Slytherin Syndrome

Slytherin Syndrome:  1.  The process of overtly villfying a group of people without explicitly saying they're all evil; we just know they are because there is no evidence to the contrary.  2.  Claiming the moral high ground on arbitrary personality characteristics while villifying others.

This is not a jab at Harry Potter.  Disney is also to blame.  All the hyenas are evil, after all.

But first let's look at Harry Potter.  Slytherins are evil.  All of them. Name me one good one.  Snape.  Okay, name me two.  In any case, we spend the first six books thinking he is evil, and his revelation does not really call into question previous assumptions about other Slytherins.

But what is a Slytherin?  That is easier to answer than what is a Hufflepuff.  Slytherins are ambitious.  Ergo, they are all cowardly cruel bullies.  Because that's what ambition means, right? 

What an impressionable child understands of this dynamic is that being brave is good, and being ambitious is bad.  Being intelligent or diligent (I think that's what Hufflepuff is; we're just going to go with that) is not bad, but it is not particularly good either.  Nothing to be proud of. 

Let's look at ambition first.  Ambition to take over the world and make all Muggles your slaves, bad.  Ambition to find a magical cure for cancer, good.  Ambition to invent a flying machine/win the Olympics/bring peace to a war-torn nation:  you get put on a motivational poster.

So really, there is nothing wrong with being ambitious.  There is nothing wrong with aspiring to greatness.  And they wonder why kids these days aren't performing up to par academically, why they don't aspire the way they used to, what happened to the enterpreneurial spirit of America, why they're all so damn apathetic.  Well, who wants to be ambitious?  Be brave (and reckless), be smart (and arrogant), or be diligent (and humorless).  Just don't be ambitious.

It's not just a Harry Potter problem.  In children's books or shitty fantasy with a teenage protagonist, the hero always whines about "Why do I get stuck with the magic powers?  Why do I have to be king?  Why can't I just live on the farm and have people tell me what to do?"  Not that the hero isn't constantly being told what to do by helpful wizards and deities that all secretly wish the Chosen One wasn't such a whiny bitch.  Frodo did not whine.  Frodo volunteered.  Did we forget that after Eddings?  I think we did.

In contrast, the villain is the one who is trying to get magic powers or become king.  In fact, the villain is the only one that shows any gumption.  See, it's more morally right to have life give you power than to seek it, which is why we have a democracy where people run for office instead of a monarchy where they are born into it.  The reason villains are always more interesting is because villains have plans and goals, and don't just go where the plot takes them.  Which makes them bad people.

They have ambition.

Look at Disney.  Scar saw what he wanted and took action to get it.  Simba dodges responsibility until he gives into peer pressure.  Ursula was a shrewd businesswoman.  Ariel was just...Ariel.  Why shouldn't Jafar be sultan?  Jasmine's father is kind of a dope - and is that really who you want leading the nation?  Didn't we try that in America?  How did that go?

Harry just wants to goof off with his buddies.  BORING!  Voldemort wants to change the world.

What really set me off on this, though, was realizing that I am a lot more interested in analyzing literature than writing it.  I'm a critic.  The bitchcritic.  Which, if you have seen Ratatouille, makes me the bad guy.  But really, is not the highest honor a rat could receive the approval of the bitchcritic?  It's not that he hates everything, he just has high standards, and doesn't it make you proud to know that you are awesome enough to meet those standards?

You know, this only happens because all our creative writers and filmmakers see themselves as intrepid inventors that the world cannot do without, and anyone who criticizes them as evil.

So I'm evil.  Fine.  Actually, no not fine.  I'm not okay with being evil.  They tell the hero that they can be whatever they want, be it chef, warrior, prince, princess, human, king.  But no one tells that to the villain.

Because we're ambitious.

I am the bitchcritic and proud.  And to everyone out there who has an ambition (and just how different is that from a dream, Ms. Disney Princess?) - go for it.  As long as you have the intelligence to come up with a plan, the diligence to follow through, and the courage to risk it.

In Memoriam: Brian Jacques

Brian Jacques, author.  June 15, 1939 - February 5, 2011

When I was eight, I discovered the Redwall series.*  I think my dad started reading it to me.  Every night, another chapter - or more, if I was able to beg it out of him - until I realized that I actually read faster on my own.  Then I burned through the entire series, and read them over and over again while impatiently waiting for the rest to be written.

My Redwall obsession lasted two or three years, peaked at fifth grade and was gradually replaced by other interests.  But for a while, I hardly read anything else.  I always had one of the books on me.  Always.  And I swear not one single other person in my school had ever heard of it.  Is it any wonder I had no friends, if I was surrounded by people who didn't even read?

But what is so special about these mice?  Yes, there is a little mouse who just wants to be special and finally gets his chance - isn't that a fairly common motif in normal fiction as well?  But the rest of the books feature a variety of heroes from all different backgrounds - what is the common factor here?

I can narrow it down to two:

1)  All of the stories feature a hero facing real danger and impossible odds, but they simply have to accomplish their quest or the world will be left in ruins.  It was my first exposure to something truly EPIC.  It's just so much more interesting to read about a story that matters. 

2)  They were mice in a forest, not children in a school.  I had enough of children in school in my life - I didn't want to read about it too!  I didn't want to be reminded of how unlike everyone else I was.  Furthermore, I was never a very girly girl -  in the Redwall books, there are very few instances of actual gender roles.  Really the only difference is arbitrary pronouns.

