Not really a Harry Potter post, to be honest.
In fact, not even really related to Harry Potter but perhaps still of interest to those readers who enjoy YA fiction and keep track, as I do, of the recent cycles of massively popular books that appear to build upon each other.
I know that this is a bit simplistic but I can't help but think of the Harry Potter series as having inspired twilight and twilight as having inspired The Hunger Games. Perhaps not directly in terms of the writing but certainly indirectly in terms of the promotion and popularity of each series.
Each is a series of YA novels involving a likeable, lonely young protagonist finding her/himself lifted out of her/his difficult life to face significantly greater excitement and challenges in a strange, often supernatural, world.
So imagine my surprise when, last night as my partner was describing to me her experience of reading the first 100 pages or so of the new adult megahit Fifty Shades of Grey, I couldn't stop thinking about and comparing that story to twilight, the first novel in that series.
The parallels between the two stories are remarkable. So much so that I can't help but thinking the author of Fifty Shades owes Stephenie Meyer a real debt of gratitude.
Now remember, I have not read Fifty Shades and am basing my impression on my partner's description of the start of that novel, but consider these similarities:
1. Both are told in the first person, through a sweet, innocent, self-doubting young woman thrust into a new and unknown social situation;
2. Both involve that protagonist meeting an intoxicating, irresistable man and both include long descriptions of his incredible beauty, with a focus (believe it or not) on his scent;
3. Both males are masterful, powerful and worldly; both are older and more experienced than the female protagonist and enjoy a great deal more social and physical power;
4. Both stories are told as romances with a background of fear and terror;
5. In both stories, the sexual relationship between the two main characters involves significant danger of physical harm to the woman.
According to my partner, Fifty Shades is terribly written with no literary merit whatsoever. I'm glad to say that twilight is at least well-written and interesting.
After thinking this all through, I did a quick search of the relationship between the two novels on the internet. My reading suggests that Fifty Shades might actually have begun its life as fan fiction related to twilight. Wow. I thought there was a relationship there.
Too bad it didn't begin AND END its life as fan fiction. From what my partner told me, Fifty Shades does not deserve to see the light.
Showing posts with label The Hunger Games. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Hunger Games. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Separating the wheat from the Harry Potter chaff
I think I'm going to have to accept the fact that, while I'm still revelling in the world of Harry Potter, many other people have now moved on to other stories, other interests.
A couple of weeks ago, for example, my sister-in-law and her three kinds came out to visit. I was excited at the thought of talking Harry Potter with my 12-year-old nephew and nine-year-old niece. Unlike so many other people in my world, I thought, they'd still have Potter fever.
"Harry Potter sucks," my nephew told me when I first raised the subject. He then mentioned three other writers and their series of novels and told me that each of them is "way better than Harry Potter."
My niece, while more polite, seemed to be of the same opinion: Harry Potter is now old news and there are a lot of other, more exciting books out there for them to read.
My heart sank. Is this what the world is coming to? I myself have also started to read other books (I'm delving into adult science fiction at this point) but, even so, I haven't turned my back on the wonderful works of J.K. I still have at least one HP book on the go at any given time and watch the movies from time to time.
I try to keep an open mind. I read The Hunger Games trilogy a couple of times, for example, but it just didn't grip me, it didn't have the breadth and depth of Harry Potter to keep me interested. I'm having to accept that the passage of time tends to distill just about anything down to its basic elements and that goes for Harry Potter fandom too. As long as new books and movies were coming out from time to time, casual fans stayed tuned. But once the stream of new material came to an end, those fans slowly faded away, finding other things to interest them.
Until only the truly hard-core people were left. Like you and me.
It's sad, I guess, but predictable too. I can't say I like it when former Potter fans who have found something new feel they have to declare that "Harry Potter sucks" but I understand that some people will drift away over the years.
Not me, of course. I'm dyed in the wool. I'll keep reading, watching and writing about Harry Potter until I have to make the ultimate decision: stay on earth as a ghost or "move on".
A couple of weeks ago, for example, my sister-in-law and her three kinds came out to visit. I was excited at the thought of talking Harry Potter with my 12-year-old nephew and nine-year-old niece. Unlike so many other people in my world, I thought, they'd still have Potter fever.
"Harry Potter sucks," my nephew told me when I first raised the subject. He then mentioned three other writers and their series of novels and told me that each of them is "way better than Harry Potter."
