A blog celebrating the way we love stories, from Star Trek to Harry Potter, from Star Wars to Marvel. And that shadowy place near the horizon? That's DC, and we must never go there (except to visit Themyscira).
I understand being disgusted by Trump turning the White House into a tacky circus for his (hopefully last) birthday and America's 250th anniversary, but I can't help but think that he and all of his fucking MAGA chodes have already reached their peak, they have as much power as they'll ever have to force this bullshit upon everyone, and people still hate them and their days occupying the White House will still come to an end one day, with all of these desperate, cringeworthy attempts to turn D.C. into Mar-a-Lago getting torn away as soon as 2029 hits (and even sooner, with a federal judge ordering Trump's name to be taken off the Kennedy Center). And don't doom on this post. It can end if people actually give enough of a shit to vote instead of spending another decade whining with their thumb up their ass about why it's akshewally praxis for them to enable Republican victories. Nothing is set in stone. There's a path ahead for a future where every gaudy, physical legacy that pig intends to leave behind in D.C. is ripped out and thrown into a metaphorical dumpster, leaving his supporters big butthurt and aggrieved once their cult leader is gone forever
It looks terrible on you and you've always thought that. When you were really young, you thought that's just what everyone thought about their hair colour. When you were a teenager, people chalked it up to hormones and wanting to be unique and follow the trends of dying your hair. It wasn't.
You've seen people with brown hair. It looks so good. You start imagining yourself with beautiful brunette hair. What if you could be that? And then you hear someone talk about you, call you 'that blonde over there' or someone telling you, 'your blonde hair looks so good!' and you're reminded all over again.
Your parents talk about something. Something you've never heard of before. "All those young kids, dying hair everywhere," they say. You ask them what it means. "Oh, that's when someone with one hair colour thinks they're better off with another hair colour." Your heart lights up. There's more people like you. You're not insane. And then- "Fucking insane. They just want to feel special. All this ridiculousness over trends." It hits you in the heart. You say nothing, just mumble an 'okay' and turn your attention back to your food.
That night, you're scrolling on your phone, and one video pops out. It's talking about dyed hair. You see people not just with natural-coloured dyed hair, but blues and greens and so many other colours. It looks beautiful. You remember your blonde hair. Could it finally be brown? These people are like you. They might be able to help.
You do research. You reach out to people online. And finally, you have your hands on a box dye from a store. it's not the highest quality, but you have it. At midnight the next weekend, you do it. You dye it brown. It's messy and tricky, but your heart is swelling with joy the entire time.
You expect people at school to be happy. Your hair is beautiful. You're beautiful. You finally feel comfort in your hair, confident in the way you look. Instead, you get side-eyes. People whisper and glare. One of your friends pulls you aside. "What happened to your hair?" You tell her you dyed it. Asks her if it looks nice. She grimaces. "Yeah... it looks fine.... but your blonde hair was your natural hair colour and it looked fine as well." You tell her the truth. How you've always hated it on you. Found brown to be so, so much prettier. Looked so much more amazing on you, and felt it too. "Yeah... but blonde is still your natural hair colour, right? No amount of dye is going to change that." Your confidence starts to sink. Will everyone think this?
Turns out, they will. You hear people still refer to you as "that blonde there". New people express confusion. "But her hair's brown? It's very clearly brown." "Well, yeah, but she dyed it. Her natural hair colour is blonde." "Oh... okay."
Your parents don't like it. "Your blonde hair was so beautiful," your mother sobs through her tears. "Why did you have to ruin it? My beautiful blonde child is gone! Gone forever! Why did you do it?" And you tell her that her child is not gone, her child is right here, just with different hair. She doesn't listen to a single word. Your father is mad. He yells at you to get out of his house, that you're a fucking disgrace, that you're mentally ill and brainwashed by trends and so many other hurtful things. You can only leave.
You try to go to another friend's place. She answers the door with a scowl. "Why are you here?" she seethes. She's angry. Why? You tell her about your situation. "Serves you right," she spits. "You're incredibly offensive to everyone with blonde hair." You ask her why, puzzled. "You clearly hate blonde hair. Why else would you dye it? Do you find blonde people disgusting?" No, no, that's not it. Blonde people are fine, you try saying. It just didn't suit me. I wish it did, but it didn't, so I changed it. "Stop twisting everything," she says. "I don't want to see your face." The door closes and you're left there on the steps.
You don't know what else to do. Were you truly lying? No, blonde hair has never suited you. Brown looks better. Brown makes you feel secure. You feel it's what makes you feel like yourself. But why can no one grasp that?
You search up more on your phone, and you find a community for similar people. People thrown out, disowned, abused for dying their hair or expressing wants to. When you get there, you find that they accept you with the warmest smiles and the coziest hugs. You find people that bleached their brown hair to blonde and dyed their blonde hair to brown, just like you, and they look so amazing. You find people with all sorts of coloured hair too, red, blue, yellow, purple, multicoloured and hair that gets redyed differently depending on the day. They all have similar stories. You've finally found a place you belong.
Outside, people are still outraged. They scream at the community that they're brainwashing their kids, that they're grooming every kid to dye their hair until there's no natural hair kids left. You don't feel hurt anymore. You know now they make no sense. They push out their own children, and this is the result. They don't want people with dyed hair banding up together.
Brown hair has always suited you. You're rather tired of people trying to pretend it doesn't.
Sunday, June 21: WIP Day (share a current WIP preview!)
Monday, June 22: Canon Rewrite Day (rewrite or re-draw the best or worst of canon!)
Tuesday, June 23: Free Day (do whatever you want!)
Wednesday, June 24: AU Day (depict solangelo in any alternate universe you can think of!)
Thursday, June 25: Collab Day (collaborate with another creator!)
Friday, June 26: Pigeons and Cornstalks Day (think back on the worst things that ever happened to Will and Nico, respectively!)
