Narnia Recap: In which Lucy and Edmund Pevensie are pulled into Narnia through a picture on the wall, along with their annoying cousin Eustace Scrubb. Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Chapter 1: The Picture in the Bedroom
Ana's Note: Today's post is a short one, because I'm composing this whilst battling some kind of cold/flu. Consider this interesting filler material.
I'm reading Terry Pratchett's Hogfather because while I'm not really sold on the Discworld series as a whole (I tend to avoid franchises with 30+ books, for reasons that I've never bothered to adequately suss out), I saw the movie and found it utterly delightful. Furthermore, it's getting nippy weather here finally and since I tend to find A Christmas Carol depressing, I can't bear It's a Wonderful Life, and I don't care for A Charlie Brown Christmas, that means that if I want yuletide entertainment, I have to reach for something a little non-traditional. And Hogfather fits that bill.
For those who haven't read the book, Hogfather takes place in Pratchett's alternate/fantasy universe where Christmas is represented by something called "Hogswatch" and where a big piggy fat man in red robes delivers presents to children while riding on a sleigh pulled by four giant boars. On this particular Hogswatch in question, a nefarious group is trying to erase children's belief in the Hogfather, and so the personification of Death has to step in and pretend to be the Hogfather in order to buy his granddaughter Susan time to make things right. And I think that's really all you need to know in order to read this post.
So I'm reading Hogfather as innocent as you please and who do I find in the smack middle of the book but Eustace Clarence Scrubb:
The boy gave the Hogfather an appraising stare as he sat down on the official knee.
“Let’s be absolutely clear. I know you’re just someone dressed up,” he said. “The Hogfather is a biological and temporal impossibility. I hope we understand one another.”
AH. SO I DON’T EXIST?
“Correct. This is just a bit of seasonal frippery and, I may say, rampantly commercial. My mother’s already bought my presents. I instructed her as to the right ones, of course. She often gets things wrong.”
The Hogfather glanced briefly at the smiling, worried image of maternal ineffectiveness hovering nearby.
HOW OLD ARE YOU, BOY?
The child rolled his eyes. “You’re not supposed to say that,” he said. “I have done this before, you know. You have to start by asking me my name.”
AARON FIDGET, “THE PINES,” EDGEWAY ROAD, ANKH-MORPORK.
“I expect someone told you,” said Aaron. “I expect these people dressed up as pixies get the information from the mothers.”
AND YOU ARE EIGHT, GOING ON…OH, ABOUT FORTY-FIVE, said the Hogfather.
“There’s forms to fill in when they pay, I expect,” said Aaron.
AND YOU WANT WALNUT’S INOFFENSIVE REPTILES OF THE STO PLAINS, A DISPLAY CABINET, A COLLECTOR’S ALBUM, A KILLING JAR AND A LIZARD PRESS. WHAT IS A LIZARD PRESS?
“You can’t glue them in when they’re still fat, or didn’t you know that? I expect she told you about them when I was momentarily distracted by the display of pencils. Look, shall we end this charade? Just give me my orange and we’ll say no more about it.”
I CAN GIVE FAR MORE THAN ORANGES.
“Yes, yes, I saw all that. Probably done in collusion with accomplices to attract gullible customers. Oh dear, you’ve even got a false beard. By the way, old chap, did you know that your pig—”
YES.
“All done by mirrors and string and pipes, I expect. It all looked very artificial to me.”
The Hogfather snapped his fingers.
“That’s probably a signal, I expect,” said the boy, getting down. “Thank you very much.”
HAPPY HOGSWATCH, said the Hogfather as the boy walked away.
Uncle Heavy patted him on the shoulder.
“Well done, master,” he said. “Very patient. I’d have given him a clonk athwart the ear hole, myself.”
OH, I’M SURE HE’LL SEE THE ERROR OF HIS WAYS. The red hood turned so that only Albert could see into its depths. RIGHT AROUND THE TIME HE OPENS THOSE BOXES HIS MOTHER WAS CARRYING…
HO. HO. HO.
His name is Aaron, not Eustace, and he doesn't call his mother by her first name, but the boys fit on all other points. Aaron is intelligent to the point of being what we might call a "know-it-all", he doesn't believe in magic or the supernatural, and he's interested in non-fiction books, dead animals, and banal things like fresh pencils.
I don't think -- and here is where all you Pratchett fans can jump into the comments with links if I'm wrong -- that Aaron is a deliberate homage to Eustace. I think that the trope of the Eustace-esque boy is so common that it's tremendously easy to write a Eustace without even having to realize that's what one is doing. But what I still don't fully understand is: what is the sin of boys like Eustace and Aaron?
Because Eustace and Aaron are sinners in a literary sense. Eustace will have to be redeemed through his ordeal with the dragon in order to become a proper protagonist; Aaron will be punished for his non-belief by having his expensive and asked-for presents turned into socks (the Pratchett equivalent of coal in the stocking) by the magic of Hogswatch. But what isn't clear is what specific sin is the reason for these retributions.
Looking at Aaron for a moment, we might speculate that his sin is his disrespect for his mother. He states that he has to make sure she gets the right presents, because she often gets these things wrong. Yet having disrespect for his mother be Aaron's sin doesn't really scan; Death assesses the woman in an equally disrespectful manner, judging her in highly dismissive language to be a "worried image of maternal ineffectiveness". Nor would I consider Hogfather to be a feminist text: there is one front-and-center female character in this book out of a cast of over a dozen main characters. Any other women briefly mentioned in the text are fit into unflattering stereotypes -- the Social Climber, the Silly Governess, the Mannish Mother, the Deliberately Frail Man-trap, etc. -- and our one female character spends a great deal of her inner monologue expressing strong dislike of all other women. So I don't think Aaron's sin is meant to be sexism.
It's possible that the sin of Aaron and Eustace are sins of banality: they prefer dead animals to living ones, non-fiction to fantasy, and pencils and journals to proper pastimes. The issue here isn't, I think, that they are cruel -- though mounting bugs on pins and lizards on paper isn't particularly humane -- but rather that they are more interested in dullness and static things than in the wonderful world of living and vibrant experiences. The problem here, though, the war of Non-fiction against Fantasy, is that the people writing the Eustaces and the Aarons are not remotely unbiased. Having a fantasy fiction author rail against those children who perversely prefer non-fiction to fantasy -- indeed, even to such wonderful fantasy which can be found at your nearest local retailer, ask for "Narnia" and "Discworld" by name, local taxes may apply, etc. -- is not convincing to me as a reader. Though I may be in the Fantasy Is Good camp by virtue of reading said fantasy, I'm not automatically therefore in the Non-Fiction Is Bad camp.
And funnily enough, I think Pratchett at least gets that. Aaron Fidget, lover of the banal, may be a sinner, but Ponder Stibbons, who prefers his somewhat-mundane computer Hex to the magical world of the wizard's university is presented as a mostly sympathetic character. He recognizes that he, much like Aaron and Eustace, was intolerable (to certain persons) as a child, but there's no suggestion in the text that he needs to change or be something different as an adult. And adult!Ponder really drives home another problem with child!Aaron and child!Eustace, which is this: though Aaron and Eustace are presented as "bratty" and "bullying", it seems to me that they'd be far more likely to be the target of bullies rather than the companion of bullies.
Aaron and Eustace are different. They read non-fiction, and they collect dead animals. They act in ways that seem disrespectful to adults (such as Eustace calling his parents by their first name), but in an Othering and different sort of way rather than in a too-cool-for-school kind of way. They lack social skills, and alienate almost everyone they meet with their know-it-all attitude. They're intelligent, but in the sort of way that would make them a target for bullies, the sort of way that Madeline L'Engle recognized that her Charles Wallace would be bullied when she made him enjoy reading physics textbooks and biology dissertations. Indeed, Aaron and Eustace seem like they would be the classic geek-insert-figure for the sorts of self-identified geeks reading these same books, were it not for the one detail that they don't believe in the fantastical -- or, at least, they don't believe in the fantastical whilst living in a fantastical world.
And perhaps it is non-belief that is the sin of Aaron and Eustace. They've been born -- or plunked down in -- an Obviously Magical World, but they're too dull, underneath all their outward intelligence, to see what is perfectly plain to the reader. And yet. Aaron Fidget isn't wrong to say that Hogswatch is more commercial than magical: five minutes before Death burst onto the scene, the store's fake Hogfather display was operating with commercial gain in mind. Nor is Aaron wrong to say that the Hogswatch display isn't genuinely real: Death may be providing a different fictional narrative about the Hogfather, but it's still a fictional narrative nonetheless. Albert and Death outline this explicitly in a later exchange:
BUT THE HOGFATHER CAN CHANGE THINGS. LITTLE MIRACLES ALL OVER THE PLACE, WITH MANY A MERRY HO, HO, HO. TEACHING PEOPLE THE REAL MEANING OF HOGSWATCH, ALBERT.
“What, you mean that the pigs and cattle have all been slaughtered and with any luck everyone’s got enough food for the winter?”
WELL, WHEN I SAY THE REAL MEANING—
“Some wretched devil’s had his head chopped off in a wood somewhere ’cos he found a bean in his dinner and now the summer’s going to come back?”
NOT EXACTLY THAT, BUT—
“Oh, you mean that they’ve chased down some poor beast and shot arrows up into their apple trees and now the shadows are going to go away?”
THAT IS DEFINITELY A MEANING, BUT I—
“Ah, then you’re talking about the one where they light a bloody big bonfire to give the sun a hint and tell it to stop lurking under the horizon and do a proper day’s work?”
Death paused, while the hogs hurtled over a range of hills.
YOU’RE NOT HELPING, ALBERT.
“Well, they’re all the real meanings that I know.”
I THINK YOU COULD WORK WITH ME ON THIS.
“It’s all about the sun, master. White snow and red blood and the sun. Always has been.”
VERY WELL, THEN. THE HOGFATHER CAN TEACH PEOPLE THE UNREAL MEANING OF HOGSWATCH.
Death isn't the real Hogfather. Death does have a fake beard. Death's narrative that he's selling isn't the "real" meaning of Hogswatch; it's just a different unreal meaning than what the store owners are trying to sell. Aaron is right about these things. Aaron may come to the wrong conclusion when he rejects all interpretations of the Hogfather rather than settling on the one right one in a sea of wrong ones, but being wrong in his conclusion (There is no Hogfather) doesn't mean he was wrong in his premise (You're not the real Hogfather).
