Written by: Aashiya Shrestha - 27030, Grade X
Posted on: 25 July, 2024
Harry Potter is a very popular book among the ages of all people around the globe, while Percy Jackson is also a very popular book but mostly read by a younger audience. They’re both book series which are filled with magic and mystery, one written by J.K Rowling (Harry Potter), another written by Rick Riordan (Percy Jackson).
There are 5 books in total in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series while there are 7 books in the Harry Potter series. Percy Jackson is a book based around a 12 year old boy who finds out he is a demigod and the son of the Greek god of the sea, Poseidon. He slowly finds out about the powers that he had inherited from his parent and uncovers more about the greek mythology as his journey moves forward, whereas Harry Potter is a book where our protagonist, Harry Potter, discovers that he is a wizard at the age of 11 and with the help of his friends, he tries to discover more about the mysterious death of his parents and digs more into the past of the magical world.
There is a huge controversy among both the books as to which book’s storyline and characters are better. People constantly bring up the plots, character development, and the crossover of both of these books to compare it to one another. While I love the storyline and plot of both of these books, Percy Jackson is just better. If we think hard about Harry Potter for over 10 minutes, we will see all the holes and gaps in there. There are things like time travel that aren't truly explained properly and are really just seen in one book used by a girl to be able to attend all her classes. Other questions like how did they truly manage to keep the magical world filled with wizards and witches all a secret for such a long time? How is this world not known by ordinary people when muggleborns exist? Just like that, there are many more holes in the story line. In the Harry Potter series, all the other characters’ lives also seemed to revolve only around Harry but in Percy Jackson, it seemed as if all the characters had their own lives and their own problems to deal with. While the series Percy Jackson and the Olympian also had few plot holes, it wasn’t as confusing as Harry Potter as there were a lot of queries in that series, it was also never properly explained on how Lily, Harry Potter’s mother, protected Harry Potter from Voldemort.
The Harry Potter series had a world built around a singular kid whereas in the series Percy Jackson and the Olympians, one kid was thrown into a world that was already built. If we look at both the series in a way, if we took Harry Potter out of the story, everything would fall apart whereas if we took Percy Jackson out of the series, everything would remain the same. All the characters had their own significance and importance to the story which helped the book’s plot to be better. This also shows that Rick Riordan could write Harry Potter but J.K Rowling couldn’t have written Percy Jackson and the Olympians.
