hi! my name is baye (she/her), and I've been a percy jackson fan since 2008 (so, when I was 8 years old... I'm 24 now!). before you follow, here are some things to know about me:
100% multishipper (I'm very open to many things, and I love rarepairs!)
because I'm a multishipper, don't follow me if you don't have your NOTP tag blocked; I'm not "allegiant" to any one ship, and I post about a wide variety of them! consider also blocking: "[notp name]posting", as that's the tag I use when I don't want something to show up in tumblr search engines
I have zero patience for fandom immaturity. if you aren't cool/polite/normal/even-tempered in the way you interact with me, then you aren't the sort of person I'm interested in engaging with 🫶
I'm turbo ADHD and extremely bad at replying to things
I love pjo always and forever, but I'm also riordan critical (including towards characters/ships that I enjoy), and I use the #rr crit tag somewhat frequently. block it out if you don't want to see it!
I've read all pjo books, the kane chronicles, and I'm working my way through magnus chase!
pjo characters are almost always 20+ years old when I draw and write them. I grew up with the characters, and in my heart, they've grown up with me too. if you have a problem with that, I really do not know what to say to you beyond please use the block button - for your own wellbeing?
my blog is like 80% sfw (if I'm posting adult stuff it's still pretty tame + usually under a readmore), but my blog is not specifically intended to be appropriate for minors and it is up to you to be discerning and keep that in mind! In the nicest way possible - I am not and cannot be responsible for protecting you on the internet!
I use the m-d-n-i tag (without dashes), and all minors who follow me should block it out!
whats a stereotype for your country that you absolutely do. mine is that i unironically go "eh" and apologize a lot and i often drink maple syrup straight
I really liked your last post about Piper. I'm reading all the books again and one thing that sticks out to me is that Rick has a pattern of embarrassing women in a kinda sexual way as a joke, have you noticed this? Like everything with Piper, and Percabeth getting walked on, etc
hmmmmmm true. definitely not all of these are equally bad (i.e. I think the sallypaul scene is fine personally) but it does seem like the ones being humiliated in these contexts are piper reyna and annabeth, and in almost every instance the one embarrassing her is a guy. it happens often enough that it's fair to feel discomfort with and point this out in rick's writing of women and girls. you know especially girls
I still can't believe Heroes of Olympus had the audacity to introduce the concept of the gods having a roman form, of Neptune being feared and disrespected by the romans, of Percy, inspite of this, becoming praetor, of Percy beginning to explore the "darker side of his powers, of percy defeating the arch nemesis of Poseidon/ Neptune practically by himself, yet still chose not to have a single appearance of Neptune or a single interaction between him and Percy
Top 10 anime betrayals of all time
Rick Riordan did that specifically because he hates me, Helena, on a personal level
was rereading mark of athena and rick snuck in there that leo’s morse code “i love you” that he shared with his mom came from their grandfather and was about hazel. who had been dead for decades at that point.
i still can’t believe that they kept this subplot in the comics but it’s so crazy to remember that leo was actually a beloved child. first great-grandchild and his grandfather and mom loved him.......
I really don’t want to open this can of worms because Tumblr hath no fury like people called out on their political performativeness but it is literally driving me up the wall to watch people react to Serkis’ ‘keep Tolkien white’ commentary by insisting twice as hard that Tolkien would descend down to earth and dropkick the entire Republican party to hell or whatever, just because they want to ensure that a piece of media they enjoy isn’t seen as being morally impure. Case in point: I have seen at least five instances of Tolkien’s ‘I hate apartheid’ valedictorian address being used as a ‘counter’ to Serkis being racist, including by actual news outlets.
Except it’s only ever the ‘I hate apartheid’ line that’s shared, and not the actual quote in its full context. Because here it is:
If we consider what Merton College and what the Oxford School of English owes to the Antipodes, to the Southern Hemisphere, especially to scholars born in Australia and New Zealand, it may well be felt that it is only just that one of them should now ascend an Oxford chair of English. Indeed it may be thought that justice has been delayed since 1925. There are of course other lands under the Southern Cross. I was born in one; though I do not claim to be the most learned of those who have come hither from the far end of the Dark Continent. But I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.