Aaron's sin seems to be that he's resisting the narrative. He doesn't want presents from the Hogfather. Presumably he didn't even want to visit the Hogfather display and he seems anxious to get it over with as quickly as possible -- perhaps he only submitted to this exercise to please his mother. Aaron just wants to get home and get back to his non-fiction books. He doesn't want more out of life than what he already has. But Aaron will be punished for this complacency: his presents will turn into socks and he'll see, just you wait, that the Hogfather was real and that he was wrong to snub him. Aaron will become a Believer because his punishment will show him the value of Belief, and he'll join the ranks of the unresisting children who were Believers because it got them more and better presents. (As Susan's charge is described: "She’d believe in anything if there was a dolly in it for her.")
It's this "sin" of disrespect and disbelief that are integral to the Aaron Fidget and Eustace Scrubb characters that reminds me of the old Nancy Drew villains in Bobbie Ann Mason's The Girl Sleuth:
Evil is not only sexy in Nancy's universe, it's disgustingly lower class. And the men aren't just evil, they're strange. Their names tell that: Rudy Raspin, Tom Tozzle, Tom Stripe, Mr. Warte, Bushy Trott, Grumper, Alonzo Rugby, and Red Buzby. They are all good-for-nothings who want to upset the elitist WASP order. They are tricksters and hucksters who sneer at the authorities -- the paternal benevolence of the businesses, institutions, and laws of the reigning upper classes. [...]
Good and evil are strictly white and black terms. Criminals are dark-hued and poor. One crook is "dark, with a mottled complexion and piercing black eyes." [...] Piercing dark eyes are the most common characteristic of Nancy's foes. Their greedy eyes are piercing because they are disrespectful, gazing threateningly beyond their station, perhaps seeing through the facades of the gentry whose power they crave. All the virtues of refinement, taste, intelligence, and beauty belong to Nancy's class, while everyone else is vulgar, greedy, ill-tempered, insolent. [...]
Thus, the original Nancy Drew series -- the first thirty-five or so volumes which accumulated throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s-portrays a fading aristocracy, threatened by the restless lower classes. [...] When minorities know their place, Nancy treats them graciously. She is generous to truck drivers and cabbies and maids. But woe betide the upstarts, the dishonest social climbers who want to grab at the top.
The problem here -- or, at least, a problem here -- is that disrespect isn't a sin, nor is disbelief. We choose on a daily basis to reserve respect and belief from those things which have not earned our respect and belief. Not respecting and believing in everything that requests our respect and belief is a good thing: it's what keeps us from giving all our money to hucksters, what prevents us from following after demagogues.
It's possible to make the case that reserving respect and belief from things that deserve respect and belief is a bad thing, but I think that path is fraught with peril. I think we are entitled to ask why the Hogfather deserves Aaron Fidget's belief to the point where it is necessary and just to punish him if he withholds it. I think we have a right to ask why fantasy and fantastical worlds and Aslan and The Emperor deserve Eustace Scrubb's belief to the point where it is good and right to tie his physical salvation to his capitulation to those ideals.
And I think the reader has the responsibility to remember that disbelief and disrespect are most often railed against as sins when they are held by the lower classes against the higher ones: when the poor disrespect the rich, and when the weak don't believe in the religious platitudes of the strong. There's a pattern there, a pattern that runs through our literature and our language, and it's one that I think is worth remembering.
General Thread Note: Advocating for bullying children with prank gag gifts is disallowed in this space. If you do not understand why prank gag gifts from powerful adults to powerless children is buillying, read this thread here.
97 comments:
In a hurry, and I haven't read the post, let alone the 89 (at this moment) comments.
So this is just to say that I hope you're feeling better, I'm glad to see the Narnia deconstructions are continuing, and I love the title of this one.
Thank you!
OMG, there are 89? I need to talk about Pratchett more often, clearly. Though I expect at least 40 of the comments are mine. :)
Also, of course, "spoils it for other people" still means that we're dishing out punishment for essentially exercising freedom of speech and religion. Which has a lot of troublesome parallels.
I'm really reluctant to sign off on punishment for presumed crimes. If he is a jerk to people who believe or play along in general (as opposed to while being forced to do something he doesn't want to do and doesn't believe in), we should have been shown that. It's entirely possible to think that Christmas/Hogswatch is horribly commercial, not believe in (or even approve of) the Santa/Hogsfather myth, not want to sit on a mall Santa/Hogsfather's lap, and still think light up piggies/Santas are cool or love to sing Chrismas/Hogswatch carols with family and friends. I don't think it's safe to conflate doesn't believe or won't play along in this instance with spoils it for other people.
And, as Makabit points out, this may be in character for Death (who isn't just being mall-Hogfather to pay the rent) and even somewhat understandable from his point of view. The odd thing is that we seem intended to uncritically side with him. If Aaron were a likable or neutral figure, it wouldn't change Death's motivations but it would mean we'd have to think about the whole thing a bit more. (Again, it's odd for Pterry who is generally quite good at having sympathetic characters sometimes behave badly and not narratively hide the fact.)
This. Susan, Ridcully, and Ponder all do unsympathetic things at times, but remain both Sympathetic and complex. Aaron just seems like he was wheeled in from the stereotype factory.
I don't think we have to agree with Death's actions here. Death is obviously not infallible, and might easily get annoyed with the kid and do something not-especially-justified because, hey, them's the breaks. Maybe it's just his inner arbitrary mythical force taking over.
Oh, I don't think that Death acts to protect the lizards. (Now, if it were kittens, sure.) I don't think Aaron's sin is that he kills lizards. I think Aaron's sin is that he pisses Death off by refusing to play Death's current game. Remember, this is the figure who supplies other small children who please him with whatever they want, including a pony in a small upstairs apartment, and a real sword.
My only point was that a human concept of Aaron as a child, someone marginalized, and someone being forced into a certain set of social behaviors, someone who is deserving of more respect than he's getting, is probably beyond Death's extremely limited social capacities, and Death is realistically unlikely to see him as powerless. He isn't, particularly, from Death's perspective, not more or less so than all the rest of mortal flesh. And Death is clueless. Death is an appallingly bad store Santa. He's effectively omnipotent, and has no sense of propriety at all. Compared to Kris Kringle from "Miracle on 34th Street' for example...
Now, of course, we're not really talking about Death, we're talking about Terry Pratchett, and his motivations. Which is different. But from the point of the character himself...I think Aaron's only sin is that Death really doesn't like having his fun stepped on.
The difference between Eustace and Aaron is that Aaron is a 'throw-a-way gag' character meant to impact the main character Death towards his final conclusion ("a mere ball of flaming gas would have illuminated the world") whereas Eustace is the main character (at least in terms of character development). I wonder, then, if the fact that Death would hand out gag presents to a kid (no matter how much of an [excusable] twit he may be) is more a reflection on Death as a character caught up in his own fantasy than Aaron's lack of fantasy.
Besides, Aaron seems like he'll have a fine career in the Alchemist's Guild, poking at frogs to make electricity. A fictional universe with so many examples of nerdish, obnoxious (from a certain point of view) children learning (usually the hard way) how to channel that into becoming awesome adults (cf: Ponder Stibbons, Tiffany Aching) gets a few credits on the balance sheet. I say give Aaron his own book.
[Edit] Clarification: That is, at this point in the narrative Death is trapped in a Fantasy all his own, of the Magic Hogfather Distributing Presents. Aaron is, at worst, just the opposite side of that, with Death's assistant Albert (for all his 'orrible faults) taking the opportunity to snap Death back into reality (no matter how fantastic) with a jolt of straight talk.
I suspect Aaron or Eustace isn't really disbelief, but about spoiling things for people who want to believe. It's not that Aaron doesn't believe that a pig-man leaves him presents, it's that we are to presume he makes his mother, his classmates, and anyone else who will listen feel like an inferior for believing in him, or at least believing its fun to sing Hogswatch songs and put light-up piggies on the front lawn. It's not, then, the disrespect to the Hogfather that's the problem, but the presumed disrespect and unkindness to his peers. It's just that the Hogfather is the one that has the power to do something about it, at least in this revenge-fantasy setup.
This leaves the question of whether having all the things you were hoping for turned into socks is an appropriate punishment for saying disdainful things to carollers open, though I suspect this punishment will be orders of magnitude less absurdly disproportionate than whatever Lewis does to Eustace (it's been a long time since I read them). And there's also the issue that people get quickly defensive about things that they know in their hearts are a bit silly or problematic, and are sometimes quick to read "i don't really like x" as "you are stupid for liking x". There is more than a little of the straw man in Eustace and Aaron. On the other hand, after years of meeting bright kids that are mostly on the receiving end of the bullying (and being one myself), I have heard of one child that is closer to properly being Eustace or Aaron. This kid is in the k-2 class a friend of mine teaches. His problem isn't that he thinks he's smart , but that he thinks other kids are dumb, and he doesn't waste an opportunity to make them feel...lesser for not knowing how to read as well as he does, or not knowing how to do subtraction yet, or for liking what he has decided is baby stuff. He's made a kid that has learning difficulties cry by telling him he was stupid, and he didn't seem particularly remorseful until another little girl he has a crush on (who, per my friend, is smarter than him) yelled at him. I'm not sure if this thing is more common than I realized, and I only didn't realize because I was too busy getting teased myself for not liking the baby sitter's club to see that the same thing was happening to my tormentors.
What is your assumption for why Aaron is interacting with a mall-Hogfather at all? Just a chance to be a jerk to someone?
Possibly, yes. Plus, he gets an orange.
I also really like Sir David Jason's take on him, but I also can't really get past having read the book "Mort" first (the one in which Albert is first introduced), and his moral character doesn't exactly come off well there. :)
Oh. (With regard to previous comment) Yes, that makes sense. I started reading the discworld books when there were only four or five of them, and for me Albert is very unsympathetic because I first met him in Mort.
...also, I've never actually seen "The Hogfather", because honestly, I like the novels well enough that none of the movies really appeal. And I can't bear David Jason.
I haven't read all the Discworld novels and I haven't read any of them for a long time but I seem to remember that Albert is a horrible jerk. I think we are supposed to like him (and I do) but he's not... nice. At all.
ALBERT is ""an EXTREMELY sympathetic character"?