Saturday, June 27: 10 Years Later (in honor of 10 years of solangelo this year!)
As always, these prompts are intended to spark creativity to help people participate in this event, and are in no way requirements for your participation! Please check out our event rules (pinned post) before sending us an ask.
Tag all tumblr posts with #solangeloweek and @solangeloweek to make sure we see your work! Tumblr participation is not required, but if you cross-post to other platforms, we'd still love to promote your work! Share links to your work on Instagram, Twitter, Bluesky, AO3, Tiktok, etc. with us through our ask box so we can include you in the celebration.
An Update On Will Solace and the Socialites of Olympus University and Overthinking the Geopolitical Implications of What Started as Gay Fanfic (long post)
As some of you already know, I originally planned for Will Solace and the Socialites of Olympus University to end on New Year’s Eve/New Year’s Day; very neat, very symbolic, very ‘new year, new beginnings, everyone finally stops being emotionally constipated for five minutes.’ Unfortunately, the fic has now looked me directly in the eye and said no.
You may also have noticed I haven’t updated since November, which is partly because life has been doing whatever life does, but also because I’ve been editing the fic. Nothing has changed plot-wise, so if you’ve read it already you’re not suddenly going to find out I killed Percy off-screen or decided Nico actually is in the mafia. The actual story is the same, I’ve mostly been going back through earlier chapters and smoothing out places where I felt like certain events, especially single nights, had started to sprawl a bit too much. Karaoke night, the first date and the redo date are probably the main ones, I love those chapters but on reread I could feel myself circling some of the same emotional beats so I wanted to tighten them without losing what they were doing.
Obviously, because I am incapable of behaving, the ‘abridging’ process also somehow involved adding things. Most self-indulgently, there is now more about my favourite book, The Secret History, in chapter 16, because apparently I looked at my dark academia college AU and thought, do you know what this needs? More Donna Tartt. Nobody is shocked, least of all me.
But the bigger thing I realised while editing is that the fic has grown past the ending I originally imagined for it.
The starting point was always the campus gossip thing. I kept thinking about how insane the rumours around the Seven must have been in canon, because imagine being a normal camper watching these half-mythical teenagers come back from quests where they fought gods and monsters and then just trying to sit near them at dinner. Obviously people would speculate, obviously there would be completely unhinged theories. So the AU began as that translated into college: these rich, beautiful, suspiciously mysterious students wandering around campus while everyone else tries to work out if they’re in the mafia, a cult, a spy ring or some kind of emotionally unavailable vampire coven.
But the class stuff was always there too, the jail arc was one of the first ideas I had, along with the first date disaster. I always knew I wanted the romance to sit inside that social divide, with Will not just being dazzled by Nico’s world but constantly aware of what it means to be near money without belonging to it. The difference is that as the fic has gone on that side of it has become much bigger than I expected.
I’ve always tried to keep the Greek myth world folded into the AU, even without literal gods or monsters. Sometimes that’s through names, sometimes through settings, sometimes through family businesses, sometimes through stupid little jokes that were probably only funny to me. The House of Hesperides is one example. On the surface it’s just this beautiful, exclusive, ridiculous rich-person restaurant but it was also my way of translating a piece of Greek myth into a modern social space.
In myth, The Garden of the Hesperides is guarded, sacred, difficult to reach, full of divine fruit and temptation. Heracles doesn’t really have access to it in the way Hera does, or the Hesperides themselves do. He isn’t wandering in because the space belongs to him. He gets close because of labour, literally because he has been sent to complete a task, and even then the whole point is that the garden is not freely open to him, he is entering a divine space through effort and exception rather than belonging.
That feels very relevant to the way places like the House of Hesperides work in the AU. Will and Austin can stand in the room because they are serving the people who actually belong to it, Rachel can move through certain elite art and social spaces because her labour, taste and connections make her useful to that world. In other words, their access is conditional, it depends on what they can do.
Nico, the Seven and the other customers occupy the space differently. They are closer to Hera, or the Hesperides themselves, or the figures who do not need to be sent into the garden on a labour because the garden already recognises them. In the AU, that divinity becomes wealth. It becomes being able to sit down, order, be served, linger, leave and never think of the room as something that has to be earned. So Will’s relationship to the House of Hesperides is not just ‘poor boy works in rich restaurant’, it’s him being allowed into the garden through labour while Nico’s world enters it through inheritance.
That was always the kind of translation I wanted the AU to do: mythic places becoming restaurants, gods becoming parents with companies, quests becoming social disasters, monsters becoming very human systems. But the more I’ve written, the more I’ve realised the fic is moving beyond just ‘here is a clever modern equivalent of this myth thing’ and into something bigger about fate, class, inheritance and power.
Because once you take the literal gods out of PJO, you don’t really lose them, they just stop looking like gods.
In canon, so much of these kids’ lives is shaped before they are old enough to understand what is happening. Their parents, prophecies, powers, cabins, quests and enemies all become part of a story already moving around them. Greek myth is full of that too: children trapped inside family curses, prophecies trying to complete themselves, parents creating the very disasters they are trying to prevent, people running from fate only to end up exactly where the story wanted them. Oedipus is the obvious one, but Paris is another example: sent away from Troy because he is predicted to bring disaster, only for that exile to put him on the path that leads to the apple, Helen and the war anyway. Myth loves a circle, it loves people trying to escape the story and accidentally tightening the knot.
PJO pushes against that. It still has prophecy, but it cares so much about choice. The whole series is full of kids being handed ancient grudges and impossible roles and still trying to say, no, we are not doing it exactly like you did. The cycle doesn’t break because the gods suddenly become perfect, it starts to break because the next generation sees the pattern and refuses to repeat it blindly.
That’s what I’m trying to do with the AU too.
