Genre WAS: That Bloody Man Again

[nrenka]

--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, "pippin_999" <foxmoth at q...> wrote:

> Pippin:
> *She* didn't characterize the fantasy genre that way, the author of
> the article did. As far as I know, she stands by the quote.
> 
> You don't need to be up on modern fantasy to satirize the genre.
> Cervantes reads just as well as a parody of Star Wars and LOTR as
> it does of Le Morte Darthur.
> 
> I assume she's read Cervantes. And acres and acres of folk tales.
> And Narnia.

Did you read the article, Pippin, because she says she never finished 
Narnia. :)  [She never finished Tolkien either, who for good or ill has 
been the overwhelming model for High Fantasy, although I think that has 
decidedly changed.]

> And Pullman. And the Alchemical whatsit. She's spent 
> decades working this stuff out.  Whatever she is, she's not naive.

When I think of fantasy, there are some hallmarks of the modern genre 
that I think Rowling's work is distinctively missing, or doesn't engage 
with on as deep of a level as it could have.  And the first and 
foremost of those is the magic.

Particularly as we go on in the series, there are times when I shake my 
head and think "That's a really neat and inventive piece of magic, but 
how is it supposed to really work?"  You'll note that Rowling's 
standard explanation is "It's magic--it does that.", which I hate to 
say it, but is a rather ad hoc sort of answer.  Typically in fantasy, 
the foundations of how and why the magic works are utterly essential to 
the unique cosmology which each author is constructing, and it often 
has really deep thematic resonance.

The closest we get in HP is magic as choice and intention, but we don't 
get as many other connections as I might have thought.  The magic sits 
very lightly upon the story, in many ways.  Mercifully, she's not 
writing the kind of systematic issue!fic that Pullman did, and why I 
couldn't make myself finish the third book there (but people told me 
what happened.)

Rowling's idea that she's subverting the genre is predicated on the 
idea that the genre is essentially escapist, when someone discovers 
they have powers and then life becomes so much more magical and happy.  
She is hardly the first person to do that, although given her lack of 
knowledge of the genre, it may well feel that way.  [I'd say that in 
many of the things that I've read, the sharp reader knows immediately 
that getting new powers is going to result in a world of suck for the 
character, before eventual triumph.  That sounds familiar, no?]

-Nora sets her standards for generic subversion high, like Bach