where is He getting the fucking candy from

I'm shaking this is Serious. i have proposed some theories and evidence for everyone to look at but feel to share your own theories so long as they are pg-13 and rooted in Facts and Logic

THEORY 1. he gets the candy from a supplier who is one of his mortal "friends"

this excerpt is from botl but the illegal candy trade bit js from tlt and it's never mentioned again. percy is a total outcast in tlt and as far as I can remember he doesn't mention befriending a single person at yancy academy besides grover. so while percy may have pulled together a classroom friend or two by the time botl rolls around and he's newly attending goode high (paul's school) it just doesn't seem like percy had friends besides grover in tlt - especially given that he's gone to many different schools by the time tlt starts

grover has no need for mortal money and he eats fuckign. soda cans. he is probably not supplying the candy to percy

this doesn't mean that percy could not have been roped into an illegal candy trade by someone who is more of an acquaintance rather than an actual friend

THEORY 2: percy buys the candy himsef

percy has some cash in tlt. he may have used this cash to buy his candy in bulk for cheap to then sell it back to his peers at a higher rate for profit

we can safely reason that sally just gives percy some cash in case of emergencies or whatever else, so this holds up well enough

if sally told percy to only use the money for emergencies then I think he would feel too guilty to use it for other reasons. but sally is nice and fairly chill so she may have also told him that he can use it for other things he likes, including illegal contraband

THEORY 3: he steals the candy

percy jackson is a lot of things but he is NOT a thief;!!

unless he was lying when he said this, in which case fuck this guy forreal

THEORY 4: SALLY JACKSON is his illegal supplier

sally works at a fucikng candy shop. this is compelling evidence because she would just Give percy the candy for free. he can eat it himself or sell it back to his peers at unethical resale rates.me personally I am choosing tbe latter

is sally complicit in his crimes...? giving him "free samples" that she can grab at work and then encourage her son to sell them back to his schoolmates...? probably not to be honest because doing this could get percy in trouble, and with all the likely expensive private schools sally has to send percy to I don't think she's risking extra reasons that might get him expelled

this doesn't remove the possibility that percy might just keep a few extra gumballs from sally's free samples and sell them to his sugar-starved peers at yancy

I made a half-serious version of this for annabeth months ago but fanon hazel is also extremely bad so here's a little characterization guide for her as well (based primarily on hazel in son of neptune because as we all know rick seriously loses the plot with like All of his characters in the second half of hoo but especially hazel):

this girl can cuss: one of the first things you see hazel do in son of neptune is cuss out octavian for threatening her (once he's no longer within earshot - hazel probably would not actually cuss someone out to their face). she is also stated to have had her mouth washed out with soap by the nuns for cussing at school. that said, she doesn't seem to swear super casually, and it usually occurs as a response to something that frustrated her

good at consoling others, difficult to console: hazel is great at comforting frank and percy during their most emotional moments in son, but when percy and frank attempt to do the same in return, she doubts them, questions them, and is generally resistant to being cared for by others. there's a line in son where she literally feels guilty about asking percy and frank for something as minor as something to drink because her throat is dry after one of her blackouts

minimalistic: here is a post by @hazellvsq that takes note of hazel's unwillingness to keep possessions or hold onto objects that she cherishes. hazel is not glamorous, does not dress up in fashionable clothes, and in general just doesn't do nice things for herself or appear to care much for material things (if there's anyone who lives by "you can't take it with you" it's probably the girl who already died). hazel grew up in poverty and her entire childhood took place during the great depression. she associates wealth with suffering because her mother's desire for a better life is the thing that cursed hazel and ruined their lives. I'm trying to avoid using too many direct quotes to keep this post shorter but here's an extremely sad line from hazel that summarizes this:

""old-fashioned"": this one's in quotation marks because rick very disappointingly does not actually dig very deep into what surely must be hazel's complicated feelings about being a time traveling black girl from the jim crow-era (I wrote about this a little bit in an extremely long post no one needs to read about the complexities of frazel as a poc/poc interracial relationship). however, some things we know for sure: 1. hazel describes in son how she is freaked out by modern technology to the extent of "nearly having a stroke" the first time she went on furlough to berkeley. from son: "Television, computers, iPods, the Internet... It made her glad to get back to the world of ghosts, unicorns, and gods. That seemed much less of a fantasy than the twenty-first century." 2. she is one of the few characters on the argo II who is actually scandalized by the percabeth-found-sleeping-together incident in moa. 3. frank is able to clock that hazel is from the past before she even tells him due to the old-fashioned "... way that [she] talk[s]. The things that surprise [her]-- like songs, or TV shows, or slang people use.", and when percy asks hazel if she's ADHD, she replies "I don't know. Maybe. Back in my day, they just called kids like us 'lazy'."

