“They Sound Hot”: Sexuality and Vocality in Supergiant’s Hades

The association of Supergiant Games’s Hades with bisexuality has become so commonplace online that it is the subject of memes and parody. Fan groups joke about Hades ‘turning people bi’ as well as the ‘horniness’ and ‘thirstiness’ of the game’s fanbase, and explicit fanfics and fanart of the characters are abundant online. Jen Zee’s impossibly attractive character designs befit the subjects, literal deities and mythic figures, but they alone do not explain why these millennia-old characters are suddenly the object of modern lust. The characters’ dialogue and the voice actors who brought it to life also play a major role. Furthermore, I argue that the superlative nature of Hades, the result of so much hard work at Supergiant, is not the only factor contributing to its iconic, memetic status. The paucity of positive, deliberate, unambiguous depictions of queer people and queer relationships in mainstream media meant that Hades shone all the brighter by featuring a bisexual protagonist, Zagreus, and offering the possibility of a polyamorous relationship among Zagreus, Megaera, and Thanatos. As players reconsidered their own assumed heterosexuality, the result of compulsory heterosexuality, they also formed and found online communities where others discussed their own queer awakenings.

The specific confluence of timing, positive representation, and excellent performances catapulted Hades into becoming “bi culture,” as one commenter put it,¹ but the sensuousness of the voice is not a new phenomenon. It is easy enough to think of musicians in the age of recordings who became sex symbols and even objects of obsession for fans: Elvis, Madonna, the Beatles, Taylor Swift, the list goes on and on. But even within Western performance history, sexiness is not limited to pop stars or rock-and-roll bands; for hundreds of years, opera singers were lusted after by patrons and fans. Writing about video games, Tim Summers notes “the voice’s potential for disruption, multiplicity, interstitiality, and disjunction,”² but he could be writing about opera as well. Despite the surface-level reification of gender roles in opera, particularly nineteenth-century opera, the disruptive possibilities—the queer possibilities—of the voice have always existed. The castrati, who were objects of desire for both men and women in the eighteenth century, were almost too attractive, threatening the social order.³ One famous castrato part, that of Orpheus in Gluck’s Orfeo, is echoed in Hades as Orpheus (performed by Darren Korb) sings in a high, lyric voice.

In the interest of full disclosure (and as a sort of academic coming out), I myself have experienced one particular permutation of this experience. My awareness of my own bisexuality was not initially kindled by Hades, but it did coincide with Hades. Over the last few years, online communities and information, including Hades fan spaces and fan-made media, made me reconsider experiences that I thought were ‘normal’ but which were, in hindsight, early clues to my sexual orientation. For example, I assumed that everyone experienced a time where they were not sure whom they were attracted to, and I have generally found other women to be more attractive than men, but I believed that it was just a fact that women are objectively more attractive than men. It is only after talking with other people about their experiences that I discovered that many people have never had any uncertainty at all about their sexual orientation, and that finding women attractive means I am not straight. I have come to identify as bisexual but have been hesitant to speak about it, in large part because I am married to a man and therefore ‘pass’ as heterosexual, an enormous privilege in the rural area in which I live. I realize biphobia, which I will discuss later in this article, also plays a role. I offer my own experiences with Hades and bisexuality not as a paradigm but as a possibility, an illustration of one potential path toward bisexual identity and awareness. Furthermore, my own experience sheds light on some of the reasons an awakening is necessary at all: compulsory heterosexuality and biphobia.

Finally, a note on language—throughout my article, I use the adjective “queer” as in “queer theory”; that is, referring to people, characters, or narratives outside of the heterosexual, allosexual, cisgender (and often male) norm in twenty-first-century western culture. GLAAD defines it thus:

I recognize that it is not a perfect option, but it is a widely known and reasonably accepted word to denote anyone or anything ‘not straight’ in the broadest sense.

