brace yourself

(irt this post) I was actually mostly referring to thalia's post-ttc dialogue. thalia is generally fine in ttc, in fact she seems to be more even-handed when it comes to sex in ttc than she is later in the series, i.e. one of the main points of contention between thalia and zoë is that zoë hates men and thalia doesn't - specifically that zoë once tried to recruit thalia back when she was homeless with luke and annabeth, but refused to join because of luke. zoë told her this decision was stupid because luke would fail her someday

this wasn't zoë being prescient, she just thinks that men are intrinsically bad and thus luke was inevitably going to fail thalia. not because of his worldview or his hubris or his violence or anything else, but just because he's a man. to be clear I like zoë just fine but "men are evil/stupid/incompetent by default" is not the anti-sexist anti-patriarchy pro-feminist take of the century (how could any man be held responsible for his bad behavior if he was simply born a bad person?). I could elaborate on this more but it's a big topic + not the main idea of this post

after thalia has completely lost faith in luke and zoë is dying, she tells zoë that she was right about men. but zoë admits she was wrong! (we just have to ignore the unfortunate connotation that "not all men" now has in the post-#metoo era otherwise this looks really bad 😭)

unfortunately it doesn't seem like thalia internalized this. after joining the hunters, thalia has just gotten worse about gender, and now sounds a lot like zoë did before she changed her worldview. the hunters are anti-men, they didn't get along with aphrodite kids in ttc and that hasn't changed under thalia's leadership. thalia basically says here that she likes piper because piper isn't like other aphrodite kids, and this is something that tlh loooooved doing - framing piper as superior to her siblings specifically because she's not girly like the rest of them

I think that the question of "is thalia REALLY punk?" is an awkward and almost impossible thing to answer definitively, mainly because I think rick has no interest in what punk is. imo rick largely uses thalia's "punk" appearance as shorthand to express how cool she is rather than to convey her political leanings or involvement in the culture (though there is a mention of her listening to green day - I don't know them at all but there seems to be some debate as to whether or not they're really "punk". cue jokes about how the most punk thing to do is debate how punk something really is). she is clearly meant to look punk - the "spiky" hair, the ripped jeans, the leather jacket with buttons on it, etc. yet rick also describes her in-text as goth (at least) twice, which indicates to me that he barely knows the difference, and therefore I kinda just don't take this too seriously and would encourage others to have a similar approach (i.e. punk is anti-sexism. can thalia be anti-sexism when rick himself is misogynistic and gives her misogynistic dialogue? etc)

that said I have some distaste for positioning luke and one's alignment with or rejection of his political goals as an indicator of how "punk" one is. luke is definitely radical and rebellious; his character revolves around his ideology that "western civilization is a disease", that it's "killing the world", that he wants to "burn it to the ground" by defeating the olympians - but he is not an anarchist, nor is he fully anti-establishment. luke is still pro-authoritarian. this is made clear in the very first book: "Kronos will rise. [...] He will cast the Olympians into Tartarus and drive humanity back to their caves. All except the strongest--the ones who serve him."

there are nuances to luke's motivations (i.e. he has been groomed by kronos since he was a teenager, and I'm using "groomed" intentionally here. he also can't fail kronos without being tortured as punishment, and he says as much multiple times) but his efforts are centered on replacing the olympians with someone who is, in his mind, a more just ruler - but this just isn't true. for one, luke is fighting for an autocracy wherein anyone who opposes his leader is silenced; while the olympians are (debatably) somewhat autocratic too, around zeus is still a council that votes on major decisions - and it happens more than once that the demigod cast gets to have some input on those decisions (just look at the winter solstice scene in ttc - the gods are literally voting on how to proceed in the war against kronos, among other major decisions). does kronos seem like someone who will listen to anything the demigods have to say, or even his fellow titans?

Musically speaking they are not punk. They were, and the scene is split between whether they stopped being punk when they signed with a major label (1994) or when they stopped making punk music (1998, imho). Either way, today they are clearly in pop punk (useless term) or alternative rock territory.

Politically speaking, it's gonna depend on your definition of punk's politics. The Sex Pistols, the godfathers of punk if you will, occasionally wore swastika armbands for shock value and Johnny Ramone licked Reagan's boot so hard it came back out his ass so any idealisation of punk as politically great across the board is always gonna be rose-tinted. Financially they are very much filthy rich by now, but they have a considerably stronger antifascist ethos than many other former punk icons that have become anti-"woke" right-wingers. They told Bush to fuck himself then, they tell Trump to fuck himself now, that's more than you can say about Johnny Rotten, Johnny Ramone, or (lmao) Dexter Holland (not that The Offspring were ever punk but w/e, that man isn't dunked on nearly enough).

So I'll say despite their very comfortable material circumstances and their changing style, they've kept the core of punk ideals (which, again, you won't find two punks who agree on what that is): stick with the weak, fuck oppressors, don't take shit lying down, break the rules if the rules are the problem.