Tis the blog where i dissect stories in the most objective way i can
Rules: we dont judge authors based on what they write (however, we do note on whether reading it makes you feel uncomfortable)
Qs to ask while dissecting:
What are the events, why are they important, why they work, how does it work
Is the work a product of its time?(no idea what the hell this means, absolutely no clue, gets tagged as save for later)
Is it a progressive work or regressive one?(in the sense that does it induce positive growth or makes political tensions and whatnot worse)(both at the time of publication and the present)
Humor??why is it funny??can one dissect why the book seems to have magic??
Timelines make any sense??
Worldbuilding= does it stand up against intense scrutiny??(no idea how one does this either, guess this is why ill start with hp first)
Research= well researched or throws stereotypes??remember some authors warp or add onto preexisting ideas
How does the mystery plot work?? Are we hinted over the pages or is everything dumped on us for Maximum Shocking Effect(tm)
Books that get a hard DNF=anything with incest, rape, sexual abuse and assault, involving children animals or non consensual=especially if it is graphic(heavy emphasis on this one) oh yeah i forgot suicidal ideation and suicide itself
Do not read this i am warning you future self i know how you are if you read books like this you are screwed you need to maintain your mental health
Solutions offered= carefully dissecting out the bits i dont like and reweaving the fabric by adding bits id rather were there in the first place
what are the elements of the book? too much fantasy or horror or plot??
FORMAT=
Inspired by= (search from interviews if available-note the prompts, inspiration bits if shared, or postulate )(probably color code these)
Divide into 3 parts?
Type of story
Age rating
The point of the story(does it have a hidden message or does it just exist as a story?)
Riz Ahmed is the one that puzzles me the most because he’s an advocate for human rights but I guess it doesn’t matter if you’re a trans person. And someone like Hugh Laurie cannot possibly need the money this badly, he was paid a lot of money for House MD back in the day when shows had full seasons and ran for years and actors got residuals from reruns. Honestly though, it’s so weird that they’re choosing to associate themselves with Jo Rowling for the sake of Audible books. It’s not like this is a plum acting gig that will advance their careers. I can better understand the actors who signed up for the HBO series because it is a gig that will make money and put their faces out there. I still think it’s loathsome, but I can understand it. But this is just an audiobook gig.
I think they figured nobody would notice.
It’s impossible to be morally pure and live in the 1st world but not supporting the Nazi lady who is using her money and influence to try to wipe transpeople off the face of the earth is actually pretty clear cut.
Fuck it, I didn't want to make a post on this but it's bugging the hell out of me so let's exorcize the thought.
Lilo and Stitch is an extremely good children's movie. I've been working at a daycare for over five years now, and out of all the children's movies I've shown to an auidence of twenty or so school-age kids (i.e. between the ages of 5 and 12), the only movie that's held their attention as well as Lilo and Stitch is The Emperor's New Groove, and the only one that's held it better is An American Tail. Of those three, Lilo and Stitch has won the vote of "what movie we will watch" the most. It not only entertains kids, but emotionally captivates them from start to finish, because it very thoroughly understands how to engage children on their level. It's a smart, tightly written children's movie.
The feat of story-telling genius it pulls of lies in its ability to reach both where children's imaginations want to go and where their lived real-world experiences lie - most children's movies focus on one or the other, but Lilo and Stitch dives deep into both. On the imagination side, there's Stitch's whole plotline of being a little alien monster being chased by other weirdo aliens onto earth because they want to stop him from running amok and causing havoc (which, of course, happens anyway in fun cartoony comedy/action spectacle). On the real-world side, you have Lilo's plotline of being a troubled little girl who has an abundance of very real problems that, like an actual child, she struggles to comprehend and deal with, as well as the many adults in her life that care about her to some degree but all struggle to fully understand her. Kids want to be Stitch and run amok and cause cartoony havoc. Kids, even the least-troubled kids, relate to Lilo, because all of them have been in a similar situation as her at least once in their lives.
Balancing these two very different stories, with very different tones and scopes to their respective conflicts, is a hard writing task, but Lilo and Stitch manages to do it in a way that seems effortless with one very powerful trick. The two plots are direct mirrors to each other, complete with the characters involved in each having foils in the respective plot. To break it down:
Stitch, the wild and destructive alien gremlin who everyone has labeled as a crime against existence, is Lilo, the troubled young girl who's viewed as a "problem child" by all the adults in her life. In both plotlines, Stitch and Lilo are facing the threat of being "taken away" from the life they know because they act out, and in both plotlines, we see that this is an unfathomably cruel thing to do to them and will not actually solve the problems they have.
Dr. Jumbaa, the mad scientist who made Stitch because making monsters is what mad scientists do, and who had no intentions of ever being nurturing or parental to anything or anyone in his life, is Nani, Lilo's older sister whose parents died when she was young and now is forced to act as a parental substitute despite not being mentally or emotionally prepared for that responsibility yet. Both Dr. Jumbaa and Nani are trying to get their respective wild children in line with what society wants them to be, and both are struggling hard with it because they in turn have a lot of growing to do before they can actually accomplish that.
Pleakley, the nebbish alien bureaucrat who ends up being assigned to help Dr. Jumbaa despite being mostly uninvolved in creating the whole Stitch situation, is David, the nice but mostly ineffectual guy who's crushing on Nani and wants to help her but doesn't really have much he can provide except emotional support. Ultimately Pleakley and David prove that said emotional support is a lot more helpful than it seems on the surface, as they give Jumbaa and Nani respectively a lot of the pushes they need to become better in their parental roles.
The Grand Councilwoman, who runs the society of aliens that is trying to banish Stitch forever for his crime of existing, is Cobra Bubbles, the Child Protective Services agent who is in charge of deciding whether or not Lilo needs to be taken away from her home forever for, ostensibly, her own good. Both are well-intentioned and stern, with a desire to follow the rules of society and do what procedure says is the most humane thing to do in this situation, but both lack the understanding of Stitch/Lilo's situation to actually help until the end of the movie.
Finally, we have Captain Gantu, the enforcer of the Galactic Council who is a mean, aggressive, sadistic brute but is viewed as a "good guy" by society because he plays by its rules (well, when he knows can't get away with breaking them, anyway), who is the counterpart of Myrtle, the mean, aggressive, sadistic schoolyard bully who is viewed as a "good kid" by other adults because she plays by the rules they established (well, when she knows she can't get away with breaking them, anyway). Both Gantu and Myrtle are, in truth, much nastier in temperament than Stitch and Lilo, but are better at hiding it in front of others and so get away with it, and often make Stitch and Lilo look worse in the eyes of others by provoking them to violence and then playing the victim about it - in fact, both even have the same line, "Does this look infected to you?", which they say after goading their respective wild-child victims into biting them.
The symmetry of these two plotlines allows them to actually feed into each other and build each other up instead of fighting each other for screentime. The fantastical nature of Stitch's plot adds whimsy to the far more realistic problems that Lilo faces so they don't get too heavy for the children in the audience, while the very real struggles of Lilo in her plotline bleed over into Stitch's plot and make both very emotionally poignant. When both plotlines hit their shared climax, they reach children on a emotional level few other movies can match - the terror of Lilo being taken away from her family, and the emotional complexity of that problem (Cobra Bubbles pointing to Lilo's ruined house and shouting at Nani, "IS THIS WHAT LILO NEEDS?" is so starkly real and heart-breaking), is matched and echoed in the visual splendor and mania of the spectacular no-way-this-is-going-to-work chase scene where Stitch, Nani, Jumbaa, and Pleakley all team up to rescue Lilo from Gantu.