It is nearly impossible to precisely quantify the prevalence of a concept or association on the ever-expanding corpus of the internet: there is no programming schedule to analyze, no way to definitively count comments or posts. Instead of a comprehensive survey, I offer a representative sample of various depictions of media connecting Hades to bisexuality. Figure 1 features three meme images linking Hades with bisexuality. The leftmost and middle were originally posted on r/bi_irl, a subreddit devoted to memes about bisexuality, and crossposted to r/HadesTheGame. The MQ, a satirical magazine published at University of California San Diego, ‘reported’ about several players’ experiences with Hades:

While this article is clearly tongue-in-cheek, Hades’s recognition as a milestone in gaming representation is not fictional. Hades won both Game of the Year and Readers’ Award at the first Gayming Magazine awards.⁷ Dom Peppiatt, writing for NME, summed up what so many players and fans gestured toward, laying out clearly just how important the positive representation of queer people in Hades was for him:

We all want to see ourselves represented in media, and reactions to Hades make it clear that for many people, this was one of the first times, if not the first time, they saw their sexual orientation depicted as a positive thing in a video game. That is not to say, however, that video games have only suddenly become queer, but rather that queerness in game history has been forced to operate under the surface. The representational poverty of LGBTQ+ people and relationships is no accident or oversight: it is the result of systemic forces aligned to support compulsory heterosexuality.

While Adrienne Rich was not the first to discuss compulsory heterosexuality (“comphet”), her 1980 essay on the topic is a concise summary of the concept, which theorizes that heterosexuality is not a natural default of all women but that it is promulgated and enforced by the patriarchy through a variety of means, both overt and covert. She writes of

She continues on, discussing the importance of identifying heterosexuality as a cultural construct because it is so familiar that it is difficult to perceive, much as the air we breathe. Unless it is critically considered, the forces that enforce it cannot be identified, let alone dismantled: she writes, “the failure to examine heterosexuality as an institution is like failing to admit that the economic system called capitalism or the caste system of racism is maintained by a variety of forces, including both physical violence and false consciousness.”¹⁰ More than 40 years later, Rich’s image of lesbianism feels restrictive and her reputation is tainted by her endorsement of trans-exclusive writing, but her musings on comphet and the methods of its enforcement still feel uncomfortably familiar.¹¹ If we consider Rich’s ideas in a broader fashion—that comphet does not only suppress lesbians but anyone outside of cisgender/allosexual/heterosexual norms—the ongoing existence of the systems that perpetuate those norms is clear. The systems themselves are more visible today because exceptions to those norms are more visible and therefore efforts to suppress them cannot pass by unnoticed.

For members of marginalized groups, supportive communities can be literal lifesavers, affirming places for people invisible to or actively harmed by societal norms. As Adrienne Shaw found in her study of online “gaymer” (gay gamer) communities, “the creation of online communities was often analogous to the development of queer communities…individuals need safe spaces, particularly when those individuals do not conform to dominant norms.”¹² Shaw’s ethnography found that “for many [online community members], the main reason for being on the site was that it was a ‘safe space’ where they felt less pressure to censor their gaymer identities, which they experienced as a hybrid or intersectional identity that was not defined by being ‘gay’ so much as appreciating a gay sensibility and queer worldview.”¹³ One theme that recurs in many personal narratives in Claiming the B in LGBT is the importance of community in people’s awakenings to and their comfort in their bi identity: Jamie Q. Collins writes about the importance of language and community in “being able to explain your identity more clearly, to having access to communities of similar people, to the feeling of ‘Others feel this way? That means I’m not broken.’”¹⁴ Several contributors comment on the value of online communities, especially for people who are geographically isolated or who may lack a supportive community in real life. For example, one interviewee writes, “While it isn’t perfect, thank technology for the Internet, so people can find others! That is the biggest, most significant change in the years I’ve been out and active!”¹⁵

This was my personal experience as well—online interactions and resources (including online communities of Hades fans) prompted and propelled my investigation into my own identity. Communities built and information shared online have enabled discussion of a variety of theoretical concepts by a wide and diverse cohort: the internet has circumvented many of the restraints imposed by the patriarchy. Theoretical fluency regarding queer identities among young people today has flourished online. For example, a document called “The Lesbian Masterdoc,” originally published on Tumblr, explains comphet in a friendly, colloquial, and even intimate tone:

Online discussions provide ample evidence that progress is being made on the first step of counteracting comphet, that of identifying and naming it and the structures that support it.

