So Close. . .

I hesitate to write a negative review, because I worry that in some distant future I will encounter the author or editor or publisher of the work in some professional setting. I imagine their faces going sour. “Oh, it’s you,” they will say.

Which is why I feel it prudent to preface this with some explanation. I loved Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series. It was creative and different and deep in ways that the Rithmatist isn’t. I get that the latter book was just a little side project for him, and that it was written with a younger audience in mind. It also happens that my complaints about the Rithmatist are not specific to this story alone, but apply to so very many fantasy stories, both for children and for adults. And I am picking on the Rithmatist, not because it is the worst offender of the bunch, but because it came so close to breaking out of the gravitational pull of generic fantasy, and I was sad to see it fail.

I picked up the Rithmatist on the recommendation of a friend, who knew I was looking for unusual YA fantasy. several elements in its favor. Topping the list is the magic system. In this world certain people are endowed with the ability to attack and defend using chalk drawings. On top of that, the fantasy genre has been hybridized with the mystery genre, and the setting is an age of clockwork technology in an alternate history of the United States. So the Rithmatist begins with fertile soil. And yet out of it springs. . . a suburban lawn.

Sanderson’s novel fit the bill, and from the start had

The architecture of the plot is predictable even for a genre mash-up. There is mention of a tower somewhere far away that is leaking naughty little chalk-monsters, in a toy-like imitation of Tolkien. There is a school for the magically endowed. There is a youth of mysterious parentage whose longings and personal history tell us that he is destined to end up in the magical community. We know that the first girl who snubs him will end up being. . . well, just his friend, for which I give Sanderson points. Love triangle do get so tiresome.

We know when the mentor figure is going to get payback for the wrong done to him. We know that the obvious villain is going to turn around and do something heroic, even if he proceeds to surprise us again. We know that the villain will turn out to be one of the seemingly nice characters whom we have met along the way, and we know that the villain isn’t the cranky desk worker who seems to have been planted there in a wet noodle of an attempt at a red herring.

The magic system, while novel on the surface, boils down to something we have seen ad nausem: certain special people have special abilities. Special fighting abilities. Nevermind that there is untapped potential for new systems of magic to delve into areas of creativity or spirituality. No, these people are human guns.

That said, Sanderson explores, shallowly, one aspect of the magic-as-weapon trope that too many other authors overlook, and it is this: how exactly will society control such overpowered and dangerous individuals? These rithmatists, as they are called, are conscripted at the age of eight, trained at their Hogwarts for several years, and then shipped off for a ten-year stint on the battle front. At the end of their tour of duty they are free to rejoin society. My suspension of disbelief fizzles here because these powerful people, isolated during their formative years, sent away to face horrors for an entire decade - they go on to neither be victims of PTSD, nor a threat to society. In fact, the plot revolves around the “shocking” possibility that one of them might have gone bad - as if they were not emerging from a system that, in the real world, would be churning out the mentally ill and and terrorists like maggot-infested meat emitting flies.

The handling of gender in the Rithmatist, while not offensive, leaves something to be desired. Many works of fantasy are placed in settings of gender inequality to match their generic setting of pseudo-Medieval Europe. Older generations of fantasy did this without questioning the practice, chaining together male-dominated societies un-self-consciously with stories that were largely about men and for men. Newer generations of fantasy writers use the same patriarchal settings, but as a foil for their heroines to look progressive or oppressed or heroic. This is the track that to a limited extent Sanderson took. Which is great. . . except that there are so many other unexplored possibilities. Why not a world in which gender equality is the norm? When the repression of one gender plays exactly zero role in the plot, why throw inequality in as a background element in the first place? All that it accomplishes is to reinforce the notion that the repression of women is normal.

In the Rithmatist, there was the possibility of a dramatic reveal of how the setting ties into the villains and the magic system. But instead of a revelation there was a puny tease. That great ta-daa moment, if there is to be one, was punted to the inevitable sequel. And the cover didn’t even have the decency to proclaim that the Rithmatist as “book one.”

