To New Beginnings: Growing Past Percy Jackson - Reactor

My identification with the characters of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series hit me like a lightning strike—intense, immediate, and singingly powerful. I was twelve years old when I first read The Lightning Thief, and the fact that Percy was also twelve seemed significant to me; the kinship I felt with Percy, Annabeth, and their fellow demigods was inextricably tied to the fact that we were in the same stage of life, all of us teetering on the edge of childhood and adolescence. Percy had monsters, prophecies, and godly parentage; I had my first year of middle school on the horizon. 

I had years to catch up with Annabeth and Percy, to test my experiences against theirs as I aged. In 2014, I turned 17, and so did Percy—The Blood of Olympus was published in October of that year, marking the end of the Heroes of Olympus series, a five-part saga that follows the events of Percy Jackson and the Olympians and spans the length of about a year. After that, I kept aging, but Percy’s timeline slowed almost to a standstill. Since 2017, Percy has been suspended in a kind of narrative stasis. He’s aged about six months in the past eight years; only in The Court of the Dead, a spinoff sequel published earlier this year, do we learn that Percy has finally made it to college.

I am now 29. Nearly six years ago, shortly after the Disney+ Percy Jackson and the Olympians show was announced, I wrote about the ways in which the “Riordanverse” (stories in the linked universe created by Percy Jackson author Rick Riordan) grew with me. I stand by that assessment and remain grateful for the surprising ways in which the Riordanverse has continued to reflect my experiences and identities as I’ve grown older. But I’ve noticed recently, as the Disney+ show aired and as I returned to the Riordanverse books for the first time in several years, that my relationship to these characters and narratives has shifted. When I initially wrote about Percy Jackson, I was a first-year teacher. I am now in my fifth year of teaching, instructing primarily juniors and seniors in my AP English Language and creative writing classes. This means that my students are Percy’s age—and, like Percy, they are in the midst of the transition between high school and college, adolescence and adulthood. When I read Percy Jackson now, I no longer see myself in these stories. I see my students instead.

It’s bittersweet to recognize that a story that once resonated with us is no longer “for” us; it belongs, now, to the next generation of children who need this story as much as we once did. As a teacher, I see how profoundly my students are impacted by Percy Jackson and the rest of the Riordanverse. We’ve spent entire class periods discussing favorite characters, beloved quotes, tragic incidents in the narrative. I delight in these conversations, of course. But it’s strange to reckon with the ways in which my relationship to Percy Jackson has changed. Percy, Annabeth, and the others are no longer my peers. Where I once felt kinship and identification, I now feel an almost mentorly connection. After all, I’ve grown up, and they haven’t. When I look at Annabeth now, I don’t see myself. I see my students and their plans for the future, their college applications, their budding relationships. And that’s beautiful, but it’s a little sad, too.

There’s nothing as certain as the knowledge that we cannot go back; I will never be a twelve year old reading The Lightning Thief for the first time again, nor a seventeen year old with college, a career, and my whole adult life ahead of me. But despite that certainty, ours is a deeply nostalgic culture. And fandom is a particularly powerful site of nostalgia. Online, fandom discourse often revolves around that familiar refrain: “This ruined my childhood!”. It’s adult men arguing about Rey Skywalker and Doctor Who fans lambasting the last decade of the show’s run. Nothing is beyond criticism, but so many of these arguments ultimately pin a story’s “failure” on its inability to make a fan feel the way they felt when they were young.

I get it. I really do. It took me weeks to work up the courage to watch the Disney+ Percy Jackson series. I knew that the show would be excellent, and I also knew that it would not feel the way reading The Lightning Thief felt when I was twelve. It was difficult to come to terms with that. I felt almost jealous of the tweens and teens who would get to grow up with this show the way I grew up with the Riordanverse saga. I recognized that the show wasn’t for me, no matter how much I might enjoy and appreciate it, and there was a kind of loss in that realization. I had come to the end of something, and I was watching a story I love enter into a new era, which it couldn’t do without leaving me behind.

