Hi, I was just re-reading The Last Olympian for the third time, and I’d like to point out a couple little discrepancies I noticed. I recently discovered this blog and I thought some of the mistakes you found were really clever, by the way, so thanks for writing! Anyway, two things:
This first one isn’t really a mistake, it just seemed a little weird to me. At the beginning of the book, when Percy is on “The Princess Andromeda”, right before he and Beckendorf blow it up, he fights a giant crab. You probably remember this scene, and anyway, when figuring out how to kill the enormous crab he thinks back to a trip that he, his mom, and Paul Blofis took the previous winter. They went to Montauk, and apparently on this trip Paul took him crabbing. He remembers Paul telling him how “crabs have a chink in their armor”. The full quote is below:
Then a weird thought came to me. Last Christmas, my mom and I had brought Paul Blofis to our old cabin in Montauk, where we’d been going forever. Paul has taken me crabbing, and when he’d brought up a net full of the things, he’d shown me how crabs have a chink in their armor, right in the middle of their ugly bellies.
Ok, so for those of you who are not from New York like me, a couple of things about the seasons here. Our summers are pretty warm, like 90° Fahrenheit tops. They can get kinda humid in the city too. But the winters can be cold, not as cold as, say, New England, but definitely below freezing. It starts to snow around the beginning of December. And for those of you who don’t know anything about crabs, they hibernate in the winter. So, yeah, you could go crabbing on Long Island in the winter, you might even catch one or, if you’re lucky, two. But the water would be freezing, and you certainly wouldn’t come up with “a net full of the things”.
Next something further into the book, after Percy and Nico go to Central Park and wake up Grover after Morpheus caused him to sleep for two months. They’re about to go to the down to the Underworld through The Door of Orpheus when Percy does something that doesn’t make sense:
“Ready?” Nico asked me. “It’ll be fine. Don’t worry.” He sounded like he was trying to convince himself. I glanced up at the stars, wondering if I would ever see them again. Then we plunged into darkness.
Ok, so … Percy “glances up at the stars”? If you’ve ever been to New York City, you’ll know that there AREN’T stars, not that you can see, even in Central Park. You can hardly see them in Westchester (which is the mostly suburban county abone NYC). The light pollution from the city is so great that the only thing in the night sky is the moon, the glow of the city, and the occasional pane flying past. Ok, SOMETIMES, on an especially clear night, if you squint REALLY HARD, you might be able to make out one, possibly two, of the thousands upon thousands of stars that would otherwise be visible. There’s absolutely no way, however, that you could just glance up at the sky and gaze at the stars. This sort of disappointed me, because Rick Riordan does such a great job writing about New York, other than these and that one time that Percy and Annabeth meet Rachel Elizabeth Dare in Times Square. No New Yorker in their right mind ever goes to Times Square, much less arranges a meeting there. But anyway, that’s another subject. This has gotten pretty long, so goodbye!
@rickriordanmistakes comment: First off, wow. I am amazed by how in-depth this “mistake” went! It was so intriguing to read because I don’t live in New York so I would never have caught these discrepancies. I don’t think I can even argue with it! Anyone else wanna take a stab at this marvelous submission?