The mythic forces become real-world structures. Divine parentage becomes surname, inheritance, reputation and access. Monsters become institutions that can ruin someone without ever looking like monsters at all. The gods become parents whose money and influence are so vast that ordinary people can start to seem abstract to them. It isn’t meant to be a neat one-to-one substitution where class equals prophecy or police equal monsters or capitalism equals Kronos or whatever. It’s more that the same narrative pressure exists in a different form. These characters are still being born into stories written before them; the question is what those stories look like when Olympus is made of boardrooms, universities, restaurants, police stations, galleries, ports, legal firms and family offices instead of marble palaces in the sky.
The jail arc is probably where that becomes impossible for Will to ignore. Cecil’s situation is terrifying because the facts matter less than who gets believed first. Octavian has proximity to legal power, so his version of events immediately carries more weight. Jason can call Zeus, Leo and Annabeth can produce a document, Nico and Piper know how to move through that kind of crisis because they have grown up around people who know which levers to pull. And Will is left thinking about the people who don’t get rescued, the people who don’t know anyone, the people who don’t have a Grace or a McLean or a Di Angelo standing beside them when the system decides they are disposable.
That is the point where the fic, at least for me on reflection, starts asking bigger questions than ‘will Will and Nico figure their shit out by New Year’s?’ Which, to be clear, is still a deeply important question, but it’s not the only question anymore.
Because I’ve also been thinking more about the darker side of Nico and the Seven’s wealth. Other than Zeus and Hades, most of the parents’ enterprises weren’t originally developed because I had some enormous geopolitical subplot planned for each of them. A lot of it started as myth translation: Poseidon gets oceans, hydraulics, shipping, wealth connected to water. Athena gets architecture, planning, cities, strategy. Mars gets weapons. Aphrodite gets beauty and social influence. Hephaestus gets tech and industry. It was mostly me trying to make their AU counterparts feel like the gods from canon and myth, just filtered through modern elite power instead of literal divinity.
But once you start taking that seriously, it does get darker.
Because the gods in myth and canon are not just quirky powerful parents with thematic branding. They are actual gods and there is distance built into that. They are immortal, ancient, cosmic, operating on a scale where mortals are tiny and brief and, very often, collateral damage in a story the gods think belongs to them. That does not excuse them, exactly, but it does create a kind of mythic distance. Ares influencing war as the god of war is one thing, a human man standing in for Mars as a weapons tycoon is another, because then he is not some divine force hovering above mortal conflict, he is another human being making money from it.
That difference is where the AU starts to get morally uglier than I think I first realised.
The parents should feel recognisably godlike, not because they can throw lightning or summon storms, but because their influence is so large that ordinary people become almost abstract to them. The problem is that in a modern human setting, ‘ordinary people becoming abstract’ has very real consequences. It becomes profit margins, contracts, lobbying, procurement, development, branding, philanthropy, investment, museum boards, political favours, legal pressure. It becomes the kind of power that still looks elegant from the inside because the suffering is always happening somewhere just far enough away.
Mars as a weapons tycoon is a big one, very Tony Stark before the Iron Man moral crisis. It works as a nod to the god of war, but it also means Frank’s family money is tied to defence contracts, weapons systems, militarisation and the machinery that turns conflict into profit. And I don’t mean this in a naive ‘no country should ever have defence’ way, because obviously there is a difference between the concept of a country defending itself and a private billionaire building an empire around the fact that war, security and instability are profitable. A government can make terrible decisions too, obviously, and many countries have not been innocent in their conflicts, but a Mars-style figure is not the state making a defence decision. He is the private industry orbiting those decisions, supplying them, lobbying around them, profiting from them and surviving regardless of whether the war itself was justified.
He is not personally declaring wars, obviously, but private contractors do not have to declare wars to make money from them, especially when they exist in the orbit of the US military, which is one of the largest and most heavily funded military forces in the world and has relied heavily on private companies for logistics, security and support in modern conflicts. Congressional Research Service reports on Iraq and Afghanistan describe contractors providing troop support, base support, construction, transportation and security, while private security contractors were used to protect convoys, forward operating bases, buildings and infrastructure, which is exactly the sort of background machinery a Mars-style defence empire could plausibly profit from.
So if Mars has been operating at that level since say the 90s, it’s hard not to think about what that actually means. The Gulf War and everything that followed. Bosnia, Kosovo and the wider Balkans, not necessarily in the cartoonish sense of him arming everyone from a shadowy boardroom, but through the very real world of logistics, military support, procurement, bases, equipment, reconstruction, security and contracts. Iraq, Afghanistan, the wider War on Terror, drone warfare, counterterrorism technology, arms deals with allied states, border security, surveillance systems, private military support. All the places where state power and private industry blur together politely enough that everyone can still wear a suit to dinner.
That feels much uglier than just saying ‘Mars is the god of war, so obviously his AU version makes weapons’. Ares/Mars in myth can be this distant divine embodiment of violence, rage and conflict, but human Mars, billionaire defence contractor Mars, is not war as a cosmic force but a man profiting from war as an industry. Frank being gentle and kind does not erase that, if anything, it makes the contradiction more uncomfortable, which is probably exactly why it’s worth looking at properly.
Hephaestus Industries is similar, but in a different register. It’s funny when Leo is building ridiculous things, hacking campus infrastructure or behaving like OSHA was invented specifically to spite him, but a huge tech/manufacturing empire has its own shadow. Surveillance technology, military contracts, automation, extractive labour, environmental damage, unsafe factories, supply chains no one wants to look at too closely, innovation marketed as progress while someone else pays the cost. Hephaestus as a god makes beautiful and terrible things for other gods to use. Hephaestus as a human billionaire means those inventions are entering markets, militaries, cities and workplaces. Leo’s genius is real but his family’s money is still not magically clean.
