Percy Jackson and His Pretty Friends Save the World from Ugly People
The beloved kids' series is almost perfect. But it equates cleanness, youth, beauty, and thinness with morality. This problem is subtle, gross, and all too common.
“[Fat] bodies are neither reflections of our character nor comeuppance for bad actions.” Aubrey Gordon, You Just Need to Lose Weight, and 19 Other Myths About Fat People, 158.
I love middle grade fiction. I re-read my favorites often: The Mysterious Benedict Society, The Penderwicks, The Betsy-Tacy Books. But somehow, the Percy Jackson books got stuck with Harry Potter as a legendary-book-where-I-saw-the-movie-first. I know, I’m sorry! So last year, for the first time, I read Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief.
The story is a classic quest narrative. It combines present-day locations with ancient Greek myths. Here’s the basic plot: A young boy gets sent home after being kicked out of boarding school. He and his mom borrow her crummy boyfriend’s car to visit Montauk. The trip is cut short when he learns that his father is Poseidon and his mother has been hiding him from the Greek gods for his entire life. The gods have discovered his existence and are blaming him for the theft of Zeus’ lightning bolt. His mom heads toward a secret summer camp for other demi-god kids but dies trying to get him there safely. He trains there for like a week, then he leaves with new bffs Gordon and Annabeth on a quest to find the lightning bolt to prevent a war between the gods.
It’s basic middle-grade fiction stuff. Kids suddenly in charge of high-stakes problems without parental aid. Kids making friends and learning about themselves.
It’s a pretty good book. But.
Riordan makes his protagonists clean, young, beautiful, and thin. He makes his antagonists dirty, old, ugly, and fat. He uses characters’ physical bodies as direct indications of their moral state. This is a problem.
Listen to this quote from Jessica Defino, a writer and critic of the beauty industry (the hyperlinks in the text link to other posts she’s written; read the whole article here!):
This is some brainwashed beauty-as-an-ethical-ideal logic. [. . .] Beautiful […] people aren’t inherently good. Ugly […] people aren’t inherently bad. Positioning attractiveness and proximity to youth as moral qualities […] only compounds the problems of beauty culture. Stop doing this.”
Yes! You cannot tell by looking whether or not a person is morally good. We know this if we slow down enough to think about it, but when we’re running on auto, which is most of the time, we associate cleanness, youth, beauty, and thinness with moral goodness. This is gross! People who have stringy hair and acne and wrinkles can be kind. People with shiny, voluminous hair and a chiseled jaw can be mean!
But not in Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. This book automatically correlates beauty with moral goodness, page after page after page. This is a problem.
Also, quickly, some definitions: In this article, I’m using “beautiful” to mean “adheres to western beauty culture’s restrictive, ridiculous standards.” “Ugly” means “repulsive to an eye trained by beauty culture’s standards.” I use “fat” as a neutral description of a large body, in the way fat activists have recommended. I could write a whole piece defining these words, and I probably will. For now, just subscribe to Jessica DeFino’s The Unpublishable and read Aubrey Gordon’s work.
Here’s what’s next: We’re going to zoom allllll the way in on Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. We’re going to look at how Riordan connects morality to his characters through four areas: cleanness, youth, beauty, and thinness. This connection between morality and physical characteristics perpetuates four lies. We’ll walk through them one by one, meeting characters along the way. By the end, you’ll see how problematic such lazy writing can be.
Also, even though I’m organizing this into four distinct categories, most characters fit into multiple of the categories (only, though, on the same side: overlap between ugliness and old age, for example, or youth and thinness). The overlap makes it all even more arrestingly problematic.
Lie #1: “Clean people are good people. Dirty people are bad people.”
Let’s start with hygiene bias. In her book How to Keep House While Drowning, K.C. Davis points out that skipping personal hygiene is not worth pathologizing—it’s not even that rare. There are dozens of mental and physical health reasons why people are unable to shower and keep clean.
Also, there is no health reason to shower every day. Personal hygiene looks different across different cultures. Our culture’s hygiene trends aren’t necessarily correct, they’re just pervasive. And pervasive cultural belief is not a good enough reason to assume that a person is morally horrible because they smell horrible. (Read this and this for more on how dumb hygiene-as-morality is. It has a lot of classist and racist implications and they’re all disgusting.)
For the first example, we’ll hear from Percy about his mom’s boyfriend, Gabe Ugliano. And yes, Riordan literally NAMED THE ABUSIVE BOYFRIEND CHARACTER MR. UGLY. Ugly, as in refer-to-lie-number-three-on-beauty-as-moral-goodness. Here’s the introduction to Mr. Ugliano:
When I was young, I nicknamed him Smelly Gabe. I’m sorry, but it’s the truth. The guy reeked like moldy garlic pizza wrapped in gym shorts. [. . .] Smelly Gabe was in the living room, playing poker with his buddies. The television blared ESPN. Chips and beer cans were strewn all over the carpet. [. . .] Gabe had put on weight. He looked like a tuskless walrus in thrift store clothes (30-31).
