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Complicated feelings regarding LO's penultimate episodes - was this really the only way?

It's been a while since I've written a proper episode analysis of what's going on in LO. Partially because I've been extremely busy, mostly because the most recent episodes have often left me feeling more confused and exhausted in a way that I can't even be bothered to write about. Or maybe it's because I know the comic is ending in three weeks so it feels almost... pointless now, knowing fully well that the comic will never be able to achieve the ending we were hoping for back when it was in its prime.

But I don't want to talk about any of that. I want to talk about the ending we were waiting the longest for and never truly got - the resolution of the SA plotline.

CONTENT WARNING: Discussion concerning sexual assault and FastPass spoilers ahead!

I'm going to apologize in advance for this essay, as it's very long and I found myself struggling at times to keep everything clean and organized. The reality is that there's just a lot to unpack with these final episodes and in many ways, I don't know where to start. I'm not going to be able to address everything because there's a lot to cover, but everything else that I miss will be saved for potential future posts.

I suppose we should talk about everything that's led up to Episode 277 first, as I haven't really written anything regarding these episodes (though people have certainly asked).

Persephone trying to resurrect the Mortal Realm using her newfound power is... already rocky enough. I'm just gonna say it, I think Persephone discovering how to use her powers again through a simple metaphor of spring=rebirth is a complete cop-out and frankly insulting to the audience who have been following along for weeks now.

That's not to say that the concept of this epiphany is flawed in theory, but the execution certainly is, because up until this point, the entire conflict has been predicated on Persephone getting to Tartarus so she could speak to Erebus and forge a new deal. Weeks of episodes were written around this concept. So for her to suddenly just re-discover her powers through some metaphorical self-realization... it just doesn't work here. It's not like Hercules sacrificing himself to save Meg and thus becoming a true hero and god; it's not like Maui going through a montage of re-discovering his own powers and re-building his confidence so that he could shapeshift again while they were already on the way to their destination to return the heart of Te Fiti; it's not like the Madrigal family getting to the root of their powers failing and discovering that it had to do with burnout, pressure, and interpersonal rejection linked to their generational trauma. LO is trying to have some grand adventure with a goal in mind, but then undercuts that goal to present the solution in a more internal way, so all it accomplishes is wasting the audience's time.

If I can speak candidly on what would have worked better, instead of having Persephone randomly learn her powers still work through some chance cameo from Dionysus and a LOT of mental gymnastics after looking at a grape, instead:

Hera approaches Kronos on her own with the intent of distracting him so that Persephone can make it to Erebus; this makes it so that she can still have purpose in helping Persephone, without telling Persephone that she knows it's going to lead to her death.

The plan goes 'wrong' (i.e. it goes exactly how Hera foresaw) and Hera 'dies' at the hands of Kronos

Knowing she can't let Hera's death be in vain, Persephone escapes the clutches of Kronos and makes it to Erebus where she demands a new deal.

Erebus reveals that her powers are not gone, that they've simply changed, that she has changed.

After hearing this, Persephone reflects on what he could mean and comes to the same epiphany that spring = rebirth. But now she's come to that realization without completely undercutting her reasons for going to Tartarus and risking Hera's life in the first place.

Persephone manages to create life right then and there, and realizes she now has what she needs to help defeat Kronos.

Persephone hurries back to Hera and brings her back to life, and things resume from there.

Laying out an alternative possibility with this, I hope it helps really get across how little Rachel plans for her writing and how all of these 'twist reveals' just aren't as smart as she thinks they are. She doesn't connect any ideas together, and the ones that she does connect often depend entirely on retcons. Case in point, the reveal that Hera was the grey fertility goddess painted on the wall doesn't even make sense, because they don't look remotely the same:

Another example, the reveal of the interloper being Melinoe, who doesn't resemble the face we saw back at the start of the season that Morpheus recalled seeing:

(you can really tell Rachel uses her same face syndrome to her advantage in S3 because she's constantly greying out characters to leave them ambiguous so that she can make them whoever she wants them to be by the time it's revealed who they are; that's also definitely why it takes her weeks to actually do these big reveals because she likely hasn't figured it out yet when she's set up some cliffhanger regarding a mysterious unnamed grey god/goddess/deity).

