In the Olympian Pantheon, Hades is the god of death and the Underworld and the brother of Zeus and Poseidon. Zeus is a frequent philanderer who abuses mortal women and often alienates his wife, Hera. The River Styx is the boundary between the mortal realm and the Underworld, with Charon the ferryman serving as the immortal being responsible for shepherding dead souls to the afterlife. Hades also owns a fearsome dog, the three-headed hound Cerberus.

In myth, Hades and Zeus agree that Persephone will be Hades’s spouse. They use a particularly beautiful flower to lure her underground. Demeter, the goddess of the harvest and Persephone’s mother, is outraged by the act and plunges the world into darkness and winter in her despair. Persephone has been warned that consuming food in the Underworld will bind her to it, but before she returns to her mother, she eats some pomegranate seeds. This results in a compromise wherein Persephone spends part of the year—spring and summer—above with her mother and the rest of the year with Hades, which creates fall and winter.

Robert reworks aspects of the Hades and Persephone myth to craft alternate arguments about gender, agency, and power.