"Introduction" FROM "It is Tough to be a God: Self-development in Rick Riordan’s The Trials of Apollo" (masters dissertation for the University of Edinburgh, 2021)
You watched a generation grow up on a diet of Harry Potter, Hunger Games, and Marvel movies, you stripped away their hope, their jobs, their futures, and then back the most cartoonish super-villain in history for President, and you’re shocked the children are fighting back? (1)
In forty-six words, science fiction author Patrick S. Tomlinson (@stealthygeek on Twitter) highlights a relation between popular media and its consumers. He suggests that one of the reasons ‘the children are fighting back’ is because those children have grown up with novels and movies that emphasise values such as hope, love, and sustainability. His suggestion seems to imply that such works have shaped the values and morals of their consumers. This implication grants works created for mass consumption a significant amount of power, as it suggests that they are able to alter the way in which their consumers react to socio-political situations. The didactic element within Tomlinson’s reasoning echoes Claudia Mills’ opening of Ethics and Children’s Literature (2014), in which Mills argues that media consumed by children and young adults is ‘a vehicle for transmitting values to young readers’ (2). Media consumed by children is, in other words, a valuable tool for content creators to shape the coming generations of citizens. If this is true, it is vital that we inquire what values and morals the works consumed convey. As a test case, this dissertation will focus on The Trials of Apollo (2016–2020, abbreviated to ToA), a children’s literature pentalogy written by the popular American author Rick Riordan (3). It will describe the pentalogy in terms of a Bildungsroman, and examine themes of self-development through exile and psychological trials. Such an approach allows the dissertation to highlight the values and morals Riordan’s work may convey to its young readers, and the didactic method by which he attempts to do so.
Among readers and critics, Riordan is recognised as a liberal author with inclusive attitudes towards disabilities (especially dyslexia and ADHD) and LGBTQ+ characters. In ToA, Apollo, the first person protagonist, directly tells the reader that queerness is acceptable by establishing himself as bisexual. The pentalogy goes on to place three female same-sex relationships in the spotlight, to include one male same-sex relationship, multiple references to other male same-sex relationships, and to suggest that one character is asexual. In terms of disabilities, demigods (children of one mortal and one godly parent) in Riordan’s works experience a version of dyslexia that allows them to instinctively interpret the language of their parent god. This is especially prevalent in the demigods with a Greek god as their parent. Many demigods also experience ADHD, which Riordan suggests gives them an inherent ability to shift their attention quickly while battling ancient monsters. It is a vital trait that heightens their chances of survival. There are also characters who use physical disabilities to hide unusual body-parts, such as Chiron the centaur who, by magical means, hides all except his human upper body in a wheelchair to disguise himself among mortal humans. Through further statements made by Riordan in ‘The Learning-Disabled Hero’ (2005) (4), it becomes evident that Riordan has made it his mission to show disabled and otherwise socially outcast characters in a positive light, thereby creating a safe space for groups of young readers who may feel excluded from popular media (5).
Riordan’s success began with the Percy Jackson pentalogy (2005–2009), in which the twelve-year-old titular character goes through the challenges of the ancient Greek heroes. In the first novel, for example, he must retrieve his mother’s spirit from Hades’ underworld, like Orpheus attempted to retrieve Eurydice in, amongst other retellings, Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 AD). Later, Percy also faces the same cyclopes that Odysseus faced during his journey home from Troy. Riordan imagines a continuation of the ancient Greek corpus in a contemporary American setting, stating that the classical gods have existed since ancient Greece, but relocated to wherever ‘the flame [of the West] was brightest’ (6). Currently, that is New York (7). Riordan continues imagining the ancient Greek myths, including also Roman versions in his second pentalogy, The Heroes of Olympus (2010–2014, abbreviated to HoO). The second pentalogy starts after the end of Percy Jackson and contains a number of recurring characters. In ToA, Riordan begins six months after the events of HoO, this time imagining that Apollo has been punished by Zeus to undergo servitude among mortals for a third time. Apollo has been stripped of his godhood and forced into a master-servant relationship with Meg McCaffrey, a demigod daughter of Demeter brought up in an imperial Roman household. Over the course of the series, Apollo and Meg become close friends and undergo mirroring trials as they attempt to disentangle themselves from mutual trauma caused by psychological abuse and manipulation. Their trials are woven tightly into a narrative of self-development and self-improvement, while offering further criticism of patriarchal institutions and systems (ancient Greek and imperial Roman, respectively), occasionally going so far as to implicitly call those systems tyrannies (8).
