This book is actually a very convoluted metaphor to bring you to the same emotional state as Nico di Angelo while you read it. it's performance art. You can really feel his misery and anguish for yourself with each flip of the page as you are presented with the latest worst thing you’ve ever read and all the joy is slowly sucked out you.

It’s so disappointing that TSATS had to completely reinvent Nico and Will’s characters in the worst ways possible to shoehorn them into a plot and character arcs that don’t fit them at all, when there are perfectly reasonable alternatives sitting right in front of them.

Like, I’ve been mentioning a lot in the discord that one of the big things in TSATS that’s absolutely grinding my gears is trying to give Nico an identity crisis arc when he’s one of the characters who is actually the most assured in his identity throughout the entire series. In fact, a lot of his most iconic lines are exactly him declaring who he is and how well he knows himself and embraces his identity - Son of Hades, Ghost King. The darkness is his birthright. There’s absolutely no excuse for him to ever be in this arc. And then Will is a medic. He of all people should be plenty familiar with death, especially after having dated Nico for a whole year, apparently. How does he still struggle with his concept of who Nico is, like he didn’t know exactly what he was signing up for when they started dating?

And the book keeps trying to push this idea that Nico represents change, when Nico is one of the most consistent characters throughout all the series - which I’d argue is actually why he’s also one of the most popular characters in the series. His consistency lends to him tending to be better-written than other characters who keep getting caught in loops of changing dramatically and then reverting to previous states. Nico has literally never represented change and it’s ridiculous to try and tack that onto him thematically - and why is change the theme we’re going for here, in a book focusing so heavily on queer identity but seemingly pushing this notion of giving up an aspect of your identity if people don’t accept that part of you? Why does that seem to be the metaphor we’re pushing with Nico’s whole “darkness” identity crisis thing?

If you’re going to give Nico a theme that represents him, why not unity? Nico has always been a character that brings people together, or connects two places. Reyna hugging him at the end of BoO is literally a very direct metaphor for the camps joining. Nico was the first to bridge the gap between Camp Half-Blood and Camp Jupiter. He bridges the gap between the living and the dead. Mortals and the gods. Past and present. Here and there. And everyone is unified in death, so Nico doesn’t have to give up his symbolism of the Underworld either to keep the theme. Heck, Hades and Persephone even have mythological themes of somewhat keeping the peace or breaking up conflicts, which Nico does as well. And what a lovely theme unity is for a book focusing on queer identity? And you could lean into Will having elements of that too - healing indiscriminately on the battlefield, the sun shining down on everyone, etc etc.  The arc and symbolism they’re trying to give Nico and Will just feels so forced and unrelated to their characters. It’s dragging the entire book.

TSATS really does honestly feel like someone took all the solangelo/Will Solace from early post-HoO in the fandom, shoved it in a blender, cranked that shit on high, and then dumped it into a book without any care for consistency or anything. The book keeps stumbling into reading like somebody who just found out what being gay was, or exactly like a 2014/2015 pjo fanfic or forum rp with Ye Olde Fanon Will back when nobody knew what to do with him and half the fandom decided his major character trait was “Asshole.” Like, back then photokinesis!Will was at its peak. Saberghatz’s Solangelo quest AU, before the plot of was TOA announced, was absolutely booming (and between Saber’s au and Cherryandsisters’ Will askblog, they were probably the leading sources for Will fanon at the time). Nico was being UwU’d to hell and back. The fanon, being fanon, never was actually required to comply with canon, so headcanons about Will having known Nico since TTC were plentiful because nobody cared - it was headcanons - and nobody could remember anything about Will Solace anyways.

But TSATS seems to be taking all of that and going “No, it’s canon now.” Which doesn’t work. Fanon can exist as fanon because it’s all headcanons, and it’s just making stuff up in a little playground of picking and choosing what canon to stay and go. If you’re actually writing canon, then you’ve already decided what canon stays and goes because you put it in the book, and now that’s what’s established and you need to follow it. Or else you’re making a retcon or a continuity error. Fanon can have Will impossibly exist in The Titan’s Curse, but canon absolutely can’t (and it definitely can’t say Nico somehow spent more than one week at CHB when the entirety of TTC is contained within one week). And it feels incredibly bizarre to see all this in a canon book anyways, because again - basically all of it feels ripped from fanon with zero consideration whatsoever.

ooh wait i just remembered i have all my reaction images i prepared for TSATS. I can finally put these bad boys to use.

good morning it is so very important to me that Nico canonically joined CHB before Will and also ran away after only a week, whereas Will couldn’t have feasibly joined any earlier than immediately before the events of BoTL.

noooooo continuity error my immersion is ruined

Now that I have finished TSATS, enjoy these reaction images I had saved in preparation for the book that ended up being useful, and a few I also made while reading.

one of the other things that keeps bugging me about TSATS is Nico randomly suddenly being so uncomfortable and self-conscious with his darkness? when prior to this, the closest we’ve ever seen him to this type of thought is in HoO when he notes he’s somewhat wary of the dark due to actively fading, but he gets over it relatively quickly (”the darkness is my birthright”). Literally, consistently he acknowledges that darkness and the Underworld are a part of him, and they’re just as valuable and interesting as anything the overworld has to offer - it’s entirely that other people fail to respect him for that, or see past the surface of things, and that’s their problem, not his. Nico himself is entirely confident and content in his self-image as a son of Hades. It makes no sense for him to suddenly go back on that! (Not to mention also the whole retcon of his relationship with his father. What happened to Hades saying that Nico would always have a place in the Underworld in BoO? Why are we saying now that Hades has banned him from the Underworld and acting like Nico is still on shaky terms with his dad and not like they sorted everything out way back in TLO?)