Is it possible to let go of the expectations of nostalgia? Modern pop culture seems inextricable from it; we live in an era of remakes, reboots, and sequels. It’s so tempting to recede into the comfort of our childhoods, to attempt to relive the joy and wonder and awe we felt when we were young. But we keep moving forward. The next generation takes our place. And though studios are eager to capitalize on as many audiences as possible—the young and the old(er) alike—the stories are no longer for us; they’re for them. They’re the ones who need them now.

Percy Jackson and the Chalice of the Gods, a 2023 release from the Riordanverse saga, involves a scene in which Percy, Annabeth, and their satyr friend Grover find themselves within a literal nostalgia trap. Hebe, the goddess of youth, runs an arcade and candy shop that magically transforms its patrons, erasing years of their lives and restoring their youth. Nostalgia is a potent magic, Percy learns, and a dangerous one. This episode is a little ironic in a novel that could itself be described as a nostalgia trap; the back cover of the book reads “Percy Jackson, Annabeth Chase, and Grover Underwood are reunited for their first quest together since The Lightning Thief,” establishing this newest installment as a throwback to the earliest days of the Riordanverse. And yet, as Annabeth remarks, “a lot of places sell nostalgia. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.” Chalice of the Gods invites me, an aging zillennial, to reminisce upon my adolescence. But for my students who, like Percy, are in the midst of college applications (Percy needs to obtain letters of recommendations from three gods to complete his application to New Rome University), the story is keenly relevant. They, too, are subject to forces and systems larger than themselves: the public education system, the insane bureaucracy of university applications, the fraught challenge of securing favorable letters of recommendation. For them, this narrative isn’t nostalgic. It’s current, present, and real.

Though I may be many years removed from the horrors of high school, I’m able to find meaning in the recent Riordanverse installments; it just looks different from the meaning I found when I was a teenager. Last winter, I finished reading the Trials of Apollo series after a seven-year hiatus. I was shocked at how deeply some of the themes of the series resonated with me; at its heart, The Trials of Apollo—which follows the (mis)adventures of the god Apollo after he’s been cast out of Olympus and turned into a human by his father, Zeus, as a punishment—is about hope and redemption. It’s about the strength by which we break toxic cycles of abuse and the resilience at the core of humanity. To a pessimistic 17-year-old, I’m not sure these messages would have rung true. But as an adult, I see my own worldview reflected back at me in Apollo’s burgeoning understanding of humankind. The series is remarkably complex and nuanced, almost Good Place-ian in its evaluation of the human capacity for change. When Apollo tells the subterranean creatures known as troglodytes that “We have to help one another. That’s the only future worth fighting for,” I believe him with an intensity that took almost three decades of life to cultivate. 

There’s something for me in Riordanverse even now, though I’m no longer the target audience. Sometimes I’m taken aback by a cuttingly specific reference to the chaos of teaching before remembering that Riordan, too, was once a teacher. Sometimes I feel a surprising kinship to characters like the centaur Chiron or Percy’s stepdad, Paul Blofis, who once I regarded only as kindly but insignificant adults who populated Percy’s life. And sometimes I find myself in tears over a particularly beautiful line of prose or a poignant insight into life, mortality, love, or resilience, which in my youth I might have overlooked or ignored.

Stories can be different things for different people. Percy Jackson is no longer mine, but that’s okay. There’s a joy, I’ve found, that comes with stories that don’t age with us. There is the joy of seeing old narratives resonate with new audiences. For me, there’s a joy in seeing my students in the characters to whom I once related. And there’s a joy that comes with establishing new perspectives on beloved characters and a beloved text. 

The dedication to The Chalice of the Gods reads, “To Walker, Aryan, and Leah. Here’s to new beginnings!” We’ve entered a new era, and the future of the Riordanverse belongs to the next generation of young readers, including the stars of the Disney+ series whom Riordan recognizes in this dedication. Chalice is, in many ways, a story about growing up. “If you [grow] older with the people you love, [isn’t] that better than any alternative?” Percy reflects. In a book about wrestling with nostalgia and building one’s future, Riordan takes a definitive stance: to grow older is a privilege. To grow away from the stories we love and leave them for their next readers is, I’m certain, a privilege, too.