Critics of Riordan’s works have referred to his concept in a variety of ways, ranging from “appropriation” to “reimagining”. Ginger Stelle, in ‘Loyalty, Honor, and Death in Rick Riordan’s Olympus Series’ (2018), has acknowledged that “adaptation” might be a suitable term, though she prefers “appropriation” (9). She makes a convincing argument, but through recent popular socio-political and cultural discussions, “appropriation” has been increasingly weighed down by negativity as focus has been placed on the preservation of foreign cultures and objects within their traditional context. Although it may be argued that the term occasionally has been used incorrectly, the current sensitivity to cross-cultural explorations makes me wary of calling Riordan’s works appropriations, when ancient Greco-Roman stories and imageries have been integrated into Western culture and philosophy across several centuries. Adaptation, on the other hand, refers to the transposition of a concept from one context to another. An example might be Jean Anouilh’s Antigone (1944), based on Sophocles’ play by the same name (441 BCE or earlier), in which the characters and events of Sophocles’ play have been transposed from ancient Greece to France. Although Riordan occasionally retells the ancient Greco-Roman stories as found in source materials, his works overall focus on exploring characters and events in a new setting beyond the sources. To say that he merely adapts the ancient Greco-Roman stories would therefore be to ignore the greater changes he makes.
Terms such as “reimagining” do not require a transposition and may, in their crudest form, be a retelling of another text. In an article on exile and displacement, Parin Dossa and Jelena Golubovic define reimagining as ‘a simultaneous aspiration to maintain a connection to what has been lost, to entwine the past and the present, the “there” and the “here”’ (10). Here we may consider Madeleine Miller’s The Song of Achilles (2011) in comparison to Homer’s Iliad (approx. 8th century BCE). Miller retells the story of the Greek hero Achilles from the perspective of Patroclus, Achilles’ friend and lover, in ancient Greece. She connects the present demand for novels containing queer characters with a story from the past, narrated in a contemporary mode, thereby reimagining the story with a greater emphasis on the queer romance. This caters to contemporary LGBTQ+ readers, and is more similar to what Riordan does. Rather than retell the ancient stories in their own setting, however, he adapts the stories to a new contemporary setting and creates new characters who will engage with the stories in a new and imaginative way. There is therefore a distinctively creative aspect, as Riordan gives the ancient stories a new guise, a new context, setting, and characters. Similarly, source material is vital to his works, but rather than reimagining close to it, he examines it creatively from a contemporary perspective. To emphasise that creative aspect, I would like to refer to his works as “imaginings”, works that take what has been lost and shift it into the present to there interrogate it under a new lens.
Although Riordan has become a popular children’s author, both in the US and abroad, his works seem to have drawn little critical attention beyond a limited number of recent dissertations, articles, and book chapters. The majority of these critical examinations relate to the Percy Jackson series which, in many ways, is the foundation of Riordan’s success. Originally a high school teacher of classics, he used to tell his oldest son myths and legends as bedtime stories. When he ran out of myths and legends, he began inventing his own. These resulted in Percy Jackson, through which he has claimed to hope to promote classical studies and engage reluctant readers (11). Along with the first novel, he developed academic materials for other high school teachers to use in the classroom while engaging with Percy Jackson. These resources were made freely available on his website, and suggest some didactic intentions behind his works. At the time of the writing of this dissertation, Riordan’s works have reached a large fanbase and created a demand for multiple spin-off series set within various myths, religions, and ethnicities. Riordan has also reached an agreement with Disney to create a TV series for children, based on Percy Jackson. The wide outreach this will allow is likely to bring his works to the attention of multiple new children and young adults, possibly placing his works within the defining strain of contemporary popular children’s literature currently dominated by authors such as J. K. Rowling, Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, and Philip Pullman, not to mention J. R. R. Tolkien. For this reason alone, Riordan’s works demand further critical attention.
