Hades: Gay All The Way Down?

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Daddy Issues. Disco Balls. Dionysus’ thighs. What do all these things have in common?

#Hades #LGBTQ #Jturn

Hello all I’m Jake and today I’m going to be chatting with you about Hades, the darling ‘indie’ title of 2020. Hades is by Supergiant Games, and was a surprise hit at lots of awards shows and stuff too apparently. I don’t know, I don’t follow that stuff all that closely.

Here’s the link to my newly set up £1 Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/jturn
It’s purely for those who wish to support at this point, but I’ll soon be putting time into building out higher Patreon tiers that I can be proud to offer, but for now it’s purely for kind hearts. 😀

Also a huge thank you for supporting my small channel by engaging with this video in any way that you can. 🙂

My Silly Lovely Reading List:
Black Athena: How Hades Gets Its Gods Right
https://kotaku.com/black-athena-how-hades-gets-its-gods-right-1845146132
LGBTQIA+ Representation In Hades
https://www.reddit.com/r/HadesTheGame/comments/ger1jq/lgbtqia_representation_in_hades/
Hades Gets The Queer Love Story Right With Achilles and Patroclus
https://www.pcgamesn.com/hades/achilles-patroclus-relationship
Hades Reminds Us That, Now More Than Ever, the World Needs Hunks
https://www.fanbyte.com/features/hades-reminds-us-that-now-more-than-ever-the-world-needs-hunks/
Can you be gay in Hades?
https://gaymingmag.com/2020/09/can-you-be-gay-in-hades/
Hades is about erotic punishment: How Supergiant Games’ roguelite makes it desirable to rush headlong into death after death
https://www.polygon.com/2020/11/16/21563033/hades-supergiant-games-erotic-power-play
What Hades Can Teach Us About Ancient Greek Masculinity
https://www.wired.com/story/hades-ancient-greek-masculinity-classics-representation/
Where Are All The Fat Queer Video Game Characters?
https://gaymingmag.com/2020/10/where-are-all-the-fat-queer-video-game-characters/

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30 thoughts on “Hades: Gay All The Way Down?”

  2. I love the video!! I did want too flag a discussion around Chaos that (I'm,, not to fandom present, so I'm not sure how wide spread the critism is) I noticed. While I ADORE Chaos as they/them representation, as a they/them myself I would love too see some more,,, honest I guess representation? While I would love too be a primordial god I'm not — and while this is a game about gods, it would be nice too see a they/them who just is, and not a primordial being from the beginning of time

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  7. As a native Brazilian portuguese speaker, the matter of gender-neutral pronouns and linguistic treatment of gender non-binary people is very complicated.

    Portuguese is a very strongly gendered language. Most nouns are gendered one way or another and there aren't proper rules for gender-neutral language currently, though people have tried and are trying to create and spread the use of gender-neutral pronouns, in hopes that those will be added into the rules of the language. This has been a slow process so far and the use of gender-neutral language has been met with severe resistance, even from within the LGBTQIA+ community.

    I'm not saying the localization team is completely innocent but it's a tricky matter they had to deal with.

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  8. I LOVE that you brought up the body issues – since I was recently looking into that Bigorexia and toxic world of guys taking anabolic steroids to "get jacked" to be conforming to their own or others expectations of how a "man is supposed to look like" (which is a belated issue in the "male" side of the world after women were held to sickening standards for the most part of their existence already, I'm well-aware, which doesn't diminish the severity of either issue though).

    So, another point about Ancient Greek Aesthetic "Standards"/Norms, that might "interest" particularly the gay community might be the thing about the size of their genitals: small was supposed to be "better" back in those days since "big" was associated with "uncivilized" character traits. Of course hedonists would prefer the latter then…

    But it's a great point to start interesting (philosophical/psychological) discussions, i.m.h.o.

    And the Greek Pantheon of Gods does give a pretty wide range of Personalities – even though, it's hardly complete nor should anyone take Astrology or Myers-Briggs-Classification as serious as scientific – read: able to be replicated in fairly accurate (if not even sufficient by scientific standards) manner – tests like the "Big 5" Test for example.

    Oh, this whole topic can explode into all directions since it's touching so many layers/levels of human existence, it's really fascinating/exciting.

    (homo-demi-hypersexual and mostly homo-romantic [with very few exceptions] is what I'd find myself at in "the spectrum" if I got all the definitions right, but I'm first of all human-rights-for-everyone before all the sexual stuff is even looked at, since any phobias [homo-/xeno-/whatnot-phobias] seem to be interconnected "functions of 'fear of the [still] unknown'" and especially fear of death as the ultimate "End-Boss" – why "Hades" [the Greek God of the Underworld] and "Thanatos" [God of Death] are somewhat interesting Archetypes in this context – and also "Hypnos" as a "voluntary" and essential to survival state of "unconsciousness" throughout our lives. Of course, if there was a "God of Orgasms" [which is supposedly the "little sibling of Death"] would also be interesting since all those states of [having lost our] minds are something "natural" and some of them even "desirable" [orgasm] to many humans. But enough of my "ramblings" for now…I just wanted to give a little example of some of the implications these ideas behind the whole setting, characters and relations inspire in me. If I had people to constructively discuss these things with, I'd be happy for YEARS I think, if not until the end of my Life even. But I have not and too many are incapable or unwilling to hold constructive and respectful conversations even, so f**k it ;-P )

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  11. None of the Gods are Black though. They’re ethnically Greek, Greeks get that dark and are depicted that way in artwork. White skin was seen as barbaric and Southern Europeans and Middle Easterners saw blondes and red hair as unhealthy since babies and old people have light hair. You can’t draw Phenotypically caucasian people and claim they’re black. Black isn’t a race it’s a skin color and I’m tired of hearing that it is.