Many of us can tell Rachel takes a lot of her ideas from other pieces of media, specifically Disney films. But the issue lies in her inability to recognize why those ideas worked in the first place - you can't just Frankenstein together a bunch of individual ideas from different things, because then you're removing what made those ideas work in the first place, their execution and their influences. Ideas don't just exist in a vacuum, they're influenced by experiences, individual perspectives, and other things that shaped us as people. Whether an idea is expressing the nihilistic conclusion of what happens when power falls into the wrong hands-

-or simply expressing the love between a father and daughter-

-you can't just take an idea in isolation and slap it into your own work without considering what went into that idea in the first place. Taking inspiration from others' ideas and adapting them into your own is fine, everyone does it and its how stories are told and retold, but you need to also be expressing your own side of things in the process. LO doesn't do this, it simply takes and repeats while swapping characters and scenes out with Hades and Persephone without meeting halfway with any of its own awareness or experiences. It's cheap at best and disingenuous at worst.

Is it any wonder that the only time LO isn't ripping anyone else off and purely being influenced by its own creator is when she's putting the words of the critics in the mouths of her worst characters? And even THAT'S not an original thought because she's still just parroting whatever people are saying on the Internet.

And when it's not using its worst characters as mouthpieces for criticism, it's using fan theories as a way to fill in the blanks for an otherwise nothing story. Rachel doesn't seem to know how to have an original thought, she only takes from the thoughts and ideas and works and efforts of others.

It's now especially apparent since the return from the S3 midseason finale that Rachel is doing a lot of catch-up on work she never did, with random lore dumps, many of which were taken straight from both the critical and fanbase communities, and all of that catch-up relies on readers not remembering what she already established sometimes as recently as a few episodes prior - and often times it undercuts the entire purpose of what LO was promised to be, a retelling of The Abduction of Persephone, a tale that was originally designed to explain the creation of the seasons.

All that's to say, it's really hard to even try to write what's wrong with all of these episodes, because... all of it is. It all feels wrong. Much of what's happening simply expects you to take it at face value without a single thought, but as soon as you do spend a thought on it, you realize just how absurd it really is within the context of the greater story.

Why is Melinoe claiming she's only been in the pocket dimension doing her work for Kronos when Hypnos and Morpheus explained that the problems with their dream-jumping - and the interloper - started years ago?

That time may be nothing to Melinoe in the pocket dimension, but that doesn't mean it's only been a "few days" for everyone else like she's claiming. It feels like a retcon for Rachel to try and get around the criticisms of Hades and Persephone fucking around for days not rescuing her. Just about everything with the sudden time travel plot feels like a nothingburger that's only there to excuse any plotholes in the story. It's really easy to go "timey wimey stuff!" at anything that seems 'off' in the story.

Why is Kronos even able to use his time abilities anyways? Hecate claims that they were exhausted to him years ago but now he's just able to use them again. She doesn't explicitly say that it's due to Persephone's tree in Tartarus that brought him back to life the first time and he didn't use them the last time they faced off, so why is he just now able to use them?

(girl, were you not listening to what she just said? Why was "Hades and Morpheus are trapped somewhere in time" your first assumption after what Hecate just told you?)

And what about the Hera x Echo thing? Honestly it was such a blink and you'll miss it moment, to the point some people hadn't even realized that they were kissing (due to the camera angle), that I wouldn't be surprised if Rachel went "psyche! They weren't kissing, Hera was just burping in Echo's ear, why would I make a character gay in this Greek myth retelling comic ???"

Unfortunately, they are kissing and it's still just as absurd as the alternative, because we haven't seen Echo even speak in this comic since the halfway point of S2 and everything that went on in their plot arc has to be filled in by, you guessed it, fan theories and personal headcanon.

Most recently, why did Eros actually go through with crafting a love arrow for Apollo?

There was no threat made, beyond... keeping him trapped in the enchanted basement I guess ?? But Apollo took him out of it to have this conversation with him. Eros could have escaped. Or he could have just not gone through with it because there's no way Eros didn't clue in to what Apollo was planning. It's left all too vague for us to know what was going through Eros' head or why he decided to make it, so it just makes him look - yet again - like a terrible friend to Persephone for actually going through with it.

