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apollosgiftofprophecy · 4 months

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RRVerse Fandom, Please Hear Me Out...

Message to the wider Riordanverse fandom:

Please correctly tag your fanfics with the correct fandom tags.

I am getting tired of seeing non-Apollo fics cluttering up the Trials of Apollo tag (such as Percy/Annabeth. like. what. they're barely in ToA. why are they there.). If your fanfic does not deal with Apollo, Meg McCaffrey, or the story of ToA or the consequences of it, please do not tag it as such.

I have seen fics tagged as ToA and not even have the MC, Apollo, tagged as part of the cast. So please. I am begging you. Please stop. You have the Percy Jackson & the Olympians - All Media Types, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, AND The Heroes of Olympus tags.

Solangelo writers, you now have the Sun and the Star tag, as well as the All Media Types one. Unless it happens during or alongside something to do with Apollo & his story, please refrain from tagging it as ToA.

And no. I do not think just being Solangelo should qualify all Solangelo fics to be tagged as ToA. If anything, they should be The Sun and The Star tag or even The Heroes of Olympus tag because that's when it all began! However, if, say, it's during The Hidden Oracle or takes place in the ToA timeframe then sure! ToA tag it!

But if it's just like an AU or something that only focuses on Solangelo? Then please don't. It's not ToA then.

This is what the ToA tag looks like btw:

I know, Nico, Will, and Percy are all popular characters, but COME ON. This is Apollo's tag, please give him this! It's so hard to find fics I want to read because it's so cluttered! Apollo's not even in the top three most-tagged characters in his own fandom tag.😒

And look at the gap between the number of fics Apollo's in compared to Percy! A 354 gap! And there's 1,616 gap between Apollo and Nico! And I can say with certainty that not all of those fics Percy - and even Nico and Will - are in are related to ToA.

Meg McCaffrey, the second MC of the series, is not even on the board. And she's a very close second MC.

And trust me. I know a bunch of these fics have nothing to do with ToA. I have scoured the tag many times and have figured that out.

So please, please, please leave The Trials of Apollo tag be unless you are writing for The Trials of Apollo. We are our own fandom and frankly, it's getting annoying having to shuffle through a bunch of fics that have nothing to do with ToA just to find ones we want to read.

Fic authors, it would be such a big help if you could remove the ToA tag from your fic if it doesn't have anything to do with ToA. I know you want your fic to be seen, and use a bunch of tags to do so, but this really inconveniences the ToA fans who just want to read about our favorite loser god and his gremlin adopted sister. ☹️

Sincerely,

A ToA fan who just wants to read fics about her favorite character but can hardly wade through the fics even with the filtering system.

Thank you. It needed to be said.

#plunged into the toa ao3 tag #and returned annoyed and frustrated #so hard to find my boy #so hard to find fics for toa IN THE TOA TAG #like. please. please. i am begging you. please properly tag your fics.#proper tagging also means NOT tagging fandoms that have NOTHING TO DO with your fic #when i write my fics i tag them All Media Types and ToA #because they are about Apollo and the wider rrverse #but i've seen fics tagged as toa and NOTHING from toa shows up in them #NOTHING #no apollo. no meg. nothing.#and really apollo should be the main selling point #if he's not an important character in the fic than honestly the fic's not toa #exceptions are meg-centric fics or a character who debuts in toa #like lavinia or crest or emmie and jo or-#you get my meaning #so i've decided to throw this out there #please please please tag fics correctly. please. i know i'm not alone in this the toa fandom has a hard enough time okay do us this favor #AND YES. i know. “use the filter” and I HAVE been doing that BUT EVEN SO it's STILL difficult to find toa-centric fics!#i'm just. frustrated. it'll be a big help if ao3 writers would do this for us. please. i know i'm not alone in this #please and thank you #percy jackon and the olympians #the heros of olympus #the trials of apollo #pjo hoo toa #heros of olympus #heroes of olympus #trials of apollo #percy jackson #rick riordan

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rynnaaurelius · 3 years

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So There's Solangelo Discourse On My Dash Again. . .

