Nightmare Fuel / The Trials of Apollo

• Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, A.K.A. Emperor Nero. Dear freaking goodness. All it takes is to read the aforementioned Useful Notes page to know everything about him and why he deserves the spot of a Big Bad in a fictional fantasy series involving gods and demigods. He is probably the series' most terrifying villain to date, simply because of one particular thing: what he is. The previous villains were a titan, a primordial goddess, a personification of chaos, and a god of trickery. Nero, on the other hand, is a human.
  • Rhea notes that his being a human is much more hard to accept if he were a god or a titan, simply because our demigod heroes can relate to him better. Which, if one took account of previous series, is a very unfortunate truth. Do we care about the clash of gods, or demigods? Who heated up the impeding clash between Camp Half-Blood and Jupiter? Boy, did Nero deliver the warning, since he manages to exploit something that all humans have: trust. As in, having Meg pretend to befriend the newly-human Apollo.
  • The methods that Nero once used to persecute Christians: He beheaded them, fed them to dogs, and also tied them to crucifixes and burned them alive. The last part is particularly shocking since the series usually never delved deeper for details in the horrific things that real-world religious figures experience, and yet it did. Better yet, Nero is going to do all these to teenagers.
    • And what's more shocking is that these crimes are all not worthy of spoiler-content; the freaking Roman Catholic Church officially endorsed these theories, whatever doubtful they might be, as they are part of the stories of the martyrdom of Saints Paul and Peter. Yes, as in, the first Pope.
    • Here's one more surprise: Nero is the likeliest subject of what the The Book of Revelation called The Antichrist. There's no more horror than that. That's where his moniker, The Beast actually comes from. Even the Number of the Beast itself, when decrypted, spells out Nero.
  • What Nero did to his adoptive daughter, Meg is a textbook example of More than Mind Control. He is the one who killed Meg's father, and yet he is also the one who raised and trained her. Such contrary actions obviously made Meg think that she should keep the "good side" at all times by serving his interests so as to keep "the Beast" from emerging. Eventually, Meg was led to think that these two sides are different figures and began referring to them as such. You know what's even more horrifying? It's a real emotional abuse method called gaslighting A.K.A. Why Did You Make Me Hit You?.
    • If this isn't bad enough, the next book reveals that he has been doing this to Meg since she was five-years-old. And blamed her for the death of her father (who he killed) when she was six. Since Meg is twelve-years-old at the beginning of the series, this means that she has been abused like this for over half her life.
    • Apollo mentally comments on this:
      I didn't know how Nero had managed to imprison the grain spirit [Peaches], but I understood why he'd done it. Nero wanted Meg to depend entirely on him. She wasn't allowed to have her own possessions, her own friends. Everything in her life had to be tainted with Nero's poison. If he got his hands on me, no doubt he would use me the same way. Whatever horrible tortures he had planned for Lester Papadopoulos, they wouldn't be as bad as the way he tortured Meg. He would make her feel responsible for my pain and death.
    • The fact that Nero had 'adopted' eleven other demigods, some as young as eight, and raised them like he raised Meg. Apollo comments on the symbolism in the finale:
      Apollo (narrating): [Meg] would be the twelfth, I realized. Twelve foster children to Nero, like the twelve Olympians. That couldn't be a coincidence. Nero was raising them as young gods-in-training to take over his nightmarish new world. That made Nero the new Kronos, the all-powerful father who could either shower his children with blessings or devour them as he wished. I had badly underestimated Nero's megalomania.
  • Nero has amassed followers and wealth and is trying to build fortunes by taking over all the oracles so he would become the loved object of veneration. In other words, he is motivated by Greed. A sin far too many people in real life have fallen into.
  • Nero enslaving dryads.
    Apollo (narrating): Nero shooed her away. Areca hurried to the side of the room and stood by one of the potted plants, which was... Oh, of course. My heart thumped with sympathetic pain. Areca was standing by an areca palm, her life force. The emporor had decorated his throne room with the enslaved: potted dryads.
    • And by enslaved, we mean it. When a dryad hesitated to attack Apollo on Nero's orders...
      Apollo (narrating): A fiddle-leaf fig was hanging back, perhaps waiting for her turn to get me, or just hoping she wouldn't get noticed. Her demigod keeper noticed, though. He lowered his torch and the fig tree went up in flames as if it had been doused with oil. The dryad screamed and combusted, collapsing in a heap of ash.
• While most of Apollo's complaints about how Being Human Sucks are Played for Comedy, he does occasionally realize just how horrifying it is to be a puny mortal stuck in a world of Jerkass Gods.
