::Sigh:: Fandom...
Dec. 7th, 2003 12:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rymenhildOh my God. There is Dark is Rising fandom. They have Will/Bran slash...
I don't know why I find this so very disturbing. I am the one who had the utterly pervy thought of setting Cimorene up with Morwen, or Alianora, or Mary Sue, Princess of the Dragon in the Next Cave Over. And at least the Will/Bran folks wait for their heroes to visit each other at the age of eighteen, most of the time.
It may be that I just can't think of Will Stanton as hot. In the books, he's a boy of eleven or twelve who just happens to have a secret life as an Old One, wizard and keeper of secret knowledge. Neither the eleven-year-old boy nor the ancient Old One seem at all interested in sex. (Bran, on the other hand, has a rather attractive mysteriousness.)
Also, any plotline that includes, by necessity, Will remembering and Bran forgetting the events through Silver on the Tree irritates me deeply. I hated the ending to Silver.
Summer's Men by Kest, which has Will and Bran meeting eight years after Silver, isn't too bad. The writing is not Susan Cooper-perfect, and the name of Bran's new dog, Lloegr, is translated to mean "England". This is wrong on many levels. In the Arthurian cycle, Lloegr is the name for Arthur's kingdom, which encompassed the land now thought of as England; it was then occupied by the Britons, the people who are now called Welsh. The Angles and Saxons, having defeated the Britons, pushed them to the border of the island of Britain, and the Britons pine for their lost sovereignty to this day. Nevertheless, the story is all right, and there's an entertaining hint at a Merriman/Arthur pairing.
Midsummer's Country by Ashura (sadly a work in progress) is a much stronger piece. In an alternate universe, Bran follows his father to the back of the North Wind, and then discovers it's not that interesting. The author has obviously read the Mabinogion texts, and the story is richer for it. A sample:
In the evenings, they told stories. They were old stories, and everyone already knew them, but it seemed they never tired of reliving them. Even the jokes were the same—Owein would begin, and Kei would interrupt him, and they would bicker like children, egging each other on until Arthur told them to get on with it. Gwenwhyvar and Laudine would look at each other and roll their eyes, and sit in the warm, comfortable chairs by the fire pretending that they were thoroughly entranced with hearing the same tales of their knights-errant for the tenth night in a row, and Olwen would laugh and toss her hair and play a small harp beneath it all.
I don't know why I find this so very disturbing. I am the one who had the utterly pervy thought of setting Cimorene up with Morwen, or Alianora, or Mary Sue, Princess of the Dragon in the Next Cave Over. And at least the Will/Bran folks wait for their heroes to visit each other at the age of eighteen, most of the time.
It may be that I just can't think of Will Stanton as hot. In the books, he's a boy of eleven or twelve who just happens to have a secret life as an Old One, wizard and keeper of secret knowledge. Neither the eleven-year-old boy nor the ancient Old One seem at all interested in sex. (Bran, on the other hand, has a rather attractive mysteriousness.)
Also, any plotline that includes, by necessity, Will remembering and Bran forgetting the events through Silver on the Tree irritates me deeply. I hated the ending to Silver.
Summer's Men by Kest, which has Will and Bran meeting eight years after Silver, isn't too bad. The writing is not Susan Cooper-perfect, and the name of Bran's new dog, Lloegr, is translated to mean "England". This is wrong on many levels. In the Arthurian cycle, Lloegr is the name for Arthur's kingdom, which encompassed the land now thought of as England; it was then occupied by the Britons, the people who are now called Welsh. The Angles and Saxons, having defeated the Britons, pushed them to the border of the island of Britain, and the Britons pine for their lost sovereignty to this day. Nevertheless, the story is all right, and there's an entertaining hint at a Merriman/Arthur pairing.
