so you want to talk about Rick Riordan? pt 1

hello everyone! Today I am going to be a very weird blog post, since it isn’t like a review or even a tag. Instead we are going to be talking about Rick Riordan and why we shouldn’t praise him the amount we do. Before we get into this, i just want to lay out a couple things. First and foremost, take everything i say with a grain of salt, i found all my info either from me reading these books years ago, tumblr threads, and also reddit posts. Second, you can say your thoughts and opinions on this, but be respectful. And last but not least, i know Riordan has given so much light on raising up POC and Woman voices for their books and published them. But, we still need to talk about everything that is wrong with his books. 

And since this is going to be a bit of a long post, this is going to be in multiple different parts. I’m also going to be talking about this in multiple different parts, so basically instead of having everything all over the place, it’s going to focus on a common thing. You’ll see what I mean when we get into this. But, this post might get triggering, so this is your warning. and in this post i’m no way ripping on anyone that might deal with anything in here, i’m just trying to bring awareness to some of the shitty things in this book.

ABLEISM- 

Ableism is the discrimination and social prejudice against people with disabilities or who are perceived to have disabilities. Ableism characterizes persons as defined by their disabilities and as inferior to the non- disabled. 

The first person that i wanted to bring up was Rachel Elizabeth Dare. I personally wouldn’t consider her to be a main character, but she is one of the bigger characters, to some degree, and needless to say there are some issues about her. But, basically a bunch of people in the PJO fandom think that Rachel has some sort of schizophrenia and/or psychosis. This was really brought up in BoTL, but this is going to be a common thing in Riordan’s books and also in this post when I’m talking about his writing, is that there are a lot of mental health issues or disabilities brought up, but then they are just dropped. 

One of the main criticisms with this character about how crappy he did his research with this. And people that have schizophrenia and/or psychosis have said that Riordan did not do the proper amount of research for this mental illness correctly. Then the research that he did was not good and it was basically onl surface level for everything. And also Riordan was talking about the mental illness once, but then brushed it to the side, kind of like a plot choice. 

And this goes for more than just Rachel, but there could be so many mental illnesses and disabilities that get brought up, but then just get dropped. And this has happened to many different things in his books, and it’s just so bad and it makes me so angry. But, I do feel like if different mental illnesses get brought up at a younger age, it wouldn’t be such a hush hush topic when kids get older and can make some interesting topics. 

Moving on to the next person, we are going to talk about Grover. This character has got so much controversy, and I 100 percent that there are so many things wrong with his character. One of the things that gets brought up a ton is the criticism in the first couple chapters in the lighting thief. But, one of the main things for him is that he doesn’t have human feet, instead he has hooves, and i like to think of them as a cross between a horse and a goat. And obviously when he is in the human world he just can’t have hooves, so he has to cover them up. 

So, with Grover needing to cover this up, he has to wear some sort of braces. And these braces basically just cover up the hooves and makes it look like he has some sort of chronic pain issue. So, with having this character with hooves, he had braces and then canes to help him walk. But, it got told that Grover got severely bullied, and then he got bullied because he isn’t ‘normal.’ and he’s one of the biggest disabled and deals with chronic pain, but a lot of people said the research was half assed and that all of this was never talked about ever again in any of the books. 

The next character was going to talk about Tyson. Tyson is another character that is really well known, and that a lot of people know who he is and a lot about him. But, basically that Tyson is a cyclops, and that he normally has one eye, but sometimes he does sometimes have two eyes. 

But, the real issue with his character is that threw the mist, it makes him look like he has two eyes and that he looks “abnormal.” the whole mist thing also plays somewhat of a part in Grover too. Anyway, threw the mist Tyson doesn’t look ‘normal’ and a lot of people have pointed out that it made it look like Tyson has down syndrome, since he’s not “normal.” I don’t need to spell it out for you, but you can see why Riordan got crap for this, since what would even tell a grown adult to write this. 

Now, let’s talk about a character that everyone loves, is Nico de Angelo. Like I said, this character is talked about a ton on bookstagram and everyone loves him a lot. Even around Halloween I saw a ton of people dress up as him on bookstagram and twitter, which looks good, but if you dive deeper into things about him, there are just more and more issues. I’m only going to bring up a little bit about him now, since there’s another bigger topic that involves Nico. 