  • Furthermore, he's been turned mortal twice beforehand, so this is nothing new for him. Whose to say his Character Development will stick once he becomes a god again?
  • Even more horrifying is that the idea that Apollo might have been much worse than he currently is prior to being turned mortal the first time.
• Though perhaps not as sly or as manipulative as Nero may be, Commodus is still a nasty piece of work on his own. Whereas Nero can hide his cruelty and bloodlust behind a veneer of civility, or pass it off as some alternate persona of his, Commodus seems to flip back and forth between an impatient man child and a raving madman at the slightest provocation. Everyone working under him has to deal with the fact that even slightly displeasing or disappointing him can be grounds for him ordering another underling to kill them and take their post. He captures humans (mortal and demigod) and magical animals and forces them to fight in gladiatorial combat for his amusement, and will even join in the fight to slaughter them himself if he feels like it. And that's not even getting started on the beef he has with Apollo.
• The Oracle of Trophonius is this in-universe. An applicant first has to drink from two springs, Lethe (Forgetfulness) and Mnemosyne (Memory), to prepare the mind, before they suffer "untold horrors".
• The third emperor is Emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus. In other words, Caligula. As in, THE Caligula.
• The Burning Maze is the leftover essence of Helios. Worse, Medea plans to flay Apollo alive to add his immortal essence to the mix so that Caligula can be become the new sun god.
• How Apollo explains how he became a Sun God: he just woke up one day with the powers of one, and Helios was nowhere to be found. Only his stuff was left. No warning, no expecting that to happen, one day he's there, one day he's not and Apollo's the Sun God.
• How Caligula and Commodus make clear their intention and cruelty to Camp Jupiter during the battle: Riding into battle on chariots pulled by wingless pegasi - as in Pegasi whose wings were cut off, chained and used as little more than beasts of burden.
• Three words: zombies in sewers. Tarquin had a whole army of them ready to burst from the ground and overrun the city after finding the Sibylline books. Fortunately, Diana arrived just in time to assist Reyna and Lavinia to destroy the army before it could do anything
• The evil cattle in Tower of Nero. They are completely invulnerable, except if dropped down a pit. While this may seem comical, the only reason they die then is because they get so angry that they literally choke on their rage. To make matters worse, they are far smarter than normal cattle, to the point where most of them stop upon noticing a large pit, realizing that Apollo and the others are trying to lead them into a trap. While some of them do fall into said pit, this was only because they were going too fast to stop in time.
• At the end of The Tower of Nero, Chiron reveals that he's met with Bast and Mimir, "acquaintances of [his] from other pantheons". While this is amazing for fans of Riordan's works, Chiron states that they were discussing "a mutual problem", which Chiron states Apollo doesn't want to know the specifics of. Keep in mind, the Second Titan War, the Second Giant War and rise of Gaea, the Great Imperial War, the rise of Apophis, and Ragnarok threatened the entire world, yet only the pantheons directly tied to those crises got involved. This "mutual problem", by necessitating the collaboration of three pantheons, is even more destructive than all of those.
• The Bunker 9 chapter from Camp Half-Blood Confidential: the opening narration talks about Bunker 9 and its amazing treasures, before talking about something bad hidden in one shadowy corner. The story then opens with several demigods are sitting around one night, talking about curses their cabins have placed on others, like the rhyming curse from The Last Olympian. One Hephaestus camper is challenged to tell the others about her cabin's curse, and she retrieves an old diary she found hidden under her bunk, and the time immediately shifts to a ghost story. The diary tells the story of a daughter of Hephaestus (Heloise) who met a son of Aphrodite (James) while designing a Greek fire-powered car in the 1940s. The two become close while working on and testing the car, and it seems a romance may blossom. Then, on the Fourth of July, Heloise finds James with a daughter of Ares. The next few entries state the car was destroyed and Heloise and James broke up. The diary's last entry states that Heloise is now working on a new project, codenamed "Harmonia's Necklace". The demigods discuss the last entry, with the daughter of Hephaestus who brought out the diary stating that Harmonia was the daughter of Ares and Aphrodite, and Hephaestus made her a necklace that cursed her with lifelong misery, as well as anybody else who wore the necklace. The demigods theorize that Heloise created something similar, hence her project's codename. The story's twist then revealed: James, the son of Aphrodite, was James Dean, who died young in a car crash. The daughter of Hephaestus then lists that other people who came in contact with the wreck also had bad luck, and that the car disappeared in 1959. She then states it's hidden in Bunker 9. The scariest part? Aside from the mythology parts, everything that happened with James Dean's Porsche is completely true.

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