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Hades and Persephone 

Tools:

Photoshop

Brushes - Kyle T Webster

22″  Cintiq

Lore Olympus is a modern day retelling of the Classic Greek Myth; The Abduction of Persephone. Updates once a week on Sunday.

Read the comic here

Patreon is here

Lore Olympus Tumblr ask account is here

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Female authors when their girlboss, female rage, pussy power retelling of Greek Myth gets called out for ignoring the fact that Odysseus very much did not fucking consent to Circe and Calypso’s advances and that ignoring male victims of harassment and SA is actually not at all feminist

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How come in the original lore Olympus we rarely got thirst trap panels of Hades? It was always Perse with her boobs n butt out. Isn’t it from her pov. So why are we focusing on her body and not Hades. I will never understand why the creator did that.

I mean, I think the simplest answer is literally just that Rachel prefers drawing women. Out of all the comics and art she made prior to LO, only two (?) featured a male protagonist - The Doctor Pepper Show (which eventually got rewritten and swapped the main character to a female protagonist) and a one-shot comic she did for The Godfather.

And though I can't find the source right this moment, she's definitely stated at least once that she's just "not good at" drawing men.

None of this is necessarily a criticism, I think she just likes drawing women the same way Tim Burton likes working with Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter. At its most innocent, it's just an artistic quirk.

Though I will say, her male characters in LO looked 10x better in the pilot / S1 art than later on in S3 when clearly Lisette and the other assistants took over drawing the majority of the panels (i.e. when all the men started looking like brick shithouses)

But tbh I think Rachel just has issues with drawing anything outside of her comfort zone, and that still seems to be the case to this day. It's not necessarily a bad thing to have a preference, as I've said, but I do think it becomes a bad thing when it limits you as an artist; and that can be especially troublesome when you're trying to draw comics with a wide range of characters who are all meant to be uniquely identifiable from each other.

CW: Artistic nudity ahead

When she was just making one-off illustrations, her artistic preferences were noticeable but not necessarily an issue, because every illustration stood alone and could be carried by a lot more than just the subject (subjects who aren't necessarily "characters", because they don't have specific names, backstories, etc.)

When you're trying to maintain a long-term story with multiple different characters who are all supposed to have unique traits and backstories, however...

What could just be an innocent comfort zone starts to become a lot more of an issue 😅

And yeah, drawing sexy women is definitely her comfort zone. Even her old LiveJournal was tagged with women-focused kinks and genre labels. This is, after all, the same person who used to predominantly create gothic lolita art.

At best I can assume she just didn't have as much freedom to do that as LO went on, undoubtedly due to both time constraints and burnout, but also Webtoons' own censorship rules that she's willingly tried to protest against by drawing Persephone as naked as possible without having her be technically naked.

( ^^^ quoted from Rachel's own Discord mods, some of whom were former assistants who worked on the comic in S1)

Long-winded speculation aside, I think it really does just come down simply to "Rachel likes drawing hot girls". And so it's not really all that shocking that she'd put more effort into learning how to draw women over men, and specifically drawing Persephone in sexualized situations more so than Hades.

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The Lore Olympus TV Show Has Been Cancelled.

Well, it finally happened.

After 3+ years of digging, monitoring the sparse status updates from both the showrunner (Stephanie K Smith) and Rachel, listening to interviews, and parsing whatever information we could to help shed light on the status of the show when Stephanie, Rachel, and Webtoons were keeping dead quiet about it while simply reassuring people with empty promises that the show was "still happening", this is as official as official gets - the highly-anticipated Lore Olympus TV show is dead and buried.

But how did we get here?

For those of you who haven't been keeping up - or maybe you just need a refresher - here's the general timeline of what went down, according to what we've pieced together over the past few years. Buckle up, because this is a comprehensive breakdown of everything that's happened over the past 5 years, either what we've been told or what we've had to go out of our way to dig up.

October 10th, 2019 - Lore Olympus' TV adaption is officially announced in a partnership with Jim Henson Company. It does not have a network.

It's presumed that the show rights were being discussed and sold over Q1-Q3 of 2019 (as during that time, Rachel's team underwent a massive shift in staffing, including her editor, who was swapped from the original Bekah Caden (who was later joined by Annie Lahue around Episode 30 and then eventually phased out entirely around Episode 52) and then suddenly replaced entirely without warning by mass-series editor Bre Boswell (also the editor of series like The Kiss Bet and Down to Earth) with Episode 101. These episodes released

It's also worth noting that between Annie's sole takeover of the series and Bre stepping in, both the art and writing started to phase more towards the style it maintained throughout S2 and S3.

