solheim

Nico's character was built on platonic and familial love, on the desire for connection and acceptance. In the original series it was about Bianca, his past and indentity; for some time it holds up in Heroes of Olympus - in the Son Of Neptune, he tries his level best to associate with people at Camp Jupiter - comforting Gwendolyn when she returns to life, discussing war strategy for the games, being a spectator of the games from the watch tower and earnest in his duties as an ambassador despite Camp Jupiter's dislike for his heritage - he tried to connect and belong in spite of his personal turmoil and the Roman demigods' aversion.

Why do you think he was one of the first demigods in a long time to stop and talk to Hestia, the goddess of family? Or the fact that he sought connection in the dead when the living rejected him, even goind far enough to give his sister Hazel another chance at life (problems regarding this aspect notwithstanding)?

His story was about seeking acceptance and belonging, dealing with grief and abandonment*, platonic and familial bonds, identity in a world which wasn't his - not in time, not in culture. It was about all of this and so much more.

In fact, his relationship and feelings towards Percy were platonic - which is exactly what it made it so beautiful; they loved and "hated" each other the way siblings do!

Now enter Riordan and House of Hades: bluntly put, the whole "Erm ackshually 🤓☝️, Nico has a crush on Percy since years, he isn't pushing people because of his isolation and personal issues - you see, he actually has this huge complex over his romantic orientation as a gay guy which is going to be resolved largely off-screen after he gets to hold hands with a side character" retcon was a major disservice to everything about Nico and his character, but ok.

All that being said, you're probably thinking "OP, you mean Nico shouldn't have been queer?" - no! Nico could've been queer in ways which perfectly fit everything previously established about him without coming off as a botched retcon - he has quite a few motifs gender queer allegories (enby Nico? Yes.), and could've worked great as a gay oriented aroace character in Trials of Apollo.

On that note, characters like Piper, Leo, Jason and even Percy would've been way better fits for diverse orientations. Piper could've been sapphic/lesbian, Leo could've been gay, Jason and Percy could've been Bi.

but Riordan barely ever puts thought into his diversity so

I think this might have started once he tried his hand at writing other main characters in the same series as percy and realized a) it was hard for him to make them look quite as interesting as the character people had been following for a entire series focused entirely on him and b) despite his best (?) efforts, people still cared more about percy than his other protagonists, which showcased his failure as a writer, and would suck particularly bc hoo was one of his firsts projects after pjo, and one of his first attempts at writing not-percy's.

With his other series, I think he had already learned some lessons (such as not having too many pov's, continuing with the first person pov, basically, sticking with what he's good at). Meanwhile hoo (to me) is the series he took a risk and tried to challenge himself as a writer by having multiple main characters, writing 3rd person pov, trying to expand his worldbuilding - but I don't think he was ready for that. Mostly, I find it hard to believe that the idea was even entirely his - some of it does feel like a pitch his editors might have made for him bc they wanted him to continue milking this universe, and he thought, yeah, that sounds about right, I totally can do that. Except, he couldn't, bc it didn't suit his writing style, his strengths and limitations as a writer, or even the arcs he had already written for some of these characters in the first saga.

If you read the first two hoo books, there's not a lot of percy bashing going on, and truly, I started to feel that more intensively by the end of the saga, when things needed to get resolved and he didn't want them to get resolved by percy - this wasn't percy's saga after all, it was supposed to be a team assemble, people were supposed to be interested in the other protagonists by now! But still, Percy's character was the one that received the most focus by the fans, and I think he might have become more and more irritated by that - especially bc there was a lot of stuff people were excited about that he didn't plan to follow up on (case in point: tartarus). Throw in the fact that he has a tendency to write people in a relationship as not being allowed to care that much about anyone else except their partner (unless he's building a love triangle), which means that a lot of characters who had important relationships with percy now had to start not thinking very highly of him (i.e: nico, who he couldn't write getting over percy without diminishing his role in his life and making so the solution for him letting go of his hero worship was making him start finding percy annoying and dumb), and yeah, he started to get more and more comfortable with using percy-bashing as a new writing tool to spice things up.

There's also something to be said about how this percy-bashing was most notably used in hoo to prop nico's character, and nico ended up one of his most popular characters after that, alongside percy, so...

any [insert __] is for the sender to fill in :)

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