Why is Hades always portrayed as the bad guy?

Why is Hades always portrayed as the bad guy?

In Greek myth, he did way less evil shit than Zeus did.

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Because you can not make a god of death a good guy in western media.

I know it's you, Hades. I can see you right there in the picture.

Because hell and all that.

Discworld's Death is an OK guy

Reminder that the only really bad thing Hades actually did in the original Greek myths was to kidnap Persephone, but she ended up falling for him because Hades got Persephone away from her overbearing mother Demeter

Because you can't easily convince the public that the ruler of the Underworld is actually just as good/bad as the other Greek Gods.

Yeah, Poseidon's the far bigger dick brother.

>Film about the Old Testament
>God is portrayed as a good guy

Hmmmm.

You fans and Sup Forums in general has a really stupid view on Greek mythology and beliefs.

It's like nerd revanchism.

Hades wasn't particularly liked at the time. He was seem as grim, and his name brought bad luck.

Zeus on the other side was seeing as a Chad brother, patriarch of Gods and the most powerful guy around having the time of his life. He wasn't actively malevolent and could actually help humans, it's actually the point of him having multiple temples.

Because every mythology or ancient religion that utilizes an underworld and celestial plain will ALWAYS be filtered through the lense of Christianity.

Already said but the connotations of hell and the devil in Christianity which is the major western religion which is making all these cartoons.

The idea of a King of Hell that's just a neutral bureaucrat doing his job and his closest vice is he's sort of a jew is alien to most western culture.
Also Zeus egged him on.

>The Greek Underworld
>Hell
That's Tartarus.

>Aphrodite, goddess of love
>Not of infidelity, jealousy, turning girls into gorgons

Of course, the disnified version of the story is that she was always a gorgon and aphrodite tried to help her make friends with special glasses to prevent turning people to stone incidentally.

Yeah, but Hades was a really good bad guy.

Besides, if they followed the mythos more, Hades would just be a lonely dude doing his job. There's no antagonistic force to a blue- collar guy.

>Hades wasn't particularly liked at the time. He was seem as grim, and his name brought bad luck.
I don't see how that's incompatible with the comments you're responding to.
They're onyl saying he wasn't a villain.

Of course you're not supposed to say the name of the god of death. Saying something's name summons it. Ancient people from all over the world knew that.

They are both hell though. Tartarus is for titans.

There was an antoganistic force in the original myth though. And she came in the form of an evil stepmother! That's something Disney has experience with.

expecting the average consumer of media to understand the difference.

Here's the thought process.

Hell=Below the ground, Hades is the greek god of shit below the ground therefore, Hades is like Satan.

Greek mythology is part of western media though.

>Disney's Hercules
>Zeus and Hera are a happily married couple and Hercules is their biological son

I know making the main villain of a family movie the angry wife of an adulterous husband taking revenge on her husband's lovechild wouldn't go over well, but it might as well not even be the Hercules story at this point.

That is completely true, but I can see why they didn't want to go with "evil bitch" villian, because they had done that many times before.

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Basically, when discussing Zeus and Hades in a modern western context, it usually goes down like this:

"Okay, listen up white Christian cartoonists, today we're going to design characters based on Greek gods. We'll start with Hades."
>Oh, Hades. I know that word, that means Hell.
"Well, the realm he inhabits, also called Hades, is like our concept of Hell. See, through bad luck, he was cast down from the Greek kind of Heaven and he goes to rule in this underworld domain where souls end up when people die."
>So, he's Satan. He's evil. Got it, we'll design him like Satan and write him in a Satan like role
"No no, guys, you don't get it. They don't exactly have Satan. This other god, Zeus, was a much bigger douche. He's portrayed as a big guy with a beard that rules over all the other gods and lives in the clouds and hurls lightening bolts at people."
>Dude, no, that's God. He's a good guy. Don't be blasphemous. We'll write him as the good guy and Hades Satan as the evil guy.
"I give up. Let's just move on..."

