Chapter Text
This is as much a story about redemption as it is a story about surviving abuse. It could not have been any other way, because for Apollo these two things are, in almost every way that matters, one and the same. Yet Apollo claims for himself only one of these two story arcs. He takes the redemption, as he rightfully should. He leaves the survival to Meg. She’s the one who should not be held responsible for what she’s done on Nero’s orders. She’s the one who didn’t – couldn’t – know better. She’s the one who could not have tried harder. She’s the one who has a chance of getting free.
‘I don’t blame you for anything. [...] The fact that you left me alone in the Grove of Dodona, that you lied about your stepfather –’
‘Stop.’
I waited for her faithful servant Peaches the karpos to fall from the heavens and tear my scalp off. It didn’t happen.
‘What I mean,’ I tried again, ‘is that I am sorry for everything you have been through. None of it was your fault. You should not blame yourself. That fiend Nero played with your emotions, twisted your thoughts –’
‘Stop.’
‘Perhaps I could put my feelings into a song.’
‘Stop.’
‘Or I could tell you a story about a similar thing that once happened to me.’ (TDP 163-164)
I could tell you a story about a similar thing that once happened to me, Apollo says. But he doesn’t. Not to her, and not to anyone else. Not even to us, the readers, the only people to whom he eventually finds the courage to admit what he’s known all along: that he’s been a victim for at least as long as he’s been a villain.
In the centre, behind a marble altar, rose a massive golden statue of Dad himself: Jupiter Optimus Maximus, draped in a purple silk toga big enough to be a ship’s sail. He looked stern, wise and paternal, though he was only one of those in real life.
Seeing him tower above me, lightning bolt raised, I had to fight the urge to cower and plead. I knew it was only a statue, but if you’ve ever been traumatized by someone, you’ll understand. It doesn’t take much to trigger those old fears: a look, a sound, a familiar situation. Or a fifty-foot-tall golden statue of your abuser – that does the trick. (TTT 94-95)
It is a costly admission for him. It takes him 3 books to get there. Oh, he’s joked about it before. He’s complained. Apollo LOVES complaining. Never let it be said that he missed a chance to loudly and dramatically whine about a minor inconvenience. He’ll happily tell anyone who’ll listen how hard and cruel and unfair his life is... so long as there’s no chance of being taken seriously.
Apollo tells his most convincing lies simply by making the truth sound laughable.
Zeus seemed to consider egotism a trait the boy had inherited from me. Which is ridiculous. I am much too self-aware to be egotistical. (THO 31)
But he is, indeed, much too self aware not to know what he’s doing. Which is why his rather unconventional redemption arc involves so little actual soul searching. He never has to look very far. Once he finally resolves to stop lying for good, he doesn’t have to look at all.
It’s precisely the act of finally recognizing his wrongdoings for what they are, and resolving to take responsibility for them, that at long last allows him to acknowledge the evil that has been done to him.
He only ever voices the first of those two confessions in front of his companions. He knows he has no right to make excuses for himself, no right to ask for sympathy. He sees the similarities between himself and Meg, but he knows he is not like her. Despite the child-like body he’s been forced into by his father, he is an adult. He does not get to claim ignorance, or impotence, even though he’s tempted to, even though, by some standards at least, he could. It doesn’t matter. His shortcomings may not be entirely his fault, but his surrender is.
Because that’s what he had done. He had surrendered.
The Apollo we meet at the very beginning of this story, before he is cast out of Olympus and trapped in the dreadfully normal mortal flesh prison that is the body of Lester Papadopoulos, is a fully grown man, father and grandfather and great grandfather hundreds of times over, still living at home with his abusive dad and his wicked stepmom. He is fine with it. More than fine, in fact! As he tells us repeatedly, he can’t wait to get back to that life. So what if that life kinda sucks? What if he has to live it according to his father’s dictates rather than his own? What then? There are no better options. None that he’s been able to find, and he has been looking. He has been looking for a really, really long time. So maybe, as pathetic as the notion is, this is the best he can do.
