ok so i already touched on what i think octavian’s parents are like. so. hear me out. octavian was an accidental pregnancy and his parents decided to keep him because they had the money to just hand him off to someone else who had the time to take care of him, and it would be a bad look if they got rid of him. so octavian would have spent much of his formative years with a nanny, and his little amount of time with his parents would probably just consist of them ignoring him or being overly critical with him when he messes up due to being concerned about their image. of course, when they eventually send him to the legion, he is very cautious about what he says and does due to not wanting to tarnish their reputation. this backfires on him because people start thinking he’s a phony due to not saying anything he thinks would be “wrong,” leading to people not knowing his views on anything out of his fear of disappointing his family. he eventually decides to just go with whatever views he thinks are popular to avoid that scrutiny. it doesn’t exactly work as well as he hoped it would but whatever it’s better than when people just didn’t know anything about his beliefs. he becomes a good speaker to sort of deflect the ever-present scrutiny people feel towards him, and eventually, people are more comfortable with him. he tries aiming higher, having ideas for things that could truly help camp jupiter as a whole, and is eventually made augur due to the whole prophetic stuff blah blah blah i’ll add to this later, but that isn’t enough. he feels unaccomplished due to not being in a position where he can implement his ideas, so he aims to become praetor so he can really get to work. unfortunately he loses the single election he’s in (loses to a character i made up to be the praetor with reyna but before jason was praetor, said character doesn’t matter here though) and doesn’t get another chance because the next few praetors are not chosen through elections (i imagine reyna might have been raised on a shield or whatever, jason was raised on a shield, percy was raised on a shield, and jason forfeited his rank to frank so octavian never gets another chance). of course, he gets bitter due to his failure. he feels like he’s a disappointment for not becoming praetor, and he gets biting criticism from his family. this drives him to use his words as a means for authority, focusing a lot more on his wording and tone than ever before to gain trust. he really does want to improve the legion, he just can’t. he’s not in a position to implement things he passionately believes will help, and he’s not exactly in a good mental state either. he definitely has some sort of untreated mental illness that leads to him not exactly being trusted due to acting “off” to many people. he doesn’t know he has that, he just thinks everyone else is overly critical, and all he wants is to improve things. he is ruining his relationships due to that and people see him as power-hungry. he is not happy. someone hug him. uh idk what else to type so i guess this is it
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