#rr crit

[justaz]

(@geemspop on tiktok)

i’m sick to my stomach over this actually

[justafewberries]

after noticing an unfortunate trend of an increasing reliance on potty humor in the past PJO universe releases, i've gone over every PJO book I can find and documented the instances of potty humor. I wanted to know what the numbers said, so here they are:

I coded each instance of potty humor jokes (PHJs) under eight categories:

Fart

Poop

Butt

Burp

Pee

Underwear

Toilet

Bathroom

I searched each work for those words, then determined if the instance fell into one or more of the following criteria:

Instance used as a punchline

Instance used as a humorous location or object

Instance framed as an unexpected reaction (e.g., random farting, nervous burping)

If the use of the term did not apply to any of these categories, I did not code for it. For example, a hero may use the "butt of the sword" in combat. In this instance, I omitted the use of the term from the overall tallied count, as it was not a joke, it was a natural descriptor.

For each book, I totaled the number of PHJs to create a graph.

The data from 2005-2009 suggest a moderate usage of PHJs in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians Series. Many of these jokes are underwear (such as in the case of the Minotaur's choice of dress) or bathroom related (upon meeting Clarisse).

The data from 2010-2014 are fairly moderate as well. Blood of Olympus features the most PHJs at seven, with Leo ending up in his underwear twice, Frank's bathroom habits mentioned humorously once, and a few other coded instances of potty humor. Mark of Athena and The Demigod Diaries, an off-shoot book, only feature one PHJ each.

2016-2020 shows a significant increase compared to the two prior ranges. Each Trials of Apollo book features at least five PHJs. The Dark Prophecy features a whopping 18 PJHs, The Tower of Nero has 14, And The Burning Maze has 10. This range also includes two "other" classified books, one of which, Camp Jupiter Classified published in 2020, features 13 PHJs.

2023-2025 consists of the senior series and the Nico and Will series. The newest book, Court of the Dead, contains 32 PHJs, the second most of all time. The worst offender is Wrath of the Triple Goddess, which features 36 PHJ's, twice as many as the highest number in ToA.

I then took the overall total averages of PHJ's per book in a series to determine if there is a trend based on a series alone. I omitted books I coded as "other" as they range so broadly in date and often did not fit directly within a series, it would not provide any productive result. The averages are as follows:

PJO: 2.8 HoO: 3.4 ToA: 10.8 Sen. Series: 17 Nico & Will: 19

This study is limited, as potty humor does not solely consist of using the actual term. For instance, Percy wets himself in WotTG, but it does not explicitly say the word "pee" in the action. Thus, it was not counted in this study, meaning there are more instances that I was unable to feature.

While potty humor can draw in very young readers, it lacks the seriousness that some of the topics Riordan and Oshiro attempt to cover in Court of the Dead. It becomes dissonant to read jokes about a monster with nervous flatulence issues when the writers attempt to use the novel to cover heavier issues. The trend of an increased use of potty humor makes the books feel more superficial than those written before them.

The PJO series used potty humor sparingly. It wasn’t oversaturated, but it offered some well-timed comedic relief. The Senior Series and Nico & Will series, however, seem to rely a bit too much on juvenile humor to lighten the heavier topics Riordan used to handle with more nuance in the original five books.

When every punchline revolves around bathroom humor, it starts to feel like the book belongs in the bathroom, too. The "comic relief" Riordan and Oshiro are aiming for ends up feeling less like relief and more like… constipation.

[ahotknife]

as someone not planning on reading the books, what’s the deal with tlg? what happens in it that everyone dislikes?

takes a very deep breath okay well. it's a lot. i'm gonna try to be concise, since i know i won't be brief. or maybe this will need to be multiple posts i don't know. but we'll get going and see what happens. maybe i will expand on some individual topics separately. but for now this is what i think most of the biggest issues + concerns + takeaways are.

the first thing i have a really hard time with is how shane is handled in general. i'm sure everyone's tired of hearing that but like... y'all it's so bad. he suffers so much undue humiliation in this book and i can think of no other way to describe it. he is the best player in the league. he's one of the best players in the world. tell me why everyone is constantly mocking and deriding him? and i'm not even being sensitive he is genuinely the butt of every single joke in the whole entire book. like what the fuck is this.

he's also so uncharacteristically CRUEL at several points it's honestly mind boggling. "your mom hasn't been texting you all week" "sorry i don't want to smoke pot" et cetera like who the fuck is this? it is ooc and it's just to manufacture misery for ilya. really weird.

