Getting older and then looking at all these teenagers who have to save the world…..why did I ever think that was acceptable……..they’re so young….let Katniss sleep…….let Harry Potter have a normal school year……..Aang is literally 12, I’m twice his age and incapable of 1 percent of his plot duties, these poor children, these poor acne encrusted puberty enduring babies
#honestly!!!#its really disconcerting like… being an adult now and seeing other adults not uh#question this or be uncomfortable with children in these situations#like even fictional ones?#i understand being a kid and not seeing it#but being an adult and looking at a piece of media about like#war or some shit#and being like ‘yeah putting kids in the middle of it is a great idea and message’#nnno??? (via @blazednarancia)
ok but did you forget what being a kid and reading/watching these stories was like? because actual real children do not live lives devoid of violence or responsibility or darkness.
kids have abusive families like Harry and live in poverty like Ron, they live in poverty as part of specific systems designed to keep them keep them there like Katniss, they live in situations that ask way too much of them like Aang and Harry and all of them.
My little sister’s graduating class had a lot of dead parents. There were all kinds of reasons, drug overdose and sudden illness and motorcycle accident and long battle with illness and ’….ehhh probably heart disease? they didn’t do a real autopsy…’. For the long battle with an illness category, Sarah’s mother got cancer not long after giving birth to her much younger sister. Not only did Sarah have to watch her mother slowly lose that battle over the last years of Sarah’s childhood but she had to basically raise that baby because her father was busy trying work and care for their mother. Sarah didn’t have to save the world but you don’t think it didn’t feel like it some times?
It’s like JKR has said, kids don’t hear these stories and suddenly realize monsters are real. They already know. These stories tell you monsters can be defeated. That you can survive. That it might get worse some times but you can win. And yeah it would be nice if in the real world kids never had to do it themselves but that’s just not true.
Harry Potter didn’t make me feel like it was fair or reasonable for teens to save the world, it made me feel less alone in my struggles. Reading about kids fighting the world made me feel like I could make it through too. One of the reasons these stories are so popular is that they give you hope, they give you characters to fight along side during the dark and hard moments in your own life–whether that’s imagining your math test as a Hungarian Horntail you have to get past, or struggling to leave your own abusive family like Harry having to go back to the Dursleys every year, or watching violence and drugs take your friends like the Battle of Hogwarts killed so many.
These stories don’t normalize kids saving the world, they tell kids who already have to that they can survive it.
This response is beautiful and I don’t think I have anything to add.
The thing is, all the parts of this can be true at once.
As a child or a teen, the reader sees themselves in these stories. And that is vitally important. The examples of kids and teens struggling with impossible odds are great, but it’s not just them. Nearly EVERY young person feels the weight of the world on them, whether it is or not. We all perceive ourselves as being at the center of all things happening around us, because… that’s how POV works. Good middle grade and YA lit takes that to its broader conclusion; it makes that centering real and true within the world as well as just within our own vision.
At the same time, as adults looking back, we SHOULD be concerned about these characters, and the fact that they’re dealing with these incredibly hard issues with no support. It’s not invalidating the narrative to say that these are gigantic weights that should not be put on any individual, let alone one who’s still going through puberty. That it resonates with struggles does not invalidate that as adults we have a different lens through which to see children suffering. That is a good thing. The alternative is adults not caring about kids’ pain.
But- here’s where they converge- that’s because these kids should never be through that pain. All kids go through it (although it’s usually more metaphorical than in these fantasy texts), but what we (should) want is at least help ease that pain. And reacting to literature, where adults are put into the shoes of teenagers and children, allows us to say “Holy shit, this is not okay, what am I as a grown-up doing to create a world where a fifteen-year-old isn’t responsible for saving us all?”
Also I’m sorry, I know this is pedantic, but the quote about helping kids know the monster can be beaten isn’t from JKR about Harry Potter, although I’m sure she may have said something along those lines. It’s not even the @neil-gaiman quote from 2004, although his phrasing in Coraline is, for good reason, the popular one. As Gaiman himself noted, its origin is a G.K. Chesterton quote from 1909, which I’ve nabbed in its entirety from WikiQuote:
Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy
tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales
give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination.
What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the
dragon. Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a
series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear.These aren’t brand-new ideas. We’ve been engaging with them for over a century.
No story is one thing to all people. Good children’s stories teach children that they can fight the monster. They remind adults of our time when we were small but fighting the monster anyway. And they help adults acknowledge that kids are fighting these monsters, and should not be responsible for those monsters on their own.
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