Harry Potter is the French Revolution of Fiction

Last day of National Novel Writing Month! I still hate being alive, but that’s not a November-only thing, and at least I have an idea of how this story ends now! But I don’t know how we got here, and so I still kind of totally failed at this because I’m… not a good novelist. Like, at all. 

I’m not good at noveling, I’m apparently useless for employment… guess I’m just a worthless human being! Hooray!

Anyway here’s a Saturday Note. I wrote it years ago and pitched this to a few online publications and never heard back because I’m not really worth contacting, I suppose.

Though I imagine parts of it might be outdated...

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Harry Potter is the French Revolution of Fiction

Allow me to explain: there’s a famous quote by Zhou Enlai, the first Premier of the People’s Republic of China, that when asked by President Nixon in 1972 about the effects of the French Revolution, responded that it was “too early to say.” So it is in the case with Jo Rowling’s famous series—one can discuss for weeks on end the direct and indirect results of the Harry Potter series’ popularity, but in the end so much has come from it that it’s too soon to tell precisely how it has affected our culture.

It’s obvious that nothing has quite struck the same chord with the world that Harry Potter has. Yes, we can debate how other things have entered the public eye and consumed the media, for better or for worse—Twilight, The Hunger Games, Eragon, et cetera, et cetera and so forth. But none of them were the same. There was a time when just about everyone was reading Harry Potter, and it was more uncommon to find someone who hadn’t read the books or seen the films than it was those who had.

No one thought it strange in Twilight’s heyday if you hadn’t read the book. No one gives you a funny glance if you don’t understand Hunger Games references. But Harry Potter? It was omnipresent in a way that almost no piece of fiction has been since.

“Alright, so Potter Mania was big back in the day,” you may be thinking. “What’s your point?”

Good question, fair reader. My point is that Potter Mania is still affecting our everyday lives in its continued ripples through popular culture. Well no, we’re still not getting Harry Potter films, as such (except Fantastic Beasts prequels, I guess), and there aren’t any more of the novels being released, but that doesn’t mean we’re not still influenced by their release.

The most obvious effect is the sheer amount of published fiction (particularly fantasy aimed at young adults) that has become publicized and entered the pop culture narrative. It’s not hard to see why—publishers and studios have been clambering to create “the next Harry Potter” because Harry Potter made an obscene amount of money and people want in on that. In a way they’re still looking for it, as we can see how many different YA books are still being published with fanfare and adapted to film with big-budget special effects. Sure, they may seem like they’re trying to be “the next Hunger Games” or “the next Twilight”, but the fact remains that this wouldn’t have really started if it hadn’t been for Harry Potter.

The sad truth of it is that people have realized that there is a huge market for fiction about and aimed at adolescents. That’s not to say that teenagers didn’t have fiction before (they did), but for the most part publishers promoted made books for young children and for adults. If one wanted a book for anyone in-between, usually he or she would be pointed to the classics, like C.S. Lewis and Roald Dahl. That’s not bad at all, but it was nearly unheard of for many in the age range of 10-18 that there were new books written and published specifically for them.

Harry Potter changed all that. Suddenly people knew that young people would read these books if they had entertaining enough stories, even if the stories went on for hundreds of pages. And so  literature exploded. Books were marketed in comparison to Rowling’s series—for the same audience as Harry Potter, books for the audience before they were old enough to read Harry Potter, books for the audience waiting between Harry Potter novels, books for readers who outgrew Harry Potter—all of these were things that happened. You’ll still find editions of Young Adult books from a few years ago with critics giving praise along the lines of, “Yeah, this is better than Harry Potter!”

[A very subjective opinion and hard to prove, but it was often made nonetheless.]

Basically, something success as a piece of fiction was judged by its quality compared to Harry Potter. And when the books became adapted to film by Warner Brothers, suddenly everyone wanted a Young Adult book-turned-to-film franchise to be “the next Harry Potter.” A brand new market came to the forefront of the film industry and became an unstoppable juggernaut that’s still going to this day. And when the final book was adapted into two films, Hollywood saw how well that sold and began to decide that it was mandatory for Young Adult film adaptations—Hunger Games, Twilight, and Divergent all opted to use them. Even Marvel Studios announced that the conclusion of its third phase of films will end with Avengers: Infinity War divided into two parts (though they eventually renamed the second part as Endgame), illustrating that this idea for film execution is leaking into other genres besides Young Adult films.