protective of others: all hoo characters are protective of their friends but I feel a need to point this out for hazel because she is often seen as being far more timid and passive than she actually is. hazel doesn't hesitate to stick up for others; this is certainly true of son-era hazel, who passionately supports and advocates for the likes of frank and percy when she feels they are being mistreated or too hard on themselves

somber: hazel is a fairly somber, contemplative person. she is not bubbly and she's rarely ever even particularly cheerful throughout hoo. although her dialogue is quite friendly and in general she's a very sweet person, her internal monologues (especially in son) are quite morose, which makes sense given her extremely dark backstory. tldr hazel is outwardly friendly but internally very angsty and unhappy for most of her hoo povs. source: flip to any random hazel pov and 7/10 times the page you land on will probably depict her being miserable one way or another

self-hatred: hazel is simultaneously resentful of the horrible way she's been treated by others her entire life and still does not appear to hold herself in high regard. she downplays her numerous acts of heroism, talks badly about herself, feels immense guilt for things that are objectively not her fault but she feels complicit in (i.e. "helping" gaea, the countless people she cursed with her gems, being undead), does not feel she is deserving of the care or tenderness that characters like frank and percy give her, etc. there are so many examples of this but I mean You get the point

extremely self-sacrificing: I don't think this really needs an explanation this is one of the most obvious things about her - but I do want to note that this personality trait is very pervasive and presents itself in ways that are big (saves her mom from the fields of punishment by denying herself elysium) and small (doesn't mention that she gets severe seasickness and hates riding boats when percy recommends that they use a boat for transportation on the quest to alaska)

mature: hazel is one of the most emotionally mature characters in the hoo cast. this doesn't mean that she is stoic; she cries many times in hoo and has her moments where she lashes out in anger, and she does have some other moments where her behavior/way of thinking is genuinely immature if only in more subtle ways (i.e. she knows that her random blackouts could be very dangerous should they happen in a fight - nico reminds her of this before he leaves camp, but she's so secretive and ashamed of her past that she doesn't mention this to frank and percy, who are depending on her support during the son quest. that's an extremely important thing for them to know and she still didn't say anything!). nonetheless, it is still a rarity that her emotional reactions are meaningfully disproportionate to the stimuli that caused them

casually says weird shit all the time: hazel casually says weird shit all the time

bad fanon/misinformation to avoid:

fellas we have to get rid of this perception of hazel being the light bubbly angelic innocent ray of sunshine to nico's dark emo depressed mean angsty sadboy we have to Kill it with fire. this is an unbearably inaccurate view of both characters but especially hazel; her backstory is probably the darkest one in the entire series, so why do we understand her as a softhearted innocent little girl who is any less complicated or angsty than nico/the rest of the cast? there is no good reason to dumb hazel down like this or reduce her to a stock disney sunshine character, she is not like this at all and I really don't understand where fanon this bad came from beyond an unfortunate suspicion that people really have not reread the source material in 5+ years

another great post by @hazellvsq about how fandom portrayals of percy and nico's respective relationships to hazel are often Uniquely Weird (misogynistic) that you should read even if you don't ever see yourself creating fanworks involving hazel

here is a post in which I gripe about the "hazel is percy's baby sister that he adopted" stuff that I see all the time (if you have a picture in your head of percy and hazel being siblings that's Fine but be aware that this perception can very quickly cross into a mischaracterization of their friendship for reasons mentioned in this post. hazel is one of percy's closest peers in the series and they are equals and friends before they're anything else!)

frazel does not have an age gap. hazel is 14 in hoo and frank just turned 16 before the start of son. here is a post by @aroaceleovaldez explaining why they do not have an age gap (tldr: writing errors that are rick's fault)

nico likes frank and trusts him with hazel (source: son, boo). he is not a rabid overprotective older brother who hisses at his sister's love interests and it would be very creepy and not-cute if he did. that frank is scared of nico in hoh is a truly awful retcon of a line in son that explicitly defined frank as one of the only people at camp jupiter that isn't scared of the underworld kids

other minor canon details that people often forget/get wrong/etc:

hazel suffers from severe seasickness due to trauma associated with the boat she had to take for 6 months to the island where she raised alcyoneus and eventually died. she does Not like riding boats or being at sea!

when hazel gets flustered and embarrassed she starts fanning her face. she also gets dimples on her face when she frowns. fun facts

animals do Not fuck with hazel. one of the reasons why hazel likes horses is because they seem to be the only animals that aren't scared of her (probably because she's a creepy underworld kid). source: "Hazel loved horses. They seemed to be the only living things that weren't scared of her. People hated her. Cats hissed. Dogs growled. Even the stupid hamster in Miss Finley's classroom squeaked in terror when she gave it a carrot. But horses didn't mind."

