The Percy Jackson Show is Bad

This Saturday Note is written a bit later than usual–I had a dinner thing Friday night (yay!), but also after writing Fun Facts my computer decided that the browser needed to freeze and would not re-open after I closed it and clicked it dozens of times.

Physically, I am much better off than I was at the beginning of the week, in which I felt pretty crappy. I’m re-reading a (possibly signed library copy?!) of The Wee Free Men, and finishing up “Valley of Memory” on Assassin’s Creed: Mirage.

The Extended Editions of The Lord of the Rings are in theaters this weekend, by the way.

The Percy Jackson Show is Bad

I’m going to take the controversial opinion that the Disney+ adaptation of Percy Jackson & the Olympians is a bad television show.

[None of this is to be blamed on the cast, especially not the child actors. Complaints that the characters don’t look like their book counterparts are silly–the problem is the writing.]

Let’s back up.

Percy Jackson is a series of middle grade urban fantasy books by Rick Riordan about a troubled sixth-grader who discovers that he’s the son of a Greek god in modern day America, and most go on a quest. The story was originally made as an attempt to create a new Greek myth for Riordan’s son, who loved Greek myths, but like Percy, struggled in school due to dyslexia and ADHD. The series was adapted a couple of times; the first book into a musical (which fans quite like) and two movies by 20th Century Fox (which fans did not quite like). The movies changed a lot, aged up the characters, and while Riordan himself was quiet about them for years, sometime in the late 2010s he decided he’d had enough and declared to anyone who would listen that he hated those movies. He went as far as to post the notes he gave after receiving the script.

So Riordan campaigned hard to have a remake, especially once Disney bought 20th Century Fox, and he kept fans updated. Once production on a television adaptation started, he regularly posted news such as casting and where in the process the production was, proudly announcing that he and his wife were now executive producers and he would do some work on the scripts of episodes. Riordan promised a faithful adaptation, and when cast announcements went out, he made comments about how the actors fit perfectly for the roles, and he couldn’t get them out of his head when writing the scripts.

The reaction to the first season was… okay, critics adored it, and a lot of fans went nuts for it. But there was a vocal group of book fans that believed the show wasn’t really that great. Because there were still changes–and not just for things like time constraints and budget! Notably, while the Plot is still basically the same, the characters don’t feel the same as their book counterparts, especially as, in an attempt to make them “smarter” they often foresee every trap they might fall into, or every monster. Riordan had made comments that he saw this as a chance to rework material that he wrote twenty years ago; it was clear that he thought he was rewriting the original story, and that newer version of the story… was dumb.

Because, look: if your characters, who are children, begin every encounter knowing what they’re facing, it robs the suspense. There’s this weird school of thought driving the writers to say, “Well, they’re smart kids, it doesn’t make sense for them not to know!” apparently missing that A), they’re kids on a desperate quest, and B) there’s no tension. In the books, even when the characters don’t know what’s going on, there’s tension because the reader can tell something is off.

The result feels very harmless and laid back; the characters have it all in hand because they’ve read the script, and know what they’re looking at almost immediately. It doesn’t help that the cosmic deadline that the story provides, to get the Master Lightning Bolt back before the Summer Solstice, comes and goes, and nothing bad happens because of it. The war between the gods that will start if the heroes don’t finish the quest in time? Nah, it’s fine; they’ll wait it out so the heroes can fix things. There is no deadline.

That change, above all, is what made me think the scriptwriters had no clue what they were doing. I excused quite a lot in season one as budget and pacing issues; certain things had to be stretched into full episodes, certain things had to be left out, the Discourse around things had to change. But this? No, there’s no excuse; they made this change for no reason other than because they couldn’t, and not only did it not add to the story, it actively detracted from it.

Someone online asked what that was about, and the answer that Riordan’s wife gave was that it was a BS standard that the gods set, which is something authority figures do sometimes: make impossible standards that don’t actually matter as a way to assert dominance. That doesn’t work, though, because the gods were going to go to war. It wasn’t a standard set for the heroes, it was a deadline for Poseidon. Not meeting the deadline wasn’t an act of rebellion against unjust authority anyway, because it wasn’t done on purpose! Now that you’ve told the audience that the deadlines you set for the characters don’t matter, then where are the stakes for the story? Where are they, Becky?!

