[0:07] Hello and welcome to MythMakers. MythMakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy.
My name is Julia Golding. I'm an author and also I run the Centre for Fantasy and today I'm joined by my regular podcast partner Jacob Rennaker who who is based in Seattle and is an expert on the making of fantasy games, amongst other things, and Tolkien.

[0:40] But I've since discovered he is also pretty much an expert on Percy Jackson.
And that is the theme of today's podcast.
So, Jacob, I first met Percy Jackson when my children were reading him.
They're in their 20s now, so they were reading him as the books were first coming out.
And I remember them absolutely adoring that series and really getting into it, particularly my oldest boy.
We've got all of them on the shelf. Beautiful books. How long have you known about Percy Jackson?

[1:17] Uh not nearly as long probably as your children have so i i uh really uh learned about them got into them uh as an adult when i was uh graduate school actually yeah so it was more young at the moment so you're in that in-between stage where you're waiting exactly yeah so yeah it didn't come out when i was when i was younger so um and largely my interest uh was because i was studying being ancient mythology and cosmology.
That's where the overlap was and kind of served as an introduction into this

[1:56] fantasy world in particular.
So we're going to talk about what makes a good adaptation because there have been two bites at that particular cherry, at least.
There was the film version of some time ago where they made,

[2:10] I think, did they make two or three of them?
Two, wasn't it? They made two. Two, yeah. Two films.
And Rick Riordan, the author, wasn't very happy with those adaptations.
And now they've just made the Disney adaptation of Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, which actually had Rick Riordan as part of the production team being behind that series.

[2:34] So let's start, first of all, with the more general things.
What would you say makes for a good adaptation? What do we mean by good?

[2:45] Yeah that's that's a great question i think that's what is possibly the reason for some of the most uh heated disagreements uh between friends about uh was this a good adaptation right so everybody has a different idea of what good is and it really the challenge of adapting books in particular uh is that, the level of audience engagement that's required uh so you're having to paint all the pictures as as a as a reader especially if there hasn't been any sort of adaptation prior you are casting the characters of the book yourself right you're uh you are creating settings and now authors are are painting the picture for you but like you in your mind are really kind of creating all of the details they're kind of providing can canvas and these characters they can describe them but you are going to be casting them um and so each person for each person no no two audience members booked like their idea of a book is going to be the same it's not going to look the same because they're having to do that personal creation by reading translating the written word into their imagination as they're reading it.
So because of that, I think it's really hard to agree upon good adaptations because good works of fiction are open to multiple interpretations.

[4:12] And so somebody might gravitate to this particular message or this particular theme or this particular character arc in a book because they identified it with it themselves.
And so to see that character not treated with with the same care that that person had while reading it, that's going to send them off the deep end when somebody puts that character entirely out of an adaptation or if they cast a character that was wildly different from the one that they imagined the character looking like in their head.
So I think a good... So broadly speaking, understand that you can never get an adaptation that's going to make any person happy, completely happy, who's read the book, I think a good adaptation, talking about it from the book's perspective and perhaps the author's perspective, is one that does justice to the spirit and characters of the book.
And that's also a big US note in interpretation. Yeah, I suppose that's faithful to the book.
So a good adaptation that's faithful to the book. and then there's an adaptation which manages to create his own form of.

[5:29] Uh artwork which in a way exceeds or goes beyond what you thought the yes being so one area where i would say this let's go let's move sideways briefly um the paddington films if you read a straightforward paddington novel they're very.

[5:47] Sweet but a paddington film

[5:51] has gone one step.

