per aspera ad astra 🌟

happy lin manuel as hermes casting 🤩😫

all of the gods are adults, every bad teacher or monster in disguise is an adult. they rarely seek the help of adults, and mostly avoid them on quests. it’s not a coincidence that hestia, the goddess they immediately are meant to trust, takes the form of a child, or that artemis consistently takes the visual age of the teens in the hunt, or that the one ally they actually take on is rachel. and it is just not possible to achieve the stark dynamic when the cast of canon 12 year olds are played by grown adults that look like they should be holding down 9-5 jobs and then going home to kiss their wives.

the core of pjo is about children. thinking about percy grappling with immortality doesn’t hit the same when it’s a middle aged man, not a small, scared sixteen year old still learning to drive. bianca choosing to join the hunt and subsequently dying would not have been such a big deal if she didn’t have a kid brother, and wasn’t a child herself. even luke becomes a much more sympathetic villain with the context of him being so young, not when he’s some sleazy 25yo with a beard

so much of the magic of the story is lost when you take away the age of the characters. i can’t explain the feeling of reading pjo when i was 7 or 8 and looking up to the Big Kids that were funny and witty and angry and loving and smart and valuable, not in spite of his flaws but because of them, and then watching the movie and being like. oh. that’s just some guy

I love visually seeing how the campers are all age accurately cast. In the books, it didn't hit me as hard because it was something I read when I myself was around 12. Even upon rereading I just go back to my 12-year-old body and the age is just this textual evidence that I KNOW exists but it doesn't truly impact me as much as it really should.

With this still, though, it's clearly visible how young all of them are. And it's scary. It's just the teaser trailer and it's already scary to think just how tiny and innocent they are, and how many hardships they have to go through at such a tender age.

But the scariest part about the scary part?

The youngest campers. That little girl (sorry for the bad quality) who's sitting right behind the girl with glasses looks around 7-8 at most. She's so small, so tiny, and yet she's at a camp where she has to learn how to survive and fight off monsters 100 times her size.

And the essence of all this is exactly what the movies failed to capture. The movies had a mostly adult cast, with zero ideas of what they were doing with the plot and characterization that could make the movies as impactful as the books, and focused a little too much on getting their Percabeth ship going, with absolutely no buildup of trust or slowly falling for each other or anything.