Pjo Crit - Blog Posts

“Side note: If you think anything I've said is wrong, tell me. I'll correct it immediately.”

There's a lot to unpack here but I'll try my best.

This whole post is based on a number of misconceptions, including a common christocentric misconception that there is a “correct” or “canon” version of the ancient mythology. Which has NEVER been true: not then, and not now. It’s also based on the common but incorrect notion that Greece alone somehow has a monopoly over shared deities, which were worshipped for millennia over the whole of the Mediterranean and beyond.

To start: the fun part about mythology is that everyone tells their own version. Greek mythology is not Christianity: there’s no canon. There’s no “correct” version—they have always been diversely personified. Each individual village, town, and city might have their own roster of local gods, and their own versions of the common stories. If there are certain versions of the stories you prefer, that's awesome! But make no mistake—there’s no such thing as an “actual” Greek myth—just versions that have survived. Even within those stories, there are huge contradictions!!!

Even Homer and Hesiod, the oldest available (written) sources, disagree on a TON of stuff. Famously, Homer claimed Aphrodite was a daughter of Zeus, while Hesiod claimed she was born from sea foam. Hephaestus is another example: in Hesiod, Hera bore Hephaestus alone, as a sort of revenge for Zeus birthing Athena from his skull. In the Homeric tradition, Hephaestus is a son of Zeus. We're barely scratching the surface here. This is true of pretty much every Greek myth we have.

Literally, search any entry of William Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. It's an extremely dated source (so much has happened both in archeology and scholarship since then; it literally predates Arthur Evans), but it's still very useful to see the pure number of variations in the stories, with reference to the original text. Nearly every entry details how different traditions were between authors.

If we have multiple sources for a story, those stories will have differences. Medea comes to mind. This is essential to understanding Greek mythology as the ancients themselves understood it—each storyteller had license to make the story their own. The way the gods were depicted and worshipped was different in different places and throughout time. It was never static, always changing. Importantly, NO ONE HAD OWNERSHIP OVER ANY OF THEM.

Riordan’s telling isn’t more or less valid than anyone else’s. And his version of the story doesn’t invalidate anyone else’s. If anything, Riordan fits perfectly into the millennia long tradition of remixing and adapting old myths into something new. He’s doing the exact same thing as Hesiod, Homer, and countless other forgotten storytellers of yore, who wove fantastic tales about heroes and gods (and often added their own spin). In this way, Riordan is authentically within the ancient tradition. His take isn't wrong—it's just different, and adapted to a modern, young audience.

So, this is the first major misconception addressed—that there is no canon, no correct version of the myths, and that storytellers were not only allowed to add their own spin, but expected. None of Rick’s changed would have been perceived as abnormal, incorrect, or in any way inappropriate. He is perfectly within the poetic tradition.

Let’s address the second major misconception: that Greeks (or anyone!) has ownership or authority over the ancient gods. By definition, you cannot own a god. They are pieces of culture, shared and disseminated through song, conquest, migration, and trade (particularly the trade of decorated amphorae). A hellenistic Greek might simultaneously worship Zeus, Ra, and Mithra. This would not have been abnormal—as armies moved into new territory, they would adopt and adapt the local gods. The locals would do the same with the new gods. This is a process called syncretism—the blending of different beliefs, practices, or ideas into a new whole—and it is central to Greek mythmaking (and ancient worship in general!). In fact, what Riordan does can very easily be considered a form of modern syncretism!

The gods themselves have NEVER been “Greek and only Greek.” They did not spring from the ground fully formed. They were passed down generationally by singers and storytellers, and predate any concept of “Greece” by millennia. They grew from a shared tradition of Proto-Indo-European stories and deities. From western Europe to India, you can find evidence of this shared origin. How can “Zeus” be Greek and only Greek, when he is derived from the deity “dyeus phter” (lit. Sky Father) shared among the whole Indo-European world? From Italy to India, identical formulas referring to him exist. “Zeus” as it were is simply one version of a SHARED story.

I can understand how it would be frustrating to get fandom stuff in a historical or religious tag, but this whole post is antithetical to how the ancient Greeks themselves viewed the gods. Ironically, you’ve adopted both a Christocentric and Eurocentric position—that there is a canon to ancient myth, and it’s the Greek one. Which is not at all how they thought or worshipped.

N.B. I am beyond tired of goyim using Jews and the Holocaust as rhetorical props. Don’t use Jews as fodder for your point. Keep us the fuck out of your mouth.

HOW RICK PORTRAYED THE GREEK GODS AND WHY IT WAS SO IMPORTANT

So people are going to notice that a lot of my complaints aren't just in PJO but extend to media portraying Greek Myths in general. But I want to focus on Percy Jackson and not other media, so I'm going to focus on Percy Jackson and not other media.

Starting off.................

The way Rick portrayed the Greek Gods was important because PJO was the most read book series that heavily centered around Greek Mythology he pretty much destroyed their images at the time.

There's an entire anti Percy Jackson tag as well as an anti PJO tag for you to scroll through to see how Rick Riordan portrayal of the Greek Gods was terrible. Be my guest and treat yourself to it. Search it up.

There are also people like @alatismeni-theitsa, @margaretkart and @katerinaaqu to ask for correct information on Greek Mythology. So be their guest too.

Today, we have PJO fans running around having incorrect perceptions of the gods and flinging hate and abuse at the real Greek Gods while Greeks and Hellenistic Pagans have to suffer through all this bullshit.

The torture is REAL. Just ask them.

I mean, you have people claiming that they are the CHILDREN of VIRGIN GODDESSES.

Artemis, Athena, Hera and Hestia don't have any demigod children.

If you really want to, call yourself their chosen champion. Not their child. It's disrespectful to Greek culture and religion to do otherwise.

Rick Riordan read about and taught Greek Myths in school, so he must have read the actual versions of the myths.

And knowing these, he decided to twist them into his terrible, inferior, crappy versions.

That man literally wrote Hephaestus, a rapist, as a poor guy trying to get a girl, oh, he's so sad and pathetic, and Athena's such a mean bitch for not accepting his advances even if she doesn't want it!

I'm not joking.................and I don't have words for this. I just don't.

Riordan doesn't really have any tact, does he? None at all.

And no, Greek people and Hellenistic Pagans cannot get away from these horrible portrayals, because there are too many Percy Jackson fans clogging up the Greek God tags with their Rick Riordan written PJO versions of the gods, which is kind of terrible for the Hellenistics who just want to be able to read devotional things about their gods and other people who just want to read about real Greek Mythology, not Percy Jackson. And this happens in real life, too. I mean, people using PJO as a substitute for real Greek Mythology.

Pro tip for PJO tumblr users: if you're typing about a god, use the Greek God PJO tag, like PJO Apollo or PJO Aphrodite, not just Apollo or Aphrodite, ok? Thanks for reading this.

There are many common misconceptions about Greek Mythology due to Percy Jackson. So, if you're not sure about something, please search it up on verified academic websites or ask real people-you can do this online too.

Now I am aware that Rick has the creative license to portray Greek Gods however he wants-

but let us as educated people all be aware of the fact that we should not always take portrayals of the Greek Gods in modern media depicting them seriously and if you want to read up on the actual gods, then read the myths and the Odyssey, Iliad etc.

Now, to name another shockingly appalling writing choice-

In the very first book, WW2 is atrociously used as a plot point

Yes, that's right-Rick Riordan, beloved author of a bestselling franchise for children and adults alike, reduces WW2, one of the most bloody and complex conflicts in history with a multitude of a reasons for its existence, to a fight between fictional demigods of the Big Three simply to have a reason for the Big 3 not to have children.

Do you know how serious this is? Do you actually know how bad this is, though?

Millions of people even today are affected by the WW2 due to generational trauma and abusive parents. WW2 killed millions of soldiers and civilians alike, and the Holocaust was so horrible that some people would faint just reading about what happened.

I will not go into the bloody, gory details here, but if you still don't believe this, go search up WW2 and Holocaust torture and treatment of Jews and other minorities as well.

Jews today still have gaping holes in their family trees because of it. And to have Rick Riordan portray it in such a callous way, to make a literal Greek God sire war criminals in modern history, when there were other methods he could have used to intertwine the mythological world and demigods and history.........it makes you wonder what was running through his mind at the time.

There were so many other ways he could have portrayed the prophecy-make it so that Big 3 children were constantly causing natural disasters and fictional wars in the mythological world, not the real world, and constantly dividing the cabins at CHB. Maybe they had their own war parallel to WW2. There were so many ways to do this- and none of them had to do what was ultimately done.

PJO WWII IS THE ULTIMATE INSULT TO THE GREEKS

What makes this even WORSE is that during World War II, the Greeks were in fact part of the ALLIES.

The Allies were fighting against the Axis powers, the latter of which contained Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Japan.

When the Nazis invaded Greece-well, it's never a good thing for a country to be invaded by enemies during a time of war.

At least 250,000 people died during the Axis occupation and its Jewish community was pretty much killed off. And the country's economy and infrastructure were ruined quite horribly.

And generations of Greeks are traumatised because of this, even today. Not just Greeks-thousands of people. Millions of people all over the globe are still traumatized from this war, be it direct experience or generational trauma.

And to make ANCIENT GREEK GODS responsible for WWII is simply, totally and absolutely unforgivable on Rick Riordan's part.

To make the Greeks' enemies the sons of their ancient gods........no. Just no.

And yes, Hitler is a son of Hades in canon. Rick later changed it because of the backlash. He's absolutely disgusting.

WHY THE HELL ARE THE GREEK GODS IN AMERICA?

Now.........the Greek Gods are in the USA!

But..........they're Greek, right, which means that they should be in Greece! So why now are they in the USA?

Well.........here's Rick's explanation for it.

Apparently, the Greek Gods started with the fire of the Western Civilisation and then moved onto other places.

'Flame of the West' crap my ass. Search it up-there's this great article called the Whitening Thief. Read that.

What's meant by Chiron's explanation is that apparently Greece is too bad for Greek Gods now, which is terrible, because that's literally where they originated. And their explanation for leaving it and coming to America is extremely half-baked and just reeks of white American superiority.

@margaretkart

@alatismeni-theitsa

@katerinaaqu

These are all good blogs to disillusion yourself with Percy Jackson and learn about what really happened in Greek Mythology.

And I just want to say-Percy Jackson is an ok start for venturing into Greek Mythology as long as you've read up some basic background beforehand, but-

But-

Do NOT, under ANY circumstances whatsoever, take RICK RIORDAN'S portrayal of the Greek Gods as the REAL Greek Gods.

Never do that. That is the one thing that must not be done.

Hera doesn't just love perfect families. She literally lives in the most dysfunctional family to ever exist. And she loves you if you try. She really does.

Hades would not threaten to eternally torture literal children just because of what their parents did to him. His literal job is to uphold justice in the underworld, and sending a child to Tartarus just because her father angered him and he couldn't punish the father isn't justice now, is it?

Ares loves his children and as for why Rick made him hate them-

Rick has a hate boner against the war god, that I will swear on. Read this post and the explanation for why Rick shouldn't have done it.

And the gods are actively depicted as cruel, neglectful, abusive parents, when in the myths they are quite the opposite.

Real Aphrodite loves her son Aeneas and frequently comes to his aid on the battlefield. She also tells him to not marry a woman (TO GIVE UP LOVE, HER LITERAL DOMAIN) so that he can fulfil his destiny of becoming a king.

Real Ares loves all his children. He tries to avenge his son Cycnus when Heracles kills him with good reason for being a cruel tyrant-and they were even riding chariots together when Heracles came across them. He avenged his daughter even at the cost of being punished by Poseidon and Zeus, neither of whom liked him.

Now, what I want to tell you is that the PJO Greek Gods are Rick's interpretation of them.

An interpretation of a Greek God by a modern author (who isn't Greek, by the way, please take note) is not the same as the real Greek God. Please understand this and accordingly adjust your views.

This also goes for Madeline Miller, Rachel Smythe, etc.

And lastly, one of the most ironic things is that though Richard uses the Greek Gods in his books, he has never ever added a single Greek character in it.

I'm talking about a modern Greek demigod who comes from Greece. Imagine them teaching the other demigods Modern Greek and Greek culture, language and traditions!

It's very ironic that he includes Chinese, African and Native American culture in his works and then turns around and pretend that Greek culture doesn't exist.

The demigods are in Athens, but for how much time before they go back to America? Barely any at all. And nothing learnt about culture while they're there.

(No hate to his already shitty representation. I'm merely making a point that there should have been a Greek character in a book that heavily centers on Greek Gods and their children, even if it's in America.)

RICK DOESN'T USE GREEK CULTURE OR RELIGION AND IN FACT INSULTS GREECE IN HIS WORKS

So, if you've read the title, let me tell you something-

Do you know that Greek Gods are still worshipped?

Some of you do, some of you don't, but let me tell you, they are still worshipped.

And accordingly, you must respect them and their worshippers, just like you would do for Christians. You cannot maliciously ridicule and condemn Hellenistic Pagans and Greek Gods just because they are a minority.

And if you've read the myths and think that the Greek Gods being cruel......

They're not, actually. I mean, yes, you think they're cruel, but most of the myths aren't taken literally by Hellenistic Pagans.

What the Greek Gods do is supposed to be symbolic.

Hades kidnapping Persephone symbolises death ripping children from their grieving parents' arms. It's an explanation for the seasons and it finally represents the fact that daughters could be given away by their fathers with the mother having no say in it whatsoever.

Demeter's grief and her actually being able to do something about her daughter's marriage and Persephone being returned to her is supposed to be a comforting tale for grieving mothers who have lost their daughter.

Artemis' cruelty towards certain people? It represents the cruelty of nature towards humans and what it will do to humans if they provoke it.

Zeus' infidelity and abuse of his power? Well, it represents what kings do. Zeus represented the kings of Ancient Greece, and kings abused their power and had many mistresses besides having a wife.

Many Greek kings also claimed to sons of Zeus or descendants of the gods, so it the idea that Zeus had many affairs with ladies and princesses of royal lineages was conceived.

The link above provides many good reasons for why the Greeks wrote Zeus having many affairs with mortal women, so check it out.

Also, Zeus is symbolic of storms. Storms are volatile and raging, and so was Zeus at times. He was a god of storms and as such symbolised them.

Hera punishing the mistresses and children in a jealous rage to bother Zeus? That's what queens did back in the day since they couldn't directly punish their husbands.

Dionysus being charming and fun but also being mad and wild? Well, he represents breaking away from social norms and going fully wild. Also, wine can make people fun and charming, but at the same time, it can turn people into mad, raging creatures.

The point is, most of what the Greek Gods did was symbolic to their domains. And no, contrary to popular thought, Greeks did not live in fear of their Gods striking them down every moment. In fact, many of them genuinely devotionally loved their gods.

And Greek Gods themselves are very kind and benevolent to their devotees, even today, as long as you don't provoke or seriously insult them. Just ask Hellenistic Pagans and you'll be surprised at the results. I'm serious.

The problem here is that we're trying to moralize divinity.

According to the Greeks, gods weren't humans. They were modelled after humans, but they were above humans and human flaws.

And the Abrahamic gods do terrible things too, but do we mock them? No, we don't, because their worshippers say that they are above humans and human flaws, so similarly, the Greek Gods are above humans and our flaws.