My niece, while more polite, seemed to be of the same opinion: Harry Potter is now old news and there are a lot of other, more exciting books out there for them to read.
My heart sank. Is this what the world is coming to? I myself have also started to read other books (I'm delving into adult science fiction at this point) but, even so, I haven't turned my back on the wonderful works of J.K. I still have at least one HP book on the go at any given time and watch the movies from time to time.
I try to keep an open mind. I read The Hunger Games trilogy a couple of times, for example, but it just didn't grip me, it didn't have the breadth and depth of Harry Potter to keep me interested. I'm having to accept that the passage of time tends to distill just about anything down to its basic elements and that goes for Harry Potter fandom too. As long as new books and movies were coming out from time to time, casual fans stayed tuned. But once the stream of new material came to an end, those fans slowly faded away, finding other things to interest them.
Until only the truly hard-core people were left. Like you and me.
It's sad, I guess, but predictable too. I can't say I like it when former Potter fans who have found something new feel they have to declare that "Harry Potter sucks" but I understand that some people will drift away over the years.
Not me, of course. I'm dyed in the wool. I'll keep reading, watching and writing about Harry Potter until I have to make the ultimate decision: stay on earth as a ghost or "move on".
Saturday, April 14, 2012
Strong female characters and the family decision
I went to see The Hunger Games the other day with a friend here in Halifax who is not only a literature professor at a local university but also a big fan of Young Adult (YA) fiction like I am.
Not surprisingly, over dinner after the movie, we enjoyed several hours of lively conversation that worked its way from the film through the original Suzanne Collins novels and finally, of course, to Harry Potter.
One of the things we noted about The Hunger Games, the movie, is that the screenplay attempts to incorporate some aspects of the second and third novels of the series into the film of the first book. Whereas that first novel focuses entirely on Katniss and her personal struggle to deal with the challenges she faces, with little thought until the end of the greater political impact of some of her decisions, the film version actually presents that potential political impact on-screen throughout, making politics a more important part of the story.
For example, in the film the people of District 12 salute Katniss for volunteering herself for the slaughter in place of her sister. This is an act of defiance that would never have been considered by the people of her district at the start of the first book. It is only when, in book two, Katniss visits Rue's district on her Victors Tour that such a salute takes place and it is greeted with cruel violence by the Capitol. Further, the film shows Rue's district move into an actual uprising when Katniss stands over Rue's flower-ornamented body and salutes her solemnly, an uprising that didn't start until late in the second and possibly early in the third book.
We discussed the implications of this on the entire story arc of the expected three-film Hunger Games series, comparing this compression of the story to the way the Harry Potter film-makers actually expanded the seven novels into eight films in order to J.K.'s story justice.
This led to a discussion of the epilogues included at the end of both series of novels: J.K.'s infamous 19-years-later section that brings The Deathly Hallows to a close and Collins' denouement wherein we find Katniss and Peeta married and taking care of their two children in the slowly recovering District 12, now that the revolution has been successfully completed.
And, as is quite natural for two people with such similar political viewpoints, our discussion of the two epilogues necessarily raised our discontent with the decisions made by these two strong women writers to use their epilogues to show their equally strong female characters (Hermione and Katniss) as having chosen to settle down and raise families, rather than continue to pursue a more public life.
We are not arguing that the decision to raise a family is an inappropriate one; we simply wish that the authors had at least left open the possibility that their characters could have pursued other opportunities in addition to, if not in place of, the more traditional route.
With regard to Katniss, we both agreed that this character was too badly damaged by her experiences (starting with the death of her father and the temporary "absence" of her mother, through her years of keeping her family alive by hunting and trapping and ending with the brutality of not one but two trips into the games, followed by leading a bloody revolution) to ever be able to settle into any kind of normal or stable life and was probably less capable than any literary character we could think of at the end of her trials to take on responsibility for raising children.
With regard to Hermione, on the other hand, we simply could not understand the message that Rowling is trying to send by showing Hermione as Ron's wife and the mother of his children at the end of the novel and mentioning nothing about her continuing to study, her taking on an academic career, pursuing advanced research or perhaps even taking over as Hogwarts Headmaster (or, for that matter, helping to establish the first wizarding university for advanced magical studies). Her intellectual curiosity and academic leanings are so pronounced in the seven novels that it is completely bewildering to us that they would not continue to form part of her life once Voldemort was vanquished. And, as so many people have proven, it would be completely believable if Hermione were to be shown to be accomplishing both: raising a family and continuing in a more public, academic role.
