Today, I’m going to tell you about Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief, the 2010 adaptation of Disney’s Hercules, or a reboot of the Harry Potter series. After all, all three movies start with a young hero named Percy/Hercules/Harry, who doesn’t fit in with the regular mortals/mortals/Muggles, but makes new friends in the form of a Satyr/Satyr/ginger and an annoying girl/annoying bitch/annoying girl.
Little does The Young Hero know that he has special powers over water/special powers of strength/special powers over space and time without limits if he would just learn fluent Latin. Luckily, James Bond as a Centaur/Rip Torn?/Dumbledore is there to tell him about his demigod parentage/all-God parentage because Disney is ball-less/significant orphaning. He is then whisked away to Demigod LARP camp/the training camp of a satyr/Hogwarts to train his powers.
However, Hades/Hades/Voldemort is terrorizing the world. The Young Hero is initially kept out of harm’s way (and instead enjoys the sport of LARPing/monster-killing/Quidditch) but the kidnapping of his mother/his girlfriend/various people throughout the books spurs him to strike out on his own and travel to Hell/travel to Hell/travel into the hellish basement of Hogwarts. There, he is surprised to learn that the villain is actually a classmate/okay, still Hades/a teacher.
There is an epic battle, in which he fights the villain in the rain/on Mount Olympus/in a basement and retrieves the lightning bolt/his girlfriend’s soul/the Golden Snitch or something. He is commended by his father and the gods/his father and the gods/Dumbledore, the closest thing the Potterverse has to a white-bearded, all-knowing, and self-sacrificing-for-initially-mysterious-reasons God. Afterward, he doesn’t get the girl because they’re setting up for a sequel/gets the girl/doesn’t get the girl because they’re both twelve.
Meanwhile (in Percy Jackson), the acting is so terrible (except for Uma Thurman, maybe) that the special effects fall flat.
But, you know what? We’re not here today to talk about how bad the movie was. We’re not even going to go over the Hero’s Journey plot. No, it’s time for another Clichés I Abhor. Today, we’ll be talking first about God.
To give you some background, Zeus of the old Greek pantheon was the first player. How much of a player? Besides being formally married to his sister, Hera, he had up to forty-three mistresses (that we know of), all of whom he had children with (Hercules being one of them, with the mortal princess Alcmene). Forget Aphrodite; this guy was the god of love, albeit extramarital.
Fun fact: Back in the day, Zeus had some fun with a mortal named Danae, who gave birth to Perseus (known for killing the Medusa and being the namesake of Percy Jackson). Perseus then fathered Electryon; he was a king or something, but mostly he had the most awesome name ever. Electryon then fathered the princess Alcmene. Zeus disguised himself as her fiancé and slept with her several times, thereby technically raping her.
Yep; Zeus raped his own great-granddaughter. Zeus wasn’t just a disgusting adulterer, but a rapist — incestuously when he could manage it. We Greeks are a fun people!
In Disney’s Hercules, the titular character was the child of Zeus and . . . Hera. No affairs, no rape, no incest. This isn’t entirely attributable to it being a Disney movie marketed to children. Part of why this change was made was in order to turn Zeus into a God figure, in line with the Christian system. This plus this equals this.
See, Viewers are Morons. Movie-makers think that they need to have a solid good guy and a solid bad guy.
Which brings me to Hades.
In the Greek Pantheon, Hades ruled the dead. Not just the bad, sinful dead, but also the good, moral dead. Hades’ world was neither Heaven nor Hell; it was just the place of the dead.
If Zeus was the first player, Hades was the first brooder. Ruling the dead was lonely, the other gods rarely came to visit, and his world, while not hellish, was generally gloomy. He married Persephone but was only allowed to be with her during half of the year; the rest of the time, he was on his own. He was the Hiei to Zeus’ Yusuke, the haunted Legolas to Zeus’ Aragorn (if Aragorn slept around), the depressed Han Solo to Zeus’ Luke Skywalker (assuming Luke ever actually slept with Leia), the Murtagh to Zeus’ Eragon.
So how is he portrayed, almost without fail, in modern retellings? Well, he’s the lord of the dead, right? Clearly, he must be evil. Hence,
In Hercules, he’s at least amusing.
In Percy Jackson, he gets about four minutes of screentime. The first time, he shoots up out of a campfire.
Ready to have your mind blown?
Note the resemblance to Dungeons and Dragons 4e creatures called Balor.
When The Young Hero makes it to Hell, he meets the man himself, as well as his loving wife Persephone. Wait, in this, Persephone hates him and wishes she could escape him forever. And he looks like a biker.
And that’s Hijacked By Jesus.
About Fiona Canteberry
A novelist from northwest Arkansas, Fiona's range of topics include writing, tropes, and self-improvement. She goes by 'FekketCantenel' online.
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Okay. This was funny. My parallel is with the books and the Disney Movie Hercules. At the end of the fifth book, Percy is offered immortatlity after leading the defeat of the Titans and turns it down to be with Annabeth. Sound familiar? I finished reading that and thought ‘really? Come on.’
It’s bad enough to rip off the myths and pretend you’re being original (Shrek and Dresden Files come to mind, but only one franchise is entertaining), but ripping off a mediocre Disney movie, basically making a copy of a copy? Wow.
Percy wasn’t just offered immortality, he was offered godhood. We can assume this has happened exactly once before, with Dionysus, though it may not have happened even then. He was fathered by Zeus of a human mother, who died while still pregnant. Zeus took it upon himself to carry Dionysus in his knee. He was probably still a demigod, unless the mere fact of being born out of a god makes you a god.
Any sane mortal would have taken the gods up on this offer. To be a god? Hell yes, I would. Besides, what’s saying he can’t still be with Annabeth? Can’t he just grant her eternal life and youth, like Artemis does with her huntresses? So… worst ending ever?
It’s kind of like being offered a million dollars, or a position as a CEO who makes a million dollars a year. Percy took the money and ran. Poor idiot.
Of course, godhood could be rejected if it functions in the story as a temptation, i.e. ‘Become an all-powerful but personality-less being who watches over the world without actually doing anything, forever.’ However, the gods seem to have personalities, and probably could have/did interfere in events if it pleased them. So it’s not so much a temptation here as a gift.
(I still haven’t read the books, so I’m going off of what the movie showed me.)
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