I’ve got a question, and I’m throwing it open to the general readership because answering it at the moment is beyond my competence.
The Young Wizards series often gets compared to other YA series, past and present — sometimes with good reason and sometimes not. The most frequent comparison is to Harry Potter, as some of you will guess, though it always makes me laugh when this happens, as it’s hard to imagine two series that are less alike except for the fact that they both contain young wizards.
Anyway, something new and different has come up for consideration lately. In the YW books, there’s a running joke that’s been going on for a while about blue food. Kit Rodriguez has something of a pig-out on it at the Crossings while on the way to his and Nita Callahan’s excursus / “exchange student” holiday on Alaalu in book 7 of the series, Wizard’s Holiday. In subsequent books the issue resurfaces a number of times, often as a joke, sometimes just in the form of another wizard teasing Kit about this repeatedly-indulged tendency.
Recently, though, somebody brought it to my attention that Percy Jackson in Rick Riordan’s books also has a blue-food thing going on. Apparently the reasons behind this haven’t been dealt with in canon, though it is apparently stated there that Percy’s mom will make blue cake, or other desserts, for him on occasion*.
Now I’m assuming it’s some kind of obscure parallel development. (I know that George Carlin had a riff he did on blue food: whether I internalized that and it then popped out to be played with, I have no idea. And even less idea in Riordan’s case.)
That said: Wizard’s Holiday was published in 2003. I have no idea when this trope started turning up in the Percy Jackson books. Does anybody who’s a fan of the Riordan books know when the blue-food thing first appears? I’d be glad to satisfy my curiosity about this.
Thanks in advance!
*Disclosure, if needed: To date I haven’t read any of Rick Riordan’s books. It’s not that I have anything against them: it’s just that this hasn’t been a priority. I have seen the films, though, and enjoyed them.