Zeus is slightly different because his power has already touched the plot directly, and he is probably the cleanest example of me thinking I was making a clever canon/myth nod and then realising I had accidentally created a man whose entire fortune is built around modern infrastructure. In myth and canon, Zeus is sky, kingship, law, hierarchy, judgement, the father at the top of the mountain; in PJO specifically, his domain is so literal that Percy cannot safely travel by plane because the sky belongs to Zeus. So, in the AU, airlines felt like the obvious translation. Of course Zeus owns airlines. Sky god, planes, private routes, rich people crossing continents above everyone else’s heads. Very tidy. Very clever. Unfortunately, the second you make him a human billionaire instead of an actual god, that stops being just a neat little reference and starts meaning carbon emissions, labour, fuel, airport politics, borders, security, logistics, who gets to move freely and who gets treated as a problem at the gate.
The same thing happens with the energy empire. At first it felt like another obvious translation of divine power: storms, electricity, the grid, light, force, the ability to keep whole cities running. But then you sit with it for more than two minutes and remember that an energy conglomerate is not neutral just because energy is necessary. If Zeus owns or invests in fossil fuels, then he is profiting from carbon, extraction and the environmental consequences of keeping everything powered. If he has shifted into renewables, wind farms especially, then there is genuine environmental value there, obviously, and I’m not trying to do some contrarian ‘clean energy is secretly bad’ thing because that is not the point. The point is that Zeus would not be in clean energy because he had a sudden spiritual awakening about the planet. He would be in it because the future needs energy and the future has profits attached to it.
That is the part that feels very Zeus to me. He can profit from the old world while positioning himself at the front of the new one. Airlines give him the glamour and violence of movement: fuel, emissions, private travel, global business, the privilege of crossing borders easily. Energy gives him the more respectable language of transition, sustainability, infrastructure, investment, public good. He can be the man whose companies contribute to the problem and then the man whose companies are paid to help solve it, which is very godlike in the worst possible way.
And then there is lobbying, which is where all of that becomes political. Because a man with airlines, energy companies, security firms and legal connections is not just sitting on money, he is also sitting near regulation. Aviation emissions, airport expansion, fuel policy, energy subsidies, grid infrastructure, renewables contracts, environmental standards, security procurement, labour rules, campaign donations, all the boring adult words that decide how much damage can be made legal and how much profit can be made respectable. Zeus does not need to be a cartoon villain for that to be ugly, he just has to be the kind of man whose businesses sit close enough to government that policy and profit start having lunch together.
That is why the jail arc matters so much, because it only shows the part of Zeus’ power Will can actually see. He sees the phone call to the state senator, he sees the favour from last year, the budget pressure, the legal crisis becoming manageable because the right man says the right thing in the right voice. But the phone call is not the whole empire, it is just the visible spark from a much larger system. So yes, I thought I was being clever making Zeus an airline and energy billionaire because planes are his domain and electricity is his thing, and now here we are, staring directly at the climate, political and corporate implications of the sky god owning the sky in a world where the sky is full of emissions.
Poseidon is another one because on the surface it’s water, oceans, hydraulics, marine wealth, all very obvious god-of-the-sea translation. But if you push that into the real world, the ocean is political. Shipping lanes, ports, offshore drilling, maritime choke points, private coastal development, environmental damage, who controls access to water and trade. A private billionaire obviously does not ‘own’ the Strait of Malacca or Bab el-Mandeb in some cartoon villain way, but people with enough money in shipping, energy, ports, insurance, infrastructure, logistics or offshore extraction can still have influence over the systems that move goods, fuel and power around the world. So then I’m sitting there like, oh my god, does Poseidon turn a blind eye to human rights violations in Eritrea because access to the Bab el-Mandeb matters for trade routes? Which is an insane thing to be asking about a fic that once had Will nearly combust because Nico wore sunglasses indoors, but here we are.
Hades is harder to talk about because his version of it is colder, more restrained, much easier to mistake for reverence than violence. It doesn’t announce itself in the same way Mars’ world does, because it comes dressed as taste, preservation, family legacy, scholarship, all those expensive words people use when they want possession to sound dignified. Funerals, inheritance, antiquities, archaeology, underground wealth, old money; on the surface it fits him almost too well, because of course Hades’ empire would be built around death and the things buried with it, and of course his money would come from what is kept, catalogued, insured, restored, displayed, passed down. His power would not look like conquest in the obvious sense. It would look like custody, which is exactly what makes it more uncomfortable to me, because custody is not neutral when the person doing the keeping has all the money, all the access and all the authority to decide what belongs where.
That is where the antiquities and archaeology side gets darker than I first let myself think about. It is very easy to make it romantic in a gothic way, all marble statues and old coins and beautiful dead languages, but the real world of museums and private collections has always had this shadow under it: colonial extraction, stolen or contested artefacts, wealthy people buying pieces of other people’s histories, institutions like the British Museum displaying objects whose ownership and removal are still fiercely disputed, and entire cultures having to argue for the return of things that were taken from them and then rebranded as world heritage once they were behind European glass. Even when the language is beautiful, there is still the question underneath it of who gets to keep things, who gets to say ‘this belongs here’, who gets to build authority out of other people’s dead, and who has their grief, history and burial turned into an object with a label and an insurance value.
And that is messy for Nico in a way I actually find much more interesting than if Hades’ empire was simply cartoonishly evil, because Nico does care about memory. He does want to honour his mother and Bianca. He wants the dead to matter, he wants what was lost to mean something, and that is such a human, painful, completely sincere instinct that it almost makes Hades’ world more dangerous rather than less. Legacy, preservation, continuity, keeping the past alive; all of that sounds close enough to love that Nico can recognise something true in it, but it also sits terrifyingly close to control, because memory becomes something else once a family has enough money to own it, store it, display it and pass it down as proof of its own importance.
So Nico studying classics and archaeology while being dragged towards that inheritance feels sharper to me now than it probably did when I first set it up. He is trying to understand how people loved, feared, honoured and buried their dead, while his father’s world is built around making death respectable, profitable and inheritable. The question is not just whether Nico becomes Hades’ heir, but whether he can honour the dead without turning them into possessions, and whether legacy can stay loving once a family like his gets its hands around it.
