Just wondering...

[graculus]

As people who read my journal regularly will probably know, my recs pages have been taken over by Harry Potter recs, mostly because that's the fandom I'm reading the most in recently - while there's some hideously bad fic out there, the pairings I like don't seem to be too bad and there are some writers out there who turn out story after story I really like. But this post isn't about that... ;)

Recently, there's been the latest couple of stories in a series of Harry Potter fics posted where the first story begins with one of the protagonists being at the World Trade Centre on 9/11. They're well-written fic, on the whole, so the issue is not that, it's just that when I was re-reading the original fic when the second was recently completed, I'd forgotten quite how it made me feel the first time around and why I hadn't recced it back then.

For me, even as an observer, not directly affected by the effects of 9/11 any more than the average person in the street, it felt wrong somehow. Not because it took the whole subject lightly or casually (which it didn't) or that it used it as a plot device to get the protagonists together (which it didn't, or at least not directly) but it just felt like an event that was too important to use in that way, as if involving it in fic somehow trivialised it. I'm not sure I'm explaining myself very well...

Would I feel the same way about fic involving the many godawful things I've seen in my lifetime alone (the Boxing Day tsunami, the IRA bomb campaigns, Lockerbie, Hungerford, Hillsborough, the recent London Underground bombs, to name just a few)? I don't know. Are there things we shouldn't use this way? And if so, why not? Is where we draw the line different for fic?

Comments

[emony.livejournal.com]

It's very interesting. I read an HP fic recently which was about the London bombings. I really wasn't sure, before I read it, if it was going to upset me or just seem wrong. I'm still not entirely sure whether it was right, and I've no idea how you would draw a line between acceptable and unacceptable integration of real events of this nature in fic. I suppose I'd see it as a way for the author, and also maybe the reader, to work through some feelings about the events at a slightly removed distance. I found the footage of the London bombings extremely harrowing and very difficult to see, but it was the fic that really made me cry over the human loss that had occurred in real life.

I also saw that programme on BBC2, The Rotters Club (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0426367/), when it was on a year or so ago, one part of which involved the boyfriend of the main character's sister being killed in the Birmingham pub bombings. It's the same sort of thing really, I think, providing an access point to a subject that might otherwise be difficult for the reader or viewer to fully process. I know that with that programme, and with the fic too, part of my reaction was seeing the pain that those characters were going through, but part of it was also recognising the real pain that people went through when their lives were destroyed in those, and other, events. The Birmingham bombings, for example - my parents were living in Birmingham at the time. They could've both been killed. It was something fairly abstract until I saw that dramatised version of the events. Then it became something real.

I don't think I'm explaining very well. But I think absorbing real events into fictional situations can be a way for viewers or readers to access the events on a different level. As long as they can maintain the distance to realise that the events within the fic are not themselves real, and as long as the subject is very sensitively handled, I think it can be okay.

[graculus.livejournal.com]

I'm still not entirely sure whether it was right, and I've no idea how you would draw a line between acceptable and unacceptable integration of real events of this nature in fic.

I think it's easier to say what's completely unacceptable than what's borderline, which to me would be things like the use of disaster as a flimsy plot device to get character A and character B shagging. It would probably depend on the talent of the author in question as to how contrived a disaster backdrop appears, I guess...

But I think absorbing real events into fictional situations can be a way for viewers or readers to access the events on a different level.

There's certainly been a long tradition within fic of using stories as therapy of a sort, though again this can be kind of awkward and unsettling for the audience. It's the kind of thing that (for me) begs the question 'okay, so it was good for *you* but does that necessarily mean you need to share it with everyone else?'.