#anon crit

[ourflagmeansgayrights]

ngl the "im white so i dont talk abt any characters' race ever bc im afraid of accidentally saying something racist" approach to fandom is like. very weak. imo.

like first of all: i get that "i dont incorporate race into my media analysis because i'm afraid of messing up" comes from a different place than "i don't incorporate race into my media analysis because I Don't See Race 😊 there is only The Human Race." but it has the same functional effect, right? that effect being that your analysis of [INSERT MEDIA HERE] ignores the very real way that race impacts people.

second of all: it feels kinda lazy! like ur saying "i dont know enough abt race to feel comfortable commenting on how race affects this show and i dont care enough to learn." the only way to become more comfortable discussing race is to actually practice discussing race. but when i see people saying this it feels like they're saying "i'm white, which means i don't know how to talk about race, and i don't have to know how to talk about race, and i don't ever have to know how to talk about race, so i'm choosing to never learn how to talk about race."

third of all: just because you don't openly talk about race doesn't mean you're any less likely to accidentally say or do something racist. implicit biases run deep, y'all. it's probably already there in your interpretation of the show. but the "i don't want to accidentally say something racist" implies that you are positive that your interpretation of the show isn't racist. and i'm not saying you're wrong. but i'm saying that if a person of color tells you that something you said about [INSERT MEDIA HERE] was racist, you better be prepared to actually listen and not just brush them off because "i can't be racist! i purposefully never talk about race just to make sure i'm not racist!"

which brings me to my final point: if you do accidentally say something racist... literally just apologize. if someone says you've been doing something racist, apologize and stop doing that thing. it's literally not that hard. i've done it. i've seen other people do it. "i'm scared of being called racist!" is such a weak excuse im tired of it. getting called racist is not the end of the fucking world. calm the fuck down and grow a spine. jesus.

[ofswordsandpens]

circular discourse, criticism being met with death threats... pjo fandom we're so back baby

[percabeth4life]

I feel like rick missed an opportunity when he made Frank closer to Percy's age instead of Hazel's. Like, I'm sure there are reasons (It's been a while since I read HoO, so I can't say what they are, but they're probably there(I hope)), but can you imagine Percy, on a quest with two kids that are 13-14 (I can't remember how old she is in SoN, can't find it either, so guessing low it is).

Even without his memories, he'd be halfway to feral, but once he got them back, I can't see him doing anything but going from protective to absolutely destroying anything that hurt them.

I also think it would have been hilarious to have Percy and Annabeth at like, 17-ish? And have the rest of the seven at like, 14 max. Percy and Annabeth are trying to keep this group of 13-14 year olds alive, and they're both screaming internally half the time. Sometimes, it's just screaming, but sometimes, they scream about how toddlers shouldn't be on quests.

(Side note this popped into my head while I was writing, so have a- thing

Annabeth: There's a bunch of babies, Loose on a quest! No one knows what the babies are going to do next, least of all the babies! They've never been on a quest before!

Narrator: The babies in question are 14, and they have, in fact, been on quests before. (She is right about them not knowing what they're going to do, though.))

Then again, maybe I just like big brother/protector Percy too much. (Reluctant and screaming big sister/mentor figure Annabeth is also fun.)

(And on a sadder note, Annabeth realizes this must be what Luke and Thalia felt like and almost starts crying.)

To start, you're absolutely right that it was a missed opportunity. Percy is, without knowing it, the most experienced of the questers, except Frank is nearly his age in comparison to Hazel (who should be 14 by math, but is 13 by Rick's declaration). I think it's less that he made Frank closer to Percy's age and more that he was trying to make Hazel younger than Nico.

But yes, it would've been super interesting to see him basically mentoring the other two, especially after he regained his memories. I feel it was a major missed opportunity to not have Percy and Annabeth trying to watch over the younger quest members, instead he aimed for weakening the two to make everyone else their equal. It's a shame cause it missed the opportunity for the younger questers to be major boons for their skills, rather than raw power.