The Apollo we meet at the beginning of this story is fully determined to believe it. After so many attempts, after so many failures, he has found an incredibly shitty but incredibly solid way to cope. And he has settled. He has decided to settle. Even though, deep down, he still feels that this is far from what he should be able and willing to aspire to. He has surrendered. He's found comfort in surrendering. An incredibly shitty kind of comfort! But comfort all the same.
The Apollo we meet at the beginning of this story is the empty husk of a person who's given up on everything that ever mattered to him. He’s a pretender. A showman. An aged comedian with a stale act and an astounding inability to read his audience. He shamelessly tells us of his humiliation and his blunders, brags about how little he thinks of us without a trace of embarrassment, painfully confident that even at his worst he deserves our attention. How could he not? He’s the lead actor on the world’s stage, the main character of Life.
And yet, he’s very clearly not the character he’s supposed to be: “the handsomest, most talented, most popular god in the pantheon,” he helpfully reminds us, and as ridiculous as that sounds, especially coming out of his own mouth, he may as well be quoting the introductory section of his own Wikipedia page.
The Brilliant Apollo, the crown prince of Olympus who far outshone all his siblings, who amassed talents and domains beyond those of any of his brethren, to whom so many heroes owed their success or demise, whom so many emperors and kings wanted to emulate, and who, yes, may have been kind of an asshole at times, but a competent asshole who got things done.
This guy? He is, at best, a parody of his fabled namesake. He’s a small, petty, ineffectual loser desperate to be liked but unwilling to do any of the work that would make that possible. He can’t wait to get someone, anyone, to fight his battles for him. He’s all too happy to take credit for others’ accomplishments to make up for the fact that he has none of his own.
It’s very easy to laugh at him. He seems like he had it coming. The more he keeps lamenting the injustice of his punishment, the more he convinces us that he deserved it. Sometimes he almost seems like he himself might be conscious of this:
I stared at my battered face in the bathroom mirror. Perhaps teenage angst had permeated the clothes, because I felt more like a sulky high-schooler than ever. I thought how unfair it was that I was being punished, how lame my father was, how no one else in the history of time had ever experienced problems like mine. (THO 30)
But immediately he rushes to disabuse us of that notion:
Of course, all that was empirically true. No exaggeration was required. (THO 30)
I’m not joking, he insists while delivering his lines like he expects there to be canned laughter at the end of them:
If I didn’t know how much Percy Jackson adored me, I would have sworn he was about to punch me in my already-broken nose. (THO 26)
And he shows us enough of his real vulnerability that it’s easy to believe him.
I took a deep breath. Then I did my usual motivational speech in the mirror: ‘You are gorgeous and people love you!’ I went out to face the world. (THO 31)
After all, what kind of depth can a person who unironically does that have?
‘I’m fat!’
‘You’re average. Average people don’t have eight-pack abs. C’mon.’
I wanted to protest that I was not average nor a person, but with growing despair I realized the term now fitted me perfectly. (THO 20)
He’s convinced he’s so much better than us, he takes our sympathy for granted. He trusts we will believe his obvious lies because he’s too taken with himself not to realize how transparent they are. And even if we don’t, even if he isn’t, does it really matter? Are we not entertained?
If there’s one thing Apollo is confident he can do – the only thing Apollo’s still confident he can do – is put on a show.
And he does. He makes us wince and cringe at his awfulness, marvel at his obliviousness and ineptitude, see through his obviously fake brags so clearly and so often in the span of the first handful of chapters, that by the time he finally, actually, has to do something we are fully ready to believe it’s an accident he happens to do the decent thing. He’s so quick to declare any good deed of his was not his intended result, and simultaneously pat himself on the back for doing the bare minimum, that for a ridiculously long while the idea that he can actually be relied upon to do what’s right, that this is in fact a pattern of behavior and intent for him, keeps seeming just implausible enough to be disbelieved.
“You saved me,” Meg interrupted. “I was going to die. Maybe that’s why you got your voice back.”