RR needs to stick to only writing white characters because the way she handles her characters of other races is shockingly offensive. and that's that on that.

everybody's wearing really bad outfits the whole time. floral print teal tanktop and gray athletic shorts and black toms. jesus christ

moving to ottawa and joining a terrible hockey team destroys ilya's mental health and yet the book continues to try to convince us it was not a mistake. again: what the fuck is this?

the conflict within the plot of this novel is weak and the characters suffer unjustly at the hands of it. we needed there to be conflict because a book is supposed to have conflict but we picked the worst possible conflict ever and then did a really bad job handling it. 0/10

hayden pike needs jail time. he needs to be shot. he is a villain. shane accepts and forgives so much bullshit. how stupid does hayden have to be in order to do something so fucking careless? and then they forgive him and within a page it's over. when personally i think they should've beaten him to death with hammers. he quite literally put their LIVES at risk. jesus christ. and he is never able to actually stick up for shane in a way that matters. he immediately folds. it's despicable.

shane is clearly suffering from an eating disorder. this is not up for debate. i don't care what RR says. he's got an ED. and yet, like everything else in this book that has potential to be meaty/interesting, this eating disorder magically fixes itself. after he gets outed and eats a snickers bar. then in a later timeskip chapter we're told he has beer and chocolate cake because he "decided he was still a good athlete even if he ate burgers" the fuck? cus that's totally how lifelong eating disorders work and are "cured". sure rachel

we spend paragraphs upon paragraphs early in the book with shane where he thinks about how much he loves his team, loves montreal, loves winning games, loves winning cups, plans to retire in montreal et cetera. THEN literally and i am not even kidding we get ONE throwaway line about him deciding to leave. he simply up and decided he didn't want to be in montreal anymore. we get no character moment. no exploration. no on page discussion, even. it is one throwaway line in a TIMESKIP chapter. the BIGGEST career move of his life, one that could quite honestly prematurely end his career, one that no doubt caused him such agony and such distress. and we get one line. he spends no time on it. we spend no time with him while he spends time on it. absolutely batshit insane

ilya's depression is built up throughout the entire book and also again dealt with in a few throwaway lines. he tells shane that he gets sad sometimes "like his mother" and shane's like okay we'll get you on drugs. and then in another throwaway timeskip it's mentioned he takes meds. and that's all she wrote. that's literally it.

ilya's therapist fucking sucks. absolutely fucking sucks. her practices are shockingly bad and irresponsible.

ilya clearly subconsciously blames shane for his problems and blatantly resents the fact he moved to ottawa. he never addresses any of these thoughts or concerns directly with shane. mind you shane never asked him or forced him to do this but ilya's therapist is like "how many things do you do because shane wants you to" bitch NO THINGS!!! THAT IS NOT WHO THEY ARE. sorry i'll stop yelling i know we're trying to have a civilized conversation

i fucking hate "that's why you're my favorite son" i fucking hate it sorry it's terrible. i wrote about this before so i won't spend more time on it but just know i fucking hate it.

it's also mentioned in a throwaway line that shane came out to his team at some point and some of them "don't like it". but we never see this scene, and we never find out what kind of conflict exists in the dressing room beyond JJ being an absolutely terrible person.

everybody is always making fun of shane and i don't like it. despite the fact he is clearly visibly struggling. the way the other characters interact with him is bizarre. he's referred to as "miserable" and "annoying" by his friends and loved ones. there's teasing and then there's like okay well is shane just a nuisance to you? is shane just a nagging bitch wife to you? is shane just here to prop up the scenery? what is he doing here? can we get him out?

