| “ | I have taken my human form at last. The boy you once knew as Luke is now I, Kronos, Lord of the Titans. Come now before me, Percy Jackson. | „ |
| ~ Kronos declaring himself to Percy in The Last Olympian. |
| “ | Finally! The Olympian Council—so proud and mighty. Which seat of power shall I destroy first? | „ |
| ~ Kronos upon entering the throne room. |
Kronos is the main antagonist of the Percy Jackson book pentalogy.
He is the king of Titans and is known as the Lord of Time. He first came to power by overthrowing his father, the primordial sky god Ouranos, and cutting him to pieces, sometime before the creation of the first humans. He is also the father of the six eldest Olympian gods and goddesses. After being overthrown by his own childern and imprisoned in Tartarus, he attempts to regain power 5000 years later and return the world to the way it was during his original reign. To this end, he corrupts the once heroic Luke Castellan, and enlists him to be his new vessel until Kronos can regain his true divine form. His actions mark him as one of, if not the most deeply personal enemy Percy Jackson has ever faced.
His Evil Ranking[]
What Makes Him Close To Being Pure Evil?[]
Background[]
- After his mother, Gaea, lured his father, Ouranos, down to the earth (as Ouranos would lose power out of his domain),Kronos and four of his brothers ambushed their father, the brothers pinning Ouranos's physical manifestation to the ground to keep his consciousness from retreating back into his true body (the sky) while Kronos cut him to pieces with a scythe, scattering Ouranos' essence so thin that, even with his inability to die, he'll never be able to form consciousness again.
- While the deed itself is off-page, the aftermath is not, as it's the reason why Ouranos can no longer manifest in the world physically like Gaea can, and why Atlas must now hold up the sky on his shoulders since, in his words, "the sky still years to embrace the earth".
- Although Ouranos was a terrible father, having imprisoned his and Gaea's first two sets the children – the three Hekatonkheires and the three Elder Cyclopes – in the pit of Tartarus just for being ugly, and destroying him was done at Gaea's urging, Kronos still carried out the deed, not out of any care for his mother or his six eldest siblings, but just so he could take over the world for himself.
- As Gaea slept, Kronos, rather than freeing his six eldest siblings from Tartarus like Gaea wanted, instead left them to their fate and even hired the sadistic Kampê to keep them locked up. While in Kronos's employ, Kampê tortured them round the clock for thousands of years until they were rescued by Kronos's opposition.
- The lost-lasting effects of the torture are evident in The Battle of The Labyrinth Chapter 7, when our heroes meet a Hekatonkheire who's been recaptured for Kronos by a recently resurrected Kampê and is so terrified of her that he refuses to even free himself when given the chance.
- What makes this even worse is that The House of Hades establishes that Tartarus is a place of pain and suffering for gods and mortals, among others, designed to hurt them, with acid air, water of sadness and the ground made of broken glass. So just leaving them imprisoned in Tartarus would've been horrible enough even without hiring Kampê torture them there for all eternity.
- In Percy Jackson's Greek Gods, it is said that he did initially free the Hekatonkheires and Elder Cyclopes from Tartarus, but later had them re-imprisoned just because of their stench and the noises they made.
- His reign, the Golden Age, so named because he propagandized it as a time when humankind lived innocent and free of all knowledge, was actually, as stated by Chiron, "a time of darkness and savagery for mortals", as Kronos cared nothing for humankind except as "appetizers or a source of cheap entertainment", despite them being his nephew Prometheus's creations, and it was only after he was overthrown and Prometheus brought fire to mankind that the human species began to progress.
- In Percy Jackson's Greek Gods, it's stated that during the Golden Age, he would often go around the world and speed up the lives of random humans and animals, taking sadistic pleasure in watching them age and wither away.
- This isn't off-page villainy either, as it's the reason why Chiron and his students at Camp Half-Blood strive to prevent Kronos from reclaiming control of the world and starting a new Golden Age. When Luke outs himself as an agent of Kronos at the end of the first book, he says "[Kronos] will cast the Olympians into Tartarus and drive humanity back to their caves. All except the strongest — the ones who serve him".
- He ate five of his own children alive as newborns out of paranoia that they might overthrow him one day otherwise, despite his wife, Rhea, pleading with him to spare them, and then tried to eat their sixth child Zeus as well, only failing because his wife, Rhea, hid Zeus away and tricked Kronos into eating a stone swaddled in cloths instead.
- It wasn't until after Zeus grew into adulthood and infiltrated Kronos's palace as a cup-bearer, that he fed Kronos an emetic which made him disgorge his other five children, who, being immortal gods, had been living and growing up completely undigested in Kronos's stomach all those years, which was essentially a fate worse than death.
- For his savagery towards his own children, Kronos became known as "King Cannibal."
- This vile deed is immortalized in artwork, including a stele that Chiron shows Percy in The Lightning Thief while having Percy recount the entire story behind it.
- When his mistress, the nymph Philyra, abandoned their out-of-wedlock son, the centaur Chiron, on Mount Pelion at birth and left him to fend for himself, Kronos evidently did nothing about it, even though the newborn Chiron could have easily died as a result of this abandonment.
- The aftermath of this is evident in Camp Half-Blood Confidential, in which Chiron recounts how he spent the first couple centuries of his life alone in his cave on Mount Pelion until the god Apollo met and befriended him and gave him the idea of establishing a camp for training young demigods.
- After the gods overthrew him, cut him to pieces, and cast his remains into Tartarus, Kronos spent the next 5000 years occasionally entering mortals' nightmares and breathing evil thoughts into their minds in attempts to manipulate them into freeing him so could rise again.