CONCLUSION

And no one cares about the fact that a guy is objectifying and making money off a culture all the while removing its significance and turning it into a joke.

Even though Greeks have a millennia old and rich culture, people are always bastardizing it. Non-Greeks really must stop doing this. It's very culturally disrespectful.

I've also seen grown adults saying that the Greek Gods are American so they're allowed to do what they want with them now, and that's absolutely disgusting. It's cultural appropriation, that's what it is. Do not condone it.

Ah, sorry, not conclusion-let me add one last thing here.

Rick Riordan has a series called Trials of Apollo in which Apollo is cast down to Earth as a human for the third time to defeat Python.

What I want to talk about here is Apollo's human name-Lester Papadopoulos.

Papadopoulos is a common Greek Christian surname that means 'son of a priest'. One of Apollo's domains in prophecy and he has many priests, so maybe this is a reference to that.

But what is most upsetting is that this name is used for comedy.

It's belittled, laughed at and ridiculed for its longevity and hard pronunciation when it is in fact a very normal Greek surname. Even if it's not an American surname, even if it doesn't sound normal and sounds ridiculous to you, it's not ridiculous to others and you should respect it.

Can you imagine how Greek people with that last name read the books and felt bad about their last name? Or felt furious. I know that I would be FURIOUS if my last name was used like that.

And the fact is that Papadopoulos isn't even that hard to pronounce! It's literally just 5 syllables that you can repeat a few times until it doesn't twist your tongue.

And if you can't repeat this simple name, then you need to go back to kindergarten. Hell, go back to preschool even.

And there are people who have the audacity to say that the Greek Gods belong to America and are American. Grown adults, actually, on Twitter, no less. Tweeting it for the whole world to see their absolute foolishness and audacity.

They're pretty tactless, huh?

The Greek Gods were and always will be GREEK. Foreigners are not their rightful descendants-the Greeks are (Greek immigrants included). I mean...........this is bizzarre.

To conclude, (really conclude this time) though it's a series heavily entwined with Greek Gods, the only Greek thing about the series is the Gods. There's no Greek culture, religion or language, and even the Greek Gods are heavily Americanised, which is pretty disappointing. I hope that other authors will do better handling the Greek Gods than Rick Riordan.

(Side note: If you think anything I've said is wrong, tell me. I'll correct it immediately.)

@fandomloverangel

I keep thinking about Piper and Hazel, the girls, being the ones who have unique eye colors and not Frank and Leo, the boys, who are allowed to have normal eye colours.

It's intersectionality-they're girls of color, so they have to be prettier, but the boys of color don't have to be as good-looking because they'e boys.

Rick Riordan fucked up ALL the Gods in Goddesses, both Roman and Greek ngl. Also, why did he choose Neptune for the Romans to fear/dislike— they were literally a navy POWERHOUSE.

Just why, why do you do this Rick 😭

He does it because he's a fool who doesn't properly research culture, history and mythology before crappily writing it into his books. It's sad that he'll never what he wrote wrong. He really does infuriate me sometimes.

I've always thought that making the Romans hate Neptune just gave Percy unnecessary angst, which is bullshit. Imagine how much cooler it would be if he was immediately treated like a great soldier, like the potential new Praetor, like the Savior of Olympus (Though they wouldn't know it at that time.) Compare and contrast that to how he was treated at Camp Half Blood! It would have been so interesting to read about (if written properly, which we all know was not Rick's mandate at that time).

I feel disappointed that Rick implied that Hazel and Nico were related to the most infamous Nazi and didn't care to address it. Or that Camp Jupiter was allied with the confederates and all Hazel does is go "Not cool".

Did he not want to think about how fucked up that is?

This is a case of Rick intertwining real life history with his fictional world and fucking it up big time.

It's absolutely horrible to make the Greek Gods responsible for World War 2. It's even more digusting to have the Nazis be children of the Greek Gods. It's a huge insult to Greeks, their culture, their history (The Greeks fought AGAINST THE NAZIS!) and their culture.

I don't know much about the fandom history or PJO history, but I think that he retconned it to avoid backlash.

The fact that Camp Jupiter allied with the Confederates is also extremely disgusting. Hazel definitely should have been horrified and more disgusted. And making Hitler's half-siblings the type of people that he hated was even more fucked up, though it could have been interesting if it was talked about.

My best guess is that he didn't want to address the implications of how fucked up that was, which was why he retconned it and didn't talk about it again.

Sometimes I wonder what goes on in his mind. I guess that it's just the infamous American arrogance, especially from an old white Christian man.

I’m gonna say it - practically everything Nico ever did getting retconned as “because he had a crush on Percy” is some of the most amatonormative shit I’ve seen in my entire life.

True words. True words.

It's extremely annoying that many people think that a person would move mountains and do impossible things only for someone whom they love romantically. This is just not true.

There are people who would do this for their friends. Menelaus said that he would drive out the people of an entire kingdom just so that Odysseus could come and rule there with his people, and he didn't like Odysseus romantically.

It seems that Rick Riordan cannot for the life of him put platonic relationships before romance-or rather, he can't do this without involving a virginity oath. His heteronormativity is crystal clear when you take a critical look at his books and Nico and Leo's unnecessary romantic relationships.

part 2 of my ask about demigod scents and technology because the previous one would be too long and disorganised otherwise

Anyway:

I highly doubt that Piper, the teenaged daughter of a famous Hollywood movie star, had 0 access to phones growing up. I could see Tristan blocking certain social media apps to try and protect her (cause people are gross online to teenage girls and I don’t think he’s that incompetent of a parent to not care, especially as his fame grew). It meshes well with her backstory as well - Jane/ another assistant/ Tristan himself could’ve handed Piper a phone and expect that to fix her need for parental attention that wasn’t purely monetary, especially since Tristan wouldn’t’ ve known about demigods not being safe near phones

Frank could’ve not been allowed a phone due to his grandmother knowing about the Poseidon ancestry (if I remember right), but he also had the most normal childhood compared to the rest of the 7, as he likely went to a regular school (I remember he mentions participating in spelling bees), so he would’ve been around them for a good chunk of the day

Maybe consistency with his own worldbuilding is too much to ask from Rick anymore

This-all of this. You're right. Frank's grandmother could not be around him and protect him all the time. He would have used some technology-he would have encountered some monsters.

I wish we knew if he was homeschooled or went to normal school. We don't even know that much about his pre-CJ life.

You know that meme where an angry-looking guy yells at his employees for ideas and then he throws the third guy out of the window for suggesting something he doesn't like?

That's Rick and his consistency respectively.

I’ve been thinking about demigod’s scent and the no phones rule when it comes to piper, frank and leo

out of story, it makes sense why Rick would implement these things. Demigods scents explains how our heroes keep encountering monsters and why camp doesn’t give them a map with the locations of monsters, and the no phones rule means that the characters have to think on their feet and not just Google how to defeat x monster and copying that method

that’s all fine and dandy, until you get to HOO

prior to the beginning of HOO neither of the previously mentioned characters mention encounters with divine monsters, and I just have to ask how?

Both piper and Leo aren’t related to the big 3, but they both have extremely rare and powerful abilities that they were showing from a young age, that surely would have bumped up their scent more than your average demigod. And while Hera did mess with their memories, they seemed to have no issue remembering their backstories so I feel like one of them encountering a monster either before or during wilderness school would have been mentioned when they got to camp

Frank is very distantly related to the big 3 (and while you could argue that because it’s so distant it wouldn’t affect his scent, but I’d argue that his family being blessed with shapeshifting for so long would make them tasty to monsters & being a son of Mars)

I just need an explanation why Annabeth, who has no demigod powers, attracted more monsters at the age seven than piper and Leo did at 15 (when demigods are canonically a lot more on the monster’s radar

sorry if none of this makes any sense

This does make sense, don't worry.

Honestly, the best explanation for your last paragraph I can give is Rick's inconsistency and him not remembering his previously established lore. There are multiple examples of this throughout the series.

I'm don't remember charmspeak, shapeshifting or pyrokinesis bumping up their scents-that's never stated in HOO (if it is, please tell me which book exactly). So that's incorrect.

But you're absolutely correct about them not encountering monsters contradicting previous lore. They're way over twelve years old, and they should definitely have encountered monsters by now, multiple in fact.

You could argue that Leo was on the run, but even then, he was still over twelve and should definitely have encountered monsters, because there are multiple monsters all throughout America and even other countries. They don't need to be around him for a long time before attacking.

Piper doesn't have much of an excuse. She's fifteen, has been to multiple schools and should definitely have encountered multiple monsters by now-as a teacher or a guidance counselor or janitor.

Frank also doesn't really have an excuse-you could argue that his family mansion was protected and his mother and grandmother wanted to protect him, but they couldn't have protected him all the time-he definitely should have encountered at least one monster.

Of course, none of them knew about the mythological world, so their scent would be weaker, but the other demigods who are 12 don't and they're still attacked by monsters. So this argument doesn't count.

In the end, it's just another case of Rick Riordan botching his own writing.

Jealousy, jealousy, jealousy galore

One thing I've noticed is that so many of the relationships in Percy Jackson had in common was jealousy.

Annabeth is jealous of Rachel, Calypso, Reyna and even Hazel for a few seconds because they're close to Percy.

Percy is jealous of Luke because of his close relationship with Annabeth (this is not romantic, but it's still jealousy).

Piper is jealous of Reyna and even Annabeth at one point because the latter was comforting/helping Jason.

Calypso is jealous of Reyna because she thought that he was Leo's girlfriend.

Frank is jealous of Leo because..........Leo's great grandad was Hazel's first love. And he thought that Hazel and Leo might have had something.

Nico is jealous of Will staring at Paolo to assess how his arms are working. (And it's treated as cute, too, which is something else that's bad.)

Grover is jealous of Juniper thinking that Luke was handsome.

Reyna is jealous of Piper and Annabeth (it's not unfounded, honestly, but she's still jealous).

It's a very interesting pattern I've noticed. It seems like main characters in PJO can't be in a relationship without having at least one jealous moment. Rick Riordan don't make your characters jealous of others for flimsy reasons challenge (impossible?).

Then again, they're teenagers and their hormones are high (I should think) so it might make sense that they're jealous, but Rick never touches on or says this in his books.

Also, all of them are teenagers and they're jealous. The adult couple, Jo and Emmie, were very healthy, probably the best couple with no jealousy.

Thoughts?

Let Nico speak Italian

One thing that bothered me when I reread The Tower of Nero was Nico only speaking Italian when he's really upset.

Nico only speaks Italian when something really bad has happened and he feels bad........so Italian is associated with something horrible happening.

But why does he only speak Italian when he's really upset? Why can't he just speak Italian normally? What's wrong with it? What's the reason to make him speak his mother tongue only when he's extremely emotionally distressed?

Taken on its own, it's not particularly bothersome to me, but when it's combined with Rick's other instances of racism, it's extremely annoying.

HOW RICK PORTRAYED NYX AND GAIA

The way Rick portrays Nyx is eyebrow-raising at best, head-bashing-against-wall at worst.

Let me tell you about Nyx. She's a Primordial-not even a Titan, a Primordial.

First Generation, so powerful that she scared off Zeus himself. And she resides in Tartarus, where even the most powerful of gods fear to tread. All the monsters never mentioned her name, only called her 'Night', ALL OF THEM were scared of, even the worst ones.........

And when Percy and Annabeth finally encounter her...........she's portrayed as this foolish, crabby, whiny, woman who can easily be fooled by two demigods.

Rick is notorious for building up something exciting and then leaving it to crumble, but this one might just take the cake.

If Real Nyx sided with PJO Gaia, then Percy and Annabeth would never have survived. She's a Protegenoi-a Primordial. More powerful than the Titans, and Kronos himself took a whole book to defeat. And then she calls all her children, and then they're portrayed as dumb too. The minor gods, Nyx'x children, each more powerful than probably most of CHB put together..........

You understand what I'm getting at?

HOO is full of horrible characterisation, logic and retcons and this is just another feather in its pillow stuffing.

(I made that up on the spot ok-)

And Gaea-well, she could have been the grayest character ever.

She had so many good reasons to rise up and take back what's hers. Humans were destroying the planet. They were suffocating her and Pan was already dead-

and instead, all we got was a rash, screeching, morally very dark gray woman who was apparently 'too proud and took on a physical form too soon'.

It took only a few pages to defeat her. The fight was so anticlimatic, don't even get me started. Piper, only a demigod, being able to defeat an awakening primordial?

Aphrodite should've used charmspeak. She would have been powerful enough to send Gaea back to sleep. Along with Drew and Piper-that would have been a nice bonding moment, provided that those two don't fall asleep first.

How Nyx and Gaea are portrayed is really eye-twitching head-banging stuff.

(This is shorter than the others-feel free to add your thoughts in the comments and reblogs.)

THE TRAVESTY OF THE VIRGIN GODDESS ATHENA

Note: red highlighted parts are important and must be read.

This is a link to a post that beautifully talks about Rick Riordan's horrendous portrayal of Athena and the other goddesses down below-

It's a must-read. Please read it.

ATHENA SHOULD NEVER HAVE HAD CHILDREN IN THE FIRST PLACE

Rick has made many, many egregious writing decisions. I can't say which one is the most horrible, but a leading candidate is the fact that he chose to make Athena, a virgin goddess, have children.

For the shocked Pikachus who have had the utter bliss of not having to know how Rick Riordan ruined Athena, yes, Rick made Athena have children.

She doesn't lose her virginity though-she has brain children formed from the thoughts of her and her lover, which she considers the purest form of love.

And this is terrible, because the Ancient Greeks equated virginity to not bearing children and not marrying. If Athena bears children, then how can she be a virgin?

Yes, Athena's children ARE HER CHILDREN. They are explicitly called her children. And she's said to be their mother. That means that she's not a virgin anymore.

And Athena's virgin goddess status and refusal to marry reinforced her role as a powerful goddess who was independent. Marriage symbolized subordination to a husband, so by not marrying, Athena's autonomy and power were shown very clearly.

Athena's key qualities-wisdom, strategy and war-are associated with rationality and independence, which were not associated with love in Ancient Greece. If she loved men, then she would be unable to retain her identity as goddess of wisdom and war.

Virginity oaths for goddesses were taken very seriously. When Artemis came close to loving Orion and breaking her oath, Apollo decided to kill Orion and risk the long lasting wrath of his sister rather than having her break her oath. That's how serious they were.

And this is already so terrible, but you know what the worst part is?

She doesn't tell her lovers that she's going to give them a baby. She just forms the baby and then DUMPS it on them, which is horrible, because-

ATHENA IS THE GREEK GODDESS OF WISDOM!

NO GODDESS OF WISDOM WOULD DUMP A CHILD ON AN UNPREPARED MORTAL'S DOORSTEP AND FORCE HIM TO RAISE THE CHILD WHEN HE DIDN'T WANT TO!

IF RICK HAD TO MAKE HER HAVE CHILDREN, WHICH IS ALREADY SO HORRIBLE, THEN HE ABSOLUTELY SHOULD HAVE MADE ALL THE MORTALS WHOM SHE HAD CHILDREN WITH REQUEST HER TO AND GIVE THEIR CONSENT TO THE PROCESS!

And Athena did not even have to have children in the first place.

ATHENA SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN A BAD MOTHER

Also, even if Rick was inexplicably desirous of going through the terrible process of making a virgin goddess have children, did he really make ATHENA, goddess of WISDOM, think that Annabeth would be well-treated and cared for with a single father who was unprepared and did not even want her in the first place?