But most of all, it must be mentioned that Bre Bowell isn't just a Webtoons editor - she's an editor with an academic background in traditional animation and television writing. The perfect combination of skills for what Webtoons clearly wanted out of LO.

This was also when many of her older S1 assistants started to shift off the team, being steadily replaced with assistants who - surprise surprise - also have backgrounds in animation and television, including Lisette Carrera (hardheadedwoman) and Jaki Haboon (dnaeri)

And when did that span of episodes release, when both the editors and assistants were slowly starting to phase out from the early S1 line-up and into the line-up that would consistently make up the team from the end of S1 up until the end of the series?

That's right. From Q2 - Q3 of 2019 - the episodes that released from April to September of that year, preceding the eventual announcement of the LO TV show just a month into Q4 in October.

December 2020 - April 2023 - Lore Olympus has found a network with HBO Max

While LO's time with HBO Max presumably lasted a whole 3 years, we don't really have much to say about their time here, as nothing was really released or teased during this time. In fact, they never even formally announced their partnership, the only way of knowing LO was affiliated with HBO Max was either directly through Stephanie K's LinkedIn, or through assumption after watching the wildly cringe (and very concerning in hindsight) live action advertisement featuring rising HBO co-star of Euphoria and America's Favorite Republican Darling Sydney Sweeney-

This advertisement, of course, had nothing to do with the LO TV show. It was merely another flaccid attempt at advertising the comic to a wider audience, sandwiched in between the "literature's favorite side hustle" bus terminal ads and that one time Rachel did a Wonder Woman comic for DC.

Regardless, this deal clearly eventually ended in April 2023, and LO was once again without a network, leaving it solely in the hands of Stephanie K Smith and JHC executives to find it a new home.

July 2023 - October 2023 - NYCC and SDCC Announcements

✨ Lore Olympus will be officially ending in 2024! ✨

Oh, you thought we'd use New York Comic-Con and San Diego Comic-Con as an opportunity to talk about the show? What show? It's still happening. Stop asking us. Buy our books. I'm as big a deal as Ewan McGregor and Cassandra Clare, it says so on the poster!

February 2nd, 2024 - Lore Olympus Finally Finds a New Home, Tells No One About It

Finally, some real news! Delivered in a vague tweet from the showrunner which doesn't explicitly state what it's about - but we knew, oh yes we did, this was confirmation that Lore Olympus' TV show had finally found a home with none other than Daddy Warbucks, savior of Hazbin Hotel and harbinger of the robot takeover - Amazon Prime.

But once again, no formal announcement. Despite the fact that Rachel had lined up appearances at massive events which presumably were happening while these deals were being made, all that was said was the same tired line of "it's still happening, we just can't show anything or say anything about it because that would be very naughty :3" No cast, no trailer, no pitch, nothing. After nearly 5 years since the show was announced - and a whole ass pandemic that swept the world - we were still left with as much information as we had back then, jack diddly squat.

May 22nd, 2025 - Uh Oh Spaghettio's (Someone's Getting Fired)

After nearly another YEAR, the comic has ended like a wet fart and has since continued forcing cheap merchandise down our throats, someone finally let the cat out of the bag - Halle Stanford, executive of Jim Henson Company as well as 7 Crow Stories (a company she founded), states in an interview with Kidscreen that the Lore Olympus TV show... hasn't even been greenlit.

So from here, we had to assume at best that the show was back in the hands of JHC and Stephanie once again, resuming its search for a network.

Well, it turns out that search has finally been put to an end.

August 2025 - Today We Ride (Their Asses, Because We're the Only Ones Who Have Actually Bothered To Keep People Informed About This Shit).

Though we can't say for certain when these changes were made, they were presumably quite recent, between the end of July of this year and today, as the last updated Wayback view of her About section on her personal website still had the previous version (i.e. when she was still presently working on the series) on July 15th 2025.

And what's wilder still is that her bio actually confirms everything we had come to suspect through our digging - it was originally with HBO, before being passed onto Amazon, but has clearly since been dropped.

If I had to come up with any sort of alternative best-case scenario for those still clinging on with hope, it's that the show's distribution rights may still belong to Amazon, but Stephanie herself has clearly been let go from the project. Considering she was the only one saying anything about it outside of Webtoons using the show was a marketing ploy in their stockholder meetings, the fact that Stephanie is no longer with the show is clear indication that the show is likely never going to happen. It's been presumably rejected by every streaming service out there, and so at this point, the only thing that could *possibly* turn this around is either selling it to a new production company - perhaps an actual animation studio and not a studio that's primarily known for making puppet shows for children - or finding a new showrunner, someone with *actual* credibility in the animation industry (which Stephanie clearly did not have, if her bio and resume is anything to go by).

