Stranger Than Fantasy Fiction

We are, you might have noticed, living through some very strange times. How do you cope with that if you are a writer of fantastical fiction?

Hell, I don't know how to cope with it as a critic. Or as a citizen.

Case in point: Earlier this year, there were reports of complaints about a promotion for the Amazon show "The Man in the High Castle." The series, loosely based on Philip K. Dick's novel of the same name, is set in an alternate reality where the Axis powers won World War II. To promote the series' second season, Amazon created a fake radio station it called "Resistance Radio." which purported to be a voice for the resistance heroes inside this fictional North America. Here, in our real America circa 2017, some Americans complained, because they thought when "Resistance Radio" made verbal attacks against fictional Nazis, it was actually attacking supporters of the current president. So yeah, they chose to identify with the Nazis in this fictional scenario.

Of course, in any such story of media outrage, it's important to ask: "How many people are we talking about?" An old journalistic adage states that three examples of anything counts as a trend. But do three examples of dumbassery on Twitter count as anything? We all know there are a lot of dumbasses on Twitter.

Strange times indeed. You can find any number of similarly bizarre stories involving the place of popular culture in our current political climate. In this post I want to talk a little about Harry Potter.

June marked the 20th anniversary of the U.K. publication of "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone." (It was published a year later in the United States under the title "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," because, the story goes, the publishers thought Americans wouldn't buy it if they thought it was about philosophy. Sigh ...) Facebook marked the occasion with a cool little feature and suddenly my social media feed was all about which house the Sorting Hat would put us in.

The Harry Potter books and movies are about as close to being universally beloved as anything in pop culture can be in our deeply divided and niche-marketed age. It's natural for us to see ourselves in the stories we love, and to see the stories we love reflected in our real world. It's natural, too, for writers to do the same. If you want to boost your click count, it's also a good idea to frame your article about a beloved franchise.

And so, of course, political writers weighed in, finding parallels between the fictional world of Harry Potter and our own Muggleworld. With a little Googling, you can find dozens of articles along the lines of "15 Social Justice Organizing Lessons From Harry Potter." And now you can find articles about how Potter fans say Jeremy Corbyn is a Gryffindor and Theresa May is a Slytherin.

A liberal viewpoint is baked into the Harry Potter stories, not just because of anything J.K. Rowling or Emma Watson say on Twitter or before the United Nations, but because it's right there in the books. It's hard to miss the parallels to racism and classism in Draco Malfoy's hatred of "mudbloods" or Voldemort's plot to subjugate mortals. Rowling portrays the Ministry of Magic as a frustrating bureaucracy hampered by the egos of its leaders, but her criticism never rises to the level of advocating for its overthrow. Rather, she seems to suggest that the system just needs leaders who are more honorable.

(Yikes. I just had a scary thought. Our current president isn't the equivalent of an evil genius like Voldemort, but of a Cornelius Fudge, a guy whose ego and incompetence leave our government vulnerable to a future attack by Voldemort. Yikes again.)

The liberalism of Harry Potter is frustrating to liberalism's critics on the left and the right. Here's someone in the socialist Jacobin arguing that, despite Rowling's doubts about him, "Corbyn is Dumbledore." Here's someone in the conservative Spectator arguing that Rowling's good vs. evil structure has rendered Millennials unable to see nuance in politics. And here's one of the New York Times' conservative opinion writers saying that the Wizard/Muggle dynamic of the books makes them unsuitable models for real-world politics.

I know, right? It's too bad that the Harry Potter books were the first children's stories in the history of humanity to portray a struggle between good and pure evil, but I guess someone had to go first.

Is there a word for this phenomenon yet? "Pottersplaining," maybe? "Mugglesplaining"? Whatever you call it, I'm getting tired of it.

Some months ago on this blog, I intended to write a critique of last year's Rowling-penned film "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them," in which I'd point out that the movie's political messages (we all noticed the allusions to gay conversion therapy, didn't we?) get a little muddled and self-contradictory. I was going to compare it to the animated Disney movie "Zootopia," which alludes to racism in a way that gets more awkward the more you look into it. In fact, I wrote many paragraphs on this subject, and then I deleted everything.

Why did I delete it? Because I remembered that, although fantasy stories can help us make sense of our places in the real world, that isn't their job.

There's a quote that often gets tossed around in memes on the Internet that reads:

"Fantasy fiction is escapist. That is its glory."

I have seen it attributed to J.R.R. Tolkien, and it kinda sounds like an opinion he held, but apparently it comes from Ursula K. LeGuin.

Anyway, she has point. We all need escapism sometimes -- maybe especially in strange times like these. But fantasy isn't only escapism. If you take strength from the story of Dumbledore's Army, good for you! If you take strength from the story of the friendship between the bunny Officer Judy Hops and the streetwise fox Nick Wilde, that's great. You know what parts of those stories apply to your life and which parts don't.If you take strength from Harry Potter, "Zootopia," "The Lord of the Rings," etc., and apply that strength to the real world, that strength is real.

That said, if you don't realize that the Nazis are the bad guys in "The Man in the High Castle," and in real life, you need to read some nonfiction, pronto.