This may come as a shock to some of you, but I am a huge Percy Jackson fan. There, I said it. It’s okay if this changes how you think about me. I know not a lot of people like Percy Jackson.
(For an example of verbal irony, please see above)
This post will be 1% my thoughts on the new Percy Jackson series on Disney+ and 99% my thoughts on the character of Clarisse. SPOILER ALERT-ISH for Percy Jackson and the Olympians.
My thoughts on the new Disney+ series: Yep. It’s pretty good. I like how it follows the book accurately and didn’t portray Hades as LITERAL SATAN unlike some MOVIE ADAPTATIONS I WILL NOT NAME.
Photo courtesy of me screenshotting it from my Disney+ subscription
So Clarisse. For those who don’t know, Clarisse is a minor antagonist who pulls a Zuko by the end of the Percy Jackson series and becomes one of the good guys. In the first novel, The Lightnight Thief, Clarisse is described thusly:
The loudest was a girl maybe thirteen or fourteen. She wore a size XXXL CAMP HALFBLOOD T-shirt under a camouflage jacket. She zeroed in on me and gave me an evil sneer. She reminded me of Nancy Bobofit, though the camper girl was much bigger and tougher looking, and her hair was long and stringy, and brown instead of red.
The Lightning Thief (2005)
She is subsequently described a few pages later as “[t]he big girl from the ugly red cabin.” Later still, “[h]er ugly pig eyes [glare] through the slits of her helmet.” Suffice it to say, Clarisse in the book is fat and ugly, and it’s heavily implied that part of the reason she’s ugly is because she’s fat.
Clarisse in the new streaming show is…
Stunning? Is that okay to say? Her name is Dior Goodjohn, and–setting aside whatever else I say in this post–she does an excellent job as Clarisse.
But what gives? Why isn’t she ugly? Why isn’t she overweight?
Well, Clarisse can’t be ugly of course. See, when Rick Riordan originally wrote this book in the early 2000s, it was okay to equate ugliness with fatness and it was okay to equate a woman’s (or girl’s) attractiveness level with how good of a person she was. In fact, later in the series, Clarisse has a major crush and the characters are all like “Wahhh? But she’s ugly! How can she want to seek out a romantic relationship??” In The Lightning Thief specifically, Clarisse was ugly because she was a bad person, and she was a bad person because she was ugly. Remember, Scrubs, a hugely popular television show, was using its runtime to regularly make hugely transphobic and homophobic jokes. The early aughts were rife with this kind of humor and misguided symbolism.
So Clarisse can’t be fat and ugly in this new show because we’ve finally come to understand that a woman should not be judged by her looks and it’s not okay to shame someone for their appearance.
Except… what are you saying, Disney? Are you telling me you refuse to have a young woman who is overweight and/or unattractive on your new show?
Yeah, that’s exactly what they’re saying. Not just Disney, but the entertainment industry in general, has a problem with casting people who look anything other than gorgeous by society’s standards. It’s the She’s All That problem all over again (and again and again). People don’t go to movies (or stream TV shows) to see ordinary people. Psht. Gross. So therefore only beautiful people may be cast as the ugly people.
Photo from Business Insider
And if there is a plus-size character, the movie will let you know that this is your one (1) plus-size character whose character development will likely be dependent on one or more of the following: food and the consumption thereof, finding a plus-size character (usually of the opposite sex because of heteronormativity) to fall in love with, being judged for being plus-size, overcoming their own negative self-image that has arisen from being plus-size.
For examples, see Netflix’s Fate: The Winx Saga and the randomly-big-in-current-critique-media (at time of writing) Sleepover starring Kallie Flynn Childress as Yancy, the fat one.
In conclusion: Clarisse in this streaming series could not be ugly (or fat). And she could not be beautiful. The former insinuates that people who aren’t “beautiful” (whatever that entails) are automatically bad people. The latter rejects the possibility of showing a non-beautiful person (whatever that entails) on screen in entertainment media.
It’s a no-win situation.
But yeah, I like the show. I’ll continue to watch when the next season drops.
Potato Lady Blogs 