Really? I find him horribly dislikable and his "let them die!" attitude just seems very typical. Mind you, I don't "view him as a bad person" - Pterry's characters tend to be a lot more complicated than that. I just don't see Albert as sympathetic at all.
General Thread Note
This is a post about why punishment-worthy children -- i.e. "acceptable targets" -- are often similar to Eustace Scrubb, and what our response as readers can be in light of this phenomenon. This is NOT a post about Terry Pratchett as a person, about my feelings about Hogfather and/or Discworld, nor is it about how a famous and wealthy author needs defending from an Angry Woman On The Internet.
Please support me in avoiding that incorrect framing by avoiding words like "attack" to characterize the post, "defense" to characterize responses, and/or any discussions about how Pratchett is or is not a genuinely nice person.
I have tried very, very hard to make it clear over the past two years that *all* the deconstructions on this board are about the text and about trends in society, and not about individual authors -- I respectfully request that the readers on the board remember this Zeroth Rule of my deconstructions.
I also request that readers remember that female bloggers are frequently characterized as emotional, aggressive, unfair, strident, and so forth, and I hope people here will remember that supporting these narratives is harmful, even when the intent is good. Explaining to everyone that Pratchett is a nice guy presupposes that the assertion has been made here that he *isn't*; that assertion has not and will not be made.
That's pretty insightful, bekabot. You're probably right.
Oh God, how love having people tell me I'm right. Thank you.
Thanks for understanding.
In general, my point of view is this: it is morally wrong to trespass on someone's life, liberty, body, or property without compelling reasons in an attempt to mitigate or allay harm. Rosella trespasses on Ezio's body (as well as his liberty), and is not attempting to mitigate or allay harm; that makes her unambiguously wrong in my worldview.
Death trespasses on Aaron's property. He *might* be attempting to mitigate harm if non-belief means the end of the world, zombie apocalypse, etc. However, from a Watsonian perspective, Aaron's author then apparently made Aaron out to be unsympathetic so that Death's trespass wouldn't reflect badly on Death or make his actions out to be morally ambiguous rather than a cute one-off joke in the novel.
If the book had dealt with the trespass on Aaron's property as serious and worthy of careful consideration for moral implications rather than a LOL U SUX joke at Aaron's expense, then there would be a different conversation to be had here, I think. This ties into Eustace Scrubb because there is a trespass on his body which is intended to save his soul, and this trespass is apparently further "justified" by him being snotty. I have issues with that "justification" since "being snotty" does not appear in my statement of ethics above.
"How does this not make you a hypocrite for writing something superficially similar" is never a good way to facilitate communication, and that's what these questions feel like sometimes.
I never intended to stage a "gotcha" question. I'm interested in exploring this topic, but while our views differ I was being entirely serious with "how would you compare...?" You did write something superficially similar, and I was interested in the comparison since you have a unique perspective on your own work. I don't appreciate the assumption of bad faith, but I understand where it came from if you've gotten gotcha questions before. (I haven't seen them, but I also tend to fall out of the longer comment threads I'm not participating in.)
I agree that this scene has its problematic elements, but I think we disagree about what exactly those elements are and moreover where they come from, from both an in-text and societal point of view. I'd like to nail down these differences to explore things more, but I don't think I can do so and stay safely inside the safe-space guidelines. I'd probably skirt the edge, and you're already stressed by this thread. So, I too will withdraw from this thread, and I hope I haven't added to your stress too much this afternoon/evening.
I agree. I don't think that the "likes dead things" is the sin here: it's something added in to make the audience feel better about the bullying.
Death isn't "giving socks as a present". He is stealing the presents that the child's mother bought with her own money and replacing them with socks in order to punish the child. That is not the same thing. If that has not been made clear through the post and the comments, then consider it made clear here: Death isn't giving socks instead of presents. He is taking away existing presents and replacing them with socks.
Also, respectfully, we are not going to "agree to disagree" on this or any other safe space issue here. This is an explicit safe space board with a strict moderation policy for the sake of myself and numerous readers who come here for the safety of the space. You don't have to agree with me to post here, but you do have to agree to observe the comment policy that I set forth. Advocating bullying -- even if it is not the physical abuse kind -- is not appropriate here.
Language like "taking people down a peg" is extremely fraught to victims of verbal abuse, bullying, and pranking (including "gag gifts" like those featured here) and you've been asked not to use it here further.
I think this ties into the narrative that bad things happen to bad people; this is so pervasive in our culture that when bad things happen we use any excuse to frame the person they happened to as "bad".
I find Aaron and Eustace to be annoying. If I met them in real life they would irritate me.
So I have this very strong impulse to reframe the "nasty" thoughts/feelings I have about these (types of) children as being something they "deserve" (basically so that I can congratulate myself on being a good person for not snapping at them).
But I think it really is just bullying and victim-blaming.
P. I had a bad thought
P. I am a good person
C. They did something wrong and must have deserved it
Yeah, the fact that he pretty much has to be there against his will undercuts a lot of the arguments in favor of Death punishing him. (At least to me.) This isn't some adult with control over what he's doing being rude to a customer service person, this is a kid having to do something that he doesn't want, who doesn't play along properly.
He isn't even really rude - just not following the script. If the mall-Hogfather hadn't been Death filling in for the real deal, the actor might well have responded to his first statement with: "Well, yes, but it can be kind of fun to pretend." or "I know, kid, but it's a job." And who knows how differently their conversation might have gone from there.
Yeah, I agree that if the sins of Eustace/Aaron are the killing of lizards and butterflies, then we possibly have a different situation on hand.
In which case, the narrative should address that situation - but it doesn't seem to come up, at least here. Death doesn't punish him for being a lizard-killer, he punishes him for...it seems...disbelief. It seems more like butterfly killing and lizard killing are traits added by the author to make the audience not question the respective kids being punished.
I think so, too. It feels to me like the author started with "child must be punished for non-belief" and then made the said child as stereotypically unpleasant as possible in order to help it go down well with the reader.
I still maintain that the conversation could be re-written to contain the same content but with a "nicer-sounding" child that the reader would automatically sympathize with because -- as said in the OP -- non-belief is not a sin. Or shouldn't be, in my opinion.
Yeah, I agree that if the sins of Eustace/Aaron are the killing of lizards and butterflies, then we possibly have a different situation on hand. And, Watsonianly-speaking, possibly there is some justification from a Lizard Protection sense in quietly exchanging lizard-killing toys with ones that could provide another hobby. (Though I think socks will not serve that purpose towards creating a greater good...)
Doylistically, I'm ambivalent about that portion of the Eustace/Aaron characterization: I don't like killing and displaying animals myself, but I also realize that we wouldn't have medicine and doctors and so forth if there weren't people interested in dissection and biology and similar things. It almost becomes a sort of conundrum: is an author entitled to complain about people who take an interest in such things if zie partakes of modern medicine when needed? I don't know the answer to that.
I don't even believe the scene - an Aaron who had the power we're clearly meant to think he has over his mother wouldn't be there at all.
That confuses me too. He clearly wants to get it over with as quickly as possible; he's explicitly hurrying Death through his lines so that it can be done. Either there is a powerful parental figure we don't observe (a father, maybe?) who is forcing this confrontation or ... or ... I can't come up with an "or". It just plain doesn't make sense for Aaron to be here except as a function of force, which makes stealing his presents for being rude under duress even more upsetting to me.
There's also a difference when one of the persons is (perhaps) the most powerful being in existence and the other person is one of the least powerful beings in existence.
True, although it could be argued, I think, that Death is consistently no respecter of persons, regardless of their power or lack thereof. (As opposed to a respecter of cats.) And Death, I think, would argue that, to the lizards, at least, Aaron is not 'one of the least powerful beings in existence.' He's certainly not especially marginalized compared to countless myriads who Death deals with a daily basis. This is truly a character who sees every sparrow fall, and shows up for the event.
Let me ramble a little:
Aaron is asking for a killing jar. He wants to do something Death understands very well--bring death to other living beings. Death doesn't necessarily object to this--he does give the sword to the other child--but I think that his perception of Aaron is probably less 'scientific child trapped in an ascientific world', 'atheist being dragged to a religious ritual he didn't choose', or 'person marginalized by virtue of his age', and more...creator of work? Person raining on his odd holiday parade?
I don't think Death sees any reason to deal justly with Aaron as a child, any more than he would feel he had to deal with him justly as an adult, or a lizard. There is no justice, as far as Death is concerned. There's only him.
Now, obviously, this doesn't make any sense in the Narnian/Lewis context, so while the child may be a bit of tribute to poor ol' Eustace, I don't know if this is any use at all there.
I suppose there's a difference in laughing at somebody because they're goofy and out of touch, and laughing at somebody for being punished as a result of behavior that doesn't really ampount to much, but offends the general cultural narrative.
There's also a difference when one of the persons is (perhaps) the most powerful being in existence and the other person is one of the least powerful beings in existence.
[Pulchritude Spoilers]
we're not supposed to necessarily agree with Rosella
Um, what?
In Pulchritude, the readers are absolutely not meant to agree with Rosella. She's not the protagonist of the piece; she's a cruel and capricious fairy who sets the story rolling and provides denouement at the end. The final chapter explicitly establishes that she is evil as a "gotcha" to anyone who had any remaining doubts, because she doesn't care about the deaths her actions have resulted in, both directly and indirectly. (She turns people in water-breathing creatures and doesn't care if they asphyxiate, for crying out loud!) She's a deliberate deconstruction of the fairy in the Disney version, who we are (apparently) supposed to agree with.
So Rosella is related to this Discworld novel in which the protagonists bullies a child and we're apparently meant to either agree or view it as acceptably necessary for the salvation of the world, how? Are you genuinely thinking that Death is meant to be an antagonistic force in Pratchett's view? Because if not, I feel like you're comparing apples and monkeys.
Rosella is an example of why bullying and violence *can't* fix problems.
Death here is an example of when bullying supposedly does fix problems.
(I would kind of prefer if every thread didn't attempt to somehow map to my novel in the form of an attempt at a gotcha question, to be honest. This is not the first time this has happened and it's not a conducive way to genuinely explore my thoughts on a subject. "How does this not make you a hypocrite for writing something superficially similar" is never a good way to facilitate communication, and that's what these questions feel like sometimes.)