Athena’s world started in a similar place, as a nod to her canon interests and to the rivalry with Poseidon: architecture, planning, cities, strategy, all of that sitting opposite his oceans, coastlines, expansion and force. Their professional overlap was originally just my way of translating that mythic tension into something modern, with land and sea meeting through design firms, waterfront developments, infrastructure projects and two very powerful people who would absolutely make a planning meeting feel like the Trojan War in a boardroom.
But architecture isn’t neutral either, which is the part that becomes harder to ignore once the fic starts taking power seriously. Cities do not just happen, someone plans them, funds them, designs them, sells them, and very often someone else gets priced out of them. Athena’s world can be beautiful and genuinely brilliant, because I don’t want to flatten that either. Good architecture can mean shelter, public space, preservation, accessibility, actual human care built into brick and stone and glass. But the same world can also mean gentrification, luxury redevelopment, hostile design, private security, cultural cleansing dressed up as regeneration, and glossy waterfront projects that look stunning in a render while pushing poorer people further and further from the places they used to live. That feels very Athena in a darker way: intelligence, order and beauty, but also the violence of deciding what a city should be, what counts as improvement, and who gets treated as an inconvenience to the design.
Aphrodite is probably the least obviously violent on the surface, which almost makes her more interesting to me. A cosmetics and socialite empire does not look like blood money in the same way Mars or Hephaestus does, but beauty is still an industry, and industries do not become billion-dollar empires by being harmless. Her world is branding, desirability, consumerism, influence, femininity packaged until it becomes something people are taught to chase and then sold back to them in smaller, shinier forms. It is insecurity made profitable, impossible standards made aspirational, the cruelty of convincing people they are always one product away from being wanted properly.
And that feels very Aphrodite too, because desire is not evil. Beauty is not evil. Wanting to be seen, admired, touched, chosen, adored, none of that is shallow by itself. The darker part is what happens when that longing becomes a market. When love and attractiveness and self-worth are filtered through branding until people start confusing being desirable with being safe, or beautiful with being valuable. Aphrodite’s power is softer than Mars’ or Zeus’, but softer does not mean innocent.
So no, I don’t want the message to be ‘actually Nico and the Seven are evil because they have money’. That would be boring and also not true to the story. They are not Octavian. They are not sitting around gleefully plotting how to ruin ordinary people’s lives. They are young, loyal, funny, traumatised, often ridiculous people who love each other deeply and are trying, in various messy ways, to become better than the worlds that raised them.
But I also don’t want to pretend their fortunes are clean just because they are the good guys.
That is the balance I’m trying to strike, the Seven and Nico can be ignorant about their privilege at times, and the fic has already shown that, but they are not morally empty people. In the jail arc, they know the system is unfair. Piper says it. Jason feels it. Will sees it from a completely different angle because he is the one thinking about the people who do not get rescued. Jason especially has this very canon-adjacent thing where his whole life has been arranged for him, almost like a mundane version of Hera’s manipulation. He has been shaped into the responsible one, the polished one, the future political/legal heir who knows which rooms to stand in and which calls to make, and he does not want to become his father.
The point is not that Jason, Nico, Piper or any of the others need Will, Lou Ellen and Cecil to wander in from the land of unpaid bills and teach them inequality exists. That would be patronising, and also just not the story. They are not walking around with no inner life, benevolently discovering that poor people have feelings. Most of them already know, in different ways, that the world around them is unfair. Jason knows far too much about his father’s kind of power to be innocent about it. Nico has never confused inheritance with love. Piper understands image, influence and manipulation almost too well. Leo knows what it means to be useful before he knows what it means to be safe.
What changes is not conscience appearing out of nowhere, it’s distance collapsing. It’s one thing to know the system is unfair in the way clever, privileged people can know things and still survive them comfortably, and another thing to watch someone you care about nearly get crushed by it. It’s one thing to understand access as an abstract problem, and another to stand in a police station and realise your name opens a door that would have stayed shut on someone else’s life. Will, Lou Ellen and Cecil are not there to educate the rich kids into decency; they make certain truths harder to keep at a manageable distance. They put faces, voices, rent payments, bruises, shifts, panic and actual consequences into places where good intentions used to be enough to let everyone sleep.
Now to the question of Will's dad and the files, originally, I genuinely thought Will would never open them. I liked the idea of him refusing Persephone’s temptation, leaving the folder sealed, choosing not to let that world define him. In my head, the files were almost like metaphorical pomegranate seeds. If he took them, if he accepted the information, the job, the access, then some part of him would be tied to Hades and Persephone’s world in the same way Persephone is tied to the Underworld after eating its fruit. It felt like a clean way to have him break the pattern of the original myth: here is the beautiful, dangerous thing being offered, and here is Will choosing not to swallow it.
And I did still have a backstory for his dad. I just didn’t think Will would learn it in the fic, I thought the choice not to know would be the point.
But the more I thought about PJO canon, the less right that felt. Being claimed by your godly parent is one of the biggest emotional conflicts in the series. The unclaimed kids, the ignored kids, the children left without answers or cabins or recognition, all of that literally feeds into the war with Kronos. Parentage in PJO is never just that, it is identity, abandonment, power, belonging, danger and the pain of being left without a story.
Will’s absent father has shaped him from the beginning of this fic. It shapes how hard he works, how he reacts to Nico’s wealth, how terrified he is of needing too much, how much of himself he has built around being useful and self-sufficient. So I’m now rewriting what I had of the next chapters to actually explore that reveal and what ‘being claimed’ means in a world without literal gods. No spoilers, obviously, and the pomegranate question is still there because accepting knowledge from Persephone’s hand is never going to be simple, but it became too thematically important to leave permanently shut in a folder just because the refusal was neat.
