Percy Jackson and Social Injustice

The Global Giving page for Hurricane Helene relief!

I spent actual hours fighting the first dragon in Dragon Age: Inquisition last weekend; hopefully nothing will take me that long this weekend. I’m also on the fence about whether or not to see The Wild Robot in theaters when I can.

In a couple of weeks, I’ll be out for a bit, so we probably won’t get Saturday Notes. I’ll try to make it up to the three of you readers somehow or another.

Percy Jackson and Social Injustice

I have written before on my frustration with the depiction of the gods in Percy Jackson & the Olympians versus its sequel series Heroes of Olympus. In PJO, as the story goes on, it’s revealed that the main conflict is caused by the Olympian gods themselves: the reason Kronos and the Titans are able to become as powerful as they do is because of their demigod support. There are a ton of demigods, children of the deities, who are resentful and hurt because they are neglected by their divine parents, or because their godly parent is a minor deity that isn’t respected by the major gods and signs up with the Titans. The resolution of the series is our hero, Percy, making the gods swear on the River Styx to be better–to promise to be better to their children, and to the minor gods, and reform themselves so the baked-in problems that caused these conflicts don’t happen again. The gods themselves seem troubled, but there’s a very obvious note of hope that things could change for the better.

Then the sequel series, Heroes of Olympus, rolls around, as does the sequel series to that, Trials of Apollo, and dump all over that hope. The later books reveal that no, none of those fixes stuck. The gods haven’t changed. They’re terrible, they’ll always be terrible, their rule is unjust, and everyone has to get used to it, because that’s just how things are.

[I haven’t seen more than the first episode of the television series, but from what I can tell, it follows the same path.]

I don’t like this! It retroactively turns the ending to the original series, one of my favorite modern urban fantasy books, The Last Olympian, from something optimistic about how we can change the world for the better, into… well, not that. It becomes a naive, silly finale that only succeeds in passing the buck down the line, and not even for that long. Things will go bad again because the institutional problems are still there, and no one’s going to fix them.

What also troubles me is that I can kind of see how this came about; at least, I think I can. The first book in the original series, The Lightning Thief, came out in 2005 (I remember seeing it in the Scholastic book order sheets they sent home!). And years ago, in the early 21st century, the general feeling of everybody was pretty optimistic. It’s not that we didn’t think anything bad was happening in the world–we knew that. There were plenty of problems, and the original series even talks a bit about that. Racism, pollution, deforestation, war, and so on, were all problems the modern world had to deal with. But they could be fixed. There was this feeling that if people pulled together, we could save the environment, end wars, stop racist discrimination, hooray!

That is… not where we, as a society, are now. And it’s not hard to see why. It feels like every other week there’s a scandal about a famous person being a crook or a predator (this week it was Garth Brooks!). Predators often get through just fine, too, if they do a basic apology media tour and were popular enough to begin with. We still don’t run on clean energy, and now media is telling us that the climate disaster is unavoidable and going to kill us all; the recent killer hurricanes reinforce this notion. Racism is still clearly an issue, and it’s not going away!

I haven’t even gotten into some of the fun new stuff, like data harvesting on social media and AI replacing workers to create inferior products!

And all of this is constantly being shoved down our throats by a media that makes money off of showing us a world falling apart.

I remember going to EPCOT way back in the day, and there’s an environmental thing? With Timon and Pumba? Talking about pollution and stuff, and the video ends with being like, “But humans learned and fixed their ways!” It felt a bit silly then; it feels immensely so now.

Yeah, I get it; it feels very much like we’re trapped in systems that are designed to exploit us and get away with it, and there’s not much we can do to stop it. Riordan may have felt like it was dishonest to be like, “Hey kids! You can fix the world!” when he felt like they couldn’t. I don’t know.

But this? This doesn’t help things at all. The later books have so much of this pessimism sometimes, this whole, ‘The gods are terrible and will always make your life miserable.’ Yeah, okay, and that’s what we want our people to think as they grow up? Not just that the world is unfair and unjust, but that there’s no way to fix it? That we all need to get used to it because nothing we do will make any sort of difference? That we can fight demons both literal and figurative only to come out at the bottom of the totem pole every single time?

That’s the message we want to impart to kids?

No. 

Bump that noise. 

Yeah, the world sucks a lot at times. Yeah, there’s plenty wrong with it. But if we ever want things to get better, we’ve got to stop acting like it has to be that way, and the only we can survive is by keeping our heads down and hope not to make too much of a ruckus? EFF THAT. I get enough, “Nothing I do matters,” BS from inside my head all the time. I don’t need it from my fantasy authors.

This is a terrible way to paint the world for readers and we can do so much better.

[And the original series is so much better, thematically, than almost all that came afterward.]

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