There are only a few pieces of fiction that I can remember even coming close; for instance, Bungie’s hit game Halo, which changed the first-person shooter genre and led to online connectivity to basically being a requirement for all video games. It was a product that came out and unexpectedly became a game-changer. But Halo didn’t expand those borders—yes, there are novels, comics, animated stories, and live-action online series, but it didn’t ever reach the obscene popularity outside of its target audience (gamers) that Harry Potter did.

Furthermore, the Harry Potter fandom basically revolutionized the way fans act towards things. I won’t go so far as to say that fan fiction or shipping didn’t exist before Harry Potter fans hit the Internet en masse, but they certainly weren’t staples of fandom (because you know that Kirk/Spock was a thing, right?). It wasn’t really expected that one writes fan fiction or ships two characters in the same way that it was before; now it’s practically a requirement to be respected in the fandom, and shipping’s an easy way to start an argument both on and offline. The concept that all these fans should get together on the Internet on forums and discuss character relationships, plot developments, and predictions for future books wasn’t anything close to mainstream until the Harry Potter fandom came along and entered popular consciousness. Now, it’s almost required for fans on the Internet to be writing and reading fan fiction. In many ways, Harry Potter paved the way for much of modern Internet fandom culture.

Perhaps most bafflingly of all is the input of the author. We accept pretty much whatever Rowling says about her characters and world in interviews as canon. That’s pretty much a direct contradiction to the way literature is studied in academic circles. In college English, you’re taught that what the author says doesn’t matter—if you can make a solid case for something being meant by the text on your own, you’ve got a college essay right there. And yet when it comes to Harry Potter we all take Rowling’s word as inarguably canon, and its cited in fan conversations and wikis across the Web; the only dissent comes when the topic is shipping (which is when all Hell breaks loose). There’s so much that apparently some felt the need to ask for it to stop so that more backstory is left up to fan interpretation.

What’s more, Potter culture steadfastly refuses to end. With Pottermore we continue to learn more of the backstory and behind-the-scenes of the writing of Harry Potter, and the news reports every time a new interesting tidbit is released (usually erroneously referred to as a “new story”). Studies are being done on what Hogwarts House means in regards to psychology. And now there’s a spin-off film series and a stage play! And rumors out there that someone’s trying to develop the play into a film.

The fact is, Harry Potter, as a phenomenon isn’t over. There are no more book release parties and the audience is all grown up, but the impact is still evident all over. There’s no way of knowing when it will be over. We could sit and debate for days over the effect it’s had on popular culture, on our culture, but the fact is that as with the case of the French Revolution, it’s too soon to tell how much of an effect Harry Potter has had.

On Anakin Skywalker

On the way back from Clemson this past weekend, I listened to the soundtrack of Revenge of the Sith and I had a lot of Star Wars thoughts. That led to this Note.

Also I’m a terrible novelist. In case you wanted a NaNoWriMo update.

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The Star Wars prequels don’t do a great job of portraying Anakin Skywalker. Watch Attack of the Clones and what opinion do you get of this guy? Not a very good one, I’d wager: here’s a kid who becomes obsessed with a woman he hasn’t seen in nearly a decade, he’s arrogant to the point of stupidity, brash, loud, and just really, really whiny. We don’t really see that much of his heroic side; and when he confesses to Padme that he’s just slaughtered an entire village of Sand People, down to the last child, and at no point does someone say “That’s a dick move, man,” it’s kind of difficult to understand why Padme falls in love with him at all. He’s an unstable and violent kid, and she’s an accomplished stateswoman?? Why???

Revenge of the Sith does a bit better; he makes some sketchy choices at the beginning, but overall he seems okay enough, but before long we’re watching him turn evil, and all sympathy goes out the proverbial window once he starts murdering actual children. We don’t get enough time to really connect to Anakin before he’s evil, and he turns evil by doing the most horrendous actions imaginable, so we have no chance at ever sympathizing with him. 

