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!