#pjo tv crit

[westanovencleaner]

it's season 2 of the pjo tv show, and percy and annabeth are devising their plan to save camp.

annabeth says, "the fleece will not only heal thalia's tree, but it will also bring thalia back."

it's season 3 of the pjo tv show, and they're at westover hall

grover walks up to bianca and nico and says "you two are children of hades."

it's season 4 of the pjo tv show, and percy's meeting quintus.

he says, "you're daedalus, aren't you."

it's season 5 of the pjo tv show, and percy just read out the great prophecy out loud.

rachel pops in and says, "luke is the hero."

[helpallthenamesaretaken]

maybe the real accurate adaption of pjo was and ever will be the intricately planned out movies we imagined and directed in our heads while reading the books......

and maybe that's the only adaptation we'll ever need....

[aroaceleovaldez]

i still can't believe the LA Times article/interview just. openly admits that the show intentionally, from the beginning, fully removed Gabe being abusive and overtly made him just a nosy loser. Percy's relationship with Gabe is so important to how he navigates the world and the themes of the series. Percy's first monster is in his own home. He uses wards against evil against his step-father and they work. He has overt PTSD that colors his interactions with Mr. D and is why he's so antagonistic towards him for like four books. It isn't until Percy is able to move past his trauma and how Mr. D reminds him of Gabe that he sees Mr. D for who he actually is and understand him and begin to empathize with him. Heck, even into HoO we see Percy having visceral reactions to implications of alcohol/drinking because of Gabe. Everything about Percy's home life colors him as a character. His trauma and PTSD informs his perspective and they explicitly removed his PTSD in the show.

They removed Percy's PTSD. They brush over his experiences as a neurodivergent/disabled kid after the first episode and turned Sally into an Autism Speaks mom. Why. On what planet was that a reasonable change to be made.

[professorhayforbreath]

rip to percy stacking the drachmas that was so cunty of him

on a serious note i'm surprised they didn't include any mention of hades not paying charon enough or playing with cerberus enough considering how much they're honing in on the "gods suck" angle. like damn the book already gave that to you

[chironshorseass]

what bugs me most about the pjo show is that i know they could’ve done better. i knowwwww they could’ve been as faithful as they wanted to the books. for anyone saying “oh, but it’s an adaptation! it isn’t meant to be the same so stop whining that they took stuff out or that they’re adding things in different order!” well yes, i agree that adaptations aren’t meant to be a carbon copy of the source material for the simple fact that it’s adapting the source material into a different medium (television), yet it’s just that! a form of adapting the things that are unable to be channeled from, say, a book—or on the contrary, adding things that make sense for television but couldn’t be channeled into the books otherwise…all of this in a faithful manner. a good adaptation is one that stays true to the source material by properly adapting its themes, characters, symbolism, context, pacing, and the overall story/plot so as to not only be seen as a sort of love letter to the fans, but also to reach a wider audience.

just look at the hunger games! the movies are so faithful to the books to the point that most of the scenes are taken straight out of the books, dialogue and all. and they’re movies, aka less runtime than a freaking tv show and they still did it better. did the hg movies have to take a few scenes out? yes; they have only so much time to tell the story as it is told in the books. did they resume things, like the games themselves? also yes. but did most of the important scenes and character moments stay in the movies? also also yes. again, THESE ARE MOVIES!!!!! a medium much more limited than a freaking tv series with multiple episodes that have enough run time to add even more scenes from the books than what could be possible in a 2 hour (max) movie!!!!!!!!!!!!!

and yet they STILL changed so much that rly had no business being changed other than that the writers decided they felt like it because…..a lot of it im not even sure. and the worst thing of it all is that freaking rick riordan took part in script writing yet so much of the source material has been watered down???? they make a whole ass episode about a monster fight with the majority of the scenes from said episode not even present in the books instead of sticking to the perfectly good source material???? and by doing so they delete the small details that are very much integral to character development and plot???? huh???? the math isn’t mathing. don’t get me wrong, i do like some changes, but then i think: at what cost do they add these things when there was a perfectly good narrative without it? like, at what cost do we get the whole turning to gold sacrifice scene if they’re gonna take out all the fun details that make the lightning thief the lightning thief? for example the silly water park merch and then annabeth displaying her spider phobia and her mortification at going to the thrill ride of love with percy and then being broadcasted to olympus. this is just one episode, but they’ve been doing it in all of them. and u know, it’s not that i don’t hate-hate most these changes. again, what bugs me is that this was supposed to be a faithful adaptation. again, it’s a tv series, with so much more time to develop everything from the books. rick is behind it, who apparently hated the movies for how unfaithful they were. the cast is great. and yet…the script is so mediocre. the spark is lost. character traits are looked over in place for weird pacing and even weirder changes. if the hunger games could do it, then surely a pjo tv series could as well? apparently not? i really really Don’t Get It.

[once-upon-an-animation]

I find it absolutely hilarious that after the Lotus Casino episode, we all complained that the trio having every trap and trick figured out on arrival was sucking the fun and suspense out of every scene…

…only for Episode 7 to literally begin with Percy explaining to everyone that he knows who Procrustes is and knows what his trick is in the first 30 seconds.

I literally bust out laughing.

Richard Riordan, I don’t know what you have against letting your 12 yr. old characters get deceived by something once in a while, but man, you need to let that hurt go and allow your 12 yr. old characters to get deceived by something once in a while. I don’t care how smart you want them to look; them literally knowing everything ahead of time is not nearly as much fun!

[sunnytobio]

they’re so hamfisty with the way they tell you that the gods are “bad”. it’s a slow realization for the reader to recognize that luke is right—though the way he goes about change isnt, but even then luke is the catalyst for the change percy suggests to the gods. all that is to say, the book drips this to you—by showing you zeus’s wrath, and hades being an outcast, and hermes mismanagement of his son, and dionysus being a shithead, and hera being a shithead, and ares purposefully riling people up because he thinks it’s funny, and aphrodite playing with percy’s love life, and the way the gods punished calypso for something she did not do, etc.

meanwhile, the show has EVERY OTHER SCENE being “fuck the gods!! they suck!!! they’ve never done anything for me!!! fuck you!!!” OKAY??? WE GET IT?? stop wasting my precious minutes on something you’ve already said 30x and please actually get the scenes right ?? 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼

[emma-o-yt]

Rick Riordan's problematic age gaps

Apparently reddit hates criticism because this got removed from there after a few minutes, maybe I can get it back up...anyways.

The age of consent in Texas is 17, Texas is where Rick lived (according to wikipedia) up until 2013. And yet...here we are.

Where do I even begin with this bullf*ckery? How about the most egregious of all?

Luke and Annabeth

We have two lines confirming their mutual feelings, one from The Demigod Diaries:

"Overtime, Annabeth developed a crush on Luke. As Annabeth got older, Luke developed feelings for her, too."

Mark of Athena (from her conversation with Venus):

"First there was Luke Castellan, her first crush, who had seen her only as a little sister; then he’d turned evil and decided he liked her—right before he died."

Now let me remind you, Annabeth and Luke have a seven year age difference, they knew each other at 7 and 14. By the time he died, Annabeth was just 16, while he was 23. And it's implied he begun returning her feelings a little before he asked her to run away, perhaps when she was 14. He's paralleled with Percy as Annabeth is his string in the river styx. He asks Annabeth explicitly if she loved him romantically (and she denies because Percy is there).

It's disgustingly inappropriate but at the very least they don't end up together...as for when they do...

Sadie Kane and Anubis

When it comes to immortal romance, I usually go for coded age. Anubis is thousands of years old but is mentally and physically 16, which is fine and dandy except for the fact that Sadie is 12. What do you want me to say except Rick is disgusting for promoting this.

Speaking of extreme age gaps:

Calypso and Leo

When you have a philosophy that every character must end up in a relationship, you run out of sensical options to pair up. Now, I'm a Caleo hater mainly because of how it retconned PJO and also because they are very toxic.

Now hold on, doesn't Caleo fall into coded age? Calypso is 15/16 and Leo is 15, so it's A okay! I suppose, if it wasn't for Calypso's past loves.

Odysseus, he had a wife and a son who was 20 years old in his final year on Ogygia, he is well into adult age. She also mentions the privateer Francis Drake and his wife Elizabeth, he was 45 when he married her.

If your defence is that she's actually thousands of years old, then that must also apply to Caleo. You cannot have it both ways.

Hazel and Frank

It's not that bad but it's necessary to mention for the point I will be making.

The timeline is messed up but I think they're 13 and 16 and meet at 12-15. I mean, come on.

Misogyny and Racism

What do these have in common? Well in 3/4 or 4/4, the younger one is female. In 2/4 or 3/4, the younger one is a person of colour.

Remember Nico? His crush on Percy as revealed in HoH? Well in MoA, there's a cheeky little red herring that happens a bit before Annabeth's talk with Venus (where it is revealed that Luke liked Annnabeth back). She wonders if Nico had a crush on her, but denounces him as too young. Now, Nico's age is inconsistent, I am unsure of his gap with Annabeth but I do know his gap with Percy. It's 3 years 5 months in PJO and 2 years 5 months in HoO (the series we are currently in).

So in RR's messed up mind, a white boy having a relationship with someone 2 to less than 4 years his senior is inappropriate. But a black tween girl dating someone 3 years her senior is just fine, a 12 year old biracial black girl dating a 16 year old is daijoubu, a 15 year old mestizo Latino boy dating an elderly woman is relationship goals, or the reverse a 15 year old girl dating middle aged men is a tragic romance and a 12 year old girl having mutual feelings with a 19 year old man is a "love story for the ages"!

The tv adaptation is so infuriating for this, they made Annabeth black, a lot of the changes they made came off as micro aggressions but especially her relationship with Luke. It's reduced to Luke simping for Annabeth behind her back and it's even worse because you can visibly see how large their age gap is. Heck, Charlie Bushnell and Leah Jeffries have a smaller age gap than book Luke and Annabeth.

Adultification is a huge real life issue. Children of colour and especially female children of colour are seen as less innocent than their white counterparts. Rick, who is dedicated to inclusivity should've known better than to include these illegal relationships. Stans will try and make excuses but it's there, deal with it.

As a black teenage girl who has been a fan of Rick's work for 12 years, I am disappointed.

[livingfandomly]

One major MAJOR critique about the show. Why the FUQ IS THE LIGHTING SO DARK??!?!?!??! If you wish to go with the PG/PG-13 version of the show then turn the DAM lights all the way up please!!! I don’t need to be squinting just so that I can watch a cab pull up on a beach. I’m already 25 and my eyesight is getting worse EVERYDAY and you’re NOT HELPING!!!!!!

[bikkinibottom]

actually to bring up how watered down and sanitized the first 3 episodes of percy jackson has been, it raises concerns for later books. the stakes are supposed to be high from book 1 and the bar continues to be raised. it’s an action packed series with monsters and gods and deadly quests. there’s the possibility of being killed. which raises the question, when titan’s curse rolls around, how will they handle not one but two character deaths? this is the book that’s the turning point in the series, where everyone senses this tonal shift and that they’re favorite characters could actually die. that kronos is serious and this impending war will be real, with real casualties, injuries, and intense battle scenes. how do you sanitize a literal war?

[helpallthenamesaretaken]

me when the poseidon-athena rivalry wasn't included in the pjo tv show so 'the rivalry ends here. i love you, wise girl' doesn't exist anymore in tv canon:

[aroaceleovaldez]

okay last one for the night but. honestly i really hate how the franchise has been using loyalty to Rick as a shield for so long. If Rick was involved in a project or not doesn't matter, especially not anymore.

ReadRiordan and the publishing for the franchise has been using this tactic for ages - they obscure if any writing related to the series wasn't written by Rick unless it's special circumstances. It's near impossible to find out who the ghostwriters are (Stephanie True Peters and Mary-Jane Knight). TSATS was promoted as the first time we got a non-Riordan (Rick or Haley) author working on one of the companion novels despite having seven already existing ghostwritten books in the series. The only reason Mark Oshiro was emphasized so heavily for TSATS was because they also work as a sensitivity reader for topics such as queer identity, and Rick had received backlash in the past for being a Straight Cis Old White Guy repeatedly falling into bad habits (that he hasn't broken out of) with certain characterizations that he kept doubling-down on or retconning into oblivion. The show emphasizes that Rick was involved, but the LA Times article brings into question exactly how much he was involved, and it doesn't even really matter either way. The ReadRiordan site actively avoids putting any writing credits on their articles (or art credits...) or anywhere on their site.

Practically the entire fandom unanimously agrees the musical - which had zero involvement from Rick - is the best adaptation of the series so far, including the TV show. Some of the best writing to come out of the series recently was the stuff ghostwritten by Stephanie True Peters (Camp Half-Blood Confidential, Camp Jupiter Classified, Nine from the Nine Worlds, etc). And yet when promotional stuff is posted about CHB:C, there's clearly coded language used to hide the fact that Rick himself didn't write it. Yes, that's how ghostwriters work, but at this point we should really stop pretending "Rick Riordan" isn't just a pen name for a group of authors like "Erin Hunter" and that Rick is actually writing everything in the series. I can easily look up and see which Animorphs books were ghostwritten, and who those authors were. I can find every "Erin Hunter" easily listed on official sites. And yet most people don't even know the Riordanverse franchise has ghostwriters at all.

And the franchise is still trying to use the "Tio/Uncle Rick" stuff. Author loyalty and marketing parasocial relationships isn't going to save the franchise when the author himself can't hold up his own original themes or even keep basic series bible details straight, and especially not if the editors are barely if at all doing their job. And please at least get a goddamn series bible by this point.

[latinoperce]

rick riordan you became the thing you swore so much to destroy. why change some of these things in the show??? the thing im most angry about is that the changes are either purely nonsensical or just done poorly

theyve completely eliminated the books sense of urgency, like theres no stakes on anything. you can miss the deadline and everythings fixed with a little talk with zeus. you recognize medusa and crusty and the lotus hotel right out of the gate, and obviously the only conclusion is that kronos is behind everything even though hes supposed to be locked in the deepest part of tartarus and youre a 12yo who just got thrown into this life and is just learning that monsters are real. fights are over in 30 seconds and theres no injuries or consequences except for an off screen comment on how you lost your bag or maybe a new stain on your shirt. theyre 12 but also they know everything there is to know about the greek myths.

in the books they learn and realize things as they go! its the experiences that change percy and grover and annabeth and things are supposed to be HARD because theyre kids!!! and they were sent on a mission they shouldnt have been sent on, but they get through it with each other and with a sense of comedy because theyre fucking kids! yea theyre gonna almost die and then say hello to gladiola the pink poodle, and play hacky sack on the bus stop, and stuff themselves with cheeseburgers every chance they get bc kids arent supposed all knowing and mature all the time

you cant promise a faithful adaptation of a book and then change the basic things that made the book be loved in the first place

[professorhayforbreath]

also sorry but i'm not sold on "they only have 8 episodes" as a defense for why the show is falling flat as both a show and an adaptation. 8 episodes is roughly 5 hours. that's 3 hours more than most movies lol. that should be plenty of time to adapt all the most important things, they're just not using their screen time as well as they could be. sorry i don't think it should actually be this hard to fit the essential core of the lightning thief's story and characters into 5 hours. the movie and musical were both 2 hours give or take and they still did certain things better. skill issue

[dusty-daydreams]

I’m beginning to get very annoyed at all the changes that are happening in the PJO show.

I get that adaption changes need to be made, but there have been so many of them big and small that they are beginning to really annoy me as they pile up.

For example, it really annoys me that they sought the Lotus Casino out. The whole point of it is that it’s a trap that lures unsuspecting people in.

It’s suppose to be a mistake they make that Percy has to use his street smarts to realise is a trap and get them out of, the Lotus Casino is supposed to show the ways that Percy is smart and perceptive that Annabeth with her book smarts is not.

Instead the way they did it in the show strips agency from these characters.

Now instead of making a mistake they are tricked by Ares into going into a time trap to delay them stopping the war.

Instead of Percy being smart and getting them out, Hermes gives them the answers.

It feels much less a story about the demigods and more a story about the Gods themselves.

It was the same last episode. While I liked Percy sacrificing himself, it became a story where the demigods need to be saved by the Gods.

Instead of Percy, Annabeth and Grover working together to save themselves from Hephaestus trap, Percy gets stuck in it and Annabeth has to plead to Hephaestus to save them.

I want to watch my favourite books - where the demigods overcome the odds often despite the help of the Gods.

I don’t want to watch whatever this is - where the demigods get themselves stuck and then have to rely on the capricious Gods to save them.

[once-upon-an-animation]

There are many things that frustrate me with the writing of Annabeth in the PJO TV Show, but I think one thing that I haven’t seen people talk much about is the mini-arc of Percy needing to help Annabeth with her sense of fun/humanity.

Just so we’re clear, I absolutely hate this arc.

Prior to the show’s premiere, I believe there was a quote from Rick discussing new-ish things that we’d see in the show, and one of those things was Percy helping Annabeth “tap into her humanity”. I can’t find the exact quote, but it should be on the series update Twitter account if you search it.

When I first read this quote, I wasn’t exactly sure what it meant, but I thought maybe we’d get an expansion of the theme of forgiveness that we got in the original books, or maybe we’d get an arc about Annabeth’s pride and how that gets in the way of her relationships with others. Or maybe they’d try and break down the ways in which Annabeth helps to uphold the gods’ ways of doing things, and align her more with the mortal point of view (which they essentially did, but not the overall point).

What I certainly wasn’t expecting was for them to strip Annabeth of most, if not, all of her smaller/softer traits, and give her this unusually stoic and stiff personality, where she suddenly has no familiarity with casual aspects of the mortal world (movies, Disney world, common idioms), and needs Percy to introduce these concepts to her in an effort to “unlock” her humanity.

What.

The.

Fuck.

Words cannot emphasize enough how much I despise this arc. Not only is it entirely nonsensical for Annabeth not to be familiar with these things (she was with her dad at least until the age of 7 and she goes to a camp full of other children who are regularly in contact with the mortal world; do you seriously expect me to believe that at no point in her 12 years of life, she never saw a single film, heard of Disneyworld, or heard common idioms and slang terms from her camp-mates? Seriously???)

But ALSO!

Book!Annabeth had PLENTY of humanity to go around! Even with her pride and initial coldness towards Percy, she plays hackeysack with him and Grover on the first day of their quest! She has a cute silly crush/admiration/infatuation on Luke. She nerds out big time over the St. Louis Arch! She’s the first to steal clothing from Waterland! She screams and cries when she encounters the mechanical spiders! She has an expression of sadness when she shares her backstory about Thalia and Luke! She gets lost in her little construction game at the Lotus, so much so that Percy has to use her phobia to pull her out of the trance! She grabs Percy’s hand when they first enter the Underworld because she’s scared! She tears up when it’s time to leave Cerberus!

And you stripped her of all these things, because you’re so desperate to overemphasize the Percabeth romance, and you felt that it was absolutely necessary to have Percy educate Annabeth on “unlocking humanity”??? Why!!!!

Not only did Book!Percy help Annabeth discuss things about bad parents and approaching forgiveness, but Book!Percy already had something important to offer Annabeth: loyalty, trustworthiness, and reliability. You didn’t need to take away her already-present traits and wits to convince us that Percy was the type of person she needed in her life, because we can already see what he offers her in the books. So why oh why did you feel the need to give us the silly “tap into your humanity” arc? Why did you turn her personality into something that it wasn’t? Why did you take away her depth just so her character could better serve Percabeth?

I don’t even necessarily agree with the criticism that this version of Annabeth feels like it prioritizes Percabeth more, but I can see why people made that complaint. Y’all took away so much of what made this character endearing, because you felt like it was a much bigger priority to have Percy help her unlock humanity than to let her be human prior to meeting him and outside of him. Not only does her personality get shafted, but her relationships with other people get shafted too! Her interactions with Luke are affection-less, she sent Grover off on his own in the Lotus so she could go off with Percy, and I don’t even think that she and Chiron interacted once this season; I don’t even think she mentioned the part about her calling him to come pick her up after she attempted living at home again!

But don’t worry; we’ll get plenty of scenes doubling down and tripling down on how Percy is the center of her world now! Yay!