I do slightly regret not thinking all of this through earlier, honestly. Not because I think the fic is broken, but because every time you translate gods into humans, the implications multiply faster than you expect. I thought I was already getting fairly deep into the social and class politics with things like the first date arc, which is hilarious considering that whole thing was inspired by Callie and Arizona’s first date on Grey’s Anatomy, and now I’m sitting here pulling my hair out over maritime choke points and the ethics of archaeology like this is a normal thing to be doing with my spare time.
So I wouldn’t say this is damage control exactly, because that sounds more dramatic than I mean it, but I do want to give the story space to actually explore the things it has uncovered. Not in a preachy way, this is not going to become a lecture every chapter, I promise. The fic is still romance and chaos and rich people behaving weirdly in public and Will having a medical episode every time Nico looks at him for too long. I still want the themes folded into the story the way they have been so far, through jokes and parties and bad decisions and expensive restaurants and arguments in kitchens and characters saying wildly unserious things while accidentally revealing the entire emotional spine of the chapter.
The hope of it, for me, sits somewhere in that difference between Greek myth and PJO. Greek myth often has this horrible closed-circle feeling, where the prophecy is already waiting at the end of the road and every attempt to avoid it just becomes part of the mechanism. PJO keeps the machinery of prophecy, divine parentage and inherited damage, but it also keeps pushing back against the idea that the kids have to become exactly what the gods, the prophecies or their family histories expect them to be. Percy still has to live inside a world built by the gods, but by the end of the first series he forces Olympus to change some of its rules: the gods have to claim their children, the minor gods have to be recognised, the abandoned kids are not allowed to stay invisible just because that was easier for the people in power.
That feels like the thing I’m trying to get at through the AU lens, just with the divine machinery translated into social and political machinery. Nico, the Seven, Will, Lou Ellen and Cecil are all dealing with systems that existed before them: money, class, family empires, old reputations, legal power, poverty, access, all these things that shape what choices are available before anyone has even made one. So the question is not really whether they can float above all of that untouched, because they can’t and I don’t think the story would be honest if they could. The question is whether they can recognise the pattern quickly enough to interrupt it.
That is why the fic needs more room than my original New Year’s ending gave it. It is one thing to reveal the shape of the system, or to have a character realise their parents’ world is compromised, or to have Will understand that the people he loves are standing on money with a history attached to it. It is another thing to show what they do with that knowledge. If the whole point is breaking away from the older mythic pattern, or at least refusing to repeat it exactly, then the story can’t stop at the moment everyone sees the problem. It has to sit with the aftermath long enough for the characters to start deciding what they carry forward, what they refuse, and what they try to make less cruel than it was when they inherited it.
So I really hope people will still enjoy the fic continuing in this direction. It’s still the same story, just with a bit more to explore, and apparently a lot more consequences than my original outline was emotionally prepared for.
Also, if anyone is planning a modern AU where gods become humans, my biggest advice is apparently: good luck. There are way more things to consider than you think. I genuinely cannot believe my biggest stress at one point was ‘oh my god, I can never give any of their parents surnames because the characters canonically get their surnames from their non-godly parents, I cannot go around typing Hades di Angelo.’ Simpler times.
Anyone who is remotely interested in Percy Jackson, ancient myths, class struggles, love stories, and how to exist in the world should GO READ THIS RIGHT NOW. It’s MAGNIFICENT.
“Voting for the lesser of two evils doesn’t work.”
How would you know? It’s never been tried for long enough.
Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, and Kamala Harris all lost.
Biden won, but most people spent his entire presidency shitting on him and giving him absolutely no credit for his successes, which were MANY. (If you need a refresher: RFMA, PACT Act, Chips and Science, Inflation Reduction Act, Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson etc.)
You can’t say “vote blue no matter who” and “vote for the lesser of two evils” doesn’t work if you refuse to ever give it a chance of working.
Also I hate that phrase “lesser of two evils” when we’re talking about someone who supports unions and immigrants and healthcare and food assistance and queer rights and voting rights over someone who is literally trying to end us all.
And the lesser of two evils is, by definition, BETTER.
It’s like the difference between a wound with a bit of an infection, and literal death. Those aren’t comparable.
Democrats are not perfect and no one has ever claimed otherwise, but they are making lasting change. It’s slow and it’s not linear , but it is happening.
Pro forced birth Democrats have been all but forced out the party. Same with anti-gay Democrats AND anti-trans Democrats. You don’t see many Dems supported by the NRA at all anymore. And all Dems believe in the climate crisis.
This was NOT a given even 10 years ago.
Democrats are not becoming more conservative. They’re becoming less. Across the board. Progressive policies have become a deal breaker.
This is what you’re saying is one of “two evils”?
Give me a break.
Do you want things to get better or do you want to scream “perfection only!” and watch it get worse?
Cause that’s what we’re living right now.
We’re living in a refusal to vote for and celebrate the successful harm reduction, or “lesser of two evils,” as you say.
There are rarely examples where we actually get to see what happens if the “lesser of two evils” wins.
And the thing is, when they win, they’re shit on so successfully that we lose next time. Again, Biden.
They do something, or many many things right and the goal post gets moved, again and again.
In the end, the only knowledge anyone has of their actions is that they can’t do anything right.
That’s a dangerous way of seeing the world.
I know this cause we are living it.
What is happening right now is a product of that way of thinking.
I don’t need to find statistics or read a report cause this is our reality.
This is what happens when people refuse to vote for and celebrate the wins of “the lesser of two evils.”
When people choose a candidate in the primary who has no chance of a snowball in hell of winning and then complain and don’t vote when a candidate they REALLY didn’t like becomes the party nominee.
This is our life.
We don’t have to imagine it.
And yet, the mantra hasn’t changed. The goalpost keeps being moved. Dems don’t get any credit for doing ANYTHING right. People spread demands that are literally impossible and convince other people that they are not only possible, but easy. And enough people refuse to vote for harm reduction that the harm is constantly increased.
