Jasmine Mas s'est inspirée librement de la mythologie grecque pour écrire Blood of Hercules. A l'occasion de la sortie du livre, elle a joué avec nous à "Mythe ou Mytho ?" et nous a éclairé sur ce qui relevé de la mythologie ou de son imagination. Roman disponible chez @verso
00:00Hi, I'm Jasmine Maas, and I'm the author of Blood of Hercules, and we're going to play myth or mytho. Seriously.
00:09Hades and Persephone were madly in love with each other, so I would say that this is from Greek mythology.
00:14When it comes to Hades and Persephone, I've read a lot of Greek mythology retellings of them, and I honestly really love them.
00:21I think they're like the OG enemies to lovers, but I didn't want to do that classic retelling it again because I've read so many great ones of it.
00:28So in this book, I imagine if they had such a great love story, without spoiling it, they're parents in the book.
00:35So I think it makes it fun making them parents because if they're such an amazing love story, if they had children, I thought it was fun to imagine what they would be like as parents.
00:44And like, would Hades be a good dad? Would Persephone be a good mom? And it's really fun to play around with their parenting styles.
00:51The myth of the creation of the gods and how the Great Alexandria Library is destroyed.
00:56I'd say this is a combination. I think that, especially the Library of Alexandria, there is myth out there that, I mean, it is fact that it did burn to the ground.
01:07I think there's a lot of historical conspiracy theories about why it burned, so I took that and twisted it and did my own thing and made it that they purposely burned it to hide the information.
01:16But I like to believe that that could have actually happened.
01:19And how the gods were created in my story is definitely not exactly the same as Greek mythology.
01:25So I made that part up. So a little bit of both.
01:28The Spartan War Academy existed.
01:30Once again, I'd say this is a twist.
01:32I don't think this actual Spartan War Academy that I created existed.
01:36However, I took actual stuff.
01:38I was a classics major when we studied Sparta and the training and how they segregated and separated men at a young age.
01:45And they trained for war really aggressively.
01:48It was a very war-centered society.
01:51So I took ideas from that and I made it into my own thing.
01:55The tale of immortal Spartans living alongside their pets and mythical creatures.
02:01So I definitely made this up myself completely.
02:04I just really like the idea of little creatures and animals.
02:07Though I guess I did learn at some point, I remember when we learned about Greek city-states,
02:13that there was a lot of wild dogs that roamed.
02:15And that was a real, like a big, I don't know if it was a problem.
02:18It was just, they had a lot of dogs in the cities.
02:21So maybe I was a little inspired by that.
02:23But I just, the creatures was definitely more my thing.
02:27Though there is a lot of mythological creatures in myths.
02:30But I kind of just like twisted them a lot.
02:32The story of the creation of the Olympians and the Chthonians and the events that followed the Great War.
02:39I came up with, Chthonic was a constant theme when I was doing classical studies.
02:45It represented in mythology, like it was symbolic with death, with snakes.
02:50And there was all this, like things with the underworld, like Hades.
02:53Things associated with the underworld in general was Chthonic.
02:57And I always thought that was interesting because we only in modern times hear a lot about like the Olympian, the big gods.
03:04So I kind of took that idea and ran with it.
03:06And that's why I tried to separate, for me, I created like a separated society where within the, like the Parthenon of Olympian gods, the Chthonics were actually part of that.
03:18Like the ones I thought were kind of the coolest, but the ones associated with death in my mind are maybe like more powerful.
03:24So that's kind of how I twisted it.
03:26I feel like the underworld is in the Greek mythology, like Hades runs it.
03:34So obviously, and then, like I said before, with Chthonics, the underworld is a thing associated with the afterlife and death.
03:41And I kind of ran with that and made it more of the high security prison.
03:45So yeah, I completely made this all up myself.
03:54I took, I had like the cast of characters from Greek mythology and I separated them into groups when I did Chthonics versus Olympians.
04:03And then I tried to think of a world like who would know who, and then tried to make them all like family dynamics and stuff.
04:09So that was just me making it all up, thinking it'd be cool if they were all friends.
