People really need to realise that fantasy novels and romantasy are two different things.
When you’re reading fantasy and you’re not ship-centric, romance is usually the last thing on your mind. You’re immersed in the worldbuilding, the story, the characters’ journeys, the stakes. You dgaf about romance, especially when you’re young and reading books about kids. Most of the time, you’re there for the action, the magic, the adventure, the friendships.
So no, Percy wasn’t slow.
If anything, this is just readers projecting romantasy expectations onto a story that was never written that way.
Classic fantasy (especially middle grade) is not ship-centric by default. Its priorities are worldbuilding, plot and stakes, magic systems, friendships and loyalty, and coming-of-age arcs. Romance, if it exists at all, is background at best. And when it is there, it functions as part of a coming-of-age arc, not the point of the story.
The issue is that Percabeth simply doesn’t have the massive, obvious buildup that shippers like to claim it did. In early PJO, Annabeth was very much “Luke this, Luke that”, talking about him constantly, and she spent a good chunk of the series talking down to Percy and treating him like he was dumb. Percy wasn’t missing obvious romantic signals: those signals mostly didn’t exist yet. But sure, let’s say Percy was the slow one for not clocking feelings that mostly weren’t there yet. It’s much more accurate to say Annabeth’s feelings developed later. Which is… fine. Normal, actually. They were 12-14 years old. Crushes at that age are messy, inconsistent, and rarely the center of your world when you’re busy trying not to die on quests (exactly what happens with Percy and Rachel/Calypso). They were literal kids.
I was reading the books as they were coming out, and honestly, I don’t remember the fandom fuss around Percabeth being that intense until HoO. For most of PJO, they were just kids on quests. Romance was background noise, not the plot.
Also, genuinely: who the hell is aggressively shipping 13-year-olds?
It's absolutely right to want the show to slow down when it comes to Percabeth, since that storyline is moving too fast. The whole “I’d burn Olympus to the ground for you” thing was cringe as hell and completely out of place... it felt like it was lifted straight out of a Wattpad fanfiction or a BookTok edit.
Fantasy doesn’t need to be ship-driven. PJO never was... and that’s the point. Then rr realised he could capitalise on the power of shipping and made relationships more central in HoO, without really committing to the tonal shift that would’ve been needed to take the series from MG to YA. The result? More focus on ships, but the same comfort-zone writing... and yeah, the story suffers because of this.
