A question

[mary_j_59]

I've noticed that some of my posts get no response at all, while others get lots of comments. To give two examples, NOBODY responded to my post about Green Knowe. And those books are, in my opinion, really beautiful - possibly among the best fantasies ever written, and I'd be happy to talk about them. No one responded to the clip of Michelle Paver and the wolves. And that, too, is a very well-written series, in which the teen protagonists grow in believable ways. I had one response to the news that Megan Whalen Turner's fourth Attolia book is actually coming out. Then I put up a post about how unhappy I am with Harry Potter these days, and suddenly there's an intense discussion about Snape and his character going on. Okay, it's true, I love Snape. But at this point, two years after the last book, no one's mind is going to be changed about him. At least, I don't think so.

Is it the case that people visit here only for my posts on Snape? Just wondering.

Comments

The Broken World

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

When I first read your post, Mary, my first impulse to understand why I and others might respond more to your Harry Potter entries than to others was to think of Chaim Potok’s books. What fascinates me about reading Potok is that when I enter his post-Holocaust conservative American Jewry, I’m engaged in a world which is felt to be (possibly irremediably) broken—and his characters are engaged in deeply moral, heartfelt and controversial struggles to make their (our) world whole (again).

Most readers of fantasy, I imagine, have spent some time in Little Whinging. Many of us were raised there, though our [surrogate] parents may not have literally locked us in a cupboard to try to compel us to develop more normal interests than thinking about magic, and Dudley Dursley may have hunted us only on the school playground, not in our own homes.

Even so, I suspect that many of us read the first book much as I did: as a standard, rather shallow but verbally clever fantasy, in which a child is released from the mundane world into one more colorful, more accepting of difference, more adventurous…. I originally saw the WW as a utopia, in fact, albeit a somewhat naïve and petty one, menaced by the standard monster which our boy hero must defeat.

To have this colorful escape turn into a fascist dystopia, more conformist and prejudiced than Aunt Petunia at her worst, in which children are taught to torture their enemies and mind-rape their inferiors, including their parents—and that’s the good side!?

Well, it was a shock.

(As you said, if Jo was deliberately trying to make readers turn against fantasy worlds, it was cleverly done of her. In a way, perhaps the best fantasy comparison is LeGuin’s The Beginning Place, in which two children/young adults find that the other world to which they’re escaping is a worse trap with more terrifying dangers than the mundane world of domestic violence, emotional abuse and neglect, rape, and suburban meaninglessness they’re trying to escape.

But in LeGuin’s book, facing the dangers in the otherworld gives the children the courage and skills to choose to construct their lives in this one.)

And the shock Jo gave me is not a shock L.M. Boston ever gave me. Or L’Engle, or LeGuin, or McKillip, or Tolkien.

Those of us who had found anything to love in Jo’s world, be it a character or parts of the world itself, are left in the position of Potok’s characters—it’s up to us to struggle with the broken world she gave us, to try to make it whole.

By analyzing what’s wrong with it; by writing fanfic bringing about the reconciliations she misses (the fic that got me addicted to fanfic in general, just after DH, was Branwyn’s “One More Such Victory,” in which Harry uses the Resurrection Stone one last time—to talk to Snape), by defending—heatedly—the characters who were misprized or misrepresented by the JKR or by other writers and posters.

There’s a saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” We readers feel, generally, that Earthsea ain’t broke; Middle Earth ain’t broke; Green Knowe ain’t broke. We can (mostly) entrust them to the original authors; we might have wistful or dramatic fantasies of visiting, but that’s for our benefit, not the world’s.

(Note that LeGuin did eventually decide that Earthsea was broken, and worked to fix it herself; a lot of the gender stereotypes and deeper understanding of magic and death were turned over by the books published since the original trilogy. And my teenage Mary Sue LOTR fantasies—quite properly never written—were powered partly by a desire to prove that a Wizard or person of power need not be male.)

In contrast, the Potterverse, or some of its inhabitants, we want to rescue from its inventor.

If it IS broke, fix it, seems to be the imperative.

And all of us have, properly, different opinions on how the Potterverse is broke.

Re: The Broken World

[oryx_leucoryx]

And my teenage Mary Sue LOTR fantasies—quite properly never written—were powered partly by a desire to prove that a Wizard or person of power need not be male.

Are you familiar with Pratchett's talk entitled Why Gandalf Never Married? (He gave the talk in 1985 when he was working on Equal Rites. Of course he went on to write witches that were more sympathetic and more *helpful* than his wizards. Then again, in his last few books Ridcully and some of the other wizards have become somewhat useful.)

And I totally agree with you that what keeps me in some parts of HP-fandom is the need to figure out where exactly things got broken (in wizarding culture and politics in general, Dumbledore's convoluted plans, the workings of Hogwarts, as well as the paths some of the supposed good guys have taken) and what can possibly be done about this broken world.