#i am octavian

[aurantiumred]

its me your beloved time god please feed my octavian addiction

hey babe. love you michael!!!

.

anyway onto octavian/tav. going to be calling him tav from here on out because i fucking cant be bothered to type octavian so many times.

so tav and jason were absolutely friends. also twins. the amount of times that someone came up to tav with "great job in battle today!" or up to jason with "any new prophecies?" annoys them both until they try to do a funny and swap places for like a day (because twins and silly shenanigans and the only difference between the two is the brand (which, damn camp jupiter, we're just gonna skip over them branding children (something canonically described to be incredibly painful by multiple characters) let alone TODDLERS like Jason's age when he joins) and that tiny scar which can be easily replicated by white paint) and immediately chicken out because rule following.

tav cuts jason's hair (very long has not been cut since two) to match his hair's length (also people kept exploiting and pulling on it in battle. also dysphoria.) and it trips everyone up so hard. they're not having a good time over at camp jupiter because who the fuck is who

this ends up with jason accidentally introducing himself as tav because people accidentally call him that so much and quickly correcting himself but its too late because the new camper he was talking to already thinks he's insane because who the fuck just forgets their own name???

the brother/twin thing also breaks my heart because he loses both his best friend (read: boyfriend) and his brother on the same fucking day and never gets to see either again.

imagine how bad he would feel in toa because his brother pretty much caused this. apollo is here because he couldn't save tav and he wasn't loyal to his legion

anyway this is getting off topic i have a 2 foot by two foot large replica of the hippodrome to finish making babe ily and i might draw that later but seriously ive gotta stop writing posts on tumblr while i have school to do.

[bumnyv]

you remember this in blood of olympus right

[caesxr]

your sickly pale boyfriend showed up to the function wearing five tunics on top of each other and then he had a panic attack and vomited all over the floor btw. do you want us to scrape him off the ground with a spatula and drop him off at your place or something

[dv-kelp-face]

*SPOILERS FOR MARK OF ATHENA*

Aaaaaah, he has no idea that he will be judo flipped soon

[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.

[sforzesco]

Plutarch, Antony (trans. Scott-Kilvert)

[navree]

refusing to be undone.

Atia Balba, niece to Julius Caesar, died only a year after his assassination, and was survived by her two children, Octavia the Younger and Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus, who she had named Gaius Octavius at birth. Both her son and daughter would outlive her by several years.

[ladynicte]

PJO text posts cuz I have issues

[murderspugerter-ver2]

I WILL SELL MY SOUL FOR SOME OCTAVIAN/READER FANFIC

[garvalhaminho]

btw here is a list of every blackthorn ever mentioned (that i wrote down) either by blood or marriage/name

eva

felix

john

adelaide ‌

annabel‌

abner‌

jerome‌

ezekiel

rupert‌

tatiana

grace ‌

jesse ‌

lucie ‌

andrew ‌

arthur‌

eleanor‌

helen ‌

mark‌

julian‌

livia‌

tiberius‌

drusilla‌

octavian

[tiny-librarian]

Of all the lost things in the world, the things we will never know, this lost son of Caesar and Cleopatra’s must stand as the most tantalizing. What would he have been, what would he have grown into, with the gifts he had from both his remarkable parents? Octavian did not wish to find out – and so we never shall, either.

The Memoirs of Cleopatra - Margaret George

[marcusagrippa]

every time i remember this movie exists i take one hundred billion psychic damage

[wanderingmind867]

Does anyone want a Percy Jackson series set from Camp Jupiter's perspective during the Titan War? I sort of do. Because honestly, the war from Camp Jupiter's perspective makes no sense. And honestly (I'm still rereading the lost hero, so i'm jumping the gun a bit) I think I can forgive Octavius and others at Camp Jupiter hating the Greeks. Because think about it:

Luke was the guy responsible for helping raise Kronos from the dead. Luke assembled the army. Luke gave himself over to Kronos. Luke did all the legwork (hence me making clear I despise Luke when I read the pjo books last year). The other people fighting with the titans were dumb too (like ethan nakamura, who betrayed percy after percy saved his life in battle of the labyrinth), but Luke was the worst of the worst.

But to the kids at Camp Jupiter, I'm fairly sure Luke Castellan was a non-entity. He was a Greek kid, they had no reason to be aware of him. To them, it must've been quite a shock to find Saturn rising from the dead, already with an army backing him. Because unless Camp Jupiter had their own version of Luke (who was secretly helping Saturn like Luke helped Kronos), this means it's all the fault of the stupid Greeks that Saturn rose!

Because of those Greeks, typhon rose! A wave of destruction burned across (at least) North America, and Dii Consentes, the very gods themselves were almost wiped out! So you know what? I think Octavian wasn't necessarily wrong to think the Greeks were scum. He was an extremist, but he wasn't wrong about it being unwise to trust the greeks. Again, they're the ones who woke Saturn!

[jasongr-ace]

Listen listen. Hear me out. Jastavian friends to lovers to enemies.

They both grew up in the camp, it’s natural they’d be friends, and when Jason starts wondering if he likes boys too, despite all the pressures to meet a nice girl, he talks to tav about it.

And then they kiss. It’s a cute middle school fling, nothing super serious, but Jason didn’t like how Octavian began acting as he gained power and influence, not only as Augur, but also as Jason’s friend. So they grew apart, and Octavian threw himself into his work. And Jason threw himself into his.

[as-thra]

speaking of similar colorings between characters making it odd to art them.. ovtavian (second oc) is @itsachillesbtch's !!!!

[sugar-r-rush]

do anyone actually get heated and insanely upset when a character that so near and dear to your heart is looked at wrong..

like Drew isnt a big meanie and hates other women :( no Octavian isn't a misogynist :(( PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONENENEN