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Hades, a la Shmoop.

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Persephone <<per-SEF-uh-knee>>, would you get out here? Now!

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Forgive us...she gets a little moody sometimes.

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Sephy Bear… if you come out here and tape this episode of Real Housewives of the Underworld,

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your darling Hades will give you a special treat.

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Anything you want.

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All the jewels of the Underworld can be yours.

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I just don’t get it. You make a young goddess a queen, and all she can do is complain about it.

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I even tried to start this reality show to make her feel special,

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but she refuses to participate.

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All I do is try to make her happy, but nooooo...

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“My name is Persephone. I’m the goddess of spring.

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I hate being the Queen of the Underworld...

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blah, blah, blah, blah...

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You think I like being stuck down here with all these dead people?

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You think I don’t get depressed sometimes? Because I’m the Lord of the Dead.

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Everybody thinks of me as villain. But, really, I’m not a bad guy.

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I got stuck with this job when my brothers

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Zeus, Poseidon, and I drew lots to see who got to rule over what.

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Poseidon got the oceans; Zeus got the sky; and I got stuck with the Underworld.

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Personally, I think it was rigged.

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And wouldn't you know...

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I thought things were going to be better for me the first day I saw Persephone.

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She was so young and full of joy that I just

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knew she would bring a little sunshine into my gloomy life down here.

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So, the romantic that I am,

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I burst out of the ground, took her in my arms, and

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carried her down to the Land of the Dead to be my wife.

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I’ve caught a lot of flak for this over the years. But before you think badly of me

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you should know that I did ask her dad Zeus if it was cool, and he was totally fine with it.

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Maybe he felt bad about rigging that lot drawing back in the day.

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Some of you probably just did the math and figured out that if Zeus is my brother that

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makes Persephone my niece.

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To those of you who think it was creepy that I married my niece and that her dad was OK

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with it, I say...um...you got me on that one. It was pretty creepy. What can I say? I was smitten.

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I tried to tell this to Persephone’s mom,

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Demeter <<duh-MEET-er>>, who’s also my sister.

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You’d think she’d be more understanding about that sort of the thing since

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she had Persephone with our brother Zeus.

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I guess she saw the whole thing as “kidnapping” or whatever. She got so mad that she caused

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nothing to grow on earth. People were starving and dying all over the place.

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Talk about inconsiderate, right?

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There I was trying to entertain my new bride,

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and this awful famine was causing tons of dead mortals to flood the Underworld.

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We had a major backlog going on.

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Eventually, my lily-livered brother Zeus gave into her and said that

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Persephone had to go back to her mom.

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I wasn’t going to be defeated, though.

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Before Persephone left, I offered her a few pomegranate seeds, which she ate.

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I may have neglected to tell her that anybody who eats something in the Underworld...

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...isn’t allowed to leave.

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Man, Demeter was ticked when she heard about my little prank. You’d think she might’ve

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given up then, realizing she’d been bested by the superior intellect, but instead she

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determinedly starved the world until we were forced to compromise.

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Now, Persephone stays with me for part of the year and goes back to her mother for the

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other part. While she’s with me, her mother cruelly allows nothing to grow on earth.

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*cough* Winter.

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When I send her back to her mom, however, I take no revenge at all.

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And yeah...Demeter allows the world to bloom again, and I do nothing to stop it.

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I could drag the flowers into the earth and all sorts of bad things, but do I do that? Nope.

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I love Persephone with all my heart. All I want is for her to be happy.

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Now tell me, am I really such a villain?

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