And also, the two of them looking after younger ones and wanting to protect them but also having to risk their lives to save the world- and the rest being alone when Percabeth falls with Nico to help except half of them find him freaky- would've allowed them to grow into their own more.

It would also show how Percy and Annabeth really ARE the most experienced, how their quests haven't been the norm so even Jason who is remembering some quests hasn't done anything this insane before but Percabeth just takes it all in stride.

[bookishjules]

I saw someone remark somewhere that for the past few years Rick has been writing for his fans rather than his story. The books he's written as of late have been eaten up by manly long-term readers who love this series, but rather than continuing the story and exploring the characters more, he's just giving a bunch of random adventures with no real consequences or substance, more fanservice than story.

see i've heard similar claims. and i could see that for tsats, because of just how heavily he (or mark) leaned into popular fandom interpretations for it, but i don't know how well that justification for these books can hold up the further we get into this new wave of the riordanverse. because no, you're right, there isn't much story at all for a 300+ page book. but there is also so little consistency of characterizations and the universe as a whole.. and i just question how any long-term fan of said characters/universe could see that and appreciate it (despite said fans suposedly eating it up which just.. baffling tbh).

idk i guess what i'm saying is.. if it's fanservice. it's tacky. it's cheap. it's like.. going into a party city for a yankees cap for an annabeth costume instead of using a legit quality hat with the real logo on it. there's this facade of making it for the fans without the followthrough of actually caring about the fans. if fanservice is meant to please the fans of that media, i feel like the right way to go about it would be to use said media as a base level and spin into inconsequential fluff from there. make it fun, but not at the cost of the integrity of the media people have clearly loved for so long.

[where-are-the-spooky-gays-2]

"Where are the spooky gays" this and "where are the spooky gays" that

WHERE ARE THEY ALL AT???? WHERE DID THEY GO?? WILL THEY EVER RETURN???

APPARENTLY ITS BEEN 4 YEARS SINCE THE WEDDING EPISODE??? AKA THE LAST SIGNIFICANT PLOT POINT??

I miss them

I feel like im in my Steven Universe era where the show was in a everlasting hiatus. Where are they, Mr sanders??? What have you done with them/lighthearted

-🐀

They're all trapped in the secret Beach episode /joking No but controversial take that will absolutely get an angry mob at me but I don't give a shit at this point and this is not directed to you at all 🐀 Anon I've just been in this fandom for 7 years and I'm tired of biting my tongue /genuine But y'all need to understand that if we didn't have the Asides/Short vids, The Incorrect Quotes, The Photoshoots, Bloops, etc. then we would have not seen the Sides at all in the span of 4 years (That's 1,475 days) and even through said 4 years there was a pandemic, a hurricane that quite literally flooded the shit out of Thomas' old office, and a stress related condition that quite literally made this man not even wanna look at himself (If you think this is 'babying' him actually touch a dictionary) I know this might come as a surprise especially with the old memes I used to make on this blog and with how most countdown blogs are now but I'm probably the only one in this fandom who honestly doesn't care for the wait due to watching literally everything he makes. He's juggling different projects, he's preforming in more theater stuff, he's making a lot of music for a 4 part season finale along with a possible prologue, he's trying to get back into the swing of things and getting over his intimidation of doing main series characterization of the Sides and all we can do is wait and continue making more beautiful content for the fandom to enjoy and gush about the characters and ships we love. I'd rather watch something that was written with time and patience than rushed and hear more bitching from the fandom for something they wanted.

