They let me out of work early on Friday due to winter weather!
I am presently reading The Quiet Damage, which is about QAnon–or rather, the damage it does to families when people go down that path and become obsessed with its conspiracy theories. It’s interesting, and weirdly made me… not as depressed this week? Like, yeah, I feel a bit aimless in life, but at least I don’t find myself so lost that I think we have to depend on Donald Trump to save the world.
Anyhow! That has nothing to do with today’s Saturday Note. I had this idea a few weeks back, after watching a review and going down a (non-conspiracy) rabbit hole on Rick Riordan’s last book (Wrath of the Triple Goddess).
Rick Riordan Cannot Build and Maintain a Fictional World
Some background, before we start: Rick Riordan is the author of the wildly popular Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, and all of its sequel serieses and spin-offs. The original series is about a pre-teen in modern day New York City named Perseus “Percy” Jackson who discovers that he’s a modern day demigod, the son of Poseidon, and there’s a bunch of mythological monsters out to kill him. The Plot slowly goes into a war between the Olympian gods and their predecessors, the Titans, who are back and want their cosmos back. Being a series aimed at middle schoolers, our protagonist (who also narrates in first-person) is very funny in his descriptions of his adventures.
The sequel series, Heroes of Olympus, expands the core cast to nine viewpoint characters, and depicts a revival of a different set of the gods’ enemies: the giants, the children of Gaia. There’s a sequel series to that, titled Trials of Apollo, which goes back to a single viewpoint character, this time Apollo, having been turned mortal as punishment by his father, Zeus. That series was touted as, for the time, the final set of full adventures in this setting.
[“The fall of the Sun, the final verse.”]
The door was shut on the series. Ish. Riordan admitted he wasn’t opposed to coming back, but that he wanted to put a pause on it for now, and that was as good a place as any to end it. In total, that means there are fifteen full novels in the sequence.
Then he released The Sun and the Star with co-writer Mark Oshiro, centered around one of the recurring characters and his boyfriend.
With the then-upcoming release of the Disney+ adaptation, Riordan announced that he was going to release three more Percy Jackson books. He had pitched them to Disney as a way to raise hype for the streaming series. They were not full adventures, just in-between-quels (between Heroes of Olympus and Trials of Apollo) about Percy going to a demigod college, and how he needs three letters of recommendations from gods. Which means he’s running errands for different minor deities to secure letters.
I haven’t read the two released books in this trilogy; look, going from Plots about saving the world to doing inane tasks for people, in books straightforwardly admitted to be part of an advertising strategy for a series I do not have the means to watch… yeah, no. Pass. Watching and reading reviews, though, made me think I made the right decision. Because many readers complained about character inconsistencies, weird things in the worldbuilding that don’t add up, and weird mistakes. One character who is assumed dead at this point of the timeline (again, in-between-quel) is apparently tutoring Percy in Spanish. Annabeth is happy to throw a party in a house they’re taking care of for an absent goddess, and throws up fake cobwebs, despite being deathly afraid of spiders. And Percy, who has faced down gods, giants, and the primordial deity personification of Tartarus (y’know, HELL), wets himself at the sight of a minor goddess.
Also, apparently there are a lot of peeing jokes?
Anyway, this leads me to a thesis: Rick Riordan can tell a story. He cannot build and maintain a world, especially for an extended period of time.
There are inconsistencies in the original series; this is well-known. Blackjack is introduced as a mare, but when the character appears in the next book, the horse is male. Riordan’s apologized for it and handwaved it as, “Percy didn’t get a good look at the horse.” Fine. But problems run deeper than that. We’re told, halfway through the original series, that Percy’s fatal flaw (every Greek hero has one, we’re told) is that he’s too loyal. Okay, that sounds like something you say in a job interview, but in theory it’s not too bad: he refuses to let go of his loved ones, even if the world required him to do so. He would burn the world if it saved his friends.
Except A), that never becomes an actual thing that hinders the Plot and B), the entire climax of the first novel in the series has him overcoming that flaw, putting the needs of the world over saving someone he loves.
Characters seem to change basic characteristics at times when he thinks it needs to for the story. Annabeth is apparently described in the newest book as being such a People Person, which she never was before. If anything, she was difficult for most people to get along with because of her forwardness and pride (her fatal flaw). Percy is depicted as being kind of dumb muscle, when in the original books he was remarkably clever. Grover’s also apparently different from how he used to be?
Riordan even at one point got the names of Nico’s mother and sister mixed up in the novel he co-wrote with Oshiro.
Some have chalked this up to Riordan mixing up his book versions of the characters with his literary ones. I don’t know if that’s true, but he did work on the show, so I suppose that it’s possible.
And whenever Riordan expands the world, it shows something that obviously doesn’t really add up. The original series wasn’t too bad, in this regard, but you cannot tell me that the Labyrinth feels like an organic part of the worldbuilding, rather than something he made up to make a Plot. But you know what? Fine. We’ll allow it. Then the sequel series makes it worse, by adding a completely different faction of demigods we’ve never heard of, and keeps telling us they’ve been doing stuff, but looking at the world as it’s already been shown, it doesn’t make sense.
The history of demigods is a mess, too. We’re told that the Olympian gods always move around with the “Heart of Western Civilization,” or the most culturally powerful country in the West. The third series explains that the gods moved to the United States in the 1860’s–except in that time, the US was far from the most powerful Western country, that would have been the UK (“The Sun never sets on the British Empire”, anyone?).
Then there’s a throwaway line in Trials of Apollo that explains that the reason demigods don’t use firearms is because magic somehow messes with the effectiveness of gunpowder. This is despite us seeing Celestial Bronze firearms in past books for scenes. Annabeth’s dad uses Celestial Bronze bullets in Titan’s Curse, and Annabeth shows off a magic shotgun in The Lost Hero.
[This explanation, I should add, is ripped from Mortal Instruments by Cassandra Clare, who Riordan knows personally, and has dedicated a book to.]
The real answer, of course, is that in a book aimed at middle schoolers, Riordan needed some in-universe reason as to why our warrior characters aren’t packing modern firearms, which would be immensely helpful against monsters coming at you with swords. That, and he was probably tired of answering the question. Answering, “This is a series for kids, I don’t want too many guns in it,” probably wouldn’t feel satisfying to the audience.
A lot of these things, on their own, wouldn’t be that big a deal. But when you start compiling them, especially over the course of over a dozen books, with an audience as invested as this series has… well, then there’s a problem. Characters aren’t acting consistent from one installment to another, the worldbuilding isn’t adding up. Again, in individual installments, it’s not an issue, it’s when you look at it as a whole that you get into problems.
Rick Riordan does not need to keep writing these books. Or, I don’t know, maybe he has financial issues and does, but unless that’s the case, he absolutely doesn’t. But because he keeps doing them anyway, he’s making the problem worse. He’s showing off again and again that he can’t maintain the world he’s built. And yet he keeps building at it! Like a shaky, wobbly tower that keeps getting additional levels added, it’s going to collapse sooner or later.
—
No comments:
Post a Comment