The Lightning Thief

Ares is the god of war. When Percy meets him, Ares takes the form of a larger-than-life biker, with a leather jacket, loud motorcycle, and dark sunglasses. When he removes his sunglasses, his eyes are infernos. Ares is menacing and intimidating; he frightens several mortals when he joins Percy, Annabeth, and Grover in a Denver diner. This is partly because, as a god, Ares naturally emanates power and danger, but it’s also because he’s a power-hungry and self-important individual. Though copping an attitude is a major risk for Percy to take, Ares fortunately finds Percy’s sass and attitude charming. Ares sends the trio on a brief quest to an abandoned waterpark to fetch his magical shield, which he forgot there after a date with Aphrodite. It’s clear that Ares knew about Hephaestus’s trick—installing cameras and filling the pool with mechanical spiders—and so he sent the kids on purpose to save himself the embarrassment. Though Ares follows through on his promise to secure the trio’s passage to Los Angeles in exchange for his shield, unbeknownst to Percy, Ares also plants a backpack that secretly contains Zeus’s thunderbolt with the trio. As Percy later discovers, this is because Ares is being controlled by Kronos and, on Kronos’s orders, is trying to incite war between Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades. There are a number of Ares’s children at Camp Half-Blood: they’re all hulking, loud, and violent.