If you don’t know, Nico deals with chronic pain and also fatigue. And also when he uses his powers, it kind of triggers all of this to happen, since he gets super exhausted, which causes fatigue and chronic pain. Which, how well Riordan wrote this is the same as everyone else, it’s shitty and he needed more proper research to be done. But, one thing i’ve only seen a couple of times is if Nico was so sick, shouldn’t he have had some sort of service dog, so it can help Nico if he falls or even get help to call 911? 

The next character I want to bring up is Clovis.who is honestly just used to be this comic relief character since he sleeps a lot, since he was disabled. And it was pretty much just used as “omg lol he sleeps a lot hahaha.” while also just using his disability as his entire personality. And I know people in real life that have chronic illness, and nothing is honestly funny about it at all. With chronic fatigue, it makes you sleep all the time, like you’d oversleep before going to school/class, sleep thru car rides even if it is a short ride, whenever you get home you go to sleep, so you get the point. And like even the simplest tasks will make you so tried, so it’s nothing to laugh about. 

And having this big ass author make jokes about it isn’t okay. Like, you know how many kids will read this book, and now think that this is just a joke. And I mean, it was so annoying to see how Riordan treated him. From what i’ve seen and read about, everyone kind of has one thing in common about how you can go on medicine in order to try to help. Which was never brought up in the books and was just brushed off and made jokes about it. Moral of the story, chronic illness isn’t a joke. 

In these books, there aren’t really any disabled characters in these series. Nico can be argued about, but i don’t really think he is supposed to be disabled. And this is something that i have seen nowhere besides like one reddit post. But, throughout the first series, Luke is told to deal with some sort of facial scarring, but Luke is told to be grotesque. But then there’s this other character, Jason, who is said to have a tiny little scar on his lip, and he’s a good guy and handsome. So, please tell me you see the issues with this. 

Then, I’m going to talk about Grover and Chiron having faking disabilities. I seriously don’t understand why Riordan and his editors thought it was a good idea to have these characters fake disabilities, since so many people have them, and they get told that they are being babies and nobody listens to people that actually have it. 

I’ve already talked about this a little but, but everyone in this book is said to have some sort of learning disability. And did you know that there is some kind of overlap between adhd and Autism? It is honestly surprising that there is no character that has it canonically. Again, I’ve already said that there is a strong argument for some of the characters, mainy Nico and Leo. And that there is also talk about how Nico and Leo feel bad or weird or even alienated by their different Autistic traits, but yet they cannot actually say that they are Autistic. 

I’ve also dealt with dyslexia my whole life. It started when I was really young, and now I still deal with it on a daily basis when i’m reading or writing. And, honestly, I know that a lot of people who deal with this. But, upfront this book looks like that the dyselxica rep would be pretty good, since it’s a main thing in this story. Personally, I found that every single thing is that “oh they can’t read,” when it’s headaches when you constantly read, and it’s hard to spell and like reading in front of the class gives you a lot of anxiety. When in here it’s basic af, in here and it also shouldn’t get praised that much. 

• The lack of physical disabled people, even though there is a shit ton of books? Ableist. 
• the lack of exploration of their learning disabilities and it is only played as a plot choice? Ableist.
• the treatment for autistic coded characters? Ableist.
• having MULTIPLE character faking their disabilities? (i don’t care about the mist or magic or whatever it’s called.) ableist.
• the use of physical deformity characters as the villains? Ableist.  

But, I’ve read these books, and I’ve read posts about these books, but these books have zero mental health rep. Like, it’s a camp of teenagers and young adults, and nobody is completely perfect. But, there have been some threads and tweets on twitter about how Riordan allegedly said something along the lines of “i don’t write books with characters with mental illness or disabled people since demigods are stronger than that.” and when i read that, it kind of comes across to me, if you have disables your weak, if you have any mental health issues, your weak. Which is just so wrong.

anyway, that is all for today! i honestly hoped you liked this post and maybe learnt something about him. there will be another part in this talking more in depth about characters in his books and just pointing out some issues.