awhile ago a coworker and i were play arguing whether or not the mystery gang were all romantically a thing/polycule or just really good friends (yknow bored at work things) and knowing my bfs interest in scooby doo i texted him asking him to be the tie breaker and he responded “well it depends which canon youre going off of” and just instantly cold sweat knew i was out of my depth
“haunting the narrative” is one of those phrases i wanna put up on a shelf. not all characters that are dead haunt the narrative. not all characters that are dead haunt the narrative. not all characters that haunt the narrative are dead.
a character who haunts the narrative is a character whose presence in the story itself is sparse to none (!!!!!) but whose actions have major consequences to the story and help to build the theme of the work (!!!!!!!!!) if blorbo blingus doesnt tick both these boxes then im sorry. they are not haunting the narrative. they just died.
The original percy jackson series is about cycles of abuse and neglect, right. Were introduced to percy as a kid who has clearly been left behind by a school system that has given up on him, restless and unengaged and self-defetist because hes been given nothing that works for him and no one even tries to meet him where he is. Then hes told no, listen, your neurodivergence is amazing and you just need to be given something that actually utilizes your unique palatte. And thats obviously the uplifting idea rick wanted for his kids, right. But once we get to know chb the same cycles are happening there too. There are kids “left behind” there too for one reason or another, because their parents dont want to claim them, because their parents werent important enough to get a cabin. Do you get it, all the kids who dont fit the most common neurotypes get shoved into the same closet. Kids are being left in a cruel world to fend for themselves without the tools they need. Theyre dying because no one bothered to accommodate them. Its such an obvious parallel that the first chapter introduces a teacher whos written to be especially hard on percys disability and she turns out to literally be one of these monsters trying to kill him. Meanwhile sally jackson tells him she named him after Perseus because she wanted a redemption for a hero whos story ended in tragedy. Meanwhile every book in the series replicates a greek myth step for step until the moment they break the cycle. Annabeth, playing Odysseus, is talked down from her hubris and grounded by her friends. Percy, playing Heracles, meets someone wronged by the original Heracles and rights his wrongs by refusing to go down the same selfish path as him. Monsters are reborn because they are–as the books explicitly call them–achetypes. These kids are stuck inside the cyclical nature of mythology because thats what happens to mythology, it gets retold over and over again. But these are the kids who have to live it. The series ends with percy being offered immortality and he rejects it because he wants to use his godly favor to force them to break their cycle of neglecting their kids. The series ends with a declaration that we cant keep letting this happen. The very first book offees the same choice. It ends with percy refusing to keep the head of medusa as a spoil of war, refusing his heroic reward. He lets his mother have the head and use it to kill gabe. Isnt that fucking crazy for a kids book? Gabe wasnt a Monster. He wasnt going to Turn to Dust and Disappear in a narratively convenient way. He was a living breathing mortal dude and percy and his mom killed him without remorse. Break the cycle of abuse!!!! Dont let this happen again!!! Anyway thats why the original percy jackson series is Hey where are you going with our breadsticks
Ok firstly l already love love LOVE analysis’ like this and this is fucking AMAZING but also like
percy’s choice to refuse immortality and to tell the gods to break the cycle is just such an empowering scene, and when l first read the book, l read that chapter over and over and over again and l didn’t know why, but it’s just because that scene just gives you that moment of oh, wow, and it feels like that first domino falling, that first action that very first step, in a series of chain reactions that’s going to lead us to a better place.
And yeah, I’m future series we see that’s things aren’t going perfectly because nothing’s perfect, y’know, and that’s just reality, but you can still see that chain of dominoes falling one after another, and you realise that this can happen, we can break this cycle, and you see that Percy’s world isn’t so different from ours, because both worlds are still incredibly messed up with so many problems that still haven’t been solved, but these books just make it a little better, and a little more hopeful, and OH MY GOD THE NEW PERCY JACKSON SERIES EPISODE TITLES
Just in case the show doesn’t end up airing or they air the censored version Internet Archive has the whole series plus more so you can watch this fall :)