The thing is that this isn’t actually the picture we’re supposed to be getting of Anakin. For starters, we’re supposed to actually like him, and when he falls to the Dark Side we’re meant to think this is a massive tragedy of a capital-H Hero collapsing into evil. Which doesn’t work at all! Part of this is due to the very nature of the story being told and the way it’s being told--in films, you’ve got to nail the big, cinematic moments of the story, and you don’t have as much time to get all the little character moments that you would in a book or television show. So we’re not getting Anakin in his everyday life, or even as a Jedi on the battlefield most of the time. We’re getting Anakin’s moments of highest emotion, most intense stress, and greatest frustrations. That’s not always a good picture to judge someone by.

Also… George Lucas’s writing was a massive problem. Which I tend to kind of excuse sometimes, because at least Lucas admits that he doesn’t do dialogue well, but in this case his direction and the general writing made Anakin as unsympathetic as humanly possible. I don’t even blame Hayden Christensen’s acting, as Lucas not doing well helping his cast is pretty well-documented. I don’t know if it would have been much better if Christensen’s acting and delivery had been better though, because the dialogue and scripting just don’t make him come across as a very good character. He’s just annoying, and I think he would have been annoying if the most talent performer on the planet was playing him.

I was very surprised then to watch the CGI animated series, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and find myself thinking, “Hey, Anakin Skywalker’s kind of awesome.”

What the eff, man?

To be fair, there are moments in the series where Anakin seems to flirt with the Dark Side. But for the most part, you don’t get the impression that this is an emotionally-unstable jerk that’s constantly getting angry at everyone around him. Anakin, as presented in The Clone Wars, is a friendly, powerful, skilled Jedi, who often bends the rules, but usually to do what he feels needs to be done. He has a temper, but we don’t see him slaughter innocent people, and when he gets upset it is proportional to the grievance in question. He goes out of his way to help people even when it inconveniences him. He’s kind to those lower than him in the chain of command. And he seems well-liked by several other Jedi, officers, and politicians. 

Maybe it’s because I haven’t seen all of the prequel movies in a while, but when I think of Anakin Skywalker, I tend to think of the one from the show rather than the one from the movies. And I suspect that Anakin as he appears in the series is closer to Lucas’s original intention.

I ended up looking at the traits of Anakin in the animated series that I listed above: mostly friendly, gets along well with people, has a bit of a temper, a tendency to bend or break the rules if he thinks it’s the right thing to do, but with amazing power and skill, and I thought to myself… that describes a lot of pop culture heroes. 

The one that came to mind was Percy Jackson, actually. And that felt weird. That’s not to say that I think Percy’s doomed to become his series’s equivalent of Darth Vader--for one, we’ve seen no indication that Percy, even when his temper flares the highest, has ever shown any sign of being okay with hurting civilians. But I would also totally read the heck out of a story that involved Percy Jackson becoming a supervillain, because there is groundwork there, if you wanted to make it happen.

The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher tries to play with this too, in that Harry Dresden carries a lot of those traits, and because of certain parties taking an interest in him, the White Council of wizards sees that too, and they definitely see him as a potential threat. Jim Butcher’s made it clear in interviews that while many wizards do like Harry, the Senior Council is extremely wary of him, how powerful he is, and basically expect him to turn out to be the next Dark Lord and are preparing accordingly. Yeah, we know that he’s not that bad a guy because we’ve been in his head for fifteen books, but most people don’t have that benefit, they just see this powerful wizard who breaks rules a lot, has connections to some sketchy types, and often leaves flaming wreckage in his wake.

Because of these two examples, and with The Clone Wars I kept thinking that this Anakin Skywalker-type of character, the one that Lucas was going for, is actually a really strong character and one that could be interesting to explore even without said hero (or heroine!) going to the Dark Side. But the examples I could think of where it was done well were all shows or book serieses that gave these characters lots of time to develop. I know I’ve rambled about this before, how movies don’t often give enough time for character development, especially when they’ve got spectacle to deliver.

I’ve seen it suggested before (and I might have done so too, I don’t recall), that the prequel trilogy would have been stronger if the first film focused more on Anakin, rather than picking him up partway through. And I agree; that way we’d get more character development and we’d feel like he’s less of a violent entitled jerkface. Because that’s key to making any character likable or sympathetic: we have to have had enough time to get to know them. So even if we do see their bad sides, we see their good sides too so that we care when they turn evil. That we get it, instead of just writing them off and saying, “Well, that guy was a douche anyway! Moving on!”

