#deathwis

i do want to start off by saying that legacies are inherently less cool than demigods. from a storytelling perspective, legacies are more able to blend in in public without getting targeted by monsters for their godly blood, they’re less likely to have cool powers, and they have no ingrained sense of being able to read greek/latin texts and no hardwired battle instincts like demigods have. so... they’re just not as fun to write. but if it was just about there not being many legacies at all, i’d probably write it off as a decision made to appease a younger audience with flashy powers and cool light shows. but i think what makes this interesting is the introduction of biased narration and villainization of existing legacies.

let’s start off with biased narration. what quickly marks octavian as a villain is the narration from percy, hazel, and frank, all of whom dislike octavian. even reyna, a certified girlboss tm, does not like octavian. these characters, who are cool people that we like, are sympathetic to us as readers, so when they say octavian is nasty, we’re kind of inclined to believe them. i do think it’s also worth mentioning that people generally don’t hate octavian for, like, starting a war or whatever. it’s almost always that he killed percy’s panda pillow pet, and then (as an afterthought) that he blackmailed hazel into voting for him for praetor (which she didn’t even do). it’s also interesting how demigod villains who do similar things (like drew using charmspeak to get everyone to elect her the leader of the aphrodite cabin) does not get her widespread death threats or even much in the way of talk about her not inherently being deserving of the position she has. but i’m getting ahead of myself here. biased narration makes octavian seem more insidious than he is by describing him as “crazed” or whatever. but there’s a stronger example of biased narration during the war games, when gwen is stabbed by a pilium from the first cohort. it’s stated in the previous chapter that percy had knocked octavian unconscious, and percy’s strategy did include stealing people’s piliums. it’s entirely possible that someone picked up someone else’s pilium and stabbed gwen with it. what’s absolutely certain, though, is that octavian would not and could not have murdered her. for one thing, it goes completely against his moral code as a roman, which is something octavian adheres to extremely strictly. roman law is very important to him, and there’s no reason why he’d break protocol to kill some random centurion. but since he was unconscious, it literally actually rules him out. and the pilium, by the way, was not octavian’s. if you go to the actual chapter, you’ll see that frank noticed it was a pilium from the first cohort, and then immediately checked only octavian to see if he had his. which he didn’t. so octavian was blamed for this, and the setup begins to show octavian as some crafty manipulator who kills people for fun and profit.

and then we come to our only other named legacy: bryce lawrence. oh boy! our only two legacies being two people who are widely considered to be dangerous, violent, and sociopathic? it’s almost like there’s a narrative being constructed here about legacies being a danger to the superior group! like, was bryce lawrence constructed to be an awful bad guy for nico to kill so that we wouldn’t care that he kills octavian? yes. but also in the story itself, he’s a character that’s pretty much cherry-picked to be like: oh no, a really mean legacy! just like octavian! if bryce were a demigod, it would have had the exact same narrative point, but since he’s a legacy, it perpetuates that same, legacies are expendable, they’re power-hungry, they need to die rhetoric going on. i also do think it was a deliberate choice that bryce’s backstory is that he was exiled for murdering his centurion in cold blood. it continues to establish that rhetoric of legacies killing others, legacies being dangerous, legacies breaking the rules... legacies needing to be stopped for everyone’s good. it’s a lot, you know?

the final aspect that i’d like to touch on, which i think is a deliberate writing move, is that octavian is the only character whose powers are repeatedly called into question. many, many people have suggested in canon that octavian might be faking his divination powers, something that people generally don’t say for demigod counterparts. it comes back to the idea that legacies don’t usually have special powers, but it also feels very insidious in the sense that it implies that octavian isn’t fit for his job — another thing he regularly gets teased for. like, i cannot stress enough that it is so weird to think about someone walking into the temple and being like “ha-ha! octavian’s doing his job! what a total loser!” but that’s also besides the point. the main thing i wanted to point out was that octavian has been accused a couple times of faking his powers, and this kind of notion that this would make him somehow unfit for his position, like... that the absence of special powers would make him unfit to be augur, when lowkey i doubt a demigod son of apollo who was faking divination powers would face the same kind of scrutiny.

so now that i’ve mentioned some of the narrative stuff, i’d like to point out some of the in-universe systemic stuff, starting with my last point about legacies being lesser than demigods because they don’t have hardwired fighting abilities, demigod features, or special powers. first of all, like, i see you frank, i know you have a Legacy Power tm, but i don’t think that’s very common at all, plus you’re also a demigod, so you have rights. sorry about that. but frank is a very interesting example here, actually, since frank, if you recall, does not have adhd or dyslexia. which means he does not have hardwired fighting abilities nor can he automatically read ancient latin. still, he has a place in camp jupiter because he’s a demigod. another example is annabeth. despite having demigod features like hardwired fighting abilities and the ability to read ancient greek, annabeth has no special powers to speak of. actually, her main talents are learned! pretty much all aphrodite kids are similarly powerless, save for the few special ones with charmspeak. so the question then arises — in a space like camp jupiter, where there are allegedly thousands of legacies all being trained to read ancient latin and to fight effectively, why aren’t more of them making centurion? why aren’t more of them praetors or augurs? why is octavian the only one? (i know in toa, there’s like claudia’s unnamed father, but like fuck you, i seriously cannot handle this. toa is a sin anyway bc the main villain is yet ANOTHER legacy of apollo, like fuck off actually)

i mean, the narrative that legacies have “thinned-out” godly blood is probably a good reason to consider them weaker and inferior, right? like, will actually literally calls octavian anemic, which... yes he probably is anemic, but isn’t it interesting that will insults octavian’s blood, while in the same breath referring to himself as the “real” son of apollo? like, it’s the way that legacies get dehumanized and discredited when demigods never do. truly. even if there’s no systemic discrimination against legacies (which i doubt), there’s definitely unconscious bias at play here.

but! systemic discrimination! let’s talk about that too, since we’re on the subject. i think it happens. i believe that in order to make centurion, there needs to be five years of service and the person must go on a quest. however, this idea that legacies are inherently weaker could lend itself to some bias in picking demigods over legacies for quests. adding this up, it’s then more likely for demigods to meet requirements for becoming centurion, which is the gateway to higher ranks in the camp. like, listen... you can’t tell me that there are thousands of legacies here and literally like four of them in all of history made centurion. like that is so ridiculous. im literally not functioning.

anyway, another take of mine is that octavian is the first legacy to make augur in all of history, and i do think it’s absolutely ludicrous that he’s shooting for praetor. like, yes. octavian is rich and his family has a lot of influence. but i truly don’t think he ever would have made centurion if he hadn’t had those things, let alone being an augur. and while “octavian has friends, most of them bought” (thanks hazel), i think he kind of... needed to resort to methods like that in order to secure a position as prestigious as augur and to even consider trying for praetor. i just don’t think that lifetimes of discrimination and unconscious biases would be dismantled as easy as that. and knowing all this, is it any wonder that everyone wants to kill octavian with their own hands when villains like luke castellan were given the benefit of the doubt until the end? that everyone thinks octavian’s weak, cowardly, manipulative, and dangerous? that at the end of blood of olympus, there’s a ceremony for all the fallen demigods?