Which is to say. This isn’t exactly the antiracist quote of the century, to say the least. This is a white South Africa born man and a white Australian shaking hands and going ‘omg we relate’ and expressing what is a very, very mild ‘segregation is not great’ opinion in order to convey his thoughts on an academic subject, ie the confluence of language and literature. Using race to make a point about his own subject of interest, in his own interest, which is, amusingly enough, what a lot of ostensibly well meaning progressive seem to be doing.
I also think that some of the general surprise around ‘what do you mean large swathes of the Tolkien fandom are incredibly conservative!?’ in lib/left Tolkien fandom is the result of a tendency in said parts of the fandom to transpose one’s own progressiveness onto Tolkien and turn a blind eye to things like, say, the Shire being a very specifically mid-century British racist construct that is very, very clear in its politics, often going so far as to insist it’s anarchist or an ideal society or whatever the fuck… and then getting really Pikachu-meme ‘but they’re misreading it’ every single time a conservative explains exactly what it is about the legendarium that they really love, and get surprised when someone uses the Shire being a racist construct to do more racism. It is 2026 let us do away with ‘I don’t see colour’ interpretations of media, I beg. Nobody is cancelling you for enjoying a book that is not kind to race. Most of the books I love are not kind to race.
I genuinely don’t have the energy to go deeper into it now because I and others have been beating this drum for ages but like man. Man. I’m not surprised by Serkis’ comment. I don’t really give a shit about what Andy Serkis says and does because if I was the kind of person who gave a fuck about Andy ‘I felt like an ethnic minority on the Black Panther set’ ‘I somehow interpreted Animal Farm in the most ridiculous way possible’ Serkis’ opinions on anything, let alone race, my life would be much sadder. I think the adaptation will be an enshittified money-grab, and I will probably embrace cannibalism when McDonalds inevitably starts giving out little Gollums with every Happy Meal. Again.
What I am surprised and disappointed by is how the liberal-left reaction to this shit is to always and forever just either pretend it doesn’t exist in the text, or is the result of a complete misreading. So seldom is the response ‘fuck me, this book has some real wild thoughts on race, let’s see how we can engage creatively with that in an adaptation’. Which has never happened. In fact, all your thoughts on Amazon and lore faithfulness and other adaption criticism or applause aside, TROP, the only Tolkien interpretation that has directly engaged with race has thus far done so very, very badly, and only on a surface level. Why?
Because the loudest parts of liberal Tolkien fandom is not interested in exploring race as it exists in the text, to explore it progressively, to engage creatively with the structural conservatism present within the very construction of Middle Earth. They’re interested in concessions that change very little: you can have your brown elves, as long as we don’t have to think about the implications of foundational aspects of our beloved world, which we relate to greatly and do not wish to think about why we relate to it beyond our own experience of encountering the text.
No, it’s always either an insistence that the Racists are Wrong because the Text is Pure, or a slight, grudging concession that Tolkien had ‘a few racist elements’ but ‘nothing like the racism of today’. Of course it’s nothing like the racism of today. Tolkien isn’t writing in 2026. It was the racism of yesterday, and it is very clearly written into the text. Tolkien is not your mildly problematic grandpa. Tolkien was an Oxford don with an enormous, wide-ranging cultural impact, and refusing to acknowledge that is the misreading, not the pointing out of or engagement with structural racism within the text.
There's also a version of this where people cite Tolkien's 1938 letter to the German publisher, ie the one where he refuses to confirm he's of "Aryan" descent and basically tells them to fuck off, as the other canonical "proof text" that Tolkien Was Not Racist, and it does the same flattening as the valedictorian quote. It's a great letter, very ‘get thee gone from my gate’ but it is also a letter about refusing a specific, legally coded Nazi racial category, not a statement about the internal racial logic of his own fiction.
