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The Sun & Moon 🌑☀️

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yeah

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Is this how you comic

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lester would mew

#and get mogged by meg

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my favorite failboy

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I don’t know what to caption this

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Father's love

One of my favourite things in The Trials of Apollo are the parallels between Apollo and other characters, the prime example being Meg's relation with Nero and Apollo's relation with Zeus. The fact that seeing how cruel and manipulative Nero is towards Meg helps Apollo finally admit to himself that Zeus is abusive father and a tyran is just so special to me.

I love them, I love those books and I hope that with The Sun and The Star on it's way, more people will read toa cause it's a very good series and I hate how underrated it is.

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country/folk singer style apollo is cool and all but what if he decided to be will wood once in a while

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Apollo and Overcoming Guilt

I was looking through my Hidden Oracle highlights and found this:

I sang of my failures, my eternal heartbreak and loneliness. I was the worst of the gods, the most guilt-ridden and unfocused. I couldn’t commit myself to one lover. I couldn’t even choose what to be the god of. I kept shifting from one skill to another—distracted and dissatisfied.

I find it interesting that Apollo admits that he’s ‘guilt-ridden’. It’s like he already had an awareness of his human conscience before he was even turned into a mortal. I would imagine being immortal sort of allows his negative emotions to fester since there’s basically no deadline for when he needs to ‘sort himself out’. And because he’s physically detached from the people he’s wronged, he never had to deal with any of the consequences. So he lets the guilt sit at the back of his head, never acknowledged but never forgotten.

Fast forward to the present where he’s mortal, stripped away from the protections that immortality had provided him. Throughout the series, his guilt crashes down upon him all at once, brought to the forefront of his awareness. He is now living among the people who he had wronged, both intentionally and unintentionally. His children, who he had neglected, are an example of this. Apollo knows he treated them poorly, and you can see how this becomes an insecurity for him. But despite their uncertainty and wariness, they treat him with compassion. Apollo doesn’t think he deserves their kindness, but he very quickly comes to care about his children, and even risks his life for them, showing despite how selfish he was before, he has the capacity to become selfless within a short period of time. (why this change happens so fast is another separate topic that I’m not going to go into here...)

This leads me to Apollo’s conversation with Percy and Rachel about saving Meg after her betrayal towards the end of the book:

Rachel put her hand over mine. “Things can turn out differently, Apollo. That’s the nice thing about being human. We only have one life, but we can choose what kind of story it’s going to be.

Rachel tells Apollo that humans can choose their own story and that “things can turn out differently”, implying that they are capable of change. That Meg is capable of change. And that they can choose to make change happen. Apollo, deep down, believes that too (or at that point wants to believe that of Meg, as the fear of betrayal is still there). And although he doesn’t realise this then, Meg and him are more similar than he thinks (which is revealed in the following books). So if Meg can change her story, why can’t he?

Although Apollo doesn’t directly reflect on Rachel’s words in the book, I believe it is significant in Apollo’s arc. After all, the first step to overcoming guilt is believing in your capacity to change, and trusting that you are a different person than you were before. Apollo still grapples with this throughout the series, but we do see him realising this in Tyrant’s Tomb during his confrontation with Harpocrates. He treated Harpocrates horribly and he realises that now, but despite how much he believes he should be punished by the silent god, he knows that he needs to convince him to help them for the sake of the greater good. And how does he convince him? By proving his transformation.

All right! I pleaded. Kill me if you must. But I am sorry! I have changed!

At the very least, I had managed to surprise him. He had not been expecting regret or shame from me.

In all their memories, I looked so human…but in the best possible ways. Without words, my friends asked Harpocrates if I was still the person he hated so much.

This is partly why I find Apollo such a great and unique character! He’s someone who’s messed up so badly that there’s basically no righting his wrongs, but is able to overcome his guilt and grow into a better person; I think that is something that all of us can relate to at least on some degree.

