Joshua

After some recent trends, I finally decide to read the Harry Potter books. And I came away with something I didn't expect. I came away with an understanding of what makes a generationally beloved classic. It isn't authorial skill. Rowling is certainly talented, but, at least at the time, she was also relatively unpolished, and the series has plenty of rough patches. Uneven pacing, awkward plots, exposition dumps, two-dimensional secondary characters. I could write quite a few lines about what might be fixed. And I probably will at some point. But none of that matters. Because a generationally beloved classic is almost never the best book of a generation. A generationally beloved classic is the book that most perfectly captures what that generation yearns for. Hogwart's School of Wizardry did that for millennials, just as the quest to destroy the One Ring did so for the boomers. Boomers grew up hearing tales of recent history, and the heroism of previous generations, who got us through the great depression, and the great war. Their father, or grandfathers, or both, were heroes. But they were left growing up in the 1950s, a near-ideal time of growth, happiness, and prosperity. Near-ideal isn't ideal. Humans need goals. The boomers were left with no great struggles to fight, no great tasks to do, nothing that could make them feel like they measured up. So they invented something. A new struggle. A moral struggle. They decided that, because the great depression, and the great war, had happened when the institutions of Western Civilization existed, therefore those institutions were responsible. That those institutions needed to be torn down, gutted, and rebuilt in the new Boomer Morality. This was their great quest, what allowed them to imagine themselves heroes. As an added bonus, it allowed them to imagine that the men who fought WW2 were not. They were, after all, adherents of the old creed. When the hippies took to the streets, chanting "fascist scum, your time has come", they meant the very same people who had fought the Nazis. Lord of the Rings dovetailed perfectly into this narrative. Its central struggle, its great quest, is not a martial struggle or a political struggle, but a moral struggle... the quest not to seize an object of power, but to destroy one. Frodo was not some great warrior, or wise wizard. He was an innnocent, whose virtue was moral worth. The young, unaccomplished, and very small man had to resist the temptations of power, and to destroy it, because it was wicked. Is it any wonder that the boomers decided to tear down and hollow out the institutions of society, rather than inherit and incrementally improve them? Even to this day, any younger person who seeks power, wanting to improve the world, is subjected to any number of brain-dead aphorisms about Boromir and the Ring. Never mind that Tolkien never intended any of this. Never mind that the Ring wasn't a symbol of anything. It was a ring. It was evil not because it represented power... it was simply evil because it was made by evil for evil purposes, and possessed a malign will of its own. LOTR, the way the boomers read it, fit perfectly into their worldview, and they imagine themselves perpetual revolutionaries, always fighting the evils of power, even now when they are 70 years old and own everything. Which brings us to millennials. They grew up in the world that the gutting of Western institutions left us. They went to government schools run by characters straight out of a Franz Kafka novel, sent there by parents who inexplicably hated them from the time they were old enough to talk. When they yearned, they didn't yearn for a great moral struggle, or to tear anything down, or to be revolutionaries. They yearned for a society that cared about them, for parents who loved them, for a civilization that saw them as the future, and invested in them accordingly. They wanted to go to Hogwart's. They wanted get a letter by owl, telling them that the reason they didn't quite fit wasn't because they were inadequate, but because they were special. They wanted to be the special ones, the chosen ones, the boys and girls who lived. And that last sentence may sound a bit conceited... until you realized that when they wanted to be special, they wanted to be special in precisely the way that Harry Potter was special, the way that every child in a healthy family is naturally special... not because he is talented or great, but because his mother loved him. This is what saved Harry Potter in the inciting incident of his young life. This is what millennials wanted for themselves. Not to be astronauts and war heroes and rock stars, but to fit into a place like Hogwarts. To be mentored by wise and caring elders like Dumbledore. To be part of a community. To have mothers who loved them. To write a story like this isn't necessarily to understand a generation, because it never seems to happen except by accident. It is, rather, to help a generation understand itself. That's why fan fiction, with visions like this picture, matters. Not because it has so large a footprint as to change the world, perhaps, but because it represents the spirit of an age. It tells us what people want. And if we look carefully, it tells us why.