Nobody is saying Tolkien was a fascist white supremacist Nazi. Hell, Tolkien’s own thoughts on military atrocity in general is pretty clear in the depictions of the escalating kinslayings. But people love to conflate "hated actual fascism, said so on the record and is very evident in his fiction" with "therefore the legendarium contains no racialised hierarchy," as though those two things have to rise or fall together, when they don't. You can be sincerely, personally opposed to Nazi race science and apartheid violence and still write a mythology where moral and aesthetic worth consistently map onto a Northern-European somatic ideal. Because the racialisation Tolkien both inherited and passed on wasn't Nazi race science, it was the broader Edwardian/interwar philological raciology he was actually swimming in, hell, drowning in, considering the Oxford environment. And I find it so, so frustrating how fandom keeps failing to make this distinction: structural racialisation and personal bigotry are not the same axis, and refusing to be measured on one doesn't clear you on the other.
The Southrons/Easterlings material is obviously the part most quoted when it comes to Tolkien’s ‘problematic elements’ except it's imo super telling how rarely it actually gets quoted compared to how often it gets vaguely waved at (except Charles E Mills. I love you Charles E Mills). Anyway “Black men like half-trolls," swarthy, slant-eyed, riding out of the south and east to serve Sauron… it’s the same mapping of good-north/evil-south-and-east you get in a dozen other early-twentieth-century adventure texts. And this imo actually undermines the "it's just medievalism, calm down" defense, because medievalism is a selectively retrospective construction of which past you're claiming and which one you're othering, not some sort of static, neutral historical styling.
Tolkien's medievalism is specifically Northern European heroic-elegiac medievalism, the "Northernness" he talks about loving as a kid, and that aesthetic preference is not extractable from the racial hierarchy it produces on the page. You cannot keep the aesthetic and disclaim the politics because as in all art, the aesthetic is the politics, that's what "structural" means as opposed to "incidental”, and I just wish that many extremely clever people who understand this in a contemporary sense would allow themselves to feel uncomfortable and look at it in a beloved text.
Jackson's trilogy didn't invent racialisation in Tolkien, hell I think he even softened some of it because the Scouring is straight up impossible to adapt without it being very clear about its politics, but his adaptation does go quite some way make the existing racism legible… casting, costuming, choreography and cinematography does the same racialised sorting the text does, and does it visually: Uruk-hai as a kind of grunting brutalised, brutalistic mass, Haradrim on oliphaunts as a fairly straightforward Orientalist boogeyman, and the Fellowship itself photographed like a Pre-Raphaelite fantasy lmfao. Serkis isn't introducing a new interpretive layer with his commentary, hell Serkis was in all those Jackson films as well! Serkis is being very clear about what aspects of the legendarium matter to him, and that aspect happens to be the whiteness of it all. And I genuinely cannot understand why the huge ‘scandal’ around his comment is not that someone said the quiet part, but that saying it out loud is what became the scandal, taken as some kind of transgression against Tolkien and all his readers with Good Politics™️, rather than the quarter-century of adaptations, readings, and analysis of the text that wordlessly encoded the racism and got called faithful and dedicated for it.
I didn’t want to go to author is dead territory but. Fandom discourse keeps reaching for authorial intent as the arbiter of textual meaning in exactly the way most of these same people would reject in any other context. Everyone is a massive New Critic the second the author in question is someone they love. But Tolkien doesn’t need to have consciously intended a racial hierarchy or a white nationalist mythology for the text to functionally produce one, for it to be so loved by conservatives and ethnonationalists who come fifty years after his time.
Intent is not even a contested position in literary theory, it's just the very basic understanding that "text has ideology independent of authorial intent". The insistence on relitigating Tolkien's personal feelings as though that settles the structural question is wild to me, and I find it so extremely unproductive how liberal fandom reaches for this constantly, repeatedly chanting Tolkien’s few vaguely liberal statements that read far less liberally in context. But I guess the alternative, ie reading the actual construction of race in the legendarium on its own terms, requires giving up the fantasy that the thing you love is politically inert. And it’s just so sad man. Like I fucking love the legendarium, and I think insisting on its moral purity is the worst thing you can do to it.