Athena was a bad mother to Annabeth simply by creating her without her father's permission and placing her with a father who did not want her, thus leading to Annabeth being neglected and abused. Athena knew that Frederick didn't want a child and still created one and made him raise her-she didn't even give Annabeth away to an adoptive family who would most likely have raised her better.

On some level, she knew that Annabeth would be traumatised-even Frederick would be traumatized by her actions. That makes PJO Athena a horrible person and a bad mother.

She did claim Annabeth, but she also let her wander the streets even if she guided her to help-and that help was two other traumatised children.

And to say that she let her children fight their own battles-a seven year old shouldn't have to fight their own battles when their battles are monsters and living on the streets. Gods have been shown to break laws multiple times, so why didn't Athena do this? Zeus wasn't watching all the time and he's pretty much the only one who enforces these rules.

And when she deems one of her children worthy, she gives them a Mark and sends them to find her statue, despite knowing that it's fruitless and that all of her other children have died.

Just read this post-it explains a lot.

Let me digress here and tell you a little something about Myth! Athena.

Athena had an adopted child in the myths. His name was Erichthonius, and even though he was a product of an attempted rape on Athena, she adopted him as her own, wishing to make him immortal, and frequently protected him. He, in return, honored her by founding a festival for her (Panathenaic Festival) and setting up a wooden statue of her on the Acropolis. Their relationship was a very good one-

So tell me, why would Athena conceive a child without asking the father for permission and then force him to raise a child despite knowing that he did not want to?

Exactly. Real Athena would never do this. Rick's Athena would. Note the difference, please.

Of course, this is just another frustrating portrayal of a Greek God as a bad parent which continues throughout the PJO series-then again, that is its core foundation. Still, thought I'd write this section just to set things straight.

HOW SHE'S INCORRECTLY PORTRAYED

Athena is quite vilified in the original PJO series and all throughout the franchise.

First of all, she disapproves of Percy's relationship with her daughter. This is at first understandable, because he's a son of Poseidon, her archnemesis, and at first glance she might not like him.

But something annoying here is that she always gets bad moments with Percy, threatening him if he dared cross her, while POSEIDON NEVER GETS ANY BAD MOMENTS WITH ANNABETH.

In fact, Real Poseidon is more likely to be the person who hates Percabeth given his mythological characterisation, though he would lay off Annabeth for the sake of Percy, because he loves his children very much.

Setting that aside, my real concern here is how Myth! Athena would not do this.

Real Athena, would judge Percy based on his merits and not his parentage.

Of course, she might threaten him if he crossed her or her daughter, as befitting of a goddess, but she wouldn't continue to judge him based on his parentage. Once he proved himself, she would help him and not threaten him.

In fact, in some versions of Theseus' myth, including the one used in Percy Jackson's Greek Gods, he is a son of Poseidon, so Athena actually helped a son of Poseidon, that too in the PJOverse, so it makes no sense for her not to help Percy when it's for the good of all of them.

She also helps Bellerophon, a son of Poseidon, in the myths. In fact, she does this in the Riordanverse too, so why she would hate Percy after helping Bellerophon and Theseus?

PJO Athena also tells Percy to stay away from her daughter during a war, when romance should be the last thing on her mind.

I mean, if Athena told Percy not to get distracted by Annabeth and focus on the bigger picture which would be beneficial to everyone, I'd understand, because she's the goddess of war tactics and wisdom.

But no-her message explicitly tells Percy to stay away from her daughter because she didn't like both of them together.

And yes, she doesn't like Percy because he's too loyal and he was apparently supposed to choose a dear friend over something more important when she thinks that he should choose the big picture but his loyalty never causes any serious consequences and everyone is fine in the end, so this is absolute nonsense and it's not a good reason for her anymore.

Let me digress and tell you a little about real Athena here.

The REAL Athena would help Percy commit war crimes if it helped their side win. Hell, she'd play matchmaker for him and her daughter if it somehow helped them win (well, Aphrodite could do that, but you know what I mean.)

Real Athena was a patron of Odysseus who was a literal war criminal. Actually, she was considered to be one of the most important gods in the Odyssey. She even helps Diomedes by blessing him and directing him to wound the god Ares as well as the goddess Aphrodite (Who caused the Trojan war).

Also, Real Athena is considered a patron of heroes. Not only that, she helped tons of heroes. Odysseus, Hercules, Perseus, Jason, Bellerophon, the Argonauts, Achilles, Cadmus, Tydeus and Theseus.

She also aided several women such as Penelope, Eurynome, the Danaids, Menippe and Metioche and Nyctimene the last of whom she turned into her sacred symbol, the owl.

Athena was also believed to have invented every kind of work that women in Ancient Greece did.

The only time Athena abandoned a hero (Tydeus) was when he committed cannibalism-before that, she planned to make him immortal, in fact, but left him in disgust when she learned what he had done.

There was so much that Rick could have done with her status as a patron of heroes-have her help and advise Percy and Annabeth on their quests (indirectly so as not to risk her father's wrath). Helping Annabeth get over her prejudices and chastising her for letting her jealousy of Rachel almost ruin her chance for a successful quest.

Not.........whatever the mess that PJO Athena is.

And yes, I know that she's thought to have helped Percy in The Titan's Curse-but she just gave him a useless platitude. That was barely help at all. The only time she really helped was when she sent Hermes back to inform Annabeth about Plan 23. For a wisdom goddess of war tactics, she is surprisingly little help in the war.

And in Heroes of Olympus, a lot of people blame Athena for her cruel treatment of Annabeth while it was in fact Minerva who gave Annabeth the Mark. Athena was severely split between her Roman and Greek form and was unable to properly think at the time.

THE SUBTLE YET CONTINUOUS WAY RICK TURNS US AGAINST ATHENA

And it's clear that Rick continues to denigrate Athena-not just by using which myths he wants (Medusa being turned into a demon by Athens after willingly doing it with Poseidon in her temple in TLT, and now Ovid's myth in the PJO show) which he's allowed to do-

but he also actively takes the myths and twists them to form his own version.

Confused? I'll elaborate.

In case you didn't know, there's a Percy Jackson book called Percy Jackson's Greek Gods and Heroes, where Percy rewrites a lot of myths from the Greek Mythology.

I'll give you some advice-just skip it. It tells you about the myths, yes, but it's quite biased, and if you don't know the real myths, please read the real ones first and then read these if you really want to.

You see, if you think that it's just a book, you're wrong.

This is written in a biased fashion and subtle comments like these turn you against certain gods and goddesses that Rick doesn't like.

When Aphrodite arrives at Olympus, Rick writes all the women as immediately thinking, 'Oh, I hate her because she's the most beautiful of us all.' Not the goddesses. Just the women.

This is also shown with Ares, where Percy calls him a bully, loser and a jerk. He also says that he wanted Poseidon to beat Ares up when Ares was defending his daughter from being raped by Poseidon's son because apparently it would have been awesome to watch.

This is shown with Aphrodite as well when Percy outright states that he hates her and twists the stories about her by rewriting the narrative and adding subtle comments to make us dislike her.

It uses terrible sarcasm which is concerningly childish for a grown writer. I don't know what Rick has against Ares or Aphrodite. He definitely has a hate boner for Ares.

Sorry, I digressed a little bit there. Returning to the subject of this essay-

Athena is featured in some of the stories in this book. In one, Athena and Poseidon compete to be the patron of Attica. When Athena says that she has an idea as to how they can settle this peacefully, Rick writes- 'Typical. Athena always had some sneaky idea.'

................Really?

This wasn't a sneaky idea. Athena literally said that she had a fair idea for a competition-both of them would create gifts and the mortals would decide which one was better. How is that sneaky?

In Percy Jackson's Greek Gods, he writes her as a romance-hater (242-243 page no). While there's no evidence to indicate that she likes romance, making a virgin goddess who's heavily implied to be aroace hate romance is very aphobic. Not everyone aroace hates romance-that is a negative stereotype.

Of course, Rick promotes these stereotypes, so what can I expect from him. *Sigh*

Rick subtly makes Athena seem unlikeable like this. It's one of my biggest frustrations-that he makes gods that he doesn't like evil in one way or another through blatantly incorrect misinformation or subtle denigration like this.

All right, so moving on to the more serious story in which Athena is deprecated yet again. It's called 'Athena adopts a handkerchief'.

Brace yourself.

So in the original myth, after Hephaestus catches Aphrodite cheating on him with Ares, he's pretty depressed.

So when Athena comes to him to comfort him or ask him for weapons, Hephaestus literally tried to climb on her and RAPE HER, and she DEFENDED HERSELF from him. A woman defending herself from a man trying to rape her-that's what it was.

But Rick specifically writes Hephaestus begging and pleading and oh so miserable, even when Athena clearly walks away and yells at him to stop. And then Hephaestus cries into her bare leg, and she kicks him away in disgust.

We're supposed to root for Hephaestus here, and even if we aren't, he's still portrayed in a sympathetic light, which is completely fucked up.

Let me tell you something. If a person is crying and begging for your attention and walking after you and grabs you, whining, even after you clearly and firmly tell them not to-

You can defend yourself from, even physically. Doesn't matter if you're a girl or boy or if they're a girl or boy. You have every right to kick them away. Now matter how pathetic they seem, they are still knowingly coming after and harassing you.

But there a lot of people that don't think like this. They feel bad for men who seem 'pathetic' and often denounce women who reject men like this, even though the women have every right not to want to be with men, even if the man seems pathetic and lonely.

Rick wrote Hephaestus to seem pathetic (he literally called Hephaestus poor guy WHEN HEPHAESTUS WAS TRYING TO RAPE ATHENA) and Athena to be cold and bitchy for not acquiescing to Hephaestus' wants, thus flipping the script to make us feel bad for Hephaestus and disdain Athena.

And yes, even if Athena was ultimately written to be the one in the right here, most people will favour Hephaestus and disdain Athena in this narrative simply because of the way their behaviour is written.

It's ingrained in our brains and psychology-let men off, blame the women. Nearly everyone thinks like this-it's practically the default way for society.

I'm not saying that everyone thinks like this. There are very good people who don't think like this or are working on their behaviour and thoughts...........

But they're a minority. There are too many people who default to the 'men good women bad blame women automatically' mindset, even the supposedly progressive ones.

Rick knew the original myth and instead, he chose to twist and write it like this, having us root for Hephaestus instead. That HAS to tell you that the guy has some form of misogyny about Greek Goddesses.

Red flags for Rick Riordan? Hell yes. This was published in 2014, so we can only hope that he's improved on his behavior a decade later, but considering the recent changes in the show, I don't think it's happening.

ATHENA ISN'T ALWAYS WRITTEN BADLY IN PJO

Now, I'm not saying that Athena is always demonized when she shows up. She has a few good moments in PJO and there are some good parts to her.

She realises that Typhon was a distraction and convinces Zeus to send Hermes back, thus greatly helping the demigods.

(But this is overlooked because Rick made her tell Percy to stay away from Annabeth for no good reason. He didn't have to do this at all-but as a very wise person once said, this was another way of trying to distance Percy and Annabeth but not knowing how to properly do so, and of course, Athena becomes the scapegoat who must take on the blame here even though Poseidon could have also said this, thus giving him an actual moment that shows that hey, he's not all-good, Percy and readers!)

She does love Annabeth, as seen when she guides her on the streets to help, immediately claims her at camp, gives her the invisibility cap, appoints her the architect of Olympus itself and compliments her in front of the entire Godly council and many demigods too.

When Annabeth is in Tartarus, she speaks to her and tells her that she did well and gives her a message to send, indicating a gesture of trust, honour and respect from mother to daughter.

(But she was also a bad mother to Annabeth for reasons I've stated before in this essay. She neglected her, forced her to stay with an abusive father, did not bother to find an adoptive family for her, etc)

In Percy Jackson's Greek Gods, she instructs Cadmus on what to do with the dragon's teeth. She rightfully blinds Tiresias for staring at her while naked and not immediately looking away and covering his eyes, but then gives him a walking stick and lets him understand the language of birds so that they can direct him when she learns that it was an accident.

She also helps Percy on his quest in Chalice of the Gods by sending Ganymede and the cart that Percy's hiding in back to the kitchens to save Percy.

It's just that...........her portrayal in PJO had some serious problems. It was hideous, horrendous, ghastly, frightful, atrocious, shocking, appalling, grievous, gross and a whole of lot of other synonyms to match. And she is more often than not criticised and hated on for her bad moments than she is noticed for her good moments in Percy Jackson.

CONCLUSION

I know that Rick is free to use whichever version of the myths he wants, but I just want you to see that he denigrates her and portrays her in an appalling manner. Making her have children without the father's permission and forcing the children onto them and making her neglect her children was absolutely unnecessary and Athena did not need to have brain children.

Now, I'm not saying that Athena isn't portrayed in a positive light. She does have good moments in Percy Jackson, but what I want to say is that a lot about her characterization in Percy Jackson is absolutely egregious for the most part considering her actual mythological counterpart.

Athena is the only virgin goddess who has children, and she's also the only virgin goddess who's portrayed as an adult. Coincidence? I think not. In fact, if Rick hadn't made Athena have children, he would have made her a child too.

He turned Hestia into a child for no reason at all, so it's not entirely implausible to think that he would make Athena a child too-probably use the stupid excuse of 'children learn better and their brains are more flexible than adults' brains!'

(I don't want to give him any ideas.)

To conclude, Athena more often than not demeaned in PJO and her overall portrayal is absolutely ghastly when compared to her mythological counterpart. There are a few good parts to her, but not many, and her portrayal in such a famous pop culture series that has impacted so many people will be an eternal tragedy.

@superkooku

@cynthiav06

@fandomloverangel

Hi, it’s “Rick really shot himself in the foot when he tried to differentiate Greek and Roman mythology and failed” anon again, and I just learned that apparently Rick is not only misrepresenting the gods and Greek culture, but actual Ancient Greek philosophers, and that really pisses me off as someone with a degree in philosophy.

I haven’t been a part of this fandom in a long time. I never finished HoO (I dropped it before the series was even finished), but I saw something upsetting the other day. I’ve seen a few posts talking about this one passage from HoO (Or, at least, I think it was from HoO. If I read that part, I don’t remember because It was a long time ago.) talking about “a story by Plato about how male and female were created because they used to be the same being that was split in half, and now they’re two halves of a whole looking for their soulmate or whatever” and this was supposed to create angst or something because then Nico didn’t know how he was supposed to fit into that equation.

Again, I don’t exactly know the context (I tried Googling it, but I couldn’t find anything), but I do know that it’s referencing The Symposium. The Symposium just so happens to be one of my favorite pieces of philosophical writing, and once had to write over 20 pages on this bad boy for an academic paper, so believe me when I tell you - that story is a load of BS, and I will not tolerate Plato slander.

First of all, that wasn’t even Plato that said that. It was Aristophanes. Yes, The Symposium was written by Plato, but he was essentially just documenting stuff that was said at a dinner where a bunch of dudes got together and decided to philosophize about what love is (there are 6 speakers in total, that all lead up to Socrates, and Aristophanes is just one of them). People debate about whether all the people and situations Plato wrote about were even real, or if they’re just a device to bounce ideas off of each other, and there’s even this whole theory that Socrates wasn’t a real person - but I’m not going to get into all of that. What’s important is that we DO know that Aristophanes was a real person, and it’s important to note that Aristophanes was NOT a philosopher. He was a playwright and basically the Ancient Greek equivalent of a comedian. I have seen a lot of people act like it was some profound theory of how humans came to be, but it was never meant to be taken seriously.

