Character name: Piper McLean
Age: 17
Canon: Percy Jackson (Series)
Canon point: Post-Burning Maze
History: Wiki linkThree key adjectives: Driven, self-assured, charming
Influential Events:1. “Oops, you’re a demigod! Sorry!”
Growing up, Piper isn’t exactly the ideal normal kid - it’s already hard when your dad’s a movie star and your mom is… Gone, but she has a lot more on her plate, overall. For example, the latent ability to Charmspeak, which allows her to talk other people into doing what she wants much more easily, and no one to teach her how to control or when to use it! So she gets in trouble for stealing things when they were freely given to her, which is sure a wild thing for a teenager to deal with! So when she does eventually learn, at the beginning of The Lost Hero, that she’s a demigod, things are put into place in a lot of ways! She finds out, like everyone in the series, that all the weird things about her are actually fairly normal, which is cool, but she also finds out some special upsetting things given the specifics of how she finds out! See, she has a bunch of fake memories that get contradicted by what she learns, given to her and her boyfriend (who wasn’t her boyfriend before this, oops) to make them think they were together and, in fact, that she knew him and one of her other friends at all. She leans into the former part of the revelation, though, and for a while is mostly okay with the latter? She loves him, after all, so it’s fine! It’s fine.
2. “So, your mom…”
Piper has a lot of complicated thoughts about her exact mom, once she finds out who she is. It makes the whole Charmspeaking thing make sense, of course! No doubt about that. And her good looks, etc etc. But Piper doesn’t really like the sorts of things the other Aphrodite kids are into - makeup, makeovers, gossip, etc. Not that she’s got a full-on Not Like Other Girls thing going, but it’s not her speed, and she takes issue with especially the darker parts of the group attitude towards romance and love (i.e. You gotta break hearts so you can get a lot of different people to fall in love with you, that’s just how it goes). She butts heads with the leader of the Aphrodite Cabin at Camp Half-Blood more than once over it, being that she’s the only other one with Charmspeak in the cabin. Eventually, in order to try to change things for the better, she challenges the leader and comes out on top, taking over as leader of the cabin to try to iron out the negative parts without trying to make everyone exactly like her.
In general, focusing specifically on her relationship to Aphrodite, Piper has a surprisingly positive (by demigod standards) relationship with her Godly Parent, though they don’t interact too often (which is much more normal, by demigod standards). Her mom, kind of like her dad, is just not around, and she’s alright with that arrangement. Especially as the books goes on, she feels it much more important to focus on figuring herself out, parents or no.
3. “Hey guess what it’s HEROES OF OLYMPUS TIME”
“Hey Lyndon, isn’t this like four books of content, why are you putting it all under one header?” Well, dear reader, because Heroes of Olympus is an ensemble story, so her arc across the whole quest to stop Gaea is easier to track at once than going blow by blow! The long and short of all of the events is that Piper’s story is about self-acceptance and gaining confidence in herself! As her powers and combat abilities improve over the course of the Heroes of Olympus books, Piper learns that she has power on her own and not just supporting her friends, even becoming the deciding factor in a couple battles. At one point she literally wins a fight by using the power of love! Heck yeah!
And she falls in love, specifically with Jason Grace, that guy she got mentally hijacked into being with in the first place? She decides he’s not so bad, to say the least, and they do, on their own terms, date! It’s all very cute. It’s also important to note, because I think it’s funny, that coming into her own as a hero doesn’t actually mean not using Charmspeak to make people do things against their will. Just to do it when it’s really necessary, or it would be really beneficial. Piper will 100% steal with her light mind control powers, even after her arc, bless her heart. She does at least have/gain the significant emotional intelligence and maturity to think through using it a lot more, though.
The most symbolic “Piper gained the power of self-respect” moment probably comes at the end of the last book in the series, when she opens up enough to sing in front of everyone, and she’s really good at it!
4. “Hey you thought you were out but a bunch of roman emperors are BACK ON THEIR BULLSHIT”
After the war against Gaea, Piper elects to go back home to California instead of staying full-time at Camp Half-Blood, and to focus on herself for a while. Between books, she and Jason have some trouble and break up, taking some time to focus more on themselves outside of the fake relationship Hera planted in their heads at their introduction to the franchise, and while they seem to be bummed about it, they remain on good terms.
However, eventually a bunch of Roman emperors (shoutout to real kids book character Caligula) show up to be assholes, bankrupting her dad and forcing her back into yet another quest! She cares way too much about him not to, even though it means working closely with Jason again, and she promptly
steals “borrows” her neighbor’s car to take on the journey, because Piper McLean is, in traditional dnd terms, Big Chaotic Good.
While most of this is told from Apollo's perspective, which is marked by his relatively self-centered worldview that he's working through, it's clear that the call to action is met with more of a "sure, okay" than anything - Piper's not in it to save her dad from the bankruptcy that the villains have put him under, she knows it's too late for that. But she's on the one hand out for revenge against Caligula for what he's already done, and in part it's a matter of, well... she's used to being pulled into adventures to save the world. It's all her friends really seem to do. Moreover, now that she's comfortable being herself, she sees the adventure as an extension of her search for what exactly to do with herself, now that the first big quest is ended. Why not get on with another big life-changing field trip with a god, right? She might not hold a grudge against, say, Jason, but by god she's less forgiving of anyone who threatens her family or friends. Or, you know, the whole world. That too.
5. “Hm. Well, uh. Yeah,
[BIG BURNING MAZE SPOILERS IN THIS ONE, LADS].”
Okay so HEY, SOMETIMES YOUR EX WHO IT’S COMPLICATED WITH, UH. DIES? THAT’S NOT IDEAL! This is the most recent really big thing, and is going to inform a lot of how she acts in-game even if she won’t (probably, I’ve been in rp enough to learn how these things can go) spend a lot of time talking about it. But yeah, Caligula very recently killed Jason Grace, who even if not her boyfriend, she still described as her best friend. It hits her hard enough that she can’t even bring herself to help Apollo carry his body back to Camp Jupiter, though she does arrange and pay for the plane and hearse to get them there. Piper is very good at convincing others of things, and her being Fine(™) after this may well be her trying to convince others that she is. She’s definitely hurting more than she lets on, as indicated by the breakdown she has when talking to Leo about it, but she’s marked by her emotional intelligence by this point, so it’s hard to say she isn’t holding herself together for everyone else’s sake the rest of the time! But she definitely focuses in on her own journey, sadness or no sadness, like she’s been talking about for this whole adventure. Her family moves back to Oklahoma, and she’s mentioned as seeming like she knows her destiny is there. Unfortunately, Though, As You Know, The Character Intro Setup In Balance.
Link to Samples: Link to Sample 1;
Link to Sample 2;
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