The bit with the Little Match Girl is the only part of Hogfather that I liked. But, I've always despised the Santa mythos*, so it's probably a book I should've skipped in the first place. I take issue with it's very premise - that one must believe in myths in order to believe in concepts like Justice, and then there's the problem of a fantasy story dragging in elements from reality and using them in such a way that it's hard not to feel that the author wants the point of the book to apply to reality. In other words, it's easy to feel that the author is saying (whether or not he means to) that one must have the Hogfather/Santa/Jesus/Whatever in order to be a good person, or to believe in the concepts that make a person good.
Throwing in a strawman atheist character really doesn't help that impression. Like bekabot, I don't really believe in characters like Aaron - there may be kids out there like them, but mostly they read like, well, a strawman version of smart kids. One that's pretty explicitly saying it's okay to treat them badly because they also (clearly!) have all these other bad traits. Aaron irritates me more than Eustace, mainly because I'd expected better of Pterry, whose Guards books I really like.
I don't even believe the scene - an Aaron who had the power we're clearly meant to think he has over his mother wouldn't be there at all. The only reason I know of for kids who don't believe in Santa the Hogfather to be sitting on a mall-Santa Hogfather's lap is because their parents/guardians/grandparents/people with power over them made them. The whole thing rings hollow.
It's also weird to have disrespect or disbelief be Aaron's sin, since there's quite a lot of approved disrespect of authority and acceptable (though frequently wrong) disbelief from good characters in other books. But I find Hogfather to be a very weird Discworld book.
*Yes, lets do lie to children. Even better, lets invent a character who is both benevolent rewarder, judge, and spy/peeping tom/whatever the fuck he is in "Santa Clause is Coming to Town" (mob enforcer?). And then we'll excuse our shitty behavior by saying it's good for their imaginations. Because people believing your lies is clearly the same as them exercising their imaginations.
Hmm, I see my childhood rage against the cruelty of the Santa crap has not faded with adulthood.
I think Aaron's 'sin' is fairly clear.
It's not disrepect, although I notice you only consider him being rude to his mother and not the fact it's rude to Death. He's speaking pretty damn familiarly to a complete stranger, asserting that he knows this entire thing is a scam. That really is a little rude, and would be rude _even if he was an adult_, but I don't think that's his 'sin'.
And it's not banality. Yes, there's a coincidence of his hobbies and reading being the same as Eustance, but no one even mentions those things. (Except that Death, trying to follow the script, pretends not to know what a lizard press is.) I think, perhaps, you're reading way too much into that coincidence. In the most recent Discworld book, a young boy's hobby of _collecting poop_ is taken fairly seriously by his father.
And it's not being a know-it-all. Susan herself was a know-it-all teenager in her last book. In fact, she explicitly didn't believe in the Hogfather herself. (And this is a universe where he does, in fact, exist, and even adults believe in him, at least until this book.)
Aaron's 'sin' is clearly that he isn't following the 'talking to the Hogfather' script, flummoxing Death, who's barely managing to follow it himself. By him not following the script, Death has been denied the opportunity to give him something to make him believe, which is the entire point of Death wasting time playing the Hogfather. And thus Death does...something to Aaron's presents instead.
You think he got socks, but I always assumed, when reading that, that he just got _different_ presents than the one he had picked out and saw his mother purchase. I don't know why Death would have made them worse. He wouldn't have done it out of spite, when Death is angry, you _know_ he's angry, and when he's not angry, he doesn't care.
I am not "advocating bullying" or anything like it, and I'm a little insulted that you're assuming the worst of me. I can see that my choice of words might not have been the best, but that's hardly the same thing.
This is your board and your rules, however, as you've reminded me. So Perhaps it's best if I don't post further.
Look, I like having you here. But part of a safe space means that readers have to accept moderation decisions because they know Everyone Fucks Up and they have to move on without arguing things into the ground.
Right now, the only thing making you potentially unacceptable for this space is that you're arguing with my moderation and threatening to leave because you don't like the rules. You've admitted that you made a poor choice of words; if you can accept that I called you out on that poor choice because it's my *job* to do so, then all is well. Otherwise, if you're not okay with me doing my job because you feel like your desire to not be called out on poor word choice is more important than the safety of the space, then this may not be the right board for you. That's okay; not everyone likes safe space boards.
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There has been a General Thread Note added to the bottom of the OP that deals with this issue. If people continue to breach the anti-bullying portion of the safe space guidelines, I'm going to start deleting comments. It's not fair to the other readers to have to wade through a lot of arguments about moderation decisions and it's not fair to me to make me continually rehash them.
You are also apparently expressing approval towards theft of goods as an appropriate response to rudeness
Is this more a matter of who's doing the punishing, as much as the punishment itself? I easily see the argument that, by switching out the presents, Death is punishing Aaron's parents at least as much as Aaron himself. If instead of Death meting out the punishment, Aaron's mother had exchanged her gifts for socks, would that have been less problematic?
How would you compare this (as presented in-text) situation with your treatment of Ezio by Rosella in Pulchritude? In both cases, there's a supernatural entity in disguise, dishing out punishment for a failed moral test that has arguable interpretations. In Pulchritude, of course, the consequences are more severe and we're not supposed to necessarily agree with Rosella, but on the other hand Aaron's behaviour here isn't entrapment -- he'd presumably act the same way to any department-store Hogfather.
Oh, this is difficult for me. I mean, I'm an atheist, pro-science, a vegetarian, a social liberal, I regularly respond earnestly to jokes, I was and am a bit of a know-it-all, I stopped believing in Santa well before most of my classmates, I dislike contemporary attitudes towards children, I adored reading history textbooks as a child, I like collecting and classifying things, and I think analyzing fantasy and science fiction for underlying tropes is half the fun of reading and watching. And yet Eustace (or Aaron) have never bothered me.
Of course, looking at some of your other examples, I might have broader issues with this "type". I found Charles Wallace's and Mike Teevee's parts the most boring, don't even remember Aaron, and had remembered Dawn Treader as the snoozefest. Wesley Crusher (Star Trek: TNG) might qualify as well, and I found him pretty dull as well. It's been a while, but I remember them as characters who are always exactly as smart as the plot requires. Need an irritating bully? They'll be smart enough to find the obvious holes in your story, but not smart enough to work out the truth. Need something to go wrong? They'll be smart enough to work out how to do something, but not smart enough to work out the consequences. Need the day saved? Well, then obviously the genius will be able to extrapolate from nothing to figure out what's really going on, or will have obscure knowledge of something - even if it's miles away from their main interest.
(I will also be watching Hogfather this Christmas, btw!)
FWIW: I don't like characters like Eustace and Aaron, because I don't believe in them. They are fantastic in the sense that they don't correspond to anything observable on this earth. They have a didactic function: they are meant to deter the reader from engaging in behavior the author (whoever the author happens to be in any particular case) doesn't approve of. (Smarting off in malls, mocking other kids, failing to properly appreciate adults.) The know-it-all geekiness which marks Eustace and Aaron out is merely the means by which that end is achieved. The kind of bossiness Eustace and Aaron display is not the kind of you find brainiac kids; as Isator Levi implies, the kind of bossiness Eustace/Aaron specialize in is a kind of bossiness much more often found in loudmouthed adults. (J. K. Rowling's Hermione is a much more sympathic example of the same type of character, and Rowling is much more accurate in her portrayal of what know-it-all behavior looks like in somebody that young.) Eustace's/Aaron's incivility and rudeness is a blind. It's not the kind of rudeness and incivility that kids, when they are rude, which is often, in fact indulge in. The Eustace/Aaron social misdemeanors stand for other sins, and it is these sins which the Lewis and Pratchett are preaching against. The Eustace/Aaron sissymeany character enables them to do this via shorthand and not to have to go the long route, is all.
And the Beavers knew he ate it, so why did none of them nicely sit down and talk about it? I'm deeply, deeply attached to Edmund because everyone in the book is giving him a hard time. Then again, I love Will Parry in His Dark Materials as well. (I love Lyra too, but Will is special.)
~Lily~
I will add that one of the things I love most about "Hogfather" is Death's refusal to be complicit in the death of the Little Match Girl (and Albert's subsequent attack on the gormless angels who show up to carry her off.) That's emotionally hugely satisfying to me, in terms of refusal to play the game.
Ana, I was bullied myself as a child throughout most of my school years. I was repeatedly hit, beaten, hurt, teased mercilessly and worse, my several of my peers and the occasional adult. I don't advocate bullying and I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
However, I feel like your definition of "bullying" and mine aren't the same thing. Giving socks as a present is not even remotely close to anything I'd consider bullying. At worst the kid would be temporarily disappointed.
If you honestly consider that "bullying" then I don't really know what to say, except that we'll have to agree to disagree.
Silverbow, I rather uncomfortably feel like you're advocating bullying children for their betterment.
This is a safe space, and advocation for bullying doesn't mesh. Many of us, myself included, have been subjected to bullying with the excuse that we were "know-it-alls" and therefore deserved the bullying. I'm honestly not sure what to do with your comment in light of that fact.
ETA: You are also apparently expressing approval towards theft of goods as an appropriate response to rudeness. I'm not okay with that either.
And if we're excusing Aaron's misplaced anger, why aren't we excusing Death's punishment as the response to being on the receiving end of misplaced anger?
The reason I personally am not excusing Death's response is because there is a difference between "giving gifts" (rewards), "not doing anything" (no change), and "taking away gifts" (punishment).
To put it another way: Death is essentially stealing from this family. The mother bought presents with her money; Death is transmuting those presents into socks or bloody bones in order to punish the child for being insufficiently polite to him. I consider that wrong.
Aaron didn't insult someone and fail to receive chocolate. He insulted someone and got his wallet stolen in response.
I thought of two things, reading this, which might explain why Eustace and Aaron are supposed to be unsympathetic characters.
One, there's that belief, at least in American society, that "fantasy and fairytales are for children". It is something people are expected to grow out of, or at least gain a certain "mature" perspective of...but at the same time, you aren't supposed to grow out of it too soon. Children are *supposed* to believe in fantastic things; it's one of the stereotypical marks of childlike innocence. Children who don't believe, to some extent, are not acting like proper children, and this threatens the airy-fairy narrative of childhood that adults seem to like to create for themselves in fiction.
Two, most children have not yet acquired that certain sense of knowing when to speak up about something, and when to keep one's mouth shut. And I think there's a kind of fear grown-ups have when it comes to kids, in that you just never know what they are going to say or do next.
