller who we mentioned in the achilles section and she warns odysseus about the dangers of cilla and charybdis under it awesome charybdis sucks the dark water down three times a day she belches it fourth three times in hideous fashion as she swallows it down again pray not to be caught there when she swallows down poseidon himself could not save you from destruction then charybdis does also appear in the story of jason and the argonauts as well as in the aeneid but i would wager that its appearance in the odyssey is the most well-known and significant if skelly was odysseus he would have encountered charybdis firsthand him and the whirlpool do share a connection the next clue is the nobody one again this could be really tenuous but it also could be a genuine reference possibly the most famous section of the odyssey is when odysseus outsmarts the cyclops polyphemus odysseus and his men had been captured by the cyclops and eventually odysseus managed to trick his way out of the situation as he so often does he told polyphemus that his name was nobody and later when opportunity struck attacked the cyclops here's how it went down in the story odysseus found a club lying in the cave which with the help of four comrades he sharpened to a point he then heated it in the fire and blinded the cyclops polyphemus cried out for help to the neighboring cyclopes who came and asked who was injuring him when he replied nobody they assumed he meant no one was hurting him so they went away again as he escaped his hubris got the better of him and odysseus eventually told the cyclops his real name which ended up costing him pretty dearly as you'll know if you've read the odyssey before this was the moment where i thought skelly might be odysseus but again the word nobody isn't exactly uncommon the use of it in this particular situation just made me wonder one final clue is what was written in the codex as though he were an expert in the ways of war and to be so self-assured in death both would fit odysseus as a character he was smart sneaky a fierce warrior and above all else replete with pride as we've just discovered it's also worth considering the fact that achilles is the one who has written the codex and the achilles and odysseus knew each other quite well in greek myth they interact a fair bit in the iliad and they're often painted as opposites odysseus was usually calm level-headed and temperate while achilles was passionate hot-headed and aggressive they were pretty antithetical and maybe that's why achilles says that he and skelly seldom get along but then again reckless advice and being too talkative might not be the most odysseus-like traits so again it could be nothing although you could argue that he was too talkative when he started bragging as he was escaping polyphemus but yeah this is my theory and i would totally accept it being wrong but i do kind of hope it's right i was really hoping that the final skelly statue would give us a hint towards his true identity but i don't think it does oh and if you've played the game and don't know who skelly's employer is yet try equipping his lucky tooth keepsake on your next run and make sure to speak to hermes it might help get that storyline going anyway time to move on farewell skelly [Music] what got you pretty good again didn't i boyo i am asking you to get me out of here all that stuff about your blade and your aspect i mean you ate all of it right up believe it or not this is the final character in the game we need to discuss before we move on to brief discussion of the locations and weapons so let's get on with it the character in question is persephone goddess of verger queen of the underworld and mother to zagreus precedent-wise all of those things are true in mythology she's the goddess of stuff like spring and vegetation she does reign alongside hades in the underworld and she is in at least some sense mother to both forms of zagreus we've discussed in this video the zagarius in the game and the dionysus zagrius from orphic mythology as such let's not waste time and look at the most obvious question why is the cheerful goddess of springtime the queen of the underworld the game takes a pretty modern approach to the story and describes it as willful and consensual elopement facilitated by zeus persephone is the daughter of demeter as we'll go into and persephone leaving mount olympus had to be done on the sly in mythology and in art history this event is called the rape of persephone in the zoo section i mentioned the uncomfortable ambiguity in greek mythology when it comes to things like seduction abduction and rape there is ambiguity here too in some ways but there isn't ambiguity regarding whether persephone was taken of her own volition because she definitely wasn't i understand why the game made it consensual and i'm glad it did but this is not how it goes down in the stories she was taken the reason it's called the rape of persephone comes from the use of the latin verb rappere which you can see in the version of the story you'll find in ovid's metamorphoses in this particular instance it is referring to abduction and you'll often hear that the word rape used in this way does primarily mean abduction for example you may have heard of the rape of the savine women an event in early roman history in which multiple women were kidnapped and taken back to rome i'll be honest i think part of the reason why modern readings of these events often rationalize these things as being purely abduction is because it makes it more palatable but on the other side you could argue that that's a pretty reductive way to look at it i think that that latter idea might be too cynical a perspective though look at it this way a recent poem called persephone to hades by northern irish poet nikita gill recontextualizes this myth with the first stanza saying you are the kindest thing that ever happened to me even if that is not how our tale is told there's been a recent trend of myth retelling in contemporary literature which i really like for example the two madeleine miller books we've brought up are some of the most famous again as i mentioned in the zeus section when discussing dr emily wilson's translation of the odyssey mythology never gave women the space for their own interpretations on these stories stories which involve and revolve around them that's why books like cersei are so important myth is fluid not concrete and should be adapted for the modern age by contemporary voices the silence of the girls by pat barker gives a voice to perseus mentioned only in this video as the property of achilles and then the property of agamemnon during the trojan war margaret atwood's penelope ad gives life to penelope the wife of odysseus and there are so many more books like this which are finally giving women the opportunity to tell the stories of other women there's unquantifiable value in agency and the transfer from forcible passivity to unfettered autonomy as such it's hard not to support recontextualizing myth in