Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27219200-20151115021519/@comment-28037465-20160524060747

agreed. much like everyone else in this forum says, reyna does not need anyone, however, i feel like a lot of people are acting like apollo/lester's character is stagnate, which if you've read the THO spoiler!! it very much is not; the amount of character development he underwent in ONE book is astounding and one of the best arcs i've ever read in a riordan book. anyway, i find it interesting once you look underneath all of apollo's bluster and narcissism you'd find: an emotionally stunted man facing the pangs of unrequited love-longing for nothing more than finding someone to spend the rest of his life with i.e his true love. something he doesn't believe is written for him. anyone could be dismissive of this, or perhaps i'm reading way too into this, but i can't help but think it's an establishment of parallelism between him and reyna. however different they may be on the surface level, they have very similar experiences in terms of love and heartbreak. apollo is flighty and flirty by nature because of the deep dissatisfaction he has with his life, his "coolness" is a pretense. in contrast, reyna is held back and must hide parts of herself and history in order to fit under the mould of what a good leader is. in many ways her strength and image as a praetor is a pretense, a contrived image of herself that she created to hold up the morale of her camp. i think there is something deeply moving and poetic about a girl like reyna, whose held back by convention and trauma learning to care and understand the real apollo, without his "unearthly" good looks and his poetic charm; who lived for so many millennia and is in many ways inhibited by his immortality. like seriously, we are talking about the girl who sought love from the greeks, her enemies,  if anyone has the strength and capacity to love an olympian it's probably her. in any case, i'm really looking forward to any interaction, romantic or not, between them because he did support octavian's war-mongering and caused the string of events which led to her battling orion, so i'm expecting a lot of interesting dialogue between them.