What Cuts Down Heroic Children?
I do this thing on Twitter where a few times a week, I update a long-running piece of fan fiction I call Modern Day Harry Potter (#mdhp). Originally, I started it because I often found myself wondering how much of a trashfire Hermione and Ron’s marriage would be by the time they got to be my age, which was then 29. Being at least half as intellectually obnoxious as Hermione, I know how tedious it is to live with myself. There’s no way Ron has the fortitude necessary to survive it.
When the last book came out, I resented that the epilogue of Harry Potter ended on a note of placid serenity. And the older I became, the more I would realize why I resented it.
I was a heroic child, at least according to the narratives we tell ourselves about kids who come out of American poverty. I sacrificed a lot of happiness to work all the time to overcome the disadvantages of my birth. I was consumed by the injustice of my situation and my inflamed sense of wrong propelled me into college and eventually into graduate school. This is the heroic thing to do, I was told. And I believed it.
I am fucking livid today knowing how many kids like me have had their heroism co-opted by the lie of meritocracy so that rich kids’ educational credentials could be legitimized and rich parents could feel like their parenting wasn’t a complete waste of time. And for all their trouble and self-sacrifice, poor kids leave college with a degree the rest of society insists is useless, debt they’ll never pay off and self-righteous millionaires telling them they should have started a company instead. So I have some idea of what cuts down poor heroic children in their prime.
But what of the others? Where are the other heroic children who promised such heroic adulthoods? Where have they gone? What are they doing? What is their heroism?
As a Millennial, I think these are the questions we should be asking ourselves. I am deluded, perhaps, in thinking there are others like me asking themselves: what stopped me?
So I thought, you know what? Hermione Granger was an iconic Millennial character who was pregnant with heroic promise. What’d she be up to these days?
And from that idea spun out to what has evolved into my one weirdest side projects.
Children aren’t often thought of as having political dimensionality. While Harry Potter characters think about right and wrong, what’s wrong is still plainly Voldemort and his Deatheaters are comically evil. We never know if Harry Potter would grow up to vote for Labor or if Hermione would figure out how to use magic to dismantle muggle inequality. The story stops after the obvious wrong is killed, leaving them only the less obvious wrongs to discover.
It’s not easy to be heroic in your twenties. No one tells you how to do it. There’s nothing about being intrinsically brave, courageous or intelligent that will point you to where the enemy is sleeping. The enemy is everywhere and in everything. To think about vanquishing real-life evil is overwhelming and requires understanding complicated systems of hegemony, ideology and obfuscation. It means making sacrifices when your peers are buying houses and your parents worry you’re going to die homeless.
Many of us have long given up, resigning to a life of Netflix until we’re 30, finding ourselves again at another Presidential crossroads, electing our moral proxy so that we need not think about evil again for another four years.
Something in the twenties cuts down heroic children. By the time they are my age, they are no longer seeking evil. Maybe it’s the media’s insistence of talking down to Millennials as if they are ignorant children. Maybe it has something to do with politicians becoming utterly incapable of empathizing with the issues affecting the youth because the youth can’t afford to donate thousands to their political action committees. Maybe it has to something to do with the miserable lack of heroes in the Boomer generation worth emulating.
Who knows? Could be anything.
But reflecting on Young Adult literature as a genre, it’s interesting to me how few opportunities allow readers to follow a character through their entire moral development from heroic childhood to heroic adulthood. A singular exception, I think, is Anne of Green Gables, which as a series follows Anne and her future husband Gilbert from their origin story in a one-room school house on Prince Edward Island to college and beyond without skipping over the crises they suffer in between to hasten their “THEY GET MARRIED AND HAVE A BABY!” ending.
The quiet Canadian saga is hardly epic fantasy and they don’t slay any Canadian dragons, but the mark the duo make together on their community is profound. They are recognized as heroes, citizens who are both known for sacrificing themselves and opportunities to enrich others.
There’s no couple in literature I adore more than Anne Shirley and Gilbert Blythe. There are few fictional couples I can draw on who better epitomize the concept of moral development in literature. Their story doesn’t fade to black right at the moment morality becomes a mess. They fuck up. They find each other again. Turns out staying heroic into adulthood is hard.
But growing up with Anne and Gilbert, at least, I knew growing up would be hard. No one on PEI knew what to tell them. They had to do it themselves.
And so I find myself wondering who is writing the Millennial Anne Shirley?
It’s not clear to me what a heroic Millennial would be like in 2016. We are a generation who had our icons chosen for us by venture capitalists whose moral judgment I continually find so problematic it inspires me to write bad poetry. Johnetta Elzie and DeRay Mckesson stand out as heroes to me but who else among us is performing this heroism?