the way that hades has done with persephone this video is all about precedent but progression is often more important than faithful adaptation so let's do a bit more storytelling hades took persephone down to the underworld and demeter was absolutely raging that her daughter had gone missing this is why demeter is so wintery in the game it's meant to take place during that point in greek myth where she was fuming that she hadn't yet found persephone because persephone eventually being found by zagreus and eventually by demeter and the olympians is the entire premise of the narrative in hades we'll skip forward a bit now though and talk about how pomegranates link to the story it's universally accepted that the reason persephone had to stay in the underworld was because she ate pomegranate seeds which bound her to the realm here's an extract from the homeric hymn to demeter detailing that the game brings this up as well with persephone telling zagreus that for every seed you eat you can't leave the underworld for that many months in a year i thought it was pretty funny that she then tells you she just made it up again a slight element of giving autonomy a slight element of mocking what is a pretty silly myth you might already know but the persephone being kidnapped myth existed for the purpose of rationalizing seasons the time that persephone had to spend in the underworld was when you had bad weather because demeter was in a mood but when she was back on the surface that's why the weather was good because demeter was no longer in a mood zacharias explains pretty much that exact idea to orpheus here saying that they have rules about that stuff how the game treats this myth has to be slightly different to all the others because as i said this myth is what was transposed into the main narrative of the game as such the characters are playing with the details a bit more than all the other myths we've spoken about so far there's just one last thing i'd like to go into and it's just another thing where we check the veracity of something the game says demeter says that persephone's father was a baseborne farm boy and as such persephone is only divine on her mom's side there might be a record of this being the case somewhere but the overwhelming verdict is that persephone's dad is actually zeus in most significant mythological sources the main reason this was changed is the exact same reason we discussed in the demeter section regarding why they made demeter's parentage different it's to avoid weird incest stuff in a game that doesn't need to have a weird incest stuff in it hades marrying the daughter of two of his siblings just gets a bit too out there and with that i think we're done for all the characters as i said at the start i will have missed loads of stuff and probably been wrong about loads of it too so i'm sorry about that there's still a few things for us to go over though so let's have a look at some of the locations you can find in the game i suppose i can see that i thought i might end up like father growing old wasting away then the time flew by and i realized i was closer to mother's side mortals certainly don't have it easy but their limited days it means they live their lives to the fullest i think at least we've some of that in us indeed my son i'll just say from the off that these sections are going to be a bit shorter and a bit less concretely structured than all the character sections so don't expect it to be the same sort of format a lot more creative license was taken with the locations and weapons in comparison to the characters and as such there isn't going to be quite as much mythological precedent to discuss that being said what we do discuss is still going to be really interesting first up location wise is the house of hades which in the game is the literal house you live in at the base of the underworld in greek myth the house of hades is not a house but rather a way of describing the entirety of the underworld supergiant as i just alluded to have taken creative licence and made the house of hades an actual house it's a super smart idea and executed really well but this house is not in mythology house of hades is a pretty common phrase i mean you come across it in the iliad and the odyssey pretty often but not much more to say about it than that it's just the underworld told you some of these sections would be shorter shades of the dead middle constantly within the house complaining of their woes and seeking audience from any who would listen i listen so the next three areas i want to discuss are tartarus asphadel and elysium these three make up pretty much all of the underworld and what i'd like to do before chatting about each of them individually is give you a bit of general underworld info in the hope that it contextualizes the whole thing a bit more this is pretty much the same idea as the sections which dealt with more than one character i guess okay so here's a few things you need to know about the underworld firstly the topography is essentially unknown in the game you start at the bottom and go up through tartarus and then asphadel and then elysium and after that you're pretty much at the surface this is a logical way of organizing the underworld for the game and there are pretty much no sources i know of that draw out some kind of canonical underworld map the main thing you hear when it comes to underworld location stuff comes from hesiod where he talks about how long it would take for an anvil to reach tartarus for a brazen anvil falling down from heaven nine nights and days would reach the earth upon the tenth and again a brazen anvil falling from earth nine nights and days would reach tartarus upon the tenth from this there is confirmation if we can call it that that the underworld is indeed under the world and not just a vague and nebulous nether realm that doesn't necessarily have a tangible location we'll chat about where the entrance to the underworld is supposed to be later on but yeah if you're trying to get your head around where stuff in the underworld is you're probably best not to really try to and just go with the flow it's best to just know a bit about the separate areas and some of the features like the rivers and maybe go off what scant links you'll find connecting them speaking of the rivers this was one of the main things i wanted to discuss considering they actually appear a lot in the game you'll recognize at least three of the rivers of the underworld if you've played the game firstly the styx which is the one you see both in tartarus and right at the top by the entrance exit secondly the flagathon the river of fire which is engulfed asphadel and thirdly the leafy which flows through elysium there are two more which don't get mentioned in the game as far as i know although i might have missed that there is the cachitis and the acheron these five rivers weave their way through the underworld and all represent some sort of underworldly idea the styx is the river of hate the flagathon is