We also learn that Gabe steals money from Percy, beats him up, and verbally abuses Percy’s mom: That is abuse.
Instead of letting abuse speak for itself as moral badness, Riordan also has Gabe lack personal and environmental hygiene. In real life, whether a person is clean or dirty has no bearing on whether they are kind or cruel. But Riordan writes as though physical dirtiness is a direct indication of a moral badness. As K.C. Davis writes, “It is more common than you would think for people to have barriers to hygiene. […I]t is the care area where people feel the most shame in not being able to keep up. Remember that showering is functional and not moral” (77).
Riordan also compares Gabe to a “tuskless walrus” and notes that he’d “put on weight.” No surprise at this point, but now we’ve got a full dose fatness-as-moral-badness on top of ugliness-as-moral-badness and hygiene bias.
Even worse, we learn later that Percy’s mom puts up with this boyfriend precisely because of his smelliness. Demi-gods (aka Percy) have traceable scents, and Sally is trying to keep Percy hidden, so she dates Gabe because his odor is strong enough to hide Percy.
Maybe Riordan is going for sacrificial-mom vibes here, but he writes Percy’s mom into an abusive relationship unnecessarily. Percy went to boarding school, which means that he wasn’t at home like nine months out of the year. There’s no need for Sally to date an abusive guy full-time, especially when lots of things besides abusive boyfriends are smelly! Why couldn’t they just let “garlic pizza” get “moldy” in a pair of “gym shorts” to mask Percy’s smell, sans the “tuskless walrus?” Why couldn’t Sally let food rot and stop showering herself and do other smelly tricks to keep her kid safe? Answer: because in Riordan’s shallow presentation of people, protagonists can’t be smelly.
Lie #2: “Young people are good people. Old people are bad people.”
Let’s see how Riordan (via Percy) introduces Percy’s mom:
Her name is Sally Jackson and she’s the best person in the world [. . . ] She never complained or got mad. Not even once (29-30).
There’s no word on what she looks like until a full three pages later. No surprise, it’s mixed in with descriptions of her character:
My mother can make me feel good just by walking into the room. Her eyes sparkle and change color in the light. Her smile is as warm as a quilt. She has a few gray streaks mixed in with her long brown hair, but I never think of her as old. When she looks at me, it’s as if she’s seeing all of the good things about me, none of the bad. I’ve never heard her raise her voice or say an unkind word to anyone, not even me or Gabe. (33)
Did you get that? Sparkling eyes? A smile “warm as a quilt?” Riordan writes a deeply humanizing description that intertwines general vibes about Sally’s eyes and smile with descriptions of her charisma and kindness. Dude! She could look old and ugly and still be a good mom! But nope. Hag-i-ness is saved for the Furies and Echidna, two antagonists we’ll meet later. Surprise.
Let’s also focus on the sentence: “She has a few gray streaks mixed in with her long brown hair, but I never think of her as old.” This is sort of fine—Percy is twelve, and we assume his mom was young when she had him. But also, moms get old when they’re constantly stressed about money and their kids. Moms get wrinkles when they’re taking care of other people and don’t have extra money to spend on anti-aging facials. Moms don’t need to have twinkly eyes and almost-totally-brown-hair to be good moms! Sally is kind because she is kind. She could be kind and old-looking, in real life. She could be kind and fat. But in Riordan-world, she is kind with mostly brown hair and young vibes.
Lie #3: “Beautiful people are good people. Ugly people are bad people.”
Actually, people are good or bad. And they are beautiful or ugly. And those two categories of characterization are separate.
And actually actually, people are often good and bad and beautiful and ugly, depending on the situation / day (minute?). People are complicated. We forget this at our own risk. When we don’t pay attention to the difference between questions of morality and questions of physical appearance, we get into deep water quickly.
The heart of a story is character transformation. The best stories engage willingly with complexity as they take characters on their journeys. Riordan doesn’t do that! We’ve already met ugly, smelly Gabe (bad guy) and sparkly-eyed Sally Jackson (amazing mom). Now we’ll meet Annabeth, Percy’s new friend / fellow demigod / fellow protagonist:
”She was probably my age, maybe a couple of inches taller, and a whole lot more athletic looking. With her deep tan and her curly blonde hair, she was almost exactly what I thought a stereotypical California girl would look like, except her eyes ruined the image. They were startling gray, like storm clouds; pretty, but intimidating too, as if she were analyzing the best way to take me down in a fight (63-4).
She’s athletic! Tan! Blonde! She is stereotypically pretty except for her eyes that ~aren’t like other girls’~! Riordan builds his main female character according to the most basic version of the western beauty standard. Then he lets Annabeth grow! Fight! Make decisions! Protect her friends! This is a twelve-year-old who deserves to take action because she looks correct! Mind you, Riordan is making her up. She could just as easily have had stringy hair or plain eyes or been athletic but in a big, bulky way. Instead, Riordan puts pretty privilege right on the page.