"no one at camp jupiter really cared about jason/noticed that he was gone/put forth effort to find him after he disappeared" is a common refrain in jason angst meta posts and I get why they exist but this is not true - hazel did! a lot!!!

leo was canonically infatuated with hazel and found her attractive. this so doesn't matter even a little bit and I didn't even want to include this here but I see it debated a lot when it shouldn't really even be up for debate since it's a canon detail that leo himself explicitly confirmed in-text. idk maybe this will help someone out with their frazeleo fic

hazel went to a catholic school, but her relationship to catholicism is basically nonexistent on the page beyond religious trauma associated with abusive nuns at school, so it would not appear to be the case that she is in any way faithful to catholicism or catholic teachings; however you could easily headcanon/interpret some of hazel's behaviors as stemming from her catholic schooling, i.e. the Classic Catholic Guilt™, her repenting for past misdeeds, etc

I hate the "as a girl whose grandmother was a slave, can I just say not cool?" line from hazel in moa it's the worst line of dialogue rick has written in his life. But like what the fuck. what kind of insane lore drop is that. hazel's grandmother was an enslaved woman. marie levesque cast a spell to meet the god of riches so that she could finally know what it was like to live beyond the indigence and suffering of her mother. marie wanted to be a queen, not a slave like her predecessors. she wanted pluto to give her all the riches beneath the earth

and then the earth enslaved her body. gaea possessed her and through gaea's influence marie forced hazel for six months to overexert herself to the point of collapsing to raise and reanimate alcyoneus. gaea worked hazel like a slave

it's so explicit here. this is SLAVERY. gaea was using hazel's forced labor for material wealth and power. she was only 13. her grandmother was used and her mother was used and hazel herself was used, they were black women exploited for what their bodies could provide in service to the hideous intentions of monsters in power over them. hazel broke free from the cycle and saved the world all by herself by choosing death - it was the only way out

and even in her second chance at life she's actively fighting to die again. she's an instrument of the gods being used to achieve an end that is supposed to kill her. she was convinced that freeing thanatos would result in him taking her life. she didn't know throughout hoo if her father would kill her when the main quest succeeded. even nico didn't think hazel was going to live. she didn't WANT to die a second time. but she fought for the world and for her friends anyway

look I'm not gonna lie sometimes the way people discuss percy's protection of tyson makes my skin crawl - "aww percy is SO sweet and amazing for being kind to smelly crybaby homeless tyson. percy is SO amazing for fighting back against people who use slurs against a kid with down syndrome/developmental delays. people like tyson are SO hard to love and be nice to and percy does it anyway" etc. we don't need to talk about tyson as if he exists as a pitiful vessel for percy's moral goodness and nothing else, especially since tyson is just as brave as percy and protects him from harm just as much percy protects him (notice how little people discuss tyson sacrificing himself for everyone on clarisse's boat? notice how no one cares about tyson's accomplishments independent of percy?). tyson is not percy's dumb little baby with no personhood or agency - he's an exceptional blacksmith, a protector, a fighter, a kind person, and a hero with or without percy

percy saved the ophiotaurus' life in-text not solely on humanitarian grounds but through logical reasoning. in theory, just to be safe, the gods should have killed it. whoever kills it and sacrifices its innards will gain enough power to overthrow the gods, so they should have killed the ophiotaurus to protect themselves, and while they were at it they should have killed percy too, and they should have killed nico, and they should have killed thalia again to prevent the prophecy from being fulfilled, just like kronos was right to eat his children to avoid having his power usurped, just like laius was right to try and murder oedipus to avoid being killed, just like king acrisius was right to get rid of danaë to avoid being killed by his grandson perseus - except that doing so were acts of cruelty that never worked in their favor, which percy rightfully and successfully used in his argument to save the ophiotaurus. bessie is percy in this scenario, and he's also oedipus, perseus, the eldest olympians themselves, and every other greek figure who was targeted with cruelty and violence out of fear of what they might do, without regard for the intrinsic value of their lives

hermes understood luke's fate well before it even happened, and he knew very well that he could never have prevented it, which is why he largely gave up trying to do so after efforts to keep may from becoming the oracle didn't work. this is why it's so necessary to understand percy's role in the narrative as a breaker of cycles, and why it's necessary to comprehend that role in context of the greater grecian mythos from which these books are inspired. in greek mythology it's so commonly the nature of a tragedy that some terrible thing is always doomed to happen and efforts to prevent it or manipulate the outcome wind up being the direct cause of that tragedy, which is a crucial aspect of the "greek tragedy" concept in and of itself. percy understands this, and so he acts accordingly