So when you have a child who possesses an "adult" sense of rationality and refusal to believe everything he/she sees...and yet, because they are still a child, they don't know when it's appropriate or inappropriate to voice certain thoughts and are likely to say exactly what they are thinking at any given moment...you get a young character people are going to approach with a certain amount of unease and dislike, probably without quite knowing why.
Bloody bones might be going a bit far, but socks are great. I'd be down with the socks. Kids HATE getting socks as a present -- I know I did! :D
I haven't read the Discworld books, so let me just say that upfront. My opinion might not be worth much.
However, to me this is fairly simple. Aaron's being a condescending rude little spoiled know-it-all, and Death decides to take him down a few pegs. It's not because Aaron doesn't believe in the narrative, or is an atheist, or whatever. There are ways to explain that you're an unbeliever without being a jerk about it, but Aaron doesn't seem to think that being polite and respectful is worth his time. He just wants to get it over with and he doesn't care whose feelings or beliefs he's stomping on, as long as he gets his presents. He sounds like a selfish little twit to me.
And that's... really all there is to it. I've dealt with condescending rude little spoiled know-it-alls, and in my experience if you don't knock them down a few pegs and demonstrate that no, they aren't the centre of the universe, they only get worse as they grow older.
So yeah, I'm Team Death. :D
Specifically, "good" characters fall into two categories:
1) They are believers, in that they largely accept the system as-is and find wonder in it, or
2) They are facilitators; they may not believe in the system as-is, but they also go along and make sure things keep running for group #1.
Which ties nicely into my statement in the OP that Aaron's sin is "resisting the [author's] narrative". Because it's not just about accepting/facilitating things "as-is" -- Death very explicitly wants to change things about Hogswatch, and calls out Albert for conflating "as-is" with "should be":
“I meant, this is how it’s supposed to go, master,” said Albert.
NO. YOU MEAN THIS IS HOW IT GOES.
Death wants the poor to have good presents, and the little Match Girl to live, even though those are changes to the "as-is" as well as to the established narrative of Hogswatch (a narrative so well-established that there actually IS a Match Girl who dies every year and gets hauled off by angels because the narrative apparently makes it so).
So the sin of Aaron isn't that of resisting the EXISTING narrative -- which Death does without reproach -- but of resisting the narrative the AUTHOR wants to establish.
But I'm also wondering - where else to Eustace-type children appear in literature?
I remember Mike Teavee from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory being controversial in fan circles. He's another intellectually intelligent child who runs afoul of impossible magic, and the argument could be made that he was given a bad attitude in order to make his punishment for disbelief more palatable to the reader.
Actually, *all* the Punished Children in CatCF have nasty attitudes. I remember a movie review pointing out that if they were merely impulsive without being nasty, then the story would be horrific, but that children accept the disproportionate punishments (many of them are scarred for life) because the nastiness of their personalities makes the punishment "fitting" in a way that otherwise wouldn't work if they were merely non-nasty sinners.
IOW, if Gluttonous Augustus and Gum-Chewing Violet and the rest of them were punished for falling into the river, chewing gum, etc. WITHOUT also being annoying characters, the story wouldn't be emotionally satisfying.
I think, perhaps, you're reading way too much into that coincidence.
Please read the site tagline, David.
The villains of Hogfather aren't evil because they are resisting the authorial narrative, they're evil because they're using children's teeth to entirely control their every thought, word, and deed. Aaron isn't doing that; as far as we know, he's not even telling other children that Hogswatch isn't real -- he's just telling a fake Hogfather that he knows he is fake. That's basically the *opposite* of what the villains are doing, plus, you know he isn't __completely overriding all consent everywhere__.
Aaron, to me, is problematic for two reasons.
One, his sin is not really a sin. He's not hurting anyone, he just doesn't believe in the Hogfather. He is, very basically, an atheist who is being punished for being an atheist in a story where the author doesn't want atheists being atheistic. That's a problem because it overlaps with problems in our own world where atheists are considered Acceptable Targets and are assumed to be snotty know-it-alls simply BECAUSE they don't believe in a god.
Two, he is characterized with a broad brush as, essentially, annoying and irritating in order to make the punishment for his sin of non-belief more palatable to the reader. If Aaron was Erin, a sweet little girl who said essentially all the same things but in a nice tone of voice because she'd been socialized to be Polite, her punishment for non-belief would stick in the reader's craw because who the fuck is Death to steal a little girl's presents just because she doesn't believe in Santa, etc.
So the sin of Aaron isn't that of resisting the EXISTING narrative -- which Death does without reproach -- but of resisting the narrative the AUTHOR wants to establish.
I'm not sure that's problematic. Resisting the author's narrative of the universe is precisely what the villains of Hogfather are doing, and the entire point of the plot is to re-establish things the way they were (and hopefully a little better).
The moral good or ill from resistance comes from whether or not the author's narrative is a beneficial or harmful one. I'd argue that the narrative of the Hogfather universe is a generally beneficial one, insofar as "warm cozy solstice familytime holidays" are a good thing, whereas I have a harder time making the same argument about the Narnia universe.
For me, the problematic elements to the story of Aaron comes very much from his childhood; he is being judged by an adult standard when he is clearly not an adult himself. Were he an adult, I'd find this scene to be not-very problematic. The punishment amounts to the denial of luxuries, rather than any true threat to life or safety, and an adult would be in a better position to at least respect the traditions of others, if not follow them himself.
Edit to add: I think that one of the themes to Hogfather is there being value in traditions, even if those same traditions have problematic elements that would benefit from change. Death wants to defend tradition but hopefully with change. The Auditors want to abolish the tradition outright without regard to harm, and Aaron is only willing to play along insofar as there's something in it for him.
As much as rejecting tradition may be at the heart of it, I think that Aaron's issue is exacerbated by his selfish cynicism, and there the punishment fits the offense. He gets to keep his cynicism, but he loses the benefits -- the presents -- he got by playing along with the entire Hogfather narrative.
I won't comment on Eustace, with Narnia being far from my experience, but I can talk a bit about Pratchett and Hogfather:
@Sterling:
However, I'd venture a thought that these children's "problem" is that they lack the proper sense of wonder necessary to be in Narnia/Discworld. They are pragmatic, bottom-line, and perhaps lacking in imagination. In short, they are no fun.
I think this is it. This particular scene isn't necessarily the best example of it because it is ultimately a throwaway scene in a larger work, but I think this best relates the theme of Hogfather and much of Pratchett's work.
Specifically, "good" characters fall into two categories:
1) They are believers, in that they largely accept the system as-is and find wonder in it, or
2) They are facilitators; they may not believe in the system as-is, but they also go along and make sure things keep running for group #1.
In the Ankh-Morpork plots, Captain Carrot would be an example of a believer, whereas Vimes and the Patrician would be examples of facilitators.
Here in Hogfather, Death is an example of a facilitator with a very outside perspective. He doesn't necessarily believe *in* the system, but he literally steps in to keep things running as he understands it. If anything, Hogfather makes this theme explicit. In a quote from the ending (rot13d for Ana and anyone who hasn't finished the book; this is a source for non-un-rot13ers):
“JUNG JBHYQ UNIR UNCCRARQ VS LBH UNQA'G FNIRQ UVZ?
"Lrf! Gur fha jbhyq unir evfra whfg gur fnzr, lrf?"
AB
"Bu, pbzr ba. Lbh pna'g rkcrpg zr gb oryvrir gung. Vg'f na nfgebabzvpny snpg."
GUR FHA JBHYQ ABG UNIR EVFRA.
...
"Ernyyl? Gura jung jbhyq unir unccrarq, cenl?"
N ZRER ONYY BS SYNZVAT TNF JBHYQ UNIR VYYHZVANGRQ GUR JBEYQ.”
The child in this example is a character who takes on neither role. He rejects belief/wonder, but he also isn't stepping up to the (in-universe) duty of keeping things running for others. His sin isn't so much atheism as being a spoilsport for others' fun; his parents (who play along) are themselves facilitators.
On the other hand, this doesn't erase the problematic elements. The real crime of this kid is, essentially, being a teenager -- seeing the adult world, but not yet accepting responsibility within it. Since this results in bad things happening to someone who doesn't have full agency, it's problematic, even moreso because "just go along with it" can and has been used to cover up legitimate wrongs in children's lives.
I suppose that the biggest qualitative difference here is that the scene-with-the-kid is a minor element of Hogfather, but it is pretty much the entire point of VotDT.
I think majromax really nailed what I was trying to articulate as I read the comments here, but wasn't really sure how to, at least in regards to Discworld. I hate the way my brain only offers abstract emotional/imagery-based notions instead of words sometimes!
But I'm also wondering - where else to Eustace-type children appear in literature? I feel that I must have read books that have kids like him being frowned at and scolded, but other than Charles Wallace that you mentioned, Ana, and who doesn't really fit because he is a reconstruction, I'm pulling a blank. Is one of the boys in The Secret Garden like that, perhaps? And...I think maybe there's one child in Rainbow Valley (one of the books about Anne-of-Green-Gables's children), but I'm not sure if it's quite the same.
I feel like in order to diagnose exactly where Eustace and Aaron erred, I need more examples, though I do think it is an element of the uncanny and the expectation that in this kind of story, children must act like "children", the fictional stereotype. Plus what Mariah said!
Thinking on it, I kind of have this vague idea that "know-it-all" children who turn into know-it-all adults might be something that kind of develops out of children who, when valuing knowledge and technical skills and what have you, feel a need to press the idea that they know so much in response to people who would denigrate and disregard what they have managed to accumulate so far, people who maybe do so partially out of a sense of resentment towards somebody who numerous imperatives (including biological) guide them into looking on as inherantly less capable, and partially because there's a general proclivity towards being contrarian out there (I mean, see myself in previous parts of this thread).
I get the feeling that, with children like that, a much healthier attitude could be developed on all sides if the child was properly engaged with on the subject, in a way that leads them into a greater understanding of the practical realities and their own misconceptions and shortcomings.
I myself feel that I was lucky enough to have relatives and educators who generally found my Eustace-esque attitudes charming and engaged me on that developmental level. I like to think, at least, that the adult me has a nice appreciation for the values of considering what I don't know, and actually dicussing topics rather than evangelizing them, although I've still obviously got shortcomings.
I think you're right, Death was responding disproportionately. That's where my thoughts were trending as I wrapped up the comment.