Nobody LIKED any of the gods. They just honored them in hopes that their eternal douchery would look them over and cast their boredom and wraith on someone else.

People built temples to Zeus because Zeus had reign over their land. Hades's reign was the underworld, far away from mortal concern. And in Greek mythology you were pretty much screwed in the afterlife no matter what you did; it's not like there was any heaven you could buy your way into.

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Shitty afterlife prospects were why mystery cults like Mithraism, the delphic mysteris, cult of osiris and Christianity became popular. The latter especially since you could become a Christian for free when the others were basically religious country clubs for rich people.

>cast down
Did I hear wrong I thought he drew lots and WANTED to be god of the underworld because Hades was literally the world under ours including all the shit you could mine out of the Earth and his only character trait apart from being dreary and professional was being greedy.
Poseidon was the guy who disliked his lot in life which is why the sea is such a dick.

This is why Age of Mythology is the best Greek myth kino-game of all time, because they took Greek myth games back to their Homeric roots by making Poseidon the bad guy.

>I don't see how that's incompatible with the comments you're responding to.
>They're onyl saying he wasn't a villain.

NO, he wasn't a villain. What I'm saying is that people here like to paint him in a weird light, like over compensation for how he is usually portrayed.

>Nobody LIKED any of the gods.

False.

Like, really fucking false

This is the kind of train of thought that this Sup Forums weird vision of Greek mythology ends up creating.

Gods were seeing as celebrities, cities had pride on being descendant of a God or hero connected to a god, they wrote music and verses praising them.

Really, I don't know how this weird visipn happened. Probably because people like to focus more when the gods screw with people than when they help them, and because people only know a handful of myths, and doesn't study what were the actual religious beliefs.

Because most people are casuals.
Casuals like simple brain dead stuff.
Jews invented brain dead Good/Bad mythology, spreads like wildfire.
Most people in the world are now in the whole schtik of perfect god, bad guy death and poison and sin and all that.

because death and underworld = the devil and hell.

i'm waiting for someone to do a thing with evil Hades as a capitalist monster. y'know god of money.

Tartarus contains mortals, too. Ixion, Sisyphus, Tantalus, and Salmoneus.

>And in Greek mythology you were pretty much screwed in the afterlife no matter what you did;

Elysian Fields.

>Hades pulls strings so that the Richest Cities in the world are going to be wiped off the Map
>Just so all the Rich people will buy their way out of Hades, Poor people can eat a dick

Reserved only for demi-gods.

And a late addition.

Nasu was a mistake

Oh his most famous myth and like the only one about him being about kidnapping and rape doesn't help.

inb4 Zeus I guess the argument would be Hades went at another God and not a mortal???

Yeah, if I'm remembering right, Tartarus was Hell, Elysium was Heaven, and the Underworld was just the neutral afterlife that most people went to.

>Reserved only for demi-gods.

It was also the land for heroes, Achilles ended up there despite not being a demi-god.

That was a retcon. Not muh mytholoy. The only valid Greek mythology is the Iliad and the Odyssey as far as I'm concerned. None of that Greek tragedy bullshit or Ovid and CERTAINLY no Roman influences..

All the realms had their own advantages and disadvantages, but I often hear the story going that the underworld realm was generally considered by the three brothers (Zeus, Poseidon, Hades) as the shittiest of their three realms and Hades drew the short straw and just shrugged and made the most of it. You get to have the riches of the earth, but it's still a dark dank underground place where dead people go and you have to be all alone most of the time.

I've heard that Poseidon had a secret laugh at Zeus afterwards for actually wanting the sky because it's full of a lot of fucking nothing and because what with them being Greek and the Greeks being an island faring people, the sea and all the fish and travel and seaweed and weather out there were really fucking important and valued.

Of course, every one of these myths has several versions that have been past down through a game of telephone for thousands of years so I can totally see there being other versions where they feel differently.

He was a still a demi-naiad and therefore divine.

I like how he kidnapped his future wife, and then she turned it around on him and made it so he was stuck with her no matter what.

