During the last Christmas holidays, one of the most discussed topics among my friends – the book lovers that we are – was the long-awaited release of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series on Disney+. Although I have personally refrained from purchasing a Disney+ subscription, I have often come across and enjoyed reading insightful rants about the show’s casting, pacing, and dialogue while browsing Reddit. Even today, watching terms like “Master Bolt” and “Aunty Em’s Garden Emporium” resurface online brings to mind heated debates over the superiority of Harry Potter AGAINST Percy Jackson every English class, begging my parents to give me a baseball cap (ideally with magical invisibility capabilities) on World Book Day, and hours spent studying every Riordanverse book possible, until Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard: Ship of the Dead (by the time Trials of Apollo I went out, I was busy with college). Uncle Rick’s eponymous green-eyed son of Poseidon was a staple of my early teenage years. And like Disney+ announces the return of the series for a season 2 in my early twenties, I thought it would be timely to look back at the beloved franchise and reflect on the factors that led to its enduring appeal, as well as some aspects of it that I learned to question or hate as we got older.
Ask everyone who reads Percy Jackson when they were kids, and at least half of them will probably tell you that Riordan’s books piqued their interest in Greek mythology. This is especially true for children from non-Western backgrounds, like me; Growing up in East Asia, I didn’t have access to a classical education in school, so stumbling upon the ancient world of demigods and monsters that Riordan transposes into today’s America Today was one of the greatest discoveries of my youth. Setting up Mount Olympus on New York’s Empire State Building and writing with a decidedly sassy style filled with pop culture references, Riordan is able to channel the knowledge and worldview of alien mythology into concrete environments and familiar to its young readers. As a result, Greek mythology and its characters become accessible and endearing; Percy and his friends win our hearts with their complaints about homework and absent (pious) parents. Interestingly, this capitalizes precisely on one of the major attractions of the Greek pantheon: the resemblance of the emotions or behavior of its deities to those of humans is often extolled in the broader modern discourse on classical mythology. Compared to the followers of the Abrahamic regions, the Greeks did not elevate their deities to perfect, untouchable figures, instead allowing them to embody a range of relatable human traits. Riordan’s books perhaps intentionally retain and amplify this strength of his sources, resulting in demigods, gods, and satyrs who may have stayed with us all these years.
Furthermore, watching the series with an age-clarified worldview, it’s easy to see that Riordan isn’t transposing ancient Greek civilization into the 21st century purely for accessibility’s sake; it also draws important comparisons that illuminate the state of our modern world. As soon as The Lightning Thiefwe see the Lotus Eater episode of The Odyssey used to create a commentary on the tranquilizing dangers of gambling, pleasure and addiction as Percy, Grover Underwood and Annabeth Chase find themselves trapped in a casino – a connection that actually mirrors that made by James Joyce himself. No matter what we might think Percy Jacksonthe literary merits of Ulysses», Riordan’s work clearly goes beyond denunciation young readers on the classical tradition to promote analysis and critical reflection, encouraging its audiences to identify issues that have long plagued humanity and reflect on their own societal environment.
Yet this movement from ancient Greece to modern America, which is Riordan’s greatest strength, is also one of the issues his critics criticize most. The stories of classical mythology are inherently unstable, passed down primarily through oral tradition and finding their way into the pages of our time in many different versions. Modern interpretations and adaptations of these tales, such as that of Madeline Miller The song of Achilles and that of Pat Barker The silence of the girls, essentially participate in a larger tradition of broken threads, constantly exchanged and re-intertwined; The stories of each of these authors expand the ways in which we can conceptualize and interpret classical myth.
By also participating in this reworking of the mythological narrative, Riordan is not doing something fundamentally problematic. What I take issue with is his public assertion that Greek mythology is “part of the collective heritage (of the Western world)”as if these myths were not specifically created by and did not support specific cultural significance for the communities that lived real, breathing lives in a small part of southern Europe. Of course, I myself am neither Greek, nor even Western, for that matter. However, from my perspective, no matter how widely a culture’s myths and literature are disseminated, and no matter how much that culture has influenced the overall development of “Western Civilization”, those who can claim this heritage are above all the descendants of the communities of this culture, in its country of origin. Although genetic continuity between ancient and modern Greeks is highly debated, it is undeniable that there is a modern Greek nation, with concrete architecture and objects demonstrating its historical and cultural heritage. Engaging with, and even reinterpreting, their cultural material as citizens of other nations is entirely acceptable. But qualifying their heritage as “collective”, especially in a society where the sculptures of the Parthenon himself are exhibited at the British Museum, with no plans to repatriate to Greeceseems to me to be an incredibly legitimate decision.
I’m incredibly aware that this “collective heritage” statement is just a small section of the Q&A on his website, and perhaps shouldn’t be amplified so much. However, if we consider the Percy Jackson the series itself further, particularly With the stories focusing on modern America, such an attitude might become more evident, if not more problematic. In The Lightning Thief, Chiron asserts that America is currently the “heart of the flame” of Western power, and therefore the logical and default heir of Greek civilization. Although this seemingly innocently justifies the novel’s introduction of Greek elements in America, critics (here, here) have often pointed out how much this statement actually reeks of American exceptionalism, or American chauvinism. Like McDaniel points outstating that the remnants of Greek civilization historically moved to different countries and eventually ended up in the United States, Percy Jackson and the Olympians depicts the current “entire Greek heritage as a uniquely American possession” – not Western, nor shared even with Greece itself, but solely and exclusively American. This therefore complicates Riordan’s claim to a “collective heritage”: while he magnifies, on his website, the culture inherited from the Greek people into a culture shared by the entire global West, the real intrigues of his novels further reclaim this culture as culture. uniquely American heritage, and explicitly appropriate the myths of another nation to build this narrative of supremacy for his own.
To be clearer, I don’t think it’s a question of whether America is, in fact, the most powerful country in Western civilization in the current century. You may consider America’s status as a widely accepted fact. I certainly grew up idealizing the country, constantly dreaming of moving to New York from my own hometown and enrolling in an American boarding school. Whether or not should whether this is the case is a whole other debate. The problem here is that Percy Jackson, along with the plethora of U.S.-centric media that most non-U.S. citizens are bombarded with from an early age, play no small role in creating this sort of venerable daydream. And Percy Jackson specifically uses the history, culture, and myths of another country to organize its narrative of American supremacy, a narrative that all readers – local and international – are called to believe. Riordan not only “made Greek mythology cool,” as is often said; he also made America, through its affirmed link with Greek heritageundeniably cool, and it’s something that should be questioned more frequently and critically by fans and casual viewers alike.
The featured image: Rhododenndrites on Wikimedia Commons
