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

[mer1973.livejournal.com]

I can see that. It is uncomfortable to read about 9/11 in a fic, and unless I really trusted the author, I'd probably pass a story like that by. That said, people have been issues fiction to work out their issues for ages. Some of it is legitmate self-therapy, some of it wanking, and some of it the mental equivalant of cutting. I really don't know where the line is.

[graculus.livejournal.com]

It is uncomfortable to read about 9/11 in a fic, and unless I really trusted the author, I'd probably pass a story like that by.

I went back to re-read the first story when the second one was finished mostly because I couldn't remember too much about the first story - a second time around I found it even more unsettling than I remembered my first encounter with it being.

Perhaps in this case it's because it's quite well-written that my feeling was not of exploitation (which would have been the case if it was cheapened by being used as a plot device) but more a feeling that those characters just shouldn't be there.