His mother was a nymph, a minor deity.

He wasn't a regular human.

The real question is that if Hercules is actually a secret Superman movie (and it is) who is Hades? zod i guess

which is pretty dumb cuz I dont think he nessiarily ever killed people, he just ruled over the dominion that housed the souls of the dead.

And then Medusa still ended up killing that poor roller-skating waitress who probably smashed into pieces somewhere offscreen.

Mortals can get into the Elysian fields. That was the whole point of joining and Orphic mystery cult.

>The only valid Greek mythology is the Iliad and the Odyssey as far as I'm concerned.

Well then BOY are you gonna feel stupid!

to the Elysian plain…where life is easiest for men. No snow is there, nor heavy storm, nor ever rain, but ever does Ocean send up blasts of the shrill-blowing West Wind that they may give cooling to men.
—Homer, Odyssey (4.560–565)

That's a huge stretch

Yes, but Terry Pratchett never had to answer to a producer. When a film adaptation of Mort was in very early negotiations with a studio, and a producer wanted to "lose the Death angle", he halted everything and left on the spot.

Luthor.

theyre pretending its christian mythology, and using the same old tropes they use in all the movies

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>Hercules is actually a secret Superman movie

I've seen this a lot and I don't get it. Granted, I haven't seen Hercules in a really long time, but how is it a Superman movie outside the obvious of being a hero?

>Mega Shades dot jaypeg
>She's not wearing sunglasses of any size

>implying Hades will ever get out of that soul pit
Pain and Panic are the new rulers of the underworld.

Oh please like you've ever even read a Greek Drama, much less any of the Histories. Look, I'm sure you have a dimestore Romance with a PBS Documentary you've seen once that derived them from the color that they painted their columns during their many festivals, but you're only pretending to you have a telescope into the emotions of people who lived in a time where only the most occasional of philosophical writing and high theater survive.

If might be reasonable to assume that the common person had far more of a blissfully ignorant perspective on the Gods than the philosophers and writers, but since we can only see the Greeks through these first-degree sources the depiction of the Gods is clear: they are inscrutable, flippant, and vengeful. They are not heroes and champions, the heroes and champions are (surprise surprise) heroes and champions. Instead they were the necessary and personified moral scaffolding around which life must be rightly lived without inviting hubris (which is one of the most central pillars of their morality). There was not talk of "divine favors" and "divine celebrity"- you're the one who's thinking too modern in this account- but rather, the literature talked about divine oversight, divine appeasement, and mortal humility.

Superpowered baby being adopted by humble farmers who would later became a superhero.

he did less stuff than zeus. period

people made very few stories about hades because angering the god of the underworld meant eternal pain and suffering, angering zeus meant a swift lightning bolt and being sent to hades

hades as evil stems from the medieval age when comparisons to satan, who also ran the underworld, where easy ones to make.

hades as a good, kind god is also fairly recent, the greeks mostly treated him as a freakish loner, not malevolent but still not very pleasant

>born to a couple in a utopian society of super beings in the heavens apart from earth
>is irreversibly separated from them and sent down to earth as a baby
>is discovered as a baby by a couple of childless farmers called Ma and Pa
>as a teenager he exhibits super strength and Ma and Pa confess that he's not human and they found him in their field
>as a teen goes and talks to an artificial (statue vs hologram) version of his dad that explains what happened
>goes to the big city and proceeds to use super strength save people from other superpowered beings and shit
>meets a snarky streetwise chick wearing purple who clashes with his own mild-mannered farmboy nature and gets a big crush on her, they end up in a relationship

Meg as Hades

Adorable. Ancient Greece is Athens. Ancient Greece is Athens in a very small period of time of maybe a hundred years around 350 BC. The Classics are the reason anyone today cares about Ancient Greek Mythology, not some epic poem the likes of which exist in about a dozen other civilizations. Reading the Iliad and saying "I know everything about Greek Mythology because I'm too lazy to read the things that actually moved people to higher for the past 2400 years" is basically being the weeb equivalent of Greek Mythos.

