Sunshine Challenge 2021 - Prompt 1 (Hades)

[greerwatson]

Prompt 1: Hades
Hades is the god of the dead and the king of the Underworld with which his name became synonymous. Despite modern connotations of death as evil, Hades was actually more altruistically inclined in mythology; his role was often maintaining relative balance between the realms. He was often depicted as cold and stern in his judgement, and he held all of his subjects equally accountable to his laws. Above all else, Hades ensured the finality of death and that none of his subjects ever left the Underworld.

This prompt promptly prompted <g> me to think of Forever Knight, particularly the episode "Near Death", whose flashback shows us Nick's experience in 1228 after the vampire LaCroix drains him to the point of death. He is offered the option of passing through a gateway to a brilliant light, representing death or some afterlife; but instead he chooses to answer LaCroix's call and wake to an altered immortal body.

It is an essential part of the vampire mythos, at least in this series, that they are not dead: being "undead" is something Other. For LaCroix (and most vampires in their community), actual death is The End; and, as such it is to be avoided at all costs. For Nick, whose quest is to reverse his vampiric condition, it is mortal life that he wants desperately to regain.

That death is the inevitable consequence of mortality is something that Nick accepts. Or, at least, in the strength of his current state and the health of his youth when he was brought over, he accepts death in theory. Whether, in the extremity of illness or age, he might alter his view ... well, that is a topic for fan fiction. Admittedly, few authors have tackled it.

Comments

[silveradept]

I haven't thought about Forever Knight in a while, and I had forgotten that Nick was trying to live it a mortal life. Seems like the sort of thing that someone who has lived long enough starts looking for.

[greerwatson]

In Nick's case, it's more that he feels he damned himself with the wrong choice back in 1228 and wants redemption by regaining his mortality.

As for trying to live like a mortal! In theory, absolutely. I think he saw that as redemption by little steps, so to speak. In practice, though, he was terrible at keeping to human limitations. He used vampire powers so often. Not just when people's lives were at stake (which makes sense), but just for his own convenience. He flew places instead of taking his car. He hypnotized people to cover up his slips. And, of course, he never could manage to eat solid food.

Then again, the series would have been a lot less interesting if he were constrained not to fly to the rescue, rip doors off their hinges, and hypnotize witnesses into providing evidence. So there's that.

[silveradept]

There is that. What the show and the audience want is probably different than what the character would actually want if they weren't on the television.

[greerwatson]

Television comes with constraints. This is especially true with an older show where every episode comes with a reset button; so there's no year-long Big Plot, let alone a five-season arc. It's up to fans to interpret things into character development: TPTB weren't thinking in those terms.