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eolewyn1010 · 2 years ago

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Reading Percy Jackson TLT was an ordeal for me 3 - Mythology

And here we reach the point where you can argue that this book was written for 12-year-old kids, not for me - someone who read this book for the first time in their late 20s and after studying both Classical Archaeology and History with a focus on Ancient History. And I will counter that while I don't mind reinventing old myths in new contexts, Riordan consistently leaves me with the impression that he just hasn't done his research and keeps pulling stuff out of his ass in The Lightning Thief. The whole treatment of mythology, for all he references specific myths, just winds up terribly inconsistent. And the thing is: I have read better Fantasy at 12 years old that holds up when I re-read it today. By people who made significantly less money and fame with it. Riordan's world does not hold up. Granted, the story around Pan's death making no sense because it's ripped from its lingual context may be a tad niche. But, for another tiny case example, claiming Romeo & Juliet, a couple of suicidal teenagers, are cozy Valentine's imagery does not bode well for Riordan's relationship to source material.

Goddesses whomst?

I'm not on board with his treatment of Greek goddesses in comparison with his treatment of the male gods. Once again, there's no consistency to it. Cue virgin goddesses? Artemis being a virgin goddess is a whole deal. There's an empty honorary hut for her at Camp Half-Blood, empty because she doesn't have any children of her own. Why would a goddess of the hunt and the wilderness care for a hut anyway? All of her myths play out in the forests and open landscapes. An empty hut? That doesn't gel with her mythological character at all. Neither does the only honorary hut for Hera. Why wouldn't Hera have demigod children? "She can't commit adultery; she's the goddess of marriage"? Zeus cheats on her nonstop! Is that just sexist? Possibly not, as Aphrodite gets to cheat on her husband on the regular and pops out kids on the side. But the argument of Aphrodite doing this canonically in her myths falls flat - because there are also myths out there in which Dionysos fathered the Charites on Hera. She is characterized as jealous, imperious, and vindictive. No one ever said Hera is faithful. Few gods are.

You know what god couple is notoriously faithful to each other? Hades and Persephone. I know for a fact that a later protagonist is a half-human son of Hades, so my take is that Riordan cherry-picks the parts of mythology he personally likes and just ignores the rest.

Case in point: He makes such a big point out of Hera's fidelity and Artemis' virginity... and then there's Athena. I won't mention Hestia here because Riordan didn't mention her so far, but Athena, who's mythologically even more famously a virgin goddess than Artemis (Artemis at least has the somewhat ambiguous connection with Orion and her close bonds to her huntresses that can be read as romantic, but mythological Athena is firmly on the eternal single trip). Except that doesn't fit Riordan's notion, so he conveniently ignores it without any explanation. There is zero attempt to make this fit! No "Erichthonios was actually her biological son instead of adopted, so yeah, she always had kids", nothing. She's just randomly the mother of Annabeth, and a few others. And George Washington. I almost spat out my tea.

Then again, I don't really care for the entire hut system anyway. Because it never explains what they do with the children of the lesser gods. Twelve huts. Uh-huh. Except every deity besides the Big Three is free to make children with whomever. So. Where do they put these? Eh, who cares. Only the children of the Big Three have significant powers, amirite. The rest are weaklings. Sure.

Excuse me? "A child of Aphrodite's or Demeter's is not likely to be very powerful" - ex-fucking-cuse me?? Both Aphrodite and Demeter are mythologically capable of kicking Zeus around like a puppet. The myth that is ostensibly about Hades and Persephone is actually all about the power struggle between Zeus, who gave Demeter's daughter away, and Demeter, who wants her daughter back. And Zeus is the one who has to give in. Because Demeter was about to kill the entire world! Her kids, harmless little flower children who don't even get credited with making strawberries grow? Not likely. This tastes so badly like sexism. Because I can't imagine any reason for Riordan to play down Demeter's power other than "nature stuff is flowers, flowers are girly, and girly is lame". She is literally all on earth that grows!

