#losttrioposting

[bayetea]

so fucked up that thanks to leo the lost trio got to travel for the quest on a cool as fuck dragon and a cool as fuck helicopter meanwhile the neptune trio had to travel on this piece of shit boat and this piece of shit horse

[bayetea]

there's a line during the big medea fight in tlh (I love this fight) where jason and leo are being mind controlled into fighting each other and piper says "you can't fight! you're best friends!" and saying this is what finally breaks the spell after several failed attempts. on one hand we can just read this as piper's desperation and not much else but it really just reminds me of how roughly jason and leo's friendship is written. they have such a glaring show vs tell problem going on. this moment occurs only as far as the middle of the book, so jason and leo are definitely not best friends (not yet anyway - and leo has actually known piper for 4 months and they get along well enough, so why wouldn't she categorically be his "best" friend?). leo has spent no time at that point unpacking his false memories of jason - their being best friends is equally as false as piper being jason's girlfriend. I feel that this line is the start of an ongoing problem in the jason&leo dynamic throughout hoo where you're told repeatedly that they're besties but like. are they.....? are we shown that they enjoy each other's company THAT much or are we told? because by the end of hoo it seems like their best dynamics are with other characters and not each other

[bayetea]

Hiii, I love your posts, especially your Frank and Hazel ones! Do you have any more thoughts about Piper and her dad you would like to share? (you mentioned them one time in a post awhile back) Have a great day! <3

I've not exactly gelled these thoughts too thoroughly (nor do I imagine that I'm the first person ever to raise this point) but I think it's interesting how the text juxtaposes piper against her dad in their approach to management of their painful emotions/memories

so early on in tlh we're introduced to tristan and it's revealed that unlike other mortal parents in the franchise that we've seen in the first series, he doesn't know the true identity of the mother of his child - and not only that, he tells us that if he did ever find out that spirits/gods/etc were real then he flat out would lose his mind and not be able to handle it

piper parallels this pretty directly when she finds out that her memories of jason were fake, and it breaks her. jason was the boy that piper loved, and aphrodite was the only woman tristan had ever loved. I like that they share this particular conflict where their lovers are concerned, it's a nice throughline to their mutual connection to the goddess of love herself. piper's memories of jason weren't real, she doesn't seem to know the "real" jason at all. tristan did know aphrodite but likewise, he never got to know the real aphrodite either

but piper decides that she still wants something real with jason. she exercises her agency in this bizarre circumstance where it hitherto has been so limited, i.e. "the memories were fake, but I still want to make something real out of this". I think that's an important thing about piper to understand here (see my other post about how the fake memories were piper's own fabrication all along), she tells us explicitly that she believes she can salvage a real romance from the possibility of love with jason that she saw through the mist

so we see in the above excerpts that tristan has the opposite experience. what he experiences upon being confronted with the reality of the godly world is utter horror. he can't begin to cope with what the monsters did to him when he was captured, nor can he make sense of the reveal that his daughter is a demigod, that the one woman he ever loved was a goddess. these memories are too difficult and painful for him to deal with, so he makes the decision to forfeit them completely by drinking the amnesia potion. piper wants her fake memories to be real; tristan needs his real memories to be fake, just like we were told at the start of tlh when he states that if he really believed in myths and magic, he wouldn't be able to sleep at night

leo (the orange quote) and jason play into this idea as well, i.e., hera takes away jason's memories and leaves him with nothing, or she (in tía callida form) tells leo that it's time for him to stop running away from his memories. just as "death" is the core motif of son of neptune, I see "memory" as the core motif of the lost hero; false memories, lost memories, painful memories, joyous memories, and how you decipher and confront or run away from them - it's interconnected to all three tlh protagonists in multifaceted ways, but I think that tristan and piper are the ones that embody this theme most impactfully because the parallel is so direct. tristan and his life and baggage and relationship to piper is definitely one of my favorite things about this book!