[5:54] Step further and made a kind of brilliant magical world around Paddington and added all sorts of layers of characters and special effects which make it even more charming than the original material the original material is great in its own right but they they've gone above and beyond so that's a delightful example of a place where I don't I've never heard anyone saying oh that's a a terrible adaptation of paddington uh no everyone thinks yeah that's really good you've done something more so i think that's what you're looking for with an adaptation you don't need something that's a straight version of the book you want something which finds a new area in it so right let's turn to uh percy jackson and the lightning thief as a book first of all let's think think about it as a book then we're thinking about about it as a film and then we'll think about it as the television series so firstly as a book i remember my children particularly liking um how rick ridden had turned something which was seen as a disability but having adhd into something which was a secret superpower so that was first of all a lovely sort of concept of of reframing something that many children struggle with.

[7:23] And then they also loved the modernization.

[7:29] They already knew quite a few Greek myths, being the kind of family we were, which, you know, it probably already told them all this stuff, had, you know, storybooks about Greek myths.
And they loved seeing the updating, the surprising appearance of the gods in modern life.
So the playfulness and I think they also enjoyed Percy Jackson himself as the main character they don't like all books in that series equally, and the follow on series but the first one they definitely everybody liked so that first book really works very well as a middle grade, upper end of middle grade slightly older children reads.

[8:16] Very very successful and it's a book they read on their own they didn't have it read to them so it might be the kind of book which a young reader picks up.

[8:25] For the first time and actually gets through themselves because the storytelling and everything is so exciting that it is a really good book to click children onto reading as an adult i read them alongside my kids and really enjoyed them too um so how about you what did you find in the books yeah it's it's interesting i was actually turned off by the voice of the book uh just initial like gut reaction uh because it is very it's a middle grade uh audience and the main character is a first person uh text first person narrative uh and they're you know it's speaking like a middle like a middle grader and that the for for whatever reason it like it was really an obstacle uh for me to enjoy the book itself so the messenger as an adult though i was reading it as a great like yes as a graduate that's a different experience yeah right so but but my but my my nephew connor um who has adhd uh knows it inside and out absolutely loves it and like that tone and the you.

[9:45] Know cheekiness of the character of that first person character like that just like that drew him in um and connected with him so i can see why people in that you know middle graders.

[9:56] Could really connect with the character and really enjoy that level of humor and like kind of commentary um and so for yeah so it is firmly in middle grade uh yeah middle grade audience middle grade setting middle grade sensibilities and does a really good job for for that audience um so what was most intriguing to me and why i kind of stuck with it in spite of the kind of dissonance that created for me uh not being a middle grader reading it uh was the way that um reardon translated the greek gods uh into contemporary united states settings uh and and.

[10:40] Culture to a certain degree so it was yeah so like it was a translation a translation of greek myths which that happens all the time right but this was very concrete by setting you know olympus in new york at the top of the empire state building right so uh this the specificity that it provided provided you know it it created some fun connections and resonances um uh that was just yeah that i hadn't seen done before in that way and so that was fun to see trying to figure out okay so where is he going to place this or so i was yeah and instead trying to anticipate okay so if i'm looking if i'm doing this where's the you know the greatest overlap between this character or this this place and america as i know it so it's like so it's almost like neil gaiman does this in american gods to a certain degree it's a different tack but it's.

[11:33] Translating deities this ancient stories to contemporary life culture and what that means, I can't think off the top of my head which came first. Was it American Gods first? I think it was, wasn't it?

[11:48] That's great. Anyway, that's a good girl.
Because you can imagine you're reading that and then thinking, how would this work for children?
That might be part of the sort of the compost out of which the idea grew.
I would just point out here a couple of things for reading it as someone who isn't American, as a foreigner.
Foreigner um we don't have in the uk the same culture of summer camps so the summer camps were totally foreign we don't send the pack our kids off it's too expensive i don't know how anyone affords that so europeans tend to get more holiday um so you might have a play scheme locally but you wouldn't send them off to a camp in the woods where they get up to death defying things unless less you know on not every summer maybe occasionally so there were sort of two levels of foreignness for an outsider and the other thing is um there is a kind of american cultural supremacy, that that i kind of think well what do the greeks think that i mean maybe that's the language you'd use now and you wouldn't have in the 2000s but culturally appropriating the greek gods So now thinking about it, I'm thinking actually.