So with all that in mind, I think it's safe to say that - considering all our other predictions have come true up until this point - this is the end of the LO TV show. The end of a long, drawn out era.

But there is one saving grace left to speak of. One blip in the timeline I haven't mentioned.

July 5th 2025 - It's Still Out There

Thanks to a helpful anon coming to my rescue (as they always do) another one of our suspicions were proven true - while the show never did get funding to produce a full season of content, it *did* at one point see the light of day through what I can assume was a pilot episode, precisely what Stephanie and JHC would have been shopping around to streaming services. After all, you can't really sell an animated show on words alone, you need pictures to get your point across.

And so, somewhere out there, in the recesses of possibly more than one person's hard-drive, under lock and key and shielded by NDA's from the public eye, are actual animated scenes of the show. Scenes that were storyboarded, keyed, drawn, colored, and brought to life.

Our collective hopes and fears for the show may be dead, but there's a strange sense of closure in knowing that it did and still does exist somewhere. Maybe some day, when the names on the NDA's have faded back into the crowds and both Rachel and Webtoons has moved on pretending like this embarrassing PR fiasco never happened - just like how an anonymous user laid out the entirety of Rachel's brushes used throughout every season of LO - there will be an anonymous user who will peek out of the bushes and share with us what could have been, what Rachel and Stephanie and Webtoons refused to tell us about.

Stranger things have happened, after all.

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I wanna give a special shout-out to /u/Princess_Space_Goose and /u/Cappu156 , both of whom have been largely instrumental in digging up everything we've come to know over the past few years, they largely make up the 'we' in these posts. While I do offer much of my own perspective and intel on these analyses, I'm still largely just the messenger pigeon - these posts wouldn't be anything without their invaluable insight into these industries and their assistance in finding all the necessary information in drawing these conclusions.

Here are some past posts talking about the show if you want an even more detailed look at our analyses of this dumpster fire over the years:

The LO TV Show Isn't Happening (And Here's Why)

Rachel's Discord Q&A Mentioning the Show (the last time I think she ever mentioned it)

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Chillin’ on the Bridge

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Drew silly painted siblings to go with the sad ones.

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Tigers with a frozen milk brick on a hot day

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Beautiful View - Author: hunnyDewbabe

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you are my monster

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I also forgot to share this one here

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I often see an opinion that Verso did not like to paint, but I don't think so?

"I was obsessed with my piano and my paint set".

I don't think he really didn't like painting, it is just that different types of art had a different scale in his life.

Music was on the level of a profession, which even physically takes up all the time and thoughts, and painting was a hobby, but still a favorite one. I also think the difference was that in music, Verso created more for the sake of the very fact of creation, and for a very wide audience, like in a concert hall, when you can’t see the faces of the individual listeners, but you perform for everyone at once. Sometimes for someone in particular, like when he wrote songs for Alicia, but first of all for the sake of showing and experiencing the beauty of the music itself.

On the other hand, painting was very personal for him. His Canvas was a way to give joy to himself, his sisters or parents. That is, he was more interested in painting as a result than the process. And I even dare to say that he not only found joy from painting, but also was good at it (from my subjective point of view, all art in the game is beautiful, especially landscapes. And it’s hard to create something so beautiful without desire to do it and talent). It just was not of the scale to become the work of his life; he would have felt cramped in it, especially when there was music right there, in which he felt no boundaries.

P.S. If we talk about soul shard Verso, then on the one hand, many of his answers show that he doubts a lot, hesitates whether to stop painting because he still loves his creation very much. But on the other it no longer fulfills its purpose and brings only pain (a situation from reality that I myself have encountered in more than one fandom, when there are only quarrels and scandals around the project, its creators no longer have the strength or desire to continue it). You can love the work and the project itself, but get tired of frustration if the result or the audience reaction is not what you wanted to see.

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One of my favorite statements from E33 is "We're all hypocrites, doing the same thing to each other." Because it's true. The Dessendre family is.

Renoir wants Aline home. Aline wants to stay there. She comes home, and he switches his focus to Alicia. Alicia, too, wants to stay there. If you choose the Maelle ending, you force Renoir into living without his daughter, with her shadow always there but never accessible. If you choose Verso's ending, Alicia ends up in the life she doesn't want. Yet, if you choose hers, Verso is. It's all just a circle.

Clea is "getting revenge", and while it doesn't explicitly state what she is doing, it can be assumed. She's doing the same to the writers as they did to her family. Robbing them of treasured family members, partners, children.

So many more connections can be made, but those are just some of my favorites!