#and it's extra annoying because WE KNOW RICK CAN WRITE BETTER UNRELIABLE NARRATORS

[aroaceleovaldez]

One of the both interesting and annoying things with Trials of Apollo is Apollo is an unreliable narrator who will entirely straight up lie to the audience.

Like, on one hand, yes technically that is what an unreliable narrator is, but generally with unreliable narrators you are able to parse that they’re being unreliable entirely within the contexts of the narrative and also parse the truth. A good example is actually Magnus Chase - he’s also an unreliable narrator. But he doesn’t wholly outright lie ever about random details. Magnus is somewhat coy when it comes to details about himself or his feelings, but its also generally very easy to see through his pretenses. When we’re introduced to him, he talks a lot insisting that he’s some type of tough loner guy on the streets, and isn’t super into touchy-feely stuff. Then we’re immediately introduced to his found family and spend the next two books seeing his found family grow and finally him literally win a fight with the power of friendship. He claims he’s totally independent, but then also talks about how he keeps sneaking into his uncle’s house and again, has two adoptive dads. We’re presented this information almost side-by-side, so while Magnus is an unreliable narrator, we as the audience are still receiving valid information. And then comparatively Percy is just almost entirely a truthful narrator. There’s never really a question of having to dispute the information he gives us.

Meanwhile, Apollo will exposition at the audience and we genuinely have no way of confirming or denying it, and we do know that he is blatantly lying about at least some of it, which makes basically all of the information entirely useless. The most notable example of this is Apollo spending three whole books referring to Artemis as his younger twin sister. Without contextual knowledge of Greek Mythology, specifically relating to the myth of Artemis and Apollo’s births, there is no reason for the audience to dispute this or not take this as fact when Apollo is presenting it as such. Then, in Tyrant’s Tomb when Artemis actually shows up, Apollo completely 180s into being truthful and referring to Artemis as his older twin. It honestly almost reads as just narrative inconsistency or textual error if you aren’t aware that Apollo is intentionally supposed to be lying to the audience.

And it’s annoying! Because we can’t take anything he says as fact most of the time! Like, we can presume it’s true, because we have nothing saying it’s not true until we do. But also, sometimes we do! Like with Artemis! So there’s a ton of little instances of having to go “Is this a retcon, new information, consistency error, or is Apollo just straight up lying and it will never get addressed?” We don’t know.