And through all of those questions, the tone of the story is constantly flip-flopping between "trying to be taken seriously" and "trying to make a joke of the entire situation". It's still pulling its Joss Whedon quippy bullshit instead of just letting the drama simmer, and whatever drama it has feels forced and cringy like something from /r/im14andthisisdeep, no thanks to how little real character development has happened and the fact that the stakes are relying entirely on every character in the comic being too stupid to actually ask questions and go "hey, wait a minute, why are we going along with Apollo's stupid threats? Half of us know he's an abusive douchebag, let's just beat him up and find a way to fix Zeus."

There's so much else I could cover, but to try and do it all in this post would mean it would never be done. It would also require me to do a lot more re-reading which I just... don't have the spoons for, not anymore. It's just so exhausting and boring and pointless to read especially knowing that so much of it winds up not mattering, the Erebus plotline especially.

And that leads us to Episode 277.

I will say that the art in this episode manages to be the best the art has ever been in the entire season. The compositions feel like they have actual thought behind them, and the artists clearly had their fun with the brush effects and textures. They still don't feel like the LO we once knew, but they do feel like they've been drawn well to adapt to the S3 style, and that's the best I could have asked for there. If the art had been like this the entire season - or at least a few times an episode - there might not have been so many complaints.

As for the writing... I had to sit on it quite a bit to figure out my feelings on it, and I'm still not entirely 100% sure of my feelings despite writing this entire post.

It has a similar problem as Persephone re-discovering her powers through an introspective epiphany, where it could have been done well, but the way Rachel has handled it here feels rushed and only half thought out. That said, maybe that's the best we could have hoped for considering the series has only 3 episodes left. Whether Rachel is ending the series by choice or due to being cut by Webtoons, she just doesn't have the time to give the SA plot resolution the space it needs or deserves.

The episode opens by cutting right to the chase of Persephone and Eris having some kind of internal conversation regarding Persephone's "rage".

This is yet another sudden reappearance of an old plot point so Rachel can try and convince us she planned this story ahead, but it's very evident in everything that's led up to this point that she hasn't. Eris hasn't been seen heads or tails of since the end of S2 when Persephone nursed her back to health, and since then she's only been seen haunting Apollo (so it's not her, just an illusion crafted by Apollo's own subconscious). She's just there to remind us "remember, Eris is the reason Persephone has her wrath!" as if that's even something worth remembering because it didn't make sense the first time it was established. Instead of Persephone having any sort of internal conversation with herself - maybe her past self who was abused by Apollo, her wrathful side who she talked to in the mirror - she's talking to a glorified NPC who has had zero presence in the story but we're supposed to believe is an "important part" of Persephone's character arc. She's also low key there to remind the audience of how amazing Persephone is for taking care of her to boot.

All that aside, the moment comes and goes, and Persephone decides through her conversation with Eris that it's Morbin' time- I mean, it's time to rage. Once again, Persephone has no real agency because even her wrath can't be owed to her, only to Eris.

So what does she do? She follows up to the cliffhanger of the previous episode - she explains all the consequences and character development we never saw happen following the sexual assault to Apollo so that we can get this resolution done and over with.

Again, I will give props to the art in the following sequence. It does a great job of encapsulating both Persephone's grief and Apollo's nightmare of realizing what he's done to Persephone.

Unfortunately, again, all of the writing is Persephone telling Apollo how she feels, which we've already seen before. Despite the fact that this is supposed to be Apollo realizing it, it's Persephone doing all the monologuing, with Apollo only chiming in every now and then.

As for the things he says during this sequence, everything he states and claims just isn't apparent throughout the many times we've seen the plot focus on him. And this is a problem that really comes down to Apollo's characterization - Rachel can't decide if he's a delusional egotistical jerkass who can't take no for an answer, or an evil conniving mastermind who was planning the whole time to use Persephone as a means to take over the throne. Because of this constant back and forth in characterization, it makes it hard to pin the purpose of Apollo's character, and so it makes statements like these fall flat because... yeah, he didn't care, but did he know that she was afraid? Because for the first entire season he acted like she should have been thankful to have a chance with him.

