Just Personal

The lazy day by Chu Anh Chi Mai

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We have all fallen for Han's propaganda.

Look, Han might think he's a suave, smooth-talking pilot-slash-smuggler who can outsmart a whole ship of Imperials, and that Luke's a naive little farmboy who's never seen hyperspace before, but honestly?

The whole time on the Death Star, it was Luke calling the shots. Luke bluffed an officer into thinking he was a stormtrooper with a bad comm unit; Han started shooting as soon as the door was open. Luke spent about 2 seconds on the altruistic argument - "but they'll kill her!" - before figuring out Han's angle and swapping to the argument that would win. Luke pulled out a cell block number as soon as the guard asked; Han famously fumbled the first comm call.

We give Luke a bad rap for being an idealistic farm kid, but he's not stupid. He knows when he's being scammed, although he might be a bit loud about calling it out; he's ready for trouble and pretty on the ball with coming up with cover stories. He might expect the best of people - but you know what? It works! People want to live up to those expectations - so they do. Han comes back. His father turns from the Dark Side. People listen.

I'm not even talking about in the 'oh thats not REAL capitalism' kind of way. I mean I dont recall any indication of private enterprise. The district workers labor for the government in the capital. Resources and rations are centralized and dolled out by the government. Wealth and privileged come not from business, but from ones proximity(literal or metaphorical) to the capital.

I think of that part from TTC when he meets Annabeth’s stepmom and expects her to like turn into a raving lunatic at the mention of her name and is surprised when she doesn’t. And it’s easy, I feel, to read this in retrospect as Percy just not understanding the nuances of bad parental relationships. But I think this is what it actually is: Percy’s experience with a bad stepparent is Gabe. And that’s how Gabe always reacted at the mention of Percy’s name. And Gabe would have left him to rot without any question or remorse. So of course that’s what he expects from the stepparent Annabeth has been complaining about as long as he’s known her, and she deemed bad enough to run away from.

And yes, compared to Luke and Thalia and Annabeth, Percy is somewhat better off solely because of Sally. Except he, too, was deadly serious when he said he’d rather live on the streets than live with Gabe, and if not for camp that would have been his only option at this point in his life—the same as it was for them. Percy truly CAN relate to the feeling of camp being his only safe haven because this is also true for him. Percy probing Thalia about her history with her mom is not a kid who comes from a stable home trying to relate to her and failing: it’s a kid who grew up sharing living space with an alcoholic, and is able to tell at the age of 12 years old “when an adult has been hitting the happy juice.” And this is of course not even to talk about his constant awareness of money and his mother working odd jobs just to put food on the table—experiences that Thalia, Luke, and Annabeth don’t have. So I think it is just so unfair to view him in retrospect as the kid who is so privileged that he can’t understand trauma rather than what he actually is: a kid who was only ever one bad day away from being in just as bad of circumstances as any one of the other demigods, and who at points in his life, actually was in their circumstances. When Percy meets May Castellan he is not just reflecting on how bad Luke’s life sucked, he has experience and trauma of his own, and he feels a heavy sense of “how easily this could have been me.”

Percy being not outside of the problem, but inside it, is fundamental to the series. He’s not just championing Luke’s cause: it’s also his own! Because who is more exploited by the Olympians than Percy Jackson? This is a kid who has almost been put down like a dog by them ! They took a vote on it in front of him!

Leo and Frank and Hazel’s moms are actually dead and they stayed dead. But Percy watched the Minotaur squeeze his mom to death right in front of his eyes and had to process her death and blamed himself for his failure! Of course he is going to relate to them on a fundamental level, and again, he was so very close from having been in exactly Leo’s situation.

It's rude. You're making someone take their time to read something you couldn't bother to write. You're telling them they were so unimportant you couldn't be bothered to actually take the time to say something yourself. And frankly, you're lying about it while you're at it.

"on the wrong side of 40" "huh, which side is that?"