Regarding Stories
Stories were funny.
Not funny ha-ha, at least not all the time; it wasn't like every story was Thalia's territory (though she got into a lot more than people realized, because absurdity was a large part of comedy, after all, and since people were absurd, so were their stories). It was in the way they changed over the years and decades and centuries, sometimes from one retelling to the next. Clio had told Hermes once that it was like a bunch of games of telephone going on, all the time.(Even though she'd told him this before telephones existed, she'd still plucked the word out of the future: tiléfono. It wasn't like gods were confined to one temporal point in exactly the same way humans were, after all. They had long memories, and sometimes, and in some ways, those memories were so long they went forward.)Hermes had known exactly what she'd meant, even at the time. He could think of at least a hundred examples himself, off the top of his head. Take the whole thing about him being Zeus's kid, and him stealing a bunch of stuff from the other gods and creating the lyre on his first day of life. If you stretched a metaphor, sure, that was about how it had happened, but it couldn't actually be called literally true. But people had forgotten that he used to be human himself, so "young man goes on what was in retrospect a really rash and not all that planned out mission to get the gods' attention and impress them by stealing their shit and then petitioning them for godhood, manages to catch Zeus on a good day, and amuses him enough to get a promise that he'll get made a god if he manages to get the forgiveness of the gods he stole from" kind of turned into... that. He was a child of Zeus because Zeus had made him a god; he had stolen from the gods and created the lyre on his first day of "life" because it had become his first day of godhood.Or that whole story of Hercules... There were so many versions of that tale that only people who'd been there could possibly know what was true, and just listening to the Muses wouldn't help; stories changing was a natural part of things and they helped that along as much as anyone else. They were, strictly speaking, a part of the force of stories changing, so they couldn't resist it if they'd wanted to -- which they didn't, particularly. Besides, they worked for Zeus, just like anyone, so the version they told talked him and Hercules up a bit more, talked Hades down some.Zeus hadn't defeated the Titans on his own in the first place, for one thing. That had been a joint effort with both Poseidon and Hades, with help from Hera, who wasn't yet his wife at that point. Hermes wasn't exactly clear himself on how literal that "the Titans were their parents" thing was -- he'd come in late, and even if it wasn't just a story, with gods, it could be weird, like, Athena-born-from-Zeus's-forehead weird -- but there had definitely been something personal about it all; none of them would have interfered if the Titans had just been making a mess of the planet.So all of them had wanted the Titans locked away -- you couldn't kill the Titans, they weren't just forces of nature, they basically were nature -- and the Titans had wanted all of them dead, which was why. There was no way Hades would've freed them himself, not for any plan, even to get rid of Zeus and get out of the Underworld, two things that everyone knew how much he hated.It was all listening to prophecies, was what it was, and Hades couldn't exactly be blamed for that. Or, well, yeah he could, but Hermes wasn't going to blame him. And the whole thing with Hercules himself... well, yeesh, that was too much to get into. It was probably enough to say that he had been half-mortal from the start and that Hera hadn't been all that convinced about giving him complete godhood and call it a day. The truth was -- and this happened a lot -- somewhere in the middle of all the stories.