#hoo octavian

[wanderingmind867]

The one thing i'm glad about (which, to be fair, i probably didn't get because anonymous asks turned off), nobody was too rude to me. And to be fair, I didn't say I despised Reyna. I even admit that i want to like her, I just had some slight issues. But I'm incredibly thankful nobody has been too mean about it.

I still don't like Reyna very much. I don't despise her, but I also don't like her very much. Octavian is sympathetic because Rick Riordan heavily hammers in that Octavian is lonely, and has nearly every character bully him. But Reyna isn't like that. I don't think I've seen anyone bully her. Instead, she's used her power to try and manipulate things. She tried to get Percy to date her or something. She once allied herself with Circe, a woman who turned people into animals (and felt no shame about doing it). It's just…not the easiest task to sympathize with her so far. I still hate a lot of other characters more (like Luke, for example), but Reyna just rubs me the wrong way occasionally.

[percexe]

top ten worst guys

[i-am-traveling-the-multifandom]

Octavian knew he was going to die but went along with it because he thought it would make him a hero. He wanted to be loved till his last breath......and you want me to hate him?

Source: wiki

[diaruchann]

I finished reading Blood of Olympus almost two weeks ago and this is totally how it happened in the book wdym

[octagon--lover]

Me when people hate on Octavian :(( /hj

[octag0n-l0v3r]

*giggles* I've done it again

[sugar-r-rush]

heres to the first octavian post after months (will be many more)

[lovelorngirl]

Octavian Headcanons !!

( general + x reader + theres like one, two blurbs )

likes olives on pizza

hates the color violet actually

complains when asked to do anything (but does it anyways)

EYELID KISSES!!!!!!

major blanket hogger

parents dont really gift him on birthdays

follow up : one time, you gave him a handmade gift. it wasn’t grand or anything. it was a reversible octopus plushie. he acted like it was silly and childish but that night, the fact that someone actually took the time to make and gift him something (w/o asking for anything in return) made him cry

speaking of cried, the first ever song he cried to was happier by ed sheeran LMAO

if you two ever argued, he’d lock himself in his room, catch sight of the plushie and maul it in blind rage. but he’d feel bad immediately after and sew it back up

he also uses it unironically its hard to take his ass seriously

purrs like a cat when you run your fingers through his hair + is embarrassed by the fact

making out in the temple of venus 🫣🫣🫣🫣

the boy has bacne cuz i said so

hes a major asshole, yeah, but he’s the only one who notices when you’re eyebags are darker or you keep zoning out

you forced him to watch the barbie movie and now he won’t stop quoting “SUBLIME!” :/

this man is BITTER!!! like, he shamelessly glares at couples

HATES PDA but is willing to hold your hand if it makes you happy (he grumbles about it tho)

first ever headcanon post !! i hope the hoes like it 🫶

- xoxo, cassie

[itsjustoctavianhere]

Like the idea of him being the shortest guy in camp at some point.

[reuben-7991]

Octavian’s treatment is one of my least favorite things about HoO because it isn’t his character, it’s his lack of one.

We COULD’VE had an excellent character who was a look into what could truly go wrong with blind devotion like Octavian’s, drawing an excellent parallel to Luke’s blind hatred in the original series (Percy even says Octavian reminds him of Luke).

We COULD’VE had a fantastic contrast into a follower’s descent into insanity after making empty promises of power whilst under the influence of a massively elder being, thus leading to said follower’s death.

What makes me especially mad is that Octavian has no backstory. This is a problem with a lot of Roman characters, but Octavian especially. He doesn’t even have a last name. All we know is:

- He’s a legacy of Apollo.

- He used to be sane and probably very charismatic, due to Reyna stating she used to have a crush on him in TTT.

