I cannot emphasize enough, casting an actor/actress with the wrong hair color to the character they're portraying MATTERS.
Maybe the original writer didn't catch their own subliminal biases, but they are there. Blond boys are paragons. Brunette boys are renegades, anti-heroes.
Are there exceptions? Yeah. Superman isn't blond. But Captain America is. It's not an ironclad rule (however I will tangent that Superman is an immigrant written by Jewish sons of immigrants fleeing persecution, which surely doesn't matter one bit here, nope).
In the Nolan Batman movie, Harvey Dent was suddenly blond, because he had to play the White Knight to black-haired Batman's Dark Knight.
So it's really, immensely frustrating, especially all these years later as the subliminal biases become that much more obvious, that we were not crazy when complaining about show!Percy being blond not just because Walker was the best fit actor.
I don't know the intent of why Riordan gave book!Percy black hair. But there are several correlations to note:
Percy, Nico, and Thalia are the only major demigod characters with black hair, and are the only children of the Big Three (yes I know Beckendorf and Silena. Silena isn't a major character and Beckendorf obviously would have black hair, these three kids are white, and when the first series was written, he wasn't planning for HOO and beyond)
Percy is not your typical Captain America type good-boy protagonist. He's a rebel, he hates the rules, he doesn't always make the lawful choice, he goes against the grain. Typically, those traits go to brunet men.
Percy is said, more often than any other demigod, to have very strong Greek features. Non-blond hair checks out
So it's really peculiar that a writer who has been notably butthurt about fans headcanoning Percy being a different race, who loudly complained about the movies' inconsistencies, to cast his hero in the show with the wrong hair color and defend it until he's blue in the face.
Not to mention Annabeth going from having harmfully stereotypical traits of a white girl in the books to having harmfully stereotypical traits of a black girl when they fucked up her whole personality.
Why's it matter, Rick? What are you trying to say by making your definitely white protagonist even whiter? Funny how you championed diversity casting with Annabeth and Grover but your hero got even more white-washed. If book race doesn't matter, why didn't you go scorched earth and make Percy actually Mediterranean?
Boy's a lower-class New Yorker from the heart of Manhattan who says, multiple times, how much he loves his city. Would have loved to see a poc Percy with an accent at the very least.
I have nothing against the actors who play these characters. Percy's casting is just a huge freudian slip and it's both funny and irritating.
