Ambiguity and Percy Jackson
Sep. 17th, 2013 03:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jsburbidgeThere's an article over at tor.com regarding moral ambiguity in Percy Jackson and the Olympians, which is mildly interesting -- even though my reaction is "not so much".
My daughter is currently reading the series, so the books are on hand and I read them through, not being averse to a quick light read, and I did enjoy them. But as far as moral ambiguity went, my initial reaction was that it was unnecessarily skipping some.
My main concern was around Chronos, who is presented as an entirely bad figure (indeed, all of the Titans are presented as black, even those who tend to show sympathetically in actual myth, like Prometheus and Epimetheus). This is (it turns out in the second series) equally applicable to Chronos' "Roman" version of Saturn. However, there's a long tradition that Saturn's reign was a golden age: iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna, as the Fourth Eclogue has it. A month or so ago I was at Stirling Castle, where James V had included a statue of Saturn as part of a representation of his own reign as a new golden age. (This confused my daughter no end, given her exposure to Riordan). The gods may have had difficulties with Saturn, but humanity seems to have had a better time (although one without fire: if you put everything together, it's one of those semi-Edenic worlds without the need for agricultural labour but also without any of the benefits of civilization.
I don't think that painting Chronos black was needed, even at a middle-school level. Some shades of grey could have been provided: showing the Titans, for example, as representing a time that was so irretrievably past that their return would be massively destructive, but not simply nasty in themselves.
I will say, though, that the movies make the books look positively sophisticated and subtle, both in their characterizations and in the amount of hacking they did to the plots. On the topic of absent parents (the focus of the article linked above), for example, the movie inserts a iron-clad rule preventing the gods from having contact with their children (thereby rather improving the optics of both Hermes and Poseidon). Characterization also suffered badly. Very badly.
My daughter is currently reading the series, so the books are on hand and I read them through, not being averse to a quick light read, and I did enjoy them. But as far as moral ambiguity went, my initial reaction was that it was unnecessarily skipping some.
My main concern was around Chronos, who is presented as an entirely bad figure (indeed, all of the Titans are presented as black, even those who tend to show sympathetically in actual myth, like Prometheus and Epimetheus). This is (it turns out in the second series) equally applicable to Chronos' "Roman" version of Saturn. However, there's a long tradition that Saturn's reign was a golden age: iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna, as the Fourth Eclogue has it. A month or so ago I was at Stirling Castle, where James V had included a statue of Saturn as part of a representation of his own reign as a new golden age. (This confused my daughter no end, given her exposure to Riordan). The gods may have had difficulties with Saturn, but humanity seems to have had a better time (although one without fire: if you put everything together, it's one of those semi-Edenic worlds without the need for agricultural labour but also without any of the benefits of civilization.
I don't think that painting Chronos black was needed, even at a middle-school level. Some shades of grey could have been provided: showing the Titans, for example, as representing a time that was so irretrievably past that their return would be massively destructive, but not simply nasty in themselves.
I will say, though, that the movies make the books look positively sophisticated and subtle, both in their characterizations and in the amount of hacking they did to the plots. On the topic of absent parents (the focus of the article linked above), for example, the movie inserts a iron-clad rule preventing the gods from having contact with their children (thereby rather improving the optics of both Hermes and Poseidon). Characterization also suffered badly. Very badly.
