rachelmanija | When did we stop caring that elves aren't real?

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When did we stop caring that elves aren't real?

Starting around the 1950s, a number of books in English for children had the message that magic isn't real. Helpfully for the historical cause, many of them won Newbery Medals or Honor, so they are very easy to come across.

The basic plot is that Protagonist Kid meets a kid (Tragic Kid) who claims that magic (elves, etc) is real. The kids do magic spells, make elf homes, etc. Protagonist Kid usually isn't sure that the magic is real, but wants to believe that it is. At the end it is revealed that magic is definitely not real, there are no elves, and Tragic Kid was making it all up to cover up for the fact that their father is abusive/their mother is an addict/they have no parents and are living alone/etc. Protagonist Kid is sadder but wiser.

There are variants on this, such as Bridge to Terabithia, in which no one ever believes that the magic is real - it's explicitly a game - but it ends in tragedy anyway.

I recently came across an example of this, published in 1996, and realized that it is the most recent example I can recall of the genre. Am I missing examples of it, or did they stop getting written or published?

The thing that has always struck me most about this genre is that it's a solution in search of a problem. Kids believing in magic and elves and so forth is not actually a big social problem, but the books treat it as if is. They are written as if the belief must be broken with a devastating shock, when in reality, most kids gradually learn that their parents are Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, without the need for a dramatic revelation.

Those are also beliefs which are over way before kids are old enough to read the "there's no such thing as magic" books. The books aren't teaching kids there's no such thing as magic, because by the time they're old enough to read them they already know that. They're actually teaching them that if they read a book hoping that it's fantasy, it may in fact be a book about how fantasy isn't real.

Anyway, the genre thankfully seems to have died the death. But that made me wonder about some things. Why was this ever considered worthwhile to begin with? Why is it always fantasy book-style magic that needs to be dispelled, rather than the sort of supernatural things that people really do believe in as adults, like crystal healing and possession by demons and magical-type conspiracy theories?

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I'd bet money there was a wave of this kind of book in the mid-late 90s specifically in response to pulpy kids' SFFH like goosebumps, animorphs, and--huh, I did not realize they were 30 years old--the magic treehouse, as well as ye olde Harry Potter. (And potter-related moral panic.)

(I got Tuck Everlasting and The Bridge to Terebithia mixed up as a kid and boy, that was an experience.)

Actually more or less the opposite way around: for the most part the pulpy stuff (and HP, for that matter) was championed as an active rejection of The Morally Improving Newberry Medal Bleakness. By the time that the pulp stuff was happening, those involved in things LIKE the Newberry Medal/etc were already well onto the "if you give me another book where the dog dies I will literally set fire to it" train, to be SUPER BLUNT.

(Listening to GenX children's librarians rant on this topic is fantastic, especially older GenX ones.)

And GenX writers: Gordon Korman's YA novel No More Dead Dogs is a sentiment true to my heart, which I have held ever since reading Where the Red Fern Grows. The latter our teacher read to us during our post-lunch homeroom period in 5th grade, and I'd got a copy and read ahead so I got to experience the shock, and then anticipate it as the teacher got close to the end.

Edited (YA not YS) 2021-04-19 23:48 (UTC)

Not an answer to your question, but one of the books I really loved as a teenager was Too Many Ghosts (Paul Gallico), in which the hero investigated alleged supernatural phenomena in the hope that he would find a real ghost one day but in the meantime he was not going to have anyone scammed/scared/etc by crooks. I was mostly fascinated by the various methods used to produce the phenomena. I didn't like the sequel, The Hand of Mary Constable, in which he takes on fake spiritualists, quite so much, but it was just as interesting.

I also really like Too Many Ghosts.

I got really annoyed by the knee-jerk Reds-under-the-bed part of The Hand of Mary Constable though I loved the technical breakdown of how the scam was brought off (and the insight that because the mark -- John Constable? -- thought of himself as super-rational and the brightest man in any given room, he was more vulnerable to being scammed because his reasoning went "If I can't see how this could be a scam, then it can't be a scam" rather than "If I can't see how this could be a scam, there's some information I'm missing." A nice take on "When you've eliminated the impossible...")

It occurs to me that I've just gone through yet another super-annoying discussion of Peter's Room (the AF group on FB, fwiw) and that one of the things I find annoying about those discussions is that the blurb on the back is trying to sell PR as one of the sort of novels in question here, and it just isn't, but the dissonance between people who believe the blurb and people who don't always sets the tone for the discussion.