the "would you choose me" bullshit is stupid. shane is not the bad guy for caring about his career. conversely neither is ilya the bad guy for wanting to feel valued. but that is not how that conversation should have happened. but shane was not the villain. i will stand by this.

shane mentions in his internal narration that he doesn't like it that ilya is playing on a bad team. ilya mentions in his internal narration that he doesn't like playing on a bad team. this begs the question: why the FUCK did he move to a bad team? nobody likes this. nobody is having fun with this. nobody wants to be here.

the way RR handles kink + their sex life pisses me off and is quite honestly at some points contradictory. what do you mean shane doesn't like to be called a good boy? and once again we cannot ever actually fully commit to a kink or a sex act without first including a disclaimer. "shane wasn't actually into [blank] but he likes it when they [blank]" well i have news for you man, that means you're into that. sorry. i know. we'll give you some time to grieve you sick fucking pervert. you're going to burn in hell for being into that, btw. just so you know.

shane is pretty explicitly dealing with a lot of internalized homophobia that manifests itself as actual homophobia directed towards other gay characters in his internal monologue. i have nothing else to say about this at the moment i'm just putting that out there

the writing is bad. there's no prose worth mentioning. some of it's corny as fuck. it feels like we just sat down and put some thoughts in a word doc and then said "yep that's good" and sent it to print. like it simply cannot be taken seriously. what is this now honey i had to avert my eyes on account of the embarrassment

as i said in my comments on the first book, most of shane's narrative exists to punish him. can't make heads or tails of why. "was shane a terrible friend" no, bitch. the fuck. what are we doing. he hates himself. we never find out why. we never get to see him Stop hating himself. the way he feels about himself is evident in the way he feels about others and the choices he makes. his lack of self esteem and immense control issues are quite literally running his whole entire life. and everyone in his life constantly reinforces his beliefs about himself. he's annoying, he's miserable, he's too controlling, he's not a good captain, he's not even his own parents' favorite son. like what are we doing? and why are we doing it?

and every time RR speaks on this book i just get madder. that post where she was like "i know it must seem like i was very hard on poor shane in the second book" poor shane? i'm not sure i care for your tone.

the plane crash shit is stupid.

the plot is lazy. the conflict is bad. the characters are not themselves. which is weird, because they should be. this is where they come from. this is the world they exist in. but who are they?

you can say/think whatever you want but it is clear to me from this book that RR is not interested in shane as a character, even a little bit. everything that happens to him happens off page. everything that matters to him is taken away or permanently altered and he just has to deal with it. he does whatever the narrative needs him to do at that moment even if he wouldn't do it because somebody has to do it. it's lazy. it's not fair. it's honestly so bizarre i can't wrap my head around it.

you cannot make me believe shane is behaving in character in this book. he is short tempered, yes. he gets irritated, yes. he is rigid and uptight, yes. all of those things. he is not cruel or unkind. and he is always different with ilya, a softer version of himself in some ways. i want to help, how is your father, do you like russia, are you okay, i was thinking about you, tell him i'm okay or he'll worry, et cetera. he is always so brave. he is always trying so hard to make those emotional bids for connection. he is always trying. and he loves ilya so much. he wants to help however he can. and he genuinely does. the flippant, dismissive, MEAN way he addresses ilya and their issues in this book is ridiculous. it's ridiculous.

i've seen the argument made that "some adults prioritize their relationships" and "people grow and change" well shane and ilya would not throw away their careers so they could fuck more often. sorry. they would not give up literally everything they have ever lived for or worked to achieve in order to have a dog and a white picket fence together. they only get to play hockey at their level until the age of 35ish. shane's 30 in this book. you're telling me they wouldn't hang on for a couple more years, a couple more stanley cups, and retire together at the age of 40? they have the rest of their fucking lives to do this shit. they would not. would NOT do it at this point in their careers. they basically commit career suicide. they would not do that. they wouldn't. sorry. and the priority for them has never been the relationship. and it shouldn't be. it doesn't have to be. that doesn't mean they don't love each other. it just means their system of prioritization is compatible, and they would be able to come up with something that works. they are quite literally neutered by the forceful imposition of heteronormativity in this book.