It's kind of a bad situation all around, you know? I mean, it really sucks to be a kid who's forced into event after event with no effort made to accommodate your preferences because you haven't hit the magical age of 18. But it also sucks to be shat upon by kids who are really mad at their parents but are redirecting their anger toward you because you won't be around to punish them later and they see you as a safer target. And it also really sucks to be a parent who will probably be judged harshly for not forcing their kid to comply with religious rituals against their will and thus has to choose between the stigma of "bad motherhood" versus the child's (justified) resentment for curtailing their choices. I'm not saying all three situations are identical, mind, but it feels off to me to compare this kind of thing to Eustace's case, where the author is just outright bullying the character for existing, you know? It's a messier situation.
I mean, many of Pratchett's other books also take the "stories are literally the thing the world works on" thing in the other direction by having sympathetic protagonists who look on stories as these kinds of horrible parasites that bend the lives of people who just want to get on with themselves around fulfilling their narratives without regard to what the people themselves thing about it. Characters who are at the centre of the stories who -also- disparage fairy tales as obfuscating nonsense, and are more then a little correct to do so.
They're characters who would probably still give Aaron a clip about the ear, because they're still crotchety and conservative and think that people should respect their elders (if only because they're the old people who would benefit from that), but the big importance of fantasy and imagination and fairytales isn't help by every sympathetic/point-of-view character in the range of books (it's a bit inaccurate to call Discworld a "series", when it's more like five or six series running semi-concurrently in the same setting).
Plus, I don't know if the element of open satire helps at all, but it's still there.
Sorry about the double post. *facepalm*
~Lily~
Oh, yes, there's definitely a difference between Socks For Christmas and Being Turned Into a Dragon. I agree there's a quantitative difference in punishment.
But I still maintain there's classism at work here as a possible Fed Ex arrow.
Eustace and Aaron are know-it-alls, but they're not the only ones. Ponder Stibbons is a know-it-all, and recognizes this character flaw in himself. Ridcully is a know-it-all and is often unexpectedly right (as when making Hex-the-Computer work by threatening to hit it with a mallet). Susan is a know-it-all, frequently arguing with Death and receiving very mild rebukes (paraphrase: "I WISH I KNEW AS MUCH AS YOU", meaning that Susan is wrong). Aslan is, by some definitions, a know-it-all -- he literally knows much more than everyone, refuses to be corrected or argued with, and gives evasive non-answers to important questions.
The difference that I see between Eustace and Aslan, Aaron and Ponder and Ridcully and Susan, is that the children don't "deserve" to be know-it-alls, but the people with accrued cultural power (adults, intellectuals, royalty, gods, etc.) apparently do. I find that interesting.
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ETA: Albert, Death's assistant, is so much of a know-it-all that he argues that poor children have to die to make everyone else feel better about their lot in life. (Just imagine Ebenezer Scrooge suggesting that.) And he's an EXTREMELY sympathetic character, whom I very much like, and we're not supposed to view him as a bad person for holding that attitude. So I think there's more going on than in literary tropes like Scrubb/Fidget than just know-it-all attitudes and callousness to other people.
I didn't mean to imply that that reading was incorrect; rather, I was explaining why I didn't see that at first.
Something about the situation still strikes me as problematic. I think it's tied to the idea that mall Santa is providing a strictly voluntary service and isn't responsible for parents choosing to force their children to attend. It's kind of like walking into a church and insulting the pastor for not catering to atheists, isn't it? And if we're excusing Aaron's misplaced anger, why aren't we excusing Death's punishment as the response to being on the receiving end of misplaced anger? Especially when the response consists of removing the benefits he'd get from celebrating the religious holiday he's angrily refusing to celebrate? If you're going to insult people for wishing you a happy Easter, you can't still expect them to give you Easter chocolate. (Though then there's the issue of the fact that the mother purchased the presents. It'd be more fitting if he just didn't receive extra gifts while others did instead of removing ones he'd received from other people).
I don't know. I feel like I'm missing something obvious and probably being really offensive in my ignorance.
As an addendum to my post, Aaron also comes close to breaking the one explicit definition of sin in-universe (albeit from a different book, Carpe Jugulum):
"There's no grays, only white that's got grubby. I'm surprised you don't know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is."
"It's a lot more complicated than that--"
"No. It ain't. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts."
"Oh, I'm sure there are worse crimes--"
"But they starts with thinking about people as things..."
Of course, that doesn't make things problem-free; it assumes that people can freely exercise capacity for empathy. That's probably true in Aaron's case, but it certainly isn't true for everyone in real life, what with "what about your poor unfortunate abuser?" being a real thing.
Yeah, considering that the text explicitly states that the magic of the food is that you would do anything to get more, even eating yourself to death in the process, I feel like anything Edmund does after consumption of the TD is compromised.
And the Beavers knew he'd eaten some, so why didn't they talk to Edmund about it or something? Sorry, I'm attached to Edmund. I just wish Lewis had been more sympathetic toward him. :(
~Lily~
Haven't read hardly any Terry Pratchett, and it's been a looooong time since C.S. Lewis.
However, I'd venture a thought that these children's "problem" is that they lack the proper sense of wonder necessary to be in Narnia/Discworld. They are pragmatic, bottom-line, and perhaps lacking in imagination. In short, they are no fun.
Both Discworld and Narnia depend on a certain sense of surrender to lightness and fantasy. They need a hero with innocence or naivete, depending how you look at it. They need a hero willing to believe in what the author sees as good in creation. It's almost like these children are adults-by-proxy, adult-like in their prosaicness and lack of belief (probably lack of belief is what it's really all about) and therefore they must be taught better, since each author is trying to instill (or indoctrinate?) a belief in something greater, whatever that greater thing may be (God or whimsy, or both).
Okay, lots of parentheses there.
My friend says that it's not the Turkish Delight itself that makes him evil; it's the fact that he betrays Lucy and then goes to the White Witch after the Beavers say she's evil. But the Turkish Delight is magical, so why would that not affect his thought process? I'm confused about that.
~Lily~
It seems--and somebody correct me if I'm wrong--that Lewis punishes Edmund and Diggory for breaking rules they didn't know they were breaking in the first place.
Lily, you might enjoy this post if you haven't already read it: http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2012/07/the-question-of-susan.html
At nine years old I couldn't quite articulate why, but there seemed to be a sense of unfairness in them; the characters kept getting into trouble for breaking rules that hadn't been explained
So, I certainly don't think you're wrong in that perspective. :)
Content note: bullying, cerebral palsy
Furthermore, it's getting nippy weather here finally and since I tend to find A Christmas Carol depressing, I can't bear It's a Wonderful Life
I don't like It's a Wonderful Life either.
I read The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and The Magician's Nephew over the weekend so I could be caught up on the deconstructions. It seems--and somebody correct me if I'm wrong--that Lewis punishes Edmund and Diggory for breaking rules they didn't know they were breaking in the first place. Of course, I could be seeing it from an allegorical standpoint since my Christian upbringing--once I was told it was allegory--made it so I couldn't enjoy Narnia anymore. (I liked the radio dramas.) I tried Dawn Treader, but I felt like Lewis was just being mean to Eustace for acting like a bratty kid should. Maybe it comes from being bullied due to my startle reflex when I was about fifteen, but it rubbed me the wrong way. I'm very smart, but generally I'm shy with people because they don't know how to act around me unless they know me very well. I'm twenty-three now and still wary of getting bullied or disliked again.
So my knee-jerk reaction is to defend Edmund and Eustace. Edmund as the villain makes no sense to me.
~Lily~
Mariah, I think that's a really awesome perspective. It seems to fit really well with why this type of child is perceived as threatening.
I totally love Albert, but that's because I saw the movie first and I adore his actor's take on the character. He managed (imho) to make it seem like Albert was espousing truly horrible views in an attempt to honestly grapple with the Problem of Evil: children DO die, and the gods DON'T intervene, so...uhm...it's an integral part of social functioning, maybe? And therefore necessary? And...uhm...not to be thought about too closely.
Basically, I saw Albert as the reader-insert for genuinely good people who don't know how to explain evil and try to come up with a "nice" answer that actually isn't nice at all, but is not necessarily a reflection on the person holding it. (The Problem of Evil is an issue for almost any religion wherein gods exist. Some Wiccans solve the problem by saying that the gods are doing the best they can, but they're not omnipotent and they can't catch everything.)
Thank YOU. :)
Interestingly, the point you bring up is actually *very* controversial in some Christian circles (as you are probably already aware). There are a lot of people who are concerned that teaching children to believe in Santa will ultimately undermine faith in God/Jesus. The issue here is that when children learn that Santa isn't real, they may come to the (presumed incorrect in these discussions) conclusion that God/Jesus isn't real either. That is to say, teaching children to believe in False Things will taint by association their belief in True Things.
The book does not, to my knowledge, address this. Which is a shame, because the moral of the story seems to be that belief in little lies (Santa) is necessary for belief in larger lies (justice). And yet I *do* know people who decided that Santa and Jesus were both lies, which surely implies that there must be people in Discworld who come to the conclusion that Santa and Justice are both lies...?
Aaron Fidget may be wrong about the Hogfather, and that belief may need correction in order to support the social realities of the Discworld. Possibly that need is great enough to justify socks at Christmas. But I'm more interested in the fact that Aaron was characterized in the way that he was, so that the punishment would be acceptable to the reader. I wonder how the scene would read if it was a polite, nicely spoken little girl who wasn't rude but merely Did Not Believe.
It almost becomes a chicken-and-egg issue. Do Eustace/Aaron need punishment because they're naughty or do they need punishment because they're non-believers and are made naughty as the spoonful of sugar to help their medicine go down with the reader? (Which doesn't get into the problems of linking Naughty with Non-believer as if atheists are atheists not because they don't believe, but because they are stubborn assholes unwilling to believe the obvious...)
I'm using the term "atheist" loosely. Aaron doesn't believe in a specific winter festival god, therefore I am calling him an atheist. He may well believe in other gods; we aren't told.
I think that technically he's not wrong that the Hogfather doesn't exist, because the Hogfather technically doesn't exist when the exchange takes place -- he has stopped existing at all points in history because of the magical shenanigans going on. (But he did exist the day before, so that's possibly a splitting of hairs.) What he does say is:
“Let’s be absolutely clear. I know you’re just someone dressed up,” he said. “The Hogfather is a biological and temporal impossibility. I hope we understand one another.”