This isn't the dialogue of a man who knew he was terrorizing a girl and intentionally manipulating her for the purpose of using her to overthrow Zeus, this is the dialogue of a man who's chronically delusional and can't comprehend that Persephone doesn't want to be with him. This is the same self-absorbed airhead who went on a date with Daphne and tried to convince her to cut her hair so that she would look more like Persephone, which literally contributes nothing to his "master plan" of using her to overthrow Zeus:

That said, that's not really the worst part of this episode. No, one of the worst parts of this episode is how Apollo realizes what he's done is wrong - it's not because he came to that conclusion himself, it's because a magical arrow stabbed him in the throat and somehow the power of love made him come to that realization. On a subconscious level, he hasn't actually changed, it's just the magic of the arrow. Maybe it works fine to get him to confess to his crimes, but has anything really changed? He was obsessively in love with her before. Now he's magically obsessively in love with her, but for some reason it's different now because it allows him to really care for her, despite the fact that we've never had the love arrows fully explained to us (the readers) or even Persephone within the comic.

Like, it bears mentioning that Persephone took a massive risk even assuming that would work. Again, Apollo was already obsessively in love with her - how did she come to the conclusion that it would work in her favor to force him to fall in love with her through a magical arrow? Maybe she thought it was better than doing nothing, but I feel like there were tons of ways to 'rage' than taking such a risk that could result in Apollo becoming even more obsessive.

It also makes his 'apology' ring so hollow, knowing that he's only under the influence of a spell. Would he still be saying this if the arrow's powers wore off? Does he even really mean it when he's only acting out of the pain caused by the arrow and apologizing in the hopes that she won't force him to confess?

I'm sure there are people who could argue that this is what he deserves, that putting him through the pain he put her through is justice, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree with that. But it does make me wonder what this will do for Persephone's growth, what really matters in the SA plotline, because time and time again this comic has focused so much on the abusers themselves and their own perspectives that most of Persephone's character development has had to be info-dumped and assumed by readers filling in the blanks with their own experiences. Will this actually help Persephone? Is it really justice to simply manufacture an apology out of the abuser through magical means that are not genuine and might not even be permanent?

All of this just feels like a conveniently easy way to finally bring the SA plotline to an end without spending any time on the victims, the aftermath, the discussion. As always, it's just Persephone getting revenge in some way and then the plot moving on, never once asking Persephone if this is really getting her the closure she needs. If it is, then great, but what about the other victims? Daphne? Eris? Artemis? If inflicting the same pain twicefold on Apollo is the closure they want and need, then I want to actually see the plot explore that. So far the only times it's EVER explored the notion that revenge can be sweet has been regarding the lower class nymphs and satyrs that Persephone's terrorized.

And don't worry, Rachel tries to put that to bed, too.

Despite some of the nice things I have to say about this episode, this is probably the bit that pissed me off the most. She doesn't say what she's done, she doesn't acknowledge specifically how she's been violent and impulsive and terrible, she just says "Yeah, I've done terrible things to people, but that doesn't matter, because you need to be punished." This is truly the epitome of LO failing to understand that victims can become abusers, that the protagonist can be a bad person, that just because someone confirms they've done bad things doesn't mean they've actually paid the price for it, that's only the first step.

Persephone is a victim of sexual assault who deserves justice and healing. She's also an incredibly self-absorbed person who's used her trauma as an excuse to harm others who she considers 'beneath' herself. Two things can be true, and such is the case with Persephone, a character who has devolved so much over the course of LO that she's practically become a villain in her own right, in her own story.

All that said, the situation 'resolves' itself when Persephone leaves Apollo, presumably so he can confess to someone. Who? Oh, the TV crew that just so happened to show up, even though we didn't see Apollo actually call them, so just like the S2 finale, we just have a news crew here for some reason. As well as a bunch of other nymphs and gods who just showed up out of nowhere. None of this is explained. Why they weren't there an episode prior when Apollo was literally dragging Persephone, I have no clue. But they're there now so Apollo can confess, already prepared to beat him up, which, again, doesn't make a whole lot of sense because the whole point of Apollo being the villain was that he was the "golden child" who everyone loved and no one suspected him of being a violent criminal, but I suppose we can chalk that one up to "he just got his ass beat on TV for framing Hebe so now it's time for round two." That's about the best explanation I can come up with, at least. Either that, or Apollo really has victimized and brutalized that many women who now want revenge and yet still made it this far without getting called out.