I was reluctant to admit it, but she might have been right. The last time I’d experienced a burst of godly power, in the woods of Camp Half-Blood, my children Kayla and Austin had been in imminent danger of burning alive. Concern for others was a logical trigger for my powers. I was, after all, selfless, caring, and an all-around nice guy. Nevertheless, I found it irritating that my own well-being wasn’t sufficient to give me godly strength. My life was important too! (TDP 204)
I’m a good person, he says in the tone of someone who knows that statement to be false and is trying to delude himself into thinking it isn’t. And yet he prefaces it with “I’m reluctant to admit it.” If Meg hadn’t voiced the idea in the first place, Apollo would not even have considered it, even though it is, in fact, the obvious explanation. But that can’t be, because Apollo is not selfless, caring, or nice. To really drive that point home, with his very next breath he rushes to recenter the conversation on himself. “Why can’t I also be powerful for MY sake?” he whines.
Apollo wants to believe he’s a good person. But he is not a person. He’s a god. And gods don’t want, can’t want to be good. Gods are perfect. They don’t doubt. They don’t feel guilt or remorse. They don’t change.
Sally Jackson crossed her arms. In spite of the grim matters we were discussing, she smiled. ‘You’ve grown up.’
I assumed she was talking about Meg. Over the last few months, my young friend had indeed got taller and – Wait. Was Sally referring to me?
My first thought: preposterous! I was four thousand years old. I didn’t grow up.
She reached across the table and squeezed my hand. ‘The last time you were here, you were so lost. So … well, if you don’t mind me saying –’
‘Pathetic,’ I blurted out. ‘Whiny, entitled, selfish. I felt terribly sorry for myself.’
Meg nodded along with my words as if listening to her favourite song. ‘You still feel sorry for yourself.’
‘But now,’ Sally said, sitting back again, ‘you’re more … human, I suppose.’
There was that word again: human, which not long ago I would have considered a terrible insult. Now, every time I heard it, I thought of Jason Grace’s admonition: Remember what it’s like to be human.
He hadn’t meant all the terrible things about being human, of which there were plenty. He’d meant the best things: standing up for a just cause, putting others first, having stubborn faith that you could make a difference, even if it meant you had to die to protect your friends and what you believed in. These were not the kind of feelings that gods had … well, ever. (TON 45-46)
“These were not the kind of feelings that gods had” he thinks, still, at the beginning of the very last book. And yet, here he is, having them. He’s had them his entire life. He’s had them since he set out to slay Python the first time, a newborn god brimming with power and a good dose of cockiness too, eager to prove himself, to be of use, to make a difference.
“I was the worst of the gods,” he says, dropping all pretenses as he sings of his failures to the myrmekes. Because I loved too much. Because I felt guilty. Because I kept trying to do more. Because I kept changing my mind.
These are unforgivable sins for a god. That’s what Apollo and all of his divine siblings have been taught. That’s what they’ve all, in time, learned to believe. Good people don’t survive on Olympus.
And Apollo is, above all, a survivor.
So Apollo doesn’t want to believe he’s a good person.
This is incredibly uncharacteristic of me, he makes sure to specify every time he does something kind, every time he finds himself unable to hide his shame or guilt or doubt, to hide how much he cares, well past the point where we start realizing that it is, in fact, perfectly characteristic of him.
I’m totally gonna throw my companions to the wolves any second now, he says while moving to stand between them and the danger. I’m tired of listening to mortals talking about themselves, he says, having just finished needling them with questions about their circumstances and their feelings and the wellbeing of both them and their loved ones. I did the right thing so I could call myself right, which makes it a selfish thing, actually. I did the right thing but I was thinking about not doing it for a moment there, so really, it doesn’t count. I did the right thing but look, I had no choice, I was coerced, they offered me a musical instrument, that’s practically blackmail!
For someone who appears so eager to boast about his legendary past, he doesn’t seem to be able to recall any of the actual good things he’s done. He won’t even admit to having killed Python the first time until he’s very nearly forced to. Even then, what looms big in his mind is not his success but the fact that he struggled to achieve it. And what is even the most impressive achievement worth, if it’s not effortless? Gods shouldn’t struggle. Only the weak do.
‘Apollo,’ she said, ‘those shots were fantastic. A little more practice and –’
‘I’m the god of archery!’ I wailed. ‘I don’t practice!’ (THO 141)
So Apollo lies. He lies about being better than he is. Stronger. Immovable. In control. He lies about being worse than he is. Ignorant. Unfeeling. Cruel.
