Light Up My Life

Question: Ahkenaten! My players and I are embarking on redesigning the Titanrealm of Light. Since most of them are Greek, I went looking at Hyperion, who also seems at times to be Helios as well. I can work with both, but I am a stickler for keeping proper in myth. So my question is: which would you do, keep them separate or the same? If separate, I already know how I intend to use Hyperion; if same, I have even more awesome ideas to draw from, but either way I wanted to get your input.

Titans of light ahoy! Our advice is to definitely keep them separate; they are distinct figures in Greek mythology.

Hyperion is one of the first generation of Titans, children of Gaia and Ouranos and spearheads of the war against Zeus and the other gods. His wife Theia, another first-generation Titan, is the goddess of sight, which requires light to exist. Before the war against the gods, Hyperion was also one of the four Titans who, at Gaia's urging, castrated their father and flung his genitals into the sea, causing Aphrodite to rise from the waves. He's not just a Titan of sun but of light in general, with a name that means "that which is above", referring to the celestial light of all the heavens. As the Titan of Light, he's the father of all the lights of the heavens - the lesser Titans of dawn, sun and moon.

And Helios is one of those sons; his name literally means "sun", and with his siblings Selene and Eos he forms a Titanic triad of the major lights of the universe, all under Hyperion's umbrella. Helios is much more involved in Greek mythology than his father; as a second-generation Titan, he did not fight against Zeus and the other gods in the first Titanomachy (in fact, according to Diodorus Siculus, he outright defected to Zeus' side in defiance of his father) and remained a sort of adjunct to the pantheon, fulfilling his function as the sun while once in a while helping out or providing counsel to the other gods. His most famous myth is that of his son, Phaeton, who he promised to grant a boon to and was then forced to watch die when the boy foolishly demanded to drive his flaming chariot, and he has important moments in a few other myths, such as saving Hephaestus when the god collapsed exhausted during the Gigantomachy, lending Herackles his golden cup to use as a boat while working on his Labors, and contrarily helping Typhon in his fight against Zeus (at the behest of his grandmother Gaia). He also turns up helping Demeter look for Persephone when she is abducted by Hades and warning Hephaestus that Aphrodite is having an affair with Ares; he seldom directly does things, but rather, by virtue of being the sun and therefore ever-present above everything, sees a lot of stuff and sometimes shares that information with others. (Previous discussion on how to handle Helios is over here!)

They're both definitely Titans, but very different in myth and character. Helios loses a lot of his stories in later Greek and Roman myth because Apollo's rise to prominence leads to him taking over a lot of the sun-god role, which in turn means that you'll also see the same myth about the sun-god warning Hephaestus of his wife's infidelity attributed to Apollo instead of to Helios. Hyperion never had a lot of stories to begin with, and the confusion between him and Helios is mostly Homer's fault as he tends to use the names interchangeably (there are far more sources that differentiate between the two, however, starting with Hesiod, Hyginus and the Homeric Hymns, and even Homer himself refers to him as Hyperion's sun in the Odyssey). Ovid's not helping by muddying the waters by just calling both of them "Titan" instead of a proper name, either.

So keep them separate; they're father and son, two distinct dudes. Hyperion is the ancient, primordial Titan of Light who was instrumental in the first wars among gods and Titans, and Helios is his son, a sometime ally to the gods and lord of the flaming son. Either or both could be good candidates for a Titanrealm of Light, though some games prefer to keep Helios out of a Titanrealm since he often acts positively for the gods and their servants.