While a number of topics related to classics and contemporary issues have been discussed within the limited scholarship on Riordan to date, this dissertation examines another, less frequently discussed nexus of ideas in ToA, namely questions of identity, growth, and self-development through exile. These are issues which raise their own distinct questions with regards to Riordan’s young readership, and will therefore be framed within an overarching discussion of didacticism, in which I aim to engage with values and concepts related to identity and self-development that the readers might take away from ToA. Considering the impact both Tomlinson and Mills suggest media such as novels can have on their consumers, it seems vital to our understanding of generational cultural changes (or lack thereof) that we interpret popular works of children’s literature such as Riordan’s.
The dissertation will therefore be divided into three parts. The first will situate the discussion within the field of didacticism in children’s literature, in order to determine the didactic role of the protagonist. The second part will move on to exile and identity and discuss these in terms of cultural differences and experiences, while the third part will shift to the protagonist’s psychological developments. The second and third parts are closely connected, due to the impact the protagonist’s original culture (ancient Greek) has had on his behaviour and way of perceiving the world. In the conclusion, the dissertation will return to the issue of didacticism in order to discuss the complexities of ToA, and what views of identity and exile young readers may be encouraged to develop through reading the pentalogy.
Footnotes
(1) Patrick S. Tomlinson (@stealthygeek), tweet, Feb 21, 2018, 3:30a.m., accessed May 14, 2021, https://twitter.com/stealthygeek/status/966153208195362817.
(2) Claudia Mills, ‘Introduction’, in Ethics and Children’s Literature, ed. Claudia Mills (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2014), 1.
(3) “Children’s literature” is a wide term that encompasses texts for children up until the ages 16–18, at which point they become considered young adults. Although a text written for an audience of thirteen-year-olds may be categorised as children’s literature, just as a text written for an audience of four-year-olds, the texts will be distinctly different in composition and narration due to the significant developmental differences between the thirteen-year-old and the four-year-old. When referring to “children’s literature”, this dissertation will therefore limit itself to the body of works intended for an audience of the age group that Riordan intends for his works. Other works within this age group may include J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997–2007) and Diana Wynne Jones’ Howl’s Moving Castle (1986).
(4) Rick Riordan, ‘The Learning-Disabled Hero’, Rick Riordan, Sep 2, 2005, accessed Oct 18, 2020. https://rickriordan.com/2005/09/the-learning-disabled-hero/.
(5) For a more complex discussion of disabilities in Riordan’s works, see Katelyn Balkum, ‘Disabled Heroes’ (masters dissertation, Bowling Green State University, 2020).
(6) Rick Riordan, Percy Jackson & The Lightening Thief (London: Puffin Books, 2018), 73.
(7) For further reading about the reimagining of Greco-Roman myths in contemporary children’s literature, see Lisa Maurice, ‘From Chiron to Foaly’, in The Reception of Ancient Greece and Rome in Children’s Literature, ed. Lisa Maurice (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 139–68), and Joanna Paul, ‘The Half-Blood Hero Percy Jackson and Mythmaking in the Twenty-First Century’, in A Handbook to the Reception of Classical Mythology, ed. Vanda Zajko and Helena Hoyle (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2017), 231–42.
(8) Although not explored in this dissertation, other series by Riordan in the same imaginative vein include The Kane Chronicles (2010–2012) and the Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard trilogy (2015–2017, abbreviated to MCatGoA). Both series are repeatedly implied to exist within the same universe as Percy Jackson, HoO, and ToA.
(9) Ginger Stelle, ‘Loyalty, Honor, and Death in Rick Riordan’s Olympus Series’, in Global Perspectives on Death in Children’s Literature, ed. Lesley D. Clement and Leyli Jamali (London: Routledge, 2018), 35–36.
(10) Parin Dossa and Jelena Golubovic, ‘Reimagining Home in the Wake of Displacement’, Studies in Social Justice 13, no. 1 (2019): 173.
(11) Jacqueline Bach, ‘Battling Greek Mythology, History, and Reluctant Readers’, ALAN Reveiws 37, no. 1 (2009): 59.