I can’t help but think ahead with dread to the next two books.Our Chosen One is going to traipse off into the wilderness and come back with some shiny variant of the magic that will allow him to trounce the villain at the end of book two. Along the way he'll die and be resurrected. The love triangle (or perhaps a g-rated friend triangle) will also happen in book two, ending with hurt feelings, but this will be resolved in book three. In book three, all of the good guys will be armed with the shiny new power, and will successfully take out that distant evil tower full of bad guys. Here comes the Quest. Forget the remnants of the mystery, because it will have been shoved out of the way by marching hordes of fantasy tropes.

I would like to think that this series will surprise me. Mistborn certainly did. Spoiler alert: Mistborn so thoroughly trounced its tropes that by the end the awful villain turned out to be a hero (of sorts), the source of the magic powers turned out to be evil, the mentor ascended as a god, and the two main characters not only died but deliberately ended the world. It was epic, it was surprising, it wasn’t tragic, despite everything - and Sanderson tied up every loose end in a gorgeous Gordian knot. End spoiler.

Maybe, just maybe, Sanderson will drive the Rithmatist series off the road in the same manner. Given its beginning and his statement that it was just a plaything between “real” projects, I am not hopeful. I don’t think he takes young adult readers seriously enough to serve them anything in the way of horizon-broadening concepts. This book is junk food. But the guy can write. Here’s hoping he can’t hold himself back from more intelligent and surprising epicness.

I Blame the Dragons

At some point before grade 6, I found myself accompanying my parents to a gathering at the home of a man who had no children. While the grown-ups did their grown-up mingling, I lurked on the stairs, alone, absolutely mesmerized by a shelf filled with dragons. The figurines were all shapes and sizes, and chief among them was a glorious Chinese dragon in eye-popping reds and yellows. The host of the party stopped by to tell me with pride how he had assembled them from kits and painted them. He said if I liked dragons, he had a book for me - and he handed me Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffery. It had the most beautiful dragon on the cover I had ever seen - a cover that would eventually lure me off to art school.

But I read only the first page. Ugh. Reading that book, at that early stage in my reading, was like trying to swim upstream against maple syrup. The beautiful cover sat on my bedside table for months, mocking me.

My parents had already read me the Lord of the Rings. That, plus a better-left-forgotten animated movie called the Flight of Dragons had left me famished for the mythical creatures. The library, however, was no help. There were books about babysitters, books about kids my age going to school, and books about motorcycle-riding mice; but the dragons flew above in a strata of fiction that was as-yet out of my reach.

In order to get to those dragons, I read like gangbusters. There was one morning when I recall waking up, grabbing the half-finished book on my bedside (it was the one with the motorcycle-riding mouse), finishing it, and then grabbing a second book and reading it to the mid-point. Then I went down for breakfast.

The day that I picked up the Hobbit and realized that I could read it, I was done with those “kid’s books.” I rolled directly into the Lord of the Rings in that summer before the sixth grade, and from there into the adult fantasy and science fiction section in the library.

My reading comprehension at that point was rubbish. I was willing to hack my way through in order to get to the good bits with the dragons. My vocabulary exploded, despite the fact that I routinely embarrassed myself with mispronunciations when I attempted to use my fancy new words.

Because they were easier than McCaffery’s works, I ended up reading several series of fantasy books that I am not even sure I want to mention by name. The Xanth books. The MythAdventures books. The Landover books. I wasn’t under the impression then or now that those books were written for young adults specifically. They seem more to have been written for mostly-adult readers who wanted a fluffy bit of action, a fantastic setting, and all problems resolved nicely at the end. And there really wasn’t anything more to them then that. They were the literary equivalent of candy.

Those books had dragons, and dragons were what I wanted.

In my haste for dragons, however, I was missing out. Real, quality literature of an age-appropriate level was being published, only I never bothered with that section in the bookstore, because there weren’t dragons on the covers or between them.