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On King Arthur Stories

Marvel Studios announced this week that they’re probably going to make it so that you need to watch their Disney+ serieses to understand some of their upcoming movies, and I just wanna punch everyone involved with the money-grubbing making of Disney+ in the face.

But never mind that! YALLFest today!!

I have to have talked about this at some point, but it’s on my mind so let’s do it.

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On King Arthur Stories

I kind of hate that there are expectations for King Arthur stories. Very specific expectations. And these are usually in the shape of a triangle…

The most famous part of the Arthurian legend is the love triangle between Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot. That’s the part that people remember! It’s the thing that led to the whole downfall of the entire kingdom! It’s tragic, and epic, and is the sort of love story that people cry their eyes out about. Here’s the thing: it’s been done to death and I absolutely hate it.

Part of the reason I hate this is because the King Arthur stories are full of hundreds of stories: stories of love, and adventure, of monsters and battles, duels and enchantment. And yet what is the one thing that popular culture seems intent on giving us? A single love triangle. One that we’ve seen over and over again. There’s rarely any innovation, and if there is, it’s really boring.

Making it even more frustrating is that it was one of the later bits of the story that got added on; King Arthur stories have their basis in Welsh mythology, and Lancelot didn’t even exist in those days! The French added him to the stories later, along with changing the names. So we have this story cycle originally based on a legendary Celtic king with a war band of the greatest warriors of his time, some of whom had superpowers, and interacted with gods and monsters and giants, and yet… everyone just wants to talk about that one time a French knight started sleeping with the queen.

I was immensely relieved when I recently picked up The Squire’s Tale by Gerald Morris, which is a kid’s book, yes, but it is focused entirely on the adventures of Sir Gawain (from the point of view of his squire, our protagonist). Gawain? That guy who, as the Morris points out in his Author’s Note, was called the most honored of knights at one point before his spot was taken by Lancelot? Because the French wanted one of their own to be the hero of the British King Arthur stories?

What made the book fun was that at times it poked fun at a lot of the tropes found in Arthurian stories. At one point Gawain meets a knight who refuses to let him cross a stream without jousting. Gawain is absolutely baffled by this, wondering why this guy’s so eager to fight strangers and what precisely he thinks he’s guarding this stream in the middle of nowhere from. But it’s never a parody; the story reaffirms the ideas of chivalry and paints its heroes as actual heroes, rather than guys just goofing around in medieval England.

I’m not saying that all Arthurian stories need to take this route, but it was a welcome change from “Here’s another way to frame the Arthurian love triangle.” I’m not sure if later books will pick it up; it seems likely, considering that the first was built on many of the French stories and hint at things to come later. Which is a bit disappointing, but not a deal-breaker as long as the story remains good.

Because I like the King Arthur stories that take full advantage of dealing with the little stuff. There are dozens of Arthurian knights, and in the older Welsh legends warriors. And yet most of them are relegated to being either background characters or canon fodder. One of the most frustrating things about the BBC Merlin was having random redshirts be named as famous Arthurian characters, like Bedivere or Pellinore. And so many works do the same thing, just not as obviously. You have a bajillion characters to tell stories with and you just kill them off for cheap drama? So you can focus on a love triangle? WHYYYYYY

This is why when I pick up King Arthur stories, I prefer if they play up some of the minor characters, or downplay the love story, or leave it out entirely. I loved how The Warlord Chronicles by Bernard Cornwall played with reader expectations of Lancelot (and by that I mean making him overtly a terrible person) while focusing on a character most people haven’t heard of and I loved how The Pendragon Cycle by Stephen Lawhead left out the love triangle entirely in its retelling. I like how King Arthur: Legend of the Sword doesn’t have a love story at all and kind of goes nuts with the fantasy elements. 

Just… if you’re going to write about King Arthur, do something cool and different, not just the same old stupid love triangle.

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The Problem of Relationship Drama

Hallo. I have needed to do my laundry for a week but have not had the opportunity. Also, NaNoWriMo is going on, and that’s not always conducive to my mental health. So that’s another little fun bit of my life going on right now!