And I apparently have time to fight today, so let's talk about Solangelo and the critiques of the ship (And the critiques of that).

Disclaimer/Warnings: Extensive discussion of ableism, mentions of homophobia, discussion of forced outings.

This is a long post. I've done my best to turn my thoughts on Solangelo, the Riordanverse fandom in relation to it, and criticism of Solangelo into a coherent stream of thought, for both my reference and others', if they want.

I do my best to give credit where credit is due, and if you think I owe credit/should link to someone else, message me/leave me an ask.

NOTE: I am not saying it's immoral to ship Solangelo. I'm a Ship-And-Let-Ship person.

I am saying that this ship's canon/fanon portrayals have a lot of valid criticism surrounding it, and am breaking it down in this post. If someone hates a ship, let them hate it in peace.

I am not a Solangelo Anti. I don't like bashing. Everyone can and should leave each other alone if they've got nothing nice to say. Block who you need to for a nice time on this fair hellsite.

While I'm not about to beat up on a ship/characters themselves—because they're hardly writing themselves—I'm about to take their characterization and Rick Riordan to the cleaners.

If that's not what you want to see, blacklist the tags 'anti solangelo', 'rr crit', 'riordan critical', and get on with your day, please.

Fandom isn't activism, but it can be hella racist, sexist, ableist, and queerphobic. We need to fight that.

Now, on with the show—

I. Context

I'm queer, NB, and have been well-acquainted with Percy Jackson and the Olympians/Heroes of Olympus since I was a small child. I write a lot of PJO fanfiction.

(Yes, I'm writing this instead of an update. Don't look at me like that)

Solangelo is the canon ship of Will Solace/Nico di Angelo from the Riordanverse. As of today (08/09/2021) in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians - All Media Types fandom tag on Archive of Our Own, despite the time gap between Solangelo becoming canon—let alone Will and Nico officially sharing their first scene together—versus other ships being canonized/getting shipping material (Annabeth/Percy, Rachel/Percy, Nico/Percy, Jason/Piper, Jason/Leo, etc), it's the second most popular ship:

(Note the drop-off after Nico di Angelo/Will Solace in fic numbers. That's important)

Frankly, with Trials of Apollo complete, smart money's on Will/Nico overtaking Annabeth Chase/Percy Jackson within the next twelve months.

So. Popular ship in a massive, active fandom (That's about to get a massive Disney TV show adaptation).

II. Meet The Shippers

(Disclaimer: A lot of this section is based on anecdotal data/accounts of other people in fandom. No scientific surveys have been done, and thus feel free to take this section with a grain of salt)

Maybe I should be more accurate: A massive, active, young fandom that's only known a very specific age of fannish activity. Obviously, there are outliers, but PJO/HoO/TOA is written specifically as children's lit, and unlike, say, Harry Potter, not only hasn't massively changed tone to grow up with its audience, has been written within the last decade or so, for the most part.

As such, the Riordanverse fandom skews almost unusually young, when you compared it to fandoms of similar magnitude of size (Think BBC Sherlock, Supernatural, ATLA, etc).

They've been lucky enough to only know an arguable golden age of fandom: AO3 has been and up running for over a decade now, the Anne Rices of the world are largely a thing of the past. With access to Twitter, Tumblr, and other socials, it's easier than ever to contact the writers/creators of your favorite media.

For better, but for a lot of the time, also for worse, as I think anyone who's spent any measurable amount of time on this hellsite has seen.

(If you don't know what I'm talking about, look up 'The Johnlock Conspiracy', November 5th/Supernatural—Anything Supernatural, really—or the racist backlash to The Last Jedi/resultant Rise of Skywalker, just to name a few.

Or don't. Really, don't. You're better off not knowing.)

Anyway. This also means Riordanverse shippers are also unusually young. "Awareness of what the world was like before gay marriage was legalized in the USA in 2015" is a much rarer phenomenon than other fandoms.

