I've started reading The Last Olympian
It's once again time to discuss my complicated relationship with the Percy Jackson books! I have such mixed feelings about this series . . .
As with the previous four books in the series, I'm finding Percy Jackson and the Last Olympian too exciting to give up on and too problematic not to facepalm over. I really, really like what's being done with Clarisse. Unfortunately, during an argument, Percy brings up that she owes him for saving her from "rotting in a cave" when she was captured by Polyphemus in the second book. If you've read my previous comments on that book, you might remember that when Polyphemus captured Clarisse, he tried to rape her. And now Percy's bringing it up years later to score points off her in an unrelated context. So, yeah . . .
I'm once again boggling over the racial cluelessness. In the fourth book, Percy, who has actually fought the REAL Medusa before, compares a human-appearing black girl's braids to Medusa's snakes. (Okay, yeah, the girl turned out to be a monster in disguise, but the first time Percy saw her, she was passing for a perfectly normal human, so we can assume her hair looked like perfectly normal human hair. And now that I bring it up, given the dearth of characters of color in this series, her turning out to be a monster makes it even worse, especially considering the type of monster she turned out to be.) In the fifth book, the black guy dies first, which I thought was such a well-known cliche that writers know not to do it now. I'm holding out a tiny glimmer of hope that the death was a fake-out-- our first person narrator never saw the body, after all-- but there have been other times when Riordan whipped out a shameless cliche and/or racefail and played it straight.
Also, the death happened shortly after Beckendorf showed Percy a picture of his girlfriend and Percy infodumped about how those two had liked each other for years and finally got together not long before the mission-- I have thoughts on that too. So far, the bereaved girlfriend's grief is being portrayed well, and I love how Clarisse is the first one to step up to comfort her. But I can't help feeling inappropriately amused about the naked cliche-invoking and the fact that Beckendorf and Silena were present in the first three books but gave no sign of being aware of each other's existence, worked together briefly in the fourth book during which time he showed some faint evidence of maybe being a little bit interested in her (which could have been chalked up to her beauty as a daughter of Aphrodite rather than any interest in Silena specifically) and she showed no evidence of interest in him, and nobody said anything about the two of them liking each other, but then in the fifth book we're told-not-shown that they have been smitten with each other for years and everybody knew and was just waiting for them to get together. Oh, yeah, and Beckendorf had also been the anchor of the camp all along, so the campers feel unsteady and lost without him. It's too bad for Rick Riordan that he'd already decided to make Beckendorf only a little older than Percy and couldn't go back and make him a married father of three on the verge of retirement.
The uneven world-building continues to delight and frustrate me by turns. I loved the scene under ocean: giant sea creatures get +15 to terrify in my imagination, and the moving coral mosaic of the battlefield is exactly the kind of thing an anthropomorphic sea god should have in his palace, and of course there's a dolphin on the war council, how could there not be? And a little later Percy suddenly acknowledges that Charles Beckendorf and Silena Beauregard are technically cousins, and so are Percy and one of his love interests, and he feels the need to explain that it's totally okay because they're not related-related because gods don't have DNA, and I'm left flailing because it's a totally obvious ad hoc ass-covering that raises more questions than it answers. If the gods don't have DNA, what takes the place of the other half of a half-blood's nuclear DNA? What exactly do Percy and Beckendorf and Dionysus's twins and all the other sons of male gods have in place of a Y chromosome? It doesn't help that previous books have contained a mix of stuff that was clearly intentional counter-reality myth logic and stuff that was clearly accidental science fail and unclear stuff that could have been either, so I don't know whether this will be explained by the end of the book or even whether the author doesn't realize that explanation is needed.
I want to find out where this is going, especially what's going on with Clarisse, but I have a feeling I'm going to shout "ARRRGH!" at least twice before it's over.
This entry was originally posted at http://gryphonsegg.dreamwidth.org/1178.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
As with the previous four books in the series, I'm finding Percy Jackson and the Last Olympian too exciting to give up on and too problematic not to facepalm over. I really, really like what's being done with Clarisse. Unfortunately, during an argument, Percy brings up that she owes him for saving her from "rotting in a cave" when she was captured by Polyphemus in the second book. If you've read my previous comments on that book, you might remember that when Polyphemus captured Clarisse, he tried to rape her. And now Percy's bringing it up years later to score points off her in an unrelated context. So, yeah . . .
I'm once again boggling over the racial cluelessness. In the fourth book, Percy, who has actually fought the REAL Medusa before, compares a human-appearing black girl's braids to Medusa's snakes. (Okay, yeah, the girl turned out to be a monster in disguise, but the first time Percy saw her, she was passing for a perfectly normal human, so we can assume her hair looked like perfectly normal human hair. And now that I bring it up, given the dearth of characters of color in this series, her turning out to be a monster makes it even worse, especially considering the type of monster she turned out to be.) In the fifth book, the black guy dies first, which I thought was such a well-known cliche that writers know not to do it now. I'm holding out a tiny glimmer of hope that the death was a fake-out-- our first person narrator never saw the body, after all-- but there have been other times when Riordan whipped out a shameless cliche and/or racefail and played it straight.
Also, the death happened shortly after Beckendorf showed Percy a picture of his girlfriend and Percy infodumped about how those two had liked each other for years and finally got together not long before the mission-- I have thoughts on that too. So far, the bereaved girlfriend's grief is being portrayed well, and I love how Clarisse is the first one to step up to comfort her. But I can't help feeling inappropriately amused about the naked cliche-invoking and the fact that Beckendorf and Silena were present in the first three books but gave no sign of being aware of each other's existence, worked together briefly in the fourth book during which time he showed some faint evidence of maybe being a little bit interested in her (which could have been chalked up to her beauty as a daughter of Aphrodite rather than any interest in Silena specifically) and she showed no evidence of interest in him, and nobody said anything about the two of them liking each other, but then in the fifth book we're told-not-shown that they have been smitten with each other for years and everybody knew and was just waiting for them to get together. Oh, yeah, and Beckendorf had also been the anchor of the camp all along, so the campers feel unsteady and lost without him. It's too bad for Rick Riordan that he'd already decided to make Beckendorf only a little older than Percy and couldn't go back and make him a married father of three on the verge of retirement.
The uneven world-building continues to delight and frustrate me by turns. I loved the scene under ocean: giant sea creatures get +15 to terrify in my imagination, and the moving coral mosaic of the battlefield is exactly the kind of thing an anthropomorphic sea god should have in his palace, and of course there's a dolphin on the war council, how could there not be? And a little later Percy suddenly acknowledges that Charles Beckendorf and Silena Beauregard are technically cousins, and so are Percy and one of his love interests, and he feels the need to explain that it's totally okay because they're not related-related because gods don't have DNA, and I'm left flailing because it's a totally obvious ad hoc ass-covering that raises more questions than it answers. If the gods don't have DNA, what takes the place of the other half of a half-blood's nuclear DNA? What exactly do Percy and Beckendorf and Dionysus's twins and all the other sons of male gods have in place of a Y chromosome? It doesn't help that previous books have contained a mix of stuff that was clearly intentional counter-reality myth logic and stuff that was clearly accidental science fail and unclear stuff that could have been either, so I don't know whether this will be explained by the end of the book or even whether the author doesn't realize that explanation is needed.
I want to find out where this is going, especially what's going on with Clarisse, but I have a feeling I'm going to shout "ARRRGH!" at least twice before it's over.
This entry was originally posted at http://gryphonsegg.dreamwidth.org/1178.html. Please comment there using OpenID.