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thegayagenda-forkids · 3 years

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Riordanverse Representation: Masking, Learned Toxicity, and Improper Mental Health/Disability Help

Hello my beloved Riordanverse fans. I’ve seen several things both here and on Tiktok about representation and such in his book series, and i love listening to all of these points but i feel like there are some things that either don’t get talked about much, don’t get considered, and more.

Now specifically speaking, I was inspired to talk about this topic by tiktoker @whosevivica (I’m not able to post links on here for some reason, and I do want to credit her), I think she made some valid points, and what I’m going to talk about now is NOT TO GIVE HER ANY HATE. I’m gonna make this part clear real quick. DO NOT FUCKING ATTACK HER, DO NOT GO AFTER HER, JUST BECAUSE I DON’T AGREE WITH A FEW THINGS SHE SAID DOES NOT MEAN I THINK SHE’S A BAD PERSON OR ANYTHING. In fact, I’m sure she’s fantastic and 100% believes she deserves love and to use her platform to both showcase her opinions and promote good critiques and good causes. I simply want to give my counterpoint to what she said and let y’all come up with your opinion on things.

I’m also gonna preface this with a few things in case you didn’t know:

1. I am neurodivergent myself, diagnosed with ADHD, anxiety, depression, and cPTSD.

2. I’m not white. I’m a white passing Latina and I know I benefit from white privilege, but I also have lived in places where I have experienced racism.

3. I don’t think Rick Riordan has been perfect about his representation. He’s made many mistakes and he doesn’t always react perfectly when people call him out on his mistakes, but overall, he improves every time and I’ve literally never seen any authors until him do as much effort to make his books diverse and inclusive, especially since he does take direct inspiration from students he’s had in his past. He’s said that just about every character in his book has sat in his classroom at one point or another so while I do think there are some things he does can be problematic and such, I honestly don’t think he does it with ill intent.

Now, this will probably be quite long, and I might have multiple posts about this, and I can write on things you send me asks about and such for sure, but let’s go on several topics.

The thing that directly inspired me first was one video where she talks about Annabeth being toxic and abuse, and I want to say first and foremost, that I don’t totally disagree, but we diverge on several points.

So the first thing I want to talk about, she draws a comparison between Hazel and Annabeth, trying to say that you can’t use Annabeth’s neurodivergence as an excuse and she uses one example in particular: when Hazel found out about Camp Jupiter having fought on for the Confederacy and getting angry until she’s told to calm down. She talks about Hazel having control of her emotions and Black woman not being allowed to express anger the same way, and on the second part, I think she’s absolutely right, but I think she misinterpreted the “control of her emotions” part. So that brings me to my first topic:

Let’s talk about Masking!

Masking is a technique used by many neurodivergent people and it’s a learned behavior meant to hide trauma, emotions, their true feelings, etc.

In the Riordanverse, there are three characters that I believe mask the more prominently in one way or another: Leo, Hazel, and Percy.

The most prominent and obvious is Leo. Now, @whosevivica said that she perceived Leo as being a stereotype, had his emotions played down, and dehumanized. Now for the stereotype, as a fellow Latina, personally I didn’t see it as a harmful stereotyping and you’re allowed to disagree with me, but I saw it as common behaviors I’ve seen and even exhibited myself, but I don’t think Rick was writing his emotions as downplayed and dehumanized, I think he was exhibiting masking.

When reading Leo’s POV, we see his trauma, his pain and suffering, but when we’re looking at his dialogue and how other characters perceive him, that’s his mask. His mask is to be the funny guy. He said it himself, the easiest way to avoid getting beaten up is to make the bullies laugh. He learned that when the big tough guys laugh, they like you, and when they like you, they don’t hurt you. From that, he learned to introduce himself as the funny guy first, remove the target from his back, and hide how he really feels because in abusive situations (which he was very familiar with given his family calling him a literal devil, rejecting him after the death of his mother, and him jumping from abusive foster home to foster home), emotions are used against you, they make you weak, a target, and you’ll get hurt. Percy does exhibit this too, but I’ll get to him later.

