What gets me about the Piper and Percy one-sided beef is that it’s a bad look for Piper’s character—not because she isn’t allowed to dislike Percy, because actually I think this dynamic could have been cool—but because she is wrong about him in exactly the same way he’s been misunderstood and underestimated for his entire life. Even more egregious that this is coming from Piper, of all characters, who is literally supernaturally gifted with the ability to read people.
It is already a questionable narrative choice because it made Piper look bad to a lot of readers—Percy is absolutely beloved, so it alienates Piper from a good chunk of the fanbase. But I think it could have worked had she been accurate in her assessment of Percy’s character, or at least it could have been interesting and defensible narratively (yes, there were always going to be readers who just hated her for not liking Percy and there’s no way around that. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t serve the narrative well). Percy is a very likable character, and although he is truly my favorite character (in anything, ever), we must admit that he is partly so likable because he’s the narrative’s favorite (at least, you know, before his author started openly resenting him lol). And it could have been interesting to see him from a different perspective that exposes more of his flaws, or perhaps views them as genuine flaws rather than endearing traits.
But the reason Piper knocks Percy is actually just because she thinks he looks less impressive than Jason, and that he looks like a troublemaker.
I’ll address the “unimpressive” part first. Yes, it’s annoying if you love Percy, but it’s also bad writing, because it hits with a “we’ve heard this song before.” Because we have! Percy’s story was a zero-to-hero tale. UNLIKE Jason, unlike Thalia, unlike even Luke, Percy is not a character looked to as a de-facto leader. When he first gets to camp, he has bursts of impressive potential, but he is inconsistent. Nobody knows what to make of him, and “the only thing [he] really excelled at was canoeing, and that wasn’t the kind of heroic skill people expected to see from the kid who had beaten the Minotaur.” The campers are explicitly said to be “watching” him and sizing him up. They are expecting more from him, and “the way they stared at [him] made [him] uncomfortable. [He] felt like they were expecting [him] to do a flip or something.” Clarisse targets him because she wants to prove her superiority and dispel the myth that he is “‘Big Three’ material.” He is practically laughed out the door of Cabin Eleven on his first introduction. After getting claimed, he’s ostracized and seen as an inconvenience who brought strife to the rest of the camp. He earns respect through the quest, but we have to rinse and repeat this next summer because of his association with Tyson. And then we rinse and repeat this AGAIN in book 3 because Thalia is older, cooler, a better fighter, has known Grover and Annabeth longer than Percy, and her dad is Zeus. Thalia gets chosen for the quest—Percy gets overlooked, again, and has to sneak onto it, again.
And then we have to consider what he’s like outside of camp—bullied in school, abandoned by the school system and never had a teacher before Chiron believe in him and actually strived to rise to Chiron’s expectations because he was so starved for encouragement, plays basketball in the corner at school dances, never had a single real friend before Grover, insecure about his financial situation, growing up with an overworked single mom and an abusive stepdad who verbally degrades him and makes his life miserable at every turn. Percy is a kid who doesn’t have friends to invite to his birthday party—canonically.
The shift into revered hero really only happens in Book 4, and I think the subtext of it strongly implies that puberty hit him hard that year because all of a sudden he has three different love interests (and one not-so-secret admirer in Nico), and he is blatantly unaccustomed to it because that’s never how it has been for him before. In book 2 he is saying no girl at his school would be caught dead calling his name, [heavily implied that] he is the mocked because Annabeth is out of his league, and then Circe makes him stand in front of a magical body-dysmorphia mirror and dwell on all the things he doesn’t like about himself (imagine ritualistically humiliating a 13-y/o kid in this way as an adult woman. Federal prison. Death penalty!) and in Book 3 he is lamenting that Annabeth is taller than him, and saying he feels uncomfortable talking to Bianca because he gets nervous talking to girls (patently untrue, there are many girls he does not get nervous talking to—but realistic for him to narrate because although he is close with Annabeth, he is more aware of her romantically now and therefore less comfortable with her, and I would argue he mentions it in this scene because he thinks Bianca is attractive and she’s close to his age whereas girls like Thalia, Clarisse, Zoe etc are not ever viewed that way by him). So it truly makes sense when in Book 4, he is absolutely dumbfounded by Calypso’s confession and completely at a loss for how to interact with Annabeth now that she’s made her feelings clear.