Perfection is the enemy of progress. That’s not just a catchy phrase, it’s a fact.
If Al Gore had won, we would be A LOT further along on climate than we are now, and we would not have gone into Iraq.
If Hillary Clinton had won, we wouldn’t have lost the Supreme Court. We would still have Roe and affirmative action and the VRA and the Chevron Doctrine.
If Kamala Harris had won, we wouldn’t be at war with Venezuela and Iran and possibly Cuba and maybe Greenland? Trans people would not be attacked at the federal level. Immigrants would not be kidnapped off the streets. We would still have the Department of Education and labor and a DoJ that doesn’t do the president’s bidding.
THIS is the result of refusing to vote for and support the lesser of two evils, WE ARE LIVING IT!
So maybe going forward we stop. We give a chance for the lesser of two evils to actually work. To scream from the rooftops every time they do right thing. We don’t just vote for it once, but do so over at least a decade.
Cause we’ve tried your way. It hasn’t worked. This exact moment that you are reading this post is proof of that.
So let’s try this way, for once. Let’s give this country a fighting chance at actual progress.
Actually, I have to say a bit more about the Hungarian elections. Even tho I know the hype is mostly died down now. Many people posted about it, about how it's just about going out and voting and it's all just kumbaya from there (also including my post from the night of the election) but that is not actually true.
There were many factors that played into this landslide victory, that would probably be hard to replicate in other countries, but I will still lay it out, in case this is useful to anyone in countries in similar situations.
Péter Magyar was an insider
He was a Fidesz (Orbán's party) insider, he is actually the ex-husband of a former minister, though he didn't hold any prominent positions before. This is important, because it made it a lot harder for the government to get an angle on him. They couldn't really say that he's a buffoon or corrupt or any other shit they smeared the 'traditional' opposition with, because that would all come back to them.
And this means that you can't let someone's background cloud your vision. You have to listen, even if you don't like where they came from.
2. He was extremely tight lipped about important issues during the campaign
Hungary is a relatively conservative country. That doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of people with leftist values, but - especially after 16 years of constant conservative propaganda poisoning society against progressive values - you just can't get wide support if you get caught up in hot-button issues. Let's take Pride for example. Orbán tried to ban Budapest Pride after a long anti-LGBT campaign, and Magyar got a lot of criticism from opposition media for not taking a stand on the issue, even after the Pride was held despite the ban - and was the largest Pride in my country's history.
LGBT issues are important to me, and they are important to a lot of left leaning people, but the reality is that it's not important to (or are even negatively viewed by) a large part of the population.
In most countries - ESPECIALLY when people in power turned LGBT rights into a poisoned pill - you can't win an election if you get 'branded' with being a SJW. And yeah, it made my hackles rise that he didn't give a clear answer about it, only that under his leadership everyone in the country would have the right to protest and right to assembly.
Was that enough? No. Was that more than what we got from Orbán? Yes.
It was only an incrementally better stance than Orbán's, but it WAS better.
3. Magyar put huge emphasis on rural voters and on getting national symbols back from the far right
The opposition of most authoritarians is concentrated in urban areas. It's much easier to develop more progressive leaning values if you are constantly exposed to people of different cultures and lifestyles than your own, but that is not the case in rural areas, especially if the government has huge media presence that feeds more isolated people fear and propaganda.
Péter Magyar went on a giant campaign, holding civic meetings in sometimes bigger, sometimes tiny towns. He wasn't afraid to get close to people. Much of his first such campaigns was largely spent with him talking to people from the back of a pickup (hastily spraypainted our national colors) and answering their questions directly.
Like, literally.
He met hundreds of thousands of voters face-to-face.
By the end of his campaign, he held up to four or five such meetings a day all over the country. He'd been in bigger cities multiple times, he'd been in every voting district. His last tour had more than 500 stops. And this is a tiny country.
What I want to say with this is that, you can't do this without a) putting in the fucking work, and b) leaving the population centers, where your supporters already are.
He and his team also had a very good sense for marketing shit. In pretty much every country I know of, the far right is always fucking appropriating national/folk symbolism, and they'd been great about claiming them back, and giving people a common ground. Like his party's theme song is a very popular Hungarian folk song. That sort of shit.
4. Top notch investigative journalism
Péter Magyar's whole bid for power started with a scandal that came from investigative journalists. The details are not important now, but one of the 'pawns' that Orbán decided to sacrifice to calm the public was Magyar's ex-wife. That was what started this whole thing, what made him turn against his former community. And during the last years - and especially during the last weeks before the election - the remaining independent media kept coming out with more and more major scandals. You have to keep supporting independent media, or the opportunity may never come to change your government.
I could go on for a lot longer, but tumblr is telling me that this post is getting too long lol. Anyway.
My general point still stands. If your house is on fire, you can’t be like ‘well that’s not the fireman I imagined’. Even if it's a bit more complex than that.
USAmericans - pay attention. You aren't going to get perfect. You are going to get better than.
Coming off an authoritarian regime like we have now, you have to focus on "better than".
ANYTHING better than. If you get hung up on your single issue darling and "protest" by not voting again, we are all going to be stuck under their thumb another 4 years.
"Better than" is just what it says - Better. Couldn't we all use a little "better" right now?
Chapters: 11/11
Fandom: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan, Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Nico di Angelo/Will Solace
Characters: Nico di Angelo, Will Solace, Hazel Levesque, Original Demigod Character(s) (Percy Jackson), Drew Tanaka, Aphrodite Cabin (Percy Jackson), Hephaestus Cabin (Percy Jackson), Leo Valdez, Percy Jackson, Naomi Solace, Persephone (Percy Jackson), Hades (Percy Jackson), Apollo (Percy Jackson), Clarisse La Rue
Additional Tags: solangelo, Wedding Fluff, Songfic, Title From an Alex Warren Song
Summary:
The days leading up to Nico and Will's wedding are filled with secrets, songs, and stress - and maybe some gifts from the gods.