Poorly-written blurbs can cause so much trouble! I kept waiting for the "magical conspiracy" to show up in Freedom and Necessity, before finally realizing the book is actually about an occult conspiracy. It's hidden and esoteric, not supernatural.

Yes; the blurb in question includes the line "[author] gives a clear warning of the dangers inherent in make-believe prolonged beyond the proper age" and it grinds my gears. "[Author] gives a clear warning of the dangers inherent in poorly directed role-playing games where there isn't a gamesmaster, several of the teenage participants have concealed PTSD, at least one of them is pretty definitely dancing along the edge of suicidal ideation and everyone except the pov character has a hidden agenda" is more like it.

I wonder if it's a combination of mid-century gritty realism blended with a backlash against the popularity of kids' fantasy books? IIRC, the 1940s/50s was when books for middle-grade kids really started to become a publishing phenomenon, and Narnia was the latest in a number of wildly popular kids' portal fantasies going back to the late 1800s. I wonder if all of that tipped over into a sort of concern-trolling fear of kids taking all of this seriously and genuinely believing in fantasy worlds, kind of the 1950s/60s equivalent of "D&D is turning our kids into Satanists!"

I mean, a lot of the massively popular "literary classic" adult fiction from that general time period was also about disillusionment and having your childhood dreams wrecked by the realities of adult life, so maybe this is the kid equivalent of Updike and so on.

I think disillusionment is it, rather than the moral panic that happened later. I read a lot of this kind of thing in the 80s when I was growing up, which meant it was probably written in the 70s to parallel gritty realism.

According to a prof I had who taught a course in Children's Literature in 1973, when that subgenre was still going strong (and when schools were still shoving I NEVER PROMISED YOU A ROSE GARDEN down kids' throats in high school lit classes), he said it was a very important evolution in literature meant to teach kids that religion was all = Tooth Fairy etc, and an introduction to existentialism, which was the culmination of human philosophy. This thinking, or similar strands, were to be met with in all literature courses through my college years. The only time you could get away from existentialism was if you copped hard to Marxism. "The Marxist views in Chaucer, Marxism, the proletariat, and Piers Plowman, A Marxist examination of JANE EYRE was the ONLY way you could avoid having to write yet another paper on existentialist view of all these. And of course the only contemporary lit we read was yet more of this view.

Edited 2021-04-19 20:07 (UTC)

:points up: What Sartorias said.

Also just the general sense that only that kind of literature HAD ANY VALUE, so of course you wanted kids to read literature With Value, so it had to be that kind of literature, and the other shit would Rot Children's Brains (because it was not Valuable Literature). People who were in The Educated Classes (etc) really and truly believed this, and really and truly believed that if you let kids read "escapist" fiction (or even adults!) you were destroying their minds.

That's basically the mentality through most of the mid-century, in terms of the people who controlled both publishing and libraries (which is where a lot of the awards drew their committees) and universities and so on, held without any irony at all.

Edited 2021-04-19 22:06 (UTC)

This matches my Mum's research on the topic (she was a litcritter) which I only heard of second-hand. (She could not get into Fantasy at all but had no objections to me reading it). Her research was on German children's literature, but the pattern is _exactly_ the same: children's books must be educational, and none of that silly escapism.

Escapism rots the brain and makes you credulous and stupid! And this will end in RUIN! It's BAD and MORALLY SUSPECT and definitely intellectually corrupting.

If we were all on board ship and there was trouble among the stewards, I can just conceive their chief spokesman looking with disfavor on anyone who stole away from the fierce debates in the saloon or pantry to take a breather on deck. For up there, he would taste the salt, he would see the vastness of the water, he would remember that the ship had a whither and a whence. He would remember things like fog, storms, and ice. What had seemed, in the hot, lighted rooms down below to be merely the scene for a political crisis, would appear once more as a tiny egg-shell moving rapidly through an immense darkness over an element in which man cannot live. It would not necessarily change his convictions about the rights and wrongs of the dispute down below, but it would probably show them in a new light. It could hardly fail to remind him that the stewards were taking for granted hopes more momentous than that of a rise in pay, and the passengers forgetting dangers more serious than that of having to cook and serve their own meals. Stories of the sort I am describing are like that visit to the deck. They cool us.