In his “hero” career, the shift also happens in Book 4—he has grown as a fighter and is even complimented on this by Luke, he achieves some of his most impressive stunts in this book and shows off his skills in the battle arena, and he’s used by Chiron as a reinforcement to send to the toughest parts of the battle. And the summer after that, because he’s one of the best fighters, he is used all the time on combat missions, like the one with Beckendorf at the start of Book 5. And I really don’t think I have to explain what happened in Book 5, lol.
So. No, Percy wasn’t just granted the revered-hero status because he looks the part—he earned it, with blood, sweat, and tears (literally). And Piper’s commentary on him is that after hearing all about his exploits, he doesn’t look the part. As if we don’t have like four-and-a-half books that already told us that, made all the more familiar by the fact that Percy is his own harshest critic. The other narrators in HOO is see a side of Percy he doesn’t often see in himself—the side we only get glimpses of, such as Rachel’s painting of him killing Anteus or Percy admitting (reluctantly) that he’s slicing through an entire army and laughing at the exhilaration of it. They also sometimes notice a sadness or an anger or an intimidation factor that Percy is often not aware of in himself. Piper, on the contrary, sees only the most surface-level thing, even though she is supposedly so good at reading people that she can interpret Annabeth and Chiron’s silent conversations after only knowing them for a day. So it reads like she’s just being a hater—and I do actually think that’s the correct interpretation of this moment, considering she’s explicitly comparing him to her boyfriend. And honestly, if Piper was just being a hater, then fine—I can accept that her attachment to her own boyfriend overrides her gifts, and that’s all very human and tells you something about Piper’s character.
But what REALLY frustrates me is the “troublemaker” assessment. Again, this is a girl who is good at reading people. A girl who has been bullied in school, and befriended Leo, who has also been bullied in school and abandoned by the institutional school system, sent to a place for kids that nobody wants to deal with. A girl who has ALSO been overlooked by authority figures and gotten into a lot of trouble for misunderstandings. And she is judging Percy and saying she would “[steer] clear [of him]” because she has enough trouble in her life. What annoys me is not so much that she’d avoid him, but that SHE IS WRONG in exactly the way that most of Percy’s authority figures have been wrong about him for his entire life! He is branded as a troublemaker, when he is actually a good kid that falls victim to unfair circumstances. How many times has he been in the wrong place at the wrong time, when he was actually trying to save innocent lives? This is a kid who had a nationwide manhunt started for him at the age of 12 by his abusive stepdad because he seemed like a juvenile delinquent, and guess what, he wasn’t! So it’s super corny to me to hear Piper say this—again, we know from BOOK ONE that Percy’s features have a “brooding look that had always gotten me branded a rebel.” And Piper—again, the character supposedly supernaturally gifted at reading people—falls for it and informs the reader that she would avoid him for that.
Knowing the context (as the average PJO reader ought to), Piper’s opinion comes across as judgmental and shallow. And to be honest, I think that may have been the source for at least some of the outrage—that this just feels wrong and we didn’t appreciate the tone of it, even if maybe people didn’t know why it bothered them so much. Because the reader knows that Piper is wrong. It provokes that same kind of feeling of frustration at the injustice that Percy has to continually endure throughout most of PJO for things that are outside of his control. And I have to say, Piper being a rich kid who intentionally acts out for attention and notably does NOT have the learning disabilities that Percy and MOST demigods do, being the one to mislabel Percy in this way, adds… a layer to this whole interaction that strikes me as icky. I do patently believe this was not the intention of Piper’s assessment, because she does explain that she would avoid him because she had “enough trouble in her life”---as in, she’s not thinking she’s better than Percy, she’s thinking she’s too much like him. But that kind of falls flat considering that she’s wrongfully judging him based on his appearance and that her reasoning doesn’t make sense considering her friendship with Leo. And then she doubles down on the assessment by saying that “she could definitely see why Percy needed Annabeth in his life. If anybody could keep a guy like that under control, it was Annabeth.” This quote reads as so blatantly derogatory to me that it totally overrides any attempt at making it seem like Piper is not being judgmental and condescending here.