I think my entire argument can be summed up in a few questions. Why do conservatives keep saying "I love Tolkien" completely unashamedly, in a way they don’t realy say about most other ‘canonical’ twentieth-century texts, while we on the left have to perform a whole apologetic dance before we say it? What is it that they embrace about the text, that we have to occlude in order to express an unproblematic ‘love’? Why do we have to disavow parts of a text to claim we love it? Who are we performing to? What are we losing in focusing so hard on this performance?
This is why the Serkis-style comment, or the Rings of Power casting discourse, ends up being the deepest engagement we collectively get in fandom terms. Because both "sides" of that fight are actually shallow in the same way, just from opposite ends. The right-wing backlash to diverse casting is, repulsively, responding to something absolutely present in the text: a defensive crouch around a racial aesthetic it identifies as being under threat. The liberal-left response, the "just add brown elves" gesture, claims the problem to be one of representation and casting rather than structure, which is precisely why the racial elements of The Rings of Power satisfies no one and changes nothing.
You can put actors of colour in Númenor and Harfoot villages and yet the underlying moral framework of who is coded as inherently noble and who as inherently monstrous, whose skin colour the textual narrative uses as a standin for corruption, stays completely untouched. Again, see my TROP link above, with the jihadi-coding of the villains. Because that framework isn't located in the casting of an adaptation, it's located in the construction of Arda itself and physiognomy-as-morality at the level of the prose itself, constantly present throughout the text. Casting a Black actor as an elf doesn't do anything to the fact that "evil race coded as racially other" is still sitting right there in the Southrons and the orcs, unadapted, undiscussed, doing exactly the same work it always did, and this work takes on a new look in post-2001 adaptations.
So what you get is two adaptations of the same tiresome insanemaking discourse rather than two different arguments: the right defends the racial aesthetic as the substance of their love, and the liberal mainstream defends the fantasy that representation-level tweaks constitute engagement with race. And so, nobody actually produces the adaptation that takes seriously what nonwhite Tolkien scholars have been saying for decades, which is that you'd have to touch the orc/Southron/Valar/Valinor/blondeness architecture itself to ever productively have this conversation. Not diversify who plays the good guys, but interrogate why "evil" in this legendarium has a face and a hair colour and points compass east.
But if the talk about this goes on as it does, and continues between Tolkien the Pure versus Tolkien the Misread, there will never be anyone willing to make that adaptation, and we’ll go on forever in a sisyphean climb, where both the reactionary embrace and the progressive denial are just two versions of refusing to read the same damn book. Basically, I think we on the left etc need to stop treating "is Tolkien racist" as a yes/no gate you have to clear before you're allowed to enjoy the books, and stop acting like enjoying problematic media makes you a fascist. We need to start treating the racialised architecture within Tolkien’s world as the actual object of study, same way you'd read imperial romance or Forster or Kipling or Haggard, without needing to acquit or convict the author first.
Which means we have to name the conservatism specifically rather than gesturing at "some outdated attitudes," trace where it comes from historically (the philological Northernness Tolkien grew up steeped in, not some special personal failing that reflects badly on you), and then ask what an adaptation would look like which dramatised that rather than smoothing over it or weaponising it. We have to let go of the idea that critical engagement is disloyalty, and let go of the idea that loving something requires defending its honour. We need to get the resilience needed to engage with the idea that a work can be both formative and ideologically compromised at the same time.
We don’t need to resolve that tension into either adoring hagiography or totalising cancellation. If we do, we're going to keep getting “keep the Shire white” Serkis soundbites and “hooray we cast a brown elf in our we-invented-elf-jihadis show!” news cycles standing in for a conversation that hasn't actually started yet, and ngl buddies I have to say I personally will be biting people the next time I see yet another rendition of the same damn response-reaction cycle start again because everyone, both the conservatives and the left, wants the things they love to be a reflection of themselves, and will twist themselves into pretzels to ensure that remains the case.