― C.S. Lewis

Was it too controversial to directly say that religion wasn't real, and instead the idea was that magic = religion? It never occurred to me that magic and religion had anything to do with each other - the only books I read that had religious themes at all, whether pro or anti, were all fantasies.

I think it was considered to be controversial--the thinking, at least in publishing, was colored by textbooks being published by this conglomerate in Texas at the time. So there was this sense of tiptoeing around certain subjects, and of course texts were definitely still cram packed with patriotism and whites only stuff at that time.

But that's me talking, not the prof. There was this odd atmosphere beginning around the mid-sixties and going on through the mid-seventies when I was in high school wherein teachers/profs would take on this tone that their words were daring, or shocking, or that the Religious Police were going to leap out of the woodwork and force them into remedial Sunday school for their astounding words. . . except they *all* talked that way. I remember being seventeen or so, and thinking in my literature class, oh here comes the big lecture on existentialism again and tuning out.

By the time I got to grad school in the early/mid seventies, some of us were using Marxism as a way around the "yet again" hammer. It was the only other acceptable approach. In fact, I fell in with a bunch of Marxists (who incidentally were the most materialistic people I ever knew) because of this. (I also remember that American Marxism was not nearly as crazy-eyed fervent as German Marxism, as I experienced in Germany and Austria, the young people my age in a reactionary swing of the pendulum from their parents, who grew up during WW II, but that I guess is a whole nother ball of wax)

Oh yeah, the Marxists didn't want me talking abut fantasy at all, and I even had to keep my fantasy and sf in the bedroom, whereas it was okay to have history and German Lit books out for all to see. It was like I had to hide my horrible, degrading habit.

Edited 2021-04-20 01:08 (UTC)

Data point: a friend's 4yo who is being raised by agnostics but with a Christian grandmother opined this week "I bet Grandma believes in that," when some werewolves came on his cartoon, because his 4yo theory is that Grandma believes in supernatural stuff and he does not and Mom and Dad are somewhere in the middle. His parents are working with him on this because approaching other people with the idea that supernatural entities and events are an all or nothing proposition is not a very good idea.

Why is it always fantasy book-style magic that needs to be dispelled, rather than the sort of supernatural things that people really do believe in as adults, like crystal healing and possession by demons and magical-type conspiracy theories?

Maybe in part because when you debunk things no one above the age of 12 believes in anyway, you don't get any pushback?

Something I always found unappealing about many books of this type is how terribly safe they are. The author isn't pushing any boundaries, they're just waving the idea of boundary-pushing around and then retreating safely back into the mundane world. When I was a kid I found books like, say, A Wrinkle In Time much more engaging because they actually challenged me to imagine weird and wonderful things outside my own experience. It takes courage to write a book like that, because you're asking people to take the fantasy seriously, at least for the duration of the book, and you're taking the risk that they'll find it too silly or unbelievable. Whereas if you write a book with the message "There is actually no magic" you're not risking anything at all because everyone already knows and agrees with that.

Word.

Huh, I never classified Terabithia as one of these books, despite the Newbery!Tragedy, because Jesse returns to the magic at the end, and introduces May Belle to Terabithia, so the "wiser" part of it is actually an understanding that magic (or even "magic," or even the idea of magic) is important, even in the face of tragedy.

(Though I, uh, kind of feel strongly about this book, so I may not be the most unbiased judge of this :) )

Jinx! (see my comment below yours)

Preamble: MMV, I am not saying your reaction/take is WRONG, just sharing mine.

For me as a child Terabithia was the same as the others because the position of the book, of the narrative, was still that This Was Make Believe, and also had (for me) this strong undercurrent that even if ~*the idea of magic*~ was maybe important, that Make Believe was important, it was important ~*for kids*~, and had the undercurrent that it was potentially dangerous, and mostly just made me feel judged and condescended to.

Which actually was what put me off it much more than the actual tragedy: its framing of "the magic" felt belittling to me, like oh of course this isn't REAL. (Mind I was already highly sensitized to this feeling by both other books and real-life interactions! But yeah.)

I read a book called The Changeling when I was a child where the heroine's friend talked about how she was a changeling and not really born to her horrible family. They had a big fight near the climax where she called it all a lie.

But at the end, she sends her a letter and says that she was lying when she called it a lie.

Yes!