And it makes even less sense to have Will, his alleged boyfriend of a WHOLE YEAR at this point, be consistently uncomfortable with Nico’s powers and aspects? When everything we’ve seen about Will up until this point and know about him would imply that he’s possibly one of the few people who doesn’t mind Nico’s death stuff? (He’s a FIELD MEDIC! His ENTIRE CABIN DIED IN FRONT OF HIM in the Battle for Manhattan! He knows death! He knows death VERY WELL! Why are we acting like skeletons and zombies would freak him out? Does Rick not know that medical training sometimes includes dissecting cadavers?) He never shows this kind of reaction in any of the series! If anything, Will should be the least phased by any of this! Especially since he knew what he was getting into when he started dating Nico!

We’ve gone from Nico being confident in his sense of self as a son of Hades, and slowly becoming confident in his identity as a gay man and Will, who seems perfectly unbothered by his boyfriend’s necromancy antics, to both of them being intensely awkward and stunted, shoved into a horrible arc where Will is struggling to even consider meeting Nico in the middle and Nico is constantly in a state of considering changing himself so Will likes him better (with a hefty side of Will being incredibly condescending to Nico and infantilizing him frequently, which Nico just puts up with for some reason???)

also this book has managed the impressive feat of retconning almost literally everything. perhaps not a single detail is left unturned. we’ve retconned it all: Nico and Will’s backstories and entire timelines, every scene they’ve ever been in, their whole personalities and characters, the Underworld, Nico’s relationship with his parents, just plain greek mythology in general, heck - even nectar and ambrosia. even minor characters or something as basic as Nico’s name cannot escape the vortex that is TSATS changing details about Literally Everything.

i am. so. unreasonably mad at the flashback chapters. that was so much more underwhelming than I could have ever fathomed. it’s got everything - it loses it’s own consistency within the same sentence right at the very beginning. It ignores established canon. Nico’s at his most out-of-character ever. Nothing even HAPPENS. And then on top of it all, a heaping helping of bathos start to finish, because we can’t even get through Nico’s deepest trauma without the need to include the lamest, most lackluster jokes you’ve ever read. This is exactly why it’s so important when you’re trying to write horror that less is more. The less you actually see the monster, or the horror, the scarier it is. The less you describe the ominous, terrifying threat, the more imposing and threatening it seems! congrats! you literally fucked up the execution of these scenes in every way possible!

honestly I can’t believe TSATS tried to take Nyx and make her the main antagonist here, and claim that she’s on a threat level equivalent to or worse than Gaea.

Like, a.) It’s been talked to death over that Gaea is one of the weakest Riordanverse antagonists ever, because she’s just... so lackluster. The first series antagonists are all so cool and legitimately threatening and intimidating! And it feels like a real victory every time our protagonists defeat them! They’re winning against insurmountable odds! Gaea was just... lame, honestly. So acting like she was actually any kind of threat when discussing her in TSATS is almost laughable.

And then b.) You cannot introduce a character like how Nyx was introduced in House of Hades, and then in a companion novel expect us to accept her as A Big Bad Worse Than Any Of The Others. She was possibly one of the easiest encounters Percy and Annabeth faced in Tartarus! She’s explicitly a silly villain in HoH! Trying to make her the Big Bad now is like if you spent all of The Lightning Thief having every scene of Luke depicting him in a clown costume, right down to the pit scorpion honking when it stings Percy, and then proceeding to spend the rest of the series trying to convince the audience that no, Luke’s totally a valid threat! Just ignore his clown shoes, and the fact that he makes cartoon crashing noises when Thalia kicks him off a cliff. Nyx in HoH is comic relief. And then we’re supposed to believe she’s somehow the biggest threat possible in TSATS? And it doesn’t help that in Nico’s Tartarus flashback, there’s once again so much bathos packed into that scene that Nyx is STILL left feeling completely unintimidating! Like, congrats, yeah, she is the worst villain of the series so far, but worse in the wrong direction than what you were hoping for.

I’ve done it. I’ve figured out why TSATS!Will Solace is so Like That. Why they act like he joined Camp Half-Blood in Sea of Monsters and why he’s such an asshole.

they fucking mixed him up with Michael Yew (joined CHB in Sea of Monsters and is notorious for being the singular Apollo kid who’s a huge asshole)

they literally retconned the misery out of Nico’s Tartarus trauma. they literally retconned the misery out of Nico’s trauma. Achlys was not there.

WHY DOES EVERYBODY KEEP USING EVERYBODY ELSE’S FULL NAMES SO MUCH

they retconned everything.... literally everything.... perhaps the single stones left untouched were Hazel and Reyna, because Hazel was only ever even mentioned three times exactly, and Reyna only once barely in passing. Literally everything else... nothing is sacred. nothing is holy. TSATS is a wormhole sucking in everything, warping it into something else, twisted and horrible.

im honestly a little fascinated with how poorly written Will is in this book. Like. how the hell did they get here. how did they manage to land on this.