This series, Trials of Apollo? Has, ultimately, been centered firmly around APOLLO’S personal journey, his character development throughout his time as a mortal, with him slowly coming to terms with the problems in the world he’s been ignoring, the issues within himself he’s been pushing down, who he is, and who he wants to be.
The Hidden Oracle: Apollo starts at least thinking about his issues, from how much his kids deserve a better father than him, admitting to himself that Zeus abused him, to realizing, to beginning to accept that the lives of the beings around him, from the dryads to the demigods, had far greater worth than he’d treated them as having.
The Dark Prophecy: Mostly just deepening the lessons he started learning in THO, especially with him Taking a Level in Kindness with respect to helping save Lit and deciding that he would in fact be willing to die for Meg. This is also the book where his arrogance mostly fizzled out.
The Burning Maze: Now THIS book, this was a MAJOR turning point. In the previous two books he saw the problems and issues both with himself and with the culture he’d been apart of, with callously abandoning demigods and mortals, treating them as expendable and lesser. The Burning Maze hammers in that Apollo needs to remember these lessons, with Jason telling him to “Remember what it’s like to be human”. It cements Apollo’s desire to change.
The Tyrant’s Tomb: I’d say this book’s main claim to fame is really hammering in how Apollo himself has screwed over and mistreated people in the past. While previous books emphasized how his inaction and uncaring approach, with just standing by while terrible things happened and not caring unless he was personally involved, led to him just accepting a lot of tragedies happening around him that he was somewhat complicit in and could have reasonably stopped or made better, this book… this book was different.
This time, Apollo’s confronted with how he screwed over the Cumaen Sibyl, ordered for one of his girlfriends to be murdered for cheating on him, cursed crows and blamed THEM for telling him about the affair, and bullied Harpocrates pretty horribly. This wasn’t just him being callous or uncaring; he was the main one responsible. Here, he really confronted that in some ways, he hadn’t always been that different from the Emperors themselves, at least in the eyes of those he hurt.
He’d been trending away from wanting to forget and just move on with his life after this experience for awhile, but having his worst actions thrown back in his face like that, now that he had the perspective to understand how bad the things he’d done really were? Made sure that he did NOT want to be that person again, while also emphasizing how much he WASN’T the person who’d done those things anymore.
The Tower of Nero: His main changing is done. Meg’s character development, her plotline, receives a lot more attention this book than in… probably any previous book honestly, with her whole situation with how she deals with Nero, with being within her abuser’s grip again, being addressed in a lot of detail. Apollo makes direct comparisons between her situation, with needing to go back and confront her abuser while trying to stop from falling in line, from succumbing to their emotional and mental abuse, and his own, with him wanting to retain who he is now and not to regress into who he was, into who he was shaped into by the toxic environment on Mount Olympus and by Zeus more specifically. Abuse, how it works psychologically, and how to try to break free from it, receives a LOT of attention this book, having been touched on in previous entries but in far less detail.
It also emphasizes identity a lot, with Apollo trying to figure out who he is and who he wants to be. Not so much as in actually questioning what principles he should adhere to in the future - previous books locked that down pretty well - but more in coming to terms with who he’d become and not wanting to lose himself, to lose this version of himself, once he regained his godhood, and being afraid that he would if he returned to Mount Olympus’s abusive environment once more.
In Conclusion: I REALLY enjoyed the whole book series from start to finish and think it did an excellent job developing Apollo’s character, with each book emphasizing different stages along the way, but with other facets of his development running along in the background. It happens gradually enough, with the catalysts of his changes and realizations made clear enough, that it all feels like a natural course of development, even with as drastically as he changed.
Trials of Apollo is in my mind, one of the best character development-focused stories out there and is absolutely worth a read, especially for anyone who likes redemption arcs.
