YMMV / Hope Springs Eternal

• Can't Un-Hear It: You will be reading every line that comes out of Hades' mouth in James Woods' voice. That is a fact. To a lesser degree, don't be surprised if you find yourself hearing Lisa Kudrow while reading Aphrodite's lines.
• Character Rerailment: The whole point of this fic is to take the Hades from Disney's Hercules movie and develop him into something closer to his original mythological self. Aside from redeeming him and adding his relationship with Persephone, this also includes actually having him use his iconic invisibility helmet from classic Greek Mythology.
• Harsher in Hindsight: A major plotline in the fic (uploaded in the late 1990s) is the Age-Gap Romance between Persephone and Hades, with Hades being concerned about taking advantage of Persephone due to her young age (relative to him) and lack of experience, not to mention Hades being falsely accused of kidnapping and raping Persephone. It has a bit of a shadow cast over it due to accusations surfacing in the 2010s of James Woods (who voiced Hades in Hercules) being predatory towards young women, with Amber Tamblyn stating that Woods continued to hit on her even after she told him she was only sixteen. The author even added a disclaimer at the start of the fic in 2017, stating that while relationships with big age gaps are common in Greek mythology and she took care to not present Hades and Persephone's romance as being coercive or predatory, she fully understands some people may find it off-putting because of the real life context and recommends not reading the fic if you're sensitive to these issues.
  Quantum Witch: I would love to NOT have this knowledge darken my OWN view of what I wrote, but it's happening anyway.
• Jerkass Woobie: Hades' whole backstory. Sees his father violently rape his own mother, then swallows both him and his brother Poseidon where they had lived in his stomach for years. After Kronos' defeat, his youngest brother Zeus decides that he's the leader since he saved Poseidon and Hades, growing up to become the King of Olympus and getting all the love and glory, while Hades is ostracized by his fellow gods and is considered by them to be the resident Butt-Monkey (the opening scene in the movie is a good example of why he perceives himself as an outsider - even Poseidon doesn't hold him in high regard). Not only this, when he was younger and exploring the Underworld, he came across Kokytus, a waterfall in his domain. Being curious and being King, he tasted the water as he missed Olympus, but loses his Power Glow - thus explaining why he does not glow unlike the other gods. On top of that, the only love he had known died tragically, forcing him to contemplate suicide. This long Trauma Conga Line ultimately drove him to evil.
• Nightmare Fuel: Most of Hades' childhood. Even if one excuses being eaten alive AT AGE FIVE, there's also that Hades knows for a fact that his father RAPED his mother frequently.

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