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  14. In German, there isn't really a genderneutral pronoun. Singular is like english he she it – er sie es, but you wouldn't say es – it to a person. "They" in german is also "sie", so you can't differentiate between 'they' and 'she', as it is the same word. :/

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  15. A few things about the skin colour of the gods, they probably took that liberty because there is a trend of whitewashing Greek and Roman history in general so that's just fighting a little bit against that whole thing I assume (also because of how living generally was the whitest anyone would probably be is around Hermes)

    Also Idk about the other languages but in Spanish you can correctly refer to someone without gendering them but like as long as it's kept within a few sentences, after that it gets really difficult, like you can't use the word parent or parents because parents is just the word for father with an S at the end (padres) and parent singular doesn't exist, you can use the word progenitor but it still brings to mind male genderification, and you can say like "chaos is my progenitor" and have it be okay, but good luck following up that sentence without gendering them as male, the closest you can get to it is gender fluidity but aside from that not being what chaos is, it's not going to feel grammatically correct to anyone

    The one thing you could do is go full on inclusive language but because it's so new there isn't a consensus about it, some want to apply its rules to every gendered word, some to generic words that are ment to refer to groups of people without a specific gender in mind but because of how Spanish has always worked the words themselves are gendered + a few words to use to refer to an nb person, not only that, until semi recently the character by which you would define gender neutrality has been in contention, here where I live, I can't talk for other Spanish speaking countries or regions for that matter and there's also the fact that this is not like the word "they" that has always been there, this is a literal change to the language so it's clearly gonna be waayyy more controversial than "just use they more often" people don't like change and a language's basic feature, especially when it's the only one you can speak is going to have a lot of push back (even if the change isn't big it's still gonna be a pain in the ass to introduce it), basically it's not worth for a foreign project to delve into that because then you use an ancient form of inclusive language from like 2016 and the people who hate it in general are going to hate you, the people who recognize it and or use it on a daily basis are also going to shit on you and them and the people who use it in different ways are going to complain and probably accuse you of not understanding how any of this works and just rainbow washing to appeal to everyone who that would appeal to (even tho playing the game you can see they wouldn't do it with those motives)

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  21. As a cis het guy, I frankly love the amount of diversity in hades. It never felt forced, and it opened up many more opportunities for compelling relationships. Achilles and Patroclus, Meg Than and Zag, Dusa, Hades and Persephone, even Theseus and Asterius. Hades is a story about love, in all senses, which is a very Greek theme. also, ancient Greece was VERY bisexual, so its nice to see myths not being twisted to fit the hetero norm. Love the video and your energy, keep it up.

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  23. Regarding representation of disabled people, considering this game is based on the ancient greek pantheon and its mythos, the only canonically disabled greek god is Hepahestus and he's grnerally not treated very well. On top of being disabled, he's said to be a deformed monster, too ugly for even his parents to love (that's canon by the way, Hephaestus' parents treat him like shit).

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  24. There's also an argument to be made about Dusa loosely representing trans queerness. While bonding with her, she'll eventually talk about struggling to find work since she doesn't quite fit the mold of other gorgons. She's offended and upset when Zagreus asks about her body, and later when he apologises for hurting her, she says “Oh don’t worry about it. It’s just… the past me, it’s as though it wasn’t even me. This is me now and I’m glad I’m here!” which resonates with a lot of trans people, myself included. Further, once she turns Zag down, she says “I never thought you’d have those kinds of feelings, for someone like me. It makes me feel complete." which in context also sounds very trans. I know for a fact that a lot of trans people agree with this, too, though it's rarely talked about since it's so subtle and the trans community is small in the first place. I recommend looking up her whole story arc on YT and seeing it through trans lenses. You'll see it too, trust me. Also 👻

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  28. Remember when we didn't just give people a medal for having a gay character. Just appreciated it. Greek mythology had many homosexual relationships. Including hercules and appo not together but both had boyfriends. "Daddy issues" is just Greek mythology. Zeuse dad chopped of a certain body part of his farther that became aphrodite. Zeuse dad ate all his siblings except zeuse because his mother saved him. He saved his siblings and over thrown his farther. And zeuse is like the farther of half the gods. Including artemis, apollo, persephone, hermes, dionysius, ares and hephaestus. And thats not even all of them. This feels like your projecting on to them, your own stereotypes. Real progressive, being a complete stereotype.

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