The enforced isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic further emphasized the value of virtual interaction as birthday parties, choir rehearsals, and classes moved online in an effort to curtail the spread of the virus. Physical isolation was, obviously, difficult in many ways, but one less intuitive but no less important effect of isolation was the critical reassessment of many social norms, including assumptions of heterosexuality. Michelle Santiago Cortés, a reporter focusing on digital culture and the social internet, writes:

It was into this context, as online social interaction became ever more important and online conversations included sexuality and theoretical concepts such as comphet, that Zagreus emerged from the pool of blood in the House of Hades.

One structure undergirding comphet is the invisibility of other options: if people do not know anything other than the norm is possible, they will be less likely to push back against it. This is one of many reasons queer representation in media is important in breaking down the patriarchy and all its attendant structures. One long-lasting result of morality rules in media, such as the Hays Code, is the scarcity of openly LGBTQ+ characters on screen. Characters are sometimes implied to be non-straight via stereotypical mannerisms (termed “queercoding”) or a same-sex relationship is teased but never made official (“queerbaiting”). When openly gay or lesbian characters are included in a work, they may feel like a token gesture, especially if the pre-release marketing hype contained phrases such as “first openly gay character in…” (e.g., LeFou, Gaston’s sycophant in the live-action Beauty and the Beast film (2017), or the nameless group therapy member in Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame). The impetus for queerbaiting and including token queer characters is often commercial, as film journalist Jericho Tadeo explains:

But while this tactic may be commercially viable, its impact on queer people, especially queer or questioning youth, is harmful. A study published in 2007, funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and conducted by scholars specializing in childhood and adolescent psychology and risk behavior, quantitatively demonstrated the scarcity of queer characters on screen and discussed how their absence likely impacts young people. Deborah Fisher et al. write:

It is not difficult to imagine how lonely it would be to grow up with no role models that shared your identity, without trusted adults to guide you or a story to see yourself in. Erin B. Waggoner, a communications professor who specializes in LGBTQ+ topics, writes of her own experiences as a student in ways that resonate strongly with my own: “I was afraid that if I was too visible, people would be able to tell what I was hiding. That I was gay. I felt alone. And I did not know until I was much older, talking to former teachers and peers, I did not need to feel alone.”²⁰ This parallels my own experiences: I grew up in a rural, conservative part of Ohio, and I have vivid memories of being afraid I was gay and having no one I could talk to about it, no one I felt safe telling.

While a great deal has changed since I was that lonely junior high student, the invisibility of queer people and stories, whether interpreted as symbolic annihilation or identified as one leg of comphet, is an ongoing issue in media, including television, film, and video games. The quantity of queer characters on screen is slowly improving, but as Waggoner points out, numbers alone do not prove positive representation: “While there have been an increasing number of visibly LGBTQ characters on television…the narratives presented, while more visible, were still focused on more relationship and interpersonal issues instead of accurate representations of WLW [women loving women] persons.”²¹ Fisher et al. found that “portrayals or discussions of sexual situations related to gays, lesbians, and bisexuals are still relatively infrequent, especially compared with the prevalence of sexual content on television associated with heterosexuals.”²² Today, there are more characters on screens denoted or identified as gay, but the unequal depiction of sexual and romantic behavior communicates that same-sex affection is somehow more sexual or dangerous than the same behavior between heterosexual pairings.

Bisexuality is often grouped with homosexuality, but it is neither synonymous nor interchangeable with gay and lesbian identities. Biphobia, which can come from inside the queer community as well as outside of it, often takes the form of negative stereotypes that characterize bisexual people as ‘greedy’ or dismiss bisexuality as ‘a phase.’ Bisexual people are often assumed to be either straight or gay depending on the gender of their current partner, which leaves few visibly bisexual characters in media. Waggoner specifically identifies bisexual erasure as its own particular issue in representation, as characters may remain in a same-sex relationship and be read as homosexual or (more likely) ultimately be paired up with an opposite sex partner and therefore be defined as heterosexual, with no consideration of bisexuality as an option: “Often, female characters who engaged in same-sex relations would still end up with males eventually (bisexual erasure), further validating the heteronormativity prevalent in television.”²³ Avalon Penrose, the voice actress for Megaera, is openly bisexual, and she has uploaded a video to YouTube that humorously summarizes and counters many of the stereotypes surrounding bisexuality (Figure 2). She concludes by singing:

“Being Bisexual” antedates her casting, performance, and success as Megaera, which quashed her father’s concerns quoted elsewhere in the song that being ‘out’ would cost her job opportunities. It also points out that the problem is not bisexuality (or pansexuality or asexuality) but people’s failure to understand, to imagine other possibilities than heterosexuality or even homosexuality. It is the creativity to dream outside of dichotomies and the refusal to be constrained by how things have always been that is the hallmark of queerness for many scholars—as well as what propels Zagreus toward the surface.

While the presence of LGBTQ+ characters or narrative elements, explicit or implied, are often the subject of discussion, queer analysis is not restricted to media with queer characters or creators. Adrienne Shaw and Bonnie Ruberg argue that “Queerness…can be defined as the desire to live life otherwise, by questioning and living outside of normative boundaries.”²⁵ Summers makes this summary:

Shaw and Ruberg suggest queerness as a fruitful lens for reading all games, a way to step out of the ludo/narrative dichotomy: “Rather than understanding games as rule-based structures (ludology) or just in terms of representation (narratology), we can view games as spaces where we play within and against rules and explore representation beyond explicitly named queer content.”²⁷ The core conflict in Hades is Zagreus’s desire to live his life otherwise, outside the role prescribed for him by his father. The resolution is one that defies the dichotomy laid out at the beginning: stay in the House of Hades and slog through the office work or escape and live on the surface. As Summers writes, “Queer perspectives deconstruct false binaries by emphasizing ‘both-and’ instead of ‘either-or.’”²⁸ Throughout Zagreus’s story, he refuses to settle for one option and ultimately, Zagreus’s resolution is a both-and, in which he both escapes and returns.

While Hades is notable in part for its forthright incorporation of queer characters, it is also structured in a way that mirrors musical loops in video games, a structure that refuses the “straight” path of conventional musical structures.²⁹ Summers describes musical loops “held in stasis, and whose temporal history is at once its past, present and future,” further noting that “though there may be ebb and flow within a loop, large-scale musical climaxes operate only on the broader level of the manipulation of loops,” and therefore looped musical cues are intrinsically “a queer musical structure.”³⁰ Hades’s overarching form, in which the beginning and ending of each run (escape attempt) elide and in which progress primarily happens between runs, neatly echoes these compositional strictures and therefore their queer nature. This structurally echoes both the narrative themes of Hades’s queer characters’ simultaneous stasis and growth and players’ growing understanding that their own identities may not be what they had always assumed. Zagreus, Achilles, Megaera, and many other characters reside in the House of Hades at both the beginning of the game and the end, but their relationships and roles change. Players are still themselves, but their understanding of themselves and their identities evolve. For players and characters, Hades is full of both-and, a fundamental element of the game incorporated into its ludic, narrative, and musical structures.

In much the same way that my own bisexuality seems obvious in retrospect but was ineffable in my adolescence, Hades’s current status as a widely recognized and lauded queer cultural touchstone was not foreseeable when it became publicly available. Hades’s success was by no means divinely (or chthonically) ordained, and the first players had no way of knowing how Zagreus’s story would conclude. The first early access release on Epic Games was in December 2018, its player base exploded after it was released on Steam Early Access in December 2019, and it was officially released in complete form on September 17, 2020.³¹ Players reacted enthusiastically to Supergiant’s choices surrounding sexuality, and many of their comments were made in dedicated online communities. A sampling of comments on threads in r/HadesTheGame is included in Figures 3 and 4, and one user-created poll in the subreddit found that 163 of 348 respondents, or about 46.7%, self-identified as queer, far more than the 4.5% of the US population estimated by the UCLA Williams Institute.^32,33

