Iâm sure everyone remembers that one scene in House of Hades (I thinkâŠ) where Nico was outed by Cupid/Eros in front of Jason? Well, I donât know if everyone knows this but in Rome same-sex relationships were normal. So, imagine Nico being all scared and anxious because he just outed himself to Jason â who he probably thinks wonât accept him because Nico thinks heâs (Nicoâs) unlovable â and is just waiting for Jasonâs response but the guyâs acting so nonchalant about it??
Nico: âŠI have a crush on Percy.
Jason:
Jason: Nico, Iâm pretty sure that doesnât count. Eros/Cupid said it had to be a secret you never told anyone, you know, something less conspicuous?
Nico: *confused*
Nico: wait⊠what-?
Camp Jupiter could be so much gayer if Rick had just actually tried to write it properly đ. Jason probably already knew Nico had a crush on Percy but was like: thatâs normal so he just never mentioned it. Like, why would he? Itâs just a crush. Heâs in a war, crushes arenât something youâre going to discuss. And Nicoâs so confused and embarrassed because heâs old schooled. Thatâs how they became best friends, your honour.
There are many things that frustrate me with the writing of Annabeth in the PJO TV Show, but I think one thing that I havenât seen people talk much about is the mini-arc of Percy needing to help Annabeth with her sense of fun/humanity.
Just so weâre clear, I absolutely hate this arc.
Prior to the showâs premiere, I believe there was a quote from Rick discussing new-ish things that weâd see in the show, and one of those things was Percy helping Annabeth âtap into her humanityâ. I canât find the exact quote, but it should be on the series update Twitter account if you search it.
When I first read this quote, I wasnât exactly sure what it meant, but I thought maybe weâd get an expansion of the theme of forgiveness that we got in the original books, or maybe weâd get an arc about Annabethâs pride and how that gets in the way of her relationships with others. Or maybe theyâd try and break down the ways in which Annabeth helps to uphold the godsâ ways of doing things, and align her more with the mortal point of view (which they essentially did, but not the overall point).
What I certainly wasnât expecting was for them to strip Annabeth of most, if not, all of her smaller/softer traits, and give her this unusually stoic and stiff personality, where she suddenly has no familiarity with casual aspects of the mortal world (movies, Disney world, common idioms), and needs Percy to introduce these concepts to her in an effort to âunlockâ her humanity.
What.
The.
Fuck.
Words cannot emphasize enough how much I despise this arc. Not only is it entirely nonsensical for Annabeth not to be familiar with these things (she was with her dad at least until the age of 7 and she goes to a camp full of other children who are regularly in contact with the mortal world; do you seriously expect me to believe that at no point in her 12 years of life, she never saw a single film, heard of Disneyworld, or heard common idioms and slang terms from her camp-mates? Seriously???)
But ALSO!
Book!Annabeth had PLENTY of humanity to go around! Even with her pride and initial coldness towards Percy, she plays hackeysack with him and Grover on the first day of their quest! She has a cute silly crush/admiration/infatuation on Luke. She nerds out big time over the St. Louis Arch! Sheâs the first to steal clothing from Waterland! She screams and cries when she encounters the mechanical spiders! She has an expression of sadness when she shares her backstory about Thalia and Luke! She gets lost in her little construction game at the Lotus, so much so that Percy has to use her phobia to pull her out of the trance! She grabs Percyâs hand when they first enter the Underworld because sheâs scared! She tears up when itâs time to leave Cerberus!
And you stripped her of all these things, because youâre so desperate to overemphasize the Percabeth romance, and you felt that it was absolutely necessary to have Percy educate Annabeth on âunlocking humanityâ??? Why!!!!
Not only did Book!Percy help Annabeth discuss things about bad parents and approaching forgiveness, but Book!Percy already had something important to offer Annabeth: loyalty, trustworthiness, and reliability. You didnât need to take away her already-present traits and wits to convince us that Percy was the type of person she needed in her life, because we can already see what he offers her in the books. So why oh why did you feel the need to give us the silly âtap into your humanityâ arc? Why did you turn her personality into something that it wasnât? Why did you take away her depth just so her character could better serve Percabeth?
I donât even necessarily agree with the criticism that this version of Annabeth feels like it prioritizes Percabeth more, but I can see why people made that complaint. Yâall took away so much of what made this character endearing, because you felt like it was a much bigger priority to have Percy help her unlock humanity than to let her be human prior to meeting him and outside of him. Not only does her personality get shafted, but her relationships with other people get shafted too! Her interactions with Luke are affection-less, she sent Grover off on his own in the Lotus so she could go off with Percy, and I donât even think that she and Chiron interacted once this season; I donât even think she mentioned the part about her calling him to come pick her up after she attempted living at home again!
But donât worry; weâll get plenty of scenes doubling down and tripling down on how Percy is the center of her world now! Yay!
Why do you not ship percabeth? Not ad hate or anything, I'd just like to know
So there was a point I greatly hated it, now I'm just apathetic for it. I don't really care but I don't ship it.
I just never cared for the romance while reading the books, I was here for fights and cool shit.
What made me not like it at all was honestly the fandom.
I'm not so much in the thick of it like I was than and people got livid when I said I shipped Percy with Nico.
Like genuinely livid at me and others. I saw grown ass adults bitching about it on fics that "destroyed" Percebeth.
Finding out Nico had a crush on Percy was a fun day.
That and heroes of Olympus because I just didn't like how it was handled, especially with the Tartarus trauma that went unsaid.
I just didn't like their relationship, things like how Annabeth called Percy a nickname he's said on multiple occasions he didn't like, didn't sit right with me.
I never cared for the ship, didn't like it and the insistence and anger of the fandom made me hate it.
the show has made me really appreciate the musical's choice to not only have annabeth fail to recognise medusa, but to make her ANGRY at herself for not picking up on it, then using that as a segue into her desire to prove herself to her mother, her insecurities and her dreams. it works really well
what's funny about the discourse on whether or not annabeth should've known it was medusa is that in the book she acknowledges outright that learning about the myths and applying it to the real world are not the same thing: 'at camp you train and train. and that's all cool and everything, but the real world is where the monsters are. that's where you learn whether you're any good or not' (pg 170)
annabeth who desperately wants to prove herself via the quest, but who falls short because she has mostly theoretical knowledge she hasn't yet applied to the real world and is frustrated with herself because of it is, to me, far more compelling and realistic than annabeth who just knows everything because 'she's the daughter of athena and that means smart'
i'm going to say something controversial. i enjoyed the pjo movies more than the show. while they were incredibly innacurate to the source material, they were at least FUN and i think got the vibes of the book better than the show did. I actually enjoyed watching them whereas with the show i felt like i was just watching it out of obligation and sort of just waiting for it to be over.