i don't think the conversation had with the head of the NHL or whatever he's supposed to be would go down like that. bare minimum they would've had legal representation present.

i absolutely fucking despise this scene with literally every single cell of my being this actually turned my stomach when i read it. what's going on here. why is this a humiliation ritual. he's the best hockey player in the world. what's happening.

i'll be quite honest and for real with you i have to expand on this: the introduction of heteronormativity to their storyline literally kills their dreams. i've talked about this before and i'll link the rest of my meta below but she absolutely destroys these characters by changing them to fit the "dream". everyone wants a house in the suburbs, right? everyone wants two kids and a dog, right? once she "cures" them of their unsavory need to compete + win, then they just become something else. and i don't like what they become. shane would have to be dragged off the ice and shot in the parking lot behind the arena like a lame horse before he would willingly retire.

it's mentioned dozens of times over how much no longer winning fucks with ilya's brain and his self esteem. to the point where he develops passive suicidal ideation. this is bad. all bad. all the choices made for the characters were bad. it makes no sense.

the plane crash shit is stupid. said this already but i'm just reminding you. it's stupid.

the way shane proposes is stupid. sorry we've been dealing with emotional turmoil for the last few months but you just almost died so i think we should set up a couple of lawn chairs in the backyard and get married. hello?

this isn't even everything but like. isn't this enough? baffling. some other meta i've already made about this topic:

ottawa plotline crit 1 2 3 4

RR + shane’s book characterization 1 2 3 4 5 6

TL;DR: i hate this goddamn book. sorry this got so long but like. YOU ASKED! and i answered. and i'm sure i'll have more to say. sorry i got kind of riled up this is mostly word vomit. but like jesus christ. jesus christ. i feel like shane and ilya are trapped in here and i can't get them out. i can't save them. all i can do is watch with unending wide-eyed horror as things get worse and worse. oh my god

[patronsa1ntofnothing]

Rick Riordan’s switch up on Percy is so funny to me. In older books it’s painfully obvious that Riordan preferred him, with his constant insistence that Percy is the strongest despite severely under-exploring everyone else’s powers, every character speaking highly of him, and his insane feats. In recent books, Percy is both demonised and flanderised. He has been dumbed down to the point of being unable to do anything without Annabeth, he’s being called out and blamed for things he didn’t do, and he’s just being bashed at every opportunity. Literally what happened???

[6noura]

Do you guys think about how the moment Percy was casted as blond, blue eyed boy his poverty wasn't mentioned, his abuser became a comic relief, the media calling him a delinquent and a terrorist was removed and camp never excluded him? Because I do, a lot

[edains]

Rick Riordan constantly trashing the movies for not sticking to his books then releasing a show in which he rewrites everything and loses the spirit of the books entirely

[phoenixystix]

What gets me about the Piper and Percy one-sided beef is that it’s a bad look for Piper’s character—not because she isn’t allowed to dislike Percy, because actually I think this dynamic could have been cool—but because she is wrong about him in exactly the same way he’s been misunderstood and underestimated for his entire life. Even more egregious that this is coming from Piper, of all characters, who is literally supernaturally gifted with the ability to read people.

It is already a questionable narrative choice because it made Piper look bad to a lot of readers—Percy is absolutely beloved, so it alienates Piper from a good chunk of the fanbase. But I think it could have worked had she been accurate in her assessment of Percy’s character, or at least it could have been interesting and defensible narratively (yes, there were always going to be readers who just hated her for not liking Percy and there’s no way around that. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t serve the narrative well). Percy is a very likable character, and although he is truly my favorite character (in anything, ever), we must admit that he is partly so likable because he’s the narrative’s favorite (at least, you know, before his author started openly resenting him lol). And it could have been interesting to see him from a different perspective that exposes more of his flaws, or perhaps views them as genuine flaws rather than endearing traits.

