the more i revisit pjo as an adult, the more actively hostile i feel toward rick riordan’s writing choices, because it becomes impossible to ignore how thoroughly the entire universe is filtered through a misogynistic lens.
starting with the gods: rick takes an already misogynistic mythos and somehow amplifies the imbalance in a modern retelling. poseidon is reframed as the Cool Imperfect Dad™️ who occasionally checks in on Percy, athena becomes the emotionally distant robot mother whose defining flaw is pride, aphrodite is reduced to an unserious ditz, and hera is written as a bitter, vindictive witch. the myths were never kind to women, but the deliberate softening of male gods’ worst offenses while exaggerating the women’s flaws is striking. there’s an obsessive narrative focus on athena’s hubris, yet almost no engagement with the fact that poseidon is, objectively, one of the most violent offenders in greek mythology. i understand that this is a children’s series and that sanitization is inevitable to some degree, but the sanitization is not neutral. you can still make characters unsavory without mentioning the non kid-friendly stuff. poseidon is allowed moral revisionism in a way athena simply is not, and that discrepancy is telling.
then there’s the insane amount of frederick and hermes apologism, especially in a series where fathers wronging their children is literally the backbone of the plot. why was the onus ever on annabeth to make amends with frederick? why does percy say her family doesn’t seem that bad, effectively discrediting her lived experience? hermes is an even more egregious example. percy openly despises luke, and hermes’s absentee parenting is the catalyst for the entire war, so percy logically should dislike him too and hold him accountable. instead, post-war, he becomes oddly forgiving. hermes blames annabeth—the girl his son raised, manipulated, and later fell in love with—for luke’s descent, rather than confronting his own failures as a parent. while percy challenges this in tlo, he later minimizes it entirely in staff of hermes. percy repeatedly fails to stand on business and this feels less like character consistency and more like authorial anxiety—rick just wants closure without accountability and redemption without reckoning. another reason why luke is painted as this tragic hero in the end.
which brings me to percy himself. i’ve honestly learned to love my own version of percy jackson that’s canon to me, because i have to actively divorce rick’s sense of humor from the character. rick consistently treats weaponized incompetence as a joke. it shows up in little moments that people brush off as jokes and read as endearing, like annabeth being framed as an unreasonable girlfriend for caring about celebrating a monthaversary while percy forgets, or percy casually admitting he’s late to their dates. percy’s characterization fluctuates wildly across the series, and some of this is okay because no one’s the same at 12 as they are at 17/18, but this particular version of him is just annoying and directly contradicts the “personification of loyalty” he is otherwise meant to represent. i know a lot of people hate and disregard hoo compared to the original series for a variety of reasons, many of which i agree with, but son, moa, and hoh are the only books where percy doesn’t feel like a man written by a man. he’s more emotionally mature and internally coherent there in a way he rarely is in pjo, which makes sense for his age and role develop. percy is absolutely allowed to be emotionally obtuse and frustrating at times in pjo because he’s just a kid living and learning, and i’m not calling for character revisionism to make him perfect in the show, but the text often treats some of these behaviors as charming rather than something to grow from.
the show only sharpens these issues. while it attempts revision, the revisionist history disproportionately exaggerates annabeth’s flaws or invents new ones while polishing percy’s. annabeth’s hubris has never outweighed her intelligence (her fatal flaw is both informed by and hindered by her wits), so the decision to have her tie percy to the mast during the upcoming sirens scene—while she’s presumably going to be actively confronting her truest, most hopeful desires—makes little narrative sense. it removes her contingency planning and sense of self-preservation, traits that define her character. she’s smarter than that. similarly, the flashback where she steps beyond the boundary, is captured, and is implicitly blamed for the chain of events leading to thalia’s death feels unnecessary and oddly punitive (especially when it was technically grover’s fault in the books and annabeth showcased bravery by stabbing a cyclops in the foot). i understand that her guilt is meant to add the complexity of her grief, which i actually find quite interesting and wouldn’t upset if this was a one-time offense but it’s not (more in this post). meanwhile, percy is embellished as this emotionally intuitive therapist mom friend, despite the fact that, in pjo, he rarely offers meaningful advice and has a notably inconsistent record of emotional support—particularly toward annabeth (the only advice he gave annabeth being to reconnect with her father, which imo wasn’t great advice and also brings me back to my second point). when they share physical comfort, she is almost always the one to initiate. much of fandom’s perception of percy as outwardly emotionally intelligent is post-pjo or fanon characterization bleeding backward into the original series. i’m guilty of this misremembering too. of course this doesn’t mean he’s devoid of empathy, it’s quite the opposite, but he isn’t the best at expressing it all the time.
but what frustrates me most is the asymmetry in critique. the pjo fandom is deeply allergic to criticizing percy, while other characters—especially annabeth—are scrutinized relentlessly. percy between the ages of 13 and 15 does not need to be perfect, but the way his flaws (outside of loyalty and anger) are minimized or ignored, while women’s flaws are exaggerated and narratively punished, reflects a broader pattern in rick’s writing. men are softened, contextualized, and forgiven, while their feats are highlighted, embellished, or distorted by both the text and fandom, while women are sharpened, simplified, and blamed, with their accomplishments minimized and dismissed. every bit of discourse i see about percy and annabeth holding up the sky is a microcosm of that phenomenon.
and once you see it, it’s very hard to unsee. as @silenab said, suddenly everyone’s a men’s rights activist.
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