The arcs of the characters all more or less line up. Nani confronts her own failures to be a guardian and parent to Lilo and resolves to do better and learn from her mistakes. Jumbaa, who through most of the movie protests to be evil and uncaring, nonetheless comes to not only care for Pleakley, but more importantly for Stitch too, and ends up assuming the role he never wanted but nonetheless forced himself into from the start: he is Stitch's family. Hell, the moment that reveals this is really clever - Stitch goes out into the wilderness to try and re-enact a scene from a storybook of The Ugly Duckling, hoping, in a very childish way, that his family will show up and love him. Jumbaa arrives and, coldly but not particularly cruelly, tells Stitch that he has no family - that Stitch wasn't born, but created in a lab by Jumbaa himself. But in that moment Jumbaa is proving himself wrong - because Stitch's creator, his parent, DID show up, and did exactly what happens in the story by telling Stitch the truth of what he is. It can't be a surprise, then, that later in the movie Jumbaa ends up deciding to side with Stitch, to help him save Lilo, and to stay on Earth with his child.
David and Pleakley go from being pushed away by Nani and Jumbaa respectively to essentially becoming their partners in the family. The Grand Councilwoman and Cobra Bubbles finally see how cruel their initial solution of isolating Stitch and Lilo from their family would be, and bend the rules they are supposed to enforce to protect and support this weird found family instead of breaking it apart. Gantu and Myrtle are recognized for the assholes they are and face comeuppance in the form of comedic slapstick pratfalls. And most importantly, Stitch and Lilo both get the emotional support and understanding they need to thrive and live happy lives as children should be allowed to do. It's like poetry, it rhymes.
It's a very precise, smartly written movie. It's a delicate balancing act of tone and emotions, with a very strong theme about the need for family and understanding that hits children in their hearts and imaginations. It's extremely well structured.
...
So it'd be kind of colossally fucking stupid to remake it and start fucking around with the core structure of it, chopping out pieces and completely altering others, with no real purpose beyond "Well, the executives thought it might be better if we did this."
for the last one i don’t just mean oh the author inadvertently wrote in gay subtext or whatever i’m talking about media as a cultural artifact which can reveal a ton about societal norms, biases, ideals, etc. it’s all about positionality and an unexamined positionality is often the most revealing of all
Divergent is a bad book, but its accidental brilliance is that it completely mauled the YA dystopian genre by stripping it down to its barest bones for maximum marketability, utterly destroying the chances of YA dystopian literature’s long-term survival
Sure. Imagine that you need to make a book, and this book needs to be successful. This book needs to be the perfect Marketable YA Dystopian.
So you build your protagonist. She has no personality traits beyond being decently strong-willed, so that her quirks and interesting traits absolutely can’t get in the way of the audience’s projection onto her. She is dainty, birdlike, beautiful despite her protestations that she is ugly–yet she can still hold her own against significantly taller and stronger combatants. She is the perfect mask for the bashful, insecure tweens you are marketing to to wear while they read.
You think, as you draft your novel, that you need to add something that appeals to the basest nature of teenagers, something this government does that will be perversely appealing to them. The Hunger Games’ titular games were the main draw of the books, despite the hatred its characters hold for the event. So the government forces everyone into Harry Potter houses.
So the government makes everyone choose their faction, their single personality trait. Teenagers and tweens are basic–they likely identify by one distinct personality trait or career aspiration, and they’ll thus be enchanted by this system. For years, Tumblr and Twitter bios will include Erudite or Dauntless alongside Aquarius and Ravenclaw and INTJ. Congratulations, you just made having more than one personality trait anathema to your worldbuilding.
Your readers and thus your protagonist are naturally drawn to the faction that you have made RIDICULOUSLY cooler and better than the others: Dauntless. The faction where they play dangerous games of Capture the Flag and don’t work and act remarkably like teenagers with a budget. You add an attractive, tall man to help and hinder the protagonist. He is brooding and handsome; he doesn’t need to be anything else.
The villains appear soon afterward. They are your tried and true dystopian government: polished, sleek, intelligent, headed by a woman for some reason. They fight the protagonists, they carry out their evil, Machiavellian, stupid plan. You finish the novel with duct tape and fanservice, action sequences and skin and just enough glue and spit to seal the terrible, hollow world you have made shut just long enough to put it on the shelf.
And you have just destroyed YA dystopian literature. Because you have boiled it down to its bare essentials. A sleek, futuristic government borrowing its aesthetic from modern minimalism and wealth forces the population to participate in a perversely cool-to-read-about system like the Hunger Games or the factions, and one brave, slender, pretty, hollow main character is the only one brave–no, special enough to stand against it.
And by making this bare-bones world, crafted for maximum marketability, you expose yourself and every other YA dystopian writer as a lazy worldbuilder driven too far by the “rule of cool” and the formulas of other, better dystopian books before yours. In the following five years, you watch in real time as the dystopian genre crumbles under your feet, as the movies made based on your successful (but later widely-panned and mocked) books slowly regress to video-only releases, as fewer and fewer releases try to do what you did. And maybe you realize what you’ve done.
one quibble: hunger games was intense and sincere and the writer had worked for tv and knew exactly what she was talking about when she wrote how media machines create golden idols out of abused kids and then leave the actual people inside their glamorous shells to rot. hunger games had a genuine core of righteous anger that resonated with a lot of people. the hunger games was genuinely angry about shit that is genuinely wrong.
but divergent was clumsy make-believe the whole way through. it aped the forms and functions of dystopian lit but the writer didn’t actually have any real, passionate, sincere anger to put on the page. she didn’t know what it was talking about, so she didn’t have anything worth listening to.
there’s a difference between anti-authoritarianism as a disaffected, cynical pose and anti-authoritarianism as a rallying cry by people who believe in a bitter world. and the former is something corporations and industries and publishing houses are so much more comfortable with. so divergent and the flood of books published and marketed alongide and after it showed how the dystopian genre was no longer truly revolutionary, no longer a sincere condemnation of corporate oligarchies. the mass-market dystopian genre was now nothing more than an insincere playspace for people who were writing dystopia as a safely distant, abstract make-believe stage for their pretty girl heroes, rather than a direct allegory for everything that needs to be torn down in this world today.
This is the second branch of this post I’ve reblogged and like the fourth I’ve seen and I’m just thinking about how the Uglies series, a pre-Hunger Games forerunner of the YA Dystopia boom, had significantly less staying power than it could have specifically because…with the toxic beauty standards forced on teenagers being a Big Theme, studios couldn’t figure out how to make a profitable movie out of it. The book got optioned multiple times, but a film version made in Hollywood was destined to fall apart at casting & makeup - their marketing methods relied on exactly what the series was criticizing, which is…part of what made it so popular with teenage girls to begin with.
You contrast that with how the marketing for the Hunger Games films directly contradicts the messaging of the text, and how Divergent seems ready-made for the big screen, and it becomes really apparent why the genre folded in on itself. Capitalism tried to recuperate dystopian fiction criticizing capitalism, and in doing so, butchered the genre.
There’s also something rattling around my brain about a correlation between how made-for-screen a dystopian book is and how much it Doesn’t Understand Dystopia, with the culmination being Ready Player One, a piece set in a dystopia that somehow still actively glorifies capitalism & that was literally optioned for film before the book was published, but I don’t…know how to expand on that point.