But the reason Piper knocks Percy is actually just because she thinks he looks less impressive than Jason, and that he looks like a troublemaker.

I’ll address the “unimpressive” part first. Yes, it’s annoying if you love Percy, but it’s also bad writing, because it hits with a “we’ve heard this song before.” Because we have! Percy’s story was a zero-to-hero tale. UNLIKE Jason, unlike Thalia, unlike even Luke, Percy is not a character looked to as a de-facto leader. When he first gets to camp, he has bursts of impressive potential, but he is inconsistent. Nobody knows what to make of him, and “the only thing [he] really excelled at was canoeing, and that wasn’t the kind of heroic skill people expected to see from the kid who had beaten the Minotaur.” The campers are explicitly said to be “watching” him and sizing him up. They are expecting more from him, and “the way they stared at [him] made [him] uncomfortable. [He] felt like they were expecting [him] to do a flip or something.” Clarisse targets him because she wants to prove her superiority and dispel the myth that he is “‘Big Three’ material.” He is practically laughed out the door of Cabin Eleven on his first introduction. After getting claimed, he’s ostracized and seen as an inconvenience who brought strife to the rest of the camp. He earns respect through the quest, but we have to rinse and repeat this next summer because of his association with Tyson. And then we rinse and repeat this AGAIN in book 3 because Thalia is older, cooler, a better fighter, has known Grover and Annabeth longer than Percy, and her dad is Zeus. Thalia gets chosen for the quest—Percy gets overlooked, again, and has to sneak onto it, again.

And then we have to consider what he’s like outside of camp—bullied in school, abandoned by the school system and never had a teacher before Chiron believe in him and actually strived to rise to Chiron’s expectations because he was so starved for encouragement, plays basketball in the corner at school dances, never had a single real friend before Grover, insecure about his financial situation, growing up with an overworked single mom and an abusive stepdad who verbally degrades him and makes his life miserable at every turn. Percy is a kid who doesn’t have friends to invite to his birthday party—canonically.

The shift into revered hero really only happens in Book 4, and I think the subtext of it strongly implies that puberty hit him hard that year because all of a sudden he has three different love interests (and one not-so-secret admirer in Nico), and he is blatantly unaccustomed to it because that’s never how it has been for him before. In book 2 he is saying no girl at his school would be caught dead calling his name, [heavily implied that] he is the mocked because Annabeth is out of his league, and then Circe makes him stand in front of a magical body-dysmorphia mirror and dwell on all the things he doesn’t like about himself (imagine ritualistically humiliating a 13-y/o kid in this way as an adult woman. Federal prison. Death penalty!) and in Book 3 he is lamenting that Annabeth is taller than him, and saying he feels uncomfortable talking to Bianca because he gets nervous talking to girls (patently untrue, there are many girls he does not get nervous talking to—but realistic for him to narrate because although he is close with Annabeth, he is more aware of her romantically now and therefore less comfortable with her, and I would argue he mentions it in this scene because he thinks Bianca is attractive and she’s close to his age whereas girls like Thalia, Clarisse, Zoe etc are not ever viewed that way by him). So it truly makes sense when in Book 4, he is absolutely dumbfounded by Calypso’s confession and completely at a loss for how to interact with Annabeth now that she’s made her feelings clear.

In his “hero” career, the shift also happens in Book 4—he has grown as a fighter and is even complimented on this by Luke, he achieves some of his most impressive stunts in this book and shows off his skills in the battle arena, and he’s used by Chiron as a reinforcement to send to the toughest parts of the battle. And the summer after that, because he’s one of the best fighters, he is used all the time on combat missions, like the one with Beckendorf at the start of Book 5. And I really don’t think I have to explain what happened in Book 5, lol.