I missed out on other genres. I missed out on the Newbury award-winners. I missed out on the novels for the youngest readers because that window of my life opened and shut so quickly that there was hardly time for anything to blow in.

It is only just now, as a parent, that I am reading Ramona Quimby, Age 8.

I have finally matured enough that I can read children’s literature and enjoy it, even if it doesn’t have dragons.

English Teachers Versus the Screen, Part 2

The second time that movies and television became a subject of interest in my highschool English classes was in AP English class my senior year. But first, some background. I was an obedient child; I had not yet learned that teachers could be wrong. Or, rather, I had learned it, but not completely. I still wanted to think that my good teachers were perfect in every possible way. And initially, my AP English teacher fit the bill for a shining, glorious, perfect teacher.

On the first day, Mrs. O handed out copies of a poem. I wish I could remember the poet, or the title! I have never had a poem blow me away like that one did. The gist of the poem was something like this:

First I read for pleasure. The novels carried me away to fluffy-bunny-type places. I was the shining white knight rescuing the princesses. But as I got older, my tastes got darker. I read to be the vampire, to have my way with the women. I read for escape. But now I understand that my reading kept me from living life, and I am now a pathetic adult who gets no women at all. Don’t bother reading: get drunk instead.

That one poem in that one reading stunned me. Despite reading it from the perspective of a woman, it meshed exactly with my growing relationship with books. In an instant it transformed my reading habits, making me forever aware of how I had been using books for escape. That poem was one of the most powerful things I had ever read. And because my teacher had given naive me that transformative experience, she cemented in my mind her awesome absolute authority as a teacher.

Mrs. O went on, in that same very first class, to hand us a list of naughty Shakespeare words that we were told to take home and burn. She couldn’t have been more awesome.

And yet. . . that AP class slid predictably into the numb, dull routine of my previous English classes. We continued to grind out soulless essays in the creativity-crushing pyramid scheme. We continued to read books and poems that I could not connect with. Only worse: she presented us with the most difficult reading material she could find. Difficult and dull. I distinctly recall her presenting us with Faulkner’s the Sound and the Fury saying “if you can read this, you can read anything.” Trusting her, I rolled up my sleeves and read it. . . And felt betrayed. It was grueling. I was able to parrot back all of the expected details afterward. But I found nothing to love in the experience. To this day I would joyfully wade through the arcane writings of a lawyer before voluntarily opening another work by Faulkner.

My take-away from the experience was that I shouldn’t trust even an awesome teacher - even one who can hand me a poem that smashes my universe and rebuilds it. And I was highly overdue to learn that particular lesson of independent thinking. But it wasn’t the lesson she had been intending to teach, and it undermined everything else of value that she had for us.

Somewhere in all of this is a link to television and movies. And here it is: before that fateful reading of the Sound and the Fury, Mrs. O revealed to us her utter and complete disdain for the screen, She didn’t own a television. She hadn’t seen a movie in years. She found our screen habits to be contemptible. And I was in awe of this. It fueled my own mounting disdain for the screen. It turned me into a snob.

Thankfully, my respect for her unraveled over the course of the year. I continued to write those wooden essays, but my reasons for sticking to the format - maintaining good grades being at the top of the list - began to fall away. My habits clung until the day of that final AP test, when I had my pencil hovering over the page, and I decided to throw out the pyramid formula and write the words that I wanted to say. I had metaphors in me that I had been too afraid to use, and meandering prose that didn’t stick to an approved structure. I let this stuff out for the first time on that test. And I got a very high score. No thanks to Mrs. O.

