I just got back from seeing the theatrical release of Hadestown, which was also my first time ever seeing the Musical, and now I wanna ask: Who’re your favorite versions of Hades?
Hmm... that's hard to answer because I just can't recall very many good ones. I mean, there are depictions of Hades I like for their own merits, but very few of them really resemble the mythic figure. The Hades in Disney's Hercules is a really fun character, for example, but he's not really Hades so much as he is Satan with an Olympian coat of paint. I love the take on Hades that shows up in Stephen Sondheim's The Frogs, but he's specifically designed to be the opposite of the gloomy figure of Greek mythology both as the punchline to a joke and as part of the show's overall theme.
The closest character in modern fiction I can think of that captures what I like about the mythological Hades would probably be Death from Discworld, in that he's a decidedly gloomy and purposely neutral figure who comes for everyone, good and evil, alike, yet secretly has some mercy and humanity beneath that cold devotion to his duty as the personification of death. But he's also got so many of his own traits that you can't really call him an adaptation of Hades so much as a similar kind of psychopomp.
I guess my favorite Hades is the original, more or less. Granted, there are some prominent ones I haven't experienced - I've not played the two Hades games because roguelikes are very much not my cup of tea, nor have I played God of War or read any of the Percy Jackson books, so a lot of the popular modern Greek mythology works are pop culture blind spots for me.
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