We don't really have active Fandom Moms, or grizzled vets who remember the heady days of Livejournal, pre-Strikethrough/Boldthrough.

We do have a young, extremely online, and often (Especially in terms of gender/sexuality) diverse fandom; something that Riordan, if anything, has actively courted since at least the publishing of The Lost Hero, where he began to debut a much more racially diverse cast than his previous series, Percy Jackson and the Olympians.

For many fans, Nico di Angelo was their first queer (Or, to be honest, character at least read as queer) character, and Solangelo was their first queer ship in media—canon or otherwise.

And, not to be mean, but it fits a lot of familiar surface-level stereotypes to people who've seen ship fixations come and go #OnHere.

III. A Quick Aside on the Riordanverse Fandom and Shipping

This doesn't contribute much other than a possible explanation for certain trends, but as for additional context, as someone's who been in and out of the Riordanverse fandom since at least 2015—we, as a fandom, have long had a very weird relationship with non-canon shipping.

I'm old enough to remember when Percy Jackson/Rachel Elizabeth Dare shippers were the bane of everyone's existence, because it wasn't canon. Nico di Angelo/Percy Jackson shippers, pre-House of Hades, got more of a pass, if only because they automatically were working from a non-canon framework and were therefore no "threat" to the Percy/Annabeth ship. But. . .still. Wasn't canon.

Then not only was Nico confirmed as gay, but he was saddled with a convenient boyfriend by Riordan by the end of Heroes of Olympus, with perfect traits to flanderize into a popular ship for a fandom full of preteens and teenagers.

Pretty much a perfect storm.

IV. Why Are People Shipping It?

Okay, so I'm obviously coming at this from a critical standpoint. I don't ship Solangelo, I'm here to break down why the canon portrayal of it sucks, etc.

In the interests of being fair, I trawled the Solangelo tag on Tumblr, read some of the most popular fic recs with it as the main ship, and looked into what made it tick for people, beyond my own pathetic attempts at psycho-analyzing part of a fandom.

Four most popular elements, by my judgment, regardless of how I personally feel about it: (Mind, I kept a rough tally chart on Excel for this bit)

A. It's a canon ship with two gay male protagonists, neither of whom die or are killed off for shock value (Thereby avoiding the Bury Your Gays Trope).

B. Nico di Angelo and Will Solace, as most popularly portrayed in canon and fanon, fall into the beloved "Angry Dark-haired Tortured Goth Who Is Soft For The Extroverted Smiling Sunshine Blond" trope.

C. The "Doctor and Death" imagery that surrounds the both of them in later canon portrayals/fanon, considering their parentage (Son of Apollo v. Son of Hades).

D. . . .they're a canon gay ship featuring one of the Riordanverse's most popular characters falling for a character with enough of a framework to be identifiable out of a lineup and enough left blank for easy projection.

I tried, y'all. I swear.

Anyway, there's Solangelo and the people who ship it. Onto the dreaded criticism.

V. Critiques of Solangelo: Ableism

(Major shout-out to the bloggers I link back to. Warnings in this section for extensive discussion of ableism, mentions of PTSD, and me seeing red for a bit)

Okay, we're going to back up real quick for this one to discuss Nico di Angelo in Heroes of Olympus. Here's a list of the things he canonically has to deal with in HoO/post-HoO:

-Post-Traumatic Distress Disorder (Though I think an argument can be made that Nico is specifically suffering from C-PTSD, and oh boy, do I have a rant in me about Nico di Angelo, the only canonically queer main character, being the one to canonically suffer from PTD and being considered mentally ill)

-Chronic pain and fatigue, post-Tartarus (This one is danced around a bit because Riordan's a coward/translated as magic problems with Nico struggling to use his powers without dying, but it's a safe claim to say this is canon and not just fanon)

Here's the profession of Nico di Angelo's canon boyfriend:

-A medic.

. . .look I'm not saying this ship is impossible in canon, I'm just saying that to pull it off without looking gross, it required significant legwork/characterization that Riordan—and fandom, 'cause don't think y'all are off the hook—simply refused to put in.