Perhaps I could even narrow it down to one factor:  Books about mice with swords asked questions I actually cared about.  When is it okay to kill your enemy?  vs. say, How do apologize to your best friend for talking about her behind her back?  How to stand up to a bully, make a best friend, improve your home life, and succeed at your artistic goals, which is nowhere near as difficult/interesting as following a cryptic song to a mysterious place along a path fraught with danger in order to get allies to help you defeat the impossibly large evil horde.

I realize that I cannot claim that Redwall as the best series ever.  It has absurdly formulaic plots and a bad case of Slytherin Syndrome, which was what eventually caused me to lose interest - the villains obviously only existed to drive the plot forward.   Jacques did manage to do something truly creative at least once per book.  You know - an gigantic army that wears blue war paint, a hare with multiple personality disorder, etc. 

Still, it was a good introduction to the hard questions in life (simplified) and the dark side of the world (softened).  Moreover, it was just plain cool.

Brian Jacques, you will be missed.

Redwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalllll!

*If somehow you don't know, it is a set of books about talking anthropomorphic mice/other woodland creatures, who battle against evil rats/other woodland creatures, with swords/other medieval weaponry. 

Writer's Block (Part 2)

I did promise you the rest of the story.  There isn't as much of it as I had thought.

I left off in sixth grade when I was starting to realize that I had a problem.  Middle school did nothing to help any of my social phobias.  In fact, the less time spent dwelling on it, the better.

Seventh grade English class was a joke.  The only good thing about it was that the teacher actually explained what he wanted from a book report - or a "book review," since we were big kids now.  I believe I was the only person in the class who ever got a 100% on one of those.  A rather unremarkable event over the course of a day in middle school, but it was a turning point in my life.  For the first time, I realized that I might actually be decent at writing if I ever gave myself a chance.

That is to say, writing became easier, but having my stuff read still made/makes me feel a bit queasy.  I'm getting better though.  I can physically bring myself to read the teacher's comments when I get papers back.  Most of the time. 

Just don't ask to see my novels.

Big Secret #1:  I write.

It started in middle school.  As though all of the words and stories I had been taking in almost constantly suddenly overflowed.  It started with some typical "normal person discovers magical powers, plot ensues."  Then, as my tastes in literature began to mature, it moved on to deconstructions of fantasy cliches.  I am on something like my twentieth draft, with no end in sight.  Every time I think I'm getting close, a new complication appears. 

There ought to be a better way to connect me child who hated to create a single sentence to me attempting to write a novel, but there is not.  One day I started writing.  And I haven't stopped.

Books, books, books

I like books.  I should get that out of the way before I say anything else, because that is the sum of where I am from.  I hesitate to say that as a child, I had books instead of friends - rather, I had books for friends.

My first true love is and always will be fantasy - I loved it before it Harry Potter made it popular.  Normal books for children never interested me.  They were all about kids with best friends and bullies and ambitions, things that were completely foreign to my life that made it impossible for me to connect with them.

Now that makes it sound like fantasy would be even less interesting to me, because I did not have magic powers and had never ridden a unicorn (neither of those things have changed, sadly).  Yet fantasy was in fact more relevant to my life because sometimes they were about people like me - the kids who had no friends and no life outside of reading books, until they were whisked away on a magical adventure.  Certainly my life did not fit the pattern of a typical kid's book; it was far too bland.  That only made it all the more likely that something extraordinary was about to happen.

Well, in a way it did.  If you count finding out that my life is in fact a YA novel of overdramatic college students.  I imagine that in the text, eighteen years of my life is summed up as "She had an unremarkable childhood."

But back to the topic at hand.

Though I have branched into other genres, a normal book for me to read is still something fantastic, and after a seven-or-eight-year hiatus, I have gone back to the children's books as well.  There's some good stuff there - while many writers of adult fantasy are locked into the Tolkien Paradigm, children's fantasy tends to be a bit more creative.

Still to come:  Tolkienism, Coming of Age, The Author of my Life, Books I Used to Like Before I Had Taste, Translation, Non-Fantasy Books I Like, Writing

PS. If you're curious, here are some of my favorite children's books, some of which I read as a child

The Seventh Tower - series, by Garth Nix.  Most people rave about his Sabriel, but I found Tower to have a far more engaging premise.

The Unicorn Chronicles - series by Bruce Coville.  I waited nine years for him to finish the third book, and it was worth it.  The fourth one, not quite as much, but still epic and mostly satisfying.  To me it is still the definitive unicorn text.

Diana Wynne Jones - author.  She has such a diverse range of series and stand-alones that I could not possibly pick the one I like best.  Dark Lord of Derkholm would be a good place to start.

Gregor the Overlander - by Suzanne Collins.  I started reading this series right before the Hunger Games made her popular.  It's good.  Dark.  The sort of thing that would have kept me in the kid's section if I had read it at a younger age.

Inkheart -by Cornelia Funke.  Second book okay.  Third book epic awesomeness.  First book, the book for people who like books.

I'd better stop before I feel compelled to add Artemis Fowl, Charlie Bone, Prydain, Warriors, Narnia...

Books, books, books.  So many books!