Board Thread:The Trials of Apollo/@comment-30169833-20180503113236/@comment-35682838-20180525044543

Honestly, I'd say Jason's death was very realistic (and, in my opinion, quite well done). I'd expected something to happen to one of the Seven in ToA sooner or later, though I was unsure of the specific person it would happen to. (The ending of the Magnus Chase series also gives a hint---remember the phone call Magnus had with Annabeth, where "she sounded like she'd been crying"?)

My reasoning for thinking this way is simple. One of Riordan's main themes is that, in the life of a demigod, anyone can die at any time, no matter what they've already been through. I feel like he's already tried to prove this in his first series, with the death of Charles Beckendorf. But, though he was supposedly close to the main character, Percy, Beckendorf was never especially close to the readers themselves (like Grover, another good friend of Percy's, was). So, sad as it is to say, no one really cared. The message was not truly received by Riordan's audience.

The next attempt at doing this takes place in HoO, with Riordan making it more obvious that one of the main characters will die. But I think he eventually realizes, that after the readers have been inside the main characters' heads for so long, the negative reaction to a permanent death would be massive. So Leo didn't stay dead after all.

However, by now, Riordan's books are gaining the reputation of a "safe" series, one where nobody dies, and everyone gets a happily ever after. In other words, the readers have missed his entire point about demigods' lives being dangerous and tragic. So he begins a new series with the intention of changing this*, getting the readers inside Apollo's head and slowly making them accept him as the main character (and lessening their attachments to old ones). He gets them comfortable with this, allowing them to adjust over the span of two books. At this point, things (i.e., overly strong/emotional feelings over characters in the previous series) will have cooled down a bit, but the readers still retain just enough of it that they still care about them. In other words, it's the optimal time for a meaningful and realistic (former) main character death. So Riordan does it, dropping major hints and death flags along the way to prepare the reader for the inevitable. This way, he creates a convincing tragedy without losing the majority of his readers' good opinions.

At least, this is what I think happened. All is speculation on my part, so anyone can challenge this if s/he thinks differently.


 * NOTE: I am not saying Rick wrote an entirely new series just to prove this point. Just that he may have decided to do this while he was writing it.