“Was he suspicious? I don’t know. Remember, nobody in the history of the cosmos had been lured into an ambush and chopped to pieces before. He was going to be the first. Lucky guy.”

These lines describe the scene shortly before Kronos overthrows Ouranos. Gaia has invited Ouranos to a romantic dinner to lure him into her trap, and Percy makes this moment relevant to readers through the humor of the final line. In addition, this excerpt highlights the unique position of the primordial gods. As the first beings, they don’t have a history to learn from, which means that Ouranos can’t look back, realize that people have been tricked in this manner before, and act accordingly to either save himself or plan a counter deception. More broadly, this situation shows the power of letting the past inform the present and the weakness inherent in not learning from past mistakes.

“Now you’re going to ask, Okay, so, if the sky was killed, why do I look up and still see the sky?

Answer: I dunno.

My guess is that Kronos killed Ouranos’s physical form, so the sky god could no longer appear on the earth and claim kingship. They basically exiled him into the air. So he’s not dead, exactly, but now he can’t do anything but be the harmless dome over the world.”

This is one of many places where Percy anticipates a potential question from readers, declares that he doesn’t have the answer, and then speculates based on what he understands about Greek myth. Such interjections remind readers both that Percy, despite being a demigod, doesn’t have all the answers and also that the world of Greek myth is complex and, like the human world, imperfect. Percy’s speculation likewise points to how the myths may vary depending on who’s telling them. Since Percy’s