This article from the Read Riordan site is an excellent distillation of the problem. It and canon fetishize Will being a very unsettling mixture of doctor/romantic partner for Nico, of the "healing power of love and connection." (Quote taken directly from article to describe the two)

And in case this isn't already clear enough, I will be blunt:

Disabled people are not people for their partners to "heal" or "fix". To build an entire romantic dynamic explicitly on the idea of someone "healing" their partner of their disabilities is to build a dynamic that is disgusting and toxic.

This is all canon. As for fandom. . .

-Portraying Will Solace as a savior figure towards Nico di Angelo, infantilizing the latter—especially in regards to writing/imagining a scenario where Will does something "for Nico's own good", or writing Nico as incapable of looking after himself in any manner without Will—is so common it's depressing.

-Look, I have a lot of problems with characterization in HoO (That we'll get to), but for now: To victim-blame Nico or portray him as silly for "imagining" the isolation Camp Half-Blood imposed on him is gross.

I'm not going to link to any specific examples here because I'm not the people who wrote that and therefore can't explain their rationale behind it and the intent of this post is not to punish "bad writing".

I will say that portraying able-bodied, medical worker Will Solace as consistently "having to save/heal" disabled Nico di Angelo and portraying it as perfectly SoftTM and RomanticTM is ableist as hell and you should re-think that fic prompt before you hit "Post".

VI. Critiques of Solangelo: Characterization

This section is going to be shorter, since we're focusing on Solangelo and not, um, the rest of the characterization in Heroes of Olympus (I'm going to write that essay one day).

Basically, it boils down to the fact that in the eyes of the reader, Will Solace and Nico di Angelo are not equal characters. Nico was a major secondary character in the original series from The Titan's Curse onwards, and becomes a deuteragonist in his own right by the end of Blood of Olympus.

-We know Nico. We've been through a lot with him, regardless of opinions on the characterization course changes (I'm dying on this hill alone but I will die on it, damn it).

-Meanwhile, Will gets a glorified cameo in TLO when the Cabin Seven counselor bites it, gets maybe one or two namedrops from then on, and then shows up in Blood of Olympus to be Nico's fix-it love interest.

-This makes for easy projection, sure, but also. . .come on. You can't do better for Nico?

-See previous section. What little characterization Will Solace gets is that.

-Mind, I think part of this is due to Riordan's desperate urge to pair everyone off, no matter the cost (Who the fuck is Shel?). If I'd been as traumatically outed as Nico had been in House of Hades, finding myself a partner in the aftermath would've been the last thing on my mind.

-Nico is solidly shown to be Not Okay and in need of some serious empathy, support, and downtime by HoH and BoO. To immediately have his head turned by Will Solace instead, when he's fresh off trying to save the world and Octavian's death is just. . .no, man. Romance isn't the end-all be-all here.

-Obviously, one can argue that Trials of Apollo is a different ballgame, but I'd argue that whatever shipping there is should come second to Nico finding the platonic/familiar love and support he needs.

VI. Backlash to Criticism: Homophobia

Saying a ship isn't perfect and has some ableist overtones to it in canon and popular fandom portrayal is not homophobia. Next!

. . .but seriously, y'all, I promise you and Riordan will survive some mild criticism. This isn't a call for you to stop shipping, and it's a call for you to look critically at what you're writing and reading.

Trust me, the white gay ship will survive some angry people on Tumblr. You do not need to justify yourself to me or anyone else.

Also, other queer ships exist in the Riordanverse, if non-canon ones, because Riordan is a coward. I highly recommend going and shipping those, too.

VII. Backlash to Criticism: Characterization

I'm including this section to point out that a lot of claims that Nico and Will, just being themselves on equal ground, actually can have a fun dynamic.

This isn't completely incorrect, if rather subjective, of course. However, I would point out that this is still a pretty surface-level analysis, and absolutely no excuse for not looking deeper at your ship and its dynamics.