[13:07] Oh okay i'm not sure it's problematic yeah and i and i yeah no i i did that so i in in uh as in re-watching the percy jackson series i reread uh the percy jackson the lightning thief just so it was just like right on the top of my head and that was one thing that i noticed that came up several times was explaining why are the greek gods in america it's that well the center of of Western civilization was Greece, and then slowly it moved.
And now the pinnacle of Western civilization is America.
So that's why it's here. And so that came up. And so that reads differently today than it did in 2005.
Well, probably not. So 2005 was when Lightning Thief came out.
And just to answer your question, 2001 was when American Gods was published.

[14:00] Oh, interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So, but you're right. There is, it does, it does land different.
And I think similarly to like the boarding schools, that's something that is largely foreign concept to to American audiences.
So that's why that Harry Potter is really intriguing to people and kind of a sense of like mystical or a foreignness that like, Oh, you go and you live at a school and that's where you eat and sleep and do everything.
And you're away from your families until the holidays.
That's something that we don't, there's, So that's interesting, yeah, that from your end, that not having summer camps, that kind of has that same sort of mystique or sense of adventure that you might not have by a native audience.

[14:40] Yeah, so that's a really good parallel. So the summer camps is our boarding school equivalent. So...

[14:48] We were talking about you know thinking about this as a as a novel i would say that it has a really strong identity as a novel beyond the little things we've mentioned which is it started off a whole kind of sub-genre itself whether or not it was influenced by american gods or not i don't think that matters because other people have reimagined these gods and before that and And in terms of middle grade and YA children's books.

[15:18] It's become a whole sort of series of books which have the Norse gods and the Egyptian gods.
Rick Riordan has done some himself. And I think there's a whole kind of licensing process where you can come up with another mythology.
Yeah, Rick Riordan presents like imprints, sub-imprint that he selects people that are authors from different cultures, is writing about myths kind of reimagined in contemporary settings yeah yeah maybe that's his answer because obviously he was writing this in the early 2000s and you know me saying well what about the greeks maybe that's in a way him sort of reflecting on that and actually saying i can see that as your kind of okay i better tidy up go corrective so it's clearly very strong um as as a novel and great well done and i'm sure it will be a classic it for many many years so let's move on to the first round of the the films um the big decision there was to age up the cast so i'll try to think of the name of the young man who played percy jackson it was logan somebody um.

[16:31] He was probably a sort of he looked a bit like he was sort of high schooler you know he was good looking um i'll google his name in a second yeah logan logan uh lehrman logan lehrman i'm going to say that and i sounded a bit wrong but anyway logan lehrman plus very beautiful annabeth beth you know improbably beautiful her blue eyes i remember that and yes um and it's quite a cute uh rover i remember quite liking yes who's a bit older anyway but, the percy jackson in that version quite quickly became very adept at sword fighting he went from on being it's as though he did the spider-man thing within a really you know he went from being a sort of being swinging between the buildings in like a scene um and they were also playing up on the sort of romance element a bit with early on um there was also some darker elements in it so the the mother and her relationship with the horrible stepfather was a darker edged thing um and.

[17:57] Yeah that's what i remember from it it didn't just didn't have the same charm i think yeah yeah yep yeah no exactly and that's when i re-watched the film in preparation you know for this like i i've been inundated with percy jackson over the past like a few weeks um which i think is a good thing which is it's been a fascinating study of going between the book and the film and the television series um which i recommend to anyone to do just in terms of adaptations uh interpretations and reworkings um but yeah so this is so it's a christopher columbus film christopher columbus directed the first two harry potter films um who also did home alone and it's done a lot of you know kind of like family blockbuster like big large-scale, films that are like family friendly but that they're because they're large scale um they are are what you call in Hollywood four-quadrant films.
So the four quadrants are audiences that are over 25 and under 25, and then male and female.
So the sweet spot is getting a film that hits all four quadrants.

