Popular Hades & Persephone “retellings” are, rightly, getting dunked on all over the socials right now and, as a Pagan who has an altar to the Queen, I could not be happier. But also, I feel like a lot of people miss WHY they’re bad - aside from just plain bad writing and lazy tropes. Which are, yeah, also REALLY bad.
Pretty much all retellings try to wave away, or excuse, or twist the whole kidnapping bit. And I actually do have sympathy and understanding for why, when speaking from a modern perspective.
But honestly…you gotta get over it. There are other stories to play fix-it with, not this one.
The Abduction is The Thing.
Were I a little more sober I could bring up chapter and verse of the Hymn to Demeter but frankly, if you know even the middle school mythology curriculum version of the story, you SHOULD know the themes. The story of Persephone was one mothers and daughters in the ancient world held dear, because it was a reality: you will, one day, be swept away from your home to go cleave to a man you most likely know nothing about. You will miss your mother, but chances are very good that he will be a good husband, once you get to know him, certainly better than Zeus or Ares, and he will make you a queen of his home.
Leaving home to marry was often scary, and violent (look up the history of the tradition of Bridesmaids, if you don’t already know it - they were originally decoys on the marriage road). Centuries later we’d have tales like Beauty & The Beast serving the same function: comfort, hope, you are leaving your safe loving home to figure life out with a (often older, powerful) stranger. Your trauma over this sudden ending of your childhood made manifest in a Beast, or a God of The Underworld.
It’s wonderful that we don’t NEED stories like this anymore to comfort us (here, at least, in this culture). But if you try to force them into modern vernacular it just will not work, not really, because you’re gutting out the whole point just to have a more tidy romantic male hero.
I have read MANY very good …novelizations? fanfic(? however you would frame them, but they’re certainly not “retellings”), etc. that simply take advantage of the blank spaces in the myth, and there are many!
It’s not explicit that sexual assault happens - “The Rape of Persephone” as a title was coined in much earlier eras, when the word was just as often used to simply refer to abduction.
“She was starving!” the gods didn’t need to eat. So it’s easy to read her eating the Pom seeds as a deliberate choice on her part. Like, shit, people, scholars have written whole papers on the symbolism of this moment, between marriage rites and even yeah, Seph choosing both worlds with her husband’s knowing consent.
And that, I think, is the real heart of the thing. People want an utterly mundane, spelled-out story here, as opposed to what it really is, has always been, just like any other myth or religious parable: IT’S A METAPHOOOOOOR.
They don’t need to be destined, or meet at a goddamned BALL and then CONSPIRE to fake her kidnapping, or shit, I once saw one where Hades got MIND CONTROLLED by Zeus?! Jesus.
Persephone was yoinked into the Underworld against her will.
That’s how it went.
I don’t mean this in a “stay out of my belief system!” way, shit I’m a white American chick with delusions of witchery. I mean this in a “stop stressing yourself out trying to make things palatable” way:
This is a very real, very precious myth to many people, BECAUSE for at least that one event, Persephone had no autonomy, BECAUSE for thousands of years women had no autonomy. Erasing that, sanitizing the fact that a girl is ripped out of the spring, from her mother’s arms, is erasing the thing that gave comfort to women for centuries. And people can and should still find power and healing in it now!
Fill in the blanks the story leaves in whatever manner seems fit to you, there’s plenty of room, but. Come the fuck on.
why would I camp somewhere named Hole Where You’ll Freeze To Death
Yeah I’m going on a camping trip to the Hole Where You’ll Freeze to Death. No I won’t be back soon.
If people are curious about what the video title means, I watched it some time ago, and it’s actually pretty important info to know if you’re going camping/backpacking: heat rises, and cold sinks, so the lowest point of the terrain can become much colder than the surrounding area, especially at night. If the temperature in these low-points drops farther than the temperatures your camping gear is rated for, you can definitely freeze to death.
“Don’t sleep in holes” seems like a pretty obvious statement to make a video about. But it isn’t talking about what we normally think of when we’re asked to describe a hole in the ground. The video is talking about low-lying meadows or depressions, often in cold mountains like the Alps, that are free of trees and large plants. They seem like good flat ground to camp on. And to compound the problem, maybe some poor sucker tried to build a now-abandoned log cabin or shack right in the middle of one that you may be tempted to sleep in, like the one in the thumbnail. But the reason the meadow is free and clear of trees, is because even pine trees, which grow in high altitudes and low temperatures, can’t survive the temperature difference. The downhill slope of the terrain collects the freezing air like water in a bowl, and with nowhere for it to go, it may become even colder than temperatures recorded at much higher elevations in the same area. And you’ll be right there in the middle of it, because it looked very nice in the daylight. Now? Not so much.
So don’t sleep in holes. Best case scenario is that you’ll have a very chilly night’s sleep and a lousy morning. Worst case is that you won’t wake up in the morning at all.
and like … actors are actors. Their whole thing is pretending to be other people? Can an actor pretend to be an elf or royalty or an alien but not queer? As long as they’re taking the role seriously, it’s fine.
if a straight person sees something meaningful, beautiful and worthy of emulation in the queer experience, that’s a good thing.
A Christmas Carol never even says that Scrooge gives up anything at all, or even somehow stops being super-rich. He just stops being a dick about it and starts using his wealth to help people. Scrooge isn’t even written as an indictment of rich people, since plenty others appear in the story and are presented as perfectly nice people. Scrooge is a miser. He doesn’t even use his money to help himself, which is called out as the reason he dies within the year. Learning to care for himself is just as much part of the Ghosts’ lessons as learning to care for other people.
how dare Charles Dickens, a man once sent to work in a factory at age 12 while his father was in debtors’ prison, inflict such Wokery upon us as “caring about the poor”
I started volunteering at this farm share program a couple years ago, where I help pass out boxes of veggies in exchange for some veggies for myself, which is great for a broke grad student but it led to me creating truly the most visually ABHORRENT meal I have ever made in my life.
I got some purple carrots, right? And I was excited because they’re (A) free carrots and (B) they’re purple, which is not something you see often. They taste just like regular carrots, so after devouring one to test the flavor, I decided that I’d use the rest in an upcoming batch of chicken soup.
MISTAKE. THAT WAS A MISTAKE.
You see. The thing about purple carrots is that their purpleness does not stay in the carrot when you leave it in a crockpot for like, six hours. The purpleness goes into the soup. It goes into the soup, where it turns the chicken purple. And the onions purple. And the celery, and the garlic, and the noodles, and any other thing you could possibly have put in that soup, varying shades of Very Purple.
I made a GIGANTIC pot of this soup that turned out toxic purple-brown, with individual components stained various ludicrous colors of purple (the noodles were a bafflingly nice shade of lilac) and it was the most dubious thing I’ve ever eaten. I took this soup to work. My coworkers were so confused and repulsed and I had explain that no, this is actually just soup, just regular chicken soup, but accidentally tie-dyed by the addition of two (2) purple carrots.
And you wanna know the real kicker as I explained all this? The carrots? The formerly purple carrots?
They ended up green.
I did it again, y'all. Accidentally turned my pasta pink by using rainbow chard. I clearly have a very SPECIFIC type of curse