Lie #4: “Thin people are good people. Fat people are bad people.”
We already mentioned how Riordan made Gabe fat and Sally and Annabeth straight-sized. As the book goes on, cute blonde bestie girl Annabeth walks Percy past the place where the god of war’s kids live, and we meet another antagonist:
[The cabin] was bright red—a real nasty paint job, as if the color had been splashed on with buckets and fists. […] Inside I could see a bunch of mean-looking kids, both girls and boys, arm wrestling and arguing with each other while rock music blared. The loudest was a girl maybe thirteen or fourteen. She wore a size XXXL Camp Halfblood T-shirt under a camouflage jacket. She zeroed in on me and gave me an evil sneer. She reminded me of Nancy Bobofit, though the camper girl was much bigger and tougher looking, and her hair was long and stringy, and brown instead of red. (81-2)
Minor problems with this:
How do you splash paint with a fist?
The kids are just arm-wrestling and arguing? All the kids? Only those two activities? All the time, forever and ever? Or did they assemble into a violent-vibe vignette for when the newbie walks by on his tour?
What is the matter with rock music?
Major problems with this:
Why does Riordan (the author) pretend that Percy (the narrator) could know Clarisse’s shirt size? This is what iMDB calls a “goof.” At no point does Percy get close enough to Clarisse to check the shirt’s tag. Roraidan jumps out of his narrator’s voice just to proclaim that this young teenage girl is not only fat, but specifically XXXL-sized fat.
Why does Riordan make Clarisse’s hair “long and stringy?” Because fat people are ugly? Because mean people are ugly? Because fat and mean and ugly are all the same thing? (They’re not!!)
Clarisse does bully Percy. She tries to beat him up a few pages later, when he’s almost finished with his tour of camp. She doesn’t even get through this without more bullying from Roraidan, though! Poor kid:
Then a husky voice yelled, ‘Well! A newbie!’ I looked over. The big girl from the ugly red cabin was sauntering toward us. She had three other girls behind her, all big and ugly and mean looking like her, all wearing camo jackets. […T]his big girl Clarisse had hands like iron. (88, 90)
Clarisse’s purpose in the book is to be an antagonist, sure. But Riordan’s physical descriptions endorse our cultural belief that beauty reflects moral goodness and ugliness reflects moral failure. But as we know, fat bodies have always been part of the world. There’s nothing wrong with being fat. Fatness is often genetic and environmental, two things kids have no control over. Fat kids shouldn’t be bullied for being fat. Especially by a children’s book.
As Jacqueline Weinstock and Michelle Krehbiel write in their report “Fat Youth as Common Targets for Bullying,” “[M]edia representatives could actively counter unrealistic body norms and support fat youth in developing positive self-esteem and effective skills for dealing with both fat phobia and bullying” (Fat Studies Reader 124).
There are kids who wear a size XXXL shirt reading the book, empathizing from the beginning with heroes Percy and Annabeth. Then they get to Gabe and Clarisse, and people who match their physical description are bad guys only. This sucks, whether they notice it or not. Thin kids may get through the book without being bullied by Riordan, but they still learn to elide fatness and meanness. Riordan portraying Clarisse as fat and ugly and morally inferior is harmful; it’s also unnecessary. I’d take issue with her trying to put Percy’s head in a toilet even if her shirt was just a Medium.
Aubrey Gordon, podcast host and author, writes,
Too often, fat is seen as shorthand for being seen as unlovable, undesirable, unwanted, excluded.” (You Just Need to Lose Weight, and 19 Other Myths About Fat People, 130)
Shorthand. Exactly. Riordan has selected—wait, actually, he has created, intentionally created—a “big, fat, ugly girl with a husky voice, ugly pig eyes, and hands like iron.” Then he makes her be a jerk. Kate Manne describes fatphobia in her new book as “a feature of social systems that unjustly ranks fatter bodies as inferior to thinner bodies” (Unshrinking, 11). If the characters in this book are a social system, Riordan has completely succeeded at making his fictitious social system anti-fat! In a world with a magic pen-sword and water healing wounds, why would you not eliminate anti-fat bias? You’re making everything up!
Also, later in the story, we encounter a woman who Riordan describes as “the fat lady” over and over until Percy learns her name (205-11). Seven times, to be precise, and Riordan also gets in “looked like a blimp” (more anti-fat bias), “beady eyes” (she’s ugly too!), and “coffee-stained teeth” (a hygiene insult!). Then we learn almost immediately that this “fat woman” named Echidna is another person who’s trying to kill Percy. No surprise there.
Yes, people grow and learn. It is entirely possible that Riordan has grown in thinking with nuance since 2005. I hope for and accept that. Gentle nod in Rick’s direction.
But the book! The book itself, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, published 2005, lacks nuance. The book is still selling, in all its simplistic glory. That simplicity is a tornado of harmful beliefs and bias. Love the series, if you love it! I’m not here to take that away. But there’s no harm in being aware of harm, of small weaknesses. We grow when we think with nuance.