the same book where percy fights to save the ophiotaurus is the book where he decides to finally claim the prophecy for himself. he is different from thalia, whose rebirth was, in itself, an inorganic scheme explicitly intended by the titan army to manipulate the prophecy's outcome in their favor. where thalia's dangerous bloodlust for the ophiotaurus validates the gods' fears, percy's concern for its innocence and right to live contradicts those fears. where thalia (rightfully) avoids becoming the prophecy child, percy stops resisting it because he understands that it has to be him. percy's empathy for bessie, for nico, for his fellow demigods is the reason why he can finally alter this mythos. this is why he is the protagonist and the most essential figure in the narrative, this is why, in handing luke the knife, he becomes the ultimate agent of change but not the tragic greek hero that luke was, whose alignment with kronos, one of the originators of this exact cycle, was always flawed and always doomed to fail

I would like 2 be insane about thalia on main again because I love her. notice thalia being more uncomfortable with sharing power than giving up all the power to someone else in this brief scene with percy. percy is uncomfortable with it too, but unlike thalia he hardly attempts to control anyone else's behavior so much as he resists any attempts to have his own behavior controlled

after this agreement thalia proceeds to take control over the capture the flag game anyway because she just can't help herself. she criticizes percy for not following her orders and gets so angry with him that she accidentally shocks him with electricity twice. thalia has serious problems with self-restraint. if we read into all of this just a little bit too much then we can see the early indicators of how and why thalia wasn't right to be the prophecy child and needed to become a hunter instead

thalia argues that annabeth was kidnapped in ttc in part because percy, in all his impulsive glory, went off on his own instead of sticking with the group - and the campers lost capture the flag against the hunters in part for a very similar reason: percy tried to be the hero and went off on his own to get the flag. when percy opts out of the final ttc fight and takes up the weight of the sky in order to free artemis, he trusts that someone else is more fit to be the hero than himself. this was character development for percy, proof of his fitness to be the prophecy child, and foreshadowing for the final showdown against kronos all in one book. it distinguishes him from his rival thalia in a very important way. she would have never in a million years listened to rachel's warning as percy did

but to the point of annabeth floundering on this quest (never mind the immense psychological torment of the botl prophecy, which predicts "a child of athena's last stand" and a "fate worse than death" for a person she loves), I think it's important to note that the labyrinth quest was straight up impossible to complete in the beginning, and the same cannot be said of the quest for zeus' bolt, the quest for the golden fleece, or the quest to rescue annabeth and artemis. in this way botl's difficulty level is distinct from all previous adventures in the series. if a quest leader's role is to take charge and guide the direction of the quest itself then she absolutely could not have succeeded in that role because it's impossible to navigate the labyrinth without the aid of a god (i.e. hephaestus' spider, hera's blessings), ariadne's string, or a clear-sighted mortal. percy blows up in a volcano and grover and tyson go missing on annabeth's disaster quest in part because she simply did not have all of the tools she needed in order to succeed (hera even says to her face that percy holds the key to this quest, not annabeth; it wasn't without additional guidance that percy could even realize what hera was referring to)

the hopelessness of annabeth's efforts is something the audience can infer from the beginning, and it's the reason why percy expresses doubt in annabeth's stubborn commitment to her fruitless attempts at coordination. at one point she even resorts to using math as a navigation tool, to using numerical logic for a maze that defies all logic - she was desperate, but she really was trying. this is very in-character for her; we have more than a few in-text indications in botl that annabeth is at least subconsciously aware that she won't be able to figure out the labyrinth, but as shown in the sphinx quote, she's wisdom's daughter, and she won't shy away from a challenge and she doesn't want others to know that she's struggling. she's a perseverant girl even to the detriment of herself and others, and it wounds her deeply to acknowledge and openly admit that she's incapable of doing something, to admit that she requires the aid of another to achieve her goals (see: hubris)

so, incomes rachel to do just that, and annabeth loses her goddamn mind over it

her reaction to rachel is interesting because it's more complicated than mere romantic jealousy. just like the sphinx scene, annabeth's animosity towards rachel is, aside from her reservations about having a mortal on a dangerous demigod quest, straight up illogical behavior. everything about her unwillingness to let rachel on the quest is wholly inconducive to its successful completion. the issue isn't solely that rachel is a romantic rival and thus she doesn't want to be anywhere near her (though it is undeniably one core influence - the botl love triangles aren't just pointless drama, they're very important to the overall story); rachel essentially becomes the new leader and guide of the labyrinth quest, replacing annabeth in that role - annabeth, the girl who struggles with feeling important, who seeks glory and fame for her greatness, who covets opportunities to exercise her skill, all of which is evidenced by her character's desires which had been hitherto set up throughout the series:

^from the lightning thief

^from the sea of monsters

^from the battle of the labyrinth

so I love the botl quest being the one that annabeth of all people gets to lead because it's the perfect obstacle for her character. she wants to prove herself, she believes that she is capable of impossibly herculean feats and then the first quest she gets to lead is impossible to lead without the aid of the last person in the world she wants to accept help from. truly the best kind of conflict to throw at a character like her

and if we can go back to ttc and remember when athena looked directly into the camera and told us that fatal flaws are dangerous but can still be good in small doses then we can discuss the role of annabeth's hubris a bit more effectively. I bring this up because I've also seen people upset that annabeth isn't "punished" or condemned enough by the larger narrative for her hubris/that her hubris wasn't "corrected" or "overcome" sufficiently, and I see where this idea comes from but I think it overly conflates that which is the standard character flaw in general literature with fatal flaws (hamartia) as they exist in tragedies, especially greek tragedies and aristotelian philosophical frameworks

(mini-tangent: literary scholars have been debating over the meanings and purpose of hamartia for a hot minute and especially in the twentieth century and beyond; I won't get into it here but check the tags of this post for a tiny bit more detail on this if you're interested)

the fatal flaw is not necessarily constructed as a lesson that the hero learns from or a stain on their character that can and should be washed away with effort, it is better envisioned as an everlasting flame inside the body that burns and dooms the hero once it grows too large. notably this "flame" cannot be evicted from the hero's interior because it is so innate, particularly as rick employs said device in pjo: annabeth states that hubris is the flaw of children of athena, bianca states that holding grudges is dangerous for children of hades, as though their godly ancestry had predetermined their characters from the moment they were born. this has its root in the issue of the unchangeable nature of fate vs. the agency and free will of humanity that the first 5 books like to play around with

literary scholar ac bradley discusses hamartia in his famous writings on shakespearean tragedies - which are, yes, shakespearean, but I'm not going to waste time building a venn diagram to show the key differences and similarities between greek tragedies and shakespearean tragedies (feel free to google that if you're interested in this subject); instead let's just take a brief look at how he characterizes the dramatic literary device that is the "fatal flaw" (hamartia):

(if you're a shakespeare scholar and my mentioning bradley just sent shivers down your spine don't worry I'm very aware of his Flaws and using his readings sparingly)

"his weakness or defect is so intertwined with everything that is admirable in him". I'm going to bring this up again later so put a pin in this quote

you may have already noticed that I've said nothing about hoo or mark of athena so far and I think I have to disclose that this is intentional; there are many good reasons why many readers do not consider hoo to be a worthy successor to the first series. this post is not for my criticisms of rick's approach to fatal flaws and annabeth's character in hoo (though believe me I have plenty of those), so we're just going to ignore hoo with regards to discussion of annabeth's hubris here. back to pjo

botl is the book where annabeth's hubris truly sets fire to the page. her eventual acceptance/tolerance of rachel represents the beginning cooldowns of the worst effects of her fatal flaw. the most notable interaction where annabeth recognizes her own hubris and keeps it at bay is when she finally accepts in tlo that she cannot change luke or save him from his tragic fate. the death of silena and luke's role in that event is what finally cements this conclusion, something that she's been unable to accept for years, something that her siren vision in som told us she desired so extremely. she really believed that she'd be able to save him, as though she, once again, believed that she was capable of impossible feats like changing luke's fate (see: hubris!)

re: the issue of "is annabeth sufficiently corrected of and condemned for her flaws by the narrative?", I want to raise a counterpoint that might help reshape this mindset: do we believe that arachne deserved her terrible fate as punishment for her hubris? I don't even like the pjgg/pjgh books but percy himself sure didn't think so in his greek gods narration, where he tells us outright that he doesn't agree with the "preachy moral" of arachne's story:

so it's all the more appropriate that, towards the end of botl, percy expresses a really interesting idea that moves in conversation with pjo's overarching thematic commitment to breaking from the cycles of suffering seen throughout greek mythology and tragedies. do our flaws have to be extracted from our bodies? do flawed beings have to be punished like arachne? pjo lands on a more hopeful, freeing, and malleable conclusion: annabeth's hubris, like percy's own loyalty, can be maddening, it can be dangerous, it can be managed, and it is "so intertwined with everything that is admirable" in her