This is by Zilpha Keatley Snyder, and is one of the few "disillusionment-with-magic-as -a-metaphor-for-growing-up" books that I _do_ like, perhaps because Snyder clearly did _not_ disdain fantasy, and actually wrote quite a bit of it. In fact, she later wrote a whole trilogy of fantasy/sf novels based on the world the girls come up with in The Changeling, and I actually read those _first_, before I ever came across The Changeling.

I loved that book for many reasons, but the fact that the author included the "I was wrong; I was actually a changeling after all, and so might you be" part was one.

I came in specifically to make this point if no one else had, so thanks.

I don't really think of Bridge to Terabithia as a variant along these lines, because I remember the ending being that the magic/imagination is real and worth all the pain, not that whatshername died because she believed in her imagination. That's why it ends with the boy taking his sister to Terabithia.

I had also thought the others ones were using Magic as a metaphor for the belief that people were mostly basically decent, which only innocent kids would believe and they needed to wisen up and realize that everyone was a jerk and the whole world mostly sucks. Which is different from the way real fantasy books are sort of a metaphor for the idea that Dragons in life exist but you (maybe with the help of your friends and also common decency) can struggle against them.

I don't understand those books either. It's like they feel a need to take imagination away from children. None of this shit is real, so get over it and look at the real world. WTF?!

Genuine answer to why it stopped, at least part of it: the kids that were forced to read those books and mostly hated them finished growing up into writers and - crucially - public librarians and we fucking hate them and stopped giving them awards or buying them.

Actually mostly GenX did this, rather than Millennials (only a few elder Millennials my age actually had to suffer the Newberry Bleakness), but it was . . . emphatic. GenX hated those books and GenX got onto the Newberry Committees and went "fuck this shit". :P (Listening to GenX librarians rant about this is a great time especially if you give them wine first. The younger-Milennials/Zennials will sometime be like "wait that was a thing?" and BOOM OFF GOES THE CURRENT HEAD OF YOUTH SERVICES!)

Why is it always fantasy book-style magic that needs to be dispelled, rather than the sort of supernatural things that people really do believe in as adults, like crystal healing and possession by demons and magical-type conspiracy theories?

Because at the time there was the assumption that the former led to the latter so that if you could Educate and Elevate the Children you would inoculate them against that other nonsense. That adults were around who believed that nonsense was proof that their brains were rotted by Crap when they were children.

Edited 2021-04-19 22:07 (UTC)

Also crystal healing and conspiracy theories hadn't really been invented yet! Both are offshoots of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture, which was both anti-science and anti-government. Obviously the big exception in conspiracy theories is antisemitic stuff like the protocols of Zion, which had been around for quite a while, but the invention of the national security state in this same period really goosed conspiracy theories, partly because many of them weren't wholly untrue in the era of Cointelpro and the like. It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you.

XD I mean true but there were plenty of weird Woo things that occupied the same place as crystal healing all the way back past the beginning of the century; just looking more at spiritualism and so on, rather than "crystal vibrations". The specific outfits changed, but the core tendency was very solid.

Mostly: Educating Children Properly (with ~* good literature*~ with ~* great literary merit and value*~) was supposed to make it so that they would be safe from any of that kind of influence and would be Clear Eyed and blah blah blah fishcakes.

Oh this is so so true.

This is an obvious statement but WWII, especially the Holocaust and the firebombings and nuclear bombings, did a real fucking number on everybody, and in intellectuals the response was very much a new cheerful variant on existentialism--the key text is probably Paul Tillich's The Courage to Be. Kids had to be taught that magic wasn't real so that they could properly accept grim reality and soldier on despite it. You can kind of see this in the fact that it was The Last Battle that won the Carnegie; it's a pretty easy interpretation of that book that Narnia was a lie and the Christian afterlife is real. And of course the train crash for that extra dose of realism.

Edited 2021-04-19 22:18 (UTC)

Mmmhm. The Dwarfs being the way they were was very much something those who pushed this whole mindset would have approved of, as well as the Ape's charlatanism.

Give it another few years and TLB would have been out of fashion for framing the Christian Afterlife as real, but.

Interesting context.

I don't have any special knowledge here, but the 'magic isn't real' books felt to me like the same underlying message as Old Yeller and Bridge to Terabithia and all the 'problem' novels: The world is sad, and big problems exist, and you can't fix them. Parents die, friends die, pets die; you cannot save them. Alcoholism and bullying and poverty happen, and you cannot fix them. You can't even escape them: A Day No Pigs Would Die, and Save Queen of Sheba, and some others, had the message that all your efforts will not get you out of the socioeconomic slot you were born into.