Now, I have seen that story be taken out of context many times, and it always annoys me, but this might be the most egregious one yet. The Symposium is not heteronormative in the slightest. In fact, it is VERY queer, which is what drew me to it in the first place.

The ACTUAL story that this is trying to reference is when Aristophanes tells a story where originally humans had 2 heads, 4 arms, and 4 legs, and there were 3 genders - male, female, and androgynous (which represented the sun, earth, and moon, respectively). The gods were intimidated by the humans, so they split them in half. The ones that were originally male became men who were attracted to men, the ones that were female became women attracted to women, and the ones that were androgynous became men and women attracted to the opposite sex. That is the very short version, but needless to say, very inclusive of homosexuality.

I see how what Rick was trying to do could’ve worked for asexuality or aromanticism, however, this is only just one small part of The Symposium, and there is actually a lot of stuff in The Symposium that I would argue are very ace and aro coded, but I’m not going to get into all of that, though, because this would be very long and that’s beside the point.

(Just one thing, though, because I can't resist. It’s not relevant to this, but it’s cool, and it relates to my previous ask. At one point, one of the speakers, Pausanias, tries to define love as a complex being and says that Aphrodite is the personification of love. He acknowledges that there are two different versions of Aphrodite that the Ancient Greeks believed in, from different parts of Greece (again, this is pre-Roman), and instead of trying to determine which is the “true” Aphrodite, he embraces both of them and says they are the personifications of two different kinds of love, which eventually results in him basically figuring out the split attraction model 2000+ years before it was called that, and I love it so much.) Anyway, everyone should read The Symposium, it’s public domain.

All that to say, this means one of two things. Either Rick knew this story and intentionally changed it to be heteronormative to create angst, or he read some other version of the story, that was not a primary resource, where someone else had already changed to be heteronormative - and that really freaking bothers me, because it could not be farther from the truth.

As a queer person who found a lot of comfort in The Symposium, I find it disgusting that it was twisted for the sake of making a queer character feel bad about themself for extra angst (and don’t even get me started on how Nico’s character was handled, that is a whole other thing I can go off about, but I won’t because this is about Plato). Shame on you, Richard.

Again, I haven’t touched HoO since I was in high school and it was still being released, and I honestly don’t remember reading that part. So, if I am taking this out of context and later in the book they say “Wait, but that’s not actually how the story goes!” then I will be pleasantly surprised for once, and you can disregard all of this.

You are wonderful, anon, and I love you and this message that you've sent so much. I will definitely check out Plato's Symposium sometime soon.

Don't worry-you're not taking this out of context. What you're talking about is, unfortunately, written in either HOH or BOO-I clearly remember that.

Rick Riordan does tend to misrepresent cultures in his stories-especially Greek culture, so I wouldn't be surprised if this was true. His views on Hellenistic Paganism and Greek Gods when he was writing PJO and HOO were unfortunately very derogatory and it's clearly reflected in his writing.

The fact that he changed a story to fit his version does not surprise me at all, though it's painful to learn that he has committed yet another infraction regarding Greek Mythology.

It's terribly discouraging to me when I see how many people think that what Rick Riordan writes is true and urge them to read up on real sources regarding Greek Mythology. This twisted version of Plato's Symposium is only one of many examples in Percy Jackson.

Knowing Rick Riordan, he either read the full version and twisted it to form his own terrible version, which he has done before (Hephaestus' attempted rape of Athena) and is quite good at or he read a version that wasn't the primary resource and just took it to be the real thing (like he did when researching for Piper Mclean).

Nico's moment there was pretty poignant, very relatable for many LGBTQ readers wondering how they would fit in to heteronormative society...........

But unfortunately, a lot of nice moments in PJO come at the cost of incorrectly interpreting Ancient Greek Gods and culture. It's pretty sad, honestly. Rick really likes to slander Greece in his works. First with the flame of the West, then with slandering all the gods and all those mythological inaccuracies, now with this twisted Symposium version of his.

Rick Riordan doesn't even do his research properly, so of course he said that Plato said it and not that Plato wrote down what Aristophanes said out loud. I wonder if it would actually kill him to do some more research. Is he really that bad at it?

Anyway, I will read the Symposium to gain more insight onto how Rick could have handled it better. I really like aro-ace coded stuff, too, so I'll love this one.

HOW RICK PORTRAYS ARTEMIS

Now, before I start on the nasty pile of shit that is Rick Riordan written PJO Artemis (NOT the real one, NEVER the real one) let me give you some links to posts talking about her portrayal in PJO which you should most certainly read.

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RR crit re: aspec representation, the Hunters and the portrayal of romance

There are many things that bother me about Rick's aspec rep. His books are weirdly amatonormative and as an aspec person I find his portraya

You should most certainly read these posts-they talk about the subject of this post magnificently. Especially the first one.

THE HUNT OF ARTEMIS IS TERRIBLE AROACE REP

Rick makes her and her hunt aroace and depicts them as radical feminist misandrists.

This is misogynistic and aphobic, as it makes the narrative and by extension the readers think that hey, aroace women actually hate all men, which is not the case for every one of them!

Also, Rick writes Artemis as usually liking to appear as a young girl and never assumes a form older than twenty. And she always appears as a child in PJO. Never any other age. Also, the Hunters are apparently literal CHILDREN who are called immature and misandrist while also being aroace.......hmmmmmm.........aphobic much?

Yeah, do you see how aphobic this is?

People usually view aroace people as childlike and immature due to the fact that they don't want to have sex or romance when they can be just as mature or even more mature than non aroace people.

Also, the two hunters who've left the hunt, Emmie and Jo, are 'growing out of it'. Also, they fall in love and aren't as 'childish' anymore. This implies that aroace people are just 'late bloomers' and 'oh, you'll grow out of it!'

Which is not the case. It's never the case. They never 'grow out of it' because they don't feel attracted to it, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Romance and sex do not determine an adult's maturity. And they sure as hell don't determine Artemis' sexuality.

Also, Artemis kicks wlw hunters out-lesbians being kicked out of a safe space for women just for romantically liking women, does anybody hear this?-and calls romance a plague.

What the hell? Aroace people don't always think like this. And sex and romance are to different things. It's possible to be an asexual lesbian too.

This is lesbophobia, which is awful, because men are often violent towards queer women, so this could have been a good form of rep for queer women-queer female solidarity.

Now, I'm aware that Rick is allowed to portray Artemis as aroace. I'm simply pointing out the aphobic and misogynistic tropes that he fell into.

This isn't the only virgin goddess that Rick has turned into a child. Rick also turned Hestia, a former Olympian in PJO, into a child for no reason, most likely because she is also a willing virgin goddess. This is also extremely aphobic and unnecessary.

Artemis usually appears as a young woman in her statues and paintings. If Rick really wanted to make her young, he could've had her be in her late teens or early twenties. There was no reason to make her look like a child.

Also, the major huntresses of Artemis that we know of-Thalia, Bianca and Zoe-joined because they were traumatised from their past.

Thalia because Luke 'betrayed' her, Bianca because she thought she had to take care of Nico, and Zoe because Hercules also betrayed her. They're all traumatised and are frozen to become eternal children. And Reyna is also heavily traumatised.

Do you see this shit, my liege? This implies that all the aroace people are traumatised and that's why they suddenly become aroace and join the Hunt. Absolute nonsense.

Also, not all Hunters of Artemis are aroace. Taking a vow of virginity is not equal to aroace. I get that you want to have your representation, which is fair, but you need to know this.

PJO ARTEMIS IS CREEPY AND PREDATORY

So, we know from the Titan's Curse that Rick Riordan written PJO Artemis recruits girls between 10 and 14 into her hunt.

She says that girls that are older than 14 usually 'go astray' and 'leave their senses, running after boys all day'.

She makes her huntresses take oaths of virginity and celibacy. Why would anyone make a child take a virginity and celibacy oath?

She recruits girls who are too young to know if they want to date or have sex or grow up and pursue something else instead of just hunting all day.

She calls romance a plague and kicks out all lovers from her Hunt, be it mlm or wlw, which is terrible, because she was a sapphic icon back in the day.

And she promises young girls nice things and twists her word, not actually telling them about the bad things of the Hunt until they're actually in and can't get out again.

Do you know how terrible this is? And how terrible it is for the real Artemis and her worshippers?

This is very predatory-and extremely OOC for Real Artemis. She's the protector of girls-she doesn't take them on monster hunts.

REAL Artemis is the protector of children, especially young girls-she would not freeze them biologically forever and pull them out of their lives and take them on monster hunts, thus harming them and endangering them. She would take young girls into hunt, but she would educate them and train them to defend themselves and only take them on monsters hunts when they were fully mature, consenting adults.

Let me fill you in on info about the REAL Artemis' hunt-

If Real Artemis accepted girls into the hunt, they would age normally, and they weren't immortal. And she wouldn't make them hunt monsters. They'd hang around at camp, dance, sing, pick flowers and worship Artemis, like the original nymphs in the myths, who, by the way, were adults.

Also, Real Artemis' huntresses didn't always stay with her. They stayed for some time and left-actually, being a companion of Artemis was a popular title for heroines of Greek Myths, like Anticlea, mother of Odysseus, who hunted with Artemis when she (Anticlea) was young or Beroe, who was also a hunter before becoming a lover of Poseidon or marrying him.

Real Artemis' followers must be virgins or they cannot join her, but they are free to leave, and after that, they may lose their virginity.

Real Artemis' followers are not immediately granted immortality-they must earn it. Artemis grants Britomartis immortality after the latter jumps off a cliff fleeing from King Minos. In some versions, she turned Iphigenia into a goddess as she was sacrificed for Artemis.

And I get that it was a fun concept for Rick to make Artemis' hunt an immortal sisterhood band-and I'm not saying that it's a bad concept.

I'm just saying that the concept was horribly executed. It's absolutely horrible that the girls are frozen forever in time and never get to grow up and be more mature and educated. It would also help their muscle mass and strength, effectively making them better hunters. I've made another post about this.

And Rick also makes Artemis not interact with men because.......her first few interactions with men failed?

This is hilariously terrible. Oh no, Artemis doesn't like men because apparently a few of them failed her and her interactions with them went terribly wrong, so no men now!

And also, she kicks lesbians out of her hunt.

Read this post. It'll detail all the bad things about my last sentence, and in the meantime-

This is terrible, because Real Artemis was heavily associated with lesbianism back in Ancient Greece or before that. Also, Rick's hunt was supposed to be a safe space for girls. So many little lesbians thought that they'd been seen-only to have Rick throw this back into their face. And you know what's even more horrible? He could've made the hunters ace lesbians, because yeah, you can romantically love women and not want to have sex, it's entirely possible.

PJO Artemis is ultimately 'redeemed' by helping Percy and his friends and voting against his death, but her portrayal in such a popular books series will be an eternal tragedy.

And I've heard some people say that he turned Artemis into a radical feminist because it was popular at the time, and let me tell you-

You don't get to do that. You don't get to use a culturally, religiously and ethically sacred goddess as your experimenting ground for humour and modernity mixed with magic.

You don't just get to ignore all the myths and then reduce a sacred belief and way of life to something so horrible as what Artemis' hunt was in PJO-predatory, creepy, cult-like and abusive.

It isolated girls from the outside world and fed them one source of information.

It tricked them into joining by lying to them, promising them happiness, not telling them about the bad things, and then it did not let them leave when they wanted to, making them regret it eternally.

So many people actually worship this goddess-imagine how horrible they feel about this portrayal.

@fandomloverangel

PERCY JACKSON'S MISSED MOMENT FOR SELF DEVELOPMENT

Ok, this has been bothering me for over a month now and I need to share it with other people. I really need to get it off my chest.

So, you know Percy Jackson's Greek Gods? Where he narrates the myths in his own way? Well, I wanted to talk about one particular moment in that book-one that involves Ares.

So if you don't know, a son of Poseidon (Halirrhothius) rapes Ares daughter. And then Ares kills him, and Poseidon is furious, so the latter demands a trial for Ares and the first ever Olympian trial is held. In the end Ares is acquitted AS HE RIGHTFULLY SHOULD BE.

All right, to get to the point-

First things first, Rick says that Alcippe didn't like Halirrhothius because, quote direct quote from the book- 'A son of Poseidon? Gross!'

What was the need for this? Really, tell me. There was no need for that, but Rick simply had to denigrate her just because. (cough cough misogyny cough cough)

It goes surprisingly fine for a Percy Jackson retelling until we come to the trial, where the story inevitably goes wrong.

Percy says that a fight between Poseidon and Ares would have been sweet because Poseidon would totally have owned that idiot in a fight.

Perseus Jackson, it does not matter if you say you're not defending your brother. You are actually indirectly defending a rapist by defending your father WHO'S DEFENDING HIM!

And later, he says that even though he agrees that Ares had the right to defend his daughter, he still thought that Poseidon should have beat the snot out of Ares because it would be fun to watch?

Wow, Percy. Wow, Rick. Wow, just WOW.

And you know what the saddest thing is?

This could have an amazing moment for Percy to step back, look at the situation and say, 'Hey, you know what? Even though I don't like Ares, I can't deny that he's a good guy sometimes. And my dad isn't always good, even if he also loves his kids, because he's defending a rapist. That's bad.'

That was a missed moment for self-reflection and character growth! That's what frustrates me so much.

anon because the fandom does genuinely scare me sometimes, especially within the caleo stan circles

love your posts. what are your thoughts on caleo? i personally greatly dislike it, but how do you feel about it? i think it's another percabeth situation, where people only defend the abuse that happens because of the gender (if calypso was male and leo was female, there would be a riot. same situation with the constant hitting/violence with annabeth. a genderswap would ruin these ships.) i dont think leo or calypso act happy in the relationship, whatsoever.

About Caleo.............

All right, I hate that ship, but my main problem is how Rick portrayed Calypso in PJO versus how she is portrayed in the actual mythology and the Odyssey.

Putting this under a cut because I don't want to clog your feed up.

I don't know how many PJO fans have read the Odyssey, but if you have read it before or after, doubtless you'll be surprised at how different the two Calypsos are.

How Calypso is portrayed in the Odyssey.

She is not a sad, helpless UWU teen girl like Calypso in PJO. She shouldn't have even been a teenager in PJO-she romanced two grown men!

She's not the type of person to understand and let someone go. She didn't do that with Odysseus-she kept him captive for seven years and only let him go when Hermes threatened her with the wrath of Zeus (not something you want to tempt, never ends well.)

Being a nymph and a minor goddess who was the daughter of Atlas, she supported him during the First Titanomachy which was why she lived on Ogygia in exile as punishment. She's a goddess, which means that she was leagues more powerful than Odysseus, who was exhausted, traumatised and didn't have any crew or supplies to sustain him. Going back into the ocean was also dangerous because, well, Poseidon and his rage (not something you want to have on your head either).

It's literally stated in the poem that Odysseus cried on the beach every morning, wishing to return home and missing it terribly. He literally just wanted to see the smoke that rose from his homeland and wants to die. Exact lines copied from Homey's Odyssey-

'By night indeed he would sleep by her side perforce in the hollow caves, unwilling beside the willing nymph.'

