i just saw your post about how disney is probably expecting pjo s2 to flop and it got me thinking
most pjo fans will tell you that the sea of monsters is their least favorite book, for a variety of reasons, but as far as i've seen, it's definitely the least popular out of the series
i think with them announcing the casting for nico and bianca now, they're trying to rush us into season three so we can kind of just pretend season two doesn't exist, because we still need it for context, but maybe people won't focus on it too much if we drum up excitement for s3
anyway there's that
[one of the recent posts in question]
Oh yeah no, absolutely this is exactly what they're doing. Sea of Monsters suffers from what i like to call Second Book Syndrome, in which it's a book that is primarily the connective tissue that allows The Lightning Thief to smoothly go from a stand-alone book as it was originally intended to a five-book series. The problem is that because it is primarily connective tissue, it's very focused on Doing It's Job and that job is almost entirely in service to what's coming next, not what's in the book itself. Which means for most people, their favorite parts of the series are going to be on either side of that connecting book, not in the book itself. But it's an incredibly important puzzle piece.
The franchise is also FULLY aware that Nico is hands down the most popular character at this point. He is more popular than Percy, just objectively. I have seen it firsthand. Hearing the entire crowd of a general book tour cheer for Percy's name, and then cheer twice as loud for Nico's tells you everything you need to know. There's a REASON why they leaned on him so much with TSATS for distracting from Rick's massive PR mistake with Piper and Samirah and everything, especially because their company relies very heavily right now as billing themselves as progressive/"diverse" and Nico is a "diverse" character who simultaneously isn't very contentious in their eyes (explicitly queer, but not in too exciting of a way and also a white guy). So it makes perfect sense why they're leaning on Nico right now. They already did it in s1 by teasing the di Angelos cameo, and in s2 they're leaning heavily on Thalia because they know she is also an extremely popular first series character. They're popular and pushing anything involving them is free advertising to generate enough momentum for moving forwards.
The mantra of PJO TV at this point is basically just fanservice. It's why they're pushing Percabeth so much in s1 (and also into s2, inserting extra Percabeth scenes). It's why they're making a lot of the weird changes just to excuse random nuggets or other edits for the already established fans of the series. It's why they're not bothering to explain anything, just kind of vaguely gesturing to things expecting the audience to already be fans of the books and recognize it and clap along because they understood the reference. It's why they're strategically dropping casting announcements to drum up discussions and advertisement because they KNOW people will be more or less excited for specific news. They know s2 isn't going to preform well because most people don't care about Sea of Monsters or Tyson or Grover or Clarisse, and they've run out of stuff to announce for it that people care about. So they're leaning heavily on advertising the di Angelos/s3 because that's basically guaranteed hits where SoM can't generate it on its own.