the river of fire pretty much what i said before the lethe is the river of forgetfulness and this is why patroclus says it's all forgettable with a single drink the cakitis is the river of lamentation and wailing and finally the acheron which is the river of pain all of these rivers play a role in different myths so it's worth getting to grips with what they are and more importantly what concepts they're meant to represent the two most important though are definitely the styx and the acheron in popular culture we know the styx as being the river that leads into the underworld but ancient sources sometimes go with the acharon instead a fun fact about this is that the acheron is the only one of these rivers which is actually a real river in greece which is likely where the idea that it led into the underworld came from so yeah that's all there is to that really worth knowing though that the flagathon flooding asphodel that's hard to say is only a thing that happens in the game not in any myths okay so tartarus near the start of this video when we discussed nyx i think i brought up that tartarus was actually a primordial deity and often primordial deities represented realms so that's one of the ways that it's worth looking at tartarus as if it's alive personally i think this plays into the core idea of the gameplay really well it makes sense for the biomes in the game to have shifting chambers if the underworld itself is alive and this is perhaps why achilles tells zagreus that his real enemy is actually the underworld itself as opposed to hades or the monsters he fights the other thing we know about tartarus from this video mainly from when we talked about sisyphus is that it's where the worst of the worst go the codex says of the people consigned to tartarus that punishment is all that is left for souls such as these no more chance of rehabilitation only suffering knowing this gives us a chance to do a bit more contextualization i'll be honest this is a really oversimplified and reductive way to approach this but it gets across the concept it's worth looking at tartarus as being similar to the western idea of hell a place where the wicked are punished elysium is much the opposite being the ancient greek equivalent of heaven asphodel is the kind of middle ground for those who weren't particularly bad or good and i guess it's kind of like purgatory again don't quote me on that because it isn't strictly accurate this is just a way of getting context for what the areas are meant to represent for people who are new to this kind of thing there are plenty of nasties locked up in tartarus but the most famous are probably the titans defeated by the olympians kronos and his cronies you might remember us looking at that in the poseidon section and i briefly mentioned there that they disposed of them in tartarus specifically it's a zagreus says here they chopped the titans into bits and sprinkled them through tartarus so they couldn't regenerate pretty grim stuff not somewhere you want to be asked fidel is a bit nicer although the usual depictions of it aren't quite like what is in the game as we've just discussed with the flagathon zagrius asks karen about this saying that he thought asphodel was meant to be a flower-covered meadow generally asphodel is referred to as the asphadel meadows and is meant to be a pleasant if not non-descript place for the average person to spend their afterlife again the codex kind of mimics what i said before about what asphadel is for saying that the worst are sent to tartarus the greatest to elysium and all the others there it's tricky to give too much info about this area because even ancient sources don't give it nearly as much attention as the other two there's more to say about elysium though and i think that the most interesting thing about it is actually how you would get there we know already that only the greatest whatever that means gain access to elysium but who decides that well various afterlifes have some sort of judgment system in ancient egypt for example the god anubis would weigh your heart on a scale against a feather representing mat the goddess of truth balance and harmony if your heart was heavier than the feather it meant that you had led a wicked life and the heart would be eaten by amit the devourer of the dead unfortunately the ancient greek one isn't quite as cool but it's still pretty interesting the underworld had three judges minos radamanthus and iacos and yes that minus is the same one from the minotaur stuff here's an example from plato mentioning three of them for if a man when he reaches the other world after leaving behind these who claim to be judges she'll find those who are really judges who are said to sit in judgment there minos and ratamanthus and iaikus the game does mention this idea albeit vaguely hades says here that the dead are judged and sent to the appropriate place and the codex entry from elysium mentions that there are judges entrusted to consider the many cases the master himself could not see to you personally so that's how that works if you're wondering the judges basically weigh up what each person did in their life and send them off to where they need to go one thing the game brings up a lot though regarding that idea is the criteria with which you get into elysium the character who brings this up the most is patroclus unsurprisingly here you can see him muttering to himself and he says i knew so many peaceful decent men but none of course are here instead it is the warriors the kings the slayers great men the standard for greatness is low indeed it's probably worth mentioning that over a few thousand years our ideas about what constitutes a great deed has changed slightly back in the day it was a lot more to do with heroism fighting nobly having the favor of the gods and succeeding in conquest and this world view informs supergiant's choice to make elysium what it is a place for warmongers and killers now i think we'd assume it was more correct for judgement to be made based on moral grounds and kindness rather than killing more people than the guy next to you i guess it depends on how you define good right look at this extract about elysium from pinder the good receive a life free from toil not scraping with the strength of their arms the earth nor the water of the sea for the sake of a poor sustenance but in the presence of the honored gods those who gladly kept their oaths enjoy a life without tears while the others undergo a toil that is unbearable to look at to be honest i don't know enough about the philosophy behind the subjectivity of goodness so i think it's best that we move on at this point before this gets away from me so how did it go how did you die ignobly this time pray tell sir bruce and i can't wait to hear the tale in that case i'll spare you the details fine your failure is quite easily imagined how often it recurs almost as though my realm is built to keep you here you and every single soul that's ever lived but by all means continue