/lit/ - Literature

PJO was comfy. It was tightly-plotted, Percy's first-person narration was a good vehicle for Riordan's sense of humor, and the occasional woke themes came from Riordan's lived experience with his kids so they were integrated naturally rather than getting slammed in your face. Most importantly, Luke was a tolerable villain with a legit grievance against the gods, and there was some real tension in that Percy clearly shared a lot of the same frustrations.

HOO had too many characters and the villains didn't have any compelling motivations, they were just rip-tear forces of nature. Given the "bringing people back from the dead" theme, this series should have had humans who got screwed over by the gods in lead villain sidekick positions -- it would have been repetitive of Luke's story, but it would have been better than "hurr I was just created to smash and whatever." Also I'm butthurt about Percy deciding to leave his mom for college on the West Coast, fuck you Percy your mom deserves better than that.

Trials of Apollo could have been PJO 2.0, with a tighter core ensemble and some personal drama. But Riordan's writing is like a parody of itself now, it's trying too hard to capture the slightly zany energy from PJO. It's like later Star Wars authors trying to mimic Aaron Allston. And three shit-tier Roman emperors just don't make for plausible threats to a divine world order. Story can redeem itself with I, Claudius memes in the final book though.

I remember jack-all about Kane Chronicles and the Norse one was anticlimactic. Can't believe it ended with a rap battle.

tl;dr Riordan used his best protagonist and his best story idea in PJO and it's been all downhill performative wokeness from there.