No, Rowling doesn't say anything in the epilogue that precludes the possibility that Hermione continued to develop herself in these areas but she certainly makes no effort to suggest that Hermione does so. Rowling states that Neville is a professor at Hogwarts by that point: why not Hermione?
Perhaps more problematic for us is the fact that both Rowling and Collins make a point of showing these strong female characters settling into more traditional female roles at the end of their narratives: what message are they trying to send to their readers by deliberately defining the decisions of these characters in this way?
Not surprisingly, over dinner after the movie, we enjoyed several hours of lively conversation that worked its way from the film through the original Suzanne Collins novels and finally, of course, to Harry Potter.
One of the things we noted about The Hunger Games, the movie, is that the screenplay attempts to incorporate some aspects of the second and third novels of the series into the film of the first book. Whereas that first novel focuses entirely on Katniss and her personal struggle to deal with the challenges she faces, with little thought until the end of the greater political impact of some of her decisions, the film version actually presents that potential political impact on-screen throughout, making politics a more important part of the story.
For example, in the film the people of District 12 salute Katniss for volunteering herself for the slaughter in place of her sister. This is an act of defiance that would never have been considered by the people of her district at the start of the first book. It is only when, in book two, Katniss visits Rue's district on her Victors Tour that such a salute takes place and it is greeted with cruel violence by the Capitol. Further, the film shows Rue's district move into an actual uprising when Katniss stands over Rue's flower-ornamented body and salutes her solemnly, an uprising that didn't start until late in the second and possibly early in the third book.
We discussed the implications of this on the entire story arc of the expected three-film Hunger Games series, comparing this compression of the story to the way the Harry Potter film-makers actually expanded the seven novels into eight films in order to J.K.'s story justice.
This led to a discussion of the epilogues included at the end of both series of novels: J.K.'s infamous 19-years-later section that brings The Deathly Hallows to a close and Collins' denouement wherein we find Katniss and Peeta married and taking care of their two children in the slowly recovering District 12, now that the revolution has been successfully completed.
And, as is quite natural for two people with such similar political viewpoints, our discussion of the two epilogues necessarily raised our discontent with the decisions made by these two strong women writers to use their epilogues to show their equally strong female characters (Hermione and Katniss) as having chosen to settle down and raise families, rather than continue to pursue a more public life.
We are not arguing that the decision to raise a family is an inappropriate one; we simply wish that the authors had at least left open the possibility that their characters could have pursued other opportunities in addition to, if not in place of, the more traditional route.
With regard to Katniss, we both agreed that this character was too badly damaged by her experiences (starting with the death of her father and the temporary "absence" of her mother, through her years of keeping her family alive by hunting and trapping and ending with the brutality of not one but two trips into the games, followed by leading a bloody revolution) to ever be able to settle into any kind of normal or stable life and was probably less capable than any literary character we could think of at the end of her trials to take on responsibility for raising children.
With regard to Hermione, on the other hand, we simply could not understand the message that Rowling is trying to send by showing Hermione as Ron's wife and the mother of his children at the end of the novel and mentioning nothing about her continuing to study, her taking on an academic career, pursuing advanced research or perhaps even taking over as Hogwarts Headmaster (or, for that matter, helping to establish the first wizarding university for advanced magical studies). Her intellectual curiosity and academic leanings are so pronounced in the seven novels that it is completely bewildering to us that they would not continue to form part of her life once Voldemort was vanquished. And, as so many people have proven, it would be completely believable if Hermione were to be shown to be accomplishing both: raising a family and continuing in a more public, academic role.
No, Rowling doesn't say anything in the epilogue that precludes the possibility that Hermione continued to develop herself in these areas but she certainly makes no effort to suggest that Hermione does so. Rowling states that Neville is a professor at Hogwarts by that point: why not Hermione?
Perhaps more problematic for us is the fact that both Rowling and Collins make a point of showing these strong female characters settling into more traditional female roles at the end of their narratives: what message are they trying to send to their readers by deliberately defining the decisions of these characters in this way?
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