Hadestown: Hades is not a villain or a bad husband, he is a minor antagonist at worst

Wanted to see how popular/unpopular the opinion was.

I will never see Hades as the villain of this show. At no point does he ever leave a resounding negative impact on either lead. Eurydice leaves Orpheus of her own volition, and Hades just sorta offers her a job (which is supposed to be binding for life, but we know how that turned out). When Orpheus comes, we thankfully get narration from the Fates that states that he has no good options. Letting Orpheus leave with Eurydice could cause a ripple effect that destroys his town/business, while making her stay would make Orpheus a martyr that his workers would start following. He is told to make Orpheus do something incredibly difficult to keep Eurydice, and he actually picks something relatively easy.

To reiterate, at no point in the story is Orpheus directly harmed by Hades. Eurydice leaves him because he is so absorbed in his music that he won’t listen to her, and she fails to come back because he looks back at her in the finale. Whether or not Hades ever harmed Eurydice is slightly more debatable, but the fact that she signed her life away without reading the terms and conditions sort of absolves him of guilt.

Onto the second point, Hades being a terrible husband. This will sound cliche, I’m sure, but he’s really just misunderstanding the situation he is in, and I feel like that’s reasonable, given the premise of the show. Hades’ alleged clingyness makes perfect sense, given that his wife leaves him for half a year and hates coming back. He tries to impress her by making her a power grid and a factory, but she hates it, while never giving him a reason. When Orpheus comes to meet him, he tells him that he needs to make life so good for Eurydice that she can’t bear to leave him. Earlier Eurydice ran from him for exactly that reason, and Hades is more or less sincerely trying to save him from the same fate he is going through.

Is this a view of the show that overlooks some things, of course. Nearly all accounts do, it’s a complex show. But yeah, I’d love to discuss this, because I’ve never had the opportunity to see how controversial this is.