I had one other act of rebellion in me that year. On my own, I read A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I hated it, but I did it anyway. Why? Because Mrs. O had mentioned that in previous years she had allowed her students to do an art project based on a classic book in place of the final exam. By this point I was accepted into an art school and aimed at a career in illustration. I turned up my nose at the final epic poem the class studied - which was a lousy translation of something French, and sounded, to me, like Doctor Seuss. Which, at the time, I was disdainful of. So, I painted an illustration of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and brought it with me to that final test. This was in spite of the fact that Mrs. O offered no art opt-out for the test to our class. I handed her the painting, sat at my desk, and wrote on my exam paper, “One fish two fish, red fish blue fish. Have a nice summer!” And, wouldn’t you know it: Dr. Seuss has since then been a more powerful influence on me than any of the adult classics that snobs are supposed to like.

My snobbishness about movies and television was longer-lived than it should have been, given the lesson Mrs. O taught me. It took into deep into art school to recognize the power that stories have when told through the medium of still or moving pictures. Ultimately, given my education in illustration, I came to see books and pictures and movies as being one continuum of story-telling. But this post has gone on long enough - I will leave that topic for later.

English Teachers Versus the Screen, Part 1

I got distracted in that last post! When I sat down at my computer, what I had intended to write about was the relationship between my highschool English teachers and, dun dun dun, the dreaded Screen.

I went to highschool in the nineties, and at the time, it was all the rage to bemoan the number of hours that children spent each day in front of the television. And the numbers were indeed scary: statistics were reporting that children were watching upwards of eight hours of television a day. While my own television habits weren’t that bad, if you tallied the time that the “idiot box” was on in my home, from early-morning news, to mealtime-watching, to late-night laugh-tracks, the second-hand screen-time may have added up to four hours a day, every single day. One-sixth of my life.

I was knowledgeable of the statistics back then - and why not? Those news shows certainly went on about them! And against this backdrop of shame, in a schedule that increasingly left me deprived of sleep, I had a growing awareness of the role television (and advertisements) played in depriving me of my life. And, increasingly, I rejected television, to the point that when I left for college, my screen time dropped away to almost nothing.

And against this backdrop of television, I continued to read, obsessively.

Sometimes my teachers had to tell me to stop reading under the desk. Yes, even my English teachers.

Anyway. . . Twice during my highschool experience I had English teachers make an impression on me regarding movies and television. The first was when one of them had a unit on movies. She brought in someone to talk to the class about editing decisions made in films. Woosh! That was the sound it made as the lesson went over my head. We were sent home with an assignment to watch a film and write about how it was edited. I chose Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and it was the first time I watched any movie without being lost in the movie. And, as far as I could tell, the experience was a failure: the one and only editing feature I was able to notice was an old-school wipe transition. I had to fudge quite a bit in my essay. And I was baffled as to what a movie had to do with English.

That assignment, at the time was a failure for me. But, but the very failure of the assignment made it memorable. And in remembering the experience, I was gradually awakened to the fact that there was another way to watch a movie, putting myself in a state of observation that was more active, deliberately looking for elements, deliberately listening to the writing of the dialog, deliberately not getting so engrossed in the action as to be blind to subtleties. Eventually, I would apply the lesson to books as well. Of all the subjects we touched on in that year of English, that was the one that had the most lasting effect. That may have been the three most profound things I learned in all of my English classes combined.

Stay tuned for part two!

Where English Class Failed

I was an avid reader as a kid, but I hated English class. I have done quite a bit of pondering, trying to figure out why. The obvious answer is that I was interested in different subject matter from what my teachers presented. I was reading Asimov, Heinlein, Tolkien, Card, and LeGuin, while in class it was Shakespeare and a parade of other fiction that lacked the adventure elements I craved. But even on the rare occasions when a teacher had us read science fiction, such as Childhood’s End, it was still a struggle to embrace the book against the stifling current of busywork that came along with it: journal-keeping, quizzes, discussion (being a quiet soul, this was painful for me), and the need to slow down my reading so as not to get ahead of the rest of the class.

But looking back now, I can also see that part of the problem was my inability to grok any sort of deeper meaning in literature. Despite my teacher’s best efforts, I wasn’t merely indifferent to sub-surface points being made in stories: I found the idea to be offensive! I wanted the stories I read to be as obvious as what was on the surface, and nothing more. I was not the “great reader” that I thought myself.

