Originally published in print September 2022.
From the live action remakes of animated Disney movies to the Star Wars sequels, people are starting to identify adaptation with badly made cash-grabs preying on our nostalgia. Nostalgia is powerful for the same reason it’s predatory; it promises to fulfil an ideal to the point of self-deception. When it doesn’t fulfil that ideal, you get something like Percy Jackson (2010). If you’re a fan of the Percy Jackson books series, or know someone who is, you probably already know how detested this adaptation is. I count myself among the haters, but when I heard that Rick Riordan would be more involved in the upcoming Disney+ adaptation, I found myself getting excited at the idea of seeing an author-led vision come to life.
A childhood spent reading about mythical road trips until one in the morning was knocking at the door of my mind. A cursory glance around the internet told me I wasn’t the only one – old fans came out of the woodwork when the new show was announced. They created art, talked about the personal importance of the series and hoped that the adaptation would be true to the books. But what is the ‘truth’ in the books? Why do these books, which are themselves beat-for-beat retellings of ancient myths, have such a hold on readers?
I’m certainly nostalgic for a time when fifteen seemed to be an ancient, unreachable age. As a nine year old, I remember seeing Percy, Annabeth and the rest as larger-than-life heroes. Now I just wonder how Chiron could let a bunch of thirteen year olds go running around the country without an older teen to help them out, at the very least. The series is a reminder of when the weird world of high school and college was something distant that I didn’t have to worry about.
Another reassuring element was Camp Half-Blood. The summer camp returned the characters to the same place again and again, giving the series a familiar focal point. It was guaranteed that the heroic training grounds of Camp Half-Blood would be there. In a way, we were all returning to the camp every time we opened the book. It gave its readers a sense of unity. We all wanted the orange t-shirts and debated who our divine parent was. It was a place, albeit a fictional one, where we could all find our niche regardless of where we fit in in the real world.
The characters were just as important as the setting. The cast selected for the roles, as well as the new flood of fanart, shows all the ways that the characters are imagined, even years after setting the books aside. Remembering my favourites from the line-up is like reading a diary from my younger self: I like Annabeth because she’s smart and I was always called a smart kid; Nico because he had an aviator jacket and the goth aesthetic I was never brave enough to pull off. Even the gods are endearing, such as Iris in her hippy shop, or grounded, like Zeus wearing a pinstripe suit. Riordan’s connection between the divine and the mundane, shows that the strange intricacies of the adult world aren’t as grave and cryptic as they seem.
Seeing characters we connect to navigate the weird world of myth is comforting. Combining coming-of-age tales with mythical worlds is not unusual by any means – most children’s fiction centres around this concept. Riordan doesn’t just reframe ancient myths in a modern setting; he gives them new heroes. C. S. Lewis sums up the idea succinctly: ‘Since it is so likely that (children) will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.’ Although, as I mentioned earlier, several kids fighting a bunch of monsters seems unrealistic, that isn’t the point. Riordan’s books are meant to teach kids that they can take on anything. This lesson gets revived whenever I return to the books, even though I’ve left my childhood behind.
This above all is why so many of us old readers return to the books and follow the show’s development. Although nostalgia is something that can be preyed upon, it can be handled carefully. Nostalgia isn’t just an unhealthy longing for the past – it’s a strategy to use the past for our present and future. Whether it’s lessons we’ve learned or just a reassuring feeling of belonging, the past has something to offer us so we can remember to move on. I think we all want a bit of the community and determination from those books, or others, as we hopefully emerge from the pandemic.
Not every adaptation or reboot will be fulfilling to watch for all of us. But we return to old material for the same reason that it’s remade, to remember the power that they have. The original has the seed of something, different in every work of literature, that attracts us to it. Even disappointing adaptations that result from this remind us of what should’ve been done right, and what we loved about the original. Regardless of how the Percy Jackson show turns out, I’m glad it brought me down memory lane to remind me of the good parts of the past, which I hope to see again in the future.