He’s as determined to misread Percy’s annoyance toward him as adoration as he is to misread Chiron’s faith in him as an insult.
It occurred to me that I’d seen that keen look in Chiron’s eyes before – when he’d assessed Achilles’s sword technique and Ajax’s skill with a spear. It was the look of a seasoned coach scouting new talent. I’d never dreamed the centaur would look at me that way, as if I had something to prove to him, as if my mettle were untested. I felt so … so objectified. (THO 104)
Chiron’s not the one who thinks Apollo has anything to prove. In fact, Chiron has the highest possible expectations of him. Chiron, who owes Apollo everything he knows, everything he has, still believes Apollo capable of great deeds like the ones recounted in his Wikipedia page, the ones we all know from the storybooks.
“Wikipedia,” says Apollo, “is always getting stuff wrong about me.” And as for the storybooks? They’ll make “good tinder for a fire.”
Apollo knows the truth. He isn’t a hero. He isn’t great. He isn’t even good. A good person would not have to worry about forgetting his children’s names. A good person would not stand by as little kids get enlisted to fight their parents’ wars. A good person would not let them die. A good person would not take out his anger on people he knows to be without fault, no matter how rightful that anger is, or how unreachable the real target of it is.
And if he’s a bad person, then he has no reason to try and push back against a status quo where kids are seen as fodder for the gods to use and discard as they see fit. No reason to risk his neck by challenging his father’s rules. No reason to risk anything by trying to do better. If he’s a bad person, then he can claim all the actions and, even more, the millennia of inaction he so regrets were his choice rather than his failure, or worse, something that he had no real say in at all.
I turned my face to the sky. ‘If you want to punish me, Father, be my guest, but have the courage to hurt me directly, not my mortal companion. BE A MAN!’
To my surprise, the skies remained silent. Lightning did not vaporize me. (THO 252)
There’s a long stretch of book 1, immediately after Kayla and Austin get kidnapped, in which all of the bullshit abruptly disappears and we get Apollo’s almost completely unfiltered, genuine pov. It is a noticeable enough shift that it’s impossible to miss even on first reading, but at the time it happens, we don’t know enough about who Apollo really is as a person to know how to interpret it. “It’s all my fault,” Apollo states, even though it clearly isn’t. He takes the blame for his enemies targeting his children. He takes the blame for Meg being captured by the ants.
And it was easy, in light of what we knew about him at the time, to view this as more proof of Apollo’s egotism. Of course he’d think that. He thinks everything is about him. But look: Zeus did not in fact vaporize him. Apollo’s just being his usual overly dramatic narcissistic self. He’s cracked enough jokes about being fried by his father’s lightning that we know not to take that seriously. He’s just being a comedian.
Granted, not a very original or funny one. He keeps recycling the same tired punchlines. For example, he keeps making a production of anticipating cartoonishly violent responses from people whenever he says something he knows they’ll dislike. That routine got old fast, but he seems to be really fixated on it for some reason.
It takes us a long while to realize what the reason is.
But it’s not actually for his own sake that Apollo fears the most.
“How could I have been so foolish?” he berates himself. “Whenever I angered the other gods, those closest to me were struck down.”
It’s only in this moment that he finally allows himself to call Kayla and Austin “my children” out loud. He’d explained his reluctance to do so before:
My eyes watered. Not so long ago – like this morning, for instance – the idea of these young demigods being able to help me would have struck me as ridiculous. Now their kindness moved me more than a hundred sacrificial bulls. I couldn’t recall the last time someone had cared about me enough to curse my enemies with rhyming couplets.
‘Thank you,’ I managed. I could not add my children. It didn’t seem right. These demigods were my protectors and my family, but for the present I could not think of myself as their father. A father should do more – a father should give more to his children than he takes. (THO 115)
And then, of course, he’d instantly rushed to cover up the shame of having shown some decency. “This was a novel idea for me,” he’d said, lying through his teeth and at the same time wholeheartedly believing his own lie, as all the best liars do.
Sometimes a decent, moral notion just springs up in your brain fully formed and perfectly articulated like that. You never know when it might happen! It’s not weird. It must be the mortality, actually. That pesky mortal conscience side effect that people get together with their ability to die. It’s totally a thing.