Zagreus is decidedly and intentionally bisexual, not a blank slate or true avatar for the player. He had a history before the game and existing relationships with other characters. However, as Zag speaks with his friends and family and even his nemeses, he is ever cool and witty, and the players too form opinions of and affection for the deities, shades, and occasional monsters that dwell in the underworld. He has a past with both Megaera and Thanatos, and the player’s input into their future is limited to the choice to continue or stop the budding (or reflowering) relationship. And the player’s choice is not absolute! They may choose to build a relationship with Dusa, but she ultimately decides that she does not wish to have a romantic relationship with Zagreus. Summers points out that “designers who create games with distinct characters for us to adopt are explicitly asking us to play with identity. For heteronormative and queer players alike, these games provide fantastic opportunities to open out possibilities of identity.”³⁴ Players are invited to take on Zagreus’s identity in play, and in doing so we may queerly consider alternative identities for ourselves as well.

And Zagreus is not the only queer character. Reuniting Achilles and Patroclus takes time and devotion, but seeing the couple together again is worth the effort. Artemis, virgin goddess of the hunt, frequently brings up her nymph companion Callisto. Chaos is fundamentally nonbinary, neither male nor female, young nor old, speaking with the voice of a multitude. As u/spoonerfan summarizes, “it doesn’t queerbait! Canonical queer, gay, bisexual, poly, and ace representation. Excellent game.”³⁵ But the characters in Hades are not just remote examples of queer characters. They are also the objects of imaginative lust for many fans.

The sheer abundance of Hades erotic fan art (both visual and textual) demonstrates the creativity it inspired in fans.³⁶ In order to get a sense of the trends and preferences of the creators and consumers of erotic Hades fanart and fanfics, I surveyed Reddit, Twitter (X), and An Archive of Our Own (AO3) for works related to Hades. It is important to note here that the numbers I reference are not intended to be absolute—new art is always being created and added. My counting methodology was less straightforward than I initially expected. I had to make an authorial decision to count alternate universe (AU) versions of a character in the same category as the ‘regular’ version. If a post or a tweet contained multiple images by the same artist within it, I counted it as a single item. If there were two virtually identical images that differed only in the genitals drawn on a character (e.g., paired illustrations of Zagreus with a penis and Zagreus with a vulva), I counted them as a single item. I tried to exclude duplicates, but the sheer breadth of the art makes it impossible to be absolutely sure. In order to be tallied, an image had to be sexual or erotic; here I used my own judgment. For AO3, I derived my numbers from tagged works.³⁷ I grouped art that included non-speaking participants, such as enemies, under individual art; I also included works with anonymous appendages (for instance, penises not clearly attached to a particular body) in the solo category.

As can be seen in Figures 5, 6, 7, and 8, I found substantially more art on Twitter than on Reddit and even more on AO3. I was surprised to discover just how widely trends varied by platform: Reddit users demonstrated a strong preference for Aphrodite (very visible in Figure 5), and for art depicting Megaera and Zagreus together, while Twitter overwhelmingly favored art of Thanatos and Zagreus (Figure 6). Some artwork featured more than two subjects. On Reddit, I found two illustrations of Megaera/Zagreus/Thanatos (the canonical throuple) as well as art featuring all three Furies, Ares/Dionysus/Zagreus, Achilles/Patroclus/Thanatos/Zagreus, and a drawing of Alecto and Megaera with an unidentified third participant. Twitter had even more combinations depicted, with Megaera/Zagreus/Thanatos depicted at least fifteen times, and Zagreus/Achilles/Patroclus depicted at least nine times.³⁸

I found art depicting characters kissing, masturbating, or engaging in anal, digital, oral, and/or vaginal sex. Megaera was often depicted as a domme (a female dominant). Aphrodite, whose official art depicts her in the nude, was a particular favorite, especially on Reddit. Some art crossed taboos, such as depictions of close family incest, including Zagreus with Nyx, his adoptive mother, or Persephone, his biological mother.³⁹ Particularly common on Reddit, though not absent on Twitter, is the assumption that the viewer has a penis and is interested in penetrating the character depicted. Some characters’ sexualization was a bit of a surprise, for example, that of Charon, the skeletal psychopomp who runs the in-game item shop. His voice lines are limited to groans and his body is almost completely shrouded by his cloak and hat. That did not stop fans from imagining and illustrating his ghostly penis—at least nine works of art and 390 stories feature Charon. Other characters were surprising in their absence: I found zero erotic illustrations of Zeus, a philanderer of mythic proportions, and only two out of the more than 4000 stories I surveyed included him!⁴⁰