And I had one other tremendous flaw that my teachers were unable to rid me of: I assumed that the ideas in all books were correct.

Looking back now, I am relieved that I never picked up an Ayn Rand for fun. (I did have to read Anthem in one of my classes, and I could easily have taken to her longer works after that first taste.) It was bad enough that I read Heinlein’s dirty-old-man’s wish-fulfillment with nothing but a dumb nod of agreement at each turn of the page. I was naive. It had not yet occurred to me that I could disagree with an author’s politics. I swallowed up notions that were racist, sexist, and otherwise detrimental to humanity, and it was years before I began to question and reject those learnings.

I don’t know if my teachers neglected to teach that books could be wrong, or if their teaching came too late. Certainly I recall an endless stream of picture books in my early years which were never contradicted by adults. What they read to us was either just for fun (to encourage us to read) or openly didactic; but I can never recall a book being read to us that caused the adult reader to pause, and scowl, and then tell us that he or she disagreed with the author. I wonder if that is where the problem lay: the controversial books were left on the shelf when it came time for an adult to read to me.

But I do remember a time when, in the tenth grade, one of my classmates was scolded by the teacher for “being judgmental” about the life a particular character was leading. I wonder if, inadvertently, our teachers were teaching us not to think critically.

By the time I was reaching for novels, which was quite early, I had absolute free range in the library. But I lacked the tools to differentiate between a nourishing read and garbage.

The Trouble with Parents

Open any adventure book. Read the first few words. If we aren’t told in the first paragraph that the adolescent hero is living with an evil stepmother, then we may as well speculate in what manner one or both parents will be killed off, left behind, or kept out of the story. Because even if there are two parents at the outset, chances are there will only be one later, or none at all.

Our folk tales are full of young characters with mysterious parentage: the child of noble descent, raised by a stepmother or by wolves. Surprise! The unsuspecting youth is suddenly told that she has access to a privileged class or magical abilities, or she is the focus of a prophesy. Or perhaps all three! And what child doesn’t secretly long to be told that he isn’t as ordinary as he feels? It’s wish-fulfillment at its finest. Harry Potter, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, Tangled - this trope is so standard in fantasy stories that no effort is made to disguise it. The child-of-mysterious-parentage trope meshes so perfectly with the quest and Cinderella tropes that it is hard to find such a fantasy story for children in which the main character has mundane parents.

Even in science fiction, the trope persists. Incarnate: the main character’s father goes missing at her birth, and only returns at the end to reveal that he is the reason that she is not the reincarnation of another person, as everyone else in her society is. House of the Scorpion: the young protagonist is revealed to be the clone of a dictator, created as a source of spare organs. His parentage sets him up to take over as the next dictator. Cinder: in this retelling of Cinderella, the protagonist is revealed to be the missing heir to the moon, with psychic powers to boot, and rumors that serve as a science fiction stand-in for prophesy. The Giver: the kindly mentor figure turns out to be the real father, and the source of the protagonist’s ability to store and share the memories of others. And of course there is Star Wars.

An alternate use of parents in stories for children is emotional ammunition. The parents are built up as awesome, wonderful, compassionate protectors - and at a key moment the parent or parents are killed. The resulting emotional turmoil launches the protagonist into the story or moves the plot further along. Bambi, Percy and the Lightning Thief, the Lion King, Divergent, Frozen, Babar, Gathering Blue. Not to mention all of the stories in which the death occurred before the story began: Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, Harry Potter, the Thief, Delirium, the Hunger Games, and far too many others to mention. I suspect that this trope is used in large part because it is so easy. Not only does the author have one less character to write, and thus less conflict to arrange among secondary characters; but that it also immediately gives the young hero a depth of character that a happier and more sheltered child would not have.