But the second Kayla and Austin are in danger, his hesitation suddenly evaporates. They are his children. They are his responsibility. “I should’ve done more to protect them,” he says.“I should have anticipated that my enemies would target them to hurt me.”
Nero wanted Meg to depend entirely on him. She wasn’t allowed to have her own possessions, her own friends. Everything in her life had to be tainted with Nero’s poison.
If he got his hands on me, no doubt he would use me the same way. Whatever horrible tortures he had planned for Lester Papadopoulos, they wouldn’t be as bad as the way he tortured Meg. He would make her feel responsible for my pain and death. (TDP 194-195)
Apollo immediately understands Nero’s game. He knows how this works, because he’s living within a scaled up version of it. It doesn’t matter that he isn’t a child. That he’s a god. Zeus is a god too, and he’s more powerful than him. There is no questioning his edicts. There is no escaping them either. No matter how much distance Apollo can put between himself and his father, he’ll still have the same amount of privacy and freedom as a kid whose parents won't let close the door to his own bedroom. Zeus just has to take one step forward to be instantly breathing down his subjects’ neck. It doesn't matter that he doesn't always do it. What matters is that he can, if he wants to.
All the gods live in fear of the day Zeus will decide that he wants to. They’d do anything to redirect his wrath from themselves. They have no one save their own family, high on top of the Empire State Building, walled off from the rest of the world, forbidden from having any kind of meaningful interaction, from building any kind of lasting connection with the mortals down below, and they are ready to throw one another into the jaws of the Beast at a moment’s notice.
“If I gave up on everyone who has tried to kill me,” Apollo tells Meg, trying to make her understand why he’s willing to put his faith in Lytierses, “I would have no allies left on the Olympian Council.”
Apollo doesn’t hold it against them. It’s just how it is.
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t do more.’
‘What could you have done?’
‘I mean at the Parthenon. I tried to talk sense into Zeus. I told him he was wrong to punish you. He wouldn’t listen.’
[...]
My first thought was to scream, ARE YOU INSANE?
Then more appropriate words came to me. ‘Thank you.’ (TBM 216)
The tragedy of Jason Grace isn’t that his death is unfair, though it is. It’s not even that his death was preventable, because it wasn’t. It’s that his death, ultimately, was not necessary.
This right here is the turning point for Apollo. Not Jason’s death, but Jason’s willingness to stand up to Zeus for him, even though Jason barely knew him, even though it provided Jason nothing, when nobody else, not even Artemis, would. It’s Jason’s willingness to do for Apollo what Apollo had long lost the courage to do for anyone, including himself.
But Jason has no way of knowing that, and all Apollo can give him is his word. That’s when Jason’s fate is sealed. The moment he decides that Apollo’s promise is worth more than his life. The moment he chooses to sacrifice his last few precious seconds to remind Apollo of it once more, one final time, to stake everything he has on this crazy gamble, believing – or at least hoping, even against all hope – that Apollo will follow through.
“It’s all my fault,” Apollo says. But Meg disagrees.
‘Jason made a choice,’ she said. ‘Same as you. Heroes have to be ready to sacrifice themselves.’
I felt unsettled … and not just because Meg had used such a long sentence. I didn’t like her definition of heroism. I’d always thought of a hero as someone who stood on a parade float, waved at the crowd, tossed candy and basked in the adulation of the commoners. But sacrificing yourself? No. That would not be one of my bullet points for a hero-recruitment brochure.
Also, Meg seemed to be calling me a hero, putting me in the same category as Jason Grace. That didn’t feel right. I made a much better god than a hero. (TBM 316-317)
I’ve always hated thinking of heroes as expendable, Apollo admits, finally, after almost 3 books spent lying to both us and himself about it, and by the time he does, it doesn’t even feel like a revelation anymore. He’d told us, didn’t he? He’d shown us. He is the worst of the gods. But still, a much better god than a hero. Because heroes are willing to risk it all for what they believe is right. And Apollo? He just really, really doesn’t want to die. “I was,” he says, “a coward that way.”