Hazel masks as well, but differently. There are plenty of times when we’re reading this, she hears something that makes her angry, but it’s like she doesn’t react this way, and it’s gotten to the point where the fandom seems to portray her as innocent when she’s not. In her flashbacks, we learned that she would have a quick temper and a sailor’s mouth that caused nuns to wash her mouth out with soap. Now, I’m not going to go in depth about traumas and attitudes of black women except to contextualize her mask because I don’t think I’m qualified to really talk about that. But she grew up in a really racist time period (the 1940s). Jim Crow laws were in effect and she had to go to a segregated school and her mom was a witch which made her a bigger target. She’s very mature for her age not only because of her identity, but the situation that she grew up in, and I personally think that her mask makes her appear more mature because that’s a learned behavior. I don’t think she calmed down when she learned that the Romans fought for the Confederacy, I think her trauma (and neurodivergence) caused her to mask in a way that made her look calmer and more mature, but all of her emotions, her feelings of betrayal, her anger and her attitude, they’re still there.

Now Percy’s mask is one that might not look as obvious, and we mostly get his mask in other people’s POVs. Rick Riordan plays it for comedy, and it can be used for comedy, but while Leo masks as a comedian and Hazel masks as a woman who’s calm and in control, Percy’s mask is angry. In his POVs, we see his anxiety, his fear, his feelings of inadequacy, but other people see him as powerful, imposing, and most of all, scary.

With Smelly Gabe Ugliano, we know he’s scared because he gives Gabe his money, he listens to Gabe’s threats about beating him, he avoids Gabe, but when he’s talking to Gabe, he refuses to show that fear to give him power. Instead, we see him act angry towards him, scowling, basically telling Gabe to go to hell, and all but losing it when he finds out Gabe abused his mother because while is is actually angry as well, Percy’s terrified.

Whenever Percy is scared, he acts angry. When his mom was taken from him, he looked angry at the world, but we were allowed to see that he was actually a scared little kid who wanted the only person who’s ever been good to him back, and in that fear, he acts angry whenever it looks like anything is getting in his way. When Chiron —acting as Mr. Brunner— tells Percy that Yancy wasn’t the best place for him after he was expelled, Percy was scared that the person he viewed as his ally also wanted to get rid of him, so he got angry again, and even in little things, when he was afraid of failing his Latin final (and disappointing Brunner), he acted out of anger and threw his book away.

Another time he acts angry out of fear is when Annabeth falls off a cliff in Titan’s curse. Nico is being the hyperfocusing ADHD kid he is trying to contextualize the world he’s just learning about through his hyperfixation (Mythomagic) and asking what could be insensitive questions, and Percy is holding himself back from strangling this child. And two other times Annabeth is in danger (Last Olympian —when she takes the knife— and Mark of Athena —when she drops the knife into the water signaling to Percy she needs his help) he looks like an angry god about to fight them and wipe them out those times. And in Tartarus? He’s afraid for his life and yet Annabeth was even scared of him based on how menacing he looks.

You wanna know what character doesn’t mask? Annabeth.

But now I want to talk about the second thing Rick actually touches on:

Improper mental health and disability help and learned toxicity.

Now there are 3 things you need to keep in mind about Annabeth at all times:

1. She’s neurodivergent

2. She never learned proper social interaction

3. She’s traumatized beyond belief.

Annabeth has ADHD, which commonly is coupled with Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria. That means that anything that could even be slightly perceived as a rejection of any sort is felt 10 times harder in people with ADHD. Now, let’s look back to little 7 year old Annabeth, being continually dejected by her dad, made to feel like a burden because he asked Athena to raise her because he didn’t want to, seeming to favor her stepmother and half brothers, and her stepmother even making Annabeth feel like she’s unwanted because she only brings disorder, danger, and strife to “her” family. So Annabeth runs away and runs into Thalia and Luke, who basically raise her until they reach Camp Half Blood.

