is it normal that I have stomach twisting, anger inducing, gut wrenching, and excruciating rage filled swirls in my stomach every time I see Jason Grace slander?

first of all i love your thoughts on cabin 10 and i especially think a lot about how piper fought so hard to be herself against the traditional heteronormative expectations of not only her mother but also hera the god of marriage who implanted her feelings for jason in her brain. also. lavinia is my favorite fiction book of all time

RIGHT!!!

I don't remember tlh super well so correct me if I'm wrong about any of this, but my interpretation of Piper was always that she was an incredibly rebellious person. She "steals" stuff to get her Dad's attention, and I like to imagine that part of her pushing back against traditional gender norms is her rebelling against the societal expectations on what she, as the daughter of a hollywood heartthrob, is supposed to look like. Can't imagine the other nepo babies approve of her cutting her own hair, and I bet she loves that

But yesssss I think about this so much as well!! Like the Aphrodite cabin is consistently portrayed as mostly girls with traditionally feminine interests. Their only real use in the titan war is adjusting armour, and six Aphrodite girls kiss Percy on the cheek in TLO because he let them buy perfume to repel monsters. Piper doesn't care for that type of thing, and Aphrodite pushes her to be more feminine in the claiming scene by forcing her into a dress + makeup. There's so many expectations from both her mother and the other campers on what she's supposed to be because of her parentage, and it makes sense that someone so rebellious by nature would push back against that at every turn.

I doubt Rick had envisioned her as a closeted queer woman when he was writing HOO, but that adds a whole other layer to her discomfort with traditional gender norms too. If she was internally exploring her gender and sexuality at that time, then the expectations she had to be a certain way would have felt even more stifling.

Piper was genuinely attracted to Jason (according to tsats anyway), but Hera playing with them like dolls and pushing her to be with him because she's a pretty girl and Jason deserves to be with a pretty girl is SO messed up. She does eventually choose to be with Jason, but would she have made that choice if Hera hadn't put the thought in her head first? Would she have discovered her attraction to women a lot sooner if she had been allowed to consider options other than Jason? How much of her attraction to Jason was real, and how much of it was her thinking she had to like him because Hera wanted her to, and/or because he was conventionally attractive and nice and that's who girls are supposed to like? Regardless, breaking up with him was the right decision for her because it allowed her to explore other options without Hera's meddling hanging over her. Maybe if TOA had gone differently, she could have come back to him (I only ship Piper with women personally, but I acknowledge that it's possible), but she needed to figure herself out first away from those expectations, and she didn't reeeeally have the space to do that in HOO.

There's so much to say about Piper and her relationship with the Aphrodite cabin and gender/sexuality as a whole, but her discomfort with conformity is framed as a 'not like other girls' thing, and that Piper is 'above' them because she doesn't stoop to their 'shallow' level. It doesn't help that there isn't a single effeminate character in the books that isn't treated as a joke or a villain. The closest we get is Silena, but even then, she isn't shown to be particularly feminine - we just assume she is because she isn't shown hating femininity the way Piper is. We're supposed to view Drew as a bitch, and Valentina as vapid. Piper, who hates makeup and cuts her own hair and is talented with a dagger, is framed as better than them because she rejects femininity.

Piper pushing back against expectations is GREAT but I don't love that it comes at the cost of framing femininity as lesser. There are SO many interesting reasons for why Piper would reject traditional gender roles, and there are ways Rick could have explored that without framing femininity as a bad thing/something to ridicule, but that's not what we get in the books. Instead, cabin 10 are all vain and shallow, and Piper is better than them because she isn't.

The way cabin 10 is written is so so frustrating. They all deserve SO much better.