BEFORE I BEGIN (also known as: before you take out the pitchforks): THIS IS NOT SOME KIND OF BATTLE BETWEEN THE TWO STAGES OF CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. I LOVE THEM BOTH. THEY'RE NOT GOING TO DUKE IT OUT IN THIS BLOG POST. IT IS MERELY A COMPARISON. PUT DOWN THE TORCHES. Thank you.
So, hello, my friends! To demonstrate just how eclectic this blog is, following a review of an incredibly emotionally devastating movie, we have a comparison (kind of a tracking of character development) between two stages of development of one of the most lovably adorkable characters ever to grace the printed page. PERCY JACKSON (Jackson, Jackson, Jackson)! PJO/HoO fans, this is especially for you! I hope you like it, and, with that in mind, let us begin.
We are gathered here today to track the character development of one of my favorite fictional characters. Percy Jackson. I was inspired to do this while watching CassJayTuck's review of Son of Neptune, so thank you Cass! I feel like he has developed so magnificently, and it has been so beautiful to watch him grow, that it would be a crime not to acknowledge it in some way. I would love to make a venn diagram for this task, but I am infamously awful at charts and the like. So, I will stick to paragraphs. Yay.
We will start, of course, with PJO Percy, as we knew him first. We meet Percy in The Lightning Thief, and he provides us with a self-formulated image of himself fairly quickly. He is dorky. He messes stuff up. We see throughout the series that he has the potential to be a bad-asphalt object of teenage obsession, but he has a seriously adorkable side that keeps him from quite getting there. He displays a combination of this kind of absolutely dense thickheadedness in respect to relationships and just a bit of confused cuteness that made our little sixth-grade fangirl hearts beat a bit faster right along with Annabeth's. He was cute. And, by the end of The Last Olympian, it was easy to see his potential to become more than that. But it was clear from his first-person point of view that, in his eyes (and, consequentially, in ours), he was still this sort of dorky guy with a fair amount of talent, but also with the tendency to attract trouble and quite the track record with bad luck. He is, just barely by the end of the PJO series, still the pure-hearted, dorky kid that we met in The Lightning Thief. However, once we see him again in Son of Neptune (and throughout the HoO series), things begin to change.
I feel like Son of Neptune is the first time that we fully realize that Percy is, at this point, sixteen. He really isn't that dorky little kid from The Lightning Thief who didn't know how to hold a sword anymore, no matter how much he might feel that he is. The third-person point of view really helps us to reach this conclusion, because without Percy's witty self-deprecation fueling the delusion, we are able to visualize Percy from someone else's perspective. You know that sort-of kind-of crush on Percy you'd been harboring ever since he proved he really was an emotionally functioning human being (*cough* The Titan's Curse *cough*)? Yeah, well, that snowballs when we meet Percy through Hazel's eyes. Hazel actually believes that she and Frank are being tested by the gods, because Percy, she says, has the "good looks of a Roman god" and an insane aura of power (*hyperventilates*). She also points out that Percy is the most powerful demigod she has ever met, and, in House of Hades, calls him the demigod she admires most. We see Percy as an entirely new person, a Greek hero worthy of admiration and capable of so much more than he allows himself to believe. We also see that this little spiritually stainless kid who would never even consider empathizing with Luke is... kind of gone. He understands where Luke was coming from. He recognizes that he is around the age Luke was when he tried to overthrow Olympus, and he recognizes that he can relate to what made Luke turn against the gods. THIS IS CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT AT ITS FINEST. HE IS EMPATHIZING WITH A PREVIOUS ENEMY, REALIZING THAT, YES, BEING A DEMIGOD MAKES LIFE CRAPPY, AND NO, THE GODS AREN'T PERFECT. AND IT JUST SHOWS HOW STRONG PERCY IS AS A PERSON. Because he knows why Luke would feel abandoned and used, because Percy feels the same way. But he doesn't give up, or try to work against the gods, because, unfortunately, the gods are the better alternatives. He recognizes this, and moves on, showing that he can be the morally "bigger person."
THIS, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, IS A TESTAMENT TO MY PJO OBSESSION. Oh well. Here are my sources/inspiration for some of my points. Thank you for reading!
This video
and this video
and all the PJO/HoO books, of course.
And, as always,
Good luck in life, happy watching, happy reading,
Fangirl Anonymous
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