Now, maybe correct me if I’m wrong, but maybe two traumatized neurodivergent teenage runaways aren’t the best people to raise a traumatized neurodivergent seven year old. Luke’s mom went insane, and Thalia’s mom was a drug and alcohol addicted starlet who LOST HER TWO YEAR OLD BROTHER. And now they’re responsible for this seven year old who felt like she was kicked out by her family. From them —whether they intended that or not— she learned toxic behaviors about being angry at the world, and when Thalia died, she learned not to let people too close to her because it’ll hurt too much when she loses them.

Now at Camp Half-Blood, I want to say that Chiron is a great guy and really does want to help these children, but maybe he’s not exactly the best at mental health. Chiron’s goal is to teach children how to survive first and foremost using their natural abilities, and he messes up SEVERAL times on how to handle their mental health (I could go into that later if you want me to). He notices Annabeth has a tactical mind and he teaches her how to hone in on that. So with that in mind, let’s have Percy and Annabeth meet.

When Annabeth meets him, she appears rude to him and dismissive. This is based on two things: 1. The fact she doesn’t want to get close to people (remember Thalia), and 2. Something that’s prominent in women with ADHD is a difficulty in handling emotions and emotional needs of other people. Women with ADHD often get misdiagnosed for autistic due to that and sometimes, the only way they can relate to someone’s story or trauma is by trying to relate it to their own. —side note: this is where I think a lot of people see her “diminishing” the traumas of the WOC in the series where, when I read it, I saw it as her using her own experiences to relate because that’s how she processes emotions. And I saw this because I also do this too. I never want to make people feel like their experience is diminished when I compare it to mine, I’m using it as my way to relate because that’s how I do it.—

Annabeth first uses Percy as bait because remember how Chiron taught her how to hone in her tactical brain? That’s what she did there. Was it a jerky move and insensitive? Yeah, but she learned from Chiron to survive, not how to handle people around her and their emotions, so she did just that. Then she starts “hating” Percy when he was claimed as a son of Poseidon. I like to called that “Learned Toxicity.”

You know how in this world, children who grow up with racist parents learn how to be racist too? She’s an Athena kid, and from her mom, whether directly or indirectly, she learned how to hate Poseidon and his offspring because she’s led to believing her mother’s battles are her own too. When she’s explaining to Percy why she hates him, she tells him the story about Athens choosing their godly patron, and Percy has to get her to form an alliance/truce with him by asking her about when Poseidon and Athena worked together (the story of the chariot).

That rivalry causes her to call him Seaweed Brain, meaning dumb and stupid, which he does hate then, because guess what? She’s 12! You wanna know the most common insult middle schoolers have for each other? Dumb and stupid. BUT, as their friendship evolves, the meaning of Seaweed Brain evolves too, so it’s not Annabeth forcing him to accept the nickname, it’s Percy seeing the shift in its meaning and you can see that Percy let’s ONLY Annabeth call him that, because of the shift in meaning and context. It no longer means stupid and dumb when she says that.

And finally, her toxicity towards Rachel when she had “no reason to be” because she didn’t know how Rachel and Percy felt about each other? Guess what? She’s 14, insecure, going through her own emotional roller coaster, and like I mentioned before, she doesn’t mask, and she never learned healthy social interactions and how to cope with her emotions and disabilities. She’s insecure, jealous, and young, so she’s acting out. Is she being mean? Yes. But she’s being defensive of her insecurity.

I’d love to talk about other subjects in the Riordanverse if you’d like, see where you disagree, and I accept constructive criticism and disagreements and would love to hear them, but please don’t be mean y’all! I promise I won’t be!!!

#riordanverse #Percy Jackson #Annabeth chase #Leo Valdez #hazel levesque #heroes of olympus #hoo #pjo #mental health #disabilities #representation #diversity #books #YALit

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