A Powerful Hades is an Unpopular Dude : Dynamics of Power and Agency in Hades/Persephone Fanfiction

This paper employs Riveter (Antoniak et al. 2023) to analyze the dynamics of power and agency between the characters of Persephone and Hades in 482 short works of fanfiction (369,809 words total) about Greek myth. Where a difference was measured, on average Persephone has higher power scores and Hades has higher agency scores. I plot the development of differences in character-power and agency over time and examine how they correlate with several other story features, including popularity metrics and the occurrence of different types of violence in the stories. Hades' power correlates negatively with story-popularity, while Persephone's agency correlates positively with it.