#Bob has been freed from his punishment because he's helping Olympus now! He's a janitor for Hades! he should be able to just leave!

[aroaceleovaldez]

i think i’ve pinned down one of the things that’s bugged me about the recent series/books - over time there’s been a slow over-saturation of the mythological aspects, at least in how they’re presented to us. The first series and TKC balance the mundane and mythological really well, but as things go on there’s more and more emphasis on mythological things as separate rather than merged with the mortal world. The best two examples I can think of for this are Tartarus (We’ll ignore Tartarus in mythology versus how it is in PJO for now, that’s a topic for another day) and MCGA -

[Under cut for length]

in the first series, Tartarus is scary and ominous because we don’t know anything about it, we’re just told it’s bad and the only things down there are Kronos and reforming monsters (who can actually relatively easily escape Tartarus, it just takes them a minute), essentially. All we ever see of it is glimpses in the first book of the edge of it and a little bit later in the Labyrinth when there’s some cracks that lead to it. In the beginning of HoO it’s still scary because we still haven’t seen it, but we know Nico went down there and it was extremely bad for him. We still know nothing else! This also adds something special - Nico now has the unique trait of being the only mortal to have passed through Tartarus and survived. All of that then immediately falls apart when Percy and Annabeth fall into Tartarus and... it’s not that impressive. They actually get through it relatively fine. They run into a friendly giant who gives them soup and we get a literal deus ex machina as Iapetus/Bob shows up out of nowhere to help them out too. So now we’ve revoked the fact that it’s a special trait to have been able to survive Tartarus, that apparently means nothing, and apparently there’s enough friendly/useful things in Tartarus to make your life easier while you’re there AND now with TSATS we’re revisiting it again and now Will gets to have survived Tartarus too, I guess, because just anybody can do that now. Not to mention the whole “Oh, btw, Nico actually also has Super Special Tartarus Vision but Percy also temporarily got that too so that’s also not special.”

With MCGA, the series is supposed to be set in Boston, right? Except, it’s not, really. It’s set in the Nine Worlds. And it’s set in the Nine Worlds in such a way that we the reader are essentially just on a convenient guided tour of the Nine Worlds for some reason. We didn’t need to see a guided tour of the Nine Worlds! It’s just shoehorning in mythology for the sake of showing it off. PJO and TKC being set in New York worked because we actually see New York and New York is important to how the story functions. The mythology stuff is in New York! Camp Half-Blood is on Long Island Sound! Olympus is in the Empire State Building! The Grey Sisters drive a taxi! Camp Jupiter works because it’s in California. TLH and SoN work because we are in different real-world locations, but mythology stuff is happening in those spots. That’s what made PJO unique! And that’s what starts falling apart later in the books - Team Statue’s trip is memorable because we get some details about the places they end up. That one scene where Hazel, Frank, and Nico are wandering through Venice is memorable because we see Venice! Most of the rest of HoO we don’t get that same description. In TOA we lose it even more - yes, we’re in these different spots, but they feel disconnected because it’s less “We’re in this location! and there’s mythology stuff here too!” and more “OMG MYTHOLOGY STUFF and we’re like, vaguely in this location, I guess.” You could essentially interchange the mundane location of those scenes in HoO or TOA or MCGA without disrupting the story at all because it doesn’t play into it at all. In the first series it matters that we’re at the Gateway Arch and the Hoover Dam and Las Vegas and Manhattan. In TKC it matters that we’re in London and Brooklyn. In TLH it matters that we’re at the Grand Canyon! In SoN it matters that we’re in California or Alaska! Heck, it matters that the Princess Andromeda was a normal cruise ship with mortal passengers still on it! But in MOA-BoO and TOA and MCGA it doesn’t! You can interchange any random place with Greco-Roman ruins because we’re just apparently on a tour of Europe anyways. You can interchange the setting of TOA because for the most part between Camp Half-Blood, Camp Jupiter, and the Labyrinth, we’re either just vaguely somewhere or some new randomly introduced demigod-or-mythological-related place. You can interchange the setting of MCGA to any large North American city because we barely see the city, it’s just a backdrop for Hotel Valhalla and spots are chosen at complete random as access points to the Nine Worlds.

It takes away some of the meaning, to me, to over-emphasize the mythological aspects of the universe when it’s supposed to be this big special thing. The entire first series emphasizes how the mythological world has merged with modern mundane life, and especially that demigods struggle to locate and interact with a lot of these mythological locations. Trips to Olympus are rare and special occasions.Trips to the Underworld are difficult and extremely uncommon unless you have specific access or are summoned there, so every time we do go there it’s exciting! In TKC it takes effort and difficulty and specific circumstances to gain access to many mythological-related things and places in the first place, which in turns makes it rewarding when we do see it. There are absolutely some mythological locations we see in the series that it makes sense to repeatedly visit or have easier access to - the camps and nomes, obviously, are safe havens we expect to return to. The Labyrinth has access points everywhere. But the cool part of the Labyrinth in the first series versus TOA is that in PJO, where the Labyrinth was entered and exited was important and created interesting scenarios - such as fighting Kampe in Alcatraz, or having to guard the entrance into CHB because it was dangerous. In TOA it’s always just kind of... somewhere?

There’s also a lot of rehashing of places and monsters and beings we’ve met before - it doesn’t make sense to return to Ogygia a whole two times after Percy’s trip (which is supposed to be, yknow, impossible to reach unless you get hopelessly lost) or for Calypso to even show up again after the first series since part of Percy’s deal at the end of TLO was supposed to be for Calypso to be freed. Returning to Ogygia’s island and reintroducing Calypso there feels like a retcon more than anything at that point, when if you wanted to reintroduce her you could have just had her show up somewhere else, having been freed from her island and gone traveling to see the sights of the world. Why revisit Ogygia? Or Tartarus? These places that are supposed to be impossible to reach or survive? Every time you go back it just invalidates the intended feeling and structure of those settings. Why not revisit like, Triple-G Ranch? Which is just kind of there and a perfectly open spot with a known location that’s not difficult to find at all? Or the Amazon headquarters, which is also a known and easy to access building. Neither of those were totally explored when we were introduced to them! And we haven’t seen them again! Heck, we could even revisit the ruins of Circe’s Island, see if anything’s going on there now! What happened to all the sorceresses and pirates? Did the sorceresses become pirates and take back the island? That’d be cool to see! That’s an interesting revisitation of past mythological-based locations, not going back again and again to these impossible-to-reach places. It’s why we never went back to the Garden of Hesperides - we know where it is and under what circumstances to gain access it, but we only went there once and saw it maybe twice and that’s good! Because the less we see the mythological places the more special they are! And the more we see the mundane places and how mythological things have taken root in these modern mortal spaces, then the more grounded the universe feels! Not a random private building entirely occupied by Nero’s forces or magic grottos hidden in already magic summer camps, but furies and centaurs hiding as teachers and satyrs disguised as students. That was what made the universe feel so unique. And I’d like to see more of that instead of things feeling so disjointed like they have recently.