So, recently I’ve done three reviews on the main three series of the Camp Half-Blood Chronicles (the name assigned to Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Heroes of Olympus, and The Trials of Apollo). While I thought the original Percy Jackson series was good, I thought the other books were mediocre at best. Books aside however, this is basically a review of the fandom. If you don’t know what a fandom is, it’s basically just an online community of people who like the same book, T.V. Show, or video game. All fandoms have their problems that are sometimes more apparent than in others, but the Percy Jackson fandom is especially bad, being one of the most bigoted and toxic fandoms I’ve ever seen.
My first complaint with the Percy Jackson fandom is the fact that it is full of seeming pedophiles and no one really talks about it. In fact, I looked up if anyone else felt the same way and unfortunately the only thing that came up was that the character Calypso is a pedophile and that was pretty much it. Only one other blogger talked about the sexualization of characters (mostly female) by fanartists (which was basically one of the only highlights of that blog. I’ll get to that in a sec). When I was in the fandom, one of my favorite things about it was the fanart, but I had to be very careful about what I clicked on. While most of it was fine, in one click, I could be viewing a cool portrait of Percy or another character and within another click could be inadvertantly viewing fanart that was borderline pornography in the recommended images provided by Google. Remember, that the characters in Percy Jackson and the Olympians are between the ages of 10-18 years old. These images often weren’t explicit (as in characters weren’t completely naked), but would feature female characters wearing scanty clothing (I guess Annabeth and Piper started OnlyFans accounts) and in other images characters of both sexes are doing things that are certaintly very suggestive and you know that they’re going to be doing stuff later. And this is just on Google images with parental controls enabled! I don’t even want to know how bad it is on sites like Tumblr, Pintrest, or DeviantArt. Don’t get me started on the fanfic and fan-pairings, either. I would happily argue for at least 50% of the fandom should be arrested or at least heavily fined for drawing, promoting, and defending this stuff. It’s extremely disturbing how easily you can find this in a fandom for kids. Even worse is the fact that the person who makes a lot of this fanart, the artist who goes by Viria, was commisioned by Rick Riordan and by extension Disney to be the official artist of the Riordanverse.
My second complaint with the fandom is how much of an echo chamber it is. If you disagree with a decision “Uncle Rick” made about a character, don’t like a certain ship (especially if its LGBTQ+), or just have differing thoughts about things, the fandom will attack you brutally. It is the definition of a toxic fandom where everyone has a herd mentality and if you don’t conform, then you must be silenced. We saw this when it was announced that Leah Jefferies was announced as Annabeth for the new Percy Jackson T.V. adaptation. Members of the fandom with large followings on platforms like YouTube were coming out with carefully-worded statements on their commmunity tabs about how wonderful it was that Annabeth had been race-swapped and what a big leap that was for People of Color in the fandom. Fans were quick to change their depictions of Annabeth to her being a black girl. If you disagreed with this decision, then with the sacred blessing of Rick and Becky Riordan, people were allowed to harrass and bully you on Twitter for being a supposed “racist” and “mysoginist” until you apologized for wanting an accurate depiction of Annabeth. (https://boundingintocomics.com/2022/05/11/becky-riordan-encourages-harassment-of-percy-jackson-fans-doubles-down-on-calling-fans-racists/)
This is what I mean when I say that the Percy Jackson fandom is the most bigoted fandom I’ve ever seen. While the afore-mentioned blogger was complaining about racism and a bunch of other -isms in the fandom being bigotry, she (I’m assuming the author was a she) also mentioned how you’re not allowed to have different views on things. When the person who identifies as Arosexual/Pansexual/Polyamorous, Muslim, brown, and a bunch of other labels is angry about this, you know that something is wrong.
On top of that, I will agree with the author that there is racism in the Percy Jackson fandom, but it isn’t the type she’s talking about. The Percy Jackson fandom is racist towards white people. I’m pretty sure the only reason why Percy wasn’t black-washed in the new show is because Disney knew that would enrage too many people.
There also seems to be a hatred for Christians, conservative, and parents in the fandom. You don’t even have to be a Christian or conservative or a parent to be hated. All you need to be hated is common sense. As I mentioned in my review of The Heroes of Olympus, one YouTuber (TheDemigodLover who has 15.8 thousand subs) made fun of Rick Riordan for not making the Percabeth in the stables scene XXX rated because apparently that’s considered pandering to conservative Christians (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHfSloSYzoM at the 8:00 minute mark). There’s another video which was posted by Unclaimed Demigod on YouTube that reacted to “homophobic” parent reviews of the series (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBs6Ht6tiUE. I will do a response post to the arguments presented by this angry Leftist on this blog soon). These are just a few examples of this type of behavior, but it is very present in this very accepting and loving community of actual bigots.
This leads me to the last reason why I left the fandom and that is the grooming of children. I talked about this a lot in my reviews of the books and it’s something that needs to stop. I’m not homophobic or transphobic because I don’t care about your sexuality or your fetishes or whatever and I’m not terrifed of those things. What I care about is the safety of women and children. I care about the ability for kids to live healthy lives without being pressured to chop off their healthy breasts and sexual organs or take drugs that will forever sterilize them and give them cancer. I care about kids not becoming money fountains for pharamceutical companies that don’t have their best interests at heart. I care about kids not becoming sex objects for the most perverted among us. I don’t care if you like to sleep with people of the same sex or like to dress up as a woman when you’re a man. Just stop exposing kids to it and stop openly degrading and fetishizing people to the extent that it’s all of a sudden okay for you to molest children and take away the intrinsic rights of women to be treated equally. As a young woman and a teenager, I am not comfortable with they/thems and gay characters’ life styles being pushed on kids who have never even thought about sex or sexuality and I’m definitely not comfortable with kids being forced to support this stuff in fear of being bullied.
And that my friends is why I left the fandom and why I’m never going to look back.
Until next time,
M.J.
The Tanuki Corner 
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