Her style was American traditional, with bold black outlines that were a far-cry from the delicate linework pieces I’d covered my body in before. But I immediately connected with her design of the owl, a motif that had followed me since sitting on a tufted bean bag chair in Ms. Rush’s fifth grade class in Stuttgart, Germany, absorbed in The Lightning Thief during “Reading Hour.” The Percy Jackson series kept me company during my Navy family’s reassignments across different military bases in Europe.
I read about Percy’s hard-headedness and Grover’s hard-hornedness, about wondrous forests and giants with a hundred hands; cyclops and Time Titans haunted my dreams. But the character I connected most with was Annabeth – the clever, eleven year-old daughter of Athena, the Wisdom Goddess. She had blonde hair, gray eyes, a short knife, and a plan to get “the Trio” out of any dangerous situation.
My pudgy, saxophone-playing, middle school boy that was still deeply in the closet somehow saw myself in her. I treasured her yearn for knowledge, signified by the astute owl. I studied mythology the way that she did and attempted to emulate her signature wit for years to come, through the subsequent Heroes of Olympus teen series and groaning during the terrible two movies. When I originally enjoyed the books, I did it alone, without an online community of fandom.
Now, I have that and a Disney+ series adaptation to look forward to. Rick Riordan – the author of the series who’d promised to “fix it soon” in regards to the regrettable, earlier film attempts – was attached to produce, and made public his intention to cast with ethnicity “not part of the casting call description.” On May 5th of last year, Riordan announced Annabeth Chase would be played by Leah Sava Jeffries.
She was previously unknown to me, a young Black actress (12) with a few film and show appearances under her belt. Some fans took to social media to rejoice with all-capitals and signature Gen-Z fan cams, while others flooded the replies of news organizations and the author alike with complaints. Jeffries herself faced waves of bigoted comments. Her TikTok account was quickly banned after being mass-reported by haters.
Much of the hate seemed to be for her race alone, as none of the complainants’ Tweets or videos I saw mentioned anything but. Even when Jeffries specifically wasn’t critiqued, #BlackAnnabeth as a concept faced hellfire online. Lambasting the vitriol as racism and bias, Riordan himself published a lengthy blog post defending the decision five days later, and the right of literature to evolve with new faces – in his words, “the best actors to inhabit and bring to life the personalities of these characters.”
Unlike publishing cultural commentary in a magazine or hosting a radio show, the barriers of entry to social media are significantly lower. Anybody can be a critic, and young fans are empowered by this. Many triaged Jeffries’s replies, engaged with bias and played defense against her haters. It’s the kind of “enlightened” witnessing of pop culture that bell hooks urged; consider each TikTok comment a sticky note on a communal conspiracy board, each Tweet a diary post.
With tattoo needles piercing my skin, I scrolled on Twitter for distraction from the buzzing pain. Thinking about owls and Athena and Annabeth and my childhood, I searched up Riordan’s account. There, in a reply to a movie-Annabeth (white actress) fan-cam was a link to a Teen Vogue piece, “On ‘Percy Jackson,’ ‘Doctor Who,’ and the Rageful Racism Around Racebending.” I revisited the article in advance of the show’s premiere this month.
Stitch, fandom expert, writes about the “highs and lows of fandom, and unpacks how what we do online, and for fun, connects back to the way we think about the offline world” in her Teen Vogue column, “Fan Service.” When we hopped on a Zoom call to discuss the piece, her eyes sparked at the chance to talk literature, distorted image-building, and the “just a baby” actress Jeffries.
“You know, [some of the haters] are real fans. They all relate to [Percy Jackson]. They just think that the message they got is completely different, you know? And it is really interesting to watch people consume content that is about [what] Riordan says, being true to ourselves. Anybody can be a hero. Anybody can be a part of this narrative.” She paused for emphasis, frustration evident. “Except that black girl. And they're very specific about excising black women and girls from these narratives, from having heroic roles.”
Stitch uses a writing name to protect her real identity, after facing herself years of internet harassment for her commentary. She’s very familiar with the ways Black actors get harassed online after being cast in roles that were originally imagined as white. Her case studies: Anna Deop as Starfire, Titans; Moses Ingram as Reva, Obi-Wan; Candace Patton as Iris West, The Flash; even original characters in other “nerd” media, like Ismael Cruz Córdova’s elf in Rings of Power and John Boyega’s stormtrooper in the Star Wars sequel trilogy.