Why did I like it in the first place? What about it worked? Where do I go from here?
I have decided to give up Harry Potter.
J.K. Rowling’s reputation now stinks to high heaven. At this point, she is quite indefensible. And even if that weren’t the case, she is not someone that I would want to associate with anyway. Meanwhile, the internet has not only turned against her, but against Harry Potter itself. An innocent question on Reddit, about which Hogwarts Houses the ATLA characters would be in, got downvoted to oblivion. Innumerable Tumblr threads insist that fantasy fans should get into literally anything else (suggestions include Discworld, Earthsea, The Wheel of Time, and Percy Jackson). And now that Harry Potter is no longer a sacred cow, there has been a recent slew of video essays that rip it to shreds, attacking it for its poor worldbuilding, unoriginality, and the problematic ideas baked into the original books (like the whole SPEW thing), etc. Those criticisms always existed, but now they’re getting thrown into the limelight.
It pains me to see such an ignoble downfall of Harry Potter’s reputation. If Rowling had just kept her damn mouth shut, Harry Potter would have aged gracefully, becoming a beloved children’s classic. I'd still plan to introduce it to my own kids one day (after Rowling dies and the dust settles). It’s not surprising that not all aspects of it have aged well, since it’s been more than twenty years since its original publishing date, and everything starts to show its age after that long. I acknowledge that most of the criticisms of the series that I’ve seen lately are valid, and I’ve read plenty of better books. And yet, when I return to the books themselves, even with the knowledge of who JKR really is inside my head, I still really enjoy reading them! There’s still a lot about them that I think works!
None of the other things I’ve read have had as collossal of an impact upon my identity, my values, and my own writing as Harry Potter. It’s hard to move on from it, not just because it’s something I enjoy, but because I have to literally extract my identity from it. I don’t know who I’d be without Harry Potter. I don’t know what my work would look like without Harry Potter. I don’t know how to carry it with me as just another piece of media that I like, as opposed to a filter for who I am as a person. So, with all that in mind, I have to ask myself why I liked Harry Potter so much in the first place. If I’m going to move on from it, then I have to be able to define and isolate the things about it that I want to keep with me. Something about it obviously worked, on a massive scale. So what was it?
It’s not the worldbuilding. The worldbuilding is objectively quite terrible, especially in comparison to that of other fantasy writers who knew what they were doing. At best, it’s inconsistent and poorly thought-out, and at worst it’s insensitive or even racist. Is it the characters? The characters are, in my opinion, one of the stronger parts of the story. But I felt very called-out by one of the many online commentators, who said that anyone who identifies with Harry is too cowardly to write self-insert fic. (I do not remember who said it or even which site it was on, but I distinctly remember the phrase, “Reject Harry Potter, embrace Y/N.”) The reason why people get so invested in Harry Potter’s characters is because they’re easy to project upon, and it’s possible that my love of Harry comes more from over a decade’s worth of projection than anything else. The incessant arguments over characters like Snape, Dumbledore, and James Potter ultimately stem from the fact that these characters do not always come across the way Rowling wanted them to. As for the writing itself, it’s decent, but not spectacular. Harry Potter is something of a sandbox world, with less substance than it appears to have and a crapton of missed opportunities, making it ripe for fanfic. For more than ten years, I’ve been doing precisely that — using Harry Potter as a jumping-off point to fill in the gaps and develop my own ideas, some of which became my original projects.
So what does Harry Potter actually have that sets it apart? Why are people so desperate to be part of Harry Potter’s world if the worldbuilding is bad? What, specifically, is so compelling about it? I think that there’s one answer, one thing that is at the center of Potter-mania, and that has been the underlying drive of my love of it for the past decade and a half: the vibe.
Harry Potter’s vibe is immaculate.
You know what I mean, right? It’s not actually a product of any specific trope, but rather a series of aesthetic elements: The wizarding school in a grand castle, with its pointed windows and torches and suits of armor, ghosts and talking portraits and moving staircases, its Great Hall with floating candles and a ceiling that looks like the night sky, its hundreds of magically-concealed secret doorways. Dumbledore’s Office, behind the gryphon statue, with armillary spheres in every single shot. Deliberate archaisms that evoke the Middle Ages without going as far as a Ren Faire: characters wearing heavy robes, writing with quills and ink on parchment instead of paper, drinking from goblets, decorating with tapestries. Owls, cats, toads. Cauldrons simmering in a dungeon laboratory. Shelves piled with dusty tomes, scrolls, glass vials, crystal balls, hourglasses. Magical candy shaped like insects and amphibians. A library with a restricted section. A forbidden forest full of unicorns and werewolves. That is the Vibe.
There are five armillary spheres just in this shot. They are unequivocally the most Wizard of tabletop decor.
There’s more to it than just the aesthetic, though. The vibe is present in something that writers call soft worldbuilding.
There’s a phrase that writers use to describe magic systems, coined by Brandon Sanderson: hard magic and soft magic. Sanderson’s first law of magic is, “An author’s ability to solve problems with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic.” A hard magic system has clearly-defined rules — you know where magic comes from, how it works and under which conditions, how the characters can use it, and what its limitations are. Examples of really good hard magic systems include Avatar: The Last Airbender and Fullmetal Alchemist. If the audience doesn’t understand the conditions under which magic can work, then using magic to get out of any kind of scrape risks feeling like the writer pulled something out of their ass. It begs the question, “Well, if they could do that, then why didn’t they do that before?”
You may come away from that thinking that having clearly-defined rules is always better worldbuilding than not having them, but this isn’t the case. Soft magic isn’t fully explained to the audience, but that doesn’t matter, because it isn’t trying to solve problems — its purpose is to be evocative. Soft magic enhances the atmosphere of a world by creating a sense of wonder. If your everyman protagonist is constantly running into cool magical shit that they don’t understand, then the world feels like it teems with magic, magic that is greater and more powerful than they know, leaving lots of secrets to uncover. Harry Potter, at least in the early books, excels at this. The soft magic in Harry Potter is what got me hooked, and I think it’s what a lot of other people liked about it, too.
The essence of soft magic is best summed up by this scene in the fourth film, in which Harry enters the Weasleys’ tiny tent at the Quidditch World Cup, only to find that it’s much bigger on the inside. His reaction is to smile and say, “I love magic.”
That’s it. That’s the essence of it. You don’t need to know the exact spell that makes the tent bigger on the inside. You don’t need to know how Dumbledore can make the food appear on the table with a flick of a wand, or how he can make a bunch of poofy sleeping bags appear with another flick. You don’t need to know how and why the portraits or wizard cards move. You don’t need to know how wizards can appear and disappear on a whim, or what the Deluminator is, or where the Sword of Gryffindor came from. You don’t need to know how the Room of Requirement works. Knowing these things defeats the purpose. It kills the vibe, that vibe being that there is a large and wondrous magical world around you that will always have more to discover.
One of the best “soft magic” moments in the books comes early in Philosopher’s Stone, when Harry is trying to navigate Hogwarts for the first time:
There were a hundred and forty-two staircases at Hogwarts: wide, sweeping ones; narrow, rickety ones; some that led somewhere different on a Friday; some with a vanishing step halfway up that you had to remember to jump. Then there were doors that wouldn't open unless you asked politely, or tickled them in exactly the right place, and doors that weren't really doors at all, but solid walls just pretending. It was also very hard to remember where anything was, because it all seemed to move around a lot. The people in the portraits kept going to visit each other, and Harry was sure the coats of armor could walk.
