breakdown of clovis's pjosceu fic
okay i'm back for another post in this little series! today we're going over clovis's pjosceu fic and its themes and meaning. check out the previous one on connor's fic if you haven't already.
this is what i had set up for clovis's fic:
trauma response: self-neglect
premise: "being willing to sacrifice all of yourself to find yourself and your supposed purpose."
themes: abandonment, unimportance, tiredness, purpose, responsibility
clovis's fic mainly revolves around one main thing: him wanting to be someone of purpose. this is expressed through him trying to find his parentage and through his powers. he tries very hard to find out who his father is and to understand what the "point" of him being a demigod is. later in the fic, clovis yearns to be seen and accepted as someone of repute, and therefore sacrifices a lot of his own health in order to do this for people, following this mindset of "i need to do something/provide something for others in order to be of use". he has a very... capitalistic (for lack of better word) viewpoint on life, i guess. this is also kind of a reflexive response towards the neglect minor gods receive in camp half-blood; clovis attempts to "prove himself" because he doesn't want to be "useless".
i took a somewhat (i think?) unique perspective on clovis's constant sleeping for this fic. i portray it as a symptom of deprivation due to him not being able to control his powers, and later, not controlling them properly. his constant dozing, in the context of my fic, is because he is genuinely not asleep when he's "asleep": he's awake in the dream world. this is a pretty obvious metaphor of his self-neglect: the more he stays awake (as he does it to help people), the more tired he gets—the more he tries to prove himself, the more he hurts himself. this is supposed to show that... you're not supposed to be killing yourself over achieving goals or helping others, which clovis does understand eventually get over by starting to fix his sleep schedule!!
there's also a point in the story where hypnos points out that all of clovis's lack of sleep is due to his own hand. clovis initially tries to blame it on his powers, but really it's the misuse of powers that causes his pain: he doesn't take responsibility for the negatives that affect him and he is only able to get better when he does.
detracting from clovis's personal character arc, we also have a little side story with ethan nakamura and, as my sister calls it, "the angsty gay situationship they have going on". ethan is introduced as kind of a foil to clovis: they both sacrifice a lot of themselves in order to support a "bigger cause". but while clovis reels this in before having a doomed fate, ethan doesn't (like in canon).
i think i mainly put this in to show that, despite being a reflex or response of trauma and their environment, a lot of what occurs to campers is of their own choice. a lot of the pjosceu is about free will: just like connor has no control over other people leaving him in his fic, clovis has entire control over the pains that befall him (at least the ones i serve in the story).
anyway there's my incoherent ramble of the day, i hope it provided some insight to readers. if you haven't read my pjosceu series on ao3, be sure to, because i give all the love (and angst) to everyone's favorite side characters.