Midsummer's Country by Ashura (sadly a work in progress) is a much stronger piece. In an alternate universe, Bran follows his father to the back of the North Wind, and then discovers it's not that interesting. The author has obviously read the Mabinogion texts, and the story is richer for it. A sample:
In the evenings, they told stories. They were old stories, and everyone already knew them, but it seemed they never tired of reliving them. Even the jokes were the same—Owein would begin, and Kei would interrupt him, and they would bicker like children, egging each other on until Arthur told them to get on with it. Gwenwhyvar and Laudine would look at each other and roll their eyes, and sit in the warm, comfortable chairs by the fire pretending that they were thoroughly entranced with hearing the same tales of their knights-errant for the tenth night in a row, and Olwen would laugh and toss her hair and play a small harp beneath it all.
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no subject
Date: 2003-12-07 02:12 pm (UTC)Of course, that thought leads me on to an interesting set of critical essays I was reading which discuss how the vast body of all ChL, of course written by adults for children, attempts to totally repress sexuality, reinforcing the adult idea that children are sexually innocent beings. I personally was a very late bloomer (I don't think I ever really had true sexual thoughts much before college, if you can believe it) but I've met lots of people who developed much earlier -- a guy who knew he was gay when he was 9, for instance (my reaction to that was "I didn't even know I was straight when I was 9!" -- or bi, as it eventually turned out), and a girl who told me she had intense sexual feelings as young as age 5 or 6. My mind boggles but I don't deny it happens.
Anyway, there was another fascinating article I read about Child Authors (wish I could find the link), focussing on a girl who wrote and published stories for adults, not children, between the ages of 9 and 12 -- stories about the relationships and sexual politics between adults. This author, whose name I can't remember, lived and published in Europe I think more than 50 years ago, or at any rate a while in the past. Nowadays we have the highly successful published works by Christopher Paolini and Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, adolescent authors, and AAR at least has a great deal of sexuality in her books, I believe -- this is a teenage girl writing about vampires, after all.
The point of the article was that child authors generally write what they want to read, which sometimes might be very different from what adults think they should be reading -- and as opposed to adult authors for children, who are often (though not always) writing what they think kids want to read. To be fair, I think Susan Cooper (as she has said in her Newbery acceptance speech and some other essays I've read) was simply writing what she wanted to write, and that her publisher decided it her books should be aimed at children, so if there's a lack of sexuality in her books it's probably because she wasn't interested in writing about that.
Okay, I realized I've digressed a great deal from the actual topic at hand, which is not really about children's attitudes towards sex, but authors (what age, I wonder?) writing about child characters grown up and having sex, which is not the same thing. I don't think. Now I've confused myself...
citations
Date: 2003-12-07 02:26 pm (UTC)The article that talked about the repression of children's sexuality was Perry Nodelman's "The Other: Orientalism, Colonialism, and Children's Literature" in Literary Theory and Children's Literature, edited by Nodelman -- and the article was influenced by Jacqueline Rose's The Case Of Peter Pan: or the Impossibility of Children's Fiction, in which she discusses children's lit as colonization, focusing on the "effort to persuade children of adult versions of childhood." It made my brain hurt. I don't think I really buy that children's lit is a form of brainwashing, but it's still a fascinating concept to think about.
Re: citations
Date: 2003-12-08 12:30 am (UTC)Re: citations
Date: 2003-12-08 08:24 am (UTC)In the interest of academic integrity I should mention that "The point of the article was that child authors generally write what they want to read" was in fact wrong, as I discovered when I tracked down the article. The article was actually saying that child authors write not for themselves or other children, but in the hopes that adults will read and pay attention.
I was probably misled by the fact that I remember working on my fantasy novel(s) at the age of about 12, and being terribly torn between including the sexual/romantic themes I thought belonged in the story (and that from a remarkable unsexualized late bloomer) and my awareness that I was writing a children's book and probably wouldn't be "allowed" to include that kind of subject matter if it were ever published. But I would definitely say that, even though I knew I was writing children's books, specifically the kind of books I wanted to read -- I wanted recognition from adults, specifically my parents, not other children.
Must... work... yaarrgghhl
Of course if I were writing a paper on this topic there's no way I'd be able to go on about it at such length.