—Philosopher’s Stone, Chapter 8
Many of these details don’t come back later in the series, which is a shame, because this one paragraph is super evocative! It establishes Hogwarts as an inherently magical place, in which the very architecture doesn’t conform to normal rules. Hogwarts seems like it would be exciting to explore (assuming you weren’t late for class), and it gets even better when you learn about all the secret rooms and passages. The games capitalized on this by building all the secret rooms behind bookcases, mirrors, illusory walls, etc. into the game world, and rewarding you for finding them. The utter fascination that produces is hard to overstate.
Another one of the most evocative moments in the first book is when Harry sees Diagon Alley for the first time, after passing through the magically sealed brick wall (the mechanics of which, again, are never explained). This is your first proper glimpse at the wizarding world and what it has to offer:
Harry wished he had about eight more eyes. He turned his head in every direction as they walked up the street, trying to look at everything at once: the shops, the things outside them, the people doing their shopping. A plump woman outside an Apothecary was shaking her head as they passed, saying, “Dragon liver, seventeen Sickles an ounce, they're mad....”
A low, soft hooting came from a dark shop with a sign saying Eeylops Owl Emporium — Tawny, Screech, Barn, Brown, and Snowy. Several boys of about Harry's age had their noses pressed against a window with broomsticks in it. "Look," Harry heard one of them say, "the new Nimbus Two Thousand — fastest ever —" There were shops selling robes, shops selling telescopes and strange silver instruments Harry had never seen before, windows stacked with barrels of bat spleens and eels' eyes, tottering piles of spell books, quills, and rolls of parchment, potion bottles, globes of the moon....
—Philosopher’s Stone, Chapter 5
What works so well here is the magical weirdness of wizardishness juxtaposed against normalcy. Eeylops Owl Emporium is just a pet shop to wizards. A woman makes a very mundane complaint about the price of goods, but the goods happen to be dragon liver. Broomsticks are treated like cars. All of these small moments contribute to the feeling of the wizarding world being alive, inhabited, and also magical. It gets you to ask the question of what your life would be like if you were a wizard. What do wizards wear? What do they eat? What do they haggle over and complain about? What do they do for fun?
In Book 3, Harry enjoys Diagon Alley for a few weeks when he suddenly has free time, and we get to experience the wizarding world in a state of “normalcy,” when he isn’t trying to save the world. He gets free ice creams from Florean Fortescue, gazes longingly at the Firebolt, and engages with delightfully weird people. He’s a wizard, living a (briefly) normal wizard life among other wizards in wizard-land. And that is fun. It’s so fun, that people want that experience for themselves, enough for there to be several theme parks and other immersive experiences dedicated to recreating the world of Harry Potter.
One of the greatest things about Universal was its phenomenal attention to detail. You can hear Moaning Myrtle’s voice in the women’s bathroom, and only the women’s bathroom. The walls of the Three Broomsticks have shadows of a broom sweeping by itself and an owl flying projected against the wall, so convincingly that you’ll do a double take when you see it. Knockturn Alley is down a little secret tunnel off of the main street, and that’s where you have to go to buy Dark Arts-themed stuff. It’s really well done.
Another thing that contributes to the vibe, in my opinion, is that the wizarding world is slightly macabre. They eat candy shaped like frogs, flies, mice, and so forth, and they have gross-tasting jellybeans. In the film’s version of the Diagon Alley sequence above, there’s a random shot of a pet bat available for purchase. In the third film, when Harry is practicing the Patronus Charm with Lupin, the candles are shaped like human spines. In the first book, this is Petunia’s description of Lily’s behavior after she became a witch:
Oh, she got a letter just like that and disappeared off to that-that school, and came home every holiday with her pockets full of frog spawn, turning teacups into rats. I was the only one who saw her for what she was — a freak!
—Philosopher’s Stone, Chapter 4
I remember reading this for the first time, and it just kind of made intuitive sense to me. I suppose it fits into the “eye of newt and toe of frog” association between magical people and gross things, but somehow it works. Unfortunately, this is retconned later with the knowledge that wizards can’t use magic outside school, but before that limitation gets imposed, the idea of Lily amusing herself by turning teacups into rats seems like an inherently witchy thing to do.
That association between magic and the macabre shows up elsewhere, as well. In The Owl House, Luz’s interest in gross things is one of the things that marks her as a “weirdo” in the real world. When she goes to the magical world of the Boiling Isles, weird and gross stuff is absolutely everywhere. That world’s vibe leans more towards the macabre than the whimsical, but it works because you sort of expect the gross stuff to exist alongside the concept of witches, and that they would be an intrinsic part of the world they inhabit. You don’t question it, because it’s part of the vibe.
(The Owl House is one of the few things I’ve encountered that has a similar vibe to Harry Potter, but it’s still not the same vibe. In fact, The Owl House outright mocks the expectation that magical worlds be whimsical, and directly mocks Harry Potter more than once. The overall vibe is much closer to Gravity Falls.)
The Harry Potter films utilize a lot of similar soft worldbuilding with the background details, especially in the early films that were still brightly-colored and whimsical. For example, the scene in Flourish and Blotts in the second film has impossibly-stacked piles of books and old-timey looking signs describing their subjects, which include things like “Celestial Studies” and “Unicorns.” When Harry arrives in the Burrow in the same film, one of the first things he sees is dishes washing themselves and knitting needles working by themselves, taking completely mundane things and instantly establishing them as magical. In that Patronus scene with Harry and Lupin, the spine-candles and a bunch of random orbs (and the obligatory giant armillary sphere) float around in the background. One small detail that I personally appreciate is the designs on the walls above the teacher’s table in the Great Hall, which are from an alchemical manuscript called the Ripley Scroll:
It’s all these little things that add up to produce The Vibe.
Obviously, much of the vibe is expressed very well in John Williams’ score for the first three Harry Potter films. The mystical minor key of the main theme, the tinkly glockenspiel, the strings, the rising and falling notes that mimic the fluttering of an owl, the flight of a broomstick, or the waving of a wand. That initial shot of the castle across the lake as the orchestra swells, as the children arrive at their wizarding school:
If you grew up with Harry Potter, just looking at this image gives you The Vibe. The nostalgia hit is definitely part of it, but The Vibe was already there, back when you were a child and you didn’t have nostalgia yet.
In my opinion, only Williams’ score captures this vibe — the later films, though their scores are very good, do not. But the soundtrack of the first two video games, by Jeremy Soule (the same person who did Skyrim) absolutely nails it. This, right here, is Harry Potter’s vibe, condensed and distilled:
This is why I feel invalidated by the common advice “just read another book.” I have read other books. I’ve read plenty of other books, many of which are wonderfully written and have left an impact on me. But there’s still only one Harry Potter. To date, there’s only other book that has filled me with a similarly intense longing for a fictional place, and that is The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. That book deliberately prioritized atmosphere over everything else in the story, and actually lampshades this in-universe. The Night Circus has a plot and it has characters, but it’s not about its plot or characters. It’s about the setting and its atmosphere. It swallows you up and transports you to a fictional place that is so evocative and so magical that you just have to be part of it or you’ll die. And even then, The Night Circus has a different kind of vibe from Harry Potter. In this particular capacity, there’s nothing else like Harry Potter.