The "Hogfather" at the mall *is* someone dressed up, and I think (but could be wrong) that Discworld is one of those places where gods exist but are *also* still technically biologically and temporarily impossible. Which may again be a splitting of hairs.
That said, having noted that these *are* probably hair-splits, I would appreciate not being called "disingenuous". I am being precise in order to suss out Aaron's exact "sin", not insincere (which is what "disingenuous" means).
Sorry for using the wrong word, I didn't mean to offend. It just seemed clear from the narrative that the two sentences are linked -- he can't be the Hogfather because the Hogfather is impossible, nevermind that Death is also a biological and temporal impossibility and yet is standing right there, meaning the Hogfather could probably also be standing right there if he wasn't currently indisposed by plot.
My lunch break is just about over, so I'm going to bow out of the discussion for now, but I wanted to say thanks for giving me something interesting to think about :D I've enjoyed this conversation immensely.
He is wrong, however, in his assertion that there is no Hogfather at all (there is, he's just not talking to the real one), which ties directly into the narrative in which belief is required to keep the real Hogfather alive. So while he gets the minor details correct, the point that's important to the main plotline is the one that's wrong. He also lectures someone on how to do their job, which is never a fun conversation to be on the receiving end of and which it's not really his place to do as he's not the boss in this situation but a customer. I'm not denying that there's marginalization here, but it's disingenuous to imply he didn't say anything wrong at all.
It's been a long time since I read the book (I've just looked up a wikipedia summary) -- was it ever stated whether or not his atheism also tied into the plot? Because if there's supernatural forces making children not believe, and he doesn't believe, and it's because of supernatural forces, then punishing him for not believing is beyond disproportionate and right into cruel.
Possibly, but it's also important to note that brainy kids are frequently described as "know-it-alls" when the adults don't want to take the child seriously. I would even go so far as to say that Brainy::Know-It-All as Assertive::Strident, which is to say that one word is descriptive and the other is pejorative.
As noted above, Aaron isn't a know-it-all who is wrong: he's 100% right about the Hogswatch display being commercial, the Hogfather being a fake, and his presents coming from his parents instead of from a winter festival god. He's only a "know-it-all" in the sense that:
A) We don't like what he's saying.
B) We don't like how he's saying it.
Those are issues of privilege and marginalization. A stems from the idea that Aaron doesn't have the right to tell the truth, because he's a child. B is a tone argument.
I kind of vacillate between viewing Albert as a guy who's kind of desperately grappling with the unhappy and unasked for responsability of trying to educate Death in unfortunate grim realities that Death lacks the genuine human perspective to really understand, and Albert as an actually not very pleasant person where the juxtaposition between his own questionable morality and his apparent position as Death's moral instructor is dripping with irony.
That said, the perspective on varying perceptions about whether or npot one possesses the right to be a know-it-all... that's something I wouldn't have considered, and will need to ruminate on.
It's definitely interesting, that's for sure. Racking my brains, the only other explanation I can come up with is "Well, other kids tend to pick on 'know-it-alls' in a way adults don't pick on other adults", but then, that doesn't even begin to explain adults picking on children.
Well except that maybe in children's books (not sure Pratchett counts here), children expect to see all the characters acting like children?
But then, reflecting the world as it is rather than the world as it should be is not really a trait of children's books in the first place. I mean, it's okay to change the setting so that sharing cupcakes with someone means you're automatically friends forever to teach kids that sharing is good, but then it's somehow unacceptable to condemn bullying behavior? So that's not even a thing either. So it keeps coming back to the idea that "children should be seen and not heard" (worst. saying. of all time.), and as much as I dislike encouraging rudeness and misplaced anger, disproportionately punishing children for these things is clearly wrong as well.
Maybe my issue really stems from internalized oppression? I was a brainy kid, and I remember feeling frustrated trying to get adults to take my concerns seriously. Maybe that's why instinctively my brain decides that punishing kids for being too 'know-it-all' is justified?
I think Ana nailed why we get the impression the kid is a jerk: "They lack social skills, and alienate almost everyone they meet with their know-it-all attitude." A know-it-all attitude from a kid can be one of the most insufferable things to deal with--because I think for many adults, the default thought when met by that sort of attitude tends to be "kid, you have no idea what you're talking about. You think you know it all, but you haven't been out in the real world dealing with other people, you're living under your parents' roof while they pay the bills, etc." Now, most adults will have the decency to not berate a kid, especially if the kid has otherwise decent social skills that make the attitude less grating. But I get the impression that maybe Lewis had met one-too-many know-it-all kids, and decided to have it out with a literary version. Doesn't make it right, but I can see how it could be extremely cathartic.
I have an uncle who is a grown-up version--he completely lacks social skills, and has managed to alienate everyone in my extended family (excluding the aunt he married) with his know-it-allness. Upon finding out my husband was a math professor, he tried to tell my husband how he knew math better than most professors. Upon finding out I spoke fluent French and taught it to high schoolers, he tried to educate me about France and French people (using ridiculous stereotypes). He also knows the finer points of home construction better than my mother and my uncle (who are general contractors), creates videos better than my brother, is a better accountant than my accountant uncle, knows more about pet care than my veterinarian-in-training cousin...you get the picture. We are polite to him at family gatherings (except for my mom, who once told him to stop bullsh*ting everyone), but no one wants to really have anything to do with him because he has to dominate any topic of every conversation he is part of...and that's only fun for the person doing the dominating.
I would hazard a guess that kids like Aaron and Eustace have a goodly chance of growing up into that kind of know-it-all jerk. It's the know-it-allness that turns their difference from someone being bullied into someone who bullies--not physical bullying (which they both might still be subject to), but verbal/mental bullying. I think if Lewis or Pratchett had written Eustace and Aaron as kids with the exact same differences/beliefs but removed the aura of "I know better than the rest of you stupid fools", they would be wholly different characters. I think that's why I'm reluctant to see them the same way Ana does, but still agree with her that they're treated more harshly than they should be.
I don't think we can divorce his words from the context of marginalization. He's a child; to read him as an adult would be like ... I don't know, reading a black character as a white character, I suppose. (Though I try to avoid comparisons like that because that way lies discussions of Relative Oppression.)
Whether or not Lewis or Pratchett recognized the severe power differential between children and adults is immaterial, I think, to my larger point about why Eustace Scrubbs -- i.e., powerless, but "acceptable", targets -- pop up so frequently in literature written by powerful adults.
So, why so much disdain from adults towards children with those kinds of qualities...
I wonder if there's any merit to the idea that people who wouldn't have wanted to be seen as bullies, or didn't see themselves as bullies, and hence found people like that annoying in a way they couldn't express aggression towards when they themselves were children, and they're conveying that kind of hostility in the more socially acceptable context of adults addressing behavior that is considered unacceptable in children (if only because it kind of veers out of the space of absolute deference of children towards adults, which might be able to stand all on its own as a reason).
I need to get better at restraining myself from that kind of response. Even when I do it, I hear myself say "this is almost definitely not what the point is", I just don't listen.
Sorry about that.
Eh, it was going to need to be said eventually anyway. Thank you for understanding. *bloghugs*
I wonder if Death playing directly into the idea that punishing a child like that is what the Hogfather is "supposed" to do might not be part of the point.
I mean, it's already established that Death is kind of hopeless at figuring out what the purpose behind the actual holiday is, and that none of the suggestions he might be given are strictly right or wrong.
But I suppose, at the end of all that, we've still got an example of a child who's just a bit snotty, and gets an arbitrary cosmic punishment out of it, and it does kind of feel like we're supposed to laugh at them.
I mean, when Death thinks a genuine sword is an appropriate gift for a small child, and fumbles around for an actual meaning of Hogswatch, we're supposed to laugh at him as well, but...
I suppose there's a difference in laughing at somebody because they're goofy and out of touch, and laughing at somebody for being punished as a result of behavior that doesn't really ampount to much, but offends the general cultural narrative.
And I know that, for all the referencing the rest of the series and their overarching themes and character developments and insights into the fictional cosmology, the book still needs to stand on its own merits.
I don't know. I suppose, ultimately, I can just put this one up to Terry Pratchett, an otherwise insightful and considerate writer, playing a bit too much into a troublesome status quo.
I can only have faith in the idea that, if somebody were to bring this perspective to his attention and ask him about it, he'd give it a fair bit of consideration, and come out on the better end of decent.
" but he's basically a powerless atheist in a world where every year all the powerful adults around him demand, cajole, threaten, force, and try to trick him into to participating in a religious ritual that even *they* don't believe in."
It's funny that you say that, considering that other Discworld books have the general fate of atheists referred to as being struck by lightning with little signs left in the ashes saying "oh don't we?"
Something which plays humourously into creating a character who is an open atheist, and lightning proof (since he's a golem).
(And, in fact, one book where the entire story is about people being literally and quite violently threatened into playing into rituals and things that the society no longer actually believes in, to the point where their god is almost dead for lack of genuine belief, and what the greater implications of this are.
This is all why I think Pratchett would give condieration to this viewpoint if it were brought up to him, by the way. :))
Re: Discworld. Mm. Well, maybe, but in a book where most of the sympathetic adult characters either don't believe (Banjo is the only one who believes, and he is supposed to have a "child-like mind", which... yeah. Not going to touch that.) or refuse to acknowledge it (Susan "knows" the Hogfather is real, but her parents tried to shield her from that knowledge and she doesn't like to talk about it now), it seems telling that the one person singled out for actual *punishment* for non-belief is a child.
One of those snotty, bratty, know-it-all, asshole children that are so much fun for adults to bully because the children won't believe whatever an adult says, just because an adult says it. Or, in other words, a person who isn't respecting the usual class difference between them and those around them.
I think it's interesting.
See, I was thinking of it more along the lines of walking into an Apple store and ranting at the store clerk about why PC's are better, which is to say, using your personal biases to make someone else's job less pleasant. If you read his words as coming from a place of marginalization, it's a lot more unfortunate, definitely.
But isn't "rudeness" or "jerkass" and similar 'sins' ways that have also been historically used to cover over class differences and marginalizations?