They all felt like the main point was 'the world is grim and you should give up hope now'.
I was reading enough later to not make the connection to WWII.

Not really what you're talking about, but when I was reading/writing recaps for The Baby-Sitter's Club books (published in the 80's and 90's) I realized just how many books pushed the idea that Santa and the Easter Bunny weren't real. As if Ann M. Martin wanted to be CERTAIN that none of her (child!) readers believed in such foolishness. Of course, as one of those readers, I just rationalized that the author no longer believed because duh, she's a grown up. But as an adult, it seems so bizarre.

I also half believed in that stuff probably a bit longer than most kids do when deep down, I knew the truth. I was one of those kids who almost intentionally clueless, and you know what, it was fine.

So yeah, I don't know. It's weird, and if the trend has died, I'm glad.

I think my childhood was at the tail-end of these books being published—meaning that there were rather a lot of them in the libraries for me to dodge. I developed a habit of reading the end first in part to avoid them. (They probably played a role in turning me off mundane fiction—them and the never-pretended-to-be-anything-else problem novels.)

That wasn’t how I remembered Bridge to Terabithia at all, but having googled it I realize I was thinking of Tuck Everlasting, which I must have read about the same time (I think they were both assigned in my fifth-grade English class).

Would you class E.L. Konigsburg's Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth with these?

My mother actually wrote one book with magic where the editor got her to rewrite it with the magic not being real. I liked the first version better when I was a kid, but I now think the second turned out better (because the editor was right about the magic not being really integral to the story, and also because the rewrite meant she polished it more).

Your mother is E. L. Konigsburg?!

Ack, sorry, no, she is/was not E.L. Konigsburg! I should have been more clear. My mother is Betty K. Erwin, and the book I was talking about is called Behind the Magic Line (Little, Brown, 1969).

Would you class E.L. Konigsburg's Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth with these?

I was just describing my memories of that book to

spatch this afternoon! I have not read it since fourth or fifth grade. It doesn't strike me personally as the same thing, because what I remember of it is more of a folie à deux friendship where the witchcraft is the medium of their relationship and the problems in it have more to do with control and loneliness than make-believe, also I don't believe it ends tragically; one of the girls is keeping a secret about her family, but it's not a melodramatic one, and the consuming game of the witch and her apprentice gives way to the two girls reapproaching one another on more even terms.

I LOVED THAT BOOK

Anyway, the genre thankfully seems to have died the death.

I didn't actually read many examples of this genre as opposed to actual children's fantasies which I read all over the place, but I am leaving these citations of Tolkien and Le Guin on the value of escapism in fantasy because it seems relevant. Tolkien was speaking in 1939, Le Guin in 1974. This branch of children's fiction just looks like a particularly decorated strain of the popular view they were both, in their different generations, pushing back against.

Yeah, Tolkien wrote a whole essay on this, "On Fairy-stories."

Unfortunately this is also the plot of The Egypt Game, one of my favorite books at age 12.I need to edit to explain that I was born in 1961.

And when I read the book I bleeped out the part about how magic wasn't real. The rest of it was what I glommed onto.

As another commenter noted, that was about the same era as "Jennifer, Hecate..."... I adored that book.

Harriet the Spy was another book I read at that age. Also the Prydain books were new when I was around age 10.

I'm not sure what happened to children's lit circa 1980. I missed all that. I was in the era of older trends. A wrinkle in Time was a new rec for me. I was 10 in 1971. FWIW.

Also I was lucky enough to read LeGuin's Earthsea books in real time, and I never missed a step at relating to Ged even as a girl. All the anti feminist stuff she later regretted went right past me.

I just inhaled all the stuff I loved and needed from that trilogy and shrugged off the rest.

I apparently was a child at a Turning Point but of course was OBLIVIOUS.

Edited 2021-04-20 01:31 (UTC)

The Changeling (also Zilpha Keatley Snyder) has similar imaginative play, but I wouldn't say either that or The Egypt Game is down on magic. Snyder subsequently (as far as publishing order goes, anyway - not sure of the chronology of the writing) turned the girls' invented world from The Changeling into a fantasy trilogy. (I'm sure a lot of people here already know that.)

