From the Archives

like if i trusted that the story was actually coherent enough to analyze then i'd have a ton to say about how bad annabeth comes off in wottg. but like. i don't have enough faith in the writing to bother. like is it absolutely horrible for annabeth to sit there while her friends openly mock percy and not say a word to defend him. of course it is. but that doesn't mean it's now reasonable to characterize annabeth as a bad girlfriend. bc if you do that based on her behavior in this book then by the same logic you have to be willing to characterize grover as so childish that he can't be left unsupervised & say he's incapable of following basic instructions. you have to be willing to accept that percy has become so incompetent that he doesn't know how to lie to hecate. or that percy cannot manage to count to ten in spanish. but for some reason you don't see anybody doing that, lol. saying annabeth is a bad gf in wottg is like. you literally may as well be writing hate posts about grover drinking the strawberry milksake. like the book is so bad that it legitimately does not deserve the time of day.

& i see this same pattern in a lot of hoo too, like ppl pick and choose when to take the writing seriously based on what they enjoy criticizing. like if you think it's absolutely unreasonable and horrible writing for percy to tell jason that he legit gave up on fighting because he thought he deserved to die and for that conversation to be sideswept as if this isn't alarming. then you can have that EXACT same energy for annabeth confessing to piper that she's scared of percy, lol. like both conversations are insane and it is bad writing in both instances to introduce these wildly alarming concepts and then just push them aside. but we're gonna hold annabeth accountable for this standard and not consider that her writing is absolutely flaming trash in boo. that's silly.

what a lovely ask to get! ironically enough while i have been so vocal of late in writing about how p&a are an iconic couple (and i do think they are) i also fully understand the distaste for them and have myself had many years of not liking them for various questionable writing decisions, and it's honestly part of why i've given them so much thought (like Why is this couple so polarizing and yet so wildly popular. where does the buzz come from. bc it's definitely there). but the writing downgrade from pjo to hoo to everything that came after would frankly make it impossible for me to enjoy them as a couple if i cared to engage with canon, if that makes sense lol. even in pjo i definitely think there are some annoying things about them & annabeth used to REALLY get on my nerves when i was her age, but i think looking back it's tough for me to be too critical on any of them because it's like. i mean they really are just kids & it really is just a middle-aged dude writing about the absolute horror show that is navigating crushes and new relationships, i think often based on things he was observing when he was teaching middle schoolers. and like looking back on pjo so much of the characters' behavior is just so relatable to what going through middle and high school was like (at least for me) that i feel like ppl do need to be better at acknowledging that the characters act in messy ways primarily because they're young and not because they're bad people, if that makes sense.

but all that being said i've always been & will continue to find other ships compelling! and since percabeth is so wildly popular i often do enjoy writing about like perachel more because less has been said about them.

I think she would also like suggest crazy things that are more or less harmless, like graffiti, or getting tattoos, or spontaneous road trips - anything to keep him from getting stuck in his head.

i think around college time, and even the end of high school, that rachel would become a comfort person to percy again. bc she is canonically a friend that he relies on to blow off steam and escape from the hard stuff in the demigod world. i think they'd fall back into similar rhythms that they had that school year before tlo, and she'd be maybe the only person alive that truly knows that percy is like . one bad day away from literally ending it all. (i kinda feel like suicidality would be real to rachel in a way it just wouldn't be to a lot of our other characters because she's mortal - like she's a teenager who's part of alt subcultures in the 2010s. feel like she probably had a tumblr in high school. it tracks).

anyway point being, i think rachel would be a safe person he could talk to without feeling like he's about to be institutionalized or gawked at & she'd be able to take it in stride. but she also like. has more interpersonal skills than jason and would be like hey percy. please don't kill yourself. (will legit never get over that convo in boo. absolutely bonkers). also think rachel would be really good at getting percy out of his head and would provide a lot of options for healthy outlets to his emotions - she’s creative and she’s weird on purpose so her brainstorming would be endless.

& then their friendship progresses naturally into roommates because percy doesn’t want to just live with sally forever & he and rachel get along really well. and because rachel is the oracle they pretend like it’s all going to be Just Peachy living together and there won’t be any tension at all. but of course there is. this scenario is better if they have a third roommate to cut the tension, my pick has always been piper bc for some reason i just like that combo. and then like rachel starts feeling angsty about wanting to give up being the oracle and she doesn’t tell percy that and in his mind it’s like never going to happen because it can’t happen but he’s secretly begun thinking that apollo would probably bend the rules for them.