I finished the main story on Shadow of Mordor, and am currently on the second main DLC, Desolation of Mordor. Which is SCARY because Baranor has no magic or Ring of Power, so if I die I am screwed.
Also WE’RE REREADING DRAGONLANCE PUNKZ!! That’s not what this note is about, but I’m very excited about it.
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Artemis Fowl: Introduction to the Villain Protagonist
With the upcoming film coming out, and the trailer looking very… different from the book from which it is supposedly based on, I can’t help but think about Artemis Fowl. And I get that there are probably a bajillion posts out there explaining the problems with the trailer, on a fundamental level...we’re going to talk about this series anyway because it’s a random thing on my mind and I’m a bit worn out from all the rain.
Alright let’s take it front he top: inspired by a photo of his brother in a formal wear as a child, Eoin Colfer decided that it’d be really cool if there was a Bond villain that was an actual child. So he wrote Artemis Fowl, a story about a preteen named Artemis Fowl, the heir to a wealthy Irish crime family. Since his father, Artemis Fowl Senior, disappears and his mother locks herself in her room and refuses to come out. This leaves little Arty to come up with his own way to get back the family fortune and find his dad. The solution he comes up: fairies.
See, fairies are a real, if technologically advanced, civilization in the world of Artemis Fowl that was forced underground in the distant past. Artemis finds out that there is truth to the old legend that if you catch a leprechaun, you get a pot of gold: there’s ransom money paid to whoever manages to hold onto to Lower Elements Police Recon officer (that’s LEPrecon) gets a butt ton of gold. So Artemis kidnaps Holly Short, the first female LEPrecon officer when she’s short (ha) on magic and what follows is Artemis and Butler trying to fend off attempts to rescue her, Holly’s own quest to escape, and power struggles in the LEPrecon hierarchy in what’s an unprecedented crisis.
As Eoin Colfer put it, “It’s Die Hard with fairies!”
Artemis Fowl strikes me, upon reflection, as one of the strange children’s books of the early 2000’s that felt unique. Most books you feel as if you can trace a lineage; there are a bajillion children’s books that are fantastic in their own ways, but it’s not hard to see how they were inspired by Harry Potter or Chronicles of Narnia or whatever. And to be fair, Artemis Fowl has the very clear lineage of James Bond, Die Hard, fairy tales, and cop movies. But that wasn’t something that people saw a lot of in literature for children. And what made it really stick out was that it leaned so heavily into these tropes without pulling too many punches, AND the Bond villain is the protagonist.
Well, one of the protagonists. I think it’s fair to call Holly Short co-protagonist.
This was a lot of people’s first introduction to the idea of a villain protagonist. Because Artemis Fowl is the villain; you get his reasons, and he has noble traits, but he’s the villain. The entire thing starts because he decides he’s going to kidnap someone and hold her for ransom. We can try to handwave it away with him wanting his father back, his sick mother, or whatever, but it’s still there. And Artemis does get better, and becomes a good person over the course of the series, but that’s through several books of being the Token Evil Teammate and character development, and he still works a lot through subverting usual hero tropes. Even when he’s not evil, he’s more the Chaotic Good, who breaks the rules and does whatever he has to do in order to help the people and causes he cares about.
I have seen a couple of children’s books since that have tried this formula: H.I.V.E. is the first that comes to mind. But they tend to gloss over the idea of their characters being villains and it’s frustrating because they don’t really deal with the consequences of that, other than give them really cool gadgets and snarky personalities.
[I’m a bit on the fence as to whether Nathaniel from Bartimaeus Trilogy is a villain protagonist, and if that series is even for children.]
So you can probably imagine why it’s frustrating when fans of the series see the trailer for the new movie and it’s a straightforward Hero’s Journey, about a young boy who finds out that his destiny is to protect the fairy world or something. Yeah, a lot of the elements in the trailer are straight out of the book, but the spirit of the thing is completely gone. I understand that the change is probably because it doesn’t seem that safe a bet to make a movie for children about a child criminal. I heard (and have yet to see a source on it, so take this with a grain of salt) that someone involved with the production claimed that the reasoning was that he needed to start as a more innocent child so that you could identify with him. Which is dumb because the entire point is that he’s not an innocent child.
I wouldn’t say that Artemis Fowl is THE perfect villain protagonist, but he’s one of the better ones, and among the ones that appear in children’s literature he’s certainly the best one I can think of. He’s delightfully fun to read because he’s terrible. The whole idea is that he has to learn to not be terrible, one step at a time.
And dang, the idea of a Bond villain that’s a kid is loads of fun. It’s disappointing that someone at Disney didn’t see the appeal of that. Maybe the film will be good! I don’t know; basing an opinion on a sole trailer that I’ve only seen once isn’t something that I try to do. But the fact that they marketed it the way that they did makes me think they didn’t even begin to understand the use of a villain protagonist, or Artemis Fowl in general.
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