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Weird around the midsection and then bottom half is like a thousand snakes for a butt.

It's always snakes. It's always snakes. Yeah. Ancient Greece love putting snakes on people's

butts. What's good?

Thank you so much for tuning in to another episode of The Newst Olympian.

My name is Mike Schubert.

I'm the titular newest Olympian.

I'm a 30-year-old man who never read the Percy Jackson books as a kid, but I'm reading them now for the first time as an adult because I'm on a quest to determine if this is a book series that we've all been sleeping on. I'm not on this quest alone, though. I am joined today by a very special guest. It is Redd from overly sarcastic productions, who you might know from YouTube, Red. How's it going? Hello, things are going pretty good. I'm excited to talk about this book series because

they held a special place in my heart when I was but a young teen. Then I sort of fell off the wagon and now revisiting it again. I'm like, oh no, I was on to something with these. These were good. They're very good. I would love to get right into it. How did you come across the books? What was your story of becoming a fan of the series, etc.? Yeah, I wish I could remember the first place I ran into the books because I feel like it was either like a middle school book fair, like very late middle school, or like early high school in the library or something like that because it was one of those things where I don't even remember how I got them because I clicked with them so hard. They were so fun. You know what? We can pinpoint the year. I don't have it on hand. But when I got into it, there were only the first three books out, I want to say. So that'd be like 2008, 2007-ish? I guess I was like really little. like 11. But you know what?

I actually think that possibly I got the Titans Curse when it dropped because I had assumed the series was a trilogy. And when the Titans Curse ended on such an open-ended thing, I was like, wait, there's going to be more? I was hooked. I had it bad. Oh, cool. And before I read the Percy Jackson books, I, you know, I was that kid. I had the Dolores book of Greek myths.

Classic, classic.

I thought it was so fun, so cool. And I tried and failed to read some of it because I was a kid, so it was really boring. Then the funny thing is in the middle of this is when the channel that I made sort of started building up. And it wasn't initially at all about myths,

but it sort of drifted to being about that. And for a while, there was a running gag with my

audience that I didn't like these books because of a quip I had in a video. It was the Iliad

video, actually, because the translation that I had, it was one of the tellings where they assigned the Roman names to all the Greek gods. What had just happened is they just started putting out the Percy Jackson, like, sequel series. Yeah, the Heroes of Olympus books. Heroes of Olympus, exactly, where it's about the Roman gods. And there's like specific plot points about how, oh, you think these are just like the Greek gods, but there's actually key differences, like they're different personalities. And I was like, this is so confusing. So I had like a one-liner. I was like, this is more confusing than those stupid Percy Jackson books. And everyone got on my ass about it. And I was like, no, guys, it's loving. I like these books. That's why I'm complaining about them. Wait. So fortunately, that died down because I was like, no, I really do. I really do like these books. But for a while, anytime we did a Q&A, people would be like, what does read Hav against the Pris Jackson books? I'm like, nothing. I swear. Oh, that's great. It's something that I think is a disconnect that sometimes people don't understand. I ran into this when I was covering the Harry Potter books for Potterless.

When you criticize a series like this, especially if it's in the aura of wanting them to be better,

it's because you like them.

...