[19:05] You want males and females over 25 and males and females under 25 equally coming to the film and spending their hard-earned money to put money into your pockets.
That's the goal, right, for the studios. And so blockbuster films often are positioned in that way.
And so with the aging up, so the reason for aging up Percy Jackson is so that it can get closer to the over 25 audience.
You can have more romantic plots to make it something that's more palatable or interesting for adults. But in doing so, there's trade-offs, right?
Like you said, so like the tone is there, even the themes, right?
So in the books, you might have themes of coming of age, personal identity, coming to understand yourself.

[19:58] And what the gods are, you know, the metaphor for gods are used in, what are the gods being used as metaphors for in the books?
It's used in several different ways in the film, because you only have two hours of screen time, you really have to boil it down, distill it to one thing and kind of harp on that. that.
And in the film, it really came across as, to me, the active metaphor was the younger generations of gods rising up to challenge the older generations of gods, which is an older team, right?

[20:29] So it's the older high schoolers that are more rebellious.

[20:35] They're really kind of finding where the boundary is, challenging the authority of their parents.
Um and so that's comes across that's kind of what's happening here well younger generations of gods and older generations of gods represented for them a teenager struggling against their parents and like that's where you get like the conflict and even kind of like a lack of warmth between parents and children in like the god relationships they're really leaning into the conflict and making it more understandable as the protagonist by having completely aloof distant parents or parents that are abusive and that you deserve to overthrow them right um because yeah because the the teenagers have to be clearly the antagonist to be able to cheer for them yeah in that setting so so there's yeah but definitely the aging up affects a number of things the proficiency of percy such as have him.

[21:28] As a character his attitude right as a character um and his relatability either way again depending on where you are in the audience um uh and the romance subplots um which is why they also including you know uh pierce brosnan uh as uh you know as as your uh caron yeah yep uh and so that's to draw in the older audience right have like higher you know big name actors that can draw in and like pierce brosnan is james bond uh attracting

[21:58] male and female uh audience members with with that kind of casting so it's It's strategic.

[22:06] But it's an adaptation.
They focused on something in particular to make a particular.
So it's a retelling. So each adaptation is an interpretation and essentially a retelling for a particular audience.
And that's the route that they chose to take. Yeah.
So do you think it makes a good film?

[22:27] Just giving... Yeah. In terms of like a blockbuster, like a four quadrant blockbuster film, because you have have, you know, like, rather than focus on personal relationships, you're gonna have the spectacles, right?
So they're going to the casino, like, that's going to be one of your big set pieces, you're going to have, you're going to have, you know, like two or three big set pieces as expected.
And that's where you're gonna spend your budget on, on the set on the CGI on on that.
So yeah, so it was I remember.

[22:57] Enjoying it fine when i saw it when it was uh when it came out in 2010 um it was it was just okay but for what it was it's kind of like a popcorn you know light adventure kind of summer blockbuster film but not one that really merits re-watching yeah i think that's exactly it and i think that's why rick reardon doesn't like it in that somehow they've lost the heart, so the film as you said it was perfectly watchable film um not at all bad to watch on a rainy day go into a cinema you know nothing wrong with it from that point of view competently put together the performances are fine um moves along nicely as you say there's some great cameos from all sorts of famous people in it but i've never thought oh i must go back and re-watch that right never once yeah no and we do have it on dvd downstairs somewhere i think still somewhere um but i can't remember anyone asking for it to go be put on again so yeah that and i think a lot of that is because we don't really care an awful lot about percy, he is just something not if you think about harry potter for example if harry potter by By starting him at 11.

[24:23] Well, actually, you start him seeing him as a baby, don't you?
There is something almost kind of like we're invested in seeing this child succeed and the stakes get higher and higher and it gets worse and worse and worse.
If you'd started Harry Potter when he was in 17, the second to last year at Hogwarts, you'd probably think, oh, okay. But no, you've seen him as a child and you've seen how it goes with him living in the cupboard under the stairs.
There is elements of that in the Percy Jackson book with him failing at the schools and what have you, which they don't have time to do in the film version because they're cramming everything into the two hours or whatever.