And yet, by the time he says this, we’ve witnessed Apollo’s willingness to risk and sacrifice himself for his children, for the people he keeps insisting he finds so annoying and yet he’s always so eager to start calling friends, multiple times already.
But he’s never actually wanted to die. He just can’t bring himself to. He is a survivor. And survivors can’t be heroes. Good people don’t survive. Only the bad ones do. That’s what his experience has taught him, again and again and again, even though the notion goes against everything he feels, deep down, is right.
When he meets his children in person for the first time and they are far more concerned about the prospect of losing their talents than of losing their father, he is relieved. He wants them to be selfish, just like he is. He wants them to survive.
But as it turns out, his children aren’t selfish. They care so much, so deeply and fiercely, about so much more than just themselves. They grow attached so quickly. They are eager to help. They are just like him, in all the ways he never would have wanted them to be.
Looking at them, he can’t help but feel ashamed.
Apollo has done many, many bad things in his long life, and not all of them to survive. If there was any justice in this world, he would not be the one still here, still standing, still alive, instead of all the far more deserving people he’s buried.
But still, he does not want to die. Not even now, at his absolute lowest, not even now that he’s lost everything he’s ever had, up to and including his own name.
So he can’t think of himself as a hero. He does not want to.
“I had stabbed myself in the chest fully expecting that Medea would heal me,” he says, to explain why that does not count as a proper self sacrifice.
In his mind, intent seems to matter as much as actions do. The truth is, for a god? It probably does. For a god, wanting to do something might as well be the same as having already done it. Apollo is not a god anymore, and yet, still, he desperately wants to survive. He keeps surviving despite all odds. He keeps surviving stuff that by all rights should have killed an average mortal human a hundred times over.
But what good is it to survive, if it benefits no one? What good is the power of a god, the power to do anything you think of the moment it crosses your mind, if it can’t be used to do what’s right?
She fixed her eyes on me. Her lips quivered. I could tell she wanted a way out – some eloquent argument that would mollify her stepfather and allow her to follow her conscience. But I was no longer a silver-tongued god. I could not out-talk an orator like Nero. And I would not play the Beast’s blame game.
Instead, I took a page from Meg’s book, which was always short and to the point.
‘He’s evil,’ I said. ‘You’re good. You must make your own choice.’ (THO 290)
Apollo immediately understands what Meg is silently asking of him. He recognizes that she is looking for an excuse, a stratagem, a ruse that will let her do the right thing without setting off her abuser, because it’s what HE always does too.
He does it even now, even within the confines of his own head, arguably the only place that’s out of the reach of his father’s all seeing gaze.
His whole life and sense of self have been consumed by the hopeless search for the exact combination of words and behaviors that will let him act according to his own morals without putting into question Zeus’ judgement, without challenging Zeus’ rules, and by his increasingly despicable attempts to fool himself into thinking that that isn’t true.
But it is true. Deep down Apollo knows it is. Even when he manages to score a point, to win a round... he is still always playing his father’s game.
This is the awful reality he has resigned himself to. It’s the best he can do. He is convinced of it. He has accepted it.
But he can’t accept that the same is true for Meg. So he gives her the advice he refuses to take for himself.
“He’s evil. You’re good. You must make your own choice.”
He’s able to state it in such simple, clear terms for her. He’s light years away from being willing and able to believe that it applies to him too.
He doesn’t want that kind of responsibility. He can’t trust himself with it. He can’t even bring himself to admit to the choice that he’s making in this very moment, has to make up a half hearted excuse about suddenly lacking the ability to spin a yarn, for reasons, despite the fact that he’s been bullshitting us for almost an entire novel.
But he can believe in Meg, because she is not like him. She is strong. She is good. She deserves a chance to do better.
“You, Meg, are powerful,” he tells her on their first morning together at camp. “You will do well,” he tells Lityerses as they part ways. “We can trust him,” he says, introducing Crest to the residents of the Cistern. Despite all of his protestations to the contrary, against his own better judgement, he can’t help seizing every chance he gets to lift up the people around him, to put his faith in them, to give them his trust, even and especially when nobody else will.
“I believe in second chances”, he says, “and thirds, and fourths.” But not for himself. Never for himself. He knows himself too well. He is not strong, nor good, nor deserving.