[rosesradio]

You're the only person i follow who posts about thomas sanders

And i only watch him for sanders sides, i'm not really in the fsndom online, so i guess you are the best person to ask this

Why does thomas take so long to upload new sander sides?

ten questions scientists still can't answer, anon

[ruegarding]

Hey, quick question if you don't mind me asking but what are your thoughts on Drew Tanaka as a character and how she was portrayed in HOO?

canon drew...well. i rbed this post that says "drew was not written as a character but rather a human obstacle who needed to be feminine so the ‘not like other girls’ could defeat her," and i think that summarizes it perfectly. she exists exclusively to make piper look good, which is a real shame bc drew could've been interesting. as-is, drew is not only uninteresting, piper is also uninteresting by extension. it'd be like if nancy was one of percy's greatest obstacles in tlt.

more under the cut bc i'm incapable of keeping things short.

here, in her introduction, not only is drew, a feminine girl, vain, she's also weak and unintimidating, a triple whammy right away! she has no reason to be antagonistic towards piper here, they literally just got to camp. piper's crime right now is *checks notes* not looking cute and existing next to a "good-looking guy." oh, yeah, btw drew likes jason for being hot and powerful.

this triple whammy isn't even restricted to drew, it's the entire aphrodite cabin. they all giggle when drew flirts w jason and when piper is uncomfortable being "gorgeous" and are too scared and weak to stand up to drew. the two exceptions are a guy who got in trouble for saying piper "might not be so bad" and a girl who's afraid of ugly shoes. what an uninteresting take.

anyway, moments like this

are everywhere. now, let's remember for a moment that the aphrodite cabin (including drew!) fought in a war where they were outnumbered and won. but yeah, their biggest strength is their ability to "make an orange t-shirt glamorous" bc piper is the only one out of them who can *checks notes* uhhh run? charmspeak on a quest? carry a knife? she doesn't even know how to fight in tlh! she wasn't at camp for more than two days, she never had any fighting experience! the fact that she's being called tougher than ppl who fought in a war makes me grit my teeth. and thalia was there when it happened!

and it doesn't even makes sense bc we see aphrodite like this is ttc

and she says this in tlh

(also sidenote: why is aphrodite's claiming so egregious and uncomfortable then? it's like rick has a moment of clarity and realizes he's being stupid and then immediately fucks it up again.)

this is interesting! and some of these kids (including drew!) would have met this aphrodite during the solstices. so portraying drew and the aphrodite cabin as a bunch of shallow kids obsessed w makeup that need to be saved by piper "not like other girls" mclean is so contrived. and constantly bringing up how piper's so much better than those shallow and weak aphrodite kids makes piper's entire character grating. rick brings up aneaus repeatedly throughout tlh, a son of venus/aphrodite that founded rome. why are we acting like aphrodite children are weak and stupid when we could be exploring literally anything else? like, you know, how they're traumatized?

and the thing is, he brings up silena! and it's done terribly. piper, who never knew silena and never will, lecturing drew, someone who knew silena and was betrayed by her, has always pissed me off. piper relating to silena bc she feels like she's in the same position? good, that's fine, i have no problem w this. but acting like she knew silena to ppl who actually did and then preaching abt what silena believed should've gotten her smacked (rick didn't even addressed the actual important part, which is how the other campers feel abt silena or how they feel abt surviving a war).

then when piper challenges drew, again, drew fought in a war while piper hasn't trained for a single day, why are we acting like piper could beat drew in a fight? piper can't even use charmspeak bc drew's resistant to it! that's the one advantage piper has! writing it like this comes off like piper is only strong as long as everyone else is weak. she's not rising to a challenge, her competitor is just so pathetic that she can overpower them. she didn't earn her strength. that's not good character development! so we're throwing two entire character arcs away for this!

what really gets me abt all of this is that piper didn't need to be a counselor. piper needed a place to belong. making drew nothing more than a stepping-stone was completely unnecessary, and making the aphrodite cabin weak and vain was redundant bc we already had an example w silena (and again, all the kids that fought in a war). as it is in canon, drew's character is a great example of some of rick's biggest writing flaws.