[25:03] And so we just end up thinking, oh, okay, demigod finding his way.
But we're not invested. so i think it was a good idea for them to have another go go at it now as a limited series, or the first series so what do you think of the disney adaptation do you think um the appeal to the audience has changed i have i i personally think that this has gone the other way so going Going back to your four quadrant thing, I think that actually by being more faithful to the book, they've actually lost the potential of an older market.
I mean, you might sit and watch it with your kids, but I don't think it quite has the...

[25:55] You know the people will say oh that's for children which it is it's a series primarily for children yeah yeah no this is this this is fascinating so i was trying to think through like who who is the audience for this because yes you have uh you definitely have uh younger uh cast of characters um but at the same time the tone of the show is adult so you you don't have the like the kind of crass uh you know humor it's not leaning into the the homer the the humor is more measured.

[26:36] And sparse than it is in the book right in the book percy's kind of is wisecracking a lot and you have a lot of jokes that a middle grader would would make those i was surprised by how few and far between those elements were this was a very unally a very kind of like somber and serious yeah it's quite dark the palette is quite dark i was watching it um when i was traveling and several times we couldn't work out if it couldn't see it because i couldn't work out okay yeah yeah settings wrong so in bright hotel rooms or something so it is yeah yeah needs to be seen with the curtains closed so i'm yeah and i'm so this is where like i i haven't i i need i'm interested in talking to children to see what they thought and if they liked it because to me as i was looking at what's happening there with.

[27:30] With humor being kind of more sparing, it really is getting into the emotional lives of these characters, right? And when the...

[27:42] Kind of the operating metaphor that it has here is right gods and their offspring is a way to explore and critique uh parent-child relationships right so it's not the like overthrowing the gods like that's part of it but it's more so they examine all of the different exactly examine, healthy and toxic family relationships and patterns um and so that that's really the through line and they do a masterful job of that something that didn't even like you're saying earlier when an adaptation can add elements and really transcend in some ways what the source material did that's really what i feel is happening here with the percy jackson tele television series just disenfleshed series is that they're honing in on this particular thread.

[28:34] The gods greek gods and the stories of greek gods and gods of the offspring of gods and interrelationship between these families of God, right? Because they're all related.
So by emphasizing that family relationship and exploring challenges that everyone has in their own family relationships, tensions, misunderstandings, disagreements, love-hate relationships with parents, with cousins, aunts, uncles, siblings, all of that, I think they really honed in on that and lifted up those elements from the book or even introduced some elements that weren't necessarily there explicit in the book.
And in doing so, we're able to craft a particular emotional arc and journey for Percy Jackson, for these other characters that I thought was masterful, was very, very, very well done.
Yeah, but actually hearing you talk about it, though, does make me wonder.
I think they've missed a trick in actually...

[29:38] Being in love enough with the world of greek gods i'm thinking going back to harry potter which i keep thinking of because there is an element of harry ron and hermione with.

[29:51] Anabeth percy and yeah yeah i mean but there is a moment quite early on in the first harry potter film where he says something like i love magic i just love magic he's looking around hogwarts and it's just um and i wanted obviously you know there's the downside is poor old percy is actually starting his journey being traumatized because he sees his mom dying so he's starting his in grief which is difficult to actually then say hey we're all superheroes but i wondered if an element of um whether the actual magic of being a demigod is sufficiently enjoyed i was also not here i wasn't sure about some of the cgi choices my biggest problem was with the chiron in this one who i thought that the proportion of man to horse looked really wrong so i started worrying about okay where's your stomach you know it looks like a man stuck on top of the horse um i really think they could have done a better job of the proportions there have.

