#dragonswoe

On one hand, we love an overpowered! Percy living his best domestic life and putting the olympians in their place in Confused, but then TAW seems vaguely more canon-compliant in how no matter what the demigods do or how powerful they get, the hierarchy of power between titans/gods/demigods will always be clear and they will struggle against their role as pawns in the grand scheme of things.

Confused series gives us percy being subjected to some weird tartarus torture/stockholm syndrome-ish as the start, but percy gradually grows into his own newfound power with his own allies and gains a deeper respect from kronos. i find its as much of a give-and-take as the two of them can get. the power imbalance at the start of their relationship was righted quickly enough so both sort of have the ability to give themselves an out, but at this point percy has really integrated into the community in mt othrys and is quite distanced from the demigod world. kronos seems genuinely enthralled and actually gives percy's opinions the time of day. he, as much as possible, ALWAYS chooses percy first. and we all love a whipped boyfriend. percy, of course, is DEEP in their relationship, their basically already married from percy's POV. powerful hubby, a kid, some pets and some weird neighbours. Don't forget the domestic-ness of it all!!! leander 🦁😍

with greater protagonist power, comes greater antagonist power as well. percy and co. are now up against the protogenos themselves, who possess a completely different level of power and control over their domains. they literally ARE their domains. but as long as we keep seeing those great kronercy moments i think I'd accept anything at this rate 😭😭

In TAW, percy gets a heavyweight sponsor (kronos) behind him that swings between his greatest source of help and his worst enemy, all while kronos' motives and side plans remain unrevealed to the readers. its a weird time to be in the world of TAW especially since technically kronos has his own army, but gaia has her own army? so whose forces are attacking the argo? what is kronos and gaia's relationship since technically kronos didn't lose... so does gaia have more or less allies after the unclear performance of kronos at war once again? kronos clearly didn't think through his initial plan of getting together with percy to evade absolute defeat, as its pretty obvious that tying yourself down to a 'lower' mortal being (percy) that's already bound into their own restrictions (olympians) would make kronos in turn even more restricted! as far as i can tell, there's no escape for kronos short of killing percy or turning percy immortal, the latter would be better for the hearts of us readers in the short run but we all know how badly percy would react to that. making percy an immortal would be sort of a slower, a/b/o version of Confused but i think with all the betrayal kronos has been pulling thus far that move would be more a relationship-ender than a commonality to bring them even closer together.

at the point of writing, the trials apollo series are about to take place and i have no clue what's going to happen... even now i can only sense kronercy's relationship souring and only temporarily brought together by another enemy, before being back to square one in peace time. i see no happy ending in TAW 😭😭🙏