Monsters and Demigods: The Percy Jackson Fandom

Author’s Notes:

This author is choosing to make some stylistic choices, including the stylization of fanfiction to be spelled like … well … fanfiction. Alternate spellings include fan fiction, fan-fiction, and others. It is also shortened to fic sometimes, especially within a specific fandom (i.e. Percy Jackson fic). This stylistic choice will also apply to other fanworks like fanvids (videos) and fanart.

This author may tend to focus on fanfiction in her discussion of fanworks, since that is the medium with which she is most comfortable. She does not mean to imply that any other fanworks have less value.

Some of the videos hyperlinked to within this post do feature profanity. Since this is an accurate part of the fandom experience, the author has chosen to include them.

(Pictured: fanart of Percy Jackson (1))

The Series:

Percy Jackson and the Olympians is a five-book series by Rick Riordan, an American author. The series was published from 2005-2009. There was a subsequent five-book series titled The Heroes of Olympus, which was published from 2010-2014. Initially, I had planned to only discuss the original book series and its fandom, but I came to realize in my research that this was nigh impossible to do because of how intertwined the fandoms are. There are some people who prefer one series to the other, but because of the close releases and the inclusion of the original characters in the new series, it is difficult to separate the two fandoms.

Percy Jackson and the Olympians follows main character Percy Jackson as he discovers at the age of twelve that he is a demigod--the half human, half god offspring from Greek mythology. His father is Poseidon, which makes Percy powerful and a target. Throughout the course of five books, Percy deals with calming the gods’ often powerful tempers, helping to save the only place that is safe for demigods, and preventing the destruction of the very gods and their way of life--not to mention the usual concerns of being a new teenager with ADHD and dyslexia.

The Heroes of Olympus brings into play a whole new set of characters along with the main cast from Percy Jackson and the Olympians, as they have to navigate being a team and trying to save the world again.

(Pictured: fanart of Percy Jackson (2))

The Fandom (an Introduction):

Many fans of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series and Heroes of Olympus (hereafter referred to as PJO and HoO, respectively) are those who grew up with it. They are the “intended” audience, those who were in school when the books were releasing. I am part of this generation, as I started reading PJO around the time that the fourth book was released.

At its core, a fandom is essentially a community of people who share the love of a topic of some kind. Often, the topic is a book, an author, or some other piece of fiction, including that of different (non-print) media. For the PJO/HoO fandom, they have rallied around the series created by Rick Riordan.

The Fanworks:

There are varying levels of involvement within fandom. There are people who consume new content, those who create it, and those who do a deep dive within already existing media. Each of these elements has its own place, and they are by no means mutually exclusive.

Some of the places where the PJO/HoO fandom exists online include Tumblr, TikTok, Pinterest, and other sites. There are also fanwork hosting sites like Archive of our Own, FanFiction, and Wattpad. Those hyperlinks take the reader to the main page of the site, whereas members of the fandom normally have highly specialized the content that they come into contact with to narrow down their exposure primarily to their chosen fandoms.

(Pictured: fanart of Annabeth Chase, a main character in the PJO/HoO series (3))

Each site has a slightly different culture, and there is a bit of overlap between the sites. Pinterest, for instance, tends to have lots of material cross-posted from other sources. Tumblr is home to a lot of original content, but it tends to be either short text posts that can turn into longer threads and/or fanart. Archive of our Own, Fanfiction, Wattpad, and other similar sites hold primarily text-based fanworks, though there are some audio and visual works as well.

A common part of a fandom experience is "shipping"--which is essentially the reader hoping for two or more characters to become involved romantically. There is also platonic shipping, but this doesn't seem to be as common. Even if/when characters have become romantically, the shipping continues. Some people produce fanart, some produce fic, and in the case of fandoms that have some visual elements, some people produce fanvid edits. Possibly the most popular ship within the PJO/HoO fandom is Percabeth, which is the main character Percy Jackson and his in-book girlfriend Annabeth Chase. The pair had an interesting history together, denying their feelings for one another until the final book of the PJO series. They got together at the end of the final book, making a lot of fandom members happy.

Shipping doesn't stop once a pair has gotten together, though. Thousands of fanworks have been created since Percy and Annabeth got together. Some of these works detail bits of their lives that the readers didn't get to see in the original series. Some fanworks discuss what might have happened since the end of the canon works. There are nearly infinite ways to create fanworks, and almost everything imaginable has been tried in one fandom or another at some point.

It is also worth noting that YouTube hosts a lot of fanvids. Since PJO/HoO is a text-based fandom, many videos consist of Vine or TikTok compilations, as well as book reviews and fan theories/discussions (each hyperlink brings you to one example of such a video).

The Scholars:

Despite the plethora of fanworks that exist in non-academic spaces like Tumblr and Pinterest, there is not a large amount of "fannish" material in academic spaces. There were only a few articles that I could find, including one titled "A God Buys Us Cheeseburgers": Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson Series and America's Culture Wars, which really sounds like a fascinating read to me (4). I plan on reading it more thoroughly when I get a chance.

There are a few possible reasons for the dearth of academic fannish material. First, there is the age of the fans. Someone who was in seventh grade when the first PJO book came out would now be around twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old. While of course it is possible to be publishing in academic journals in the like by that point, it is not the most common thing in the world. There is also the element of "childishness" that is seen around young adult literature and especially fantasy literature. It's normally not seen in a serious light to be analyzed and treated as one would treat a piece of classic literature, though often one can do as deep of a dive into something like the PJO series as they could into Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. PJO is packed with pop culture references, Greek and Roman mythos, and the enduring themes of growing older and having to make one of many impossible choices.

Works Cited:

1. viria13. “The Son of Neptune.” DeviantArt, 6 March 2013, www.deviantart.com/viria13/art/The-Son-of-Neptune-357989993
2. demigodsavvy. “A colorful water boy.” Tumblr, 31 May 2017 64.media.tumblr.com/84435cce8363a0bc3e1f6f76cb896c6c/tumblr_oqueeeOuxE1tmke64o1_400.png
3. AireensColor. “Annabeth Chase.” DeviantArt, 10 September 2012, https://www.deviantart.com/aireenscolor/art/Annabeth-Chase-326424795
4. Morey, Anne and Claudia Nelson. "“A God Buys Us Cheeseburgers”: Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson Series and America’s Culture Wars." The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 39 no. 3, 2015, p. 235-253. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/uni.2015.0025.