Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, so let us return to PJO S2 once again.
We start with ‘the Sea of Monsters’, obviously.
Riordan’s novel was one thing, and Disney+ went with something visibly
influenced by the PotC franchise – remember the entire Depp vs. Hearst RL story?
Yes, that PotC. Disney is continuing to play fast and loose with its properties
– guess the Sequel Trilogy of SW did not teach them anything…
No, really, let us expand. In the SW 7-9 films,
Disney tried to push female power and other progressive politics onto the movies’
audiences, and failed. The state of affairs where Disney/SW just swung back and
forth between bending backwards to appease the viewers to flat-out defying them
(Witcher S4 style) to elsewhere made it worse. In PJO S2, this state of affairs
is not present, instead we have POCs, especially young women of Afro-American
origin, being the main characters – mostly. Circe took over for Medusa here,
(sort of – out of the two, Medusa is the more appealing character), and PJ (who
is played by an Anglo-American male), and Grover, (who is a POC, but male,
rather than female), are still important to the plot. However, otherwise?
Athena is depicted here as a POC. Not a problem – she is a goddess; in Homer’s ‘Odyssey’
she tended to alter her appearance constantly whenever she was in the mortal
world – she could appear as anyone, male or female, as well as human or bird.
Right now, we behold her as a woman of color, just as Zeus is an Afro-American
man – but that does not matter at all. Zeus courted Europa as a bull, Danae –
as a shower of gold, Alcmene – as her legitimate husband, and Leda – as a swan
to name a few; right now he looks like an Afro-American man; in the next moment
he can look like an animal, an inanimate object, or, Tartarus, even a woman –
he seduced and impregnated Callisto in the shape of his another daughter, Diana
slash Artemis of the hunt, so, clearly, the divine equipment is different from
the mortal on many levels…
Athena, of course, is supposed to be a virginal
goddess. Pause. In the second series, Riordan made it so that Minerva is a
virginal goddess, but Athena isn’t – and now, in ‘The Court of the Dead’, there
are ‘legacy demigods’ of Minerva too. He is clearly doing his best to adapt to
whatever Disney is doing with his franchise, for what else is there?
Calling it quits and leaving with some originality
and integrity intact. As king Midas showed, you cannot have all the money in
the world, and Croesus showed that you could be rich, but still have an unhappy
ending to your life. (Neither appeared on PJO yet). Riordan has 15 books on the
Greek-Roman myths, 3 on the Egyptian, and another 5 on the Norse – plus oodles
of supplementary books. That is quite enough for a single person; the royalties
for them should last him a lot – and then there are the ‘RR presents’ YA novels
– but we’ll talk about them another time. Right now we reach the point that
Riordan’s characters can be POC or WASP and move to the fact that Disney is trying
to pull an ‘Ironheart’ here – Annabeth, Clarisse, even Thalia (in the
flashback), all are POCs, and they almost steal the show from Percy, who is
not. The show is good, but now the fans have reached the acceptance stage – they
do not care about the race bending, (good for them), or about anything else. They
just watch the episode of the week, and move on. Riordan and Disney tried to
reinvigorate the franchise. It does not appear to have worked. Of course, if
they kill Clarisse, (rather than Luke) on the show, I will be sad and
disgruntled for one, but that is unimportant. I believe they are trying to make
Clarisse almost like a mentor/big sister to Percy and that, again, is original
content. Pause.
There is nothing wrong with original content; Hell,
Tom Holland’s ‘Spider-Man’ movies are full of it, and if original content is
delivered correctly, (in those movies it is), it works. Otherwise, you have ‘Ironheart’
or even ‘Marvel Zombies’, where it does not work. What next?
Clarisse’s heartfelt speech in the scene with Scylla.
Of all the depictions they could have taken with the sea monster, this one was disappointing
– a watered-down version of the PotC Kraken. Seriously, they just could have
made her a giant squid and be done with it, ‘cause why not? In addition, on
another note, it is Epic: the Musical. What?
In JRH’s version, Odysseus sacrificed a random
half-a-dozen of his crew so that he, and the rest, could get through and to
Ithaca, eventually. In Homer, Odysseus prepared to fight Scylla, but since six
heads can be smarter than one, Scylla launched a surprise sneak attack and
stole six of Odysseus’ crew before Odysseus could do anything. In addition,
here, in PJO S2, we have Clarisse and co. doing their best to save Clarisse’s
crew (who are not entirely human themselves, but Scylla does not care)… with
mixed success, but still. I honestly wonder if the script of Epic: the Musical,
(there the Scylla episode is something of a response to the ‘Survive’ song set
in Polyphemus’ cave), hadn’t influenced Disney’s PJO script writers and they
went the other way…
Polyphemus, of course, is Polyphemus, (just as Tyson
is Tyson). Here, the PJO script did something different from the book again –
the Tyson vs. Polyphemus fight, for example. Clearly, the PJO scriptwriters
felt that they needed to do something different from the book (and the movie)
here, and they did. It was certainly dramatic, too. Good for them. Pause.
Do I like the PJO S2? It is not bad. It is full of
progressive politics, just like Ms. Haynes’ books, and as I wrote before, Ms.
Haynes seems to be doing her best to be noticed by Disney and co. – but she does
not appear to have much luck in this direction. As it was written earlier, her
writing usually does not have any passion, any investment – it is not written by
an A.I., but that is not necessarily an improvement.
What is the advantage of A.I.? It allows you to
bounce your ideas around, to see what they look like as a draft.
…Ok, it can enable you to do a lot more – write an
official letter, an essay, explain a complex myth to your child and so on. The
A.I. is here to stay, but you must learn how to handle it precisely – a slight mistake
and the result is nothing that you wanted. If this sounds familiar, it is. It
is Athena and her wisdom – she can help you see clearly, (or clearer), what you
want, but nothing else. You are in charge, in fact, you decide where to go from
there, what to do with this advice, and so on. The ‘Odyssey’ shows this clearly
– Athena, disguised as Mentor, (a man – therefore, for all that we know, she was
hanging around Annabeth regularly, Annabeth just never knew that it was her
mum), helps Telemachus to organize his thoughts, make up his mind, design his
plan, and go off to execute it. It is clean, precise, methodical, and not
exactly humans – but the gods of Olympus are not exactly human to begin with,
and neither is A.I. I am not saying that Annabeth is the daughter of a divine
Skynet, but wouldn’t it be cool if it were?
Back to PJO… it was not written by A.I., or at least
– not purely by A.I., and neither were Riordan’s original YA novels, and
therefore, the PJ franchise feels more emotional than Ms. Haynes’ works. Her
non-fiction works are something else, and ‘1000 ships’… well, it has Odysseus
and Penelope in it, and so it is a much more interesting read than ‘Stone’; as for
‘House’ (her upcoming 2006 novel), we will just have to wait and see.
For now, though, this is it. See you all soon.
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