And Aphrodite? As a daughter of Uranos, she isn't even of Zeus' generation of gods. She is the one of the Olympians who is technically of the generation of the Titans. Zeus ain't telling her shit. She doesn't respect the marriage he arranged for her, she has gods fall in love with mortals all over the place, he was too afraid of her wrath to turn her down for the golden apple of Discord. Remember that little tidbit, that led to the Trojan War? And speaking of the Trojan War, there was that episode when Aphrodite gave Hera seductive power so as to distract Zeus. Zeus also asks her for help when he wants to seduce some unsuspecting human woman. The problem with Aphrodite is that, historically speaking, her myths are a stand-in for the power women were said to have over men, manipulating them into complying with their wishes. And somehow, this take manages to come across less sexist than Riordan's. Because it gives Aphrodite, love, and women power and agenda. Riordan? Yeah, according to him, Aphrodite and her children are useless and vain, and sit around all day looking into mirrors. As a goddess of love and beauty and passion, her domain, again, is of a culturally feminine connotation, and Riordan has interestingly not mentioned her early depictions as a Spartan goddess of war seems to look down on this domain - when most of her myths circle around how fucking dangerous it is that someone has all the power in the world to follow her petty, vengeful, fickle impulses. Her kids could be potentially very interesting - they could hold power over human emotions. But nah, they have make-up and... Gucci handbags? How can they afford those?? Does being a child of Aphrodite come with natural wealth?

You win some, you lose some

See, I don't get Riordan's version of Dionysos. He not only is inexplicably ugly, short and pudgy when neither the youth nor the adult depiction of him are shown to look like that; Riordan also throws a ton of goat imagery in there that might make a little sense with the satyrs. It makes none for Dionysos. Why would he be a goat? Because of the horns? Nah, honey, that's not how it works. Satyrs may belong to Dionysos' entourage, but the god who could have features of a goat is Pan. Dionysos is not Pan, and he's not Silenos either. Why does he make goat noises? There must have been a serious mix-up. The goat aspects, the short, pudgy build, the description of his face; all of that reads like either satyrs or sileni.

A part of the book I mostly genuinely enjoyed (at least once it got past the weirdly modernized entry area - a lobby with an elevator? Airport security? Oh, please, fuck off) was the Underworld. The vast part of it is fascinating and builds genuine tension. So I'm at a loss when both Charon and Hades suddenly whine about not having enough money these days. Just why. Would gods. Care for money?? Does Hades have to rent construction machines to expand the Underworld? Does Charon have to pay for human-made suits? Can he not just make himself look however he wants? Again, I don't get it.

I also don't get the part where Chiron goes: "Kronos only cared about your kind as appetizers or sources of easy pleasure." Yeah... as opposed to Zeus and Poseidon, who'd never abuse humans for their pleasure, right? The cherry-picking. It hurts. And the straw that breaks the camel's back is Riordan's Medusa.

Misuse of Medusa Myths

The part about Medusa actually managed to send me into a rage. Riordan failed to choose a version of the myth when making a choice would have been really good. Using both versions of the myth which have developed independently from each other has a result with a really bitter aftertaste. Medusa as Poseidon's ex-girlfriend? The episode in Athena's temple is infamously a story of rape. The whole point of that relatively late myth (it was written by Ovid, an early-empire Roman) was a cruel injustice of gods against mortals. It would have been better if Riordan had left her out entirely. She was supremely unimportant to the plot; it would have helped Poseidon's image not to mention her. Especially since the myth doesn't make sense the way Riordan throws it together with the earlier Medusa that actually has some agenda: He mentions that she has two sisters. So. The three Gorgon sisters were a thing? Then why is the version which ended with Medusa turned into a Gorgon over the whole raped-in-the-temple shenanigans also a thing?

Syncretism does not work that way

Riordan's treatment of Greek-to-Roman deity relationships was pretty much my first red flag in the book. Because he basically explains it as: Poseidon is Neptune, Zeus is Jupiter, Athena is Minerva, and so on. Which, y'know. Is not how syncretism works. The Romans inherited a ton of Etruscan gods way before they went and conquered Greece and assimilated all of their myths, mashing them together with their vaguely corresponding deities and smoothing over anything that didn't fit. Which was a lot. According to Riordan, it seems it was always the same Pantheon. He never mentions the shifts in characterizations and domains syncretism would have brought with itself.

