I don’t like how focused the Perachel community have been on Annabeth hate
It’s a feeling I’ve had for a while now, and I think I’ve been holding back on talking about it out of fear that the very few people in this community will turn on me, but with the recent casting of Leah Jeffries as Annabeth I feel like I need to speak out.
I have criticised the writing of Annabeth’s character and her relationship with Percy many times, and while I stand by everything I’ve said about them, I think a lot of people are taking it to an unnecessary extreme (quick disclaimer: this is absolutely not a call out post for any specific perachel shipper, and I really don’t mean to start a fight or something I’m just putting my thoughts out there and am very open to civilised discussions on the matter). I’ve summarised all of my critiques of Annabeth and Percabeth here, and as I made it clear in that post, and what I want to make clear here, is that I don’t hate Annabeth and I don’t hate Percabeth shippers. I actually really like their friendship, and what most of us tend to not take into consideration, is that it’s pretty clear that there’s no malicious intent behind Annabeth’s more questionable actions. She’s not by any means an Evil Abuser™, she’s just a kid that occasionally lashes out on others due to her own trauma.
I think it’s really easy to look at the handful of hateful and malicious Percabeth shippers and resent all of them for it, but it’s important to remember that they are in the minority. It’s just a very loud and big minority because Percabeth is such a big ship. It’s also easy to look at all of Annabeth’s bad traits and actions and forget about all of the good ones. It’s easy to focus on all of the times she’s mistreated Percy and never on the ones where she was kind to him.
As always when I talk about shipping culture, I wanna link this post, because it just perfectly explains my thoughts on the matter.
It would be incredibly hypocritical of me to say that Percabeth is a “bad” ship when I myself have said that I like Delena, which is just like and objectively more “problematic” one. I mean, Annabeth never murdered Percy’s brother. We don’t know other people’s interpretations, angles or perspectives on their favourite ship or character, we have no idea what they could mean to them, so calling them a “bad” person or their OTP a “bad” ship just doesn’t work.
I’ve said before that I wanna take the Disney Plus series as an opportunity to try and grow the Perachel fandom, and if we want to do that we will have to make the Perachel community a safe and welcoming space, and wether you like it or not, one of the key ways to do that is to welcome multi-shippers. Most of the newbies are gonna ship Percabeth anyway, since they will have had 2-3 seasons of development before Rachel even becomes a character. We can’t just spend all our time getting mad at people shipping something we don’t, you know, the exact thing toxic Percabeth shippers we all hate are doing. I really think that if we continue down this road that we will not be any better than the worst of the Percabeth stans.
I wanted to bring this up because of the casting of Leah Jeffries, because I think it’s a fantastic thing. The Disney Plus series will now have a black leading lady who’s portrayed as strong, capable and vulnerable person, who’s the main love interest of a white guy. That’s something that should be celebrated! What I also want people to think about is that this will be an adaption. The show is not gonna be exactly like the books, they will change things, which is a prime opportunity to fix the more problematic aspects of Annabeth’s character. Now, I’m personally not too optimistic about that, since everything points to the fact that Rick Riordan has not learned his lesson, but he’s not the only person working on this. The most important addition, I think, is Leah Jeffries. We have no idea how she will interpret her character, or how that interpretation might change over the years, so I’m keeping an open mind.
Ultimately, I’m not gonna stop criticising Annabeth completely, but I have officially changed my tags on here from #anti annabeth and #anti percabeth to #annabeth crit and #percabeth crit, because I am not against these things, I am merely critical of them.
I created this blog as a way to collect all of the limited Perachel content somewhere, and give shippers a safe space and community; I now want to make that community safe for everyone. My dream of expanding the Perachel fandom through the tv series is still very real, and I want everything on here to be working towards that, so I have made the executive decision to keep ship wars completely away from this blog. I would love it if you all helped.
Sincerely, Mal.
