PJO Magazine Edition #5: April 2019

Article #2: Jason's Death

There's a question that many of us asked when we got to that fateful part of The Burning Maze, or accidentally read a spoiler off the Internet: why did Jason die? But this question is usually asked rhetorically out of frustration and sorrow. I'm here to logically explain why Rick made this decision, but more broadly, why it was a main character that he killed off.

So it's book three in a five-book series, yet a major character has already met his end. What the heck. Doesn't this mean that even more devastating deaths are to come?...Well, possibly.

Anyway, like Rick did with Zoë and Bianca in book three of Percy Jackson and The Olympians, he is trying to raise the stakes, especially after the amount of deaths was relatively low in Heroes of Olympus. Don't believe me?

In the original series, there was a huge number of sad losses: Silena, Beckendorf, Luke, Bianca, Zoë, Michael, Pan...and then comes the second series.

In The Lost Hero, Jason is brought back from sure demise with Piper's charmspeak. Hazel gets a second chance at life and doesn't have to return to the Underworld despite having completed her role in the Great Prophecy. Leo dies in an explosion but comes back with the help of a pre-prepared potion. Jason was even stabbed in the back in the last book, yet survives and can later fight as well as ever.

And so death was made into something that could be cheated or easily avoided. The second series effectively wiped the message of the first series, where death is serious and permanent, happens to anyone, and should not be meddled with by bringing someone back.

I think Rick tried to make up for it by killing off many Hunters and Amazons, but...we didn't know them. If Thalia or Hylla had been one of the deaths, then perhaps it would have had more impact, but since so many were nameless or had minor roles, and they were also off-screen and so quick, we just don't care as much.

In that series, the deaths with the most impact were probably Festus, Bob, and Damasen. But Festus is rebuilt, and Bob and Damasen will just regenerate again in Tartarus, this time with each other as companions (plus Small Bob).

Then Rick starts a third series, where the enemies are even more powerful. Lester thinks to himself that "The Triumvirate might well have orchestrated all our previous troubles with the Titans and giants, which would make them more powerful than anything Leo had ever faced."

So killing off Jason, even stabbing him twice to dispel any lingering hope, is Rick's way of raising the stakes higher than ever and forcing readers to think of death the way it really is - permanent, indiscriminate, and sometimes really, really, sudden.

By ClaireValdez