So. No, Percy wasn’t just granted the revered-hero status because he looks the part—he earned it, with blood, sweat, and tears (literally). And Piper’s commentary on him is that after hearing all about his exploits, he doesn’t look the part. As if we don’t have like four-and-a-half books that already told us that, made all the more familiar by the fact that Percy is his own harshest critic. The other narrators in HOO is see a side of Percy he doesn’t often see in himself—the side we only get glimpses of, such as Rachel’s painting of him killing Anteus or Percy admitting (reluctantly) that he’s slicing through an entire army and laughing at the exhilaration of it. They also sometimes notice a sadness or an anger or an intimidation factor that Percy is often not aware of in himself. Piper, on the contrary, sees only the most surface-level thing, even though she is supposedly so good at reading people that she can interpret Annabeth and Chiron’s silent conversations after only knowing them for a day. So it reads like she’s just being a hater—and I do actually think that’s the correct interpretation of this moment, considering she’s explicitly comparing him to her boyfriend. And honestly, if Piper was just being a hater, then fine—I can accept that her attachment to her own boyfriend overrides her gifts, and that’s all very human and tells you something about Piper’s character.

But what REALLY frustrates me is the “troublemaker” assessment. Again, this is a girl who is good at reading people. A girl who has been bullied in school, and befriended Leo, who has also been bullied in school and abandoned by the institutional school system, sent to a place for kids that nobody wants to deal with. A girl who has ALSO been overlooked by authority figures and gotten into a lot of trouble for misunderstandings. And she is judging Percy and saying she would “[steer] clear [of him]” because she has enough trouble in her life. What annoys me is not so much that she’d avoid him, but that SHE IS WRONG in exactly the way that most of Percy’s authority figures have been wrong about him for his entire life! He is branded as a troublemaker, when he is actually a good kid that falls victim to unfair circumstances. How many times has he been in the wrong place at the wrong time, when he was actually trying to save innocent lives? This is a kid who had a nationwide manhunt started for him at the age of 12 by his abusive stepdad because he seemed like a juvenile delinquent, and guess what, he wasn’t! So it’s super corny to me to hear Piper say this—again, we know from BOOK ONE that Percy’s features have a “brooding look that had always gotten me branded a rebel.” And Piper—again, the character supposedly supernaturally gifted at reading people—falls for it and informs the reader that she would avoid him for that.

Knowing the context (as the average PJO reader ought to), Piper’s opinion comes across as judgmental and shallow. And to be honest, I think that may have been the source for at least some of the outrage—that this just feels wrong and we didn’t appreciate the tone of it, even if maybe people didn’t know why it bothered them so much. Because the reader knows that Piper is wrong. It provokes that same kind of feeling of frustration at the injustice that Percy has to continually endure throughout most of PJO for things that are outside of his control. And I have to say, Piper being a rich kid who intentionally acts out for attention and notably does NOT have the learning disabilities that Percy and MOST demigods do, being the one to mislabel Percy in this way, adds… a layer to this whole interaction that strikes me as icky. I do patently believe this was not the intention of Piper’s assessment, because she does explain that she would avoid him because she had “enough trouble in her life”---as in, she’s not thinking she’s better than Percy, she’s thinking she’s too much like him. But that kind of falls flat considering that she’s wrongfully judging him based on his appearance and that her reasoning doesn’t make sense considering her friendship with Leo. And then she doubles down on the assessment by saying that “she could definitely see why Percy needed Annabeth in his life. If anybody could keep a guy like that under control, it was Annabeth.” This quote reads as so blatantly derogatory to me that it totally overrides any attempt at making it seem like Piper is not being judgmental and condescending here.

This is made more explicit in their exchange with Bacchus, because, in an effort to hype up Piper’s diplomatic skills, Rick has her act shocked at how brazenly Percy speaks towards Bacchus. Sure, it makes sense for her to be taken aback—most people are by how Percy speaks to the gods. But the tone in this passage is that Piper is babysitting Percy (emphasis mine): “Piper had been watching with horrified fascination, the way she might watch a car wreck in progress. Now she realized Percy was not making things better, and Annabeth wasn’t around to rein him in. Piper figured her friend would never forgive her if she brought Percy back transformed into a sea mammal.”