I had a similar problem in season two; I actually liked episode six, but the preview for the following episode spoiled a massive Plot Point that’s meant to be the big twist at the end of the second book (and remember, this show is going one book per season!). A character proclaims that she knows what’s going to happen–something that, at the end of the book, was a big surprise for all the heroes, and proved that the villain was more devious and cunning than any of them had planned on.

And it’s spoiled in the preview for an episode, not the final one, so a character could be “smart” by predicting it beforehand.

It reminded me of Lindsay Ellis’s review of the 2017 Beauty & the Beast–the writers had clearly taken too much input from bad faith criticism made by annoying nitpickers, and so they wanted to make the characters “smart”. “After all, if they’re smart, they’d know such-and-such Plot information!”, not realizing that them not knowing things is what makes the Plot move forward. And so the characters know things that they shouldn’t know, either through intuition or because someone told them, and yet they still follow the same Plot, instead of working out different solutions, and it makes a hash out of everything. The show becomes so much easier for the characters because almost all the answers and solutions are handed to them by the Script.

It also changes the characters significantly; Annabeth is supposed to be a nerd for architecture, geeking out over it when she comes across famous structures and reading books on the subject, but this is never mentioned in the TV series, which instead makes it so that her personality is that she’s sheltered and doesn’t understand pop culture. In the books, when Annabeth reveals her fatal flaw, hubris, she acts like it’s something personal and embarrassing. In the show, she admits that her flaw is pride easily, and claims she made a presentation about it years ago. 

It’s a bit funny, too, because Riordan claims that he thinks they embody his characters so well, he pictures the show’s actors in his head while reading and writing his own work–even though they don’t match the original books’ characterizations at all.

[They don’t match his new books’ characterizations, either. Wrath of the Triple Goddess claims that Annabeth is “such a people person” and that everyone wants to be her friend, which is neither what she’s like in the older books, nor in the television show.]

The story wants to give her more to do, at the expense of making sense. There’s a vision Percy has of the Fates early in the first book, and he doesn’t understand its significance to his story until the end of the fifth and final book. In the show, Annabeth sees it halfway through the first season–which doesn’t make much sense because the story’s not about her.

And then there’s a scene in season two that I hated. Clarisse’s crew of dead Confederates is replaced by dead warriors from wars throughout history because the Confederacy is too controversial of a topic for them to dip into (and I don’t blame them, really, for changing this given they clearly don’t have the guts nor skill to handle something like that). Clarisse actually bonds with her crew, in a rare bit of nice character development, and promises them glory if they complete their quest. When Percy, Tyson, and Annabeth try to join the crew, arguing that they have useful skills,  Clarisse points out that she doesn’t need them because of three her crew members fill those functions already–at which point Annabeth straight up assassinates all of those three crewmen back to the Underworld in a moment that I think is meant to make her look clever, and instead makes her monstrously ruthless.

There are also weird problems like the entirety of Grover’s character. Grover, Percy’s best friend, is a Cowardly Lion type–timid, but he cares about and supports his friends, and will stick with them even when he’s terrified. His arc in the story is going from someone who is easily cowed into being someone who learns more to stick up for himself. In the show, however, he’s made out to be a lot “cleverer” than his book counterpart, spewing information and savviness he did not nor has any reason to have. And yet all of it makes him worse as a character, because all he does is cause problems. Grover tells Percy that his mom’s alive and held hostage in the Underworld, presumably to give Percy motivation to go there for his quest, but even if she wasn’t… she’d still be in the Underworld, giving Percy motivation to go there (which is how it is in the book). He “tricks” Ares into revealing he knows who the real Lightning Thief is, and indicates that Ares’s daughter Clarisse is the likely culprit to his friends… when that’s obviously a red herring and goes nowhere. Grover receives a subplot in the Lotus Casino while Percy and Annabeth bond, and it only holds him up and wastes valuable time. He loses his escape pearl in the Underworld when Cerberus eats him (he gets out okay, because no stakes, remember?). He’s clearly intended to be smarter in this version, and instead he’s more useless than ever before.

I strongly suspect that like with Ron in the Harry Potter films, all of his good character moments are taken out and given to another character, in order to strengthen the bond between Percy and Annabeth; as they’ll eventually become an iconic couple in the story. So you have strange things like him willing to think his supposed best friend is dead at the drop of a hat, and want to move on. When they find Percy alive, unlike his book counterpart, he’s not the one who hugs him, Annabeth is, because a lot of fans remember their romance rather than any other interactions Percy has with other characters.