Yeah, for The Egypt Game . . . my records tell me I re-read it back in 2012, so not recently enough for the plot to stick clearly in my memory, but I know I quite enjoyed it at the time. I was also somewhat surprised to learn it wasn't a fantasy novel, because that was how I remembered it! Now, to be fair, I had a nigh-invincible ability to read magic into many books that didn't actually have any (Exhibit A: The Secret Garden) -- but I don't think I would have been able or inclined to do that if The Egypt Game had actually been one of the types of books that force-fed you a banality pill.

. . . huh. My own choice of words there just made a connection in my brain: I now strongly suspect that the people who wrote Changeling: The Dreaming got exposed to way too many examples of this type of book growing up. They would have been the right age for it (firmly Gen X), and given that the entire game is built around the idea of magic and wonder struggling to survive in a world determined to deny its very existence, it ain't hard to see a connection.

Now, to be fair, I had a nigh-invincible ability to read magic into many books that didn't actually have any (Exhibit A: The Secret Garden)

How very dare.

-- but I don't think I would have been able or inclined to do that if The Egypt Game had actually been one of the types of books that force-fed you a banality pill.

I think there's a difference between stories about imagination and stories where imagination is punished. The Egypt Game begins in the understanding of a game, shifts ambiguously so that the children worry that they have accidentally tapped into something magical, and is upheld at the end as realistic, but in a way where even if the game itself is over, the value of imagination is affirmed—it's even healing. No one has their illusions smashed to show that the world is inescapable. If anything, imagination draws people to interact more with the world.

Thank you! That has given words to the sense in my head that was too nebulous for me to try and articulate it -- basically that no, there isn't real magic, but the game itself was good, not a foolish and doomed attempt to hide from a cruel, uncaring world. :-P

Thank you!

You're welcome!

That has given words to the sense in my head that was too nebulous for me to try and articulate it -- basically that no, there isn't real magic, but the game itself was good, not a foolish and doomed attempt to hide from a cruel, uncaring world.

Okay, I should obviously have saved my link to Le Guin and Tolkien for this reply.

I'm never quite sure how far Burnett actually goes into whether the Magic is real or not; obviously a lot of it is self-belief, but the distance communication between Archie Craven and his dead wife is presented as a thing, and the way something very similar happens in Robin actually is magic in a sort of theosophy/Rosicrucian sort of way.

obviously a lot of it is self-belief, but the distance communication between Archie Craven and his dead wife is presented as a thing, and the way something very similar happens in Robin actually is magic in a sort of theosophy/Rosicrucian sort of way.

I seem to have interpreted that the Magic is real, if not necessarily in the ways that the children believe and work their spells—I didn't know from either the numinous or headology the first time I read it, but it's not just Archibald Craven's dream of Lilias calling to him from the garden that can't be explained prosaically, it's the way that far off in Italy he comes back to life with his Yorkshire bit of earth like a fisher king who doesn't know it. I have opinions now as an adult reader about how much you can banish chronic illness by tending roses instead of thistles, but.

Robin is the Burnett I've read that isn't either The Secret Garden or A Little Princess! My mother and I discovered it in a one-room used book store in the basement of the Somerville Armory and bought it on the spot because neither of us had ever heard of it.

You mean there's someone else to whom I can enthuse about her neglected masterpiece T.Tembarom !?!

You mean there's someone else to whom I can enthuse about her neglected masterpiece T.Tembarom !?!

I remember your review! I just still haven't read the book!

I should have read farther down the thread for Snyder discussion ;). I adored the Green-Sky trilogy as a tween and still do, and I find it fascinating from a writerly point of view that it started as a pretend-fantasy world in The Changeling, and then she decided to write an actual fantasy series. Also, the dichotomy of endings between the last book and the video game (which I never knew existed and only learned about because of Yuletide) is _also_ kind of fascinating.

I loved the Green-Sky trilogy too: I read it first, and then discovered The Changeling and thought heeeyyyyy! I see what happened here! It was my first time, as a young person, to have insight into an author's creative process.

Snyder subsequently (as far as publishing order goes, anyway - not sure of the chronology of the writing) turned the girls' invented world from The Changeling into a fantasy trilogy.

I'm glad it worked better than Dorothy Gilman with The Maze at the Heart of the Castle.

Scooby-Doo is part of this genre, isn't it?

I think what makes at least some difference with Scooby Doo is that it's scary/bad magic being maliciously used by unscrupulous adults to hoodwink people. So the message isn't "The world is drearier and less wonderful than you realized" but rather "The world is safer and less scary than you thought." I think a Newbery-esque book in which the child protagonist was terrorized by someone using fake ghosts and then rescued by their friends wouldn't have the same disillusioning feeling at all.

