lesbians, harold

trust me there are issues with leo’s character, i know. but praising the white girl for being a “girlboss” and assuming she’s some intellectual prodigy because of her mother, ignoring the fact that she literally hasn’t been in school since 2nd grade, while disregarding the fact that leo, a poc, is smart is insidious and reeks of racism.

when annabeth is smart and/or aggressive, it’s made clear that this is a positive trait, and riordan flexes his feminism. when reyna is smart, it’s scary, it’s conniving, it’s intimidating.

when annabeth is mean or jealous— which she is, all through botl— it’s played off as funny, and her flaws are softened by the wealth of characterization we have that shows that that meanness is not her whole personality. when drew, on the other hand, is mean or jealous, it is the only thing we know about her— she’s a bitchy asian girl. okay!

annabeth is powerful. so is hazel. and according to the laws of the narrative that riordan wrote himself, hazel should be more powerful than annabeth, but she isn’t, because, uh...

annabeth has a complex relationship with femininity and that’s okay; but piper’s aversion to femininity, on the other hand, is written soaked through with riordan’s own misogyny to the point that piper’s “internalized misogyny” has become a common topic of discussion in fandom.

Hazel has gotten used to throwing away little scrap bits of paper bearing any marks of her boredom during senate meetings, but she’s beginning to regret it now, as she’s bundling old meeting notes into a recycling bag. They never contained anything vital to the meetings, just stickmen blowing rude speech bubbles, games of hangman and tic-tac-toe, Jason’s chicken scratch scrawl asking did she want to get donuts after the meeting? She can’t remember if she’d said yes, or if she’d smiled, or if she’d told him she had drills to run.

She hopes she’d said yes. She hopes she’d scribbled yes, I would love to get donuts with you, so he had known for sure that there was nothing else she’d rather have done that day. If she’d known what was coming, she’d have asked him, after every meeting, and stretched out what should have been a longer friendship. What should have been more time with her first friend in Camp Jupiter. What should have been more time with someone she saw as a—

As a—

She’s getting distracted, and her eyes are starting to prickle. With a shuddering sigh, Hazel goes back to gutting Jason’s old desk. Purging it of all traces of it’s former occupant, though she’s fighting the urge to have it towed towards his funeral pyre. Whoever sat at it next wouldn’t be quite so deserving, not of the title, not of the office, not of the desk so covered with the imprint of his late night work and coffee spills, she begins to wonder if they couldn’t conjure Jason’s soul from out of the grainy wood itself.

But, she reminds herself, it’s just a desk. No more a part of Jason than the office, the chair, the pages and pages of work scattered around. As she plucks the sheets from the drawers, her fingers brush the soft leather spine of an old sketchbook. She gasps quietly, fingers jarring with uncertainty — as if she’d found a diary, some private relic that Jason would have forbidden her to touch if he’d been there.

He is not there, and Hazel pulls the book from it’s hidden corner of the desk drawer, glancing around to make sure she is completely alone. 

princess of the underworld!!!

He completely relied on stereotypes throughout his entire writing of her and the fact that no one noticed is baffling. Sounds about white

1. She’s is literally the ONLY black character in the PJO universe who isn’t dead (she was dead but :/) or a monster. And I could write this off as pure coincidence but then we see that Hazel dead for DECADES and it feels so painfully deliberate.

2. Her mother is literally does voodoo and while this does have basis with the black community but it was used to demonize her and it’s so painfully transparent and considereding the fact that black women were disproportionately accused of witchcraft and demonized for it this is rlly insensitive to these issues.

3. Nico brings her back to life and while this could be considered somewhat of a reach it really reads like a ‘white saviour’ narrative in which the white hero has to save the POC and while it was a sweet idea when you take it to consideration all the stereotypes he’s already written this comes off as pretty iffy.

4. In classic Rick fashion he uses food to describe her,,which is gross on so many levels. She was described as having ‘cinnamon’ hair and ‘skin as dark as a roasted coffee bean’ which greatly fetishizes and dehumanizes her as a character which is inherently racist.

We then get to the point where she’s described as having eyes like 24 karat gold and like I could accept this description she wasn’t the only canonical black character within the PJO universe and if it wasn’t used to further push the narrative that POC aren’t ‘pretty’ or ‘exotic’ enough without whiter lighter features. You add this to the cinnamon and/or caramel hair and it’s a whole mess.

5. She’s paired with a SIXTEEN year old boy as a THIRTEEN year old which is wrong on so many levels when we take in the drastically differing levels of emotional maturity at the time. Black girls are constantly hyper sexualized and to push a romance with an older guy completely ignores the struggles that young black girls face due to this perception of them