'At night-time, true, he slept with her even now in the arching caverns, but this was against his will; she was loving and he unloving'.

'But Odysseus, in his longing to see were it but the smoke leaping up from his own land, yearns to die.'

And when Hermes forces her to let him go, she makes this speech saying that gods will ravish all the women they like, but the moment goddesses start doing the same, they are furious and make them stop.

That's literally just her trying to blame the gods and not herself for something she did. She's trying to shift the blame and make herself seem likeable because others did it, so why can't she?

This is something that a lot of abusers use to make them seem better. Calypso's actions are not ok, and the narrative does not tell us that it's ok. It condemns them, and so should we.

This by @katerinaaqu is a must-read, and you should check out their blog for more info on the real Calypso.

And how she's portrayed in Percy Jackson

We should not, for example, turn this adult nymph who's a rapist into a biologically and mentally 15-16 and make her a poor little girl who's sadly living on an island and then state that she's romanced grown men while somehow being 15-16 years old and ignore it.

I'm not saying that it had to be stated that she was a rapist because this is a children's book series.

But I'm not saying that she had to be portrayed as a teenager either.

The worst part is that though Calypso is depicted as a teenager, it's said that she fought in a war, the First Titanomachy which was much more serious than the Second One, and she romanced two grown men.

All of this while being a teenager? How the hell does that work? Apollo literally says that Calypso is old enough to be his babysitter! And he's millennia old! Millennia!

There is no logic in this, honestly. I mean, there's not much logic or consistency in PJO, but this really takes the cake.

And in Heroes of Olympus, more specifically the fourth book House of Hades, she appears again.........

And, well, this is where it gets really revolting.

Leo Valdez, a fifteen or sixteen year old teenager, is thrown all the way to Ogygia. And there he meets Calypso, who, as the book series states, cannot help but fall in love with every hero that appears on her island because they're just her type.

I think we all know what happens next.

Calypso, a millennia-old goddess who fought in a war and romanced grown men, gets into a relationship.........with a traumatized, mentally unstable teenage boy who's not even a legal adult. After only, what, a few weeks?

This entire situation feels like some bizzarre nightmarish distorted version of terribly-written, unfunny comedy.

THE ATROCITY OF ROMANTICISED SUICIDE

Ok, so Caleo is abusive, but I'll get to that later.

What I want to talk about-first and foremost about Caleo-is that Leo commits suicide to find Calypso's island again-and this isn't good.

...............Sorry, did I say that that wasn't good?

No, that's a fucking understatement and underestimation.

IT'S ROMANTICISED SUICIDE.

Sink that in your head people. He killed himself to find her island again and take her off of it!

And no, that's not romantic. It's not. Fucking. ROMANTIC.

it's disgusting, unacceptable, unpleasant, nasty, disagreeable, horrid, unwholesome, atrocious, awful, deficient, revolting, lacking, unwelcome, unfortunate, inferior, inadequate, lousy, flawed, pathetic, disastrous, ill, useless, worthless, gross, damnable, vile, absymal, horrendous, shoddy, abominable, crappy, faulty, trashy, substandard, nasty, terrible, dreadful, unfavourable, grim, distressing, regrettable, adverse to morality and humanity, entirely unnecessary and not up to scratch (THAT WAS THE ITCHIEST THING I'VE EVER SEEN).

How, just how am I supposed to explain how horrible this is? Especially in a children's book series?

Killing yourself just to find a loved one is never a good concept in any form of media. It's a self-destructive fantasy and suicide itself is a horrible, horrible thing-not to blame the suicidal person, but to both them and their loved ones.

And suicide should never be romanticised, never ever, period. To do so, especially in a children's book series, is absolutely atrocious writing on the author's part, no matter who they are.

He never even called it out. If he had said that it was horrible and treated it as such, it would be a little better-but no. It's cheered on and encouraged, which is a level of hell that's deeper than the Earth's core.

I don't think I've emphasized how awful this is. It's just.......let's not romanticise suicide and suicidal tendencies. Not for anything. Never.

LEO'S ARC IS RUINED

The entire point of Leo Valdez's arc was to show that being the third wheel (seventh one in this case) wasn't bad. Being single, not finding romantic love, was fine. Acceptance without romance was possible, and pure platonic love was also possible. And Calypso pretty much ruined this because in the end, heteronormativity forces romance above everything.

And he literally prioritises this random girl whom he spent a few weeks with over his friends whom he spent months with and knows them way better than Calypso.

The forced amatonormativity here is as transparent as clean air. You'' be able to see lichen growing on the trees if you look close enough.

Abuse in Caleo

Calypso is also abusive to Leo.

1) She looks into Leo's past and sees his memories. Without his permission. Which is pretty creepy and moves past boundaries in a bad way.

Now we come to the Dark Prophecy, where they star as a couple (more like a star explosion).

2) In TDP, Calypso jabs her fingers into Leo's ribs.

Why?

It's because she asked what was hiding Festus from the mortals, so he tells her what the Mist is and she says that already knows-even though she literally asked the question that provoked in the first place.

Even if she thinks he's insulting her or talking down, when he's not, she shouldn't jab her fingers into his ribs.

And that wasn't playful-Leo expressed physical pain through an exclamation. And even if Calypso thought it was playful, she didn't apologize afterwards when she saw that she caused Leo physical pain.

3) She also calls him by a name that he told her never to call him by-Leonidas.

He clearly doesn't like it, and knowing that, she still uses it, that too in front of someone they don't know very well, almost a stranger.

In the Riordanverse, names have power.

Leo chooses not to call himself that. He tells Calypso never to call him that. And she calls him that.

In this moment, she's taking his power and autonomy away from him by calling him something he doesn't like. It's probably minor to a lot of you, but honestly, it's pretty bothersome to those of us who have actually experienced this.

4) Leo often uses mechanical-related analogies, but Calypso hates them and makes him stop using them, so he doesn't even use them when she's not around.

What's wrong with him using his analogies? He uses them to help him and she makes him stop. She effectively stops him from using something that helps him. That is bad.

It's a fundamental part of him. If Calypso doesn't like it, then why is she dating him at all?

5) Leo is also bad to Calypso. He calls her Mamacita multiple times after she tells him not to. Reyna literally has to tell him to stop calling her that and intimidate him into doing it, and it's all passed off has lighthearted playfulness.

As someone who has been through this before, it's pretty damn frustrating. It's not funny or cute to do it. It's plain annoying and the person on the receiving end is completely right to want it to stop.

6) The age gap. I've mentioned this before.

But some people are saying that Calypso has the maturity of a teenager in PJO, so why shouldn't she date Leo?

All right, using that logic, let's make Apollo and Reyna date!

NO.

Calypso has lived for millennia on her island. She says that it's been three thousand five hundred and sixty eight years.

This isn't like Nico, who was in the Lotus Casino for decades but only aged a month. He was the same level of mature when he went into it and came out. Calypso was not.

Apollo has also lived for millennia. And he has a teenager's maturity. Does that mean it's ok for him to date Reyna.

No. It does not. And the same logic applies to Calypso and Leo.

I've also heard someone saying that Calypso is cursed to fall in love with whoever washes up on her island, which isn't true.

She says that the gods send her the type of person whom she can't help herself from falling in love with. Not that she's cursed to love them.

7) In TDP, Leo is working on something to try and find Georgina, a missing child.

And then when he says as much, Calypso sharply asks him if he can imagine losing his child.

He can, in fact, do that. He lost his mom, which was just as horrible if not more than Jo and Emmie losing their child, since there was a chance of Georgina coming back, but Esperanza could never come back.

He also has a little brother-Harley. He says that he would be furious if someone did something bad to Harley! So yes, he can in fact imagine what losing a child is like!

After this, Calypso for some reason gets frustrated and tells him that he can't reduce everything to a program.

He's not doing that. He's not reducing this problem to a program-he's working on a program to reduce this problem.

She tells him that Jo and Emmie don't need gadgets or jokes. They need someone who will listen.

And how is that going to help exactly? Leo is actually doing something. He's working on something to find Georgina.

A good listener is something nice to have, but a person who actually does something helpful is even better. And if Calypso thinks Jo and Emmie need a good listener, then she can listen. What else is she doing anyway?

Calypso willfully misunderstands this and wrongfully accuses him of not listening and trying to reduce everything to a machine when he's not. This is what a toxic partner does. They twist the narrative to make you think that your actions are wrong when they're not.

TO CONCLUDE

Neither Leo nor Calypso is happy in their relationship. It was built on naive dreams and false passions-the moment they became a real couple, they didn't know what to do. They thought that they loved each other, but it was only the idea of love and having a partner that was compelling to them. The moment they actually got what they wanted, which was to be in a real relationship, they didn't know how to actually be a couple. Then the problems of a real relationship began to hit both of them.

The logical solution would be to talk it out, apologise on both ends, realise that they wouldn't work out together and finally break up while remaining good friends or just stop contacting each other entirely-either one is fine.

They're taking a break now, so hopefully Rick Riordan will make them break up, but I think that he'll just never mention them again, which wouldn't be as great, but would be fine, honestly, regarding the current state of Rick Riordan.

EXACTLY. Rick's misogyny should be crystal clear to anyone with good media literacy and a good understanding of Greek Gods and myths. He somehow manages to destroy every Greek God-someone give him the Golden Raspberry award for his portrayal of the Greek Gods.

Whatever Rick doesn't like, Percy doesn't like. Honestly, I can see why some people would think that he's a Gary Stu-literally everyone seems to like him and those who don't are villains or bad side characters. It's pretty tiring.

Why would the gods abandon Greece-especially Athena abandon Athens? It makes no sense, but American superiority takes precedence to actual respect for another country's culture.

He most probably did use his brains on denigrating Athena. And there were totally ways to make Poseidon morally gray, even in Percy's POV (have him threaten Annabeth like Athena threatened Percy. It fits him more too.)

On a side note, I do think that it would be interesting to see Persephone and Demeter have a good relationship but have Demeter not like Hades because, you know, the whole kidnapping thing.

I mean, it's symbolic of course, but if you look at it from their POVs, Demeter would obviously dislike Hades because he kidnapped and kept her daughter from her for 4 months or a half a year.

Maybe have it so that Hades tries to please Demeter and is very apologetic to her? She would probably mellow out with time but she'd still be a little upset with him of course.

Just my thoughts.

One thing I find so interesting about the PJO fandom is how they actually accepted how Rick fucked up 90% of the goddesses. Even when he uses a version of a myth that specifically talks about men being idiots, he villainizes women. Like, no one complained about how fucked up is that he used the story of Hephaestus trying to rape Athena and turning it into a “poor guy cried bc he was rejected by a girl” thing?

The true story is literally Hephaestus trying to rape Athena, she fights him off but his semen falls into her skirt and cleans it with a piece of cloth and tosses it into the ground (earth, which is Gaia) and from there, Erictonio is born. And Athena raised the child as her own even tho he was the product of the assault she suffered. The guy ruled Athens.

Rick turned it into Hephaestus falling in love with Athena and crying on her lap, making her reject and KICK him plus being disgusted by the tears and the dirt.

He also used all of Ovid versions he could possibly find to fuck Athena up. Arachne doesn’t happen with Greek writers and Medusa was never cursed (or assaulted) when we talk about the OG Myth. She was already born a monster and Athena only helps Perseus kill her bc yeah, Medusa killed people.

Also, Medusa’s version by Ovid is a lot alike Cassandra of Troy story, and let me tell ya, Cassandra was cursed but it wasn’t by a woman. And when she was raped by Ajax, Athena made sure that he didn’t made it back to Greece.

Now I’m gonna talk about Demeter. Demeter, who had her daughter kidnapped, raped and imprisoned, and was turned into the typical “mother in law who hated son in law bc she thinks her daughter could do better” when yeah…she has all the right to feel angry bc her daughter was KIDNAPPED.

Artemis doesn’t hate men and her followers also don’t hate men. Feminism isn’t about hating men.

Aphrodite. I cannot even describe how dirty they made Aphrodite’s children. Like be fr one of her children helped build what it would’ve been Rome. He was a fighter. And her cabin there is just so different of what she is truly like. They should have a lot of other powers.

Also, a lot of women from the books follows the same stereotype of “omg I hate makeup it’s so girlish and I’d rather fight” like you can be feminine, wear makeup and STILL FIGHT. One doesn’t erase the other.

Another thing, but this one is about MOTHERS! I truly cannot understand the way Rick creates his women. I’m serious tho. Like, I’m sorry but sometimes it seems that his thing some goddesses (Athena, for example) are personal. The “abandoning Athens” thing, the “should’ve chosen Poseidon”, the way he wrote her as being cold towards her kids…in one of the versions, Athena was the one who saved Dionysus from Hera. She raised a child and made him a king even though he was the product of her almost rapist. She was there helping heroes all along. She fought for Odysseus for ten years.

Also, this fandom is incapable of seeing the difference between Minerva and Athena. Minerva gave Annabeth the mark, Athena had nothing to do with this. Annabeth is her favorite daughter, she made her architect of Olympus, protected her through her journey to find Luke and Thalia, disobeyed her fathers orders trying to help to find Annabeth, made battle plans with her and all…and she always claimed all of her children.

I think people just don’t like her bc she doesn’t trust Percy. And she shouldn’t. I love him, but Athena IS the goddess of wisdom after all and as such, it would be pretty dumb to trust a demigod that won a battle against the god of war when he was only twelve. Not to mention that everyone kinda thought the “preserve or destroy Olympus” was on his hands. And he tortured a goddess…I’m sorry but she was pretty much right. Wouldn’t trust someone that had the power to fuck me and my family up either. She dint made the choice based on “omg I hate my rival and his children” even more so bc she was trained by one of his children and bunch of grandchildren. She made the choice based on what she thought was less risky.

If she was so against Percabeth, I can assure you she would’ve killed Percy and probably wouldn’t even suffer much consequences. She admires some things about Percy but she was right about his flaw. And she also helped him during one of his quest to go to college. Does she loves the idea of the relationship? No. But that’s bc she is precisely the opposite of love. She doesn’t make decisions based on what her heart says, but on what her brain says. If she succumbs to the heart, then she would seize to be goddess of wisdom, reason and all of what she values. That’s why she vowed to never marry.

And, as Helenist, I do not take the myths that seriously bc when we talk about religion, I have a clear mind that those myth were made by humans who used the gods as a tool to justify some of their actions, and I hate almost all of the retellings that those authors do, but is so wild to see how much power they have on society bc now I cannot see anything about the gods without someone saying shit about them. But I do know all about the myths and I gotta say, doesn’t make much sense to use a Roman author to talk about Greek Gods. He made them dirty. Also doesn’t make much sense to use this versions of Ovid but still change it to make it more sweet for the men. Poseidon and Athena didn’t spend that much time beefing, they even have a city together (Troezen) and she definitely doesn’t hate his children. Her best friend was literally his grandchild.

Safe to say that y’all should probably question Rick on how he treats women bc I was seeing the PJO series (the cast is amazing btw, safe to say that Leah/Annabeth is my fav) and by the looks of it, saying on how he changed Athena’s personality one more time, I legit think that Annie won’t jump to save her friends on season 3, she will probably be pushed by her mother or whatever.