The thing is, I don’t think Rowling was being as deliberate as Erin Morgenstern. (In fact, given many of Rowling’s recent statements, I question how many of her creative choices were deliberated at all.) She was throwing random magical stuff into the background without thinking too hard about it, which works when you’re writing a kids’ story, but stops working when you try to age it up. Actually, scratch that — soft worldbuilding is definitely not just for kids! The Lord of the Rings has a soft magic system, for crying out loud, and Tolkien is the original archmage of worldbuilding. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that prioritizing atmosphere over meticulousness is bad worldbuilding. That is a valid way to worldbuild! Not everything needs to be clearly explained, not everything needs to make sense. The problem is that Harry Potter doesn’t balance it well. Certain things do have to be explained in order for the magic to play an active role in the story (and the setting of a magic school lends itself to that kind of explanation), but no rules are ever established for the kinds of magic that need rules. When you begin thinking about the rules, you’re no longer just enjoying the magic for what it is. At worst, you begin running up against the Willing Suspension of Disbelief.
It wasn’t actually the “aging up” of the story that did it in, per se, but rather, the introduction of realism. The early books were heavily stylized, and the later books were less so. A heavily stylized story can more easily maintain the Willing Suspension of Disbelief. That’s why, for example, you don’t ask why the characters are singing in a musical — you just sort of accept the story’s outlandish internal logic, and the inherent melodrama of it doesn’t take you out of the story. Stylized stories are more concerned with being emotionally consistent over being logically consistent. The later Harry Potter books changed their emotional tone, but without changing the worldbuilding style to compensate.
In addition to the more mature themes and darker tone, Harry Potter introduced more realism as it went, but Rowling did not have the worldbuilding chops to pull this off. There’s the basic magic system stuff: When you begin thinking about it too hard, something like a Time-Turner stops being a fun magical device, and starts threatening to break the entire story. Then there’s the characters: Dumbledore leaving Harry on the Dursleys’ doorstep in the first book is an age-old fairy tale trope that goes unquestioned, but with the introduction of realism in the later books, it suddenly becomes abandonment of a child to an abusive family. The exaggerated stereotypes of characters like the Dursleys become tone-deaf. The fun school rivalry of the House system is suddenly lacking in nuance. And then there’s the shift in tone: The wizarding world that we were introduced to as a marvellous place is revealed to be dystopian. You start thinking about how impractical things like owl messengers are, you start wondering if Slytherin is being unjustly punished, the bad history appears glaringly obvious, the quaint archaisms become dangerously regressive. Oh, and the grand feasts are made through slave labor! The wizarding world suddenly feels small and backward instead of grand and marvellous. J.K. Rowling’s bigotry throws it all into an even harsher light.
This is why I’ve always preferred the early books and films to the later ones. There’s a lot of things I like about the later ones, but they’re not as stylized — they don’t have The Vibe. Thinking about things too hard is just a necessary condition of adulthood, but it’s still possible to tell a dark, mature story that is highly stylized. I really think JKR could have better pulled off that shift if she was a more competent worldbuilder. But it is painfully obvious that she did not think things through, and probably didn’t understand why she had to. In her defense, she did not know that her story would end up being one of the most scrutinized of all time. As it stands, her strength in worldbuilding was in the softer, smaller, deliberately unexplained moments of magic that were there just to provide atmosphere. And there were less and less of those as the books went along.
Pretty much all the Harry Potter-related content released since the last film — including Cursed Child, Fantastic Beasts, Hogwarts Mystery, Hogwarts Legacy, Magic Awakened, and that short-lived Pokemon Go thing — have been unsuccessful attempts at recreating The Vibe. In fact, the only piece of supplemental Potter content that I think had that Vibe down pat was the original Pottermore, back when it was more of an interactive game. And of course that got axed. That was right around the time things started going downhill.
Some of the art from Pottermore’s original Sorting quiz.
So what now? Well, that’s the question.
I think I can safely say that The Vibe was the reason I liked Harry Potter. It’s the thing I still like the most about it. I’ve spent years chasing it, like an elusive Patronus through a dark wood. If I can capture and distill that Vibe, and use drops of it in my own work, then perhaps I won’t need Harry Potter anymore.
I'm gonna write the story that I wish Harry Potter was, and when I'm a famous author, I won't become a bigot. I'll see you on the other side.
unpopular opinion but I dont think Santa Clarita Diet needs a season 4
I feel that all the plot points were well-tied up at the end of the story, and that if they make a season 4, I hope they talk about
How Shiela deals with having a 'cult' (plus shenanigans)
I wanna know if Anne's gonna come back, and what she thinks about it(headcannoning that she's rooting to be in the cult)
Joel's first kill
More Abby/Eric stuff
And more Abby&Winter stuff
Considering there was a whole plot line about Shiela finding out her "meaning", I'm glad they subverted the Chosen One trope by saying Shiela has an inner meaning, that SHE chose what her life means, on the other hand, I kind-off wanna know what the whole deal was with the whole Find Your Purpose and Meant For More plotline
Hoping to see Joel and Abby kicking evil zombie rear ends
The Lord of the Rings is so full of goodness. It's good on a literary quality level, but it's also just crammed full of good things written by a guy who understands goodness. It's good on a literary level, good on a moral level, good in its appreciation of so many different kinds of good things. You've got the vastness of ancient myths and the homely coziness of small towns and casual heroism from the most ordinary people. It knows a hot bath is good, an ancient legend is good, giving up everything and everyone you've known in a desperate attempt to save the world is good. So many different layers of what good is, and it understands and appreciates all of them. Very few books are to-the-core Good the way that this one is.
The key is the humility. The hobbits are small enough and simple enough that they can appreciate the world around them. They're not too jaded to marvel at wonders. They don't have to overcome cynicism; they're not too good for the world around them. There's none of the usual fantasy protagonist "I have to escape this boring place because I'm made for better things." It's all, "This place isn't perfect, but it's home, and I'm only leaving because I have to." They're not striving for glory, they're just going out into the world and happen to do glorious things along the way. Even when they recognize ridiculousness in other people or events, they're able to laugh at it and take joy in it rather than mocking it. It infuses the whole story with a sense of innocence and wonder and goodness that you just can't get from most other books.
During my last re-read of The Lord of the Rings it really sunk in for me how often the protagonists encounter not only danger and betrayal, but unexpected help and friends in unlikely places. Tolkien had a sojourner's heart and said yes, we may be small, but be encouraged. Evil always tries to make itself look bigger than it is. Keep faith with ordinary goodness. Never underestimate the power of simply doing what is right and kind, against the convoluted machinations of evil. The gates of Mordor will not prevail against it.
During my last re-watch of The Return of the King it struck me how ugly and stupid evil is. Kudos to PJ and Co for not aestheticizing the baddies, even resisting the temptation to make Sauron sexy. The Witch King is scary but without substance, defeated by a depressed girl and her pint-sized bestie. The army of Mordor is huge in number but quakes at the sound of Rohan's arrival. They can't even keep a crown of flowers from forming around the fallen statue of a king, only replace his head with a dumb rock and scraps of rusty, twisted metal. The Dark Lord is powerful and dangerous, yes, but he's not all-powerful and he's not infallible. Even his great burning eye is focused in all the wrong places. He uses smoke and mirrors to impress and corrupt Saruman, and to drive Denethor to despair—Denethor, who could have welcomed home the King. (Instead, he wallows in grief, capitulates to fear, and grows bitter in grumbling over Rohan's presumed betrayal. Note how this parallels Gollum instilling suspicion and doubt in Frodo regarding brave and loyal Sam.) The enemy is a liar and a deceiver, and Aragorn knows this when he silences the Mouth of Sauron and says, “I do not believe it. I will not!”