This is made more explicit in their exchange with Bacchus, because, in an effort to hype up Piper’s diplomatic skills, Rick has her act shocked at how brazenly Percy speaks towards Bacchus. Sure, it makes sense for her to be taken aback—most people are by how Percy speaks to the gods. But the tone in this passage is that Piper is babysitting Percy (emphasis mine): “Piper had been watching with horrified fascination, the way she might watch a car wreck in progress. Now she realized Percy was not making things better, and Annabeth wasn’t around to rein him in. Piper figured her friend would never forgive her if she brought Percy back transformed into a sea mammal.”
But Piper is completely ignorant to the context behind this exchange. Percy has known Mr. D for five years. He has earned his reluctant respect, has had multiple one-on-one conversations with him, has been called the correct name by Dionysus, has been personally requested to keep his son safe in the war. Dionysus voted yes to make Percy immortal last summer. Meanwhile, Piper has never met Bacchus OR Dionysus. Out of the three people in this scene, she is the MOST ignorant, and yet we’re supposed to accept that she’s the authority. And what is even worse, is that Piper doesn’t realize what Percy already knows: Bacchus literally is too lazy to turn Percy into a dolphin and he’s not making a real threat. Percy knows that because he has tested the boundaries before (and when it became clear that Mr. D was no longer joking, it scared him enough to stop talking). So it’s just not convincing that Percy is in real danger in this exchange or that he needed Piper’s help. What’s more: Bacchus never had any intention of helping them, and Piper is just too slow to realize this, and she will subsequently admit that he was totally unhelpful! And the hilariously ironic cherry on top: later in the book, Percy is the one who successfully recruits Bacchus! It makes her come across as extremely arrogant to think that she would be more equipped at negotiating with a god than Percy, who has much, MUCH more experience doing this than Piper does.
Now, I think that this is a writing problem. Because fine, maybe we could use this moment to confront Piper’s arrogance and the fact that she completely underestimated Percy—but that doesn’t happen. But better yet, we could have used this moment to actually further both of their characterizations, with Piper realizing why Percy has earned so much respect (including from someone like Annabeth, who Piper CLEARLY immensely respects), and perhaps touching on her ever-present feelings of insecurity about not being good enough at diplomacy and feeling totally useless. It doesn’t make sense for Piper to think she’s better than Percy! It simply does not make sense for a character who is chronically self-doubting in their skills! And the reason it doesn’t make sense is because it’s just the author trying to convince us that Piper is just as necessary to the plot as Percy is. It’s even more annoying when Piper’s “diplomacy skills” are just flattering Bacchus’ ego and manipulating him to get what she wants, which is not remotely unique to Piper’s character. Percy and Annabeth do this literally all the time, and will continue to do it in the rest of the HOO series.