struggling we're going to skip over two of the codex entries the temple of styx and chaos the former will actually come up a little bit in the next section and we're missing chaos out because i kind of already spoke about chaos as a character and i don't think there's anything else that i want to add to that that means next up is erebus as an area this doesn't get brought up in the game nearly as much as the areas we just spoke about but let's have a look at what is said about it the general idea seems to be that erebus is like a holding room for the dead before they pop off for the judgment we just chatted about the codex calls it a waiting area which lies shrouded in darkness and the narrator calls erebus the place wherein the dead awaits eternal sentencing and that it's concealed in the dark recesses of the underworld that's two points each for erebus being a waiting area and being dark what else does the game say well the only other noteworthy mention was from asterius who said that he was cast into erebus when he died and seems to imply that it was because he was a monster maybe i'm reading into that wrong but that's how it appears to me but yeah we have three things here waiting area dark and maybe monsters get sent there it's tricky to cross-reference here because similar to nyx there isn't too much record of erebus in greek myth the main things we know are that erebus is a primordial deity and similar to how nix is the knight erebus is darkness that explains the references to the dark obviously in case this helps for context here's hesiod explaining it from chaos came forth erebus and black nix but of nix were born ether and hemorrha whom she conceived and bore from union in love with erebus the upper air thing that ether represents by the way is only the air that the gods breathe not that normal mortals breathe as for the waiting area thing there does seem to be precedent for that too but this is one of those instances where i can find people talking about it but i can't seem to pin down a concrete source that says it that's probably just a failure on my part to do the research though but yeah similarly to how the acheron and the sticks were occasionally conflated as both being the river which needed to be crossed to access the underworld apparently erebus was sometimes considered the waiting area as opposed to the banks of either of the two rivers we just mentioned sorry that i've not been able to tell you more but you'll just have to take my word for it this time unsurprisingly because i couldn't find a source for that i can't find a source for erebus being a holding pen for monsters either again there's the odd mention of erebus being mixed up with tartarus which i'm pretty sure is where monsters would actually go but who knows it's a shame not being able to give you more specific details but that's about all that i have on erebus and how it's depicted in the game a hidden stretch of the boundless river sticks cuts through misty erebus providing for the riverboatman charon a locale in which to deal with the unruliest of souls nice place you got here mate [Music] the last location in the codex is greece and considering greece is just an actual country i'm not going to talk about that what i will talk about is something that the codex brings up the entrance to the underworld i was born in a land with next to nothing in common with the underworld safe for the fact that it happens to contain the surface's single entryway into this realm so do we know where the underworld was supposed to be then there are a few options to be honest but if we're talking specifically about greece then i think the most likely entrance is the necromantion of acheron we know about the acheron by now we even mentioned that people believed it flowed into the underworld as for what a necromantion is it's a temple where it was believed you could commune with the dead funny enough you might recognize this if you've read the percy jackson series in particular the house of hades which is the fourth book in the heroes of olympus saga and it's also quite comfortably the best percy jackson book it's very strongly implied that this specific necromantion is the one that they're heading to in that book and this temple is actually what the title house of hades refers to in the series anyway there is a place in greece which is supposedly the entrance to the underworld but is there maybe more to it than that for a while when researching this video i didn't believe that the temple of styx in the game was a reference to anything in greek myth but a part of me wonders now if it's actually a reference to the necromantion of akron it fits in some ways it's in greece it connects to an underworld river but i'm still not convinced that this is meant to be that place there's another potential underworld location in what is now modern day turkey not too far away called the plutonian at hierapolis something about this one caught my eye and it's that the passage underground at this temple is basically filled with poisonous gas and that kind of reminded me of all the passageways in the temple of sticks with all the deposits of poisonous gas you'll find there too this location like the necromantium was known to the greeks and the geographer strabo said this about it any animal that passes inside meets instant death i threw in sparrows and they immediately breathed their last and fell anyway the point is there are supposed entryways into the underworld but i'm not entirely convinced that the one in the game is meant to be any specific one in the real world i find it interesting that they definitely have stuff in common but i imagine that just comes down to supergiant being incredibly good at research either way even if we don't get a conclusive answer just having fun trying to figure it out is still worth it [Music] the surface wind swept cracked by freezing cold nonetheless instills within the prince a sense of awe and the sublime for it is unlike anything that he has seen okay we're on to our final proper section now weapons obviously the heavy majority of this video is about the characters and the locations and weapons are more like a chaser but there's still some really interesting stuff to talk about here even if it is a shorter section there are six main weapons in the game and we're going to try and talk a little bit about each of them focusing primarily on things like if any of the weapons actually existed in some sense and why certain aspects were chosen for example my favorite weapon was the chiron aspect of the bow and there's a bit of precedent for why chiron has a bow aspect so i'll be able to give you a little bit of fun info about that however this isn't the case for all of them and if there isn't much to say about a specific weapon or aspect i'll just skim over it rather than try and make something out of nothing this video is long enough as it is to start it's worth saying that every weapon has a zagreus aspect as default so we're not going to try and read into that for