And I want to emphasize this point, this rebuttal of Sauron's divide and conquer tactics: The Fellowship gets weakened. It suffers losses. It becomes scattered across the larger battlefield. But its members remain true to each other, and to their shared mission, even when they find themselves parting ways to accomplish it. At the end of the first film, Aragorn tells Frodo, “I would have gone with you to the end. To the very fires of Mordor.” And where is Aragorn, at the end of the last film?? The gates of Mordor, with the remaining members of the Fellowship (and some new friends, too), exactly where Frodo needs them to be at that moment. No one expects to survive, no one can guarantee victory, and no one but the audience sees the tiny bud on the Tree of Gondor, hope blooming in response to faithfulness even while the sky remains overcast and the city lies in ruins around it.
To repeat my previous tags: #I've said this before and I'll say it again #the devil WANTS you to feel overwhelmed and already defeated and like the small acts of everyday love and faithfulness aren't enough #but in fact each one is chipping another stone out of the foundation of his dark tower #and from your vantage point you may not see the people chipping stones on the other side (but they are there!) #you don't need an extensive understanding of architecture to bring it down #just the willing hands of a hobbit
because the blasted book is still in my collection and I did intend to read it, urgh anyhoo
Wardrobe-john nevil maskelyne-conceal more than reveal
(The book smells so good!)
The wedding present:
Def a story I liked, and thank god it was not gifted to someone, that wouldve been awful
The summary is that a newly wed couple get a letter, which slowly reveals words and sentences where the couple is shown to be unhappy, when the reality is quite the opposite, the couple is cute, they have 2 lovely kids, and a stable job
They should have thrown the letter though.(completely useless to dwell on what-ifs when reality is Right Here, and needs fixing)
Looking for her= he's always wanted to be a porn writer, not that theres anything wrong with writing it, but this was what he was aiming for, and he succeeded. Cue objectification of women
Chivalry
Remember liking it, glad marie and knight got together(irrelevant to plot), what was the point of the story? The knight grows? More like the starting point of growth is shown, nope not even then, this is a business deal with grail in exchange for Egg and Stone
Nicholas was...
Santa claus was cursed to deliver dwarven presents every christmas, imp points: he never learnt Dwarfish even after being imprisoned so long, as a result hes vaguely racist, his punishment was harsher, he says, comparing to loki and sisyphus and all
Need more of this au btw
The Price:
Oh hey its the story where the black cat, a runt of litter, fights the demons that visit the authors house every night, as a result authors house is blessed with luck
Troll Bridge
Kid walks in the forest, sees a naked troll, talks to him(yes, its imp to know troll is naked because graphic description of genitalia), then kid grows up, reflects how much its changed, earlier there were no train tracks and now there are, and he takes over the troll-curse
I dont really care for this book, why am I still here?
Dont ask Jack:
A jack-in-the-box haunts the dreams of kids that visit the house he's in, and tells them how they will die
i find it very interesting how amanda and mark seem to share a lot of struggles, as well as personality+behavioural traits, while still having such opposing mindsets,, and i think it's a great example of how femininity contra masculinity fosters development and provides different opportunities.
so welcome to "the difference between amanda and mark - and what they tell us about gender roles" (by me)
to figure out their differences we first have to look at their similarities. both characters are very strong-willed, vocal people, unafraid of being accusatory, with one of their most defining behavioural traits being that they're very quick to action. so how does this play out?
our first introduction to mark is the proposal scene, where his reaction to clarissa suzanne saying "i'm sorry that you don't have a great relationship with your parents" after having taken the phone call is immediately calling off the proposal, impulsively throwing the ring away finishing off by going "you always knew how to make me feel small". he then storms off, hitting a rock on his way and emotional, yells out "who fucking put that rock there!? who did it?". this tells us a lot about his way of dealing with emotions, his relationship and certain social situations.
because of the nature of toxic masculinity, a lot of men aren't taught how to properly identify, deal with or feel their emotions. because of this, a lot of men struggle with processing their emotions and a common product of this is men 'replacing' these things with actions. instead of identifying an emotion they might respond with "i feel like i need to hit something" when asked how they're feeling, instead of processing an emotion through introspection they might distract themselves, engaging with things that divert them from the emotion, from the discomfort, and with these two combined they now fully distance themselves from actually feeling the emotion at all. i see all of this in mark.
we also learn that his relationship to his parents isn't great which leads me to the assumption that he doesn't, or hasn't had, a strong support system growing up to give him the tools to properly deal with situations and emotions like these. and low and behold the next scene we are given is him returning home to his drunk father where he's met with a very similar exchange. he tries to take charge of the situation, not wanting to engage with his dad's comments and just head to his room or proposing. the other part then denies him this control, his dad by ignoring his attempts of ending the conversation and clarissa by taking the phone call, and lastly he is provoked into an extreme outburst of actions as he speaks up for himself and, in the scene with his father, goes in for a punch.
our first introduction to amanda on the other hand is her comforting clarissa suzanne at the pizzeria. we find her holding clarissa, who's crying, actively listening as she lets her speak. she gently interrupts when clarissa repeatedly calls herself stupid, shutting it down and saying "what kind of self-talk is that?". with this we see her acting fully supportive of clarissa *by* challenging her views and feelings. as she responds with "i don't know, i just feel like shit right now" we see this question allow her to confront her own emotions, starting to identify what she's feeling and why she's reacting the way she is. with both statements she's expressing her feelings but one is far more helpful than the other in terms of dealing with them and working through it. having identified the current issue, she can adjust her approach by being uplifting, saying "you're not shit" and continuing on this slight tangent to make her point. now this could seem like deflecting, but in this she is lightening the mood and showing affection, communicating that she's there for her, that she doesn't think she's stupid and that she wants her to feel better. and with clarissas best interest in mind she once again makes her point with "you're more than mark". she is simultaneously being supportive of her friend and questioning her mindset.
meeting amanda like this we are presented with seemingly very stark differences between her and mark. when clarissa tried to communicate her feelings to mark he was unwilling to try and see her point of view but here, with amanda, she's able to act the exact same way while getting a wildly different response. or so it seems. you see, while the two pairs have created entirely different environments for eachother there is only one thing that sets the two apart, emotional support. both mark and amanda are expressing accusatory opposition in response to clarissa, one is just doing it along with proper support and understanding. and so as the scene continues and we see more of amanda we find her acting very similarly to mark.
cause my breakdown of only this snippet does paint amanda as this perfect person, that of course is not the whole truth. while this conversation definitely includes amanda showing signs of emotional intelligence she's also quick to lose her patience, just like mark. when clarissa fails and/or refuses to actually take in amandas advice of working on herself before working to get back mark, we get another example of a person who typically wants to be in charge of the situation being denied that power and she suddenly goes from helping clarissa deal with her emotions to having to deal with her own emotions as well. not only does this showcase the first of their many shared attributes, it also shows us the first sign of their shared struggles.
mark both shows and voices how he's continuously has been made to feel small and we see clear evidence of this with his father, who doesn't care enough to respect or listen to him. this switch up from amanda as soon as she's ignored is very telling and we will soon learn two major things about amanda that play a role in this as well. first we learn that amanda is very bold. expressive, assertive and confident, she will insert herself in situations. she's a social woman who will speak her mind and she'll do it loudly. but instead of marks more aggressive approach, amandas assertiveness is highly social, she operates in a more passive aggressive demeanor, using her social and emotional awareness to achieve her goals. secondly, we also learn that amanda has a crush on clarissa suzanne. this complicates things as she ultimately has an ulterior motive to get involved, but that thing being a highly personal emotional factor, which she has to put aside for the sake of being there for not only her best friend, but the person she's currently in love with.