Another thing: apparently only the women that like and have a friendship with Percy are treated as cool. But that’s on the fandom, not the author.

I forgot to add one thing and I’m gonna fix the grammar later but the “this is for children” excuse isn’t really valid considering that we saw Gabe being aggressive with Sally, we also saw Ares being a jerk to Clarisse (which also doesn’t make sense) and the story clearly states cheating, fights, death and a lot of other terrors. If you’re gonna use a rape version of a myth bc you chose to fuck a Goddess up, then you should state that the man is to blame. In the books we see Medusa saying she was Poseidon’s girlfriend/lover…she was his lover on the og myth, not in the version Rick chose. In the version that he chose, she was clearly raped. But he erased that and replaced rapist with boyfriend. He could’ve chosen to do another path if he didn’t want to talk about sexual abuse, I can tell y’all a hundred of ways this could go, but he chose this path and changed it, favoring the man. Again.

He could’ve gone with the theogony and said what was there that basically is: she was a monster, BORN a monster, daughter of other two monsters, no one wanted to get close to her, but he did. They slept together in a camp of flowers.

Athena only enters the story wayyy after this. And, as y’all can see, no curse. Yet, he chose to go with the rape version were Medusa is a maiden, loyal to Athena, gets raped on Athena’s temple by Poseidon and Athena curses her. And what did the author do? He made this: Medusa, loyal to Athena, fell in love with Poseidon and they did things on her temple. Athena cursed her. Again erasing the men’s fault.

The hate on Athena doesn’t make any sense at all. Y’all love some other male characters that don’t have a single sense of responsibility and possibly did everything wrong in the book. I saw people condemn Athena for her treatment of Deadalus when the guy literally killed his nephew bc he was more praised than him. And Athena gave him a mark that burned and did some shit to teach him a lesson. Poseidon wanted a trial to avenge his rapist son that was killed by Ares bc he tried to rape one of Ares daughters. A RAPIST. And Poseidon is treated like and angel bc what??? He likes Percy? Is his father and got him a gift? And Athena is being hated bc she isn’t his number one fan and her Roman part decided to give Annabeth a Mark? And mind you she’s just like that with him bc she knows more than everyone else and knows that he is dangerous. A good guy? Yes, Percy is the most amazing guy. Still dangerous. Still had the power to torture a goddess and win against the god of war. And she doesn’t dislike him, she dislikes his relationship with her daughter. And even so, she didn’t stop the relationship. So yeah I won’t ever get why the women always get more hate than the men considering this.

Again, as a Helenist, I don’t take the myths seriously when I talk about the religion in general bc the Gods are superiors. They don’t have human flaws. But, as someone who knows about the myths, is safe to say I hate those stories that uses myths like that and turns it against the Goddesses and make them out to be the worst ever. All the gods deserved way better than what they got with those retellings.

HOW RICK PORTRAYED THE GREEK GODS AND WHY IT WAS SO IMPORTANT

So people are going to notice that a lot of my complaints aren't just in PJO but extend to media portraying Greek Myths in general. But I want to focus on Percy Jackson and not other media, so I'm going to focus on Percy Jackson and not other media.

Starting off.................

The way Rick portrayed the Greek Gods was important because PJO was the most read book series that heavily centered around Greek Mythology he pretty much destroyed their images at the time.

There's an entire anti Percy Jackson tag as well as an anti PJO tag for you to scroll through to see how Rick Riordan portrayal of the Greek Gods was terrible. Be my guest and treat yourself to it. Search it up.

There are also people like @alatismeni-theitsa, @margaretkart and @katerinaaqu to ask for correct information on Greek Mythology. So be their guest too.

Today, we have PJO fans running around having incorrect perceptions of the gods and flinging hate and abuse at the real Greek Gods while Greeks have to suffer through all this bullshit.

The torture is REAL. Just ask them.

I mean, you have people claiming that they are the CHILDREN of VIRGIN GODDESSES.

Artemis, Athena, Hera and Hestia don't have any demigod children. They can't have any demigod children.

If you really want to, call yourself their chosen champion. Not their child. It's disrespectful to Greek culture and religion to do otherwise.

Rick Riordan read about and taught Greek Myths in school, so he must have read the actual versions of the myths.

And knowing these, he decided to twist them into his terrible, inferior, crappy versions.

That man literally wrote Hephaestus, a rapist, as a poor guy trying to get a girl, oh, he's so sad and pathetic, and Athena's such a mean bitch for not accepting his advances even if she doesn't want it!

I'm not joking.................and I don't have words for this. I just don't.

Riordan doesn't really have any tact, does he? None at all.

And no, Greek people cannot get away from these horrible portrayals, because there are too many Percy Jackson fans clogging up the Greek God tags with their Rick Riordan written PJO versions of the gods, which is kind of terrible for people who just want to read about real Greek Mythology, not Percy Jackson. And this happens in real life, too. I mean, people using PJO as a substitute for real Greek Mythology.

Pro tip for PJO tumblr users: if you're typing about a god, use the Greek God PJO tag, like PJO Apollo or PJO Aphrodite, not just Apollo or Aphrodite, ok? Thanks for reading this.

There are many common misconceptions about Greek Mythology due to Percy Jackson. So, if you're not sure about something, please search it up on verified academic websites or ask real people-you can do this online too.

Now I am aware that Rick has the creative license to portray Greek Gods however he wants-

but let us as educated people all be aware of the fact that we should not always take portrayals of the Greek Gods in modern media depicting them seriously and if you want to read up on the actual gods, then read the myths and the Odyssey, Iliad etc.

Now, to name another shockingly appalling writing choice-

In the very first book, WW2 is atrociously used as a plot point

Yes, that's right-Rick Riordan, beloved author of a bestselling franchise for children and adults alike, reduces WW2, one of the most bloody and complex conflicts in history with a multitude of a reasons for its existence, to a fight between fictional demigods of the Big Three simply to have a reason for the Big 3 not to have children.

Do you actually know how serious this is?

Millions of people even today are affected by the WW2 due to generational trauma and abusive parents. WW2 killed millions of soldiers and civilians alike, and the Holocaust was so horrible that some people would faint just reading about what happened. I will not go into the bloody, gory details here, but if you still don't believe this, go search up WW2.

To have Rick Riordan portray it in such a callous way, to make a literal Greek God sire war criminals in modern history, when there were other methods he could have used to intertwine the mythological world and demigods and history.........it makes you wonder what was running through his mind at the time.

There were so many other ways he could have portrayed the prophecy-make it so that Big 3 children were constantly causing natural disasters and fictional wars in the mythological world, not the real world, and constantly dividing the cabins at CHB. Maybe they had their own war parallel to WW2. There were so many ways to do this- and none of them had to do what was ultimately done.

PJO WWII IS THE ULTIMATE INSULT TO THE GREEKS

What makes this even WORSE is that during World War II, the Greeks were in fact part of the ALLIES.

The Allies were fighting against the Axis powers, the latter of which contained Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Japan.

When the Nazis invaded Greece-well, it's never a good thing for a country to be invaded by enemies during a time of war.

At least 250,000 people died during the Axis occupation. And the country's economy and infrastructure were ruined quite horribly.

And generations of Greeks are traumatised because of this, even today. Not just Greeks-thousands of people. Millions of people all over the globe are still traumatized from this war, be it direct experience or generational trauma.

And to make ANCIENT GREEK GODS responsible for WWII is simply, totally and absolutely unforgivable on Rick Riordan's part.

To make the Greeks' enemies the sons of their ancient gods........no. Just no.

And yes, Hitler is a son of Hades in canon. Rick later changed it because of the backlash. He's absolutely disgusting.

WHY THE HELL ARE THE GREEK GODS IN AMERICA?

Now.........the Greek Gods are in the USA!

But..........they're Greek, right, which means that they should be in Greece! So why now are they in the USA?

Well.........here's Rick's explanation for it.

Apparently, the Greek Gods started with the fire of the Western Civilisation and then moved onto other places.

'Flame of the West' crap my ass. Search it up-there's this great article called the Whitening Thief. Read that.

Apparently, without the flame of Westernisation, there would be only darkness and chaos. As someone who's not part of a Western country, this is pretty racist to countries like mine and I'm pointing it out.

@margaretkart

@alatismeni-theitsa

@katerinaaqu

These are all good blogs to disillusion yourself with Percy Jackson and learn about what really happened in Greek Mythology.

And I just want to say-Percy Jackson is an ok start for venturing into Greek Mythology as long as you've read up some basic background beforehand, but-

But-

Do NOT, under ANY circumstances whatsoever, take RICK RIORDAN'S portrayal of the Greek Gods as the REAL Greek Gods.

Never do that. That is the one thing that must not be done.

Hera doesn't just love perfect families. She literally lives in the most dysfunctional family to ever exist. And she loves you if you try. She really does.

Hades would not threaten to eternally torture literal children just because of what their parents did to him. His literal job is to uphold justice in the underworld, and sending a child to Tartarus just because her father angered him and he couldn't punish the father isn't justice now, is it?

Ares loves his children and as for why Rick made him hate them-

Rick has a hate boner against the war god, that I will swear on. Read this post and the explanation for why Rick shouldn't have done it.

And the gods are actively depicted as cruel, neglectful, abusive parents, when in the myths they are quite the opposite.

Real Aphrodite loves her son Aeneas and frequently comes to his aid on the battlefield. She also tells him to not marry a woman (TO GIVE UP LOVE, HER LITERAL DOMAIN) so that he can fulfil his destiny of becoming a king.

Real Ares loves all his children. He tries to avenge his son Cycnus when Heracles kills him with good reason for being a cruel tyrant-and they were even riding chariots together when Heracles came across them. He avenged his daughter even at the cost of being punished by Poseidon and Zeus, neither of whom liked him.

Now, what I want to tell you is that the PJO Greek Gods are Rick's interpretation of them.

An interpretation of a Greek God by a modern author (who isn't Greek, by the way, please take note) is not the same as the real Greek God. Please understand this and accordingly adjust your views.

This also goes for Madeline Miller, Rachel Smythe, etc.

And lastly, one of the most ironic things is that though Richard uses the Greek Gods in his books, he has never ever added a single Greek character in it.

I'm talking about a modern Greek demigod who comes from Greece. Imagine them teaching the other demigods Modern Greek and Greek culture, language and traditions!

It's very ironic that he includes Chinese, African and Native American culture in his works and then turns around and pretend that Greek culture doesn't exist.

The demigods are in Athens, but for how much time before they go back to America? Barely any at all. And nothing learnt about culture while they're there.

(No hate to his already shitty representation. I'm merely making a point that there should have been a Greek character in a book that heavily centers on Greek Gods and their children, even if it's in America.)

RICK DOESN'T USE GREEK CULTURE OR RELIGION AND IN FACT INSULTS GREECE IN HIS WORKS

So, if you've read the title, let me tell you something-

Do you know that Greek Gods are still worshipped?

Some of you do, some of you don't, but let me tell you, they are still worshipped.

And accordingly, you must respect them and their worshippers, just like you would do for Christians. You cannot maliciously ridicule and condemn Hellenistic Pagans who worship Greek Gods just because they are a minority.

And if you've read the myths and think that the Greek Gods being cruel......

They're not, actually. I mean, yes, you think they're cruel, but most of the myths aren't taken literally by Hellenistic Pagans who worship Greek Gods.

What the Greek Gods do is supposed to be symbolic.

Hades kidnapping Persephone symbolises death ripping children from their grieving parents' arms. It's an explanation for the seasons and it finally represents the fact that daughters could be given away by their fathers with the mother having no say in it whatsoever.

Demeter's grief and her actually being able to do something about her daughter's marriage and Persephone being returned to her is supposed to be a comforting tale for grieving mothers who have lost their daughter.

Artemis' cruelty towards certain people? It represents the cruelty of nature towards humans and what it will do to humans if they provoke it.

Zeus' infidelity and abuse of his power? Well, it represents what kings do. Zeus represented the kings of Ancient Greece, and kings abused their power and had many mistresses besides having a wife.

Many Greek kings also claimed to sons of Zeus or descendants of the gods, so it the idea that Zeus had many affairs with ladies and princesses of royal lineages was conceived.

The link above provides many good reasons for why the Greeks wrote Zeus having many affairs with mortal women, so check it out.

Also, Zeus is symbolic of storms. Storms are volatile and raging, and so was Zeus at times. He was a god of storms and as such symbolised them.

Hera punishing the mistresses and children in a jealous rage to bother Zeus? That's what queens did back in the day since they couldn't directly punish their husbands.

Dionysus being charming and fun but also being mad and wild? Well, he represents breaking away from social norms and going fully wild. Also, wine can make people fun and charming, but at the same time, it can turn people into mad, raging creatures.

The point is, most of what the Greek Gods did was symbolic to their domains. And no, contrary to popular thought, Greeks did not live in fear of their Gods striking them down every moment. In fact, many of them genuinely devotionally loved their gods.

And Greek Gods themselves are very kind and benevolent to their devotees, even today, as long as you don't provoke or seriously insult them. Just ask Hellenistic Pagans who are their devotees and you'll be surprised at the results. I'm serious.

The problem here is that we're trying to moralize divinity.

According to the Greeks, gods weren't humans. They were modelled after humans, but they were above humans and human flaws.

And the Abrahamic gods do terrible things too, but do we mock them? No, we don't, because their worshippers say that they are above humans and human flaws, so similarly, the Greek Gods are above humans and our flaws.

CONCLUSION

And no one cares about the fact that a guy is objectifying and making money off a culture all the while removing its significance and turning it into a joke.

Even though Greeks have a millennia old and rich culture, people are always bastardizing it. Non-Greeks really must stop doing this. It's very culturally disrespectful.

I've also seen grown adults saying that the Greek Gods are American so they're allowed to do what they want with them now, and that's absolutely disgusting. They literally stated that the Greek Gods were American now, right out in the open on Twitter.

Let me add one last thing here.

Rick Riordan has a series called Trials of Apollo in which Apollo is cast down to Earth as a human for the third time to defeat Python.

What I want to talk about here is Apollo's human name-Lester Papadopoulos.

Papadopoulos is a common Greek Christian surname that means 'son of a priest'. One of Apollo's domains in prophecy and he has many priests, so maybe this is a reference to that.

But what is most upsetting is that this name is used for comedy.

It's belittled, laughed at and ridiculed for its longevity and hard pronunciation when it is in fact a very normal Greek surname. Even if it's not an American surname, even if it doesn't sound normal and sounds ridiculous to you, it's not ridiculous to others and you should respect it.

Can you imagine how Greek people with that last name read the books and felt bad about their last name? Or felt furious. I know that I would be FURIOUS if my last name was used like that.

And the fact is that Papadopoulos isn't even that hard to pronounce! It's literally just 5 syllables that you can repeat a few times until it doesn't twist your tongue.

And if you can't repeat this simple name, then you need to go back to kindergarten. Hell, go back to preschool even.

And there are people who have the audacity to say that the Greek Gods belong to America and are American. Grown adults, actually, on Twitter, no less. Tweeting it for the whole world to see their absolute foolishness and audacity.

They're pretty tactless, huh?

The Greek Gods were and always will be GREEK. Foreigners are not their rightful descendants-the Greeks are (Greek immigrants included). I mean...........this is bizzarre.

