I feel like a big part of Heroes of Olympus was influenced by audience reaction. 

I don’t think I’m grasping at straws here. I genuinely just don’t get why some decisions were made if this wasn’t the case.

The plot of the books themselves has always felt very muddled to me and that’s why it always feels like it’s supposed to be a story about characters and relationships, but it just kind of isn’t. Sure, on a surface level, yes, and we get some very lovely character dynamics, but it also feels slightly artificial in a way? The plot was built first and the characters thrown into it, but there wasn’t much thought given too how the characters should be with each other. Even the romantic ones.

Though I feel that I could tie this idea into pretty much every part of the books, there are two things that I personally think of the most while discussing this idea.

For one, there’s Octavian’s entire character.

I have always been confused as to what exactly Riordan wanted from Octavian. He really feels like a plot device most times, made solely for the purpose of stirring conflict between the Greeks and Romans. He as an individual never really mattered. Now, there are some very cool people on this website that have managed to squeeze a decent character out of the scenes we got, but with the way he was written, that in itself is a challenge, as post SoN, it feels like the only intent behind his character was to make him as unlikable as possible. He really was a real character in SoN, despite weird decisions here and there (The killing Gwen scene for example was purely to establish that the doors of death weren't working, and to make Octavian unlikable, but Octavian himself really didn’t have any motive for the killing. It benefitted him in no way.)

In SoN, Octavian is manipulative and well spoken, but after that, he is portrayed as some sort of dim witted idiot, clouded by his desire for personal glory.

The only way I can rationalize this shift in character is in the truly visceral reaction the then fanbase had to his character. They loathed him, taking not a second to rationalize his actions, but simply hate. It also made it so Octavian became the but of a lot of jokes. Those jokes characterizing him as his idiot and megalomaniac that it he shown as in Mark of Athena, House of Hades and Blood of Olympus.

I always suspected Octavian was supposed to serve some sort of grander purpose, or his role in HoO was supposed to be at least a little more dignified or dare I say sympathetic, but there really was no turning back with how hated he was, making Riordan embrace it rather than giving him actual human qualities.

Then on the other hand, there’s also Leo and his relationship with romance in general.

I’ve touched upon it in my Caleo essay (That I kind of wanna redo with more points and evidence to back up my claims, because I am unhappy with certain aspects but I still stand by all I said) that Leo is a character that was written in such a way that getting a romantic partner before resolving certain things would actively detriment the development of his character, including healing from his trauma. The way he was written was just not meant for romance and I will take this to my grave. I’m not saying there was no room for romance, but the way they went about it was... very bad. (A girlfriend will fix my problems. That is his mindset. But he doesn’t grow out of it. Instead he gets a girlfriend. A girlfriend that he treats as a fix to his problems when she is not. A girlfriend that is bad to and for him in so many ways.)

But it is very interesting to note, that especially after Mark of Athena, the speculations and demands for Leo’s future girlfriend went absolutely crazy. I can’t speak from experience but from the tweets from Riordan and fanarts from that time that I've seen it was at least to the point that he took active notice of it. 

Besides Nico and Reyna, there weren’t really any other characters just lying around to pair Leo monogamously up with (I doubt Riordan be willing to make any characters besides Nico explicitly queer at the time and then in the next book he decided to pick up one of the background characters and said, you will do, when pairing Nico up with someone. )

There are many more examples I could go into. The universe suffered in many ways from this. Sure, it’s not the only problem that were detrimental. I believe Riordan had a plan from the beginning with all the main plot points of the series, but I feel he didn’t exactly know where he was going with the characters besides the basics. Don’t get me wrong, I love all the HoO characters. That is why I spend so much time talking and thinking about them, but the issues with the series and characters are so many that it’s borderline ridiculous.

The Theme of Control in Life is Strange

I'd like to thank @monochrome-nocturne for their recent comments which inspired this post. I ended up taking it and crafting a unique post as it was very tangential to their own comments. ^^

Both Jefferson and Madsen are control-freaks. But what differs is the path they took to becoming a control-freak, and how that impacts their different abusive tendencies.

We don't get much of David Madsen's history. We know he was in the military, he wasn't a very good soldier (given that he didn't even pick up how to sweep a room - Jefferson's ambush of him would have been far harder if David had just done things the way his training would have shoved into his head), he's paranoid and suspicious of teenagers, and it is quite likely he's hit Chloe multiple times given how both Chloe and Joyce react to him hitting Chloe.