As for the 'confession'... it's not great, either.

I have to ask, why did Rachel keep this vague? I can understand the symbolism of it all with the pressure rake brush - the visual representation of Persephone's trauma - and that feeling of "the audience has fallen silent" , but it's too vague. All we can reasonably make out from the blurred text and assume is "I raped Persephone", but what about the speech bubbles following it? Did he also confess to attempting to murder Daphne? Did he also come out about how impaling Eris was a horrible thing to do? Did he also come out about how he lied to his sister for years? Did he confess to imprisoning Eros and Psyche in an enchanted basement where they are presumably still being kept? What about Kassandra, who he literally stalked to the point that everyone around her thought she was crazy? Did he confess to poisoning Zeus and framing it on his own half-sister?

That's the issue with the vagueness, just like in every other instance throughout LO where things are left vague, all we can do is assume until it's maybe cleared up in hindsight later. But considering there are only 3 episodes left and we still have a laundry list of things to deal with... I'm not hopeful that we're going to see anymore of this plot thread. This is it. Demeter and Ares and the rest of the crowd descend upon Apollo and they presumably beat the shit out of him on live TV for a second time.

And can it really be considered a confession if we're not seeing him address exactly what he did wrong? For all we know, he could also be spitting out excuses, justifications, bargaining in the hopes that people will show him mercy. I can assume in good faith that it's not that, but isn't it fucked up how we have to keep assuming to make the plot work?

It also doesn't help that throughout this sequence, we don't see a reaction from his other victims to clarify on a visual level that he's also addressing his other crimes. We don't see a reaction from his own sister, Artemis, we don't see a reaction from Daphne as far as I can tell (though we do see reactions from a bunch of nameless nymphs who we don't know); we DO, however, see reactions from Hecate, Athena, a bunch of random NPC's, Leto who was literally a perpetrator in Apollo's crimes (seriously, I really hope she was shocked that he confessed and ruined their 'plans', not that he assaulted her, because like... she was already an accomplice in his plans to force Persephone to marry him, that's assault already on its own, why would she be surprised that he raped her? Obviously Leto is a sexual assault victim herself so that shock would be reasonable enough, but again, she's become an accomplice to his furthered abuse of Persephone), Demeter, who DIDN'T KNOW UNTIL NOW THAT HER DAUGHTER HAD BEEN ASSAULTED AND THAT REALLY FUCKING PISSES ME OFF BECAUSE IT FURTHER DISCONNECTS HER FROM HER OWN DAUGHTER IN THIS RETELLING OF A MOTHER-DAUGHTER STORY, and... Ares, who's presumably there to beat up Apollo again. Ares, the man who literally assaulted Persephone himself and then went behind his partner's back in an attempt to convince Hera to let him marry Persephone, presumably against her will because by that point she was in love with Hades and didn't want to be romantically involved with Ares, and since then has literally stalked her. Him showing up to this as some kind of "defender" feels incredibly tone deaf, especially when Artemis, the literal protector of women, is nowhere to be seen. It's just way too late to be trying to fix Ares' character back into a more accurate depiction of him also being a protector of women, the toothpaste is already out of the fucking tube.

Why, why do we spend so much time on the reactions of literal NPC's and characters who AREN'T VICTIMS, even focusing on the reaction of a perpetrator? Does Rachel simply not remember that Apollo brutalized other women in the story, or does she want us to forget?

The final panel of the episode simply shows a long shot of Persephone walking away. No reaction or internal monologue to tell us what she could possibly be feeling. Just a silent walk away. Once again, the focus is always on the perpetrators and the non-victims, never Persephone's own perspective - LO is only ever focused on Persephone's perspective when it comes to justifying harm, never when healing from it... or when she's thinking about Hades and how much she loves him.

I think the really frustrating thing about this whole love arrow sequence is that it didn't have to go this way, because Rachel actually already set up the perfect resolution for it to begin with.

Remember back in Episode 257, when Apollo hosted the meeting of the Olympians and realms' leaders as a self-appointed new King, and we got that sequence of him hallucinating his victims torturing his own mind and telling him what scum he is?

The seeds for his own downfall had already been planted. He didn't need a love arrow to realize he was guilty.