any of them anyway first up is stygius or the stygian blade there is no equivalent to this weapon in greek myth to be honest there's barely any important swords in greek mythology long ranged weapons tend to play the biggest role it's funny to bring it up again but the only other place i can think of where you'll see mention of a stygian blade is the percy jackson books you do find scant mention of some mythological swords throughout ancient stories but none that are really important enough to bring up and discuss it's a weird one the only thing i can think of that's really relevant is actually a type of sword it's called a harp and i'm not totally sure i'm pronouncing that right but i guess that doesn't really matter it's essentially a sword with a hook on it and it played a part in two myths that we've already brought up in this video firstly as you can see from this sculpture it was the weapon with which perseus beheaded medusa secondly there's some debate as to whether this was what kronos used to castrate his father uranus but i'm not sure about that one it still seems like you come across more sources that say sickle or scythe as for the aspects we have nemesis and poseidon from the greek pantheon we've spoken about poseidon already so we'll start with him in the game poseidon mentions that stygius wasn't quite his type and hades also says that poseidon was never any good with stygius that he grew envious of hades and his spear and now poseidon is more famous for having a spear than hades is poseidon certainly is famous for his trident if you remember back in the hades section at the start i mentioned that cyclopes made the helm of darkness for hades in the war against the titans well what they made for poseidon was his trident the codex implies that poseidon used a sword in this war and this just didn't happen i don't know if he was ever depicted using a sword to be honest you'll notice by reading the info in the game that each of the first six olympians the children of chronos and rhea used one of these weapons each against the titans they gave hades a spear we've mentioned his biden already so they had to give poseidon something else and they chose the sword but supergiant will have known this obviously they just had to give him the sword to help their narrative and there's nothing wrong with that now for nemesis the other greek aspect i brought up nemesis really briefly when we started talking about the furies because it is also her job to meet out justice she gets mentioned briefly in a conversation with thanatos who gives you the idea that nemesis is not someone to cross it's nice that you get bits of dialogue here and there about gods and goddesses who don't actually feature in the game anyway does nemesis have a sword yeah i think we can say yes on that one there aren't loads of ancient sources saying so but it definitely seems to have become more of a thing over time which is still totally valid you can find sculptures and paintings which depict her with a sword and that's more than enough to convince me when it comes to how the swords both look the nemesis and poseidon ones i can't see anything in them that is like an obvious reference to anything in particular might be missing something but i'm not sure as for the final aspect we get to talk about a new branch of mythology which is pretty fun each weapon's final aspect belongs to a set of myths outside of greek mythology and the first of those is the aspect of arthur who is unsurprisingly from arthurian legend the weapon is called holy excalibur and was wielded by king arthur a legendary king of britain it almost seems too obvious to discuss excalibur considering how widespread knowledge of it is i mean i grew up in the uk so there's every chance that my perspective on this is biased or atypical but i can't really think of a more famous weapon from any mythology it's so ubiquitous in modern media if you've played a jrpg the chances are that it had a weapon called excalibur in it there was even a disney film called the sword in the stone which despite issuing the excalibur name mimics the exact story of arthur retrieving the sword and thus becoming the rightful king this is where the waking phrase used in the game comes from i see your kingly pardon from a prison of stone there is specific precedent for this sword being excalibur but as we know by now myths are messy and there's also a school of thought that excalibur is actually granted to arthur by the lady of the lake some stories say both were excalibur anyway the point is arthur was a mythological king of britain who ended up wielding the sword excalibur as for why the game calls it holy excalibur it's probably to do with the heavy christian subtext dotted throughout arthurian legend however excalibur as a weapon does often come with the holy element in the final fantasy games which as far as i'm concerned is a reputable source so i'm gonna go with that instead calm down skelly i'm sure whatever it is is perfectly normal for a legendary semi-sentient titan-slaying weapon from the dawn of time weapon number two is varatha the eternal spear now although spears are a bit more commonplace than swords throughout greek mythology this particular one is like stygius made up the name is a bit strange because to me it looks decidedly on greek and i was struggling to find any mention of it so as a last resort i popped into google translate and apparently it's a tamil word meaning either do not come or absent no idea if that's accurate can't really see a link but if we're really fishing for one here this weapon was the one that was wielded by hades during the titanomachy according to the game and hades is absent compared to the other olympians because he stays in the underworld wouldn't read too much into that myself though as for aspects we've got achilles and hades we'll keep the hades section very short because we spoke about his weaponry a wee bit at the start of the video the only thing worth really bringing up here is the weapon he started using after he discarded varatha the name gets brought up a few times gygarros and again surprise surprise made up it's a pretty hefty weapon so i assume that's where the gigabit at the start comes from but i'm not really sure let's talk about achilles now because there is actually something to say there the iliad extract in the achilles section about him and agamemnon contained the phrase son of peleus referring to achilles so it won't come as a surprise that his father was a guy called peleus a king like everyone in greek myth and interestingly peleus was the son of iakis who later became one of the judges of the underworld which we mentioned not too long ago anyway there is a reference to peleus being given a spear as a wedding gift although the source is pretty niche at the marriage of police and fetus the gods gathered together on pelleon to feast and brought peleus gifts chiron gave him a stout ashen shaft which he had caught for a spear and athena it is said polished it and hephaestus