But Piper is completely ignorant to the context behind this exchange. Percy has known Mr. D for five years. He has earned his reluctant respect, has had multiple one-on-one conversations with him, has been called the correct name by Dionysus, has been personally requested to keep his son safe in the war. Dionysus voted yes to make Percy immortal last summer. Meanwhile, Piper has never met Bacchus OR Dionysus. Out of the three people in this scene, she is the MOST ignorant, and yet we’re supposed to accept that she’s the authority. And what is even worse, is that Piper doesn’t realize what Percy already knows: Bacchus literally is too lazy to turn Percy into a dolphin and he’s not making a real threat. Percy knows that because he has tested the boundaries before (and when it became clear that Mr. D was no longer joking, it scared him enough to stop talking). So it’s just not convincing that Percy is in real danger in this exchange or that he needed Piper’s help. What’s more: Bacchus never had any intention of helping them, and Piper is just too slow to realize this, and she will subsequently admit that he was totally unhelpful! And the hilariously ironic cherry on top: later in the book, Percy is the one who successfully recruits Bacchus! It makes her come across as extremely arrogant to think that she would be more equipped at negotiating with a god than Percy, who has much, MUCH more experience doing this than Piper does.

Now, I think that this is a writing problem. Because fine, maybe we could use this moment to confront Piper’s arrogance and the fact that she completely underestimated Percy—but that doesn’t happen. But better yet, we could have used this moment to actually further both of their characterizations, with Piper realizing why Percy has earned so much respect (including from someone like Annabeth, who Piper CLEARLY immensely respects), and perhaps touching on her ever-present feelings of insecurity about not being good enough at diplomacy and feeling totally useless. It doesn’t make sense for Piper to think she’s better than Percy! It simply does not make sense for a character who is chronically self-doubting in their skills! And the reason it doesn’t make sense is because it’s just the author trying to convince us that Piper is just as necessary to the plot as Percy is. It’s even more annoying when Piper’s “diplomacy skills” are just flattering Bacchus’ ego and manipulating him to get what she wants, which is not remotely unique to Piper’s character. Percy and Annabeth do this literally all the time, and will continue to do it in the rest of the HOO series.

And it’s all just so frustrating and honestly kind of sad. Because there was potential for a whole lot of interesting tension between Percy and Piper. Percy resents spoiled rich kids who act out for attention and he’s so used to encountering them that he would peg Piper as one right off the bat. Consider this quote from the beginning of TLT: “The other guys were joking around, talking about their vacation plans. One of them was going on a hiking trip to Switzerland. Another was cruising the Caribbean for a month. They were juvenile delinquents, like me, but they were rich juvenile delinquents. Their daddies were executives, or ambassadors, or celebrities. I was a nobody, from a family of nobodies.” PIPER IS LITERALLY ONE OF THESE KIDS! You’re telling me that the kid who immediately understood that the Hermes cabin was full of neglected kids waiting for calls that would never come, who reminded him of the kids he went to school with—wouldn’t notice that quality in Piper right away? Because he would. But I actually think Percy has grown a lot and confronted some of these feelings of inadequacy around socioeconomic status, primarily through his friendship with Rachel, and he is able to see through the resentment and insecurity to recognize that the parental neglect Rachel suffers is a real problem, despite her being wildly privileged. And this journey started in TLT, where Percy realizes that he’s a far cry from having a “family of nobodies”—actually he, too, has one of the MOST famous and MOST powerful beings in the entire world for a dad, and that his dad doesn’t care about him (if you recall—he had chosen to think his father was dead, because that was less painful to believe, despite the fact that Sally intentionally never said that). And he empathized with the neglect that demigods receive from their incredibly powerful parents: “I thought about some of the kids I’d seen in the Hermes cabin, teenagers who looked sullen and depressed, as if they were waiting for a call that would never come. I’d known kids like that at Yancy Academy, shuffled off to boarding school by rich parents who didn’t have the time to deal with them. But gods should behave better.” And perhaps more on the nose: “I started to understand Luke’s bitterness and how he seemed to resent his father, Hermes. So okay, maybe gods had important things to do. But couldn’t they call once in a while, or thunder, or something? Dionysus could make Diet Coke appear out of thin air. Why couldn’t my dad, whoever he was, make a phone appear?” (I still think Percy accepts the bare minimum from Poseidon because it is simply less painful for him that way so I definitely don’t think he’s healed, but enough to have compassion for other abandoned kids, certainly). 

