Written by: Hannah Dang
DISCLAIMER: The following blog post contains spoilers for Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians book series and the Disney+ series. I caution you to read at your own risk.
From the moment I learned the English alphabet, I’ve loved reading. Instead of going outside to play jump rope with my classmates or draw in chalk on the playground pavement, I was the kid who’d “skip” recess to have more time to read. As I only possessed a handful of books back at home, I considered my teachers’ much larger collections practically a library. And there was one genre I loved reading more than any other. You guessed it, it was mythology.
Ask anyone who knows me, I like to believe I’m everyone’s resident cryptic expert on mythology. By the time I nearly finished reading everything about the Ancient Greeks and Romans catalogue, I read about the Ancient Egyptians, Norse mythologies, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, the list went on. Of course, Ancient Greek mythology was my favorite, and loving it then led me down into Tartarus, falling into the arms of Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympian series.
If you’ve been reading for as long as I have, I’d find it hard to believe if you said you never heard of the Percy Jackson and the Olympian series, but I digress.
For people who don’t know, the premise is entirely centered around Ancient Greek mythology, in which Riordan imagines ancient gods and goddesses, satyrs, naiads, monsters, and other mythics existing in modern-day. The books focus on eleven-year-old Percy Jackson, a troubled kid diagnosed with dyslexia and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), who discovers he’s a demigod, a child of a god and a mortal. Percy is then brought to Camp Half-Blood — a sanctuary for other demigods — by his mother Sally Jackson and Grover, his best friend, and recognized as the son of Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea. Each book covers a different quest, in which Percy oftentimes enlists Grover, who is revealed to be a satyr, and Annabeth Chase, the daughter of Athena, the goddess of wisdom, to join him. For each quest, the trio must overcome obstacles including bloodthirsty monsters, vengeful primordials, cryptic prophecies, their fatal flaws, and even fate itself.
For the most part, it’s a fun, light-hearted (mostly due to Percy’s comical narration), action-packed story, and I can’t recommend it enough. It’s definitely in everyone’s top ten list for starter series for people who have picked reading up as a hobby. It’s even more heart-warming to know Riordan said his books were originally based around the bedtime stories he would tell his own son, who also faced struggles similar to Percy.
Following Riordan’s commercial success, resulting in the release of four more books following the first installment, The Lightning Thief and The Sea of Monsters, the sequel to the first book, received film adaptations produced by 1492 Pictures and distributed by 20th Century Fox in 2010 and 2013 respectively. Due to various reasons, including terrible characterization, convoluted scripts, and more, both films failed spectacularly, I may add, to pay homage to Riordan’s original story, but I’ll save my rant for another time. Now enough about the “Peter Johnson” movies (iykyk), I’m writing today to review one of the most revolutionary releases of 2023 and 2025, that’s right — Season 1 and Season 2 of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians Disney+ series.
Like a bunch of other readers, I was skeptical of Riordan deciding to do a live-action remake of the books, especially after the fiasco released ten years ago. I was also skeptical of Disney being the platform for its release because of the company’s recent productions — their terrible live-action remakes of their animated films. My heart was a bit eased after hearing Riordan himself would be the executive producer of the show, but I didn’t want to set my expectations too high. Following Riordan’s announcement, I lurked on the web to wait for any news and updates, and then the casting dropped.
I was reading Riordan’s blog announcing the cast members on his official website and saw their names: Walker Scobell, the child actor who was in The Adam Project alongside Ryan Reynolds, was going to play Percy Jackson; Leah Jeffries, who starred in the film Beast and the musical drama Empire, was going to play Annabeth Chase; and Aryan Simhadri, who was in the off-Broadway production of Trevor: The Musical, was going to play Grover Underwood. For a second, fear struck my heart, knowing the struggles lying in wait for these actors, but after seeing their smiling faces, I knew the show was in good hands.
Caption: Walker Scobell, who plays Percy Jackson, the demigod son of Poseidon; Aryan Simhadri, who plays Grover Underwood, Percy’s best friend and a satyr; and Leah Jeffries, who plays Annabeth Chase, the demigod daughter of Athena
By the time the casting for Percy, Grover, and Annabeth was announced, there was an uproar amongst the fans because Riordan casted Walker Scobell, a blonde, blue-eyed actor, as Percy and a Black Annabeth. Critics claimed Riordan “lied” to his fans by promising he would deliver on producing a “book-accurate” adaptation, but what exactly does that mean?
To some critics, it means the actors have to look exactly like their book counterparts, but to me, as long as the personalities and character arcs for each of the characters are portrayed accurately, that was what’s important. Last I checked, Percy having black hair and sea-green eyes was never a critical plot point, but I can see why Annabeth’s casting caused an uproar. Yes, Riordan created Annabeth to be blonde in the books to subvert the “dumb blonde” stereotypes conquering the literary and media landscapes during the early 2000s. I can understand and even praise Riordan for choosing to divert away from this as he empowered many women as a result. Casting Leah Jeffries was Riordan making the same statement, not only for blonde women, but for all women regardless of their skin color. Annabeth’s character was never about casting away stereotypes subjected to only certain people, but eradicating predetermined prejudices about everyone.
