(⛔️ pjotv crit)
One more person who doesn't understand why my chink ass is annoyed as fuck about Percy's show depiction and I hop
It isn't primarily because he doesn't look accurate, I'm over that, nobody is accurately casted; it's the way some huge portion of fandom on Other Sites are so Weird about defending him getting cranked to 400% white maxness and how his story genuinely diminishes as portrayed as blond/blue-eyed, like:
Show!Percy was basically blasted with the equiv of an Aryanification beam turning him blond/blue-eyed that a huge chunk of twt/tiktok immediately accepted and defended to death because it "made sense", that he's a beach boy now, it matches the sand and the sea,
Which is crazy to me because Percy's portrayal in fandom has over time shifted to racial ambiguity and more POC takes like Latino Percy, and even then, Book!Percy was never this level of white,
His 'sea-green' eyes read more as godly fantastical character design than ethnic identity, because it's godly inheritance from Poseidon—people with green eyes tend to skew more to the emerald aspect, but the description of sea-green and color it is associated with lands somewhere around aquamarine, which is more unnatural and proof of being a demigod, like how Jason/Thalia have blue eyes bright enough to seem like electricity, like Hazel and Annabeth and Piper having gold/gray/multicolored or heterochromic or kaleidoscopic whatever her eyes actually are, IDK.
And because show!Percy now falls fully into the golden retriever trope, let's market new Percabeth even further by repackaging the golden retriever/black cat dynamic quite literally, except:
Annabeth is immediately stripped of humanity the moment a black person is cast,
Aryanified Super Colonial Whiteman Supreme Percy FROM RICK'S MOUTH, will "introduce humanity to her"—
And IGNORES the opportunity to actually be diverse with casting, possibly even finding a Polyneisan actor to "match the sea theme" if they so preferred instead of the egregious "beach and ocean with blond hair and blue eyes". They could have at least stuck to the baseline and not ship him out looking like he's about to re-colonize Hong Kong (which is also a costuming issue as everyone has zero design callbacks to their original character when fandom has fueled so much),
And now a portion of the fandom especially the show-only side defends this version of Percy to death (especially show Percabeth shippers) because let's be honest, this show is marketed to milk their Percabeth cash cow without the subtlety or slow burn by cashing in on existing nostalgia or hunger for content,
And even though book!Percy is canonically white, the way he was written as a victim of a system failing him constantly before changing things from the inside is unintentionally a great writing move on Riordan's part for a POC reading,
Because capitalist and imperialist USA doesn't want rights for POC, rights for disabled people, or rights for anyone who aren't already benefitting from the exploitation of the abused, because they care not about the fundamental rights a person deserves, they care only what they can contribute to the white man's capitalist world.
And if a person cannot contribute, they have no place and treat it as their shame to bandaid, and not a product of their failing regime—failing their people of color they exploited to build the American Dream, failing the homeless, failing the drug addicts, failing the disabled, failing the people in poverty, failing those going over the Kill Line*, all whom people perceive as subhuman because of their "lack of contribution" and thus worth.
*The 斬殺線 is coined by Chinese social media, about one wrong thing happening to a USAmerican (a layoff, a medical accident, etc.) and they're immediately below the 'kill line' that sends them into a downward spiral of poverty that they cannot dig out from
And I found it poignant that Percy was only accepted fully by camp and the gods when he had a use to them, fully becoming the prophecy child and not just a dangerous Big Three kid,
And still he changes a failing system for the better when he was personally offered a benefit—(coughs, access to integrate with the upper class)—but still chose to uplift the working class equivalent <- turning down immortality,
Which is why he always fucking made sense to read with a POC lens, but then show!Percy basically never goes through any struggles like these as much as the book did, doubling down with the sanitization of abuse and disability themes, and then he also sits at the tippy-top of the privilege hierarchy in terms of his appearance,
And to tie it up in a pretty bow, he's a bigger (the biggest even) white savior loyal puppy boyfriend now to Annabeth's life stripped of her original humanity for shipbait, which only came the moment she's portrayed as black.
And then someone on Other Site has the gall to say "casting Percy as POC because he was abused, seen as troubled, and ostracized seems racist", ignoring the entire thematic importance of what Percy essentially does and goes through in its overall. Like tell me that again, as if your damn country isn't actively keeping POC near the Kill Line, as if this struggle isn't what real POC people in USAmerica go through—and to top it off, as if the show isn't making Zeus (played by a black man) even more villainous and compassionless to Thalia than book canon, as if Annabeth (played by a black girl) wasn't overhauled to entirely feed into ship slop with her sudden 'lack of humanity' that was never there in the book; the only new narratives told with black actors is just 'terrible person, hates their kids' or downright 'no humanity'.
Disney wants to be diverse but they can't be that diverse /s, so the main male lead can only be whiter than baseline and never the reverse, and now book!Percy is too mean and unsafe and too alt for the romantasy slop generation whose reading comprehension is so pisspoor I have to wonder if they're cousins of JJK fans.