What Happens When You Outgrow Your Heroes?

I think that most kids go through a mythology phase. You can’t help but grab the book at the library depicting ancient gods and symbols. And for most kids in my generation, this phase was heavily influenced by the works of Rick Riordan.

I was in elementary school when I first read The Lightning Thief. I had always loved mythology. When I was little, my dad would read me a different Greek myth every night from this big yellow book of myths we had. So the fact that I fell in love with Percy Jackson and the world of Camp Half-Blood was no surprise.

I was younger than the protagonists when I stared reading. But that was okay, because to me, they were these cool older kids that might still struggle, but always knew how to handle the situation. In the third book of the series, the character of Nico DiAnglelo is introduced. He’s a few years younger than the protagonists, and I related to him instantly. Like him, I had often tried to hang out with older kids, but often got pushed aside for being like an annoying little sibling. I related to how he idolized the older kids, because I had done the same thing.

I related to these stories so much because I was able to grow up with the characters. I saw myself in the characters on a physical and mental level. In middle school, I related to the thirteen year old protagonist in part because I too was thirteen. I understood the awkwardness of not really being a child anymore, but not yet being a teen either. I sympathized with the frustration felt towards adults that expected you to act like an adult while still treating you like a kid. I grew up with these characters and their personal struggles often mirrored my own.

But the Percy Jackson series ended, and I moved on to other books. I would soon return to the works of Rick Riordan when he released a new series: The Heroes of Olympus. It was a series in the same world as Percy Jackson that included some of the characters from the original story as well as new ones. I was excited and read each book as it came out. But there was something different with this series.

The original series was paced out so that in the year between each book’s publication, a year had passed in the story as well. This wasn’t the case for the new series. The books often picked up right where the other one had ended despite the year that had passed in the real world. This meant that the characters didn’t age, but I did. I started the series seeing myself in the younger characters, relating to that same feeling of not being sure you’re in the right place. But by the time I finished reading the series, those characters I had seen myself in now seemed like underclassmen I wanted to help guide. I was now closer in age to the protagonists of the first series than I had been initially. Percy and Annabeth were no longer older kids I looked up to as heroes, they were now my contemporaries.

And that fact broke my heart. In high school I started reading Rick Riordan’s new series The Trials of Apollo, which still take place in the same world as the previous two series and once again incorporate old characters while introducing new ones. But I didn’t make it very far. I ran into the same problem I had with The Heroes of Olympus series- the characters didn’t age.

I was in my second year of high school, and so were some of the characters, but they had been sophomores for a lot longer than I had.

I was so upset that the characters had become stagnant. I was so angry that while I had grown up and was facing new challenges in life, they weren’t experiencing the same ones. They were still complex and interesting characters, but it wasn’t the same.

I’m now eighteen and a freshman in college. Percy Jackson and Annabeth Chase, characters who were once several years my senior, are seventeen. And I know that now as an “adult,” I’m no longer the target audience for the series. But it feels weird, having grown up with these characters and to have had them for so much of my life as people I related to and tried to emulate, being younger than me now. It’s like I’m on my own for the first time. And it’s lonely, but I guess it’s just part of growing up.