[31:01] Been other centaurs who have been done better and there was just like really bad about that and i found it really off-putting um some of the cgi was a bit iffy i know it's probably not got the same kind of budget as a film would do but maybe one of the reasons for so many dark scenes is it's cheaper to animate.

[31:23] Monsters coming out of this world and complicated monsters against the background.
I felt at times that the budget felt a bit straightened and not quite.

[31:34] What we now get used to um right i did what i might for me what i really liked about this version and i did watch it all the way through and enjoy it and i would watch another series so i mean it's it succeeded from that point of view is i really did like percy he was convincingly young his voice slightly on that edge of being broken broken yep vulnerable he had this vulnerability about yeah so when annabeth is um the sort of first prefiguring of annabeth sort of scheming is how she uses him in the capture the flag game and him wandering around being oh i'm told to go and stand over here now am i you know that feeling of being the child who doesn't understand what's going on around you was i felt really well evoked and that felt very relatable and i thought he was splendid i thought annabeth was also she was given a limited number of things to do but she was fine absolutely fine i also particularly like grover yeah yeah yeah very strong and this and this and this is one of the yeah the amazing difference i think between today day and say 30 40 years ago is like the caliber of child actors yeah this is like it's a very very good it's like there wasn't there wasn't really there were i can't even really remember moments where acting took me.

[33:03] Out of of the story yeah these young actors were so good and so invested in these like emotionally weighty uh roles again like exploring these themes of trauma trauma uh overcoming family-based trauma uh that like.

[33:22] I'm just yeah very very very impressed uh and thought that they definitely added to the story making it convincing that like yes these are people who like you said like vulnerable like the vulnerability just like shown through and like the regret and sadness and like the dilemmas that they're having to go through that it was really it was very real and grounded and i don't know again like i don't know if they did such a good job of following the script if that was the The script didn't have within it more of a sense of the wonder that you said, but you don't really have as much.
You have moments where they're just like, yeah, this is fun, and kind of playing a playful experience with having godlike powers.
But that's really kind of subdued here in this, whereas with the book, you have this exuberant voice, this character, this first person, who is every time something's happening, to talk about how cool it is and how awesome or great and is constantly pointing out the wonder so that's one of the things that you're right i think to observe that here uh by by focusing on those really heavy emotional uh relational themes that some of you miss a little bit of the sense of like wonder uh that maybe people in that age would be more likely to experience and notice as kind of of highlighted in the Harry Potter books and the adaptations there.

[34:48] So we're talking about the success of adaptations.
Would you say that the TV series was a better adaptation than the film?

[34:59] Yeah. Yes, for what they're trying to do. Yeah, I think it is.
I think it's one like I would later re-watch the Percy Jackson television, the Disney Plus series, because, yeah, there were a number of themes into the themes that they're experiencing or that yeah that they're uh exploring and expressing, touching on such fundamental elements of you know like yeah family relationships trauma trauma response um dealing with toxic relationships as well as like ideas of meaning so they're able to take questions about you know like what does something mean like with talking about the st louis arch for example you know like is this the is this really uh uh uh a.

[35:47] Shrine to athena it's like well if somebody imbues it with that or somebody approaches it in this way yes it can be indeed so it's they're dealing with a number of different uh topics uh that are larger and that like greek mythology deals with uh writ large um but it's the the that has and again it doesn't it doesn't really harp on like this is this person is categorically good this person is categorically bad, right?
You show how that deals with Poseidon, with Percy's father, spoiler alert for people who didn't understand that already, but I hope that wasn't too much.
But his mother, right? You see the goods, the struggles that she has to qualitatively, an incredible parent, she has things that she's working through and that has done wrong.
And she has to own up to that same thing with the father. He's far more relatable.