#my brain surprises me sometimes

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There's a huge difference between redemption and humanization. I feel like a lot of "redemption arcs" aren't actually redemption at all, they're just attempts to humanize the villain so that they seem multi-faceted, but people read them as "redemption arcs" and think that that is meant to justify all the evil they've done before and negate whatever made them a villain in the first place. I think true "redemption arcs" are actually kind of rare because true redemption would take making the villain acknowledge their crimes, reevaluate their actions, actively choose to do better, and then proceed to make amends and become a better person, and that would this take more time than most stories are allowed to give their characters.

I've also seen people argue that a character has to be poised for redemption from the jump for it to work because once a character does something "too bad", they can't be redeemed. I completely disagree because redemption isn't justification or forgiveness, so no matter how horrible a character's actions, they could choose to become better, but because a lot of people (including writers) think redemption means "erasing the character's flaws and making it so they did nothing wrong ever", a lot of attempted "redemption arcs" just end up erasing a character's entire history or justifying every evil thing they've ever done. And yeah, in these cases, the only way to make a character go from a villain to a perfect cinnamon roll with no flaws *is* to have been planning it from the beginning and make sure they never do anything that can't be explained away later.

TLDR: real redemption arcs require a lot of self-awareness, patience, and growth, which are things that are rarely actually allocated to villains, and that's why real redemption arcs almost never get executed. The reason people think redemption arcs are overdone is because there are so many attempts to either humanize a villain that get misconstrued as redemption or attempts to blatantly erase who a character was in the name of "redemption", which is really just poor character development.

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meg introduces lester/apollo like this is my dumb idiot brother if you're mean to him i'll beat you to death with a rock

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love how apollo disappears for 6 months wakes up falling in a dumpster as a teenage boy and his first thoughts are like “i don't think i can manwhore mansplain manslaughter my way out of this😞”

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I love Apollo in PJO. He contradicts himself all the time

He's a god. He's pathetic. He's insanely powerful. He passes out in almost every chapter. He's always trying to convince us he doesn't care about anyone but then uses himself as a meat shield for those he cares about. He acts offended when the others don't put themselves below him but then is confused when they try to protect him. He claims he'll save everyone just for others to praise him but then expects people to be angry at him when he helps them. He says I'm fine a lot. He is not fine. He's a victim. He's an abuser. He's doing better. He's a god. He's a person. He's trying. He got enslaved by a 12 year old. Said 12 year old is his sister now. He says his sister, who helped deliver him, is younger than him. He told a 15 year old to drive the sun for him. He's an asshole. He likes to judge other people's fashion choices. He really, really doesn't want to die but has sacrificed himself multiple times even though he was sure he'd die if he did it. He told Meg Nero is bad. He compares Nero to Zeus but refuses to see himself in Meg. He claims to be the best god ever but is convinced that he's a horrible person. It took him millennia to admit that Zeus abused him. No one else knows this fact. He saved Meg and so many others from Nero but he went back to the one who abused him when he became a god. He's Apollo. His name is Lester Papadopoulos. He really needs therapy

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I'm obsessed with Apollo in PJO. He's a girlboss. He's bisexual. He's a loser. He killed his ex boyfriend by screaming at him. He's enslaved by a twelve year old. He's the 4000 year old god. He's stuck in the body of a 16 year old with acne. He passes out every fifty pages. He claims to be the eldest twin. His twin sister helped deliver him. He has a talking prophetic arrow only he can hear. He canonically gave birth to Kayla through godly mpreg. He fucking hates ravens. He sang Sweet Caroline whilst actively dying from a zombie virus. He loves elephants. He's a simp. He got cockblocked by a talking sword. He hates everything. He needs to be protected by a 12 year old whenever a fight breaks out. He's a sopping wet cat. He's blorbo. He's entirely and utterly pathetic. He should NEVER be allowed a gun. We stan <3

#the character of all time #<3

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meg everytime she had to save lester's useless ass in every quest they had:

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*draws lester one billion times just because*

#RAHHHHHHHHHH

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Art I did for my part (1/3)

#omg !!!!!! #the expressions #the colours #!!!!!! #amazing