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 playing 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 community 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 harass and bully you on Twitter for being a supposed “racist” and “misogynist” 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 
what I dislike about the fandom is that they make excuses for the incestuous relationships that are being made throughout the series.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Absolutely.
LikeLike
hi I just found this blog and 100% agree with you. I’m a fanfic writer and I used to write pjo fanfiction but eventually stopped after some crazy nico fans attacked and harassed me. Also the moderator of the percy jackson fandom harassed me and a bunch of other fanfic authors and lied after she was found out.
this fandom likes to claim it is tolerant but in reality it’s really toxic and full of bullies, and I also wrote in the naruto fandom
LikeLiked by 1 person
Wow. I’m so sorry to hear that. It’s really sad how these fandoms start off as being something benign and eventually become toxic echo chambers where even adults are attacking minors for having ideas or views (that don’t even have to be political) that don’t line up with theirs. It just adds to the long list of things that makes everyone in the fandom look like psychos (even though not everyone is), making it harder to find the real weirdos, and frankly, can make it dangerous to be a part of.
LikeLike
Hi I am the original poster thanks for responding after so long. I just wanted to talk more about my experiences with the toxic PJO fandom especially on reddit and in fanfiction. The subreddit moderators on r/camphalfblood are super toxic and ban anyone who doesn’t agree with them. One of them actually cussed me out and accused me of being a troll for just asking another user a question on a post and even suspended my account when I tried to prove my innocence.
Ironically this wasn’t the main issue I had with them. As mentioned above in my previous entry the main moderator of the percy jackson subreddit let the power go to her head and she started harassing fanfic authors. Some of these authors advertised their content on the subreddit and she’d go on their stories and mock them but then would walk it back and claim it wasn’t her it was an imposter she was hacked.
However, she harassed one author who is known for his strong beliefs and she suspended his reddit account and mocked him when he asked why. Now the things was she used those private interactions to criticize him on his own stories on fanfic.net and posted things that would’ve only been known between the two of them. Of course she was called out and there was a lot of backlash. Yet this moderator doubled down that it wasn’t her and banned anyone and everyone who even insinuated that it was her. She still is the subreddit moderator and the other mods answer to her basically making it her own fiefdom of toxicity. Good thing I stopped using reddit she and those mods were very toxic in how they harassed authors.
On a side note the fanfic community is pretty toxic especially if you don’t worship Nico and give him loads of sympathy. I’ve gotten death threats for not writing him gay or not writing him solangelo. Also the percabeth stans are really toxis.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yikes. I knew the PJO fandom was crazy and knew that they could be super protective of their favorite characters and ships, but I did not know that it was to the point of literal death threats.
LikeLike
(Not hatin’, just curious :3 )
What did Vika/Viria do wrong?
From what I’ve seen her art is AMAZING
I’ve been a part of the pjo/hoo/toa fandom for a bit (fyi im a minor)
and I’ve never seen anything weird other than a few jokes abt frank being “innocent”
Usually I scroll thru YT, Pinterest and reddit; read the books and chat with my friends abt it
Does the PJO fandom have a dark side?
Has I’ve said before I’ve seen nothin’
no attacks on ppl, nothin’ :>
LikeLike
While Viria is a very talented artist (I have respect for people who can draw humans well) and most of her stuff is okay, some of the stuff she’s drawn that I’ve run across is extremely raunchy, sometimes featuring characters mostly nude in provocative poses with each other.
As for your other question of if the PJO fandom has a dark side, the answer is yes. No fandom is perfect, all of them have some sort of dark side and maybe it’s because I was in the PJO fandom for longer that I saw it more, but the amount of stuff that I saw ranging from bullying to demented and explicit fanfics was shocking. And once again, the ease that you could find it, that it would just be recommended to you by Google without you having to search it out, is shocking. As I said in my post, I would happily argue that a lot of the people in the fandom should be in prison and have their devices confiscated and looked through. Pedophiles target where children are, and I think the PJO fandom has a big problem with those types of people.
I’m glad you haven’t run into any of these problems with the fandom yet. Thanks for commenting and stay safe out there.
LikeLike
A lot of this is news to me but is also in no way surprising. As someone who was a young girl who enjoyed My Little Pony im hindsightly glad that I did not have access to the internet at that age. But to add to your point I just want to say I had gotten into the series through in my early teens and by the time I was just about out of high school the last Heroes of Olympus book had came out so obviously greedily read it. I’ve never been a big follower of fandoms so it was definitely something that at most talked about with friends or family that had at some point or another read it but was mostly secluded to myself.
Recently I’ve been working a job where I have the ability to burn through audiobooks daily and fondly started returning to the Heroes of Olympus series, specifically because I guess through memories I thought it less kid oriented so to the characters being much older in my mind. I guess when your a teen other characters in there later teens seem much older in your mind. But when listening and realizing how young some of these characters are I honestly continue to become uncomfortable the more I listen. Hazel being only 13 and some of the sexual undertones of her character description have just entirely made me uncomfortable. I get Riordan wanted to flesh out story, I love romance and action and all the things that drive the Percy Jackson series of books. But I can’t help but escape how horribly young these characters are. The book is by no means an adult oriented book but the characters are barely even teens, I feel like alot of this could have been escaped by making the series take place later, giving some gaps. He could have easily done the story with these characters being in the much later teens. Even some writing would make sense as demigods I feel like do have a simpler and molded view of the world.
Sorry I’m not trying to rant about how they could fix it, but I just want to say I feel like this issue is a product of source material. I love these books still that doesn’t change, but I can’t escape the feeling that these characters are just much to young for the themes being represented for them. It’s probably why the fandom is so ripe with the issues your stating, the books is so chalk full of romantic tones that they don’t stop to remember half the characters are sophomore year high schoolers at best. It’s no excuse to them far from it it’s just god why is everyone so freaking young in these books.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you. I’ve been having the same issues. I do not hate LGBTQ or any of the sorts, but even at that, it feels like Rick didn’t bother too much. I never saw how Nico and Will was such a loved ship (if you love them, that’s fine), but they genuinely had so little time. I simply called this out and got insulted by the fandom which confused me and it honestly made me ask is, if Will or Nico was a girl and it was a straight ship, would people like it this much? I either got no answer, people tell me I’m a bigot for hating or just insulting me. And I agree with you. Rick refused to even try to do this to the main guys like Percy simply because even he knows he’s pushing it.
LikeLiked by 1 person