fitted it with a head by all accounts this spear was passed down to achilles and it was what he used throughout the trojan war so ultimately there is pretty specific precedent for achilles using a spear which is nice i can't speak for whether or not the one in game is meant to be this one but i'd like to think it is the shaft looks like wood so it could be the ash from that previous quote it definitely looks polished it's pretty shiny and the head of the spear is definitely the kind of mad [ __ ] that hephaestus would cook up theseus calls it a handsome spear and artemis talks about how many mortals got completely slaughtered by it so it totally could be the spear handed down by peleus to achilles if so that's a really fun detail however achilles himself says that the spear was a gift from his old master chiron which might mess up that theory chiron did help make the spear given to peleus though so who knows chiron is involved somehow at any rate our non-greek spirit aspect is guan yu and his frostfare blade you'll have to forgive me my knowledge when it comes to chinese history and myth is questionable at best but i've tried to do a bit of research on this like excalibur the frost fair blade is a weapon that there is definitely mythological precedent for which is a relief although it's more commonly known as the green dragon crescent blade which is why you see a we dragon coiled around the weapon here so who was guan yu the info the weapon screen gives us calls him a mighty general achilles calls him a great bearded warrior and ares calls him a future god of war so yeah that's pretty much it guanyu was a general whose exploits were so frequently retold and glorified that over time he became retroactively deified rather than being a war god in the first place the weapon itself is a guandao and is most famous for being wielded by guanyu in the 14th century novel romance of the three kingdoms a classic of chinese literature this story is also where the waking phrase for the weapon comes from i see you through the eyes of the crimson phoenix is a reference to a description of him found in the novel his eyes were like those of a crimson phoenix i am admittedly out of my depth with this one so i hope what little info i gave you was must not corrections him for he long ago stood by my side against the titans with that thing in hand next up we have coronacht the heart seeker and my personal favorite of the six weapons by a fair distance i'm sure it isn't a surprise at this point but this also is not a bow from greek myth the name actually comes from my home country scotland take away the tea at the end and you have coronach which is the scottish gaelic word for a funeral dirge a song of lamentation that kind of idea because it's called the heart seeker there could also be some sort of etymological link between the core at the start and cur the french word for heart but i think it's most likely from karna let's move on to the aspects first up is chiron chiron in greek myth was a centaur and according to homer the wisest injustice of all the centaurs the main thing chiron was known for was training heroes he trained hercules jason and most pertinents of the game achilles you'll know this already though because i brought it up just a second ago when we were talking about his spear as for kyron's bow achilles says that it shined like the sun and never missed its mark although he attributed that to chiron's extraordinary skill it's almost disappointing but there's not much to be found about chiron actually using a bow and arrow however there's plenty to be found about him instructing heroes in the ways of archery after all he did learn from the best apollo and artemis the gods of archery themselves supposedly took chiron under their wing when he was just a baby centaur and taught him all the stuff they knew maybe that's why kyron's bow supposedly shines like the sun some sort of reference to his tutelage under the sun god could be as for the other greek aspect that of hira there's nothing to say we know who hira is the queen of the gods and she never used a bow the skulls on the hero bow look really cool but i can't think of a specific reason why they're there that doesn't mean there isn't one of course but i have nothing to say about this one the non-greek aspect of the bow belongs to rama rama is part of the hindu pantheon and is one of the avatars of the god vishnu hence the waking phrase i see you drawn in the arms of the seventh avatar you can see it says celestial sharanga on the weapon screen and this is because shiranga is the name of a bow used by both vishnu and rama so that's where that comes from if you don't know who vishnu is i'll do my best to explain it here but it will be very simple because again i'm far from an expert there are loads of gods in hinduism but there are what you could call a main three also known as the trimerty there's brahma the creator vishnu the preserver this is why it says the preserver on the weapon screen and shiva the destroyer these deities essentially personify the cycle of life things being made existing and then not existing again i'm going to leave it there if there's anyone in the comments who's more clued up on this or the one you on please let me know a bit more about it it pierced three titans in one shot back in the war amongst our kind please do take care of it weapon number four is aegis the shield of chaos this is the weapon we've discussed most in the athena section so i'm honestly not going to say much about it as an introduction the first two aspects are chaos and zeus i might be wrong but chaos is almost never personified in greek myth and i highly doubt that if he was the first thing they'd give the almighty creator is a shield zeus carrying a shield has definite precedent though the gorgon face we spoke about in the athena section that you would find on the aegises of zeus and athena actually seems to be on the zagreus aspect it's tough to make out but you can see the vaguely sneaky tendrils coming from the skull although the codex does say that whatever is on the shield is a monstrous entity that even the titans feared i'm not sure who that could be but it would likely have to be one of the original monstrosities something like typhon that also makes me wonder what the face on the zeus aspect is it's unlikely to be a gorgon because the face is far too nice there seem to be hands coming from the face too i'm not really sure who this is meant to be so again theories are welcome additionally the game claims the shield is what zeus used during the war with the titans but again i'm not sure that's exactly accurate what the cyclopes designed for zeus to use in that war was actually his lightning bolts not the aegis but again it's what we've already said they've tried to pick a weapon for each god and it isn't that hard to find evidence of zeus using a shield so it makes sense why they've done this the non-greek aspect for the shield is that of beowulf who zagreus calls a supposedly unstoppable