Percy Jackson: Dark, Scary, and Terrifying
So let me explain before you guys all come at me saying that Percy Jackson is a very happy and very idiotic character because he's not.
We meet Percy in the Lightning Thief as a 12 year old kid who goes to boarding school and is known for getting in trouble and getting expelled by every single school he goes to. And, if you start the series when you’re nine, you will usually overlook the depth of it just on the sole fact that you’re a kid and usually wouldn’t ever notice it. And, if you’re like me, that’s what happened. I started this series in the 4th grade and by then up until the Mark of Athena had been published. I finished the first series that following summer and got the next two books from our school library in the fall of my 5th grade year and after that I stopped due to no more books being out there yet.
But 6th grade I did pick up The Heroes of Olympus again and started the Mark of Athena and the House of Hades. Which, again, I never noticed a lot. It was a great book, I love all the books with a passion, they are the reason I do read.
But waiting on Blood of Olympus to come out in 7th grade, I decided to re-read the series at the age of 13 just about and I noticed small things more and more. I had always known Percy was abused, I never connected the whole ordeal between Sally and Gabe, though. And things such as: the fact that Luke did kill himself, Percy was resentful towards Poseidon when he discovered Tyson was his brother, Percy tries to ward off Gabe accidentally and it works, He was physically abused for who knows how many years, and to be brought up in such a way, no dad, a mother that works how many jobs just to keep them a few inches above water, and an abusive step dad who was his only continuing figure of authority outside his mother.
Now obviously Percy didn’t like Gabe. He did call him Smelly Gabe and on a few accounts say awful things about him.
Well okay, so what does that have to do with anything?
At the age of 12, Percy plain flat out compares himself to Gabe, saying: “ between Gabe and I, we make my mom’s life pretty hard “ and I personally fell like that’s one of the worst things he can do towards himself is compare himself negatively with somebody as low and somebody as horrible as Gabriel Ugliano.
I have been working on a project after seeing a post that really brought all this out to me: https://lulla-lunekjaer.tumblr.com/post/138324317455/the-ultimate-percy-jackson-characterization and basically what I’m doing is tabbing or marking every depressive, mentally I don’t want to say disruptive, but anything to show signs of things such as depression or anxiety or a negatively impacting mood of mental illness and I believe in the Lightning Thief alone there was 224 things I marked/tabbed, give or take one or two, that’s a lot.
Yes, this is a children’s series, but there is so much more behind what’s being said. From the mood to just how it’s worded. It makes it subtle enough to provide it as a kid’s series but with the depth to adapt into a young adult series.
Percy is portrayed as a very happy go lucky idiot ( i.e. Seaweed Brain, Kelp Head, etc. ) when he is anything but that.
As I have begun to list and explain already, those 224 tabs were only for signs and showings of forms of mental illness. The big winner: Depression.
anxiety, apathy, general discontent, guilt, hopelessness, loss of interest, loss of interest or pleasure in activities, mood swings, or sadness
Sleep: early awakening, excess sleepiness, insomnia, or restless sleep
Whole body: excessive hunger, fatigue, loss of appetite, or restlessness
Behavioral: agitation, excessive crying, irritability, or social isolation
Cognitive: lack of concentration, slowness in activity, or thoughts of suicide
Weight: weight gain or weight loss
Also common: poor appetite or repeatedly going over thoughts
This is what depression often looks like.
So let’s bold what we’ve seen in Percy, shall we?
Mood: anxiety, apathy, general discontent, guilt, hopelessness, loss of interest, loss of interest or pleasure in activities, mood swings, or sadness
Sleep: early awakening, excess sleepiness, insomnia, or restless sleep
Whole body: excessive hunger, fatigue, loss of appetite, or restlessness
Behavioral: agitation, excessive crying, irritability, or social isolation
Cognitive: lack of concentration, slowness in activity, or thoughts of suicide
Weight: weight gain or weight loss
Also common: poor appetite or repeatedly going over thoughts
The ones I put in italics (social isolation and thoughts of suicide) were put like that because it’s not plainly put out there as are most of these other ones, but they’re subtly there. When he jumped off the Missouri Arch in tLF he didn’t know if he’d die and he was fine with that. He once said he wanted to drown, the only problem was that he couldn’t. He purposefully isolates himself for the most part in school when he befriends one person and chooses not to befriend anyone else, selectively social is what that would be called. Because I’m not confident in the idea that literally everybody picked on Tyson, or everyone picked on Grover. It’s unrealistic.
The definition of Apathy is the loss of interest or concern. Which as he grows older with camp apathy is noticed about his life at home and at school. He simply doesn’t really mind leaving for a dangerous quest even if it might worry his mother sick that he might die.Which is something else he doesn’t care about.
If he does die, and I’m not talking of old age or sickness, I mean on the battlefield or on a quest, it’s almost obviously predicted he will respond like Luke: he won’t want help. After all, him and Luke are so directly parellelled it’s scary. It said said in the Heroes of Olympus that he understood why Luke did what he did.