Perhaps because death was seen as too traumatic a subject for young readers, children’s literature of a few decades past seems, outside of retellings of Brothers Grimm stories, to have shied away from using parents as disposable plot-impetus. It seemed more standard for parents in adventure stories to be treated as something for the young protagonist to venture away from, either voluntarily or involuntarily. Thus there are stories such as Alice in Wonderland; the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; My Father’s Dragon; and quite significantly in the picture book realm, Where the Wild Things Are. This trope continues to be used in more recent works of fiction aimed at a younger audience, such as Bartholomew Biddle and the Very Big Wind, Kiki’s Delivery Service, and Howl’s Moving Castle, but does pop up, as well, in stories intended for an older audience, such as the Legend of Korra and Ender’s Game.

The parents are removed from coming-of-age-tales because they would otherwise be in the way. These are stories about young people making their way in the world for the first time. They must be alone and unprotected in order to have an adventure and to experience self-discovery. It would be inappropriate for their parents to be hovering about, making the fictional world a less frightening place, especially considering that the audience of these stories is all-too-often kids who are dealing with helicopter parents at home. For these young readers, such coming-of-age tales are their introduction to life as an independent young adult. When overprotective parents are involved, a child needs stories of other children acting alone and triumphing against seemingly insurmountable odds, so that they can envision venturing forward themselves.

That said, it seems to me as if there is much room in children’s literature for more parental-character involvement without squelching the independence of the protagonist. It seems simply too trite to forever be doing away with the parents. As grown-up writers, we can do better than this. And some writers do.

Current stories for children that involve two parents for the duration of the story fall into two categories. By far the larger category involves parents who are there to provide conflict with the child. This arrangement is more typical in straight-up fiction, or historical fiction, such as the Evolution of Calpurnia Tate; Wringer; Monkey Town: the Evolution of the Scopes Trial; and Dead End in Norvelt. No doubt being freed from the structures of fantasy tropes leaves the author feeling more free to explore the complex relationships between parents and their children who are entering adulthood. These relationships can be rich enough to carry the story without having to resort to MacGuffins or FedEx quests or parental death.

But fantasy has its roots in such conflicts, too. One doesn’t have to look much farther than Hansel and Gretel to see parental conflict being central to a fantasy tale. Even though the story focuses on the witch and candy house adventure after the children have been abandoned by their parents, the element of conflict between the parents and children is vital to the story. And, like Hansel and Gretel, modern fantasy and science fiction stories that use parental conflict also tend to mix in other tropes, giving us powerful results such as Brave (in which Merida, fighting with her mother over her impending betrothal, turns her mother into a bear, and then searches for the way to turn her back), the Giver (the adoptive parents of Jonas come to represent the increasingly disturbing society), and Iron Hearted Violet (although Violet’s mother is killed in the story, her father continues to play an important role as he pines away and becomes a lousy leader, whom Violet must replace.)

Personally, of all the story examples here, I find these last three to be some of the strongest, because they make use of fantasy tropes in intelligent ways, instead of being dominated by them.

There is one other category of children’s adventure story that involves the parents, and it is a category in which I have had the most difficult time finding examples. In this case, the entire family is fighting some outside threat together. This category includes Swiss Family Robinson, in which the family is stranded on a tropical island and fights pirates together, and the Incredibles, in which family conflict over the use of their super powers drives the plot of the movie, but by the end the family has united against a common villain.

I suspect many writers don’t go with the entire-family-versus-enemy because it runs the risk of overshadowing the story of the star child with the adventures of the parents. I can see how a writer who is feeling intimidated at the thought of managing the additional characters might default to getting the parents out of the story. And much like the issue of action movies usually choosing to go with a male lead, the problem has less to to with any individual story, and more to do with the aggregate. In other words, it’s great that one story features a child who is surprised to learn that his father is a god, and in another the child receives an invitation to Hogwarts. What isn’t okay is that a child who focuses on the fantasy genre may find herself wishing wishing she were an orphan so that she could be gifted with magic powers or the keys to the kingdom. Rarely does a fantasy story demonstrate that hard work and quick thinking are sufficient tools to free a character from a bad situation, and rarely does a fantasy story demonstrate that working with one’s family, rather than fighting them or running away from them, can have a good outcome. The fantasy genre has spent decades obsessively focused on stories of individuals being individuals.