Percy could have really seen Piper in a way that Piper is used to seeing other people. I truly do think Percy as written in PJO would immediately see Piper’s choices in chopping off her hair and intentionally styling herself in weird clothing for what it really is: insecurity masking as confidence, acting out against her parents, and struggling to find her identity separate from her parents. (Percy is really, REALLY good at picking up on these things in PJO. And he ought to be, because he developed it as a survival skill growing up with Gabe and getting bullied.)

Piper’s writing has serious problems with it, many of which have been discussed in great length and that I don’t think I need to explain here. The only thing I’ll bring up, because I think it’s uniquely related to the Piper/Percy dynamic: it is not sufficiently addressed that Piper is accused of stealing things for fun/attention when she doesn’t actually steal things, and how her race might play a role in that narrative. It is not as simple as Piper being stereotyped by the narrative as a kleptomaniac—because Piper really isn’t and she really didn’t steal the BMW, the dealer gave it to her. But the narrative doesn’t really care about exonerating her. And to make matters much worse, there is not much meaningful reflection about her charmspeak being used for coercion, and how, although she didn’t understand what she was doing, she still got the car by manipulating the dealer with magic. And I bring this up simply to demonstrate that had we gotten to the bottom of Piper’s relationship with her parents and her issues with her own identity, then at least this problem could have been reconciled in a much more nuanced way. And I think that her relationship with Percy is fairly low-hanging fruit for how this could have been explored better, because Piper actually quite similar to Percy in that they’re both ‘kids troubled by unfair circumstances and not because they want to cause trouble,” even though on the surface her antics make her seem like she’s more like Matt Sloan (the bully from SOM who stole his daddy’s care and took it for a joyride).

Anyway. TL;DR: Rick did Piper dirty by writing that she thinks Percy is unimpressive and a troublemaker who needs to be reined in from shooting off at the mouth. And it actually botches her characterization, because she’s supposed to be good at reading people, and she gets a lot wrong about Percy. Because she’s wrong, it makes her seem judgmental and condescending, and given that Percy is one of the most accomplished demigods of literally all time and Piper is just learning the ropes, she comes across as very arrogant in a way that is not consistent with the rest of her characterization.

[dracaelus4pjo]

So funny to me (and by funny I mean it makes me mad with rage) that it wasn't enough for Rick to make Rachel the oracle and make so she's unable to have a relationships with Percy; he also had to make sure that she would be going to an all girls school and wouldn't be school mates with him any longer.

And then, he also made sure they wouldn't be close friends in the future. Bc you know. She was once upon a time one of his love interests. And god forbid there's any doubt regarding Percy's choice to be with Annabeth. God forbid this girl who was once important in his life continues to be a close friend after he gets with Annabeth. God forbid he even speaks of her in front of his girlfriend (who is also her friend!) without hesitance.

Btw he did the same thing with Nico, in the sense that he used to have a deeply important relationship with Percy in the first saga, but the moment Rick decided Nico used to have a crush on Percy (and I can assure you, he didn't have this in mind in the first saga) suddenly they couldn't be close anymore. God forbid Nico's process of falling out of love with Percy doesn't involve him diminishing Percy in any way in his head. God forbid Percy is someone Nico confides in, trusts deeply and who is a huge part of his support system.

Rick's unchecked fear of fans merely considering the idea of a ship other than the one he chose has ruined the writing of some amazing platonic friendships and I'll never forgive him for this