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Kid's fantasy is ruthless
Feb. 21st, 2009 11:58 amI am often astonished by the things that fantasy for children gets away with saying. A lot of it is much darker and sneakier and funnier than most of what gets written in fantasy for adults. Or what's written in any genre for adults, for that matter.
You've got the end of Peter Pan, where the author assures us that Peter Pan will always exist as long as children are heartless. Innocent and heartless, but still - heartless. And then there's the Darling child who remarks, upon seeing his father again after their long separation, that his father is much smaller than the pirate he recently killed.
Then you've got Lloyd Alexander writing the Westmark books, and particularly the Kestrel. Where you get to see, in not-at-all charming detail, just what it does to people to fight in a revolution against an unjust government. And how even if your cause is just, that doesn't mean that the things you do are always just, or even right. It's been a while since I read the Kestrel, but the impression I took away from it as a kid was that the revolution broke some of the people who fought in it - made them bad people, or people who couldn't care anymore, even though the thing they were fighting for was a good thing.
You've got Diana Wynne Jones, who really manages to write some astonishingly ruthless bits into her stories. This post was inspired by Year of the Griffin, which I was re-reading this morning. And the artisan dwarves in the fastness, who inform the forgemaster's that there's been a revolution. "We're all equals here now. The ones who wouldn't be equal are dead."
It's not that the world of adult fiction is blunt, but usually when a writer or story is going to have a really dark sardonic bit to it, it's announced. Kid's authors slip these bits right in, stealthily, and then continue on as if nothing had happened. It awes me, it really does.
In a good way, I should add.
You've got the end of Peter Pan, where the author assures us that Peter Pan will always exist as long as children are heartless. Innocent and heartless, but still - heartless. And then there's the Darling child who remarks, upon seeing his father again after their long separation, that his father is much smaller than the pirate he recently killed.
Then you've got Lloyd Alexander writing the Westmark books, and particularly the Kestrel. Where you get to see, in not-at-all charming detail, just what it does to people to fight in a revolution against an unjust government. And how even if your cause is just, that doesn't mean that the things you do are always just, or even right. It's been a while since I read the Kestrel, but the impression I took away from it as a kid was that the revolution broke some of the people who fought in it - made them bad people, or people who couldn't care anymore, even though the thing they were fighting for was a good thing.
You've got Diana Wynne Jones, who really manages to write some astonishingly ruthless bits into her stories. This post was inspired by Year of the Griffin, which I was re-reading this morning. And the artisan dwarves in the fastness, who inform the forgemaster's that there's been a revolution. "We're all equals here now. The ones who wouldn't be equal are dead."
It's not that the world of adult fiction is blunt, but usually when a writer or story is going to have a really dark sardonic bit to it, it's announced. Kid's authors slip these bits right in, stealthily, and then continue on as if nothing had happened. It awes me, it really does.
In a good way, I should add.