[36:39] Than the film version, or even I think, in the book, perhaps, like you have, I think there's a level of that there's a depth, there's an emotional depth and kind of an ambiguity ambiguity uh that allows i think for a richer engagement with the text and like those ideas as as being a piece to explore family relationships so i think in that sense that it makes you think and interested to revisit it and think about those ideas long after uh i watched it then if that's the rubric that we're using then yes i would say it was a very successful adaptation.

[37:20] Yeah, you raised the question in our sort of notes for this discussion about if you see any links between Tolkien and Percy Jackson, other than Percy Jackson sounding a bit like Peter Jackson.
No, not that. What I was thinking actually is a link, is a sort of basis of fantasy, because what Rick Reardon has done is moving aside from live religious discussions, you know, you don't want to sort of have Jesus and God and things being involved, because that's kind of people's real living faith that you'd be using as a structure.
By moving it sideways to imagining a modern pantheon for America, and then reinterpreting the gods and the creatures within that within an American context, you give this mythology background that is extendable, that you can imagine you can tell stories within.

[38:21] So that's a really strong fantasy world because it has imaginative extensions.
And if you think about what Tolkien was doing, he invented his own pantheon of gods, which he put on top of a sort of pre-history for Britain with his valar and Eanor and the music.
You can see the roots of that in other mythologies like the Norse gods and others, but he's doing of doing his own version of it and extending that world to such a point, getting beyond the Silmarillion, that you get stories that kind of only very, very lightly touch on his.

[39:06] Pantheon he originally thought of.
They're there behind it all, but he's moved so far away that it almost can tell a story without mentioning them hardly at all.
So there is a sort of correlation between those two, which I think is worth thinking through, if anyone here is listening and is thinking of creating their own fantasy world.
It's how do you deal with your...
You're so divine element if you've got one in your story how do you interpret it for me that was a connection did you see any other connections because you raised the question yeah yeah and i think uh your answer was great and a great observation i was thinking of like more of a crass practical uh level with the adaptations which is so i'll do again i'll give the cheap answers you gave yeah so maybe we should reverse that and you could wait and give you that same same answer after i give this like really superficial answer um that would be great uh so uh with the films themselves right um so the film uh sean bean uh plays zeus right it's played boromir uh in lord of the rings films uh and then uh for the percy jackson's uh Disney plus series, uh, the themes, uh.

[40:20] The musical themes, uh, were created by Barrow McCreary who wrote the, uh, score and soundtrack for the rings of power, uh, series.
Uh, so you can hear, if you listen to, if you watch things of power, you could hear some echoes of some, some of the themes that are used there in Percy Jackson.
But, um, yeah, so that's, So that's my superficial Tolkien, kind of like secondary, tertiary Tolkien connections to Percy Jackson in Adaptation specifically.
But I really liked what you said there about, yeah, I think one of the reasons why Percy Jackson, as a series and as a world, like you said, it allows for imaginative extension.
I really like that phrase. I think that's the sign of a really good imaginative world. It's the same thing with like Harry Potter, right?
That it allows for imaginative extension for people to want to enter into that and want to like tell stories and that there's, it feels like there's space that you could tell.

[41:21] A completely different story um they're only kind of scratching the surface and that's really what you get with tolkien that the world that he created in the silmarillion that lord of the rings is just scratching the surface as one possible story is what you're only following one very small piece of this enormous world that was created and so i think yeah with percy jackson you can kind of see that once you're setting it against the backdrop of gods um and their relationship and machinations across an entire country, this very large, unnecessarily large country.
The opportunities for stories and storytelling, I think, is there and almost endless.
So yeah, I absolutely agree with you.

[42:05] Thank you. So just to wind this up, do we have a Greek mythology related fantasy tip?
Because we always have some kind of fantasy tip at the end. What's yours?
So I went this past summer, listened to both the Iliad and the Odyssey narrated.

[42:29] Phenomenal uh jobs by uh alfred molina uh narrated the iliad um if you're a superhero, fan if you're a shakespearean uh fan uh he is wonderful um he's uh he's british uh if you're a superhero fan he was doc he's doctor octopus in uh spider-man 2. too.