To conclude, (really conclude this time) though it's a series heavily entwined with Greek Gods, the only Greek thing about the series is the Gods. There's no Greek culture, religion or language, and even the Greek Gods are heavily Americanised, which is pretty disappointing.

(Side note: If you think anything I've said is wrong, tell me. I'll correct it immediately.)

@fandomloverangel

Honestly, Rick’s world building fell apart the moment he introduced Roman gods. Because the og series already conflated the Greek and Roman gods - which is fine, most mythology media does, that’s not the issue. The issue is making a whole sequel series about how different the Greek and Roman gods are, then failing to explain what those actual differences are. It’s almost hypocritical. Like how satyrs and fauns are different things, but you can’t really say that because the og series was already calling fauns satyrs - which, again, a lot of already people do and would have been fine if you didn’t bring the concept of Roman mythology being a separate thing into it. It isn’t just the Greek gods with different names, there are real differences, but that being said, most of them are pretty minor and at the end of the day are just different versions of Greek stories. Because here’s the thing - Greek vs Roman isn’t that black and white because there are different versions of mythology from different parts of Greece. They did not all believe the same things. There were essentially different denominations that had their versions, and sometimes different names for the gods, or even their own gods added into what we think of as the typical Greek pantheon. Take Orphism for example - they called Zeus Jove and Hades Pluto (yeah, the Greeks were using that name long before the Romans), and had at least 2 gods weren’t recognized anywhere else in Greece - but were still 100% Greek. So then the question becomes, are there different people/personalities for all these versions too? You would think it would be easier to just say “here are these different versions, because when things spread through oral tradition, things tend to change, but here’s the REAL version” and pick whatever one is most plot relevant (which I think the og series already kind of did if I remember correctly). Not only is that more realistic, but just makes more narrative sense. Some people might say “oh, but they’re kids books, you don’t have to get so technical about it”, and you’re right. It didn’t have to be. Again, I think it was completely fine that the og series didn’t differentiate, but Rick opened this can of worms when he introduced the Roman gods, so I’m going to be nitpicky about it. What would have made more sense is if it was just like “Oh, there’s this other demigod camp and they just so happen to use the Roman names for the gods”. Boom. Done. What about gods that were unique to Rome? They can still be real. Say that only the Romans knew/wrote about them. Heck, there was that one pjo spinoff book that had freaking Melinoe in it, even though the majority of Greece would not have considered her existence to be canon. Again, nothing wrong with that, but if you’re not going to differentiate that, then there is no reason to differentiate the Romans (or more accurately, attempt to differentiate the Romans and fail).

All of this. Every single thing in it.

Rick simplified it for the children who were reading it, but he wrote a lot of it incorrectly.

The Romans didn't just take inspiration from the Greeks-they took a lot of inspiration from Etruscan culture too.

Read this link by @lady-menrva to understand more.

The Greek and Roman gods were different in PJO because the Roman Gods were more disciplined and warlike, but that seems to be the only difference, which isn't the case.

Minerva was highly respected by the Romans. She was part of the Capitoline Triad which was very important and held a central place in Rome. They represented Roman greatness and invincibility! If she had children, they would definitely be warriors if they wanted to be.

Rick just made the Romans dislike Neptune and Minerva because he needed unnecessary angst for Percy and Annabeth. Why he did this I don't know, since they were just accepted without any question later. Just wanted to make his favorites more special, I guess.

My advice to anyone reading this is to never take Heroes of Olympus as anything that's correct. Never take any of it seriously and search on Google for your questions using verified academic websites or ask real people.

REGARDING PJO HADES

Hades might not be a nice guy............

Ok, I'm not going to pretend that Hades is a nice guy.

Sure, he's fair and just. Mostly good. But not nice. Not a laughing, smiling guy. I mean, the Ancient Greeks were scared of him for a reason.

I'm not going to pretend that he's a pleasant guy who's the life of the party. Being the Ruler of the Underworld and so many people dying before they were supposed to-well, that's not fun to deal with. Of course he'd be grim and cold after all that time there!

He's described as cold, pitiless, stern, unyielding and even hateful once. Not the kind of description that conjures up the image of a nice guy.

But he's not Satan

But he wasn't cruel. He was said to be ruthless, but that was because he judged everyone fairly, no matter their status or wealth or position on the hierarchy. No amount of sacrifices could change your judgement in the underworld based on your actions in life.

Hesiod literally says that's why us humans hate him- 'For Hades gives not way, and is pitiless, and therefore he among all the gods is most hateful to mortals.'

He is pitiless, but only in terms of fairness. If you show compassion to real criminals, then you're harming the good public by letting the bad people off with a slap on the wrist. In this way, how is Hades being pitiless, stern, even cruel to literal criminals bad?

And this is where my problem with PJO Hades comes in.

So we all know that Thalia, a child, sacrifices herself to save her friends. She should rightfully go to Elysium-

But instead, it's heavily implied and even confirmed that Hades would send her to The Fields of Punishment or even Tartarus instead, just for being the daughter of a man who angered him (Zeus).

Now, I want to digress and tell you that Hades does not personally judge souls. He leaves that to three judges-Minos, Aeacus and Rhadamanthus, all of whom judged the souls.

Hades can't interefere with their decisions. These judges are a force of nature like the Fates-and we all know how important the latter are.

In PJO, the judges rotate regularly, but Hades still should not be able to interfere with their decision, right? But it's shown that he can interfere with their decisions, which shouldn't be possible.

And even if Hades could interefere with their decisions, why would he send Thalia to the Fields of Punishment? He's a just god. His job is to uphold cosmic order in the Underworld by sending people to where they belong based on their actions in life.

So tell me, why would he send a child, a twelve year old, to be severely punished even if her father had angered him and he couldn't touch Zeus?

It goes against everything Hades stands for. It doesn't make any sense.

Then again, Rick Riordan did ruin most of the gods in his portrayal, so it's not surprising, but it's pretty annoying to read how Hades sent a monster army after a child for no good reason. Hades,

Here's a link to an ask I sent to the wonderful @margaretkart about Hades and her response. You should go check out her blog to learn more and correct misinformation from PJO.

B-but he kidnapped Persephone!

(That was entirely symbolic and not meant to be taken literally. It was an explanation of the changing seasons, a portrayal of cruelly death ripped young children away from their parents' arms, and a comfort story for grieving mothers who could not have a say in their daughters' marriages. MOST of the myths are symbolic and not literal.)

To conclude-I'm just saying, Hades might not be a nice guy, but he'll always be fair and just. Rick's portrayal of him as morally gray was nice, but he messed up in making Hades send monsters after a child for no good reason just because of her father.

This is an amazing critique of Rick's misogyny that most of the fandom is apparently incapable of seeing-they most likely intentionally turn a blind eye to it, which is very problematic. Authors are allowed to use their versions of the myths, but we must not take the media too seriously and we DEFINITELY should not think that that was the only version. Also, the fandom needs to differentiate between the OG myths and what goes in the modern piece of media that uses them (Lore Olympus, Percy Jackson, etc).

Also, I can commiserate with you about Demeter and Persephone, as it's tiring to see their loving relationship being destroyed and twisted into something horrible.

Rick really fucked up Athena and Aphrodite too.

One thing I find so interesting about the PJO fandom is how they actually accepted how Rick fucked up 90% of the goddesses. Even when he uses a version of a myth that specifically talks about men being idiots, he villainizes women. Like, no one complained about how fucked up is that he used the story of Hephaestus trying to rape Athena and turning it into a “poor guy cried bc he was rejected by a girl” thing?

The true story is literally Hephaestus trying to rape Athena, she fights him off but his semen falls into her skirt and cleans it with a piece of cloth and tosses it into the ground (earth, which is Gaia) and from there, Erictonio is born. And Athena raised the child as her own even tho he was the product of the assault she suffered. The guy ruled Athens.

Rick turned it into Hephaestus falling in love with Athena and crying on her lap, making her reject and KICK him plus being disgusted by the tears and the dirt.

He also used all of Ovid versions he could possibly find to fuck Athena up. Arachne doesn’t happen with Greek writers and Medusa was never cursed (or assaulted) when we talk about the OG Myth. She was already born a monster and Athena only helps Perseus kill her bc yeah, Medusa killed people.

Also, Medusa’s version by Ovid is a lot alike Cassandra of Troy story, and let me tell ya, Cassandra was cursed but it wasn’t by a woman. And when she was raped by Ajax, Athena made sure that he didn’t made it back to Greece.

Now I’m gonna talk about Demeter. Demeter, who had her daughter kidnapped, raped and imprisoned, and was turned into the typical “mother in law who hated son in law bc she thinks her daughter could do better” when yeah…she has all the right to feel angry bc her daughter was KIDNAPPED.

Artemis doesn’t hate men and her followers also don’t hate men. Feminism isn’t about hating men.

Aphrodite. I cannot even describe how dirty they made Aphrodite’s children. Like be fr one of her children helped build what it would’ve been Rome. He was a fighter. And her cabin there is just so different of what she is truly like. They should have a lot of other powers.

Also, a lot of women from the books follows the same stereotype of “omg I hate makeup it’s so girlish and I’d rather fight” like you can be feminine, wear makeup and STILL FIGHT. One doesn’t erase the other.

Another thing, but this one is about MOTHERS! I truly cannot understand the way Rick creates his women. I’m serious tho. Like, I’m sorry but sometimes it seems that his thing some goddesses (Athena, for example) are personal. The “abandoning Athens” thing, the “should’ve chosen Poseidon”, the way he wrote her as being cold towards her kids…in one of the versions, Athena was the one who saved Dionysus from Hera. She raised a child and made him a king even though he was the product of her almost rapist. She was there helping heroes all along. She fought for Odysseus for ten years.

Also, this fandom is incapable of seeing the difference between Minerva and Athena. Minerva gave Annabeth the mark, Athena had nothing to do with this. Annabeth is her favorite daughter, she made her architect of Olympus, protected her through her journey to find Luke and Thalia, disobeyed her fathers orders trying to help to find Annabeth, made battle plans with her and all…and she always claimed all of her children.

I think people just don’t like her bc she doesn’t trust Percy. And she shouldn’t. I love him, but Athena IS the goddess of wisdom after all and as such, it would be pretty dumb to trust a demigod that won a battle against the god of war when he was only twelve. Not to mention that everyone kinda thought the “preserve or destroy Olympus” was on his hands. And he tortured a goddess…I’m sorry but she was pretty much right. Wouldn’t trust someone that had the power to fuck me and my family up either. She dint made the choice based on “omg I hate my rival and his children” even more so bc she was trained by one of his children and bunch of grandchildren. She made the choice based on what she thought was less risky.

If she was so against Percabeth, I can assure you she would’ve killed Percy and probably wouldn’t even suffer much consequences. She admires some things about Percy but she was right about his flaw. And she also helped him during one of his quest to go to college. Does she loves the idea of the relationship? No. But that’s bc she is precisely the opposite of love. She doesn’t make decisions based on what her heart says, but on what her brain says. If she succumbs to the heart, then she would seize to be goddess of wisdom, reason and all of what she values. That’s why she vowed to never marry.

And, as Helenist, I do not take the myths that seriously bc when we talk about religion, I have a clear mind that those myth were made by humans who used the gods as a tool to justify some of their actions, and I hate almost all of the retellings that those authors do, but is so wild to see how much power they have on society bc now I cannot see anything about the gods without someone saying shit about them. But I do know all about the myths and I gotta say, doesn’t make much sense to use a Roman author to talk about Greek Gods. He made them dirty. Also doesn’t make much sense to use this versions of Ovid but still change it to make it more sweet for the men. Poseidon and Athena didn’t spend that much time beefing, they even have a city together (Troezen) and she definitely doesn’t hate his children. Her best friend was literally his grandchild.

Safe to say that y’all should probably question Rick on how he treats women bc I was seeing the PJO series (the cast is amazing btw, safe to say that Leah/Annabeth is my fav) and by the looks of it, saying on how he changed Athena’s personality one more time, I legit think that Annie won’t jump to save her friends on season 3, she will probably be pushed by her mother or whatever.

Another thing: apparently only the women that like and have a friendship with Percy are treated as cool. But that’s on the fandom, not the author.

I forgot to add one thing and I’m gonna fix the grammar later but the “this is for children” excuse isn’t really valid considering that we saw Gabe being aggressive with Sally, we also saw Ares being a jerk to Clarisse (which also doesn’t make sense) and the story clearly states cheating, fights, death and a lot of other terrors. If you’re gonna use a rape version of a myth bc you chose to fuck a Goddess up, then you should state that the man is to blame. In the books we see Medusa saying she was Poseidon’s girlfriend/lover…she was his lover on the og myth, not in the version Rick chose. In the version that he chose, she was clearly raped. But he erased that and replaced rapist with boyfriend. He could’ve chosen to do another path if he didn’t want to talk about sexual abuse, I can tell y’all a hundred of ways this could go, but he chose this path and changed it, favoring the man. Again.

He could’ve gone with the theogony and said what was there that basically is: she was a monster, BORN a monster, daughter of other two monsters, no one wanted to get close to her, but he did. They slept together in a camp of flowers.

Athena only enters the story wayyy after this. And, as y’all can see, no curse. Yet, he chose to go with the rape version were Medusa is a maiden, loyal to Athena, gets raped on Athena’s temple by Poseidon and Athena curses her. And what did the author do? He made this: Medusa, loyal to Athena, fell in love with Poseidon and they did things on her temple. Athena cursed her. Again erasing the men’s fault.

The hate on Athena doesn’t make any sense at all. Y’all love some other male characters that don’t have a single sense of responsibility and possibly did everything wrong in the book. I saw people condemn Athena for her treatment of Deadalus when the guy literally killed his nephew bc he was more praised than him. And Athena gave him a mark that burned and did some shit to teach him a lesson. Poseidon wanted a trial to avenge his rapist son that was killed by Ares bc he tried to rape one of Ares daughters. A RAPIST. And Poseidon is treated like and angel bc what??? He likes Percy? Is his father and got him a gift? And Athena is being hated bc she isn’t his number one fan and her Roman part decided to give Annabeth a Mark? And mind you she’s just like that with him bc she knows more than everyone else and knows that he is dangerous. A good guy? Yes, Percy is the most amazing guy. Still dangerous. Still had the power to torture a goddess and win against the god of war. And she doesn’t dislike him, she dislikes his relationship with her daughter. And even so, she didn’t stop the relationship. So yeah I won’t ever get why the women always get more hate than the men considering this.

Again, as a Helenist, I don’t take the myths seriously when I talk about the religion in general bc the Gods are superiors. They don’t have human flaws. But, as someone who knows about the myths, is safe to say I hate those stories that uses myths like that and turns it against the Goddesses and make them out to be the worst ever. All the gods deserved way better than what they got with those retellings.

GREEK AND ROMAN DEMIGODDESSES IN ARTEMIS' HUNT

Ok, so, all of us PJO fans know about Artemis' hunt in PJO. It's terrible, honestly, the way Rick wrote it, but that's not what I'm talking about here.

If Greek and Roman demigods couldn't be in each other's presence without fighting, then what about the Greek and Roman demigods in Artemis' hunt?

Greek demigods have joined before and so have Roman demigods. And they would have met each other because they were all in the hunt, yes?

(I'm not sure how many huntresses there are).

Were there separate divisions? Branches? It doesn't say anything like that in the books.

So this is probably just another inconsistency in PJO.