[aetsiv]

What do you think about Percabeth or Perachel?

hi, thanks for the ask!

i personally prefer perachel over percabeth. my main reasoning for this isn't that i absolutely despise percabeth, i in fact think there was a lot of good potential in the ship and richard just messed all up. i could get by some of annabeth's treatment to percy in the early books since they were still rather young but i feel she just didn't mature that much throughout and kept calling stupid and what not and generally not showing much appreciation to him.

once again, i don't believe annabeth to be a bad character but instead a product of riordan's shitty writing for female characters. i honestly won't even get into the whole judo flip scene and everything percabeth had going in hoo because there were so many problems with it-- if you want to see anything relating to problems on hoo relating to percabeth, I'd recommend checking the "anti percabeth" or "hoo crit" tags as there are tons of posts relating to that. the most i'll say about percabeth on hoo is that i feel like annabeth generally got somewhat more abusive and possessive, starting treating percy even more so like he's stupid, percy's character was for the most part reduced to him being annabeth's boyfriend.

like i already mentioned, i much prefer perachel. i mainly enjoy it because rachel and percy's relationship both platonic and romantic is so healthy. percy enjoys being around rachel and feels like he can relax around her, doesn't have to worry all the time about what she'll think if he says or does something. rachel sees percy's intelligence and doesn't constantly berate him for small things, shares things in common with him (unlike annabeth and percy mainly only bonding over being demigods), and sees him as more than a demigod. they also have a well developed friendship and have actual bonding time unlike percabeth who only bond when they're forced to go on quests (i.e. them going to the beach).

i don't have anything against percabeth shippers (unless you think the judo flip was cute and romantic) and i think people should be able to ship whoever they want since it doesn't affect anyone else. i'm really sorry if this is a bit incoherent or has mistakes in grammer and sentence structure, i'm pretty tired right now so i'm not exactly thinking straight.

[flightfoot]

The thing about the London special not outright accepting or condemning Marinette's actions itself, to me, feels like giving her more sympathy and grace than she deserves for her actions. There is no moral ambiguity here. Marinette is 100% in the wrong. And the London special goes out of its way to try and frame this as some "no right answer" type of situation and takes away every opportunity it can to have someone meaningfully confront Marinette about the impact her actions could have on Adrien.

They deny her the chance to even consider it beyond "is lying wrong?" She's almost gaslighting her boyfriend into thinking his abuser was a good person, and now she doesn't even have the excuse of not knowing how bad it was. The whole special focused on how awful Marinette felt for doing something so despicable. And I apologize for my harsh words, but that's really just how bad it is. There's no way around it, and it's honestly quite disheartening to see all the posts about Marinette being under a lot of stress and being 14 or whatever. Like sure, but I don't see nearly the same number of posts sympathizing with Adrien, who is by all means Marinette's own victim now. And anytime someone points out the very reasonable critique that Marinette is doing an incredibly bad thing, they get swamped with these excuses.

Hm... okay. So I agree that Marinette's actions in the London Special were wrong, and that she should have told Adrien the truth, even if it hurt, instead of lying to him. I disagree about there being no moral ambiguity, since "wanting Adrien not to be hurt worse than he already is and wanting to honor the last wish of a dead man, even if he was awful" are reasonable things to value, they just don't override Adrien's right to know about things that concern him, and the way she's done it is likely just as, if not more upsetting than just telling Adrien the truth.

So with the focus on Marinette during the special (and in a bunch of the fanfics that were made based off of the special, though there haven't been all that many) being mostly around Marinette's feelings about the lie, being sympathetic towards her... yeah I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I think showing her perspective is valuable to understand why she did what she did, and to show that she was conflicted about it and honestly believed that she was doing the right thing, or trying to do the right thing at least.

On the other hand, it did sometimes feel like the London Special went beyond "these are the reasons Marinette did this, and this is the effect this decision has had on her, please empathize with her reasoning even if you disagree with her choices (even she isn't sure her choices were correct)" to "Poor Marinette, struggling under the burden of the choices she made, but she will bravely shoulder them for Adrien's happiness." I thought it mostly did okay with balancing it except for the last part, with Ladybug and Chat Noir talking about secrets and them both hugging each other over the burden of what they can't tell their partner. Because Ladybug COULD tell Chat Noir, and the person she's hiding all this stuff from IS him, so it felt icky to me to have him help in comforting her for it, when he didn't even understand what he was comforting her over.

