#gaea hoo

[nyxdreamweaver]

Hot Take: Gaia/Gaea should've been a morally gray antagonist in HOO.

In the first series, Kronos wanted to wage war on Olympus and take the throne. So having Gaea do the same thing in HOO makes the series so boring.

At least change the motivation for Gaea and why she does everything. Like, maybe she got tired of pollution and how humanity treats nature despite all that she did for them.

Maybe it's revenge for killing Pan (yk, the lord of the wild that Grover spent five plus books looking for, the one who died in PJATO, and had Grover crowned as the new lord of the wild? Remember him?)

Not to mention the amount of hype and build-up there was for her, and the fight only lasted a couple pages!? Last I checked: Gaea is a PRIMORDIAL, one of the FIRST protogenoi and the literal EARTH HERSELF. And yet Hazel, Leo, and Piper all manage defeat her so quickly?

Listen, I LOVE those guys to DEATH so much, and I know they are pretty strong, but they're not THAT powerful enough to take down a PRIMORDIAL ALONE without the help of a GOD.

The war against Kronos in TLO took about half the book and he's barely as powerful compared to Gaea herself. Make it make sense Richard!!

[manygeese]

ough look at me obsessed with another musical. unrelated but who would be who in a sweeney todd pjo au. i think there are a couple ways this could go but this is my main one

sweeney: reyna. she deserves to murder people

and if reyna is sweeney that means begger woman/lucy = jason and mrs. lovett = piper (i love slightly insane piper thats my SHITTTT)

johanna: hazel, and if youre taking the easy route that means anthony = frank

pirelli = percy. and maybe toby = leo, but i could also see him and frank swapping

judge turpin: uh. gaea…? and beadle = kronos? or they could swap. or kronos could be turpin and beadle is one of the other titans

[clover-charlie]

hoo au where gaea takes leo under his wing to manipulate him. his life goes pretty much the same, he just has his 'mama gaea'. gaea also taking in octavian because his parents aren't home anyways, and he wants that love. gaea won't leave him.

everyone else that was important was already either too emotionally stable or already taken by a god.

[wanderingmind867]

For once, I don't think Gaea manipulated Leo and Hazel's connection. She uses it to manipulate them, but she isn't completely responsible for it. When Hazel Levesque left New Orleans on Gaea's orders, I suppose gaea could have implanted an instinct in Sammy Valdez to move to Texas. But I don't think even she could control sammy's daughter or granddaughter (i don't remember which) falling in love with Hephaestus. That was beyond her control to orchestrate, in my opinion.

But still, when Medea told Gaea of Leo Valdez (and Gaea subsequently killed his mom), I bet she put the pieces together then. And as any good villian would do, she promptly realized she had a good manipulation trick, ready and willing to be used. She may not have orchestrated their connection, but she sure can try to spin it to her advantage.

[wanderingmind867]

Gaea is horrifying. Hazel's story might serve as the best example of Gaea's pure evil nature. She possesed Hazel's mother, forced Hazel to try and revive Alcyoneus (by almost literally birthing him from the womb of the earth in Alaska), and was then perfectly willing to let Hazel's mom die.

Now that Hazel's returned to Alaska (and I'm at around the 420 page mark in The Son of Neptune as I write this at school), Gaea's trying to suffocate Hazel and Percy to death in Muskeg. Meanwhile, she's offering Hazel a dreamworld where she can grow up in New Orleans with her mother and her childhood crush. Also, she's trying to make her drowsy and weak with enchanted flowers and floral scents. And then she defends all of that with lines like these:

"What is real?" Gaea said. "Is your second life real, Hazel? You're supposed to be dead. Is it real that you're sinking into a bog, suffocating?"

And that, right there, encapsulates the horror of Gaea. She's the very earth we walk on, the beautiful but deadly plants and flowers are her appendages and tendrils on the mortal plain. She was an psychopathic wife (killing ouranous at the first signs of struggle) and an abusive mother and grandmother (convincing her sons, the male titans to kill their father; trying to overthrow and bathe in the blood of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, the olympians and demigods). She's a sociopathic monster, and I think she makes me despise the earth.

I already hated characters like Poison Ivy before Gaea, but Gaea makes me hate them even more. I want to imagine that characters like Poison Ivy are her avatars amongst mortals. If she could possess Marie Levesque, why can't she possess Pamela Isley? And that's now a more dark interpretation on Poison Ivy that I desperately want to see: Poison Ivy is a woman whose body has been stolen away from her by Gaea, and now she has to sit and watch as she loses control over her actions. That may be dark, but it might make Poison Ivy more compelling to me.

[wanderingmind867]

Mars refers to Thanatos and Gaea. But…those are Greek names. He should be saying Letus and Terra. I know, because Rick Riordan has an index at the back saying Thanatos's Roman name is Letus and Gaea is known as Terra to the Romans. I love my copies of the Heroes of Olympus series, but can't someone go in there and edit this to be more correct. I feel like characters like Mars should refer to Terra and Letus and not Thanatos and Gaea.

[wanderingmind867]

I don't think this is ever said, but I choose to believe Luke and Kronos were puppets of Gaea. I mean… it's clear Gaea has been influencing events for years now. She caused Esperanza Valdez's death. She made Hazel nearly resurrect Alcyoneus by possessing Marie Levesque. Gaea sleeps, but she's never not spreading her evil tendrils across earth.

So I say: why not retroactively have her orchestrate some more stuff from deep within her slumber? Say she implanted the desire to try and become oracle in May Castellan. Say she subtly influenced her son kronos into rising. Say she even whispered in Luke Castellan's ear alongside kronos, driving him mad with a desire to tear down Olympus.

Because sure, some of this was definitely done out of Luke and Kronos's own free will. But Gaea probably had some influence. I know her too well to say otherwise. She's the power behind her children. Kronos is awful, but who gave him the tools? Gaea.

[wanderingmind867]

Gaea's an amazing villian. She's irredeemably evil, but somehow that just makes her fun to read about and deal with. She's a cool villian.

Before he could say anything, a voice echoed across the valley: "You haven't won." Frank looked up. Shadows were shifting across the nearest mountain, forming the face of a sleeping woman. "You will never reach home in time," taunted the voice of Gaea. "Even now, Thanatos is attending the death of Camp Jupiter, the final destruction of your Roman friends." The mountain rumbled as if the whole earth were laughing. The shadows disappeared.