dear god never go into the anti thalia tag out of curiosity it's almost entirely people just being mad that thalia isn't nice enough to men you can't make this stuff up
thalia isn't a character whose behaviors are uniquely above scrutiny and I would actually say that thalia is intentionally constructed to be a character who isn't the most easily digestible person to the reader nor the characters sharing the story with her (that's part of why she's one of my faves) but it's a little interesting that no one critiques thalia's comparable aggression towards zoë. people don't talk about thalia saying "I finally feel like I have a home" when she joins the hunters, a group of girls she doesn't even know well, right in front of annabeth. when I brought up some of thalia's misogynistic dialogue problems a month ago a lot of people had no idea what I was talking about and were surprised that it even exists. instead thalia crit/hate appears to be "how could thalia kick luke off the cliff when he clearly needed help" "why was thalia so bitchy to leo in tlh" "it's so fucked up that thalia just dumped the prophecy on percy without talking to him about it first" and somehow there's even "hot take: thalia was a shitty sister to jason". I think thalia should drop kick all of you guys off of cliffs personally
dear god never go into the anti thalia tag out of curiosity it's almost entirely people just being mad that thalia isn't nice enough to men you can't make this stuff up
(full hazel art on the right here) ok so I was a complete beginner on the left....... 1 year 8 months difference. turns out it is actually ok to start learning how to draw at age 24
my main method for improving was that I started drinking less water wearing less sunscreen and making sure my chair posture was as crooked as can be . I hope sharing this helps others improve also (/j)
(full hazel art on the right here) ok so I was a complete beginner on the left....... 1 year 8 months difference. turns out it is actually ok to start learning how to draw at age 24
I am a little drunk write now so sorry if this post is too incisive and eloquent to be understood by anyone but there is an unsolved mystery in the percy jackson universe ghat urgently needs solving and it's rhis:
where is He getting the fucking candy from
I'm shaking this is Serious. i have proposed some theories and evidence for everyone to look at but feel to share your own theories so long as they are pg-13 and rooted in Facts and Logic
THEORY 1. he gets the candy from a supplier who is one of his mortal "friends"
this excerpt is from botl but the illegal candy trade bit js from tlt and it's never mentioned again. percy is a total outcast in tlt and as far as I can remember he doesn't mention befriending a single person at yancy academy besides grover. so while percy may have pulled together a classroom friend or two by the time botl rolls around and he's newly attending goode high (paul's school) it just doesn't seem like percy had friends besides grover in tlt - especially given that he's gone to many different schools by the time tlt starts
grover has no need for mortal money and he eats fuckign. soda cans. he is probably not supplying the candy to percy
this doesn't mean that percy could not have been roped into an illegal candy trade by someone who is more of an acquaintance rather than an actual friend
THEORY 2: percy buys the candy himsef
percy has some cash in tlt. he may have used this cash to buy his candy in bulk for cheap to then sell it back to his peers at a higher rate for profit
we can safely reason that sally just gives percy some cash in case of emergencies or whatever else, so this holds up well enough
if sally told percy to only use the money for emergencies then I think he would feel too guilty to use it for other reasons. but sally is nice and fairly chill so she may have also told him that he can use it for other things he likes, including illegal contraband
THEORY 3: he steals the candy
percy jackson is a lot of things but he is NOT a thief;!!
THEORY 4: SALLY JACKSON is his illegal supplier
sally works at a fucikng candy shop. this is compelling evidence because she would just Give percy the candy for free. he can eat it himself or sell it back to his peers at unethical resale rates.me personally I am choosing tbe latter
is sally complicit in his crimes...? giving him "free samples" that she can grab at work and then encourage her son to sell them back to his schoolmates...? probably not to be honest because doing this could get percy in trouble, and with all the likely expensive private schools sally has to send percy to I don't think she's risking extra reasons that might get him expelled
this doesn't remove the possibility that percy might just keep a few extra gumballs from sally's free samples and sell them to his sugar-starved peers at yancy
CONCLUSION: theories 2 and 4 are rhe most viable and may even be occurring in tandem. either way though I am impressed by his business acumen percy jackson's broke ass belongs in JAIL
