Before you send the firing squad, hear me out. I’m not saying I hate them, but if I ever had children, I certainly wouldn’t allow them to read this until they were out of middle school.
When I was a dumb, naïve child, I was super excited to read PJO. I had a slight interest in Greek Mythology at the time from playing God of War, and that’s what drew me into Percy Jackson. I was twelve when I read the first series and I loved them. I was super excited to learn that demigods had ADHD, and it made me feel pretty special. But it also made me feel a bit upset too. Over the span of five first person narrative novels, we never saw Percy experience intrusive thoughts.
Now, I was diagnosed with ADHD at the good old age of 7, and since then have experienced horrible intrusive thoughts. At that time, I acted on them (or tried) multiple times. Reading PJ and knowing that he was supposed to have ADHD made me feel wrong, like there was something else wrong with me, because he never experienced these types of thoughts.
Eventually I got over my feelings and went back to enjoying the books, but as I got older and reread them, I got more and more angry with Rick.
While he is a better author than some, Rick Riordan is worse in that he does not research anything he puts into his stories other than the myths. At the most, he Googled “ADHD” and looked at his son’s behavior for two seconds and called it a day.
These books were written in a time where any mental disorder was looked at like a disease, not taken seriously, not understood by anyone who didn’t have it or wasn’t a psychiatrist. For Rick — who based Percy on his son, for crying out loud — to do the bare minimum and seemingly not even ask his son’s psychiatrist what ADHD truly is and how it affects the brain as a whole was a kick in the head.
In 2005, the Percy Jackson series was acceptable as ADHD representation because mental disorders were seen as jokes and heavily stigmatized.
In 2021, the Percy Jackson series is full of stereotypes of people with ADHD (it’s always hyperactive disorder. Why do authors always ignore Attention deficit?!) and I honestly can’t see how people can praise Rick for it. (Outsiders praise him, I know we call him out. Most of us.)
This series is in dire need of a rewrite, to correct the stereotypical adhd “rep” and remove the misogynistic portrayal of women/female characters.