If I were to delve deeper into what makes him... well, him, I'd probably suggest that he was raised by parents who were somewhat abusive. Most of their abuse, however, was verbal and likely related to how they'd never make anything of their lives and the like. In fact, I am willing to bet David went into the military to try and prove them wrong. And this only served to exasperate his existing problems as the military can end up being a controlling and abusive environment. At the very least it... encouraged certain aspects of David, such as his need for a structured and controlled environment. And while that can be beneficial, something happened to scar him psychologically and left him with PTSD.

When he left the military, he refused to admit he had a problem. He tried to go into another structured environment (policing) and the police saw he had issues and did the right thing in refusing to give him a badge! And then he found someone who... honestly was not a good choice for him in Joyce Madsen. And I say that because Joyce was busy trying to find someone to keep her from feeling alone and she... enabled his abusive tendencies rather than pushing him to get help and heal. Add in a mourning teenager and he was shoved into an unstructured chaotic environment that was not healthy for him or for a certain teenage girl.

Another problem David was dealing with was that he was head of security at Blackwell, a private institution for rich teenagers learning the arts in a high school setting. On a daily basis he was going into a chaotic entitled environment... and then he'd go home and there is Loki's granddaughter calling him out on his own issues and he'd lash out at her... and be told by his wife that he was pushed, that Chloe was to blame.

Sadly enough, the death of Joyce Madsen might have been the best thing that happened to him, along with the destruction of Arcadia Bay. The person who enabled his abusive tendencies was gone. What's more, he saved someone - Victoria Chase, at least according to LiS2. He finally got to be a hero. He got to amount to something. And seeing how he was in the Everyday Hero timeline, having actually chilled out after Max's tip led to the Dark Room... I think that David was trying so very hard to be a hero. He was trying to prove his naysayers wrong. (The Chloe Dies timeline with his plotting to murder Nathan when Nathan gets out of jail shows that he also remains the man who shot and killed Jefferson in cold blood after he learns Jefferson murdered Chloe. Sadly, that David didn't learn all of the lessons he needed to learn.)

So. What about Mark Jefferson? Well... we kind of approach Jefferson from a different, less personal angle than with David. We are not given glimpses of Jefferson as a person. He's a teacher, he's a more reasonable authority figure, he's a monster in sheep's clothing. But we do catch a glimpse of that other Mark Jefferson while in the Dark Room itself... where he reveals his stripes and the fact that he looks down on his subjects and revels in being the puppet-master who manipulates his subjects as drugged manikin.

Honestly, Mark Jefferson's actions are very much coded to be rape. He goes and takes young women, drugs them, and using an activity that they find solace or pleasure in, twists it to control them and abuse them, seeking only his own dark pleasures in seeking some ephemeral quality that only exists in his mind's eye.

There's more to this as well. Given some of what I've heard about some photographers in the cosplay and convention scene, his mindset is... not as uncommon as we'd wish it to be. Female cosplayers especially risk being manipulated like living dolls to get just the right pose and catch that essence for a perfect shot. So Jefferson was also a nod toward those photographers who insist on creating the perfect shot and blames the subject matter, rather than those who, like Max, just find a shot that catches the eye and capturing that moment.

(On a personal and positive note, I recall being at Anime Boston once and was allowed to take photos alongside someone who was more professional and just capturing that one moment... when one of the two girls blinked while she was resting her head on the other's shoulder. It looked so sweet that the photographer asked both girls to close their eyes and we got to have Bumbleby fallen asleep against each other. All because someone blinked their eyes at just the right moment and inspired something. The Mark Jeffersons of the world would never have caught that moment.)

Anyway, getting back on track here, both David Madsen and Mark Jefferson seek control in their lives and work environments. The major difference is that David seems to seek control to bring safety into his world, while Jefferson seeks to control his subjects for his "artistic vision" and out of hatred of his subjects. In a way... Jefferson and Madsen are a funhouse mirror reflection of each other - one is a gruff solid bastard of an "American" man who seeks to control folk to protect them (and instead endangers them) and the other is the suave sophisticated "likeable" academic who tries to force people to see his vision, both in teaching and in art, and ultimately loses focus on the purpose of education and of art itself.

This also is a way you can look at that Final Choice in LiS. Sacrifice Chloe could be seen as "controlling destiny" by erasing your past actions and living in misery as a result, while Sacrifice Arcadia Bay could be viewed as letting chaos and randomness happen and accepting that there are things you just can't control. But so long as you have someone you truly trust and love by our side, that lack of control can be accepted and moved past.

Or maybe it's just the lack of caffeine speaking, so I think I'll have myself a cup of tea and end things here for now. ^^