amanda is very clearly upset with clarissa's defiance of her beliefs and after evaluating her options she passive aggressively proclaims "well listen, the other people in this restaurant apparently have ideas" - she feels unappreciated. but being very aware, she is now operating with damage control in mind instead of support and proactivity. this results in her making the decision to shift her attention to the other people at the pizzeria, using them as a way to express her emotions without directing the negativity directly toward clarissa and without revealing any romantic interest. this is her engaging with the very same petty and emotionally immature behaviour as mark.
in that scene we also learn more about her character as she, in her assertiveness, takes on a lot of responsibilities - both speaking up about the kinda rude british woman and taking it upon herself to figure out and deal with the man creating a ruckus. but interestingly enough, as soon as she's dealing with her own dad, this confidence comes to a halt. these two parts of this scene really parallels marks introduction. we start off by seeing the character act on impulse, taking control. then, by meeting their fathers, they are no longer the person with most power, forced out to the sidelines, left feeling unseen.
but then she does something to differentiate her from mark. as she's taken a step back, she stops to think before declaring herself in a new position of power in order to figure things out. telling her dad that "either you, me, or that drunk british woman, have to sort this out", before proposing an idea herself. at the height of her impulsiveness she yells out that she has an amazing idea, complimenting herself in the process. at the height of mark's impulsiveness, he initiated a physical fight with his father. amanda's way of taking back control is by taking a leadership-role, setting up a system for them to work out a solution and finally providing one herself. mark's way of taking back control is by force, opposing his father in an act of disrespect.
from this whole scene we learn that amanda is very adamant to be the person in charge, but in contrast to mark, she's both very calm and communicative in doing so. as shown by telling the british woman that she'll come back to her shortly, getting the man to calm down and properly get his intentions across and the previous example with her dad. all and all, this is another example of the two using different tactics to enable the same behaviour - the only difference being their level of emotional intelligence.
and so, this instead speaks a lot on femininity. while the gender roles for men often are in relation to individualistic accomplishments of success within things like careers or athleticism most gender roles for women are in relation to people other than themselves. in the name of being a good wife and mother, they are taught to strengthen bonds, raised to be nurturing leaders of their community - always there for those in need and whether it's emotional support, household tasks, administrative tasks or first aid, they are the ones you come to. this is what we're seeing in amanda, a person who not only has been given the tools on how to work through emotions and settle conflicts but also to put herself aside for others sake.
but as we know, amanda is not a coy character, and i would argue that mark is more timid than her, being more prone to tolerating certain behaviour. they both inhabit this need for control because they both feel a lack of control. in the scene where amanda is keeping the ring in her mouth her source of control is stripped away from her and she panics, forced to just stand by as the situation gets worse and worse, unable to step in. in relation to gender roles this all makes a lot of sense.
because of the typical association of dominance and masculinity vs submissiveness and femininity, a common misconception is that masculinity makes for good leadership, but that is not actually the case. this association simply comes from the patriarchal hierarchy systematically and socially putting men above women, in a position of power. when looking at examples of hyper-masculinity, we often find positions of power, but not necessarily traits that help actually build and/or uphold said leadership, or position of power. this is because of the societal perspective than you climb or rank up in positions of power, combined with the societal hierarchy mirroring our occupational hierarchies (i.e. your social status being tied to your job title). cause while a male ceo may hold the power over a company, does he hold the most knowledge? does he house the skills necessary to perform the tasks done by those under him? is he qualified for those positions?
while women are taught the skills needed to be a good mother and wife, they are also taught how to pass these skills on, giving them a fundamental understanding of what is needed, how it works and why it works. this gives them a much stronger foundation for their expertise than men. but even then, what skills are men taught? they are taught that they should be independent, but they aren't taught how to be independent, they are taught that they should be strong leaders, but they aren't taught how to be a strong leader. i would argue that they are told more than they are taught, and if the patriarchy hadn't already placed men in a position of power, i don't think they'd be able to achieve that position themselves, for they are not taught how to reach the top, but to simply exist up there. and when actually looking at the two masculine roles i don't find them to be very dominant at all - protector? very submissive, provider? very submissive. but feminine roles on the other hand? traditional wives and mothers are the ones in control, they know how to run the household, care for it's members and they are the ones to teach them the valuable skills and lessons they themselves inhabit. and this is reflected all over society, as jobs considered feminine include structural cornerstones like education, administration and healthcare on top of being mothers and leaders of their respective communities.
and in the play, we find evidence of this as mark is struggling due to his lack of skills in handling these situations and dealing with his own emotions. he's left to figure it out on his own, without the tools to properly asses what it actually is he's lacking and/or doing wrong. and that's the thing, men aren't taught how to be independent because we as humans can't be independent. and even this is so beautifully illustrated in the story, as the turning point for mark as a character doesn't come until he tries the more feminine method of confiding in others, reaching out to the church. but so what is this turning point and why is it so touching?
when tim describes father petroska as "having a good heart, really" despite his very hurtful actions, mark, looking to understand what may be the cause of the disconnect between his own intentions and his actions, sees himself in father petroska. but in an attempt to distance himself as a form of protection, mark starts asking about him, intending to use father petroska in place of himself, as a way to actually approach discussing the subject, just indirectly. tim however, cuts him off, not picking up on this subtext, and starts listing all these negative traits of father petroska, including the impact they have on people in his surroundings. as he's doing this, he's partially retracting his initial comment, in which he was implying that father is still a good person. in doing so tim, from marks point of view, is accidentally directly criticizing mark, the exact thing mark was trying to avoid, confirming his fears and anxieties.
now, this is a daunting realization, but mark is unusually calm? in his scenes with clarissa and his father, mark is painted as far more agressive and assertive than he actually is. when outside of these situations he's pretty quiet, existing more in the background. but still, we've never seen him so 'inward' before. i think this was an almost belated realization, the last nail in the coffin. he's spent years processing his flaws and difficulties, he's just never admitted it or possibly even known that's what he's been doing, and i think this was a moment of reconciliation after years of "breaches", in the form of unwanted emotions causing unwanted actions. when looking at masculinity it makes a lot of sense. society telling you that you're supposed to function a certain way but time and time again not being rewarded for that very same behaviour.
lacking the tools to properly identify and regulate his emotions, mark has shown these peaks of aggression where he took to physical action, but not this time, this time he takes it in, reflects, realizes his needs, and asks for them - not just asking for confirmation that he can be forgiven but also asking about the complex idea of how much our actions define us. steadfast and wanting the full truth, in pursuit of self-acceptance,, "how much work do i have ahead of me?"
we find him, mirroring the scene between suzanne and amanda, in a situation where he's starting to discover the feminine skillset of working through his own emotions.
and so, the two are handed very similar situations, with a lack of control, dealing with the fear of being pushed aside, but simply because one is a woman and the other a man they are presented with vastly different opportunities. feel free to continue this discussion in the comments (i would love to hear people's own interpretations and thoughts on this!) and thank you sm for reading all of it- i hope there was something of value you found to be insightful, or at the very least interesting, cause i sure enjoyed creating it<3
Some more “Little Women” remarks: the problem of Beth
I honestly think most commentary I’ve read about Beth’s character is bad, both academic and from casual readers.
