Tumblr likes Persephone. A couple of months ago I had like three different analyses and retellings of the story on my dash circling around for weeks, and I started this post then, but I came back to it today. Because it makes me think sometimes about the stories we tell, and how, and why..The version of the story that tumblr likes best goes like this: a sheltered little girl in her mother’s smothering shadow fund a way into a kingdom of her own power, and took it. She went from fragile little girl to glittering, terrible queen, and she gulped down those pomegranate seeds like drops of blood, desperate for her new life. It’s a good story. It’s such a triumphant story. She wanted. She chose. She won.We say that was the original story, of women’s power, before men took it and twisted it, Persephone subjugated not at Hades’ hands but beneath the tongues of generations of male storytellers. We say that and we want it to be true. We want to be sharing stories of women of old who wanted and chose and won. Those are such good stories, such powerful stories, such important stories. We want to believe that thousands of years ago, there were women who believed in their own power to conquer the world and told each other about it.Good. Good. We should.We should. But there’s more than one story here. Death of the author, well, the author here is six thousand years dead, and how many reinterpretations do you think have happened since? This is the real truth is a lie, a story we tell ourselves, like a story can only ever mean one thing to people unless it’s deliberately corrupted away. And there are other stories to tell.There are other stories that tumblr doesn’t like as much.We don’t like to think about the value in the version of the story where Persephone was the captive child bride, do we? It’s ugly. She loses in that version. She’s a shameful secret of history, where women always had to lose. There’s no inspiration in that, is there?.Here is a version of the story that we don’t usually tell:Persephone, weeping, her feet bare and her dress limp and washed out by the gloomy underlight, like a wilted flower, fled to the banks of the River of Hate and begged the titan Styx for passage.Styx laughed at her. The little girl who’d never been laughed at before begged for her home, for a warm yellow-glow hearth and the smell of fresh baking bread, for heat, for comfort. Styx laughed at her and said, “Then go home. The path back to your new master’s behind you.” Styx keeps her oaths and lets no man cross, nor woman, nor goddess, save Zeus or Hades themselves.Persephone ran back to Hades’ enormous manor, heart aching, feet aching, head aching. There was an empty longing gnawing at her gut, an unfillable hole, and she gulped down one tiny bitter-sour pomegranate seed to maybe fill it, just a little, gulped it down like Kronos once swallowed her aunt Hestia, who hadn’t come to take sweet Persephone home. She wished furiously that Styx would drown beneath her own waters. She learned rage.The next river was Lethe, dark and swirling with shadows. Persephone stood on the banks and longed for her mother, stood on the banks of sharp black rock under dim gray shadows and longed for the sun, and the water lapped at her toes and she wondered if she even knew what the sun looked like, any more. It had been too long. It had been so short a time, but it had been too long, and if she tried to swim the Lethe all the way to its mouth where it poured in from the world of the living, would she make it halfway before she forgot why she even cared?She chose to remember. The water lapping at her toes took the brightness of the sun and the surety of her mother’s devotion, but Persephone kept her own name, kept what was left of her heart, went back to her husband’s manor and swallowed one more seed to fill the emptiness. It went down smoother this time. Her manor hurt less without the sharpness of memories to compare it to.At the Acheron, river of woe, Charon shook his head and said, “It’s more than my life’s worth to take you, Your Majesty.”“You’re not alive,” said Persephone. “There are worse things than death,” Charon said, and because Persephone knew it to be true, now, knew what she’d never known before, she fell to her knees without any pride she’d ever clung to before, and wept. One more seed, swallowing in one more tiny piece of her prison to fill the void inside of her. One tiny bit more.Hades was kind to her. Hades was kind. He was pale, and thin, and not at all warlike, and he tended to his fields and his hound, and he looked at her like the most precious gem in all his treasury. So his fields were filled with the suffering dead, and his hound had three heads and teeth more vicious than any lion. Hades wasn’t cruel.She had to try one more time, and so she went to the River of Fire, the brightest bolt of light through the whole of the Underworld, the Phlegethon. Persephone walked to its banks and the flames leapt higher and higher, and stepped closer and let the heat sear her skin, hot enough to wilt flowers, to blacken wood. She took a step closer and refused to be afraid, for all she’d survived so far, refused to be deterred from her walk to the river’s edge, refused, refused, with all the fire in her. She opened her eyes and looked into the flames of the river, and knew that there were things even she could not survive.Hades wasn’t cruel, and there were worse things than death, but maybe he wasn’t quite one of them. Persephone wanted to live.There was only one river left, River of Lamentations, made of all the tears of all the lost souls ever trapped in Hades here alongside her. Persephone went. It was wide and rushing and terrible. She didn’t try to cross.She sat on the bank and she cried, added every last tear she could to the river’s water, wept out all her mourning for her mother and her life. The single pomegranate seed she ate, after she cleaned her face and straightened her clothes and walked back home, was salty and sweet, hardly bitter at all.The last seed was for Hades, pale and thin, who would keep her a slave or make her a queen, if she let herself be queen. Better to be queen. Better to love him. Better to, finally, turn her face towards her husband when he bent to kiss her, better for Persephone to kiss him back. Better to take what she had and swallow it down, to hold it tight, to be happy. Six seeds in her belly, and Persephone had always known how to nurture seeds. Better to let them grow, her rage and her fire, her sorrow and her tears, and fit her to this place..It’s a tragedy. It’s a story about a woman who changes herself to fit into the life of a man because she doesn’t have the option to leave it. It’s a story about how even rescue can’t pull Persephone out of the dark, because she’s swallowed it into herself, every day spent down there, taken in just a little more of the world around her. Maiden of death. After six months in the Underworld, she never gets to stop carrying it within her.We don’t like that story because it’s awful and it hurts and you’re supposed to tell stories about trying to escape your abusers, your captors, defying them however you can until your last breath. We hate it, because Greek mythology is full of references to Hades and Persephone as the happy couple. She falls in love with him at the end. Six months as Hades’ captive, no chance to go free, no choice at all, and Persephone falls in love with him at the end.It’s not the story we think we should be telling. You can’t tell a story about somebody who learns to be happy and content as a captive, as a prisoner. Happiness is for people who get out. That’s responsible storytelling..We try to give Persephone so much agency. Those are good stories, those are good versions of the story, those are stories I want to read–but we rewrite and rewrite and rewrite the story to say it was never rape and she really wanted it like we can rewrite the whole world and say that it was all just a mistake, no child bride has ever been married off to her own uncle against her will and then left there by family and society and circumstance. (Not in OUR country, some of us want to think. Tell me no little girls in your country have ever been taken and groomed and used and kept, legal marriage or no legal marriage.)We so want our victims to be good victims who always try to escape and never give in. We want our queens to be strong and tall and powerful queens who choose their own way forward, damn what other people think. We want it. We want it.We don’t have a lot of stories about victims who come to side with their abusers, their captors, who love their rapists. We don’t like to tell those. It’s hard to tell those. There’s no good answer. Persephone was happiest when she stopped fighting, gave in to her situation, and changed to fit her new life is not the kind of fairytale ending that modern feminists want to teach their children.I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m not Persephone in this story, not either version. I’ve never been raped or held captive. I just know what she always really wanted it in the first place sounds like to me. I know that I get really fascinated by the stories that people say are oppressive, are wrong, are bad stories to tell. I want to see female characters that have agency. Where do we fit in the stories about what happens when we don’t?You can call the Rape of Persephone a story built for male oppression and male domination, but right, male oppression and male domination are actual things that actually happened and continue to happen today. Maybe men aren’t the only ones who find value in stories about it.Not all things that happen in the world have happy endings.