Board Thread:Antaeus' Arena: Audience Chamber/@comment-3146930-20140803225750/@comment-3389778-20140804134022

Personally, this is a tricky one for me.

On one hand, Lightning Thief is a better 'introduction story' (and it should be! the first book is what will attract someone into the series). Percy is a great narrator with his sass and wit. Grover provides a good sidekick, Annabeth...is a bit out of place at the start (though she gets better through the other books but we're talking about Lightning Thief here).

The Lightning Thief's ending was much better than Lost Hero's (The Ending is paramount of course). The universe itself was fun and interesting, catching our attention. *cough* Anyway I won't defend TLT too much because everyone's going to choose this anyway *cough*

Lost Hero...has it's great points but lacks other things. TLH (I'm getting tired of spelling it out) expands the universe a bit more, we're able to see the world beyond Percy's eyes, which gives it a sense that it is indeed bigger than we originally thought.

Gaia was a much greater antagonist at the start than Kronos at first. She was intimidating and you got a sense that she was indeed powerful; messing with Leo well before any of current events.

We are given three main characters and all of them (Okay fine, two of them) are given proper backstories and motivations. Leo is an orphan who has been running his whole life and Piper is the child of a movie-star who seeks her father's attention due to the lack of for most of her life (which apparently is a wrong thing, seeing the reaction of much of the fandom. "She's the child of a movie star, she should be happy!" ugh)

Jason...is the weak link for the first book. He doesn't change much from start to finish. (He does get better in HoH, which is good.)

Unfortunately, the one thing that TLH doesn't have is Percy (Though if that's your basis of your dislike, I once again say Ugh) and by that, we lack Percy's sass and wit that was one of the reasons the original series was so great.

Though one thing we get out of the extended cast is more relations. in the first series, most relations we had were (Percy and ___) Now we can see the relations Leo has, which ones Piper has etc etc.