What is made abundantly clear is that fans think these characters are hot. Sexy. Fuckable. And fanart is not the only proof of this. Twitter user @thescruffycat ran multiple polls for fans to vote on Hades characters in brackets determining the best “lay” (Dionysus was voted the winner), “top [dominant partner]” (Megaera), “bottom [submissive partner]” (Hypnos), and “switch [person comfortable with either topping or bottoming]” (Zagreus). Fans also voted Achilles and Patroclus as the “most married vibes” and Zeus as the “worst date.”⁴¹ Visual fan art makes clear that the character designs are important, generally by using them as the basis for an explicit illustration. However, the fanfics and Twitter polls are not based exclusively on visual attributes—characterization matters too. And characterization in Hades is accomplished via dialogue.

Like every Supergiant game, character and relationship-building are central to the game, but unlike previous Supergiant games (Bastion, Transistor, and Pyre), every line of dialogue in the final version of Hades is voiced. Greg Kasavin, in the 2021 GDC presentation “Breathing Life into Greek Myth: The Dialogue of ‘Hades’” identifies many reasons why Supergiant chose to “fully voice” Hades; chief among them is “help[ing] make characters feel alive despite limited presentation.” Kasavin explains, “we don’t have fully performance-captured amazing cutscenes and stuff like that, but we do have actors like Logan [Cunningham], who can through their voice alone make these characters seem to pop out of the game.”⁴² In Hades, relationship-building primarily (though not exclusively) occurs in between runs, as Zagreus speaks to the inhabitants of the House of Hades. Some characters are present in the House after most runs—mentor Achilles, mother Nyx, chthonic greeter Hypnos, hellhound Cerberus—while others appear only after specific milestones are met or if certain events happened during a run. Because Zagreus interacts with these characters often, the player witnesses how existing relationships strengthen and change in a familiar and human way. Players are granted a window into Zagreus’s genuinely loving bond with Nyx as he comes to terms with the discovery of his relationship to Persephone and realizes he loves both his mothers. Lovers Achilles and Patroclus can be reunited, as can Orpheus and Eurydice. Nyx and her parent Chaos can also be reconciled.

The Olympians’ personalities must be conveyed in brief snippets, like voicemails, sent to Zagreus along with their boons. Each message is different, and by making a reciprocal offering of his own (nectar or ambrosia), Zagreus can forge a relationship with his extended family. Practically, this means that image, voice, and text together must be information-dense, to convey quite a lot very efficiently. Marin Miller, who voiced Athena, Alecto, and Tisiphone, explained how she approached this task:

Cyrus Nemati explained his approach to crafting Ares, Dionysus, and Theseus:

Fan responses make clear that the effort put into vocally encoding characterization was not in vain, but the question of what aural attributes make a voice ‘sexy,’ ‘attractive,’ or ‘seductive’ and the question of what makes a voice sound ‘gay’ or otherwise queer have no simple, universal answers. That has not stopped researchers, voice actors, and others looking to make a buck from attempting to find some and publish them!

Much as the visual aspect of media is heavily skewed toward the male gaze, discussion of what makes a voice sexy is often implicitly geared toward a male listener, focusing on what makes a (feminine) voice sound attractive to a (heterosexual male) audience. Some patterns do emerge from articles penned by voice actors, vocal coaches, and love-life gurus, often in the examples chosen, which frequently include Scarlett Johansson and Angelina Jolie. Frequently cited vocal attributes are lower pitch, breathiness, slower speech, clear diction, and vocal fry or ‘raspiness.’ At least one study, conducted on European speed daters, found that while “a relatively high voice pitch in women can signal youth, femininity, and reproductive fecundity, by dynamically lowering her voice pitch a woman might be signaling sexual interest and intimacy to a man.” In the study’s observed outcomes, “men preferred women who spoke with a lower minimum pitch, such that women’s minimum pitch explained up to 55% of the variance in how desired they were by men.”⁴⁵ The subjectivity of these categories, as well as the inclusion of mutually exclusive attributes (high female voices are attractive, as are low female voices), allow for almost any voice deemed sexy to fall into at least one of these categories.

