brace yourself

also i just need to take a moment to thank you for your contribution to the pjo fandom

PROTECT THIS ARTIST AT ALL COSTS 🤺🤺🤺

that’s so crazy cause my hc is that he lets his hair grow out after hera messes everything up and he no longer has to deal with camp jupiter’s military-like regulations but i also love this hc too!!! long hair jason supremacy across the board!!! let’s goooo!!!!!

so the idea of an all-american golden boy, an almost essentially white male figure embodying western partiarchal values, being black instead isn't unheard of in media and in real life (he's literally not american lol but jackson from the tv show "sex education" is both a good example of and subversion of the trope when appearing in a black character); the golden boy is usually an athlete, handsome, conventionally masculine, talented, comes from a "good" family, experiences favoritism, has strong principles, etc - all of which applies to white jason (the "good family" being jupiter, which awards him the highest possible status among the romans - and thus causes jason's supposed favoritism that he detests). but for a black "golden boy", there can and has been an added connotation of racial exploitation by dominant white power structures (I recall reading some really good papers in college about black football/basketball stars being exploited for their bodies/labor on both the collegiate and professional level, though I can't remember the names of said papers. exploitation of black men in sports is a big and easily researchable topic tho)

I think this connotation of exploitation would matter because although hera seems to be soft for jason in some ways later on in the series, in tlh she uses really specific, unpleasant language about her ownership of him that evokes much more obviously violent imagery if she now becomes a powerful white woman claiming ownership over a black teenager, rather than a white one (I'd like to note that this is also almost exactly what hazel goes through with gaea, which I've posted about before here and here - though to my knowledge gaea lacks a specific race/human skintone whereas we do know that juno appeared explicitly as a white woman to frank's mom when he was a baby). this is even more uncomfortable if this renders beryl grace a black woman who had her son taken away by an omnipotent white power figure (juno/hera). jupiter "gives" him to juno as a "gift" and names jason after juno's favorite mortal, rather than beryl choosing his name - as if to completely strip jason of his black roots and forcibly assimilate him into her own culture (which is just. a thing that did actually happen to enslaved black people, and why most black americans have """white"""-sounding surnames to this day, including myself)

jason rejects these claims of ownership immediately, and a continuous theme of his character is extracting himself from the repressive confines of camp jupiter, a camp that canonically has ties to the american confederacy as well as a history of racist discrimination against frank's ancestor shen lun. camp jupiter highly values collective strength and militarism, and is in general very old conservative-coded (hence why a lot of people read octavian as a somewhat conservative figure). the existence of reyna as one of its leaders unfortunately doesn't negate this conservatism, but it's interesting how, in having his memories wiped, (black) jason can gain the opportunity to view the world through a completely new lens and attempt to rediscover himself, especially while surrounded by other people of color like piper and leo (idk, especially piper? black-indigenous solidarity runs deep in america, and there's a reason why 'bipoc' is its own category)

in this way I like how jason reevaluating his relationship to camp jupiter, how "roman" (= white/conservative) he actually is, and how much he needs to find himself again after everything he's been through could then be read as a black man freeing himself from an exploitative white power structure that doesn't really care about him. it's an imperfect metaphor that gets icky when taking into account how most of hoo's nonwhite cast starts roman and stays roman (reyna, frank, hazel) but I don't think the metaphor necessarily needs to be read in the exact same way for every character (i.e. frank's eventual praetorship over camp jupiter could be interpreted as a triumph over camp jupiter's past sinophobia)

all of this only to be mischaracterised for years. like the whole point of jason’s image as this “perfect hero” is that it’s a facade. only a mask, not the real person underneath, who was constantly afraid, constantly wondering. who wondered if anyone actually cared about him, if anyone was out there looking for him like they were all looking for percy. who was devastated to find out that his mortal parent was unstable, neglectful and descended into madness. his only shred left of a family, and that was what he got. thalia telling jason about their mother and leo for once not being jealous of him, because even though his own mother was gone, at least she had been loving, at least there had been good memories. but jason didn’t have any. even if he did remember, those memories weren’t good ones.

for all his bravery, jason never had anything to fall back on. all his life he’d found that courage from inside himself, somehow, some way, because he had no other option. leo’s “you’re not alone” because in that moment he realised just how little jason really had.