Percy Jackson & the Olympians[]
- He manipulates the 19-year-old Luke Castellan – who is not only a lifelong friend and older brother figure of Annabeth's, but also a longtime member and hero of Chiron's demigod training camp, and one of the first friends the 12-year-old Percy makes upon arriving at said camp – to his cause by contacting Luke in his dreams and exploiting his growing resentment of the gods.
- He has Luke steal both Zeus's Master Bolt and Hades's Helmet of Darkness during a camp field trip to Olympus the winter before Percy's arrival at camp, frame Percy for both thefts, and set Percy up to die in Hades's domain, all in order a thee-way civil war of the gods that would ravage the mortal world and cause millions of deaths worldwide.
- When Luke is caught and defeated by Ares, Kronos manipulates Ares into helping Luke with his plan, which results in Ares nearly which resulted in Ares nearly getting Percy, Annabeth and Grover killed by Hades and Ares nearly killing Percy himself.
- He punishes Luke for his partial failure by torturing him with terrifying nightmares. This would also cause Luke to fear Kronos greatly for many of his later years.
- He has Luke poison Thalia's pine tree in order to weaken Camp Half-Blood's magical borders, allowing monsters to attack on an almost regular basis and putting all the demigods (mostly children and teenagers) in danger, and frame Chiron for the poisoning, causing him to be fired from the camp that had been his home for the past four thousand years.
- He and Luke keep dozens, if not hundreds, of mesmerized mortals, including elementary school-aged children, for show aboard their army's main transport ship, shrouded in Mist so they don't realize they're on a monster-infested boat. Within three years time, all the mortals are gone, and it is strongly implied by the narrative and speculated by Percy that they were all fed to the monsters aboard the ship once Kronos grew bored of them.
- Considering that the first time Percy and his friends snuck aboard the ship, Luke tried to feed to the Aethiopian Drakon in the cargo hold, his theory is well-founded.
- He manipulates many more demigods, including several of Percy and Annabeth's friends at Camp Half-Blood, into fighting for his side.
- He frees his top general Atlas by having Luke take the burden of the sky from Atlas and then trick Annabeth into taking the burden from Luke in turn after they capture her, then has Atlas kidnap the goddess Artemis and coerce her into taking the burden from Annabeth, intending to leave Artemis that way forever.
- His act of freeing Atlas and having Artemis kidnapped ultimately results in Artemis's lieutenant Zoë Nightshade being killed by Atlas when she, Thalia, and Percy come to rescue Artemis.
- He tasks Atlas with capturing the Ophiotaurus, and then has Luke try to manipulate Thalia into summoning and killing the Ophiotaurus and burning the latter's entrails in order to gain the power to destroy the gods, despite the fact that the Ophiotaurus is an innocent, peaceful creature who has only just recently been reborn after having preciously been killed by one of Kronos's allies during the First Titan War five thousand years earlier.
- After Atlas failed to capture Ophiotaurus and let Artemis escape, Kronos chooses not to free Atlas from the weight of the sky because he failed his duties.
- After pressuring Luke into reluctantly becoming his host body, Kronos subsumes Luke's personality with his own, while intending to eventually burn through Luke's body and regain his true divine form.
- This possession lasts for over a year, during which Luke is completely conscious but with no control of his own body, making this a fate worse than death.
- He orders an invasion of Camp Half-Blood using the Labyrinth, resulting in many campers and nature spirits dying defending their home, and Daedalus havimg to sacrifice himself to destroy the Labyrinth.
- Ambushed Percy and the latter's good friend and fellow camper, Charles Beckendorf, during a sabotage mission on his army's main transport ship, having learned of thier mission through Luke's coerced spy (and Beckendorf's girlfriend), Silena Beauregard. Beckendorf is killed by Kronos's forces after successfully setting the bombs, sacrificing himself so Percy can escape and the ship can be destroyed.
- Shortly after Beckendorf's death, Percy states that while the camp had already lost a lot of people over the summer, the loss of Beckendorf was the worst, and that with Beckendorf dead, it felt like someone had stolen the anchor for the entire camp.
- He had Oceanus engage in a year-long war with Poseidon to keep him occupied, severely weakening the sea god and getting thousands of mermen killed.
- He frees the storm giant, Typhon, and sends him on an 8-day rampage from Washington State to New York in order to occupy the gods while he attacks Olympus, resulting in 5 states being declared disaster zones within the first 2 days alone as Typhon destroys everything in his sight.
- He puts the whole of NYC's population of 10 million mortals under a mass sleeping spell that persists all through his 3-day invasion into Manhattan, even as fires spread all throughout the city due to sheer number of ovens thar are left on when the sleeping spell hits.
- During the battle, campers and their allies must drag sleeping mortals out of harm's way.
- He callously sacrifices several of his own demigod troops in order to gain an advantage while fighting Percy on the Williamsburg Bridge on the first night.
- He has Ethan Nakumura unleash the Drakon while the demigods are wounded, which results in the death of Silena Beauregard.
- When he meets Chiron, he mocks him and tells him to step aside, derisively calling him "son" as a way of insulting him.
- When he arrives at Olympus, he proceeds to destroy all of the architecture and statues of the Gods out of spite, and prepares to destroy all of the thrones of the Gods.
- When Ethan attacks him, he sends him plummeting to his death.
- His end goal was to imprison the gods in Tarturus and leave them there until humanity forgets about them, causing them to fade away. This was essentially an attempt at committing genocide.
What Prevents Him From Being Pure Evil?[]
- As undeniably heinous as his actions are, he fails to meet the massive heinous standards of the series compared to his mother, Gaea, who attempted omnicide as opposed to just genocide, and Loki, who attempted to destroy all of the Nine Realms by causing Ragnarok.
External Links[]
- Kronos on the Villains Wiki
- Kronos on the Riordan Wiki
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 Near Pure Evils
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