This isn't a "Sail the USS Healthy Ship only" post. I would point out that you should be aware of unhealthy/toxic/hateful elements of the ship in question, so that you can scrub, say, ableist elements from the ship you're writing in question.

VIII. Queer Representation in the Riordanverse

Quick rundown of confirmed, canonical queer characters in PJO/HoO/TOA. I haven't read much of Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard, so I can't speak for characters like Alex Fierro:

-Nico di Angelo

-Will Solace

-Piper McLean

Worth noting that neither Will nor Piper have made mention or had conversations about bisexuality, and Nico, as the only queer main character in HoO, was forcibly outed, and. . .look.

There is no one "good" queer representation. We're infinite diversity in infinite combinations, with "good" rep for some of us is "bad" rep for others (Excepting a few things, such as clear examples of Bury Your Gays in media, erasure, transphobia, biphobia, transmiogyny, racism and sexism, etc).

But to have your only queer character have his sexuality treated like a dark, horrible secret, and then have him be traumatically outed by Cupid is just. . .not great.

Speaking as someone for whom forcible outing was, at one point, a real threat in my life: That entire sequence left me feeling shitty.

We can do better than "One out of a dozen primary and second characters is gay and fixed up with a tertiary character, and another may/may not be a lesbian, bisexual, or pansexual now, and is dating a character without a surname."

To say nothing of Riordan's treatment of the Hunters of Artemis, or the entire mess with Reyna, where, among other things, he did an excellent job conflating aromanticism and asexuality, or the fact that his treatment of relationships is still very heteronormative in a cast that's still majority straight and cis.

(And, hell, he can't even get those relationships right)

(And "Tragically straight Percy", my ass)

(But this essay isn't about my personal headcanons of Percy Jackson's sexuality. Among other things)

No, any rep is not better than no rep. I understand that Nico might mean a lot to some people, but that rep aged. Quickly.

Rep doesn't have to be perfect or can only be written by queer people, but there should be an honest attempt made to push the boundaries of what's "acceptable", and we should do better than to shower the bare minimum of "one sad white gay cis boy from 2013" with accolades.

You had the social capital, Riordan. Use it.

IX. Disabled Representation in the Riordanverse

I will be honest in this section: I can't speak for it very well, beyond general terms. I have ADHD, sometimes-debilitating anxiety, and PTSD. I can speak for the Riordanverse's rep in terms of that—spoiler alert: most of it sucked—but not in terms of, say, the treatment of Nico's chronic pain and fatigue beyond what I've already talked about.

I can say this: Romantic partners aren't going to be fix your problems, and to portray them as such in media is gross. Riordan should be less afraid to make his characters "unattractively" scarred, considering the world they live in—and how a lot of the cast, particularly Jason, Percy, and Luke, fall into the Good Scars, Evil Scars Trope.

To say nothing of the fact that physically disabled demigods don't really, uh, exist in the canon Riordanverse. Which I find very difficult to believe.

The disabled representation in the Riordanverse is fairly minimal at best (There are demigods with ADHD, but no autistic demigods; one demigod is confirmed to have PTSD, but none of the others; and so on), and outright ableist and offensive at worst (Solangelo as portrayed in canon).

X. Conclusions

Like I said at the beginning, this is not a call to stop shipping Solangelo, or an indictment of the Riordanverse fandom as a whole. This is an explanation of a lot of very valid criticism. I hope.

I'm of the firm belief that just about any ship can work, given enough time, creativity, and effort. I don't think Solangelo is an exception of that, though I can definitely understand where the people who do are coming from.

To make ships work, healthy or otherwise, we need to have a self-awareness of the dynamics and context for the situation. The canon material is flawed. Riordan is a severely flawed author (Sayeth the penniless college student who writes fanfiction, but I don't give a shit).

I love the material anyway. I try my best to analyze it and write stories from it that I'm happy with.

This post is not a call to harass Solangelo shippers or an excuse to yell at me for internalized queerphobia or what-have-you. It's me getting some things off my chest and hopefully giving other people catharsis/some feelings into words.

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