Aaron may be lashing out at the "wrong" person, but he's basically a powerless atheist in a world where every year all the powerful adults around him demand, cajole, threaten, force, and try to trick him into to participating in a religious ritual that even *they* don't believe in. I read the above as frustration and irritation at being put through this on a yearly basis. Maybe the mall Santa isn't the best person to take that out on, but from Aaron's perspective the man still *appears* to be complicit in Aaron's marginalization. (Aaron presumably does not realize the socioeconomic realities that force people to take mall Santa jobs.)
In keeping with the theme of the post, I think it's valuable to remember that the powerful have often blamed the powerless for not being sufficiently gracious about their marginalization.
It's funny; my kneejerk reaction to the discussion of Aaron and Discworld is to defend it, despite the fact that I normally have little patience for the promotion of belief for belief's sake. I suspect Pratchett's intention there was more to have a funny little interlude than to make a point of shaming people who prefer the mundane to the magical. Within the narrative the character Death could find the child annoying and bratty, without the narrator making an overall judgement on the character of the child. On the other hand, belief in the unbelievable, regardless of the evidence, is a major theme of the book overall (with the justification that people need to believe in the little things like the Hogfather as practice for believing in the big things like justice, compassion, equality).
It's hard to tell how much my adoration of Sir Pterry and my general dislike of Lewis affect my interpretations, though. Am I being more charitable towards Pratchett because I love his books so much, and therefore interpreting the scene in a more positive light?
This is only a minor point, but I've read the Hogfather, and I always got the impression that his presents had been turned into bloody bones (it's mentioned elsewhere in the book that this is the Hogfather equivalent of coal from Santa). Of course, that makes it even worse. (Although it is still arguably fairly minor - on the grand scale of things it is not a great injury to be deprived of a lizard press)
This is an interesting discussion, because my intuition is that the kid is a bit of a jerk, but I have a hard time being explicit about what makes him one. I would like to point out that not all kinds of bullying are physical - it doesn't seem at all implausible to me that that kid would enjoy making other people feel stupid.
There appear to be multiple versions of the book -- the audiobook doesn't align with the e-book version I have. In mine, the "bad presents" are spelled out to be socks (and are denigrated as being insufficiently bad as what the bad presents used to be).
I agree that bloody bones is indeed far worse. o.O
I kind of figured Aaron's sin was rudeness. It's just plain rude to walk up to a mall!Santa and lecture him on how he's not real and you're too cool to believe in him and you know it's all just a commercial myth so he might as well stop trying to fool you into playing along, thankyouverymuch. I bet the mall Santas hate dealing with kids like that because what can you even do? You're not allowed to break character, but it's clear the kid's having none of it.
I agree with this. When you're a kid who no longer believes in Santa, there's a kinda of unspoken agreement that you have to play along for the sake of other children who still believe because it's not fair on them otherwise. So perhaps Aaron is being punished for not considering the feelings of others? I don't know.
I'm not sure what the "sin" of Aaron might be in a greater context, but in the Discworld, banality and mundanity are, how should I put it...
The Disc is a world that literally runs on imagination and engagement in the fantastical and literary. It plays around with the idea that being insufficiently impressed with the world (at least without having a great deal of self-awareness about why one is and how this affects people) can actually kind of make the world stop spinning.
I think the Discworld series gets a lot more milage out of this by being generally good humoured and silly from it.
(Incidentally, have you ever watched the Muppet's Christmas Carol?)
Well, we, at least we who have been reading Pratchett since high school, know a great deal about him, and have watched him screw up at attempting to be sort of human in ways far weirder than this.
Yeah, and we remember him almost killing his adopted daughter and his apprentice in the very first book he starred in, stopping only (we later learn) because their kids, his granddaughter, already has existed. (Or however that works in time travel tense.)
The idea that Pterry would be trying to make Death sympathetic...it took me a second to get my mind around that.
Death actually is fairly sympathetic at this point, but it's basically because his enemy is the auditors so he's automatically on the same side as humanity.
But he's still a complete screw-up when it comes to humanity, and him apparently taking someone's toys is about the least way he's ever screwed something up.
I say apparently because, as I pointed out, I always got the impression he _altered_ the toys, not removed them and replaced them with socks or whatever. I assumed that Aaron would open them and they'd be full of lizards or something (Including the ultra-rare poisonous ones! Whee!), and the book now also lists _rude_ reptiles.
But I don't side with Death, per se, in this scene, in fact the impression I get of what Pratchett wants us to feel is a sort of mounting amused horror as Death piles bad Santa call on bad Santa call.
Yes. Children are not, despite the stories, actually _supposed_ to get bad presents if they are bad. Nor are they supposed to get what they ask for if they are good.
The fact Death is following these 'rules' with all the same logic he followed Death rules is the joke. He's not _maliciously_ removing presents, if that's what was intended by Pterry. If he's did that, it's because he honestly thinks that's what he's supposed to do. Just like he thinks he's supposed to keep saying HO. HO. HO.
Well, we, at least we who have been reading Pratchett since high school, know a great deal about him, and have watched him screw up at attempting to be sort of human in ways far weirder than this.
Yeah, and we remember him almost killing his adopted daughter and his apprentice in the very first book he starred in, stopping only (we later learn) because their kids, his granddaughter, already has existed. (Or however that works in time travel tense.)
The idea that Pterry would be trying to make Death sympathetic...it took me a second to get my mind around that.
Death actually is fairly sympathetic at this point, but it's basically because his enemy is the auditors so he's automatically on the same side as humanity.
But he's still a complete screw-up when it comes to humanity, and him apparently taking someone's toys is about the least way he's ever screwed something up.
I say apparently because, as I pointed out, I always got the impression he _altered_ the toys, not removed them and replaced them with socks or whatever. I assumed that Aaron would open them and they'd be full of lizards or something (Including the ultra-rare poisonous ones! Whee!), and the book now also lists _rude_ reptiles.
But I don't side with Death, per se, in this scene, in fact the impression I get of what Pratchett wants us to feel is a sort of mounting amused horror as Death piles bad Santa call on bad Santa call.
Yes. Children are not, despite the stories, actually _supposed_ to get bad presents if they are bad. Nor are they supposed to get what they ask for if they are good.
The fact Death is following these 'rules' with all the same logic he followed Death rules is the joke. He's not _maliciously_ removing presents, if that's what was intended by Pterry. If he's did that, it's because he honestly thinks that's what he's supposed to do. Just like he thinks he's supposed to keep saying HO. HO. HO.
Except that this is a middle-class, well-educated child, quite possibly a tradesman's son, being rude to some geezer with bony knees who got stuck playing Hogfather at a department store. Smaller children, more naive children, and more polite children may accept this person as a representation of Hogfather himself, a powerful figure whether they believe in him or not. (One of Barbara Kingsolver's novels explains Santa in terms of the kachina, and it really makes quite a bit of sense.)
Aaron does not. He knows this guy isn't Hogfather. He knows (mistakenly, but he knows) that this guy is a powerless fake. And he uses his class privilege--the fact that he knows that his mother will buy him what he wants, so he doesn't need to play along to get a present, and his education--'collusion', 'accomplices', 'gullible'--to be a little so-and-so to this old man with the fake beard. He doesn't need him for anything. That's the classic fairy-tale rudeness error. This little old lady can't help you, and can't hurt you, so you can say what you like to her. Whoops.
But as I say, I really think Death is simply doing what he thinks is correct in his role, and also, what he wants to do because this kid annoys him. And I simply don't see Death as an adult, with power over children as a result. Susan's an adult. Death is...Death. The power he has he has over everything that lives.
(My poor AP students are right in the middle of Donne's "Death, Be Not Proud", which is lending a surreal quality to this discussion for me.)
Except that this is a middle-class, well-educated child, quite possibly a tradesman's son, being rude to some geezer with bony knees who got stuck playing Hogfather at a department store. Smaller children, more naive children, and more polite children may accept this person as a representation of Hogfather himself, a powerful figure whether they believe in him or not. (One of Barbara Kingsolver's novels explains Santa in terms of the kachina, and it really makes quite a bit of sense.)
Aaron does not. He knows this guy isn't Hogfather. He knows (mistakenly, but he knows) that this guy is a powerless fake. And he uses his class privilege--the fact that he knows that his mother will buy him what he wants, so he doesn't need to play along to get a present, and his education--'collusion', 'accomplices', 'gullible'--to be a little so-and-so to this old man with the fake beard. He doesn't need him for anything. That's the classic fairy-tale rudeness error. This little old lady can't help you, and can't hurt you, so you can say what you like to her. Whoops.
But as I say, I really think Death is simply doing what he thinks is correct in his role, and also, what he wants to do because this kid annoys him. And I simply don't see Death as an adult, with power over children as a result. Susan's an adult. Death is...Death. The power he has he has over everything that lives.
(My poor AP students are right in the middle of Donne's "Death, Be Not Proud", which is lending a surreal quality to this discussion for me.)
On Albert and the moral character thereof: As a couple commentators have alluded to, the other book where Albert has a significant role is Mort. In that book he has a line about how his crusty exterior conceals a crusty interior, and characters who know of his living identity react in fear at the thought of him returning. I definitely think he's supposed to be a very unpleasant person. He's not completely unsympathetic, but neither are the career criminals Teatime recruits. Just like the criminals, he's sympathetic not because of anything good he's done, but because of the bad things that happened in his backstory.
I think the difference is that people who read this book first are sorta looking at Death like he's a random _adult_ who's filling in for the Hogfather, and being outraged at behavior that would, indeed, be outrageous for a normal adult.
But for the people who read other Death books first, Death is a fairly clear example of Blue and Orange Morality. He has rules, and he follows them. He does bend them sometimes, but only to go against the Auditors, who he considers to be outright breaking those rules.
In Reaper Man, he gets put in the role of human, and a great deal of comedy arises. In Hogfather, he gets put in the role of Hogfather, and ever more comedy arises, especially as he _actually believes_ the nonsensical Christmas (Excuse me, 'Hogswatch') traditions are 'rules' and gets upset at how little sense they make.
So I never read any of the children as getting what they 'deserve'. I read them as getting what Death, as filtered through what he understands of Hogswatch, thinks they deserve, which is certainly completely wrong. If there's anyone at fault there, it's _Albert_, who points out the other inappropriate things Death does but not that one. Because _Albert_ is a bit of a jerk.
Likewise, the idea Death needs to be presented as sympathetic for taking away presents...ha ha ha. Death is somewhat sympathetic here because he has no idea what he's doing, so we're all wincing at him, but, well, he's Death. He's tried to _kill_ main characters before.
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