dragon slaying warrior beowulf is an epic poem written in old english about a bloke called beowulf who becomes a king and fights monsters classic stuff to me it always seems like beowulf would be part of norse mythology because the poem is based in scandinavia but it technically isn't how the game has dealt with this is a bit weird the word niggling exists in the beowulf story but it's actually his sword not his shield nagling's board isn't a term that existed before this game but you get the impression that they knew that saying on the weapon screen would that the stalwart warrior king's sword offered similar protection it's a bit peculiar when beowulf fights the dragon there is definite reference to him having a shield and it protecting him from the dragon's flames this is where the waking phrase i see you stand your ground against the serpent's flame comes from but it might be a bit hyperbolic to call it fire eating like ares does also beowulf dies from his wounds after slaying the dragon so i guess that's where the supposedly comes from when zagreus called him supposedly unstoppable this one is a bit weird like the pieces referring to the meth are all there but i can't quite seem to complete the puzzle you better just the original itself my own shield was forged much later in its image you'll have to tell me someday how you found it our penultimate weapon is the twin fists of malphon the original boxing gloves now i know we've had a lot less success in finding stuff that matches up in these weapon sections but this and the next one are just a bit silly these did not exist obviously i don't think anything like this really existed in myth and it goes without saying that demeter did not cut about sucker punching the [ __ ] out of the titans however the twin fists are actually really cool and i like the idea a lot reminds me of the nomian cestus from god of war 3. the name malphon is pretty interesting i expect it comes from two separate roots one latin and one ancient greek mao as a prefix is pretty ubiquitous you'll already know that it means bad or evil and it comes from the latin adjective malus the fun bit is a bit less obvious and could potentially come from this word meaning sound but i think it's more likely that it comes from fonos meaning murder you might remember that from the tessephany section earlier on in the video everything's connected the game tries to get across that these weapons fill you with a kind of bloodlust with athena saying that the fists are prone to fits of savagery quite unbecoming of a well-trained warrior i mean there are plenty of moments in greek myth where weaponless combat took place but nothing like what you see here in the game but again i keep saying it nothing wrong with that it has to prioritize what's gonna be fun to play and the twin fists are really enjoyable to use so we're just gonna skip over demeter talos is the other aspect and quite an interesting one the only aspect in the game not based on some sort of god or hero the talos was a giant bronze automaton most likely created by hephaestus its job was either to protect the island of crete or to protect europa who you might remember from the zeus section honestly the talos doesn't play the biggest role in greek myth and is probably most famous for its appearance in the 1963 jason and the argonauts film this is a pretty cool reference but i don't know what it would have to do with our wee pair of murder gloves the final aspect for these is that of gilgamesh no not that gilgamesh we're talking about the ancient god king gilgamesh if sumerian and mesopotamian legend the epic of gilgamesh is actually regarded as the oldest piece of literature ever which is kind of unbelievable so first we'll look at what the game says about gilgamesh asteria says an ancient hero fought a beast of a man bare-handed and they became friends in the end mimicking the relationship between him and theseus but what's being referred to here the beast of a man who became a friend was enkidu enkidu was a man but was wild feral essentially and had to learn the ways of humans he was also potentially part bull just like the minotaur in the epic of gilgamesh enkidu and gilgamesh eventually wrestle after a disagreement and acknowledging each other's strength become friends this fight must be the reason for gilgamesh being chosen as an aspect for malphon although curiously enough it actually seems to be encadoo's claws that you're using eventually in the story enkidu dies which explains the waking phrase i see you overcome the wild and make peace with death one tiny additional thing is that upon seeing the gilgamesh fists hades compares them to that of a manticore a manticore is a monster from greek mythology with the body of a lion the tail of a scorpion and the face of a man creepier than it sounds to be honest but the enkidu claws definitely do look more like lion paws than anything else so i totally get where he's coming from [Music] what are those bestial gloves of yours blaggard beginning to show more of your true and savage nature here perhaps okay the last weapon this is exagriff and it is a gun crossed with a grenade launcher do i even need to say it actually what i'll do is let amir rao studio director supergiant talk you through instead one of the things that can really help with creative problems is to give yourself a little bit of space so we took a little time thought about uh that move and fire weapon a little more and realized in our hearts what we really wanted out of the weapon was for it to like feel and and operate like a gun um and so we ended up going in a direction where you could still stand still by fire the secondary is a grenade and greg had to make sense of it so he called it exagrif the adamant rail it's a firearm that is a precursor to all other firearms in the world a weapon so dangerous that had to be locked away by the gods so that's where we ended up through the power of figuring it out waiting on it a bit and and seeing what we really need from it what interests me like with all the other weapons is why they decided to call it what they did adamant is obvious it's just a reference to the mythical unbreakable metal exogryph is the tricky one the griff thing definitely seems to relate to the griffon a mythical creature with the front of an eagle in the back of a lion although i'm not entirely sure why maybe just to sound cool and so the design could also look cool the extra part is the real head scratcher though but i think it's most likely linked to the number six that is the exa you'd get in hexagon for example i can think of two links albeit tenuous ones to back this up firstly when i try to imagine a gun in my head it's always one of those revolver type ones with the barrel that fits exactly six bullets in i told you it was tenuous the more likely reason i think it could be a six is as a reference to hestia the final child of chronos and rear who hasn't been given a weapon yet back in the demeter section i told you the order in which