schled:

greenconverses:

In case anyone’s wondering, here’s the review the anon is talking about: 4) Percy Takes The Backseat: The Blood of Olympus has no Percy or Annabeth point of view chapters. Readers tend to focus in on them and ignore the rest of the demigod team. In addition, Percy’s fatal flaw of sacrificing the world to save a friend would hinder the grand finale. The Blood of Olympus shifts the focus away from Percy and gives Jason, Leo, Piper, Nico and Reyna point of view chapters. To be honest, this entire section shows some bad planning on RR’s part and explains a lot about why certain plotlines were handled messily. Why make a big fucking deal about Percy’s fatal flaw coming back to haunt him in all the books leading up to Blood of Olympus, and then decide at the end that following through on that threat will slow things down? Why make three of the five books largely focus around Percy and Annabeth’s stories, and then decide they need to take the backseat in the last book in the series? Again, he didn’t have to include them in the POV roster, but there were ways he could’ve shown Percy struggling with the decision to let Jason, Piper, and Leo fight Gaea without him (like actually developing Percy and Leo’s friendship outside of, “We both have a stupid sense of humor and liked the same girl!”) to make that decision actually have weight and purpose. And I don’t know why he’s so surprised that fans focused on Percy and Annabeth so much to the detriment of the other characters. YOU END THE THIRD BOOK IN THE SERIES ON A LITERAL CLIFFHANGER OVER HELL WITH THE FAVORITES OF THE FIRST SERIES, OF COURSE THE FANS ARE GOING TO FOCUS ON THAT FOR LIKE THE NEXT YEAR. As much as I loved what we got with the two of them in this series, he could’ve made them secondary characters in the seven (like, lbr, Frank) or not included them as major characters in this series at all. As we saw in BoO, Nico and Reyna could’ve filled in their spots easily. I’ve been saying since The Lost Hero that if he’d wanted people to see Heroes of Olympus as a non-Percy Jackson series, he wouldn’t have made Percy a main character again.

I think what upsets me most - more than missing Percy/Annabeth/Hazel/Frank’s POVs; more than missing the four of them actually being present and having a vital role to play in what was the series final; more than two previously secondary characters suddenly being promoted to the fore and thereby demoting 4 out of the 7 main characters to background players; even more than the fact that most of the book was largely pointless mini-quests, and the main act, the so-called “grand finale” that Percy’s sacrifice would have “hindered”, of Gaea rising and then being defeated took about two pages - what upsets me most is Rick’s post-release reactions. His dismissiveness of any criticism as just “fangirls missing their Percabeth”, and his thoroughly weak and transparent attempts to justify the major faults in the book.

(Seriously, why bring up Percy’s sacrifice AGAIN in BoO itself if you’re not going to follow through?! Why make Percy and Annabeth main characters if you didn’t want people to focus on them? And why punish us, your loyal readers, because you’re seemingly annoyed that we [many of us] love those two characters more than your five newer ones?)

What upsets me is that these reactions have made me lose a lot of respect for him as a writer, and I resent that.