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Hello, Sup Forums here. I just found these lounging around. I think one of them might be yours.

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What is this from?

>Oh....you're man shaped...I guess that's fine too.

Athena seems to have been mostly good. She helps Odysseus kill the guys who tried to cuck him and saves Orestes from the Furies. Now that I think about it, I can't name a single bad thing she's done.

At least he turned back into a human before fucking her. You can't always count on the gods to have that decency.

She turned a bitch into a Spider for being better at weaving.

The Congress.

She also turned medusa ugly because Poseidon raped medusa in her temple.

it's boring though

Why do women always get the short end of the stick for being raped in these?

To be fair, that might've been a consensual rape.

I thought Arachne hung herself and then Athena revived her as a spider.

Doesn't Hercules actually end up killing her?

Having a minotaur come out of their cooch some months later is just a little too exciting for some women.

I wish someone in Hollywood would attempt a Greek mythology cinematic universe. And I don't mean that stupid Percy Jackson shit, I mean legitimately Greek mythology, played straight. There's so much potential there. I guess they don't want to use something that's in the public domain, but the "brand" could be the recurring cast who play the gods, the visual style, as well as certain high-profile directors, producers, composers, etc.

yeah but because he got mindfucked by i wanna guess Hera. it's a tragedy

Can you imagine how fucking disgusting the world must have been like back then without spiders to keep bugs in check? Athena did the world a great service. She probably saved millions from malaria.

Because that's how culture was at the time. Still is, in some cases.

In true myth yes. But in true myth the labors are because he murdered them in a Herainduced rage.

>legitimately Greek mythology, played straight
Modern audiences won't take kindly to all the rape and incest.

I'm sure it is, but maybe Meg would be into being Hadesified after that.

imagine a faithful, high-budget bible adaption

You mean this?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passion_of_the_Christ

Dude, you have to keep in mind that you are using the equivalent of a blockbuster and soap opera of the time to judge their religious views, instead of what the ancient texts, priests and other iconography stuff have to say.

This is always a big problem in this kind of discussion. People only know 2 or even myths, but not how the daily life worked, which God could cure your feet, which ritual you made before going to learn the future from the mouth of the priestess, or the medical chants and curses done with carved knives.

Christianity

One explanation I've read is that it's difficult to get revenge directly on a god or goddess so they tend to opt for targeting those who are weaker but still important to the one they want to fuck around with. That's why you have Hera goading Zeus' side flings and children instead of him directly.

It's usually more because of their attitudes of thinking they're better than the gods that gets them in trouble in some versions. Compare Arachne's case to someone like Pygmalion who was a pretty dope ass sculptor.

There's also the idea of rape back then not really being like modern rape.
In time where wards especially women were essentially property of their superiors, rape meant taking a woman without going through the proper channels. Hell in most myths Hades doesn't really have sex with Persephone, the rape is literally in her taking which is the archaic definition of rape.

Why does Sup Forums bitch about this change so much? All Disney adaptations from an adult source are drastically changed and kidified. Yet Sup Forums seems to make this thread at least once a month complaining about Hades being a badguy. Is it just fedorafags being unable to resist taking a jab at "those darn christfags ruining everything!" or what?

I'd kill to get an animated equivalent of Arrested Development with Hestia as the Michael Bluth stand-in trying to keep the other Gods in check.

that and a little "i'm smrt and showing off my greek knowledge"

hopefully the thread turns into something good tho

That that to keep her from ever getting raped again? Can't get raped by stone men

>Yes, but Terry Pratchett never had to answer to a producer.
Hogfather has not one but seven credited producers

Loki pls leave

>the greeks mostly treated him as a freakish loner, not malevolent but still not very pleasant
And you wonder why the denizens of the internet like him

>turning girls into gorgons

Wasn't that Athena, though?

Are there any Greek/Roman gods who are decent people? The only ones I can think of are Hephaestus, Demeter (only story I've seen her in is the one with Persephone) and maybe Eros.