This is why Scooby-Doo did not work for me: because ghosts were less scary than the idea that powerful grown-ups were going to try to screw their community over in every single community. I was more terrified knowing that it was Old Man Whatsit All Along. Way more.

I think no. "Ghostbusters" is really is its own thing, and a subgenre of horror/mystery rather than depressing realism masquerading as fantasy. No one's disappointed or learns a special lesson that ghosts aren't real when they unmask the fake ghost, they're just pleased to have captured a villain.

I was the right age to read a lot of these (along with nuclear horror stories!) and I think they just sailed on past me leaving no trace, except that I got into fantasy for adults a lot sooner because kids' books were depressing! But I read every single book in the childrens' and teens' sections of the library in order to access the adult section, so I must have read at least some of these, but I don't remember a single one.

I am of that era too, but luckily being in a Commonwealth country I got Gerald Durrell and Diana Wynne Jones instead...

Morally Improving Literature is still around, it's just a matter of which ideology is being promoted in any particular book.

I am of that era too, but luckily being in a Commonwealth country I got Gerald Durrell and Diana Wynne Jones instead...

We had those too, fortunately! All of my formative Jones languishes in storage, but my childhood copy of The Amateur Naturalist (1982) is right in my office behind me. I am glad you dodged this particular bullet, nonetheless.

Yes, as a UK person of late Gen X I don't think I encountered this at all as a child. Depressing UK children's lit at the time was heavily social realist with protagonists who were too ground down or streetwise to come up with elaborate fantasies. The closest I remember was a novel I read at school which had a heavy plot element about a Alien Big Cat on the moors near where the protagonist lived, but whether it existed or not was left ambiguous and it was more symbolic of the protagonist's inner "wildness" than anything else.

Edited 2021-04-20 12:51 (UTC)

I think I was old enough to come in at the start of the dreary social commentary phase (Honor Arundel/Joan Lingard/later KM Peyton) but what I recall was there was still plenty of fantasy about but it got grimmer elements bolted on (eg A Game of Dark, the William Mayne one where the protag escapes into fantasies of attempting to kill a "Worm" which digests its prey in acid slime, to escape the looming conclusion that he's actually the son of the woman he regards as his sister, but it's entirely possible that his father remains the same person.)

I found the book - it's called The Nature of the Beast by Janni Howker, and the ending is that the Big Cat is real, but when the protag tries to catch it to win fame and fortune it accidentally drowns in a bog and can't be retrieved.

And people wonder why Harry Potter was a runaway success.

My theory is that very few people are actually trying to warn children about the dangers of believing in Magic; they're just writing standard Resign Yourself To the Bleakness of Life in General stories that use magic as a hook (because otherwise they would just be standard Resign Yourself To the Bleakness of Life in General stories).

That, or magic is being used to represent art and creativity and imagination, so the message isn't really "magic isn't real" but "it's time to put away art and creativity and imagination and all other childish things and go work at the box factory." I don't entirely buy that as a theory, but it would explain why they haven't been getting published since 1996 - no one works at the box factory anymore, and children might need creativity and imagination to succeed in the knowledge economy.

Ohh, the first theory makes so much sense!

If the second one is true, we should be in for a giant revival of "put away imagination and go work in the gig economy" at any moment now.

Wow, the discussion is fascinating! I think my instinct is to go along with whoever it was upthread who said it's about resigning yourself to grim realities and not trying to live in a dream world because that's as bad as drugs, yo!! That's the feeling I got from those books, anyway, when I was young. That believing in fairies or magic or whatever was basically like dropping acid and was going to de-equip you for Life.

This prompted me to reread Lisle's Afternoon of the Elves, which was the example of this trope from my childhood. And... it was actually pretty good?

In no small part because the magic of the elves becomes a flexible metaphor both for building one's own magic/escapism and for learning to celebrate repurposed litter, weeds, and other stand-ins for the unsightly and Other ... like Tragic Kid herself. The protagonist going on to adopt the elf village when the girls are separated and never quite disbelieving in the magic even though she's clearly now manufacturing it, and the village, all by herself all work for me. Like discussion of Bridge to Terabithia (which I also liked as a kid) in the comments, that's the take on this trope I find successful: magic as ambiguous and/or as emotionally real and valuable even when the gritty reality of plot takes center stage.

(That said