[42:51] But he's like, he's he's an and a no way home reprises his role.

[42:58] Phenomenal. But he does he does he a tremendous job. So he's a class between doctor, Guild School for acting. It's like just just just phenomenal.
So he does the narrating for the Iliad. And the Odyssey, again, another superficial Tolkien connection is narrated by certain Ian McKellen.
Uh you can get a version of that uh that is that is wonderfully done and so if you're looking and then just like as i was you know listening to that just again these imaginative worlds imaginative extensions just being uh fully immersed in these worlds uh and kind of like following the flow of the stories and homer's storytelling uh that really just kind of renewed my love for the classics and Greek literature in particular.
And actually, the reason I went through a re-listen, re-read was after reading a few different biographies of C.S.
Lewis and his love for Greek literature and how much that inspired his own writings

[44:05] and fantasy writings and what he's doing in Narnia.
So you can kind of see little glimpses and peeks of different things and how that intersects. And that was just delightful.
So my recommendation is an old one. You might have heard of it.
It's the Iliad and the Odyssey by one Homer.
One. Yeah.

[44:23] Yes. Right. Exactly. But the audio versions are great.
That links quite well to my recommendation, which is as we are interested in the Inklings, you mentioned C.S.
Lewis. if dear reader out there you haven't yet read c.s lewis's until till we have faces you don't really understand and know c.s lewis it is probably his best adult novel by quite a long way it is reimagining of the uh.

[44:56] The psyche miss but it is an unusual female heroine completely different very complex, than anything you might expect him to write so i would i would say go go away and read that because.

[45:15] It is a huge surprise when you do i bet if someone gave it to you without his name on the front it would be one of the last people you imagine who'd written that novel it's so surprising Okay, so just for a little bit of fun, where do you think, in our best places in all fantasy worlds, where do you think it's the best place to be a god?
But we're going to narrow it down in honor of Poseidon.
Where do you think it's the best place to be a water god in all the fantasy worlds?
With your trident over water and you just... Yeah, right.

[45:50] See, I would love, I think, and this is, again, a bias towards C.S.
Lewis, that Narnia, I would love to explore what being a water god in Narnia was like, because we see, you know, you have naiads, dryads, you have different characters, but you don't see...
Father Teph, some river god comes at some point in Prince of Hathor. No, no, no, exactly.
Right, yeah, no, exactly. And so I think with, yeah, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, you're in the water.
And so like you see, right, the underwater, like towards the very end, you know, this kind of like underwater world that they just like hint at and give you kind of a longing.
And it just gives you like instilled a longing for this like underwater world that you never, you only glimpse barely and then leave behind.
But just like, just the imaginative, with Narnia's kind of Greek.

[46:40] Philosophical and mythological underpinnings and intermixings.
I think that would be fun to explore.
I would like to see what the Poseidon or the Poseidon equivalent would be doing in Narnia, something that's completely just attached to the sea and the world of water.
So how about you, Julia? I'm going to go slightly different.

[47:06] Because I was thinking Aquaman, Avatar. No, I was thinking actually one really interesting imaginings of a river god is Ben Aronovich's Rivers of London, which is the first of a series of novels set in a sort of slightly skewed London, where the river gods like Father Thames and the other rivers that are now mainly lost in London are all personified in that Greek myth way.
And I think that's a really fun thing to think of. So So a lot of those are taken.
So I might try and be another river that's not yet been given, I don't know, the Tweed or the River Severn or something.
I'll choose another river and visit that world as this sort of personified god, goddess.
I think that's quite an interesting way of putting a fantasy frame around natural things.
So that's my choice. Ben Aronovich, The Rivers of London.

[48:02] Jacob, thank you so much for talking about Percy Jackson with us.
And we look forward to Disney getting around to making a second series, because I think we'd both watch it, wouldn't we?
Yeah. So goodbye from us. Thanks.
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