And it’s all just so frustrating and honestly kind of sad. Because there was potential for a whole lot of interesting tension between Percy and Piper. Percy resents spoiled rich kids who act out for attention and he’s so used to encountering them that he would peg Piper as one right off the bat. Consider this quote from the beginning of TLT: “The other guys were joking around, talking about their vacation plans. One of them was going on a hiking trip to Switzerland. Another was cruising the Caribbean for a month. They were juvenile delinquents, like me, but they were rich juvenile delinquents. Their daddies were executives, or ambassadors, or celebrities. I was a nobody, from a family of nobodies.” PIPER IS LITERALLY ONE OF THESE KIDS! You’re telling me that the kid who immediately understood that the Hermes cabin was full of neglected kids waiting for calls that would never come, who reminded him of the kids he went to school with—wouldn’t notice that quality in Piper right away? Because he would. But I actually think Percy has grown a lot and confronted some of these feelings of inadequacy around socioeconomic status, primarily through his friendship with Rachel, and he is able to see through the resentment and insecurity to recognize that the parental neglect Rachel suffers is a real problem, despite her being wildly privileged. And this journey started in TLT, where Percy realizes that he’s a far cry from having a “family of nobodies”—actually he, too, has one of the MOST famous and MOST powerful beings in the entire world for a dad, and that his dad doesn’t care about him (if you recall—he had chosen to think his father was dead, because that was less painful to believe, despite the fact that Sally intentionally never said that). And he empathized with the neglect that demigods receive from their incredibly powerful parents: “I thought about some of the kids I’d seen in the Hermes cabin, teenagers who looked sullen and depressed, as if they were waiting for a call that would never come. I’d known kids like that at Yancy Academy, shuffled off to boarding school by rich parents who didn’t have the time to deal with them. But gods should behave better.” And perhaps more on the nose: “I started to understand Luke’s bitterness and how he seemed to resent his father, Hermes. So okay, maybe gods had important things to do. But couldn’t they call once in a while, or thunder, or something? Dionysus could make Diet Coke appear out of thin air. Why couldn’t my dad, whoever he was, make a phone appear?” (I still think Percy accepts the bare minimum from Poseidon because it is simply less painful for him that way so I definitely don’t think he’s healed, but enough to have compassion for other abandoned kids, certainly).
Percy could have really seen Piper in a way that Piper is used to seeing other people. I truly do think Percy as written in PJO would immediately see Piper’s choices in chopping off her hair and intentionally styling herself in weird clothing for what it really is: insecurity masking as confidence, acting out against her parents, and struggling to find her identity separate from her parents. (Percy is really, REALLY good at picking up on these things in PJO. And he ought to be, because he developed it as a survival skill growing up with Gabe and getting bullied.)
Piper’s writing has serious problems with it, many of which have been discussed in great length and that I don’t think I need to explain here. The only thing I’ll bring up, because I think it’s uniquely related to the Piper/Percy dynamic: it is not sufficiently addressed that Piper is accused of stealing things for fun/attention when she doesn’t actually steal things, and how her race might play a role in that narrative. It is not as simple as Piper being stereotyped by the narrative as a kleptomaniac—because Piper really isn’t and she really didn’t steal the BMW, the dealer gave it to her. But the narrative doesn’t really care about exonerating her. And to make matters much worse, there is not much meaningful reflection about her charmspeak being used for coercion, and how, although she didn’t understand what she was doing, she still got the car by manipulating the dealer with magic. And I bring this up simply to demonstrate that had we gotten to the bottom of Piper’s relationship with her parents and her issues with her own identity, then at least this problem could have been reconciled in a much more nuanced way. And I think that her relationship with Percy is fairly low-hanging fruit for how this could have been explored better, because Piper actually quite similar to Percy in that they’re both ‘kids troubled by unfair circumstances and not because they want to cause trouble,” even though on the surface her antics make her seem like she’s more like Matt Sloan (the bully from SOM who stole his daddy’s care and took it for a joyride).
Anyway. TL;DR: Rick did Piper dirty by writing that she thinks Percy is unimpressive and a troublemaker who needs to be reined in from shooting off at the mouth. And it actually botches her characterization, because she’s supposed to be good at reading people, and she gets a lot wrong about Percy. Because she’s wrong, it makes her seem judgmental and condescending, and given that Percy is one of the most accomplished demigods of literally all time and Piper is just learning the ropes, she comes across as very arrogant in a way that is not consistent with the rest of her characterization.