I have the same problem with most of the fanfics about the London Special which have cropped up. I'm okay with there being some sympathy towards Marinette in the narrative for being conflicted and feeling like she should lie to Adrien "for his own good", given that she has good intentions, but a lot of it traipses into "poor Marinette is struggling heroically with having to sacrifice her commitment to the truth for the sake of Adrien's happiness." I especially don't like when Adrien feels guilty about Marinette feeling bad over that. While that's not totally out of character for him, I feel like his feelings over his own horrific situation should be centered more, rather than Marinette's guilt over feeling like she should lie to him in an effort to make his situation seem better.

Marinette IS only 14 and I can see why she honestly thinks that lying to Adrien about his father being a better person than he is would be better for him, she hasn't exactly had a lot of classes on the effects of child abuse and the different forms it could take. But there is the angle that Adrien is ALSO 14 and doesn't even have the luxury of any amount of control over the horrible situation he's in with his father.

The main sympathy I've seen given to Marinette is that well, what would YOU do if you were thrown into the situation of having to tell your crush that his father was a supervillain, he was gonna die anyway, and decided to do the one good thing of sacrificing what remained of his life to save your substitute mom? Which... yeah I definitely wouldn't feel comfortable having that conversation, but I wouldn't lie to Adrien either, I'd foist it off on Nathalie. (I do agree with the criticism that Nathalie ought to have been responsible for telling Adrien all these uncomfortable truths, given how deeply she was involved in both Gabriel's supervillainy and in Adrien's creation, but the show has decided to give Marinette all the power and all the responsibility of deciding what to tell Adrien, so here we are).

I would like there to be more attention paid to how Adrien must be feeling after all of this, with finding out his father died and being led to believe that he was actually trying to protect him the whole time, and dealing with that knowledge, than just sympathy for Marinette's position. Marinette had a choice in what to do. Adrien did not.

[rakkuntoast]

yeah, it's all so dumb because i can excuse philza not knowing the lengths of missa's personality given his limited perspective and all of what he has seen is not helping with those "wet cat" allegations, tbh. but fans, especially crows, don't have that excuse; they can watch any of missa's streams at their leisure, they can watch clips or something! even if it's not in their main language, well, they should still try, you know?

nonnie fr like,,, looking for English translations of missa's streams are not hard at all (considering yk,, crows)

Sadly it is pretty common to see people just not bother to actually research at all and just rely on whatever the hell rehash ppl are saying (which yk the interpretation some people have of his character is definitely... A choice)

atp I've resigned myself to just "if it isn't in their language they don't care" so idk (shrugs) I do wished the view on qmissa changed cuz god they don't bring him any justice at all. and it's sad that most of his content that I have personally seen are from crows and idk love you guys but ehhj que les digo ajdjsjdj

[qtubbo]

It’s kinda frustrating how everyone will say oh we want more egg drama, we want character conflict, we want more infighting, but when it makes their fav cubito look bad suddenly we’re taking everything too seriously and ruining the fun. It’s not just a block game to the characters, because they live there, so making critiques on behavior that is bad or toxic isn’t an attack it’s what happens when there is character conflict. Correcting, or discussing is perfectly normal, but you can’t say you want conflict and then turn it into something lighthearted because that means you didn’t actually want any conflict. You wanted conflict now here’s your conflict and sadly when there is conflict it will make characters look bad, it makes Tallulah, Leo, Foolish, Phil, and Tubbo all look bad it’s what happens.

You can’t tell people to stop making analysis or critiquing behavior because you’re viewing differently, or choosing to change the story to make it more lighthearted. Like I understand saying don’t cross in to reality people often do with ccs, but is anyone actually doing that with the admins?

