#i can talk a lot about how absolutely lacking every loss post- like. MoA is. if people want i will absolutely go into it more

[aroaceleovaldez]

one of the issues i’ve had with the series since like mid-HoO is how there suddenly became like, no consequences the characters faced that felt actually lasting or impactful.

Like, the first time i read Blood of Olympus I can’t emphasize enough how genuinely angry I was at the ending. Cause genuinely if you cut off BoO before the final chapter it’s a decently narratively satisfying ending! the fight was lame but it at least felt like there was a weight to it with Leo’s death. And then it’s completely nullified and it ruins the entire thing. And that’s consistent throughout the latter half of HoO and TOA! Because you can feel that they’re constantly trying to hit that same weight the first series had but they can’t quite reach it. At least with Hazel returning from the dead it felt like she genuinely had a struggle to overcome as a price to pay for that. When Percy and Annabeth go through Tartarus, they leave behind two characters that to most people (unless they read Sword of Hades) they’ve only just been introduced to and thus have zero reason to care about, and basically recover immediately with no lasting effects from their journey. Jason gets healed in BoO through the power of friendship and there’s no lasting consequences from it. Leo completely returns from the dead with a magic potion and gets a girlfriend and flies off into the sunset. There was already a happy ending to BoO, it was just a happy ending where you felt like the characters actually went through hardship to get to where they were. Which mirrored TLO nicely! But the weight is wiped away immediately and it feels like Rick didn’t trust his audience to be able to handle that. And that completely ruins TOA in turn because you can feel the over-correction and it makes every time a character dies feel completely cheap and worthless to the narrative. Throughout HoO and TOA we have these repetitive moments where we’re basically just directly told “Oh no! This character died! These whole bunch of characters died! You should feel sad about that!” but with absolutely no narrative weight to back it up. Jason’s death in TOA feels cheap because in HoO every time a major character came close to dying or died they were just magically fine by the end of it, so it feels like there is no good reason for him to stay dead because you know there’s so many excuses in-series for why he could come back. Frank’s fight in TOA feels boring as hell because you know he’ll be magically fine. The only exception to any of that is Nico, who actually got a lasting consequence to him nearly dying multiple times that is addressed multiple times across both HoO and TOA.

Every loss in HoO and TOA feels cheap and empty. The audience has no actual attachment to Bob or Damasen because unless you have context for Bob you literally only meet them halfway through the book and then leave them again. We are just directly told to be sad about it. Bryce Lawrence’s death was a victory, as was Octavian’s. There was never any risk to Jason in HoO. The random assortment of nameless Hunters and campers we’re told who died in HoO just literally do not exist. Leo’s death was impactful until you hit the final chapter of “jk, lol!” Frank was never in any risk in TOA. We knew that every first series character in TOA was going to survive, that was never even a question. Every random death in Camp Jupiter had no weight because they were just random names we had only just been introduced to, with absolutely no character behind them. Even Dakota, who we did have some character to, was still a husk we barely saw and had no attachment to. None of the characters around them have lasting mournful reactions to any of those events. Jason is literally the only character in TOA who’s loss did anything and it feels narratively cheap because it feels like there is no reason for his death or for him to stay dead. And Jason was one of the most underdeveloped protagonists in HoO! He is the only one of the Argo II crew who literally does not have a backstory. It does not exist. I mean, fuck, the final fight in TOA literally features young campers PLAYING and we’re basically told we’re supposed to be treating it with the same weight of the Battle for Manhattan?

And it makes me upset especially looking at upcoming TSATS and Chalice of the Gods because we’re beyond the point of exhaustion! We’re being told there will be consequences but we know the series narratively cannot sustain that anymore because HoO and TOA dropped the ball so thoroughly! There is no reason for us to care! We know whatever new stuff gets thrown at the protagonists will not stick!!! And it sucks because there are routes you could go with new books that would be compelling plots! That would get literally any sliver of actual weight of consequence even if we know what the eventual outcome will be! Where’s Jason’s backstory and giving us literally any reason to care about him and the Roman camp? Where’s something like Clarisse’s quest in TTC where we know she faced horrible things and came back with the same weariness and emotional exhaustion that Percy faced after his quest in the same book? There is space in the series for this! But we keep being given the cheapest, least impactful routes possible! It’s just exhausting at this point!

#pjo #toa #hoo #heroes of olympus #riordanverse #trials of apollo #meta #im in a mood. that mood is me being mad at TOA again #i can talk a lot about how absolutely lacking every loss post- like. MoA is. if people want i will absolutely go into it more #and this is something i think about a lot when writing for my askblog #cause like. it genuinely is not *that* difficult to introduce a character / get the audience attatched / and then kill them off #the difficult part is when you have like 20 mechanics in-universe to excuse them being brought back #and you need to have any sort of justification for why that's not possible #and sometimes that justification is ''this is more narratively satisfying'' #but you need to back up every time you do that in a story or else it just feels cheap