Percy Jackson: The Problem With Book Purists
Art is about trying to capture a feeling so that others can experience it for themselves. Each medium has its own limitations when conveying the desired experience to its audience. As a result, when a story is transferred from one medium to another, it often needs to change. There’s beauty in the limitations of each medium. Art must adapt to its new home. Unfortunately, as much as we want things to be perfectly translated, it’s impossible. Great effort can be made to honor the original work, but an adaptation will never be a word-for-word or image-for-image copy. And it shouldn’t.
When it comes to film adaptations, the narrative should be able to mold itself. With the story known, adjustments and additions can be made to further develop the plot while honoring the original piece. The issue isn’t in adapting to better convey the story’s central truth; it’s when there’s a straight-up inaccurate translation.
Author Rick Riordan and his fans hated the Percy Jackson movie adaptations. The main critique: none of the changes made in the film adaptation enhanced or furthered the story in any way. Apart from the iconic iPod scene and the casting of Logan Lerman, audiences tossed the movies into the bin along with other failed book adaptations of Persuasion, The Mortal Instruments, Eragon, and World War Z. With the movies being such a disappointment, many people were apprehensive when a new Percy Jackson TV show was announced—at least until it was revealed that Uncle Rick himself would be in the writer’s room.
When season one came out, it was not a direct page-to-screen adaptation. One notable difference is that the books are solely from the protagonist, Percy’s, point of view. The story’s development is then shaped by this limited perspective. In the show, Percy is no longer the only perspective into the world; it’s not shaped by his biases or preconceptions, and instead, audiences see a bigger picture.
With the changes coming directly from the creator, you would think that the TV show would have been accepted with more grace. But that was not the case. Many viewers were upset with the changes made in season one, from a small scene of young Percy seeing Blackjack to introducing Hermes in a casino scene when he wasn’t there in the books. The argument against these changes is often that they’re not “book accurate,” unnecessary, or will lead to further changes down the line. Every adaptation commits the sin of deviating from the book; whether those changes are enough to absolve the sin is subjective.
Percy Jackson and the Olympians season two wrapped up with an epic battle at camp. Notably, this battle was not in the books. In fact, much of season two wasn’t from the original book series. Throughout the season, as in season one, many changes were made in the TV show adaptation. I will admit that I am not beyond book purist tendencies and was originally worried Disney would erase certain important aspects of the book. This worry flared when I saw how Gabe, Percy’s stepfather, was portrayed in the first season. In the TV series, Gabe was not the visually monstrous human that he was described as in the book. His abuse, his cruelty, and his smell are crucial to Percy and his mother, Sally’s, characterization. But then I rewatched it.
It’s true that Gabe is not an obvious, in-your-face abusive partner like in the books. However, I think he becomes something even more important. In the TV series, Gobe is the unassuming abusive partner. At the end of the day, Percy Jackson is about exploring what makes a hero and what makes a villain. The story wants to have a nuanced conversation about everyone’s ability for kindness and cruelty. Gabe’s new form still maintains his central truth: he is an abuser. And the other characters maintain their core characteristics. Sally is still shown as being a mother committed to doing everything to protect her son. And Percy still has to reckon with the fact that Sally invited a monster into her life to keep the worst monsters away from him.
I can’t deny that, in season two, the changes made to the story seemed to escalate more than in season one. From the moment season two starts, it’s different from the books. And on and on the changes went. But the central themes and narrative of Percy Jackson and the Olympians didn’t change. In fact, many of these changes I feel, were made because Rick Rodian wants to further contextualize, solidify, and add to the central themes of the story, and all this can be best seen in that final episode. There’s also the fact that Riordan has completed other novels that build upon the Percy Jackson universe. When he sat down in the writer’s room, Riordan knew where the story was going and where it was going to end. He was able to leverage his hindsight to further build out the fictional world his books introduced.
When you approach an adaptation with the belief that nothing should change, that nothing needs to change, you miss how each change may actually benefit the greater story. Being bilingual, I learned that accurate translation is not about word-for-word accuracy. Each language has its own rules, and trying to do a word-for-word translation can butcher the heart of the message. Instead, the focus for translation is to convey the message accurately. Rick Riodian made changes to the show, but he didn’t alter the books’ message. In many instances, his changes helped those same messages become bolder.