What are your thoughts on this?

Misinformation about real Greek Mythology in Percy Jackson, fork spotted in kitchen

Hold up hold up hold up

I was just reading The Hidden Oracle and Apollo says that Calypso is very beguiling, and that Odysseus stayed with her for seven years before returning home.

I-WHAT?

Odysseus didn't stay WILLINGLY. Calypso FORCED him to stay there and literally sexually assaulted him for years before she was forced to let him go by the gods.

This makes it sound like he WILLINGLY stayed with her. Rick didn't need to write that. This is a children's book, yes, but he didn't need to include that sentence at all. Not. At. ALL.

Guys I swear-please never take Percy Jackson as an accurate source of mythology. If you're unsure about something, search it up on Wikipedia or Theoi.com or ask actual Greek people who know.

Solangelo is not Grumpy x Sunshine

One thing that's puzzled me about Solangelo is the grumpy x sunshine dynamic and how everyone thinks it's true.

Excuse me, did we read the same PJO and HOO?

Because in PJO and HOO, Will Solace was never sunshine.

In TLO, we see him heal Annabeth. He smiles and it's exhausted from running around healing everyone. Exhausted and tired and rueful.

And when Connor Stoll says that he's willing to steal, Will glares at him and gives him sharp orders.

In TLH, Will yells at Annabeth for destroying the chariot and scowls at her. Later, when he gives Leo a tour, he looks as if he finds the idea of a sword disturbing. And in the tour scene, he's helpful to Leo (he pats his shoulder too, which is a nice gesture).

In BOO, he calms Clarisse down and prevents a fight, which is good. He tells everyone that his prophetic cabin mates' powers have been affected too. Nico describes him as nonthreatening but brave under fine and Will is insecure about the fact that he's just a healer.

Will helps multiple times by using his taxicab whistle, when defeating soldiers and stopping the Greeks and Romans from fighting. A great example of him being competent on page.

From what we've seen of him so far, he's competent in war and in general and cordial with other people. He's good at diffusing tense situations as well as being insecure about the fact that he's just a healer (though he states that he has a few musical abilities as well, like his piercing taxicab whistle).

This is good enough (especially good material for a future character which was unfortunately botched) but there's nothing to indicate that he's sunshine.

Later, when encountering Nico, Will, who doesn't understand any of Nico's abilities, forcefully orders him not to shadow-travel even when it could possibly save the camp using the phrase 'doctor's orders'.

(This is an example of Will abusing his doctor's authority).

He also says that Nico won't be summoning skeletons again without Nico's permission. You might think that Nico was doing horribly, but even so, Will literally talked for him without his consent. That is not good-it's never good. You shouldn't do anything for someone without their consent, especially not when they're conscious and standing right there.

And then we come to where Nico says that he's leaving both camps.

At this, Will is furious for some unstated reason and then proceeds to victim blame Nico, telling him that he was the one who pushed everyone away. And even if Will was tired and terrified right then, he doesn't apologise later. He just calls Nico dense.

We've literally seen in nearly everyone's POV (Frank, Piper, Leo, Jason and Annabeth-even Percy tells them terrible stories about him that warps their view of him) that Nico is creepy as hell to them. Then how do you expect us to think that the people at CHB actually welcome Nico?

And in TOA he's nice, yes, but by then people were already shipping Solangelo and reducing them to this sunshine x grumpy dynamic.

None of this paints Will as sunshine. Will isn't sunshine just because he's white, blond and a son of Apollo. Stop being so quick to stereotype characters based on their physical traits and parentage.

And Nico isn't grumpy. He's creepy to some people and he has a sarcastic sense of humour. He's quiet, tired and frustrated sometimes, but not grumpy in general.

Stop calling him grumpy just because he's related to death and Will is related to life and healing. This is just flanderisation to fit into stereotypes, and it's sad.

But of course the fandom ruins everything and Rick follows suite.

ISN'T THERE CANONICALLY PEDOPHILIA IN PERCY JACKSON

Hold on a moment.

Isn't there canonical pedophilia in Percy Jackson.

Since Calypso is stated to have stopped aging at 16 years old physically and mentally and she was young......

And she romanced grown men like Odysseus and Francis Drake (second is a weird choice by a weird author.)

What is Rick's explanation for THAT.

How the hell did Rick not see this?

WHY would you portray Calypso like that. He did Calypso dirty, and she was already so awful in the original Odyssey, but he ruined her even further. Jesus Rick

I rage quit HOO because of the Gaea stuff.

In my eyes it crossed into some misogynistic stereotypes of abuse especially considering the Sally plot line earlier.

Part of me wonders if I'm bring too sensitive or if Rick genuinely has issues with women that don't meet his definition as acceptable.

Once again maybe it hit me at a bad time and I'm accusing so don't take this as an allegation please.

He literally calls Gaea a psycho for wanting to overthrow an abusive husband and save her children when a decade earlier, he wrote Sally doing the same thing.

Rick Riordan is quite inconsistent with his writing, so it's no surprise, but it's still pretty sad considering how popular he is.

And no, you're not too sensitive. Rick Riordan does have issues with women that don't meet his standards. Athena, Aphrodite, Hera, Demeter, Artemis-he ruined all of them for no reason.

He glorified Annabeth's bad behavior and doesn't give her arc a proper ending or talk about her issues. He vilified girls who like makeup and dresses-Hylla literally says that she wore makeup and dresses as a bad thing and the narrative never called her out on it.

The way he treats Aphrodite's cabin in general is terrible-and Piper Mclean is also terribly written.

HOO in general is a terrible series with atrocious retcons and horrendous characterisation with a few good moments.

Don't worry, the wording of this doesn't read as an allegation. You're on anon as well, so it shouldn't be a problem for you if by some catastrophic chance an idiot happens to think that it is, they'll only have me to point at ;)

The entire PREMISE of The Sun and the Star is built on the worst logic ever.

Hades sends his son to literal hell knowing that he could die just to get a Titan (who has his memories back, mind you) out of it. Because apparently 'Bob was getting too loud'.

If Hades can get that satyr out of Tartarus, then why the hell can't he get Bob out of Tartarus?

And don't tell me he can't, because Bob was literally allowed to be a janitor at Hades' palace when his memories were wiped. And Bob decided to be good, so Hades could easily take him out of there

This just says how bad The Sun and the Star is as a book.

I mean, why didn't Rick just give us short stories of Nico and Will between HOO and ToA? That would have been way better.

Percy was not smart-Procrustes was dumbed down

This post is about the 12 year old trio (well, 14 biologically and 28 chronologically in Grover's case) getting caught in Procrustes' store in TLT.

So, our heroes run into Procrustes' store after being chased by mortal teenage wannabe gangsters.

And they come to Procrustes' store where he's nice at first and then traps them in the waterbeds

He leads Annabeth to another bed and when she doesn't want to get on, he pushes her onto it and traps both Annabeth and Grover.

And then he wants to get Percy on a bed, and instead of simply grabbing him and putting him on one........he tries to convince Percy to lie down?

Why did Procrustes have to convince Percy to lie down? Why didn't he push him onto the bed? It was pretty obvious that he could, but for some reason, he stopped and tried to convince Percy.

What, you're telling me that he sat down to demonstrate for Percy, knowing that Percy could just snap his fingers and say ergo and bind him to the bed?

Is this because Percy was agreeable to him? What, did Procrustes not think that Percy might want to rescue his companions and might be lying? Because if so, Procrustes is dumb.

Percy might have rescued his friends, but his wits in this are diminished by the fact that the villain was dumbed down.

Percy wasn't smart. Rick had to dumb Procrustes down, which undermines both the antagonist and our protagonist's supposed smartness. It's frustrating to see people use this as an example-please don't.

Nico and Bianca's backstory makes no sense.

All right, so they were born in the 1930s, but after WWII they're placed into the Lotus Casino. 60 years later, still children, they're taken out and placed into a military school. And we all know what happens next.

But there were a truckload of changes from 1945 to the early 2000s.

And sure, you could argue that they were slowly exposed to it, as seen with the flatscreen TV in the Lotus Casino in their room, but how the hell do you expose all the changes that happened between NINETEEN FORTY FIVE AND THE EARLY TWO THOUSANDS IN A MONTH?!?!?!?!?!.

HOW. HOW DO YOU DO THAT.

Because they were in the Lotus Casino for a MONTH, and that's a very short time to be exposed to all these new inventions.

So in Nico and Bianca's POV, they're just getting all these presents so fast.

'Oh, look, we have coloured TVs now! Oh look, women can wear revealing dresses and pants now! They don't have to dress in skirts and conservative clothing anymore! Oh look, there's something called a computer now! Oh look, we have digital clocks and watches now! Oh look, we have freaking DIGITAL CAMERAS AND PHONES NOW! WE HAVE VIDEO GAMES! WE HAVE VIDEO TAPE RECORDERS! WE HAVE CALCULATORS! DIGITAL CALCULATORS! WANT TO USE GOOGLE? LOOK AT THE INTERNET!'

All this in just a month. Imagine how bewildered they must have been. Clothing changes, fashion changes, the entire damn society changed. Technology had changed. Everything was different. And it was just shoved onto Nico and Bianca. Poor children-I actually feel a little bad for them now.

This post is both critical and comical. Do what you will with this information.

Rick has a lot of terrible logic in his books, and I wanted to list an example here.

IN Trials of Apollo, Apollo is surprised that Meg is a demigod daughter of Demeter, since Demeter rarely falls in love with mortals and has children.

Ok, if that's so, then explain how she already has THREE other daughters that are all teenagers and are all older than Meg?

That means that she fell in love with mortals in in the span of 5-6 years. That's not rare.

And no, Katie's, Miranda's and Billie's ages aren't explicitly mentioned, but it's pretty clear from the text that they're all older than Meg.

This is just another critical post. Nothing special, just thought I'd point it out since it's been bothering me for some time.

LET'S ENJOY GREEK MYTH RETELLINGS AND STORIES BUT NOT TAKE ALL OF THEM SERIOUSLY

You know, I really have to say this.

I don't think that Greeks, Hellenistic Pagans and other people who know Greek Mythology would be as frustrated as they are today if people DIDN'T TAKE MODERN SOURCES DEPICTING GREEK MEDIA AS ALWAYS ACCURATE.

Bear with me now.

All right, so, we all know about Percy Jackson.

And PJO was basically the Greek God make or break of its time and it broke the Greek Gods. Greeks and Hellenistic Pagans had the unfortunate experience of being bombarded with false, incorrect interpretations and thoughts about their deities.

And we have to remember here that to these Hellenistic Pagans, their gods are as sacred to them as God is to Christians. Maybe they wouldn't kill people over their gods, an added bonus, but we must respect the fact that they worship the gods and we must be respectful of Greek Gods when interacting with them.

See, I'm not saying that you can't be lighthearted. You can joke around and all that-it's just that actually hating and condemning the Greek Gods shouldn't be done when you're interacting with their worshippers.

Now that I'm done with that, well, Rick Riordan fucked up with Greek Mythology big time. Making Athena have children, HIS MISOGYNY. THERE ARE ENTIRE TAGS DEDICATED TO RICK'S MISOGYNY, NOT JUST OF HIS FEMALE CHARACTERS BUT OF ACTUAL ANCIENT GREEK GODDESSES. If I did a whole essay on his misogyny, I'd have to make multiple posts.

Rick done fucked up with them. I do not have to be the first person to tell you that.

HOWEVER, I am obligated to say that any author is freely able to portray the Greek Gods as they want (unfortunately at times).

And so Rick is free to interpret them how he likes.

Let's also remember that Rick thought terribly of the Gods and their worshippers when he was writing Percy Jackson and the other series.

Of course, he HAS changed for the better. Now he's more respectful of Pagans and has apologised, which is nice, but I just thought I'd let you know.

See, now we can accept and criticise Rick's writing, but before-

Well, before, it was absolutely awful for Greeks and Hellenistic Pagans. I mean, it's still awful, but it was more awful back then because almost nobody criticised Percy Jackson about depicting Greek Gods terribly. Everyone said that Greek Gods were American and belonged to America-ugh, that was horrible. It's absolutely appalling to do that, no less to Greeks themselves. People ranted about how horrible the gods were.

And I mean yes, the Greek Gods could be awful by modern standards, but we need to remember two things-

The Greek Gods were based on an ANCIENT SOCIETY with DIFFERENT MORAL STANDARDS. Judging them by modern moral standards isn't going to do anything.

The actions of the gods were SYMBOLIC, NOT LITERAL.

a) Artemis' cruelty towards humans? That's the cruelty of nature towards him. Artemis was a nature goddess and she hunted and resided in the wild.

b) Dionysus being kind and charming but also mad and ruthless at times? Well, that's what wine does. It can make people funny and charming to a point, but it also drives people mad and makes them violent.

c) Hades kidnapping Persephone? Well, Hades represents death, and that's what death does-it rips children from their parents' arms. Also, it signifies the fact that daughters and mothers did not have a say in their marriage, the father could give the girl away to any man in those times. Demeter actually being able to get Persephone back was a comfort to grieving mothers.

d) Zeus cheating on Hera multiple times?

There are multiple explanations for this one.

First, kings and princes often claimed to be descendants of Zeus, so Zeus was said to have many affairs with royal mortal women so that their claims to divine lineage could be accurate.

Second, Zeus' rain represented fecundity and fertility. As I said above, the actions of the gods are symbolic and they represent their domains, so he had multiple affairs and loads of children to signify his fertility.

Third, the Greek Gods were based on Ancient Greek society where multiple men took concubines and lovers. And Zeus did this too, because he was a king!

e) Hera punishing the lovers and bastards? That's what queens did to some concubines for revenge, since they couldn't take it out on the king.

It's all either symbolic or based on Ancient Greece. The gods that humanity created were based on those times, and they were created millennia ago, when things were different in nearly every way possible.

Anyway, what I'm trying to tell you is that we're allowed to have fun with these stories and retellings that include Greek Mythology, but if you really want correct information on Greek gods, go and read the myths and the compositions of Ancient Greek poets and playwrights (Homer, Hesiod, etc).

Because many people, when reading these modern retellings and the like, think that they are actually real mythological information and accordingly spew nonsense.

People call Apollo 'Asspollo' and harass his worshippers because of one incorrect comic that came out in 2018. Apollo never raped Persephone.

And people also view famous figures like Odysseus and Achilles incorrectly because of incorrect translations that don't correctly capture the original and CERTAIN RETELLINGS (cough-Madeline Miller-COUGH)

And there are so many more examples I could give, but then this would be too long to post.

See, it's not that the writers completely rip the original lore out. They keep a lot of it, but they also add in some incorrect information. And sometimes this isn't that bad or malicious, it's just incorrect.

So if you're not sure about whether something in a retelling or story depicting Greek Gods is true, you should search it up online or ask someone who knows.

Because Greeks and Hellenistic Pagans are constantly frustrated at how their gods are portrayed and that everyone just takes the retellings as mythologically correct.

TLDR Greek mythology retellings can be fun for you to read but don't take all of the info in them as mythologically correct. You can be lighthearted about the Greek Gods but please don't actually loathe or mock them with others who believe in them and worship them. If you're not sure about info in a retelling or story, then search it up or ask someone you know.

There are multiple blogs on tumblr who can tell you more information about the actual Greek Gods and they're pretty nice about it too, so don't be too afraid.