For Christmas this year, the same as every other Christmas, I received a lot of books. Apart from ‘One Day’ by David Nicholls, they’re all Young Adult Fantasy novels. I know already that I will write Young Adult fiction with a hint of fantasy and romance. I know this because these are the stories I enjoy reading. As you can imagine, I’ve read a lot of this genre and so in this blog I thought I’d write about something, within this genre, that interests me, and today that is the Young Adult fantasy hero/heroine.
Though this blog entry is focused on the Young Adult Fantasy hero, I believe this also applies to the hero of the Fantasy genre as a whole. In my opinion, the hero is the key to making the story work. In YA Fantasy the hero’s journey is so much more intense and epic compared to those in other genres that if you dislike the hero, you’ll put the book down instantly. I believe that in order for us to care about the hero first we need his world to be created and established. So many fantasy novels start with a big life changing moment (a bang) which might work if we were watching a film, but in the case of the novel it has the opposite effect. We don’t really care if our hero’s father died on page one because we haven’t known either character before this event and have no connection with them. So instead we have to wade through pages of the hero whining over their dead father, which is great in terms of character because most of us would be upset if our dad died, but for us as a reader it gets very boring, very quickly.
The way it should be done: ‘Harry Potter’ by JK Rowling. We enjoy Harry as a character for a few chapters at the beginning of the first book and slowly get to know about his past, whilst being given enough questions and information to keep us entertained and interested. Then suddenly we find out he’s a wizard and this is exciting because by this point we feel like we know Harry, and we know he deserved it, and we know this is his chance to go on an adventure and leave the Dursley’s; so we want this as much as he does. J K Rowling has invested time in the first few chapters allowing us time to get to know Harry and so when the journey begins we want to follow Harry to the end. If she’d started with Harry being told he was a wizard, would we really care enough about him to want to follow him to Hogwarts?
The way it shouldn’t be done: ‘Evermore’ by Alyson Noel. The story starts with the heroine, Ever, starting a new school, as she’s just moved in with her Aunty because her Mum, Dad and sister died in a car crash, that she survived. Though we know Ever is upset over her family’s death (as it is mentioned in the text), we’re not given any flashbacks or even prologue of her life before the accident, so we don’t really feel sorry that three people we didn’t know are dead. I think that the fact that her dead sister haunts her bedroom might have been the author trying to make us care about the sister as a character, instead it’s just an odd distraction from the plot, but don’t get me started on that. When Ever is moaning and crying over her dead family, we are unable to find out anything about her as a character, so we’re forced to stereotype her into the role that seems to fit her best, and that is the role of the victim, which for me, is why I stopped reading the story less than half way in.
I hate victims. A victim is not a hero. In YA Fantasy, the victim is someone who constantly moans and cries over how bad their life is and doesn’t do anything about it. The hero should be someone who might lack confidence in their abilities at the beginning but grows from each up and down they experience, and become stronger from it. They might not be smart or powerful, but they’ve reached a point of development that makes us know they’re ready to face whatever obstacle they have in their way. Bella from ‘Twilight’, by Stephenie Meyer, is a good example. When she’s being attacked by Vampires she doesn’t get through the situation alone, sometimes it’s pure luck or because someone stronger or more experienced has helped her, like Harry in ‘Harry Potter’, but she never sits down and cries about it. Bella lets herself learn from the experience and it changes her. She doesn’t wallow in pity (except of course when Edward leaves in New Moon). It’s okay for someone to be unwilling to be the hero to begin with but they must embrace it in the end, whether or not they want to.
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