Thanks to Omega Alpha Hydra, Equinoxes, SilverSeaweedBrains and PlutoGenesis for their reviews :) I was originally going to end my argument last chapter but someone sent in an idea, which is written and waiting to go, and while looking up whether anyone else (like Hazel or Frank) was hated in case I needed to defend them too, I came across some more hate points and decided that I absolutely had to continue my defence of Piper. So…enjoy and have a very Merry Christmas, all of you!
4. Piper is so conceited and self-absorbed and stuck-up! And she's, like, so shallow – she only cares about how she looks!
Incidentally, the conceited point came from a debate on the Camp Half-Blood wiki about whether Piper or Hazel would win in a fight and someone said, and I quote, 'Hazel wins because: She is not a self-centred idiot', so I added the rest on because I have seen it before (stuck-up, shallow, etc.). I honestly feel as though this person does not have a good grasp of Piper's character because Piper is anything but self-centred. Yes, she does have her selfish moments of focusing only on Jason or herself, but she's human (half). Percy had his moments of focusing only on Annabeth; heck, TC was practically him worried sick about Annabeth and pretty much only thinking about wanting to save her! And yet he gets no hate because his name is not Piper McLean and his mother is not Aphrodite.
And when has Piper ever been conceited and stuck-up? If anything, she's the opposite. She's suffered from low self-esteem throughout the entire series because a) Her father never paid her much attention and she desperately wanted a father who would love her like a father should and b) She already does feel weak from being a child of Aphrodite! Many times it has been stated that Piper hates feeling useless and helpless, such as when they were cornered by the werewolves in TLH and she was injured, and she hated having to rely on other people to protect her!
And how is Piper shallow? Yes, she does care about her looks (in the opposite way that most girls do) but it's not as though it's all she ever thinks about. She cares about Jason, Leo (who she ran to hug when she thought he'd fallen out of the ship and who she considers a best friend), Percy, Annabeth, Hazel, Frank and so on. She cares about stopping Gaea from rising and about saving the world. She cares about making herself a better fighter so that she can contribute in ways other than just her powers and so that she can defend herself. In fact, this one quote shuts this argument down nicely:
"Aphrodite is about love and beauty. Being loving. Spreading beauty. Good friends. Good times. Good deeds. Not just looking good."
Do you see that? 'Not just looking good'. If Piper was shallow then she would be like Drew and only care about how she looks and how this can work to her advantage. She recognises that Aphrodite is not just about romantic love and beauty but about all forms of love: romantic, platonic, familial, etc. Beauty isn't everything and love doesn't have to be just romantic. How is that shallow? If anything, that's quite deep.
That's all I'm going to say on this point because otherwise I'll just feel like I'm trying to hammer everything in and annoy people. Tune in next time for point five!
~ Puffy