Powers of Poseidon's Progeny

I have zero idea what to do with the powers the demigods inherit from their parents. They are so incredibly plot-convenient. One time, Percy has to get drenched in water to activate his self-healing; another time, he doesn't get wet at all when he dives into a river. He randomly knows the date and time when coming up from the underworld via the sea - what, does Poseidon's DNA come with an ingrained clock? Would have been nice to have at the Lotus-eater Casino. One time, they say he takes naturally to the water; another, he just... makes fire under the surface. Whatever?

He also breaks the laws of physics, by the way. There's this: "I'd have broken my spine if I hadn't hit the soft sand of a dune" - I challenge Riordan to throw himself down on a pile of sand with a lot of momentum and then tell me how soft it was. Sand isn't fluffy or elastic. It's a ton of tiny rocks. And it behaves like rocks. There is zero give. But it's not like Percy is the only one; the laws of physics only apply to mere mortals, I guess. Annabeth during the boat stunt cannot only do highly complicated calculations regarding physics in her head in nano-seconds, she can apparently also watch the world around her in slow motion while the boat she's sitting in is hurled in high-speed against a gate. Her maths only make sense if she has hyper-perception. Then again, so does Percy, apparently, because he calmly observes that Annabeth was right with her calculations - while the two of them are flying through the air. Neat. More exposition on those absurdly heightened senses?

Where does that even come from?

For as much as I liked the part in the Underworld, it still has a ton of "huh?" moments for me. Like Percy randomly mentioning that he imagined Cerberos as a very specific, modern dog breed? But nah, he's actually a different, highly specific, also modern breed. Why would he.

Annabeth thinks Hades is "treacherous, heartless, and greedy" - how did she get that impression? Nothing in his myths points that way. He's more of the stern, dutiful variety, if you ask the Ancient Greeks. Heartless, that may be a valid interpretion. Treacherous? Sounds more like the Disney version. Or highly Christianized Satan imagery. Greedy? For what, exactly?

"Hades was the only god down here [in the Underworld] that mattered." Uh. Yeah, so. For someone who knows his mythology, Percy has apparently never heard of other chthonic deities. He even mentions Persephone! He even meets Charon! He's met the Erinyes, several times! But they don't matter? Does Thanatos matter, Gaia, Melinoë, Hecate? Zagreus? Dionysos in his Orphic cult? This is just dumb. The Underworld was always a collective effort project.

Persephone, "appeasing her husband's temper"? He hardly even has a temper to speak of in the myths! The only things that mythologically pissed him off was some idiot trying to abduct his wife, and some other idiot mistreating his co-deity Thanatos. Persephone has zero precedence for appeasing Hades. And making her out as that gentle, placating influence tastes like sexism again. Has Riordan never even read far enough to get to "the Mistress"? To "dread Persephone"? She's the Queen of the Dead, my dude; the euphemisms were not genuine titles of a lil' softie, she was called the friendlier names because people were frightened to invoke her.

And for stuff outside the Underworld: Annabeth explaining her arachnophobia with Athena's conflict with Arachne?? What? How does that work? Athena doesn't fear Arachne; she's far above her. But Athena's children are... apparently vulnerable to every spider on earth. Every. Single. Species. Is dangerous to them. Not matter how small and non-venomous. No, it doesn't make sense. Camp Half-Blood is mostly nature and huts among forest and fields; are you telling me there is not a single spider there? I also just don't like the attempt to rationalize a phobia with "there's bad blood between my family and that of [insert object of phobia here]". It has a smack of "at least she has a valid reason for her phobia!" Which, y'know. Is just shitty to people with phobias IRL. Nevermind that making up a story of that "we have ancestral beef" kind is historically an excuse for racism.

#I'm not gonna tag this as Percy Jackson because the fandom would have my head for it #personal opinions #got this out of my system #and with that I conclude #that Riordan is a lazy researcher #books

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