That’s it! One of Rick’s gold stars is that his human characters are just that: human. They have motivations and flaws, deeply personal origins and ideals that affect their actions and their outcomes. None of the villains are just plain villains, evil by birth. They have motives to back up their actions (now weither those motives make sense or not, that’s another story, but they’re still there.) There’s Luke, Medea, Lityerses (who is an entire other can of worms), Circe, Loki, Gunilla, Randolph, hell, even Kronos and Gaea. All of them have reasons for the shitty stuff they did. Octavian is a glaring exception. We know he’s power-hungry, but we don’t know why. We know he’s violent, but we don’t know why. We know he hates the Greeks, but we don’t know why. You may argue ‘oh, he’s a minor character, he doesn’t really get a reasoning’ which is just blatantly untrue on both fronts.

1: Octavian is NOT a minor character in the slightest. He has major roles in the plot throughout the books.

2: Him being a ‘minor’ villain wouldn’t have anything to do with his motivation. Chris from the OG series has stated motivation, and he’s way more minor than Octavian.

Another thing is that Octavian’s insanity is played off almost comically. He’s relatively well put together in SoN, only being super dramatic and reportedly blackmailing Hazel and probably other legionnaires, but by BoO he’s absolutely broken. He’s utterly obsessed with being a hero to the Romans, with being Pontifex Maximus, with killing Gaea and almost proving himself to Apollo (who is utterly disgusted by him), but it’s all either framed as ‘hate this guy more plsplspls’ or brushed away to the side.

I’m torn on his death scene, because it’s a good scene overall but too much of it is humorous in my opinion. Between Will calling Octavian an ‘anemic loser’ (which like. what.) and Leo describing his screams as a little girl’s, it seems almost too light for such a pivotal point in the story. Octavian has truly lost himself to madness, ranting and raving and insisting no, HE has to be the one to kill Gaea, HE has to be a hero.

His death is horrific, yet it’s framed as a silly oopsie.

What the fuck.

Overall, Octavian is a shining example of missed character potential. We could have gotten the Riordan special and made to empathize more with our villain, like what happened with Luke or Randolph from MCGA, but all we get is a crazy blond kid, character so shallow he could count as a tide pool. It infuriates me to no end how in a sea of good, properly motivated antagonists, Octavian is the outlier.

It’s a real shame.

[ilikepjo24]

On Octavian ruining Percy's panda pillow pet...

Now, I thought this wasn't even a serious thing that needs to be addressed but I just finished arguing with someone over this, so apparently it does need its own meta.

So, the take we're debunking today is "Octavian is mean/evil for ruining Percy's pillow pet".

The thing about this pillow pet is that Percy was homeless for six months, he had to steal to survive and fight off monsters every single day, a task that was getting harder and harder every day, all while he remembered nothing. He only had his name. He didn't have friends, a home, a family, a safe place, a purpose, something that can get people by so that they don't just give up when struggling every day for no known reason with no known end goal gets too much.

During those months, his panda pillow was the one single form of comfort and familiarity he was granted. A small mercy if you will, to help get him through this. Although many people downgrade, poke fun off, and affectionately ridicule his relationship with the panda pillow pet, it was definitely something meaningful. Like the first participation trophy you got for participating in a competition for fun, only to realize you really like that activity and get hooked on it. Sure, the trophy does not indicate any real talent or success in itself, but to you it's the starting line for something you genuinely love. And to Percy his pillow pet has value because of it's emotional worth.

Which is why it had to be sacrificed.

I'll explain why soon enough, but for now, hold that thought I put in your head just now while I add a second idea there too.

This isn't talked about in the books, but it's something Uncle Rick made sure to address in the show. As Chris Rodriguez worded it: The gods love the smell of beging.

In Camp Half-Blood, when meal time is over, demigods throw the remaining of their food into the fire as a sacrifice and pray to the gods. In the show it was specified that it's better to sacrifice a portion of your favourite food, because if the gods see that you're willing to sacrifice your own comfort (even if it's just in the form of your favourite food) just to please them, they are more likely to answer your prayer. Once again, as Chris said, they love the smell of begging. And the more you beg, the more you're willing to sacrifice, the further you're willing to go, the better.

So Greek gods like it when you pray by sacrificing your food, and to an extent, your comfort. And the Roman gods like it when you sacrifice a life.

Which is why auguries became a thing. Of course you're not gonna see the future in the guts of an animal just because. The gods will grant you spoilers for the next season if you kill the animal because it will make them feel flattered to see that you're so desperate for their help that you'd rip out the soul of a living being in their honor just to get their attention.

