Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-29729973-20160915032753/@comment-29068459-20170914224255

I really wish that the gods were shown to be as complex as they are in actual mythology. The books settled for the common tropes: Zeus is a mostly good guy with only a couple issues and not the brightest, Hera is a cold perfectionist and is vindictive, Ares is a dumb brute, Aphrodite is a dizzy love goddess (and no, Piper did not help her case), etc.

For Ares, HTLJ probably stands as the best portrayal of him to date, with God of War 1 being a close second (being brutal does not insinuate stupidity. In fact, the most brutal people are highly intelligent, because they must think of ways to be brutal, like Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong).

In real mythology, Zeus - not Hades - would have been the one to engineer Thalia's death pre TLT, and certainly would not have been amused by her return. Hera probably would have favored Nico above the other heroes (she has shown a soft spot for underdogs. The Hephaestus incident only was because she wanted a perfect son to save face for all of Zeus' rampant affairs, something she clearly moves past in mythology, as seen during the Trojan War).

In fact, if anyone needed to be changed though, it was the demigods. They were all so nice. Even the ones who joined Luke just did it because "they felt left out." Demigods are representations of their parents - just as the Olympians are nice half of the time, and cruel the other half, demigods are half of the time nice, and half of the time cruel. So many, like Minos, Diomedes, Polycdectes, Pelias, Neleus, Tityos, Eryx the boxer, etc. were cruel for the sake of it. There were far less demigod heroes than villains. Yet, Chiron calls all the demigods at Camp Half Blood "heroes." Um, no they aren't.

Also, Chiron should have been more active. He is more than a "centaur granted immortality to train heroes." Immortality was a natural gift of his parentage (Kronos and the nymph Philyra, both immortal). Chiron was born before the Titan War, may have even partook in it, and trained the gods Apollo, Artemis, Asclepius, and Dionysus (three Olympians). He shouldn't have just been in the background.