I had initially hoped that I would be able to use the voices of Hades as a case study to identify which characteristics are ‘sexy’ by identifying which characters were received as such and then identifying which vocal characteristics they shared. I realized almost immediately that this would prove impossible, both as categorization seemed inappropriately broad (e.g., dividing voices by gender) or fruitlessly granular (e.g., grouping masculine characters who are read as attracted to men) and, more importantly, nearly every character was perceived as sexy. Furthermore, many voices that share traits are perceived very differently by fans: both Asterius and Zeus speak with a deep, conventionally masculine voice, but Asterius has far more admirers (or at least appears in more fans’ erotic imaginations!) than Zeus does. It became clear that the characters’ attractiveness was not solely due to specific auditory elements but a combination of narrative characterization, visual representation, and vocal performance.⁴⁶ Vocal characteristics did not seem to determine how attractive a character was, but vocal characteristics could certainly heighten characters’ erotic appeal. Certain characters’ voices were highlighted by fans as particularly effective at this, with Thanatos and Megaera being among the most commonly praised.

Fans have verbally expressed how sexy they find Hades characters’ voices, though examples of audio fanart are harder to find than visual or textual art. The best-known aural analog to erotic fanart is one that became a meme: YouTube KaiserNeko published a brief video clip purporting to be a line of Dionysus’s dialogue with the description “This is a secret introduction to Dionysus that can only be acquired if you start a new game, but give up 68 times in a row. On the 69th try, you’ll meet Dionysus for the first time, and this dialogue plays.” What plays in the seventeen-second clip is what seems to be the standard boon acceptance animation in Tartarus, but what Dionysus says is “Heeey, there Zag, man, nice cock.” KaiserNeko voiced Dionysus, mimicking Cyrus Nemati so well that many of the comments are about being fooled into thinking this was real.^47,48

Megaera, one of the feminine characters most frequently depicted in fanart, is also a character whose voice is highlighted as particularly sexy: “Just bought the game because it was on sale and…why Meg voice is so hot ? Why everyone in this game is so hot ? I dont know how to explain it, like her design is so cool but HER VOICE PLEASEEE ??? You can do everything to me with your whip ” [sic].⁴⁹ Venues such as Twitch and YouTube allow interplay between players and fans on livestream, and when cast members appear on streams unexpected moments can leave an impression, as when Penrose said “ugh, fine, I guess you’re my little pogchamp.”⁵⁰ One Reddit commenter responded to that audio clip with “I’m still not sure what that means but boy howdy it does things to me.”⁵¹ This type of response, highlighting the listener’s sexual response to character voices, is common in Hades fan spaces.

Because Penrose has recorded and published material both as herself and in character as Megaera, it is possible to compare the two and elucidate what is specific to Megaera’s voice, illuminating how Penrose has altered her vocal sound. Penrose’s own speaking and singing voice are audible in her song “Being Bisexual” (Figure 2). Penrose sings in the key of D major, with a tessitura that generally stays between A3 and F♯4, with one phrase extending up a fourth to B4. Her timbre is clear and bright, and she primarily utilizes her chest voice without pushing into a belting timbre. In contrast, when she performed an extended warranty spam call in the voice of Meg, the approximate pitch of her spoken voice dropped to around D3 or E♭3, and her timbre is full of vocal fry. Instead of cheery and smooth, Megaera’s voice is harsh and smoky, perhaps in part due to the use of notes that sound as though they are at the extreme edge of Penrose’s range.⁵² The low pitch range and incorporation of vocal fry and breathiness correspond to common entries on lists of attractive vocal attributes, suggesting that Megaera’s voice would broadly be heard as seductive. A low vocal pitch in women is often associated with confidence and social dominance, something very much in line with Megaera’s domme characteristics.⁵³

