#i hope this doesnt come across as mad/rude or anything! i'm not mad i am just very passionate about Hazel's necromancy powers

[aroaceleovaldez]

Common misconception (and that wasn't a question in my tags, it was a statement) - We do actually know Hazel is implied to have the exact same powers as Nico, sans Nico's ability to tangibly interact with ghosts as that's implied to be a Ghost King-exclusive power (Nico wasn't able to do that either prior to becoming Ghost King). Pluto isn't less associated with the Underworld by the Romans - he's just more conflated with the god Plutus, which is why his name becomes Pluto - and that's actually a late Greek thing. The Romans further conflated him with other chthonic deities like Dis Pater (who is associated with both Underworld and wealth) and Orcus, so there's no reason for Hazel to have exclusively wealth powers - and we're explicitly shown that's not the case! She's able to communicate with and sense the souls of the dead just as well as Nico in House of Hades and BoO - it's just she's never given the opportunity to fully showcase those abilities to the same level because of how her role in the narrative constrains what she's able to do as to not take away from the rest of the main cast (incredibly disappointing tbh). (Nico on the other hand does get to equally use both aspects - we see him use geokinesis many times, such as creating cracks and rifts in the ground constantly and in BoTL even creating a giant mass of black marble - not even just summoning it.)

In fact, because we know demigods get more powerful as they get older and Hazel is older than Nico (Nico ends TLO at 12 and so is 13 in HoO despite repetitive errors in the books, and is 14 in TOA after things get corrected again. Hazel died several months after her 13th birthday and then spent several more months at CJ after being resurrected, making her 14 and a half or so in HoO and 15 in TOA), plus Hazel has been honing her abilities for far longer than Nico has, Hazel is easily reasonably more powerful than Nico. That's what I was getting at in the tags. We don't see this in the books so I didn't include it in the main text, but there is no evidence to show that Hazel isn't as powerful as Nico or more so if she actually used the full extent of her abilities like Nico usually does.

the dynamic of demigods thinking which other demigod is the most powerful is always amusing to me because. like, we know the big 3 kids are all the most powerful. That's just a fact of their universe. And then we know nearly every character views Percy as the strongest demigod, and most people are very rightfully intimidated by him.

and you look at the powers of the Big 3 kids and there's Percy, but then you realize Nico is just kind of objectively more powerful than him but simply chooses to hang out in Percy's shadow like he's Percy's scary dog privileges. Like, the two of them are pretty equally capable of causing multiple different apocalypses. Nico just also has like four different instakill powers and it's not like he doesn't use them. He very much uses them! Not infrequently, even! And they don't seem to take a significant amount of energy from him! And other demigods are pretty intimidated by both of them! But Nico makes a conscious point to keep his cards close to his chest and not let on exactly how dangerous and scary he can be if he wants to. People are already scared enough of him without knowing anything about him and he doesn't like that. Percy doesn't think about that nearly as much, and so usually just goes in guns blazing and that's part of why he's considered a wildcard. And then Nico himself puts Percy on a pedestal, so those who do know more about Nico's abilities then presume Nico knows something they don't about Percy that implies Percy is even stronger than him.

And even on a meta level Nico's narrative role requires him to be functionally more powerful than Percy, because he very often serves the purpose of getting Percy out of situations he can't handle on his own. That's just part of his function as a character! But also narratively he can't overshadow Percy so he just takes a backseat of his own accord and that's very amusing to me.