However, Rick is writing books for tweens and teens. He can't just have animals being slaughtered left and right, especially for the purpose of feeding the gods' narcissism. So what can he do to make the situation a bit more pg 13? Remove the slaughtering of animals. And how will auguries be performed then? By sacrificing something else that has value. Emotional value.

It's quite logical to assume that the stuffed toys Octavian uses in his auguries are really expensive or collector's edition or handmade or are someone's childhood companion that they donated. The gods wouldn't just let you have information about the feature when all you gave to them was a sacrifice worth 1$ that you could even fish out of the trash.

Now I want you to hold on to that too and knit it together with the other thought I told you to hold on to, got it? And if you do that part of the process properly you should get to the conclusion that the best sacrifice available at the moment to get the gods to tell you how they feel about Percy joined the legion was Percy's panda pillow pet that he is so deeply emotionally connected to.

Octavian did not ruin something Percy loved for kicks. He didn't even know him yet, there's no way he had any type of malicious feelings towards Percy yet. He was just doing his job. The job Reyna tasked him to and the job Hazel told him to do during their conversation. And that was to read Percy's augury (which wasn't an augury bc Octavian is a haruspex but that's irrelevant right now). He wasn't actively trying to soil Percy's mood and ruin his day just to be the evil villain. He was just doing his job.

Thus proven.

[wanderingmind867]

"Really?’ Octavian said. ‘You seem to know a lot about our enemy’s plans, Percy Jackson."

Most insults Percy could shrug off – being called weak or stupid or whatever. But it dawned on him that Octavian was calling him a spy – a traitor. That was such a foreign concept to Percy, so not who he was, he almost couldn’t process the slur. When he did, his shoulders tensed. He was tempted to smack Octavian on the head again, but he realized Octavian was baiting him, trying to make him look unstable.

Octavian isn't trying to make you look unstable! He's reasonably pointing out that you shouldn't trust a weird foreigner who is clearly not roman! If a strange new person showed up in my home too, I'd be concerned! I can see it from Percy's perspective, but come on! Octavian is not in the wrong for this!

[fellatitledthemf]

Octavian: manipulative blackmailer who attamted murder and genocide and borderline racist

Fandom: He's actually silly n' cute, he's bad written character so he's actually good ≧▽≦ 💗 ʚ♡ɞ

My honest reaction to ppl who love Octavian but hate Luke

ONG I hate how ppl still bring up how he asked Annabeth and show how others say Luke meant romantically☠️

IT'S STILL NOT FROM HIS POV AND RICK'S A LIL BITCH

[rookhuntt]

Octavian cosplay ☀ “Aut vincere aut mori”- Camp Jupiter

Instagram: @_.dramaturgy

[percabeth4life]

Yeah, Octavian’s anger post-MOA is really valid, because to the Romans, these people showed up with claims of peace and then bombed their city, targeting not just fighters but civilians too. I also would despise them and wouldn’t be willing to listen to what they say (also? Octavian is right to bring ear plugs to counter Piper, to the Romans she’s a girl who can take away their free will and part of the group that attacked their home. Who knows what she could say to them, what if she makes them go back and attack New Rome even more? She’s very much an active threat in the eyes of the Roman demigods). There’s no actual evidence the 7 could offer up to prove it wasn’t actually Leo in charge, it’s not like possession leaves a trace nor can they display their memories to prove it.

She literally planned to use her charmspeak against New Rome from the start (Bad for Relations) and actively used it against Octavian specifically cause she found him annoying. Like- yeah, no surprise he took steps to prevent that from happening again.

And yeah, like- as far as Octavian is concerned he was literally THERE when Leo starts bombing New Rome. Maybe he'll accept that the others didn't intend to, but them running instead of surrendering and talking out what happened doesn't look good. Especially because they proceed to break more laws.

Now, I do think Rick wrote him absolutely insane, but like- him not trusting them? Tracking them down? Trying to capture them? Valid.

[shattered-glasswork]

Drew Tanaka and Octavian friendship

@blagam0nie