Today's post comes to you from the Odd Bedfellows department.
Okay, so all of you probably know all about the Harry Potter series. Kid finds out he's a wizard, gets an invitation to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, has a variety of adventures while under the tutelage of Albus Dumbledore, and eventually duels with and kills the evil Lord Voldemort. The series is beloved by some, criticized by others (especially for Dumbledore's repeated cavalier attitude toward putting the child he's supposed to be protecting into situations where he could get killed), and rejected completely by an increasing number because of its racist tropes and author J. K. Rowling's vicious homophobia and transphobia.
You may also be aware of the fact that ever since the publication of the first book in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, in 1997, the entire concept has been under attack by evangelical Christians. It's all about magic, celebrates witches and wizards, and never portrays any of the characters as believing in God. With regards to the last-mentioned, the omission is as good as an admission; the Harry Potter series isn't just non-Christian, they say, it's anti-Christian, and inspired by Satan. Because of this, the books are frequently featured in book bans and book burnings.
It was bad enough that when the staunchly conservative Reader's Digest interviewed Rowling shortly after the skyrocketing success of her first book, they were inundated by irate letters to the editor. One of the ones they printed said -- this is from memory, so it's just the gist -- "I am outraged that you would publish an interview with J. K. Rowling. Her book has led to a million innocent children being baptized into the Church of Satan. I know this because I read it in an article in The Onion." The editor, showing remarkable restraint, responded, "You might want to be aware that The Onion is a satirical news source. Its articles are meant for humorous effect only and should not be taken literally."
As you might imagine, this had little effect on the evangelicals, who went right on screeching about how evil Harry Potter is, ad nauseam. Then, in 2014, one of them, a woman named Grace Ann Parsons, decided to take matters into her own hands.
She rewrote the story, as... um... anti-fan-fic. The result was called Hogwarts School of Prayer and Miracles. Hogwarts is recast as a Christian school run by Dumbledore -- and his wife Minerva McGonigall and daughter Hermione. Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia are evil atheists who have hidden from Harry that his parents were Christian martyrs. But Hagrid, an evangelical missionary, finds Harry, tells him the sad story, and converts him to Christianity. Voldemort is there, doing his evil work -- to make Christianity illegal. The Good Female Students are always subservient to the men; the Bad Female Students are the ones who speak up and/or have talents outside of cooking, sewing, and cleaning. The four "houses" -- Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff, and Ravenclaw -- represent four different sects of Christianity, with Slytherin being intended to represent Catholics.
Oh, and there's a bunch of stuff about how Voldemort loves Barack Obama.
Well, the whole thing went viral, both amongst true believers and people who found it funny. It even attracted the attention of book reviewer Chris Ostendorf of The Daily Dot, who said the writing style was so bad it "makes E. L. James [of Fifty Shades of Grey fame] look like Shakespeare."
But the reason this comes up today is that I just found out that Hogwarts School of Prayer and Miracles has recently been turned into a comedic stage play.
I'm not entirely sure what to think of this.
It's not like Hogwarts School of Prayer and Miracles was satire from the outset, the way Trey Parker and Matt Stone's musical The Book of Mormon was. At least most people don't think so. There are a few who believe that Grace Ann Parsons never existed, and the whole thing was written to be deliberately and laughably bad. But the majority of the folks who've expressed an opinion seem to think that Parsons was honestly trying to create something that would have the draw of Harry Potter, but sanctified.
And if that's the case, isn't turning her work into a stage play that's meant solely to mock kind of... I dunno, mean-spirited?
Don't get me wrong; I think the evangelicals are largely a bunch of dangerous loonies, and their book bans, book burnings, and lobbying for censorship are horrible. At the same time, I'm no fan of Rowling either. Not only is her anti-trans work horrifying, just taken on their own merits the Harry Potter books are far from perfect, with numerous plot holes, some big enough fly a Thestral through. (My opinion is if you want to read some good fiction with the Chosen One trope, Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea trilogy and Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain beat Harry Potter by a country mile.)
I'm also not arguing against satire, here. Well-aimed satire -- such as the recent torching of Donald Trump and his sycophantic toadies on South Park -- is a time-honored way of pointing out the flaws of the powerful. But good satire always does what I call "punching upward." It's David-versus-Goliath. The ridiculing of Parsons's book, on the other hand, is punching downward.
Better known as bullying.
I'm reminded of the sickening nastiness surrounding the novel The Eye of Argon, by Jim Theis. Argon was written when Theis was sixteen, and was published in the Ozark Science Fiction Association's fanzine the following year. It was picked up and publicized in the 1970s as the Worst Science Fiction Novel Ever Written, and excerpts were read aloud at science fiction conventions to gales of uproarious laughter, and even republished in magazines. Fifty years later, it's still happening. It has become a party game -- people take turns reading excerpts, and are eliminated from the game if they laugh.
All this derision, aimed toward a novel written by someone who was sixteen years old.
And the sad postscript is that Theis was interviewed in 1984, and described how hurt he was by all the ridicule -- and stated, unequivocally, that he would never write again. And he didn't. He died in 2002 at the young age of 49, determined never to expose himself like that again.
How fucking sad is that?
And ask any writer, and you know what? Every damn one of us will corroborate that we were all writing complete tripe when we were teenagers. Many of us, myself included, wrote tripe well beyond that. (There's a reason that there are no extant copies of anything I wrote before the age of thirty-five.) They'll all also confirm that when we write, we're at our most vulnerable, showing our hearts and souls, and that nasty critiques sting like hell. I still remember a "friend" telling me, after reading the first two chapters of a manuscript, that it was "somewhere between a computer crash and a train wreck." Because of that, I abandoned the story for years, but unlike poor Theis, I did eventually come back to it -- it became my novel The Hand of the Hunter.
Yes, as creators, we need to be able to withstand some criticism. Well-meaning and intelligent critiques are one of the main ways we learn to improve, and I have really valued the input of the editors I've worked with over the years (as hard as it is sometimes to hear that My Baby isn't perfection itself, as-is). But singling out a work simply to laugh at it isn't helpful, it isn't productive, and it isn't kind.
And I'm in agreement with the Twelfth Doctor on this point.
Anyhow, let's be careful who we choose to target with our laughter, okay? Satire, sarcasm, and ridicule are edged tools, and they can leave lasting marks. Use them with care, and if you're not sure, don't use them at all. We humans are fragile creatures, and too damn many artists, authors, musicians, dancers, and other creatives have been turned away from a lifetime of self-expression by an ill-timed nasty comment.
Ask yourself if you want to be the reason someone gives up on creativity forever.
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