[ourflagmeansgayrights]

okay I'm this is a tall order but I am so confused about Taika. Does he support Israel? I've seen so many posts about people spreading rumors about him and other people saying he does support Israel, so what's the haps??

so the rumor that taika supports israel comes from the fact that he (and like 200 other hollywood ppl including some very famous names like mark hamill or jack black but for some reason ppl only are talking abt taika) signed a letter thanking biden for working to release hostages and fight hamas. the language in the letter does not acknowledge that israel is a settler colonial state and that hamas exists as a direct result of settler colonial violence.

the letter is bad but it’s bad in the way that someone who is not informed about the conflict probably would not pick up on. it’s a letter that on its surface just looks like concern for civilian hostages, which is a good and normal thing to be concerned about. the letter was also probably about as effective as when all those celebrities sang “imagine” during covid lockdowns, which is to say that it most likely did nothing. i doubt biden is making global decisions based on what 200 rich people in hollywood think (if anything he’s probably making decisions based on what 200 oil executives think ahaha)

ppl have also connected taika signing this letter to guz khan getting fired from ofmd. there was a rumor that he was fired bc he supports palestine, which is almost certainly not true. guz was fired bc the show got a 40% budget cut for s2 and his character was the easiest to write off. guz has said he wouldn’t compromise his morals for a job but that this wasn’t the job where he had to do that, and he has blocked the person who started that rumor. ALSO several actors in ofmd have since posted supporting palestine so like?? this one is pure antisemetic conspiracy theory. if taika had a problem with guz supporting palestine why was guz even hired in the first place.

anyway signing the letter was a bad thing that taika should not have done but it is impossible to determine his stance on israel based solely on the fact that he signed that letter. he has also liked posts about freeing palestine so like, who knows. i personally have much better things to be doing than scrutinizing everything a famous poc does to try and prove if he’s a good or bad person

tl;dr there is no hard evidence that taika supports israel ppl just hate him for being a wildly successful brown jewish man

[ofswordsandpens]

im sorry but I do think its a little funny that there's maybe like... a handful of people actively critiquing the show compared to the overwhelming praise its receiving, and yet there's a portion of the fandom acting like they're either being held at gunpoint and forced to read every criticism, or that they've personally been appointed by RR himself to defend the integrity of his works, and I promise you, you really don't have to do either lol <3

[percabeth4life]

Does anybody else find it kinda fucked up how Rick said that the Romans knew there had been Greek demigods at one point and that the reason they thought there weren't anymore is because they thought Rome "Perfected" the gods? Like, sir what the fuck?

So true- it's such a mess like that is literally not how it worked the Romans were an entirely different religion and set of beliefs- they just associated with and "borrowed" from the Greeks a whole lot. It's both fucked up and a gross misunderstanding of how that worked.

[sanderssideswriting]

Yeah the ts crit community really is mostly on tumblr. If any crit on twitter is brave enough to call out thomas or even just ask a SIMPLE INNOCUOUS question like ‘hey whens the next sanders sides coming out’ they get dog-piled by his followers. Just now my twitter tl algorithm made some posts pop up from ppl I don’t even follow and they’re just defending thomas + his patreon and saying that we’re just angry jealous ppl who don’t understand what goes on behind the scenes for him (as if THEY do?).

I swear, the die-hard fans that are still left, I’m sorry, they’re not a fandom. They’re a cult. A cult of personality centered around one man, purely there to keep stroking and defending his fragile ego. They’re no better than the sw*fties or any other group of ppl driven by blind devotion, obsession and white knighthood.

Oh 100%, there's next to no ts crit community on twitter, I got curious and checked a few days ago, searching stuff like Thomas Sanders Critisism, TSS Criticism, TSS critical, stuff that's used over here and the only thing that got anything was the first, but then it was just showing stuff with "Thomas Sanders" or even just "Sanders" in the post. So it's hard to organize that kind of community, plus the die hards and Thomas being on there.

I'd say the only place the fandom is pretty active is on Twitter, and that's soley because of Thomas, because he interacts with the fans and makes it so that there's motivation to make tss stuff. You know there's a community on there for it and if you're lucky Thomas will see it and retweet it. Otherwise it's kind of a joke that the fandom is dead until it's breifly revived whenever a new episode comes out. Which then leads to parasocial relationships and the idea that somehow continues to persist that Thomas is a poor boy who can do no wrong and if he did do wrong he didn't actually know any better. Never mind he's thirty-fucking-4. And his fans are half his age.