the six original olympians were born and hestia was first however this also means that when it came time for kronos to get on with the regurgitating she came out last this makes her the youngest in a way as well as the oldest it was this second post-regurgitation order which took precedence though zeus the youngest by birth became the most powerful and hestia the oldest by birth became the least prominent of the least important of the six so much so that eventually she actually seeded her spot amongst the twelve olympians to die on isis out of interest this story has become pretty widespread but i don't think there's a single source for it so it must have been a more modern invention anyway it goes without saying that humble hestia goddess of the hearth did not wield a magical machine gun and mow down the titans but as a fire goddess of sorts it does make sense for her to have the weapon that fires the most the other greek aspect is that of eres the goddess of chaos and discord the weapon screen calls her strife which you might recognize if you cast your mind back to the next section but then again that was hours ago so i wouldn't blame you if you didn't eris is a daughter of nyx and one of those personification gods she exists opposite harmonia who is unsurprisingly the personification of harmony it's like that hole they balance each other out idea anyway the most interesting thing about the heiress weapon is actually its design and again i'm hoping this isn't the most wildly tenuous thing but i'm convinced that this weapon looks like an apple unfortunately i've asked other people and they don't really see it but i'll do my best to explain it it's particularly in this smaller image rather than the full length one and maybe if you look too hard you won't be able to see it but i'm hoping maybe some of you can get where i'm coming from primarily it's a colour scheme thing picture a cartoon apple with a bite taken out of it the vibrant red skin the crisp whitish flesh inside and a wee green leaf poking out the top i mean my immediate thought when i first saw it was that it was an apple and then seeing the heiress connection i was pretty pleased and thought i was really onto something see the item most associated with eris is the apple of discord this apple is almost always golden in mythology but we'll ignore that for the sake of making my argument look better back in the aphrodite section i mentioned how paris was forced to judge a contest between hira athena and aphrodite and thus caused the trojan war it was actually heiress who in her indignation at not being invited to a wedding decided to cause a bit of havoc and used the apple to create a rift between the three goddesses so if the weapon is meant to look like an apple that's a pretty cool reference if not my bad the final final aspect is that of lucifer big daddy devil himself i would hazard a guess that of all the non-greek aspects the story of lucifer is the one that people would be most intimately familiar with his waking phrase is i see your prideful fall down from the heavens to the flames and this is obviously a reference to lucifer being cast down by god in some versions of the christian tradition the weapon itself though is probably a reference to john milton's paradise lost in two ways firstly milton has a thing for mentioning adamant in a hellish context throughout the poem it starts off by saying that satan is cast down to bottomless perdition there to dwell in adamantine chains and penal fire so no wonder his weapon would be the rail of adamant by the way i'm aware that there might be a bit of contention with calling lucifer satan but milton conflates them so while talking about his work i will too in book six of paradise lost lucifer and the demons basically build a laser cannon this sounds like a joke but that's totally how i interpret these few lines with heaven's rey and tempered they shoot forth so beauteous opening to the ambient light these in their dark nativity the deep shall yield us pregnant with infernal flame which into hollow engines long and round thick rammed at the other bore with touch of fire dilated and infuriate shall send forth from far with thundering noise among our foes i mean heaven's ray infernal flame hollow engines thundering noise i'm pretty sure that this is the inspiration for the lucifer weapon given that it shoots a fiery laser and that's a pretty fun place to end it right the rail of adamant itself has found its way into your hands cousin a malignant thing if you were to ask me and not one i would ever use myself unless perhaps i had no other choice i suppose it must have been that way for you it almost sounds a bit ironic considering the length of this video but i think sometimes you have to know when to finish something with a game like hades i could actually talk about a lot more i haven't really brought up anything about the hydra the fates nectar and ambrosia but i feel like there could always be one more thing to talk about and this is a good point to stop so i think we're gonna have to call it a day here i will say now though that if there's anything relating to the game that you want to know about that i didn't bring up in this video just ask in a comment and i'll do my best to give you some info if someone else doesn't get there first but honestly hades was an absolute dream to play and to talk about and i just had the best time with it i can't give the team a super giant enough credit funnily enough i initially intended on this video being no longer than 20 or so minutes but the more i played and looked into it i couldn't help but keep expanding and expanding the whole process for making this video took me six months and i've never made a video longer than an hour before so this has certainly been an experience however it's actually been a lot of fun being able to revisit a lot of my favorite myths and stories and ultimately i hope you've enjoyed it too and perhaps learn something new about the absolutely mental world of greek mythology as i said this has taken me half a year and hundreds and hundreds of hours for me to make and because of that i'd love for as many people to see it as possible so every like comment subscribe and share would mean the world to me it also goes without saying that this wouldn't be possible without my incredible supporters on patreon in particular my highest tier patrons christian walter cloud 3514 ryan teague subnats the greenhorn lowborn and unseen sounds i wouldn't be able to do this if not for you and i can't thank you enough for your support if you'd also be interested in supporting me in the channel as well as getting some benefits like being able to vote on polls regarding what videos i do and getting access to patreon exclusive gameplay content then please check it out you can find the link in the description below you can also follow me on twitter if you want more frequent updates from me the link to that is in the description too thank you so much for watching and hopefully see you next time