JASON AND JUNO AND UNREALISTIC WRITING

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?

I want to draw you (Part 2)

Heather showed Vivienne her drawings. They were amazing-Vivienne loved how they portrayed her cat eyes and faerie ears, making them pop. 

‘How long have you been drawing?’

‘Well, since I was a toddler. I’m going to attend community college and major in something involving art. I just love drawing and painting-it’s my central passion. I’d die if I couldn’t draw anymore.’

‘So, drawing is the thing that calms you down?’ Vivienne said.

‘Most of the time, yeah. It doesn’t always help me, though-sometimes my emotions are so intense that even if I draw, I can’t calm down, and when I have art block, it’s the worst.’

‘Yeah, art block sounds bad if your main thing is drawing,’ Vivi agreed. ‘Um, hey, want to go get some Chinese food? Just you and me-I can pay for it.’

‘Ooh, really? That would be great! I’ll pay for my own food, though. You can pay for yours.’

They went to that great Chinese restaurant-the one with the amazing fortune cookies. Heather had been there once and she’d gotten the funniest fortune-there is money in your future-that doesn’t belong to you.

‘They have really funny fortunes, though you find generic ones too.’ she said. She started talking about the restaurant and telling Vivienne all about it, though Vivienne had been there a few times before (in glamour disguise). Still, Vivi nodded her head and pretended that she was just going there for the first time, just to hear Heather talk about it.

They ordered spring rolls and sweet and sour chicken. Heather talked about her life and family and Vivienne listened to her. 

Before she knew it, hours had passed and Heather had to go home. They exchanged numbers and she left, Vivienne staring after her. 

When Vivi returned home, Taryn asked her why she was smiling so hard, and she blinked and noticed that she was. She simply shook her head and went to her bedroom, then jumped onto the bed, squealing and giggling. Maybe life wasn’t so bad after all.

(I recently learnt that there's a short story on Heather and Vivienne in Faeries Never Lie-The Honest Folk. If I've made any mistakes in this short story, please let me know! Thanks for reading!)

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.

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.

Percy doesn't deserve godhood-not because he's too weak for it, but because it's too horrible a thing to wish upon him.

He's already gone through so much-why would anyone give him another catastrophe to deal with?

Every fandom is toxic

'Oh, the PJO fandom is so toxic-'

'Ooooooh, Keepblr is so meeeeeeeeean-'

'Ohhhhhhhhhhhh, TFOTA fandom is such a HIVEMIND-'

Find me a fandom that isn't toxic. I swear every fandom is toxic. Find me one that isn't. I dare you.

NICASIA AND ORLAGH'S RELATIONSHIP

You know, the one thing I like about Nicasia is that she has a good relationship with her mother.

In Orlagh's card, it's said that she loves her daughter above all and wants Nicasia to have everything that she has. She also listens to her daughter over Balekin, an extremely important ally.

And I love this. I love it because we almost NEVER see good mother-daughter relationships in media. I don't think I need to tell you how they ruined Demeter and Persephone.

In TFOTA, almost everyone has a bad relationship with their mother.

Eva Duarte is dead, so she doesn't count as having a good relationship, even if Jude, Taryn and Vivienne love her. I'm talking about mothers who are alive.

Lady Asha is not a good mother to Cardan. She's abusive. Read the books.

Oak and Oriana DO have a good relationship, but.........it's........complicated as well. She fed him poison when she was young, and that kinds of puts a strain on things, even it was to protect him. (I highly doubt that Orlagh did that to Nicasia).

Also, Oak is a boy, and mother-son relationships are already represented plenty in media. I was talking about mother-daughter relationships.

Simply put, it would be cool to see Orlagh and Nicasia interact. Maybe Orlagh lovingly giving Nicasia advice, or Nicasia showing concern for her aging mother, or her grief about her mother and Orlagh's possible death.

Does anyone just really like platonic SoTam? Because Sophie with all the other boys just feels wrong and annoying due to the romance thing, but Sophie and Tam? Only platonic.

I'm a SUCKER for boy-girl platonic relationships and friendships. I love those. Shannon, more SoTam, please?

No emotional support and heavy procrastination tendencies, this next year's going to be one hell of a year for me.

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.