I understand why. She’s a difficult character. Modern readers who love Little Women and want to celebrate it as a proto-feminist work need to contend with the presence of this thoroughly domestic, shy, sweetly self-effacing character, seemingly the opposite of everything a feminist heroine should be. Meanwhile, other readers who despise Little Women and consider it anti-feminist cite Beth as the embodiment of its supposedly outdated morals. Then there’s the fact that she’s based on Louisa May Alcott’s actual sister, Lizzie Alcott, and does show hints of the real young woman’s complexity, and yet she’s much more idealized than the other sisters, which often makes readers view her as more of a symbol (of what they disagree, but definitely a symbol) than a real person.
But even though the various bad takes on her character are understandable, they’re still obnoxious, and in my humble opinion, not founded in the text.
Here are my views on some of the critics’ opinions I least agree with.
“She’s nothing but a bland, boring model of feminine virtue.”
Of course it’s fair to find her bland and boring. Everyone is entitled to feel how they feel about any character. But she’s not just a cardboard cutout of 19th century feminine virtue. So many people seem to dismiss her shyness as just the maidenly modesty that conduct books used to encourage. But it seems blatantly obvious to me that it’s more than just that. Beth’s crippling shyness is actively portrayed as her “burden,” just like Jo’s temper or Meg and Amy’s vanity and materialism. She struggles with it. Her parents have homeschooled her because her anxiety made the classroom unbearable for her – no conduct book has ever encouraged that! In Part 1, she has a character arc of overcoming enough of her shyness to make new friends like Mr. Laurence and Frank Vaughn. Then, in Part 2, she has the arc of struggling to accept her impending death: she doesn’t face it with pure serenity, but goes through a long journey of both physical and emotional pain before she finds peace in the end. Her character arcs might be quieter and subtler than her sisters’, but she’s not the static figure she’s often misremembered as being.
‘She needs to die because her life has no meaning outside of her family and the domestic sphere.”
In all fairness, Beth believes this herself: she says she was “never meant” to live long because she’s just “stupid little Beth,” with no plans for the future and of no use to anyone outside the home. But for readers to agree with that assessment has massive unfortunate implications! The world is full of both women and men who – whether because of physical or mental illness, disability, autism, Down Syndrome, or some other reason – can’t attend regular school, don’t make friends easily, are always “young for their age,” don’t get married or have romantic relationships, aren’t able to hold a regular job, never live apart from their families, and lead quiet, introverted, home-based lives. Should we look at those real people and think they all need to die? I don’t think so! Besides, it seems to me that the book actively refutes Beth’s self-deprecation. During both of her illnesses, it’s made clear how many people love her and how many people’s lives her quiet kindness has touched – not just her family and few close friends, but the neighbors, the Hummels (of course), the local tradespeople she interacts with, and the children she sews gifts for who write her letters of gratitude. Then there’s the last passage written from her viewpoint before her death, where she finds Jo’s poem that describes what a positive influence her memory will always be, and realizes that her short, quiet life hasn’t been the waste she thought it was. How anyone can read that passage and still come away viewing her life as meaningless is beyond me.
“She needs to die because she symbolizes a weak, outdated model of femininity.”
SparkNotes takes this interpretation of Beth and it annoys me to think of how many young readers that study guide has probably taught to view her this way. No matter how feisty and unconventional Louisa May Alcott was, and no mater how much she personally rebelled against passive, domestic femininity, would she really have portrayed her beloved sister Lizzie as “needing to die” because she was “too weak to survive in the modern world”? Would she really have turned Lizzie’s tragic death into a symbol of a toxic old archetype’s welcome death? But even if Beth were a purely fictional character and not based on the author’s sister, within the text she’s much too beloved and too positive an influence on everyone around her for this interpretation to feel right. This seems less like a valid reading of her character and more like wishful thinking on the part of some feminist scholars.
“She’s a symbol of pure goodness who needs to die because she’s Too Good For This Sinful Earth™.”
Enough with the reasons why Beth “needs to die”! At least this one isn’t insulting. But I don’t think it’s really supported by the text either. If she were a symbol of goodness too pure for this world, then she wouldn’t forget to feed her pet bird for a week and lose him to starvation. She wouldn’t get snappish when she’s bored, even if she does only vent her frustration on her doll. She wouldn’t struggle with social anxiety, or dislike washing dishes, or be explicitly described as “not an angel” by the narrator because she can’t help but long for a better piano than the one she has. Now of course those flaws (except for accidentally letting her bird die) are minute compared to her sisters’. It’s fair to say that only “lip service” is paid to Beth’s humanity in an otherwise angelic portrayal. But it seems clear that Alcott did try to make her more human than other saintly, doomed young girls from the literature of her day: she’s certainly much more real than little Eva from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example.
“She’s destroyed by the oppressive model of femininity she adheres to.”
This argument holds that because Beth’s selfless care for others causes her illness, her story’s purpose is to condemn the expectation that women toil endlessly to serve others. But if Alcott meant to convey that message, I’d think she would have had Beth get sick by doing some unnecessary selfless deed. Helping a desperately poor, single immigrant mother take care of her sick children isn’t unnecessary. That’s not the kind of selflessness to file under “things feminists should rebel against.”
“She’s a symbol of ideal 19th century femininity, whom all three of her sisters – and implicitly all young female readers – are portrayed as needing to learn to be like.”
Whether people take this view positively (e.g. 19th and early 20th century parents who held up Beth as the model of sweet docility they wanted from their daughters) or negatively (e.g. feminists who can’t forgive Alcott for “remaking Jo in Beth’s image” by the end), I honestly think they’re misreading the book. I’ve already outlined the ways in which Beth struggles and grows just like her sisters do. If any character is portrayed as the ideal woman whom our young heroines all need to learn to be like, it’s not Beth, it’s Marmee. She combines aspects of all her daughters’ best selves (Meg and Beth’s nurturing, Jo’s strong will and Amy’s dignity) and she’s their chief source of wise advice and moral support. Yet none of her daughters become exactly like her either. They all maintain their distinct personalties, even as they grow. Admittedly, Beth’s sisters do sometimes put her on a pedestal as the person they should emulate – i.e. Amy during Beth’s first illness and Jo in the months directly after her death. But in both of those cases, their grief-inspired efforts are short-lived and they eventually go back to their natural boldness and ambitions. They just combine them with more of Beth’s kindness and unselfishness than before.
“She wills her own death.”
Of all these interpretations, this one is possibly the most blatantly contradicted by the text. Just because Beth’s fatal illness is vague and undefined beyond “she never recovered her strength after her scarlet fever” doesn’t mean it’s caused by a lack of “will to live”; just because she interprets her lack of future plans or desire to leave home to mean that she’s “not meant to live long” doesn’t mean she’s so afraid to grow up that she wants to die. It’s made very clear that Beth wants to get well. Even though she tries to hide her deep depression from her family and face death willingly, she’s still distraught to have her happy life cut short.
I’ll admit that I’m probably biased, because as as a person on the autism spectrum who’s also struggled with social anxiety and led an introverted, home-based life, I personally relate to Beth. If I didn’t find her relatable, these interpretations would probably annoy me less. But I still think they’re based on a shallow overview of Beth’s character, combined with disdain for girls who don’t fit either the tomboyish “Jo” model or the sparkling “Amy” model of lively, outgoing young womanhood, rather than a close reading of the book.