People still doing "do you think voting can fix this" memes when the answer to the question "when did voting last end an authoritarian regime" is "two days ago"
Reblogged this earlier, but doing so again to add:
Hey we all remember 2020, right? When we voted out Donald Trump the first time??? That was a thing that happened a mere six years ago, and yes, America subsequently massively fucked it up and voted him back in, but we did remove him by voting once before.
Anyone also remember 2024, when Jair Bolsonaro was removed by voting in Brazil? And when he tried a coup, Brazil actually fucking punished him, disqualified him from running, and sent him to jail, instead of letting him off scot-free to do it again?
Also a spate of worldwide post-Trump elections, where the far-right wasn't in power per se but was gunning to be, and voting ensured they stayed out (2025 Moldova, 2025 Romania where massive protests annulled Russian meddling and forced a re-run where the pro-EU candidate won, 2025 Canada where the Conservatives lost after previously being up 20 points, 2025 Australia where the far right was just fuckin wiped out, 2025 Netherlands where Geert Wilders lost, AND SO FORTH).
And of course, the result referenced in the original post, 2026 Hungary where Viktor Fucking Orbán was removed by voting? Despite the massive structural hurdles facing the Hungarian voting public, far more than is the case in America even now?
(Lololol the Kremlin and Trump have immediately pivoted to "Orbán who? Never heard of him. Never knew him. Shh.")
Anti-voting has always been a deeply stupid ideology by people who want miraculous revolution to be suddenly achieved with no downsides and no widespread catastrophe, by doing nothing more than posting violent rhetoric online. Because they have no interest in actually doing the kind of hands-on, slow, systematic work that leads to positive social change in real life, and because they have no understanding of how anything actually works.
Relentless, hypocritical, purity-test politics are literally the best friend of authoritarians everywhere, because they ensure that liberal/left coalitions will never get their fucking act together long enough to put their weight behind the non-authoritarian candidate.
We've all said this before, but sometimes it bears restating.
Nobody has ever suggested that social change can be achieved solely by voting in decent or lesser-evil candidates. Voting is one tiny part of that effort. "Oh so you just want us to vote and do nothing else??" No. No, nobody has ever said that. You can and you should do a lot more than that: protest, mutual aid, fundraising, organizing, pressure campaigns, community protection groups, literally whatever. You can and should continue to hound the politicians you voted for if they're not living up to their campaign promises, as long as you actually voted for them in the first place.
Okay guys, so on the eve of getting rid of our fucking authoritarian leader, I will tell you how we did it, despite the governments overwhelming media presence and fucking undercover operations against the opposition.
It was actually said best by a Hungarian comic, I'm paraphrasing a bit: If your house is on fire, you can't be like 'well that's not the fireman I imagined'.
I know it's been said a thousand times before, I know everybody is raging against having to vote for a less than ideal candidate, but today has proven that it fucking works. It's the only thing that works. And if the new guy is just a step closer to what you want? That's a fucking win. That's a fucking step in the right direction.
Is Péter Magyar going to usher in gay marriage and UBI? No. But he's not going to ban pride, like Orbán tried. Is he going to cut all ties with Russia? Probably not, but is he going to make sure that we stay in the EU? Fuck yeah. And over Orbán, that's a fucking improvement, and I will take it gladly.
Same anon from a while back about the hungarian election - not only did he lose, he actually did end up losing about as badly as Dutton did here last time. I wasn't expecting that. Truly, the crabs, they rave today.
As per the Guardian liveblog, at this point with 97% of the vote in, Tisza will have the crucial 138 seats, or 2/3 majority in Parliament, to start fully dismantling Orbanism. That is HUGE. I realize they're still a center-right conservative party, but they're still greatly preferable to the literal center of anti-EU illiberal Russian-loving autocracy, which is what Orban has been for the past 16 years and which is why the global far-right pulled out all the stops to help him. Hilariously, as I have posted about, this included sending JD "Justkilled Dapope" Vance to Budapest to "help" Orban's electoral chances, where he seems to have done what JD Vance does. Lol. Lmao. ROTFLMAO, even. Delicious. While the risk of post-electoral batfuckery is not totally gone, at least Orban did quickly concede, so it'll be hard to come back from that.
Magyar's speech has been about restoring democracy, kicking out Orban stooges, realigning with the EU and NATO, and other things that would make a huge difference, such as y'know, Orban not instantly nuking every EU decision to help Ukraine and leaking internal discussions to Russia. Putin is having a bad night tonight; Trump is having a bad night tonight; all the European far-right parties who openly hanker to emulate Orban are having a bad night; Netanyahu is having a bad night tonight; it's generally just a truly deserved "up yours" to the worst people in the world, and that is something we should all celebrate, especially in this stupid, stupid timeline. Congratulations to Hungary for actually removing their autocrat in a landslide, and congratulations to Budapest for the ongoing "eat shit fascists" street party; it is the best feeling in the world, and something one day that I too aspire to feel again. Now, please let us send Vance to the UK to campaign for Farage, and then send him back to follow Trump around. After that, Death of the Orange can only be a matter of time.
Reminder to all bitches: if they're coming to kill you, make them bring their own shovels. To me that's what voting is about, that's what living is about, that's what stubbornly persisting is about. For a lot of us world is full of people who want to bury you and to despair is to make it that much easier on them to get you in the ground. Fuck em! Don't just sit there. Don't just cooperate. Don't just wisely pontificate about how inevitable your doom is. If anyone is coming to Get You then damn well make them sweat for it.
yo, I don't think i've said this before but you were my first moot and i really appreciate you for that and you're awesome and amazing and all the other positive adjectives
OMG this is the sweetest message! You seriously just made my whole week! 😭
Fandom Life for Me @ladystark428 - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