At the top of my list of wins for the series is the level of representation in the series’ casting. Simhadri is Indian; Jeffries is Black; Charlie Bushnell, who plays Luke Castellan, the demigod son of Hermes, is Costa Rican, Japanese, and Irish; Dior Goodjohn, who plays Clarisse de la Rue, the demigod daughter of Ares, is Persian, and it doesn’t end there.
As longtime fans probably know, Riordan is one of the few authors of his era to have devoted himself towards championing diverse representation in his books. While his earliest trial runs of making his works more inclusive were a mixed bag (ex. some of the characters in the Heroes of Olympus series, the sequel to the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series), the fans appreciated it because Riordan was putting in the effort to make his books more accessible to more audiences. The more he wrote, the more his fans realized his books were never about “selling” POC, LGBTQA+, disabled characters as a marketing ploy, but a genuine desire to connect with more people through storytelling across different mediums. Through the Disney+ series, which is arguably a more visual medium, Riordan was able to bring his characters and series to life on a bigger stage than ever before. Other fans have the right to disagree, but I was super glad to have given the show a chance.
In addition to casting a diverse range of age-appropriate actors with amazing chemistry (and line deliveries), one of my favorite parts of watching the series is seeing the stunning sets. I still remember the first time I saw Camp Half-Blood in the first promo trailer and gasped because it was exactly how I imagined it to be. Coupled with the cover of “Riptide” by Vance Joy, performed by Stealth, and a clip of Scobell about to unleash his water powers was more than enough to make me feel overwhelmed with joy.
There were also fans who criticized the series for not perfectly portraying Percy’s inner monologue. As the original series was written in first-person, in Percy’s perspective, for a middle-grade audience, it makes sense why some people believed the series failed to capture Percy’s wicked sense of humor and his thinking. In my opinion, this show may have Percy taking center stage, but it provides us with a more 3-dimensional perspective of all of the characters, worldbuilding, plot elements, and crossing storylines. For example, we get to see the way Kronos, the main antagonist of the series, manipulates Luke as well as the rest of the demigods who turned away from the gods. We also get to see more of Annabeth’s backstory as well as her complex relationships with Luke and Thalia. I never viewed this direction that the showrunners decided to take as negative. Considering I’m one of many, many fans who are constantly starved for more content, I was glad more characters and storylines get more screentime.
Something I was also surprised at, for the most part pleasantly, were the amount of plot changes Riordan and the other scriptwriters decided. For example, in the first episode of season two, Tyson’s “reveal” to be a cyclops never happened per se. From his first introduction, both Percy and Sally know Tyson is a cyclops. I know part of the reason is because the production team needed to save run-time as much as possible, but deep down, I think it’s because Riordan and the rest of the staff wanted to come up with new plot twists to keep the audience hooked to the story. While the majority are tuning in because we already know the sequence of events in the original book series by heart, at the end of the day, this series is an adaptation, and we should be cognizant of the creative decisions Riordan and the staff decide to make going forward. To me, what matters most is if the essence of the characters, the major points of the plot, and what being a demigod is like in Percy’s world is preserved.
I will admit, the Disney+ series has its faults, which I hope to see develop as the series progresses. If it’s one thing I do know, it’s that Riordan always keeps his readers’ feedback in mind. The main issue I did have with the series were the short episodes. In my opinion, in order for the series to fix the strangely fast pacing would be to add more minutes to the run-time because there was so much the first season didn’t get to expand upon, so as a result, some of the storyline fell flat.
Not only that, while most of the CGI scenes were well-executed, a majority of fans agreed that budget cuts definitely hindered the immersion of the story because nearly anything mythical would only show up on screen for less than a minute. While the sets are gorgeous, in my opinion, the series needs a Marvel-level of budget to account for the amount of mythical elements the story has, especially in later seasons. Here’s to hoping season two received enough acclaim to warrant a budget increase for the third season of the series, which according to the newest promos, season three should be expected to be released later this year.
For a series as beloved and critically-acclaimed as the Percy Jackson series, I know satisfying all of his readers would be an impossible feat. The show’s far from perfect, but I hope Rick Riordan, the cast, and the rest of the staff members working on this project know how happy they’ve made me and so many other fans by giving us a worthy adaptation of this incredible series. The first two seasons were solid thus far, and I can’t wait to get swept by the tide for the rest of the show.
Featured Image Caption: A city of bronze surrounded by rushing waters with lightning bolts in the sky. In the middle, it reads “Percy Jackson and the Olympians TV Series — A Review,” and the subtitle reads “Hannah Dang.”