There is a fabulous essay entitled A Plea for Radical Children’s Literature, in the book Should We Burn Babar; Essays on Children’s Literature and the Power of Stories, by Herbert Kohl. This book should be required reading for anyone who wants to write stories for children. In his Plea for Radical Children’s Literature, Kohl makes the observation that children’s books are swamped with children characters who are overcoming repressive situations. Which on a book-by-book level is great - but Kohl points out that rarely do the the youngsters in these stories act as part of a movement to overturn a situation that is repressing an entire class of people. The young protagonists save only themselves, repositioning themselves higher in the same repressive social structure, while the larger problem remains unsolved.

I see the largely unused family-versus-outsiders trope as being a perfect vehicle for telling such a story. And indeed, his essay is twenty years old; surely by now there must be many examples of exactly this. The Incredibles would be one, as in the process of uniting their family and fending off the super-villain, the family helps to convince the larger society that “supers” should be allowed, once again, to openly fight villains. Another Pixar film, A Bug’s Life, is another example of individuals inspiring a repressed class - this time a colony of ants - to rebel.

In traditional science fiction and fantasy, there seems to be a growing trend of having the child character save herself in the first books of a trilogy, and then change the entire broken system as the conclusion of the series. This can be seen in Knight’s Age of Fire series, in which three dragons from the same nest to live their lives. The first two dragons save themselves, but it is the third dragon in the third book who changes an entire dragon society. In Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, a god is dethroned and a repressive religion is overthrown. The recent trend of dystopian novels seems to be all over this, starting with Katniss at the figurehead for the rebellion in the Hunger Games.

It looks like writers have taken up Kohl’s challenge. My next challenge for writers of children’s adventure stories would be to find more ways to our young adventurers to gain their independence without leaving their parents entirely behind. The fantasy genre, in particular, features enough rugged individualism. Our young, sheltered readers could use some reading material that shows them how to work within the structure of their families, forging alliances and exhibiting diplomacy and leadership with loved ones, instead of simply fighting with them and heading out to face the world alone.

Standard Adventure Tropes, and a Lack of Female Leads

I recently got myself into an argument with someone over gender roles in the Lego Movie. My acquaintance was of the opinion that the Lego Movie perpetuates the longstanding problem of not enough females in leading roles. I argued that as a parody, the Lego Movie was required to stick tightly to the tropes it was poking fun of.

But at the center of it, we agreed: women are perpetually under-represented in movies, and this lack of leading females is particularly harmful among the youngest audiences.

This leads directly to the the next issue: is parody even appropriate for the under-ten crowd?

But I’m going to set that discussion aside for now. I am not a writer of humor, so the issue isn’t a pressing one for me as a writer. What is of pressing interest to me are the tropes that lead to reoccurring problems in films and books, such as the perpetual under-representation of women and minority groups in stories for children.

First and foremost, there is the “three amigos” arrangement of characters. It looks like this. A lead male. Think Harry Potter, or Emmett. A female support character, frequently a bit of a killjoy: Hermione, or Wyldstyle. And a male support character, usually providing humor: Ron or Batman - and this character is often a child, animal, or imbecile. If the third character is old enough, then the three typically form a love triangle. Thus the Lego Movie Batman, who was both an idiot and part animal.

This core group is often expanded by the addition of a mentor figure, who drops in to push the plot along and often dies to further the plot - Dumbledore or Vitruvias. And frequently the group is expanded by additional comic or muscle characters, either as a permanent part of the group, an outsider who tags along for a bit, or someone who has defected from the villain’s team.

I recently picked up Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, and I was stunned to see this exact arrangement of characters once again trotted out in its mind-numbing predictability, down to the male sidekick being both humorous and part animal, the female support character acting as the group’s dour grown-up, and a mentor (Percy’s mother) who kicks the bucket to move the plot along.