On some level, the rage is understandable. Some of the critique isn’t born in bigotry, but nostalgia. Non-Black fans who saw themselves in these characters may feel shortchanged, or that their own place in the narrative has been removed, their own self-image disrupted.
But book ink is not like tattoo ink. Meredith Clark, self-labeled “recovering journalist” and scholar of Black Twitter, insists characters are meant to be changed and reimagined. When she was younger, she begged her mom to be a traditionally white superheroine for a class project – “She-Ra is blonde, and has blue eyes, but somehow I saw myself as She-Ra” – formative to her generous understanding of the online backlash.
“For some, [racial re-casting] is jarring and scary, because [the actor] looks different than what they'd imagined all their life. And for others, it's really empowering, because they've spent a lifetime imagining a world differently than what was made originally.” Clark continued, “social media allows us to comment on that and to affirm that theory. It really is a tool of social- construction, especially with image-making, and one that empowers people in ways they haven't been before.”
Jeffries’ casting shows how media power has continued to change hands, dispersing from Hollywood publications and studio backrooms to the trends found online. When fans flooded the comments of Riordan’s initial announcement of the production deal with art of Desi Annabeth or Latino Percy, urges for the kind of representation they want to see, there was no doubt the author would consider it. Not because of any special aspect of his character, but the collective yearning he could now have. Young people organize on social media to topple political dynasties, boost birthday parties, hold artists accountable, fundraise humanitarian relief … and actualize the Black Annabeths of their childhoods.
Yet, it often feels like studios still haven’t cracked the code: social media engagement goes both ways. Riordan’s statement was a powerful defense, sure, but it was also reactionary – reactive to the hate that was to be expected if Disney had been paying attention to any of their other properties’ casting outcomes. Admittedly, Riordan later shared to Variety they “were well aware [the casting] would be an issue as soon as we knew that she was the one,” but there was no sign of that in how the news was initially announced. A Tweet, with no context, with replies on.
Stitch blames naivety like this on the lack of serious fandom experts under the studios’ payroll, and I have to agree. “They have happy fandom experts who can be like, ‘fans are going to love this… they're going to ship this.’ They don't have somebody that's going to go, ‘so if you post this [casting] announcement and leave the tweets where anybody can comment, there will be people putting racial slurs in your mentions, in the actors' mentions.’”
Why was there no upfront defense of the actress and decision in the immediate announcement? Where was the policy of having comments set to “off,” or as Stitch suggested, immediately blocking users who implemented bigoted or foul language in replies, on all platforms? Shouldn’t these precautions have already been created in advance of shoving this 12-year-old into the lion’s den of Hollywood fandom?
These questions perforate the mystique that Hollywood has social media all figured out. It takes more than influencer deals and a legion of Disney adults to direct the reaction around media releases. Hollywood needs internalized learning to maintain the magic; proactive efforts to defend their actors, authors, directors, and producers; engagement directly to the responses they’re seeing online, as Riordan did, when necessary to prevent an online hate spiral; and above all, a vision of past literature and source material that evolves beyond the limitations of creators’ worldbuilding and diversity at their inception.
Six months before the tattoo, my semester abroad in Greece felt like a reconnection to my mythological roots. I wandered the city named for Athena and saw her face carved into temple walls, her likeness baked into loaves of bread or threaded into cheap tote bags for tourists – the gray-eyed, olive-skinned, blonde likeness from my mythology books.
Annabeth’s casting announcement came during my last month in Greece, upending my imagination and obliging the ancient street art and alabaster statues as suddenly limited. Instead, I turned to social media for the vision, absorbing the warmth and celebration from the communities of Percy Jackson fans who finally saw themselves in these characters. And I soon after got the owl tattoo I’d considered for years.
Leah Sava Jeffries became Annabeth for me – and younger fans, who embody the characters they see behind their eyes when reading, no matter their assumed race, are all the better for it. Creators should take note of these stories, and industries the plethora of ways that social media has allowed them to attune to the imaginations and iterations of their younger fanbases. They shouldn’t sit idly by and let the next #BlackAnnabeth battle monsters alone.
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