Percy Jackson and the Olympians season 3 is on the horizon, which means there's never been a better time to dig into—or simply refamiliarize yourself with—the books.
Much to readers' delight, Percy Jackson hasn't made many changes from Rick Riordan's novels. Each season generally adapts one book in the series, so if you’ve kept up with the first two seasons of the show, you’ll have a decent idea of how The Lightning Thief and The Sea of Monsters unfold.
That said, you should absolutely still read the original novels, and not just because they’re excellent. For one, season 2 took a major deviation from the books that will undoubtedly impact season 3. What's more, Book 3, The Titan's Curse, introduces several pivotal characters who we haven’t yet seen in the show; the trailer for Percy Jackson season 3 confirmed we're about to meet these exciting new characters when it premieres on November 20..
But even if you’ve read every page of Percy Jackson and the Olympians (and its three sequel series, The Heroes of Olympus, The Trials of Apollo, and The Nico di Angelo Adventures), it can still be confusing to navigate the tangled web that is the Greek gods’ lineage. Here's everything you need to know to untangle every branch.
Every book in the series and all three seasons of the show, in varying capacities.
Lance Reddick (season 1), Courtney B. Vance (season 2 on)
Every book in the series and all three seasons of the show.
The Lightning Thief, The Sea of Monsters, The Titan's Curse, and The Last Olympian, and all three seasons of the show.
The Sea of Monsters, The Titan's Curse, and The Last Olympian, and seasons 2 and 3 of the show.
The Lightning Thief and season 1 of the show.
The Titan's Curse, The Battle of the Labyrinth, and The Last Olympian, and season 1 of the show.
The Titan's Curse and The Last Olympian, and season 3 of the show.
God of the Sun, Light, Music, Truth, and Healing
None, but she mentors the Hunters of Artemis.
The Titan's Curse, The Battle of the Labyrinth, and The Last Olympian, and season 3 of the show.
The Lightning Thief and The Last Olympian.
None, but her story is relevant to The Lightning Thief and The Sea of Monsters.
Even with a visual aid, this family tree is winding, and it doesn't help that the gods not only reproduce with humans, but regularly intermarry with their siblings, uncles, and cousins. There is no entirely straightforward way to explain this family, but it breaks down into roughly four generations.
Gaea is the creator of the Earth and, with her husband Ouranos, produced the Titans. She doesn’t appear directly in the Camp Half-Blood Chronicles until the second series, The Heroes of Olympus, but she’s the reason the gods—and by extension, the demigods—exist.
The Titans serve two purposes in the Percy Jackson series. Two of them, Kronos and Rhea, are the parents of the original six Olympian gods. But they’re also the gods’ first opponents—the Olympians come to power by declaring war against the Titans (and winning). Several Titans, like Hyperion, later appear as villains in the series.
The first Olympian gods were the six children of Kronos and Rhea (who, yes, were also siblings): Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus.
As the mythology goes, Kronos, who had already killed his own father, feared the cycle would come back around, and ate his first five children to prevent them from overthrowing him. Rhea eventually foiled his plan by hiding baby Zeus, who grew up in isolation and returned to prove his dad right.
While the original Olympic tally was six, that number quickly dropped to five when Hades took over the Underworld.
Aphrodite, Ares, Athena, Hephaestus, Hermes, and twins Apollo and Artemis are largely the children of Olympians, but they're also considered Olympians themselves, and they're the parents of several demigods. They—along with their godly half-siblings Dionysus and Persephone, who don’t reside on Olympus—fall between generations, not quite as old as Zeus, but much, much older than the campers at Camp Half-Blood.
Thanks to Zeus, Olympus’ most prolific cheater, eight of these nine gods are half-siblings (Aphrodite has a separate, non-Olympian set of parents, at least in Riordan’s version). In true Olympian fashion, that fact doesn’t preclude them from intermarrying.
As the name implies, demigods are half-deity: they’re the children of Greek gods and human lovers, typically raised by their human parents. This includes all of the campers at Camp Half-Blood. Demigods are especially powerful when they're the children of one of the "Big Three" Olympians: Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades.
Percy Jackson and the Olympians' first sequel series, The Heroes of Olympus, throws Camp Half-Blood's entire structure on its head—it’s set in the world of the Roman gods, at a parallel demigod camp called Camp Jupiter.
For readers unfamiliar with Ancient Greek and Roman mythology, it helps to know the two cultures overlap almost entirely in their pantheons—there’s a Roman equivalent to Zeus (Jupiter), Poseidon (Neptune), Hades (Pluto), and so on.
Riordan takes a pretty straightforward approach to this: he treats the two mythologies as parallel timelines, where overlapping gods are considered one being rather than two distinct characters. (For example: Clarisse La Rue from Camp Half-Blood is the daughter of Hades, while Frank Zhang from Camp Jupiter is the son of Mars. Because Ares and Mars are functionally the same character, Clarisse and Frank are half-siblings). In short, most of the characters in the subsequent three Camp Half-Blood Chronicles series are somehow related to those in the original Percy Jackson and the Olympians.
Most Roman demigods are introduced in The Heroes of Olympus series, as it centers on seven campers from Half-Blood and Jupiter coming together to fulfill a prophecy that prevents Gaea from awakening. The Trials of Apollo and The Nico di Angelo Adventures largely maintain the same ensemble, though they introduce a few new campers to Camp Half-Blood.
Relationship to Percy Jackson characters
He is the brother of Thalia Grace, sharing both parents, and one of the seven prophesied heroes.
He is a camper at Camp Half-Blood, the half-brother of Charles Beckendorf through Hephaestus, and one of the seven prophesied heroes.
She is the half-sister of Silena Beauregard from Camp Half-Blood through Aphrodite, and one of the seven prophesied heroes.
She is the half-sister of Nico and Bianca di Angelo through Hades and one of the seven prophesied heroes.
He is the half-brother of Clarisse La Rue through Ares and one of the seven prophesied heroes.
He is a descendant of Apollo, making him a relative of Will Solace and Austin Lake from Camp Half-Blood.
She is a camper at Camp Half-Blood and the half-sister of the goddess Persephone through Demeter.
He is a camper at Camp Half-Blood and the half-brother of Will Solace. He's even briefly mentioned in The Last Olympian.
Based on the fantasy novel series by Rick Riordan, Percy Jackson & the Olympians is an action-adventure fantasy TV series created for Disney+. When Percy Jackson is framed for the theft of Zeus' almighty thunderbolt, Percy must clear his name, all while harnessing the powers inherited by his father Poseidon at a camp created for demi-gods.
