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The Webcomics Weekly #212: Return to Olympus (11/14/2022 Edition)

By | November 15th, 2022
Posted in Reviews | % Comments

The Webcomics Weekly returns to Olympus this week by way of “Lore Olympus”, you might of heard of it.

Lore Olympus
Episodes 131-144
Updates Sundays
By Rachel Smythe
Reviewed by Mel Lake

This week I revisited “Lore Olympus” in lieu of reading a new webcomic. It was definitely necessary for me to take a break from the endless drama of the Olympians and the Underworld. Trying to digest chunks of the story every other week just didn’t lend itself to me enjoying the story. In consuming something like this, I think you either need to be hooked and obsessed with weekly updates, or take in the story more slowly, with breaks to get away from all the drama. Now that I’ve been away from it for a while, I was able to come back and remember which characters I enjoyed seeing and why.

Persephone and Hades have an honest conversation about what happened in her past that made Zeus place her under arrest. She explains that she lost control after an incident involving mortals who killed her nymph friends and then mocked her status as a goddess. Persephone killed a mortal and then terrified them even further by growing “big” and changing her appearance. Hades comforts her and even shares his own traumatic past. He is much older than Persephone, though, and has had more time to heal from his painful childhood captivity. Once the two are honest with each other, their relationship seems to chill out and become more comfortably flirty, rather than fraught with tension.

I’ve been pretty hard on “Lore Olympus” in the past for constantly employing the “woman loses control of her emotions and physical powers” trope. I loathe the use of this tactic to depower women superheroes because it’s so often used in real life to disqualify women seeking authoritative positions in society. However, I think this set of episodes really does a great job of tying Persephone and Hades’ experiences of physical loss of control to PTSD. Before this, when it wasn’t clear why Persephone couldn’t control herself, it was easier to chalk it up to “young girl can’t control herself” rather than “young person is struggling with PTSD flashbacks.” By having Hades share his own struggles with control with Persephone, it frames her physical symptoms as a trauma response rather than as a weakness or something wrong with her, specifically.

Meanwhile, Zeus is still on the lookout for Persephone and Minthe is still after Hades. The Olympian zoom call initiated by Zeus is hilarious, and exactly the kind of humor I love about “Lore Olympus.” However, I feel as though the longer the Minthe and Thanatos storyline drags on, the less I care about it. Minthe’s subplot feels like a remnant of the first act and the narrative should have moved on to bigger conflicts. Similarly, when Thanatos encounters Daphne, who is disappointed by Apollo’s obsession with Persephone, she asks Thanatos why he cares so much about Hades and Persephone’s relationship in the first place. This is something I’d like to know, too. Many characters are obsessed with Persephone without a clear reason why. Thanatos and Daphne seem headed to a romance but I’d honestly think a more interesting subplot would be Thanatos realizing he’s actually jealous of Persephone because he has feelings for Hades. (But no one is gay in “Lore Olympus” for some reason? Maybe there’s one character? It seems odd to me that there’s very little to suggest that non-human characters of the same or similar genders might be attracted to one another but this story is very much focused on heterosexual relationships.) Although I like Thanatos’s character design, I’m just not sure what he and Minthe have to add to the story that they haven’t already.

As this batch of episodes comes to a close, Hades and Persephone become closer physically, even going for a pretty heavy makeout session. But since Persephone also has trauma due to her assault by Apollo, she feels conflicted about becoming sexually involved with Hades. The way the pair negotiate this aspect of their relationship finally feels like an adult conversation between adults. I’ve given Persephone a lot of flack for saying one thing and then immediately doing another, but here she’s able to express her confusion around sex and her boundaries clearly. Thank the gods!

I also had fewer quibbles about the artwork or writing in this batch of episodes, which was a relief. Persephone isn’t nearly as doe-eyed as she sometimes is. Although I know the choice is intentional and makes us think about how audiences and society sexualize young women, when Persephone looks like a baby, it makes me cringe to see her in sexual situations with giant-sized Hades.

Though “Lore Olympus” continues to tread familiar ground, with the will-they-won’t-they relationship of Hades and Persephone dragging ever onward, the characters have slowly matured over the course of the series. Story detours like the shopping spree or the zoom call slow the pace and your mileage may vary with how much you appreciate them, but they do provide a respite from the constant feelings and trauma processing that otherwise dominates the story at this point. I always enjoy seeing Hades’s dogs and more of the Underworld, as well. Coming back to “Lore Olympus” every few months and catching up on the drama will hopefully help me enjoy the story of Persephone a little more since I do want to find out how she ends up as the Queen of the Underworld and that part of the story is still ahead.


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Mel Lake

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