i just know that post tartarus nap hit hard

SIR THIS IS A MIDDLE GRADE BOOK

"i caught you looking" "no that's not possible" william if you were staring longingly enough that a dense big three kid actually grasped the possibility that you might have liked them, then no, you are not subtle.

no cause its the way that percabeth in the show realized that the only reason they made it through the lotus casino was because they had each other

and its the way that in tsats they stated that the only reason they made it through tartarus alive was because they had each other

Haven’t seen anyone post the bookmark that came with some editions of the Sun and the Star. It’s got the cereal gang on the backside too if anyone needed a reference lol

Edit: For those wondering, I got the bookmark in the version from Books-A-Million

"nico and will are so cringe in the boo-" SHUT UP! SHUT THE FUCK UPP!!! THEYRE DUMB TEENAGERS IN THEIR FIRST RELATIONSHIP AND ITS CUTE AND SWEET. OFC THEYRE GONNA GIVE EACHOTHER TOOTH ROTTING NICKNAMES AND SHITITLY FLIRT.

In a moment full of grief and rage and sadness, Will had given him…Light.

thinking about Will telling Nico to let it out and scream and doing it himself and Nico feeling seen and understood by this bright sunshiney son of Apollo and how even though theyre surface opposites they can still see and learn and choose and love each other so much

I think one of the best examples of what went wrong with TSATS is from the book tour I attended -

At one point during the event, Mark Oshiro made a comment about Nico's card collection. Specifically, they joked that Nico collecting cards was a sign that he was gay, because clearly he was only collecting the cards to look at the men on the art (which ends up being a note made in the actual book itself).

I've said a lot that you cannot divorce PJO from neurodivergence and disability. You just can't. And I stand by that. If you remove the neurodivergence and disability aspects from PJO it is no longer PJO because that's the foundation the entire series is built upon - representing neurodiverse and disabled students and kids. If you do not understand that or try to ignore it you have missed the most fundamental aspect of PJO as a series and everything else falls apart. (This is actually a trend that begins occurring mid/late-HoO and throughout TOA and that's where I say the main series begins to feel like it's no longer itself, but that's a rant for another day.)

You cannot divorce any of the demigod PJO characters from being ADHD/dyslexic. It is a core part of their characters. You cannot separate Nico di Angelo from the fact that he is ADHD/dyslexic. If you agree with Nico being autistic-coded or not, he is explicitly ADHD, and MythoMagic as we're introduced to it with him is clearly his hyperfixation if not his special interest. It just is. MythoMagic with Nico is the main ADHD/autistic trait we see presented with him. You cannot erase that. You cannot say "Nico only collected cards because he's gay" because then you are removing the fact that Nico is ADHD and you have missed the entire point of the series. Failed step 1.

TSATS does things like this so often throughout the book. (Ex: None of the characters stim, ever. The closest we get is Will bouncing his leg in one scene, but that's heavily implied to purely be him feeling anxious in that moment and nothing else. Nico even gives up his most iconic stim object and it's replaced with a coin he explicitly never stims with. He only ever touches it, never stims with it.) The book refuses to acknowledge that Nico and Will (and Annabeth and Percy and Piper and etc etc etc) are ADHD and dyslexic (and autistic-coded, in Nico's case). And if it does even remotely acknowledge those themes, it does so in the most ableist ways possible (infantilizing Nico, blaming Nico for his own ostracization, magically healing all of Nico's problems, implying Percy is only bad at school because he's disinterested and lazy, etc). And that happens because they started on the wrong foundation. They treated the characters' neurodivergence and disabilities as secondary and optional rather than the literal foundations the entire series was built upon and it shows.

happy fathers day to nico di angelo, the only father in the riordanverse ever actually

Nico: Name a more iconic duo than my crippling fear of abandonment and my anxiety. I'll wait.

Will: You and me!!!

Nico, tearing up: Okay.

post-tsats will hate baffles me because i love and relate to him more after the book. heaped with insecurities? me. wants to be useful but feels incompetent? me. total dork and cheesy as hell? me. says and does dumb shit sometimes? me. wants to understand their loved ones but sometimes struggles to do that? me. tries anyway? me.

sometimes a family can just be a son of hades, a son of apollo, and their flurry of cocoa puffs

Nico sneaking troglodytes into the Underworld is a demigod equivalent of a five-year old dragging a baby racoon home and asking to keep it.

My biggest grievance with the people who have nothing good to say about this book is that they’re comparing Solangelo to Percabeth. Percabeth had been best friends for four/five years before they got together, meanwhile Solangelo were friends for a week before Will knew for certain he liked Nico. Obviously they’re not gonna flow as smoothly as Percabeth, who had a relationship for eight books before they fell into Tartarus, because they’re still getting used to being a couple. And an openly queer couple at that, which yes, does make a bit of a difference! They haven’t got each other figured out yet, they haven’t learned the do’s and don’t’s of their relationship. All they know for sure is that they’re ride or die, and part of the story in this book is them learning how and why.

I think my fave thing about The Sun and the Star coming out today is that today is now no longer the battle of hogwarts day, but instead the day we got the gayest Rick Riordan book, plus canonically bisexual Will Solace 😍 the queers have won today