>>717737750
https://wayback-api.archive.org/save/https://kotaku.com/black-athena-how-hades-gets-its-gods-right-1845146132
>I love Hades. It’s a great roguelike, has a cleverly-crafted story, and is stuffed with beautiful art and design. But what I like most about it is its commitment to diversity among its characters.
>Hades’ pantheon of Greek gods is diverse. Athena is a dark-skinned Black woman. Dionysus is south Asian. Hermes is east Asian. Eurydice, my favorite, is a Black woman crowned with a beautiful afro made from the branches and canopy of a tree.
[...]
>Greg Kasavin, the creative director of Supergiant Games, told me that Hades’ diversity was the result of an epiphany during the game’s development.
>“We knew going into Hades that we wanted this to be the story of a big dysfunctional family set in the Underworld of Greek myth, told from the Underworld’s point of view,” he wrote in an email. “As we discussed and researched the Olympians from canon sources, something stood out that in retrospect was obvious: They’re called the Greek gods because they were worshiped in ancient Greece, not because they themselves are ethnically Greek.” In other words, they didn’t all have to be Greek, or even white-passing for that matter.
>“Zeus rules all the heavens, not just the airspace over Greece,” Kasavin wrote. “Poseidon rules all the sea and land. They sprang from the Titans, who sprang from primordial Chaos, the source of all creation. So it stands to reason that the gods represent all the people of the world, at least indirectly.”
>To say this statement shocked me with its simplicity, is an understatement. More like it smote my heart like a thunderbolt hurled from Zeus’ own hand. Gods, if that’s where you choose to invest your belief, are for everyone. It reminds me of the slogan I’ve seen Norse Pagans adopting to combat the homophobia and white supremacy that have sprung up around their religion. “It’s the All-Father, not the some-Father.”