"Percy Jackson" and Israeli Fan Fiction: A Case Study

Adaptations and rewriting of existing works has been around as long as the works themselves have existed; in the words of Lev Grossman, “When Virgil wrote The Aeneid, he didn’t invent Aeneas; Aeneas was a minor character in Homer’s Odyssey whose unauthorized further adventures Virgil decided to chronicle”. The Internet, however, has given new shape and life to a specific type of such reinterpretation in the form of fan fiction. One of the most popular genres for fan fiction is fantasy, as amateur authors reinvent, rewrite and recast events and characters of their favourite novels. Series such as J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight have given rise to a vast and ever growing number of fan fictions. Most interestingly for our purposes, Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson books and their subsequent film versions, which were enormously popular in Israel, have given rise to a large body of such fiction. This paper gives an overview of fan fiction and its importance, and then examines Percy Jackson fan fiction in general, before honing in on such fan fiction in Israel, examining how and why young Israeli fan-fiction writers have used the Percy Jackson series as inspiration for their own writing and exploring how this interpretation of Greek mythology enables them to engage with their own contemporary society.