I mean, this thirteen-year-old Percy turns to Annabeth and declares that he’d burn the world down for her, which is frankly absurd, and doesn’t make any goshdarn sense in this stage of their relationship. But gotta please those shippers, man!

It’s tempting to say, “Well, they have time constraints, so they can’t develop the characters as well as the books! They need to keep the Plot moving!” and that sounds reasonable, until you recall that they keep adding in material that wasn’t there to begin with. Season two notably introduces a couple of new demigod minions for Luke that weren’t there in the book and do nothing that already established characters or unnamed mooks couldn’t have already been doing! Allison Simms is introduced, an apparently adult daughter of Apollo working for Luke, who still lost a knife fight to two children.

And no one is anywhere near as funny, which hurts.

Admittedly, part of the problem is that Riordan has never been that good at planning ahead, so even in the original series there are things a bit inconsistent between books. One of the main villains, Luke, is touted by the fans as a great complex villain, and he is… but he only became so after the first couple of books. So the show tries to make him sympathetic beforehand, and I get that, but instead it makes him come across as kind of a weenie in comparison, looking angsty in scenes where his book counterpart is ruthless.

[They also removed Annabeth’s explicit crush on him? I imagine they were like, “Oh no! We can’t have that big of an age gap romance!” which is stupid when it’s A) not a romance, it’s a one-sided crush that Luke manipulates her with, and B) one of the complaining notes that Riordan made on the script of the movie, which he published on his website, was that Luke is meant to be romantic rival, and the movie cutting that aspect was a negative choice. Oops. Didn't think I'd notice that, did you, Richard?]

This problem of trying to iron out consistency also means that things that don’t get mentioned until later on are brought up much earlier. We mentioned that Percy and Annabeth’s relationship gets kickstarted early, yeah. There are also troubling bits of characterization such as everyone already fed up with the gods’ BS, trash-talking them when so much of those conversations don’t happen until later. Gods appear before they’re supposed to and say things they have no reason to say.

UGH I remember Riordan putting on his blog that Lin-Manuel Miranda was the perfect casting for Hermes, and he wrote the script with him in mind, so he couldn’t get his voice out of his head when he was writing his parts. Which makes no sense because while Miranda does a good job, he doesn’t act like the book’s version of Hermes at all. But that’s a running theme here, isn’t it? Riordan insisting it’s all just like how he remembers in the books, only for it to be completely different.

EFF IT, they even keep chapter titles from the book that don’t match what you get on screen in their respective episodes! 

[rubs forehead] We haven’t even gotten to worldbuilding problems. Demigods having ADHD as battle reflexes, and dyslexia due to being hardwired to read ancient Greek, isn’t mentioned at all (ironically, the movies did explain this). Spoils of War aren’t explained, so why monsters disintegrate but pieces like the Minotaur’s horn or Medusa’s head don’t disappear is just up in the air, I guess. Several metal objects are supposedly Celestial Bronze like Percy’s sword, yet none of them actually glow like it, or are even the same color of Percy’s sword.

And Backbiter, Luke’s sword, is supposed to be a two-edged sword–that’s the entire purpose of the sword! One edge is magic, the other isn’t, so it can kill both monsters and mortals, indicating that he’s exactly the sort of person who is happy to kill people. In the show, it’s a scimitar-looking vaguely Greek sword, presumably because that’s coded as villainous in visual language for screen productions.

It’s such an infuriating adaptation the more you think about it. Hardcore fans keep insisting that it’s fine, because it’s delivering moments for shippers, or because Riordan’s an executive producer that it makes it all okay. “It’s more faithful than the movies!!” Is it? Is it, friendo?! Because it doesn’t seem like it. Sure, the shape of the Plot is much closer to the books than the movies. That’s not the same thing though; it feels as if every major aspect of the story has been affected in one way or another, to sanitize it and throw out suspense or interesting character development. We can’t have the characters not be on top of things, that makes them look bad, so they know everything. We can’t explain how the world works or what the characters are like, fans already know that, so we move to Plot. We can’t have a buildup of themes and ideas into later seasons, we have to give them now. 

So you end up with the blah television show in which characters vaguely similar to ones you know and love wander around a story shaped like one you know and love but without anything that made it special. Characters don’t have interests or personality outside of what the Plot needs, the world and even the titles of episodes make no sense, and the story’s a complete mess. If you’re not a fan, I figured this would just be bland, but if you are, it’s a slap in the face. These writers have no idea what they’re doing, which makes me question everything Rick Riordan’s ever written in the years since.

I need some apple juice.