Lore Olympus: Volume One

Smythe, a folklorist, uses Ancient Greek mythology as the backbone of Lore Olympus, though its themes and characters are modernized for a contemporary audience. As such, her characters are drawn from the well-known gods of Greek antiquity, though their roles vary from character to character from their inspiration. Smythe makes many allusions to Greek mythology as a world-building technique, both capitalizing on and subverting reader assumptions about what certain archetypal figures and character dynamics suggest.

According to mythology, after being formed from Chaos, the world was ruled over by the titans, led by the Kronos, father of Hades, Zeus, and Poseidon. Other titans mentioned in Lore Olympus Volume One include Rhea, mother of Hades; Gaia, the titan of the Earth; and Hyperion, the titan of the sun. Kronos, fearing his children would rise against him, consumed several of them before being deposed by Zeus and banished to Tartarus, an area of the Underworld akin to Hell. This is alluded to in Hades’s nightmare in Episode 25. Zeus and his brothers establish themselves as the rulers of the new Pantheon: Zeus is the king of the gods, ruling over Olympus and the rest of the Pantheon, Poseidon becomes the ruler of the oceans, and Hades becomes ruler of the Underworld.