Trials of Apollo: About Lester’s appearance
Now. When I read the Trials of Apollo, The Hidden Oracle, I searched for fanart of Lester Papadopoulos, the human form of Apollo. (For the sake of clarity, I will mostly refer to human-Apollo as Lester). First I was amazed to see just a few of it, and much more art about the other, minor characters, but the book was still freshly released so that wasn’t so much of a problem.
However, after the release of the first book, I thought to myself “Why isn’t there more art of a chubby Lester?”. I mean, that’s one of the defining traits of Apollo’s human form, one of the two major things he hates the most about his appearance and keeps complaining about : he has a face full of acne and, in his own words, he is “flabby”. Now, I’m not saying there aren’t some flabby Lesters out there : some artists made him with a bit of flab, or a little paunch, and on top of that it was cute or good-looking drawings, so that’s satisfying. But most of the drawings of him were rather thin or really svelt, not to say slender or bony. And it bugged me a bit.
While reading the Hidden Oracle, I was quite delighted to see Lester as a chubby character, because you know I’m all for plus size representations and that would mean that the artists of the fandom would have to change their style a bit to represent a chubby character. However, immediately after I was a bit disappointed to see that he wasn’t truly fat. I explain myself.
In the first book, Apollo considers himself “flabby”, “fat”. However, it is most likely not the case. In fact, the whole book is told through his point of view, which is extremely biased. He exaggerates everything, he thinks of the mortal condition as something very unpleasant, etc… The fact that, as Apollo, Lester was used to have a perfect, no-fat, six packs body all the time, and that Meg says he is “average” and “not fat” shows here that, indeed, Lester is not a “chubby” character. It’s just a perfect-looking god suddenly becoming average and as a result, since for him “perfect” is normal, average will be “fat”. So yeah, it is very probable that Lester Papadopoulos in the Hidden Oracle is not chubby or flabby. He is average, or maybe skinny-fat. The two possibilities are very plausible: Meg tells us that he is average, and like I said earlier for a perfect god, average is fat. But skinny fat is also an “average” body type, and it would make a basis for Lester’s obsession with his “flab”, since he would have a bit of fat on him. Choose your pick, in one version Lester suffers from dysmorphia and his biased view of beauty, in the other he is rather making a fuss out of nothing and exaggerating everything. (I personally like the last version better, because I feel it goes well with his idea that having a bit of acne is equal to being disfigured).
So, with these thoughts in head, I went on to embrace all of the Lesters, whether they were flabby, skinny-fat or average.
However, I’m still bugged by the Lester drawn as skinny or slim. Honestly, if people say he is “flabby” and “average”, don’t make him bony.
Anyway, for the first two books I thought that Lester was indeed a boy with an average body type, but because of being used to a god body, was seeing himself as fat and flabby.
However… The Burning Maze, the third book of the Trials, made me think again about my idea of Lester’s representation. But more on that in my next post.