Much as analysis of what makes a woman’s voice attractive has frequently been implicitly or explicitly about what makes women’s voices attractive to men, research into what makes a man’s voice attractive generally assumes that the object of attraction is women. For example, the speed-dating vocal study conducted by Katarzyna Pisanski et al. found that men lowered their voices when speaking with women they preferred.⁵⁴ Whether and how a voice can sound queer has its own challenges, many of which were identified by Arnold M. Zwicky in his 2007 essay, “Two Lavender Issues for Linguists.”⁵⁵ As he points out, even though it is popularly believed that speech can ‘out’ queer people, or at least queer men, people are often shocked to discover someone they know is not straight. Tim Summers has written about how often he experiences this: “I have become used to recognizing ‘the look’: an expression on someone’s face when, mid-conversation, a person to whom I am speaking realizes that their assumptions about my sexuality are not accurate.”⁵⁶ There have been some studies that suggest at least some correlation between orientation and vocal characteristics, but they are hardly definitive, given the complexity of the topic and the limitations of the research. For example, Benjamin Munson’s study on whether listeners can identify gay, lesbian, or bisexual speakers through voice alone includes no bisexual men, only bisexual women, yet another example of bi erasure.⁵⁷

How, then, should we consider the voice of Thanatos, by far the most popular male partner for Zagreus in fanart and, indeed, one of Zagreus’s canonical partners? Christopher Saphire, the voice of Thanatos, has been rather less visible than Avalon Penrose on the internet. His YouTube channel @TIMINDME has only 91 subscribers and ten videos, most of which have fewer than one thousand views, and I found no posts featuring him covering Disney songs or participating on live streams. His voiceover reel and his reading of The Berenstain Bears Go Out for the Team give us a sense of his own voice, which seems to have a wider pitch and timbral range than his work as Thanatos, which is perpetually cool and crisp. He does have a few ‘thirsty’ fan comments on his voice over video: “How can someone sound so hot pleaseeeee Thanatos’ dialogues are the only parts I never skip in the game. I guess. congrats Chris??!! Congrats for being so talented.⁵⁸ ” [sic] to which Saphire responded Saphire responded “” But what makes his voice as Thanatos ‘so hot’? It is neither deep nor gravelly nor sultry. What Saphire does convey is very intense emotion through terse, concise, even quiet lines, and I think this is part of his vocal allure.

Despite being powerful characters with an intense and complicated relationship to Zagreus, neither Thanatos (Saphire) nor Megaera (Penrose) is vocally bombastic. Instead, their performances are subtle, hushed—and intimate. Kasavin and Korb have discussed how this was not their original conception of Megaera, but Penrose’s audition tape won them over instantly:

User @HowDoYouPronounceGIF commented on Saphire’s voice over reel saying “I don’t want to come off too strong but the way you convey Than’s emotions (sorry I haven’t played Transistor and Pyre yet!) is sooo good. I love your soft voice in particular 🥴”[sic].⁶⁰ This is essential to the vocal attractiveness of both Megaera and Thanatos—if we are occupying Zagreus’s identity, it sounds as though they are speaking very close to us. Penrose’s voice cannot project loudly at that low register, so she must be right next to Zagreus for us to be able to hear her. Saphire is no Brian Blessed or Theseus: he must be almost whispering in our ear. Both sound confident, unflappable, in charge—at least at first. The changes in vocality as the game and their relationships progress add to the excitement.

Eros and thanatos, sex and death, are two major themes in Hades, but they are not the only ones. Love, family, honor, the importance of communication, all of these are celebrated as the player progresses through the story. Willingness to embrace both-and—and therefore queerness—rather than demand mutual exclusion lie at the heart of the narrative, as Zagreus realizes that he does not have to choose between his mothers, that he can be himself and find a role in the House, and that he can love both Megaera and Thanatos. For the players and fans, too, there is both-and as the game satisfies both narratively and ludically, visually, and aurally. By presenting characters who are unabashedly beautiful and sexy to both eye and ear—characters who lie outside of modern society’s norms, in a story that is ultimately happy—Hades pierces the enforced curtain concealing the possibilities of lives unfettered by compulsory heterosexuality and biphobia. The fan community has responded by writing about how Hades has contributed positively to their own identities and by making art that celebrates the grand diversity of human sexuality.