So many of my peers promised colleges in their admissions essays that they were going to one day change the world. Where are they now?
Where are all the Hermione Grangers?
Modern Day Harry Potter started out like many of my side projects as a lark. Harry Potter was never the most exceptional wizard in his cohort — obviously that honor falls to Hermione, who did virtually everything he ever did but while also studying everything the pair ever needed to know. No, if anyone was going to make for a compelling adulthood, it was going to be Hermione. Harry was chosen. Hermione was self-made.
So if Hermione is conscious and attentive by nature, where is she going after Voldemort? Where does Hermione go?
In my story, I’m not nice to Ron. I have projected onto Ron every bad relationship I have had in my twenties. I see in him the kind of man who is very contented in his role as the human derivative of reflected glory. In most stories, if the genders were swapped and Ron were the wife, maybe their crisis would have been resolved since women in most stories eat shit and serve smiles. But there’s no way Ron is going to support Hermione’s emotionally complicated hero journey. Voldemort is dead, he thinks, why can’t we relax and be happy? Have kids, buy a house and install a home theater?
Ron would not pacify Anne Shirley. And Ron certainly would not satisfy Hermione Granger. And being married to an angry Hermione would drive any mortal man to alcoholism.
And so my story finds Hermione tumbling out of a failed marriage into a world chock full of shitheads.
But I didn’t stop with Hermione. Most girls aren’t raised to be Hermione Granger. We are raised to be wives, supportive of men whose ambitions we cater to at expense of our own. We exist to accessorize the hero. Femininity is, essentially, making one’s self an object of reflected glory. And so in thinking about Ginny Weasley, I have reflected on what I think cuts down many heroic girls.
For their part, Harry and Ginny find themselves years deep in a sexless marriage. Harry, at 30, is bored and fixated, now, on the newly divorced Hermione Granger. To him, she is fascinating because unlike himself, she remains on her hero’s journey. In contrast to Ginny, who eats shit and serves smiles, Hermione is Rhiannon.
To make my love triangle complete, I introduce George Weasley as the wizarding world’s Gilbert Blythe, himself a refugee of romantic catastrophe and as hopelessly lost in his thirties as the rest of them. He and Hermione can’t help but find each other because they are reeling from the same wretched agony.
I’ve had a lot of fun fucking with these characters this year. Yes, it’s fan fiction. Yes, it’s fan fiction I write on Twitter. Yes, it’s fan fiction about Harry Potter I write on Twitter. But through fan fiction, I have asked myself a lot of questions about love, revolution and what heroism looks like for an overeducated, hyperarticulate 30-year-old woman whose heroism has gotten stuck somewhere.
Which is, incidentally, right where I find myself.
What cuts down heroic children? I think this is the question Millennials need to be asking themselves. We all had in us sparks of brilliance and energy that we lost to something in our twenties. It’s not too late to figure this out, but we won’t figure it out unless we at least acknowledge this much.
The Boomers revel in telling us that we’re entitled and spoiled, projecting decades of their own bourgeoisie indulgences onto us like we’re stupid enough to fall for it. But if they can’t be relied on as role models, it befalls to us to become our own saviors.
We can do better.
We have to do better.
My friends constantly ask me where Hermione Granger and George Weasley are going. Their romance has become the object of speculation and I often get text messages from friends asking me if they’ll just “do it” already.
“Do what?” I ask, knowing what they mean but rejecting its facility.
I don’t know what they will do.
After spending a year with these characters, I am asking myself their questions. They are fragments of myself, brilliant, lost, broken and confused.
But even asking yourself what heroism is in 2016 is antisystem. The system we live in doesn’t celebrate heroism in the making. Instead, the system tells us to make as much money as possible and then declares the disgustingly rich heroic.
Changing the world for the better means redefining heroism. It means writing new hero narratives.
And I think the question we should be asking isn’t what makes a hero, but rather, what cuts down the heroic child?
And if that’s the question we start with, where does it end?
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Also by Holly Wood on Medium:
On Jessica Jones, Netflix and the Utility of Trigger Warnings
The Difference Between Self-Esteem and Self-Compassion
Why All Colleges Need Safe Spaces and Why Richard Dawkins is a Monster Coated in Garbage Sauce
Ego: The Neoliberal Limit of Innate Compassion
What are America’s White Men Trying to Tell Us?
How America Became Too Great a Nation to Shelter War Orphans
Damn Right Amazon Runs a Fucking Deficit and So Should America