Luke left Olympus to destroy the gods.
For somebody like Percy to understand that, what isn’t being said?
Do I even have to explain this?
i.e Bianca, Luke, Silena, Ethan, Beckendorf, Castor, so on and so forth
They have one thing in common with each other (outside being a demigod, that is)
Percy watched all of them die, he was the one who delivered the news (with exception of Castor) to everyone else and what does he say internally after a good handful of their deaths? Especially Luke’s?
That it should’ve been him.
And with it carries and burden that he could’ve, he could’ve, but never did he do, which carries me into:
Thoughts of Suicide / Sadness
As said above, he believes it should’ve been him to die and not Luke, not Ethan, not anyone. It was his fault.
From the Missouri Arch to willingly going into Tartarus, I won’t explain this or touch on this much, but if you’d like to hear more about it you can message me.
There are just too many instances of this, I’m not going to start.
loss of interest or pleasure in activities
Percy has said multiple times that he is a troublemaker, mainly throughout the first book. He never tried to get in trouble, well sometimes, but it never bothered him until it bothered his mom. Which was guilt mania when it bothered her.
But over the series we see him in less trouble (he has yet to be expelled from Goode ??? ) and less mortal fights and more of the defense, which seems almost backwards.
He loses all hindsight in school, he just stops caring it appears to be throughout the first two series, which he never cared much anyways because he grew to love camp and almost everything about it, but in Trials of Apollo what is he doing the first time we see him?
He’s doing school work, he’s trying to prepare and study for his SAT’s and to graduate which doesn’t make much sense to me because isn’t he at least a year behind due to being missing for the entirety of the Heroes of Olympus series? Like, shouldn’t that put him back to at least his Junior year and if he’s older in his grade, Sophmore year? How does he plan to graduate that early at the age of 17? The only thing that’d make sense would be if there was a year gap, but as said by Percy there isn’t. Apollo is gone for about 6 months I believe. The six months directly after the Giant War.
That doesn’t make sense. If you go by America standard schooling system: 9th grade you turn 15, 10th you turn 16, 11th you turn 17, which allows you to graduate 12th grade at age of 18. Sometimes older if you start preschool later, get held back, but earlier if you have a late birthday or skipped a grade.
But either way, he’s either a Junior of Sophmore because there’s no way he passed the previous school year not even there for the majority of it.
When he gets back suddenly he takes a 180 on his life and seems to not care at all about Apollo or the gods or camp because it’s time for school and guess what? He’s taking care of it for once. Which is good, but like ??? since when does Percy do that?
Pick up a book, you won’t get far before this is mentioned.
Again, it’s like chapter 2. You don’t get far before hearing about this.
Can this be blamed on his ADHD and Dyslexia? Totally, it would make sense. But can it triple in with depression? 100%. He always says that he never focuses, he can’t concentrate because it’s hard and he just doesn’t really care all too much. And he doesn’t seem to care about too much, but what he cares about, he cares for. All or nothing, and that’s seen a lot in depression or anxiety. Mainly social anxiety. Just saying.
repeatedly going over thoughts
Let me tell you ladies and gentlemen how much this kid impacts Percy,
He sees him as a slightly irritating kid who simply loves his sister and loves to smile, laugh, and never shut up.
So when Bianca dies and Nico freaks out and runs away and is found how he is, the only thing that goes through his mind for multiple accounts of years is this was my fault, I should’ve saved her. Which also ties into guilt.
Things like Luke being the bad guy or the good guy, if his dad meant well or if he didn’t, if he was being used by the gods or not, every death ever, so on and so forth.
These are things he negatively brings up over and over and over again that should be simply overlooked sometimes, but he never does. He overthinks it and goes over it for years and months and days on end. The thing that triggered it was simply a kid who lost his sister and responded in anger.
There are so many things wrong with Percy’s mental state if you read in between the lines and behind that sarcasm that it blows my mind that Rick can continue this as a children’s series and that’s also why I was partially let down by the Heroes of Olympus. There wasn’t much character development. What we saw was Percy break himself, Nico come out of the closet, and a loss of grief. The only grief remaining was Leo over his mother.
Which what the heck. They just got out of war, Annabeth lost Luke for gods sake. They must have lost half of that camp in two years and more the third summer.
Percy is the only one outside of Nico shown to have something wrong with him mentally, and even by then Nico’s issues have started to fade away leaving just some insecurity and confidence issues over his sexuality which is helped by Jason to overcome.
When he tortures Misery it is said that something inside him, what little remained of him, broke like glass.
But does is show that he feels broken? That he’s lost in the abyss that is his mind?
Because he needs to be the leader, he can’t be a loser kid who’s so caught up in his emotions to even consider his own.
And with that I’ll stop here, if you have anything else you can add it here or ask me about it in my inbox/ask.
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