One this I do kinda disagree with is the idea that all his die hards and current fans are like 14, which I just don't think is true, I think they were like 14 when the last proper episode came out, and are now more along the lines of like 18 or around there. He's got a lot of patrons, including 17 people who paying $125 a month, that money has to come from somewhere and I doubt it's all from allowances.

[greenconverses]

Richard saying, "we're going to end up in the same place, it doesn't matter how we get there" pissed me off so much ISN'T "HOW WE GET THERE" THE ENTIRE POINT OF STORIES?! ISN'T THAT WHY THE ENTIRE DAMN BOOK EXISTS?!

So, shocker, I have Thoughts about this post of his. My knee jerk reaction when I saw it last night was an eye roll and an urge to rant, which I kept contained because I'd already ranted and we gotta space that stuff out from time-to-time.

And now that I have had a full night's sleep and I am slightly less cranky, I'm gonna have to go on record and... DEFEND part of his logic, gasp.

For those not in the know, RR wrotes this reply to question on Threads (lol) a few days ago about changes to the plot in the sixth episode that apparently bugged a lot of people:

And like, I'm deeply annoyed about the "it won't change anything" bit because OH MY GOD STORYTELLING which is a whole other thing but I do have something to say about the man's logic and the difference in the show premise vs the books that I think is flying over a lot of people's heads.

The plot of the show is Percy saving Sally and doing a quest along the way. Sally and Percy's relationship is the A plot, the mythology and conflict among the gods is the B plot. Percy knows from 1x02 that his mom is alive and that changes his priorities immediately; we see him start to care about the overall quest and his place in the world in 1x05, but he's still pushing forward because of his mom. You have to add another pearl to pay off that A storyline, to promise audience members that Percy is going to succeed until he doesn't.

Percy in the books has a feeling his mom is alive or that he can get her back from the Underworld, but doesn't know for sure. The quest and the setting up the overall Big Three backstory is the main plot of the books and what we the readers are focused on. I wouldn't even put saving Sally as a B or C plot in the original TLT. Percy doesn't get confirmation that she's alive until they're down in the Underworld and Hades reveals he took her for leverage, so then only having three pearls becomes a brief but important conflict.

This is where we're seeing a lot of the issues with the show's plot come to a head. It's fine to change the priority of the story from returning the bolt to saving Sally, because it delivers the same result in the end anyway, like Rick says. But you have to bulk up other parts of the script in a way to make up for it and the show has not delivered on that part. (See exhibit A: my rant about any lack of mystery with the monsters.)

I think the most egregious change that he says doesn't matter is the trio missing the deadline. In the books, we're told that natural disasters and weird things have been happening since the bolt disappeared as Zeus and Poseidon fought, and stuff was getting worse the closer the deadline came. We are briefly shown this in 1x05 with Ares and in 1x06 with Luke saying things are "bad" at camp, but imo, it doesn't feel super heavy. The consequences of missing the deadline is that gods go to war and bad shit happens! Lots of mortals are gonna die! Doesn't that matter?

The show could've stepped outside of the Percy and Sally storyline for little bit to give more of a perspective about what was happening at camp or the outside world to bring that weight - you're not limited to just Percy's POV storyline in the medium of a TV show! (Of course, we can step outside of it to give a LMM cameo/stinger because priorities but I digress.)

They didn't and I'm not sure how they're going to "solve" Zeus's response to Percy missing the deadline 'cause like... this is the unreasonable king of the gods that Rick has started yet another series based on the premise of him being a petty bitch who wants to ruin Percy's life. Is the guy gonna walk back starting a war? Is he waiting to start because Poseidon asked nicely? What's the consequence to the world going to be? Clearly nothing, since Rick said the story is going to end how it was always going to end, which is just poor storytelling.