Hooray.

But I read some Limyaael yesterday, so that was cool.

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The Problem of Relationship Drama

OR, “Where Arrow Went Wrong”

Because that’s what happened, you know? That’s what went wrong with Arrow. Mind you it’s not a terrible show, but at its weakest moments, that’s what was holding back the show. 

So let me step back a bit and talk about what I’m talking about.

[jazz hands] DRAMA

It’s got negative associations sometimes, and for good reasons, but it’s an essential part to telling a long-running story that you hope will engage audiences. How do characters interact with each other? How do they interact with the world around them? What does that say about us, the audience? In a well-written story, the infusion of drama helps keeps things fresh and keeps the viewer viewing or the reader reading: they want to know what dramatic thing is happening next to these characters.

It’s sort of an unwritten rule of television writing. It’s why shows that are mostly goofy comedies like Brooklyn 99 occasionally have episodes that deal with things like police discrimination against African-Americans or one of the detectives coming out as bisexual. That’s not a negative criticism, as I think that B99 mostly handles issues very well, but it’s a little bit odd when you think about how it’s a comedy about a detective who thinks his life is like Die Hard and hasn’t read more than fifty books in his entire life.

But the writers of that show understand that we care about these characters, and while we love watching their hilarious antics we also want to see them grow as people, and so it deals with more serious topics from time to time. Those aren’t always from-the-headlines topics either, sometimes they’re things like breakups or annoying coworkers or the like. And they’re often done with a funny twist, but it’s still drama. And it works, because it stays true to the characters, and the show doesn’t lose sight of what its viewers actually came to watch: a funny show about goofball cops.

But for some reason, some writers think that the only drama anyone cares about it romance, and that’s… pretty terrible. And that’s where we get to Arrow.

Arrow is a TV show meant to be about the DC Comics character Green Arrow told in the style of Nolan’s Batman movies. It’s also a CW show, which means it focuses very heavily on the dramas of pretty people. For whatever reason, very few people in the show can just meet and go out or something. There’s always a lot of hang wringing and drama and it’s really, really annoying. Like, insanely annoying.

Like, in season one Ollie starts dating this cop, yeah? And she asks him on their first date about his time on the Island, where he was stranded and tortured, mind you, and Ollie, quite reasonably, doesn’t want to talk about it. And his date gets upset, and both she and the show frames this as a miscommunication thing, about how Oliver Queen needs to learn to open up to people, and how pushing people away isn’t healthy in making relationships work. Except this isn’t a relationship issue. This is a basic personal boundaries issue! I’m not love guru, but if you’re on your first date with someone who has had serious trauma inflicted upon them recently, you don’t get to bring that up and then get mad that he won’t talk about it!

Fudge, and it gets so much worse. Season three--hang on.

[goes and sits at a bar in isolation for three hours sipping apple juice]

Right, so season three of Arrow tries to frame the entire story of the show as the love story of Oliver and Felicity, which is darn annoying considering she wasn’t a love interest when the show began. Its premiere has a scene where Oliver tells her that she’s the only person he really saw as a person when he got back to Starling City, and it ends with them driving off and him saying that he’s finally happy. So much of their character arcs for the next three seasons are about their relationship with each other. This “Will They/Won’t They?” that began in season two? Lasts until season six!

THAT’S FIVE YEARS!

And remember what I said about Brooklyn 99? About how no matter what serious topics or relationship drama they did, they didn’t lose sight of what the show was and what people wanted to see? Yeah, Arrow did that, because the main audience of Arrow isn’t a cluster of people hyperventilating about the idea that Oliver and his girlfriend might [gasp] kiss! It’s an action series! About a superhero! That’s the point! That’s why we’re here!

I’m not even arguing that there can’t be relationship drama in a show like this. But I’m saying that it shouldn’t be the point. If your stunt-heavy superhero action series has five whole seasons of ship tease, and takes attention away from a supervillain with nukes in order to have Felicity complain that Ollie’s keeping secrets from her (which wasn’t his fault to begin with!!) then there’s a friggin’ problem here. 

Don’t write like this. I beg you, don’t write like this.