Oh, and the plot. All the usual fantasy plot tropes are there. Percy is the innocent, young, dopey chosen one, who is an outcast character complete with mysterious parentage, a prophesy, magical ability, magic sword, nay-saying goodguy grownups, death and resurrection, scary monsters, and a trip to the land of the gods. There is a quest involving the discovery and transport of a MacGuffin. In the games industry we called that particular trope a “FedEx quest,” but thanks to the Lego Movie I will now always think of it as “put the thing on the thing.” Move over One Ring! Mt. Doom has nothing on the Piece of Resistance going on the Kragle.

After my head finished exploding from seeing these tropes laid out in Lightning Thief like lab specimens, without any apparent self-awareness or self-mockery, I did a quick survey of movies and books in related genres. I wanted to know what stories successfully escape the strangle-hold of these tropes, and how. Is it even possible to write a fantasy or science fiction story without these tropes of character and plot?

Exhibit A: the recent string of dystopian sci-fi with female protagonists: Divergent, Delirium, the Hunger Games, and others. Hooray! We are now seeing females in the lead roles!

The trope is still there, though: a triangle of characters, two boys and a girl in a love triangle, only now the girl is in the lead role.

Well, no, I take that back: in Delirium, there is a triad of characters, but there is no love triangle, and two of the characters are girls.

What else has changed? In the two D books, the main support character, now male, doubles as the mentor! This is an intriguing twist, albeit a little disturbing to have the older mentor also be the love interest. If nothing else, it is refreshing to see the main characters cut loose without any real adult supervision. It is also refreshing, in a sadistic way, to see the love interest kick the bucket.

In all three of these stories, the character structure is a little more open. Aside from the support characters and mentors, the other roles are left largely empty, with characters drifting in to fill the roles only occasionally.

Quest-wise, thank the gods of fiction, there is no put-the-thing-in-on-the-thing objective. No MacGuffin to deliver. Instead of the used-to-death trek to Mordor - all three plots involve an escape.

Given that there are probably a thousand books published for every movie, I see far more variation from these plot and character tropes in books. In the fantasy genre, I can think two examples that have managed to significantly shake up their dependency on tropes: the Thief, by Megan Whelan Turner, and Princess Academy, by Shannon Hale. I wouldn’t doubt that the avoidance of tropes has something to do with the fact that these are two of the only fantasy books in recent years to have been chosen as Newbury Honor books.

The Thief has a very typical gang of characters, albeit with no girls tagging along at all. It has a quest. But the twist? The main character is the captive of his mentor and supporters. For most of the story, his team is made up of antagonists. Only at the end is some other menacing personality substituted in as the ultimate villain.

Princess Academy belongs to an entirely different fantasy trope: Cinderella. This entire trope deserves its own essay, but suffice it to say, the protagonist of Princess Academy has a very different idea about what she wants in life, and she’s not about to let a trope get in her way.

As a way to combat the overuse of the three-character group and the quest, we could do worse than to see what writers have done with the Cinderella trope.

What the two Newbury books have in common, and what they share with the dystopian books I mentioned is that the protagonist spends a significant slice of the story alone, or in the company of hostile, indifferent, or otherwise unsupportive companions. Trope characters do appear at times, but their roles overlap, and rarely are they all united and traipsing together across the landscape on their way to Oz.

Much of this brings back memories of a particularly dark and adult sci-fi novel from a couple of decades back: the Real Story, by Stephan R. Donaldson. I recall in the preface of the book, the author spoke of his desire to write a trio of characters who change roles: the kidnapped female victim, who becomes the hero. The hero, who becomes the villain. And the villain, who becomes the victim. I believe it is this sort of focused use of tropes that makes an action story rise above its cookie-cutter brethren, and gives women and minorities more of a chance to be the lead character. While the movie industry may not be ready to think outside of the trope box, as a writer, I certainly should.