Something already wasn't right, and people were noticing.

He had hired a TV crew to show up and televise his planned proposal to Persephone, which he was going to use to back Persephone into a corner the same way he had done during the press conference where he forcibly used her powers.

You probably already know where I'm going with this, but if Rachel was already going to rip off Disney, why not go the route of the villain who falls on their own sword?

Like Mr. Waternoose, who hadn't realized he had chased Sulley and Boo all the way to the simulation room where Mikey secretly recorded his confession regarding the kidnapped children?

Or Dawn Bellwether, who was unaware of Judy and Nick's plan to trick her into believing Nick had eaten the Night Howlers so that she'd confess to her plans while Judy was secretly recording her on her carrot pen which she had already used on Nick in the first act of the film?

Or Ernesto de la Cruz, who lost all of his credibility as a famous musician after he unknowingly confessed to poisoning Hector and stealing his music to a live and listening audience?

Episode 257 had already done plenty to establish that Apollo was losing his mind, guilt-tripped by his own subconscious that clearly knew somewhere, deep down, that what he was doing was wrong. But rather than actually facing that truth, he denied it, and dug himself into a deeper hole, unable to face the truth that he had hurt people in his own pursuits for love and power, that he was just as tyrannical and abusive as his father who he thought he could succeed, that he wasn't the center of everyone's world as much as he wanted to believe himself to be.

Imagine if, instead of her 'outsmarting' him by just grabbing the love arrow with a vine and stabbing him, she outsmarted him by realizing that the TV crew was nearby and finally stating - out loud - what he did to her, causing him to snap and go on a 'mask off' tirade about how Persephone was "asking for it", how he wished he had succeeded in killing Daphne so she couldn't twist his words, and how he wouldn't let Persephone ruin his efforts to take the throne especially now that he had gone so far as to kidnap Eros and poison his own father and pin it on his own half-sister... completely unaware that the TV crew has already started filming and just televised his entire confession. And there are the other victims in the crowd, ready to come forward and confirm that they, too, have been brutalized by Apollo, strengthened by the fact that he's already lost at his own game.

Maybe the villain falling on his own sword was the story Rachel was trying to tell, but it got lost in so much muck and retcons and convenient McGuffins that it just doesn't land on the other side. Instead of him falling on his own sword or getting taken down by his own hubris, he's struck by a love arrow that was crafted by a person who was supposed to be Persephone's best friend, and conveniently forced by a magical plot device to confess to the error of his ways in a completely artificial and insincere way.

The sexual assault plotline was the longest running plotline in the entire series, outrunning even the Hades and Persephone romance plotline that the story was explicitly designed around, and yet despite that, I feel the same way about it now in its resolution that I felt last week, and the week before that, and the months before that - it's only a half-thought-out plotline that Rachel never planned to resolve, and never could resolve, because she just doesn't have the foresight or the writing skills or the awareness necessary to write such a plotline.

None of that's to say that people can't or shouldn't find peace in how it was resolved. If anything, I do hope the fans who have hung on this long at least enjoyed it. But as a former fan of LO, someone who was so touched by the inclusion of the SA which was depicted in a way that's so rarely depicted in modern media - non-violent, coercive, under the impression that the instigator can be trusted - I'm just not entirely convinced that this had to be the best way to resolve it. As it always has been, there's too much focus on the perpetrators, not enough on the victims - and whatever focus on the victims there is, it's only on Persephone, which would be fitting and fine, if it weren't for the fact that we've seen so many other women suffer at the hands of Apollo, women who have now been shelved entirely in favor of the main character, a person who has become an perpetrator of violence and abuse herself.

This truly feels like the end of the road for LO. There's nothing left that the comic could say beyond "and then they lived happily ever after". But could the same be said for the characters who aren't going to get their closure? Their retribution? I suppose we won't know for three more episodes.

But at this point... what's truly left of Lore Olympus' potential? What could it possibly have left to say? I can pose what-if's all night long, as can many others who discussed this episode, but at the end of the day, Rachel is the one writing it. And so long as that's reality, this was the only way it could have gone.

Whatever we get in the end is what we get and it's all it ever could have been.

#lore olympus critical #anti lore olympus #lo critical #tw sexual assault #tw sa

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