Does anyone have fun headcanons for some random events that happened at Camp Jupiter during the time of the Titan war? Because we know next to nothing about the Romans but I refuse to believe they didn't have any crazy weird events and quests.
Like, if the Seven were to talk about the time before HoO (or generally any Romans and Greeks) and Percy and Annabeth would go like "Oh and we went through the sea of monsters and ended up on Circe's Island that one time" or "and that's how Percy showed up to his own funeral", sure, that would be a crazy story. But Jason also defeated a Titan on his own and Reyna only ever went to CJ After Percy and Annabeth were at Circe's island, what was the crazy stuff that happened in between?
Also what did the Romans think Caused the Titan War since they obviously couldn't have known it was Luke?
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Okay, I've been thinking a lot about that whole thing with using the term "unreliable narrator" for Shen Yuan, and I want to throw in my two cents.
(looong explanation under the cut)
There are two layers to storytelling - narration and focalisation.
A narrator is the voice telling the story; it will usually be either a character inside the story (intradiegetic narrator) or a being outside of the story (extradiegetic narrator) who usually knows at least some of the things that the character/s are thinking or feeling.
Focalisation is about the being whose thoughts the narrator is conveying. A story written in the 1st person pov where a character is narrating their own life would have homodiegetic focalization. A 3rd person pov where the narrator is someone outside of the story would have heterodiegetic focalization. A story where the narrator's knowledge is unlimited has zero focalization.
What we have in SVSSS is a story narrated by a (seemingly) omniscient being, so an extradiegetic and heterodiegetic narrator. Thus, the narrator is someone outside the story, not SY, and calling him an unreliable narrator is wrong. Right?
No! SVSSS has internal focalization, meaning that the narration is focused on the thoughts and feelings of a character, in this case Shen Yuan. (As opposed to external focalization where the narration is limited to just the setting, what characters are doing, etc without delving into their thoughts).
What we read in the story are Shen Yuan's thoughts and feelings in the 3rd person. So far so good - nothing weird there. The trouble comes in the form of the fact that obviously, somewhere along the way, SY's actual thoughts/feelings get filtered/censored, so to speak, and we read a stripped down/edited version of them. This means that somewhere along the line, someone is unreliable. But we don't know who - maybe we are reading a straight up transcription of SY's thoughts and he is just that much more delusional than we thought. Maybe the narrator is leaving some things out, or isn't granted access to his "true" thoughts. It's impossible to tell.
The only thing we know for sure is that we are reading what we are meant to believe to be what SY sees happening/thinks about/feels. What we do not know is whether or not that is the objective truth.
So - even though Shen Yuan isn't the "narrator" by definition, it is still through his eyes that we see the events of SVSSS happening. There are no truly objective statements in SVSSS - it's all composed of Shen Yuan's thoughts, and who knows how much of the truth is lost to his mental gymnastics. As I said before, we don't know where exactly the unreliabilty comes from, but unless you want to have to write out this entire explanation every time and still not even have a definitive answer, let's just say that Shen Yuan is the unreliable one for simplicity's sake.
TL;DR it's fine to call Shen Yuan an "unreliable narrator" and to pull the "oh but he isn't narrating the story" is to pointlessly argue semantics. We all know what we mean by "unreliable narrator". it's not that deep. just laugh at the joke and move on. thanks for coming to my tedtalk
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