Alba Mastromatteo, am696@uakron.edu
I have been a Percy Jackson fan since I first picked up The Lightning Thief in fourth grade. These books were my childhood. They introduced me to reading and writing, which are both a huge part of me, and have had an immense impact on my life today. Because of my connection with these books, I was more than thrilled when Disney and Rick Riordan announced the creation of this new Percy Jackson show. From the beginning, I loved what we had seen of the cast. If Percy, Annabeth, and Grover (the trio of the first five Percy Jackson books) were real people, they would be Walker Scobell, Leah Jeffries, and Aryan Simhadri (the actors chosen to play these roles).
When I sat down to watch the show, I was very nervous to see how they would adapt it to TV because this TV show was not their first attempt at a page to screen adaptation. There was a movie that came before in 2005 that had butchered the books so badly that even the author of Percy Jackson, Rick Riordan, said that they had put his work through a “meat-grinder.” But, as I began to watch the show, I found myself really enjoying it.
While the story was changed in many ways from the book to the show, this show did something that the movie had not. Watching the movies, the characters were near unrecognizable. These characters that we had grown up reading about and loving were nowhere to be seen. On the other hand, even with the changes in the plot, the characters in the new show were exactly as they would have in the books. The creators of this show prioritized translating each character’s personality from the page to the screen from Percy’s quips to Grover’s calm demeanor. Despite the vastly different plot, the characters remain the same at their core as they were in the original books.
Another thing that the TV show did very well is updating aspects of Percy Jackson. One example of this is when Annabeth, Percy, and Grover meet Medusa. In the book, she is framed as a villain entirely. However, in the show she is still a villain, but we learn more about why she is how she got there. In short, Medusa is a victim of a fight between Poseidon and Athena (two Greek gods). This show raises awareness to how Medusa was only a villain out of circumstance rather than choice. Athena punished her, turning her into a gorgon, for Poseidon and Medusa’s transgression all while Medusa had dedicated her entire life to serving Athena. Poseidon went unpunished even though he was the main perpetrator. This was a very refreshing take on Medusa as most retellings of Medusa’s myth fail to recognize that she was unfairly punished and is truly a victim. She never deserved to be the monster Athena turned her into.
While I still prefer the books over the show, because of the sentimentality that the original plot holds for me, it was very special to see the characters I read about all throughout middle school on screen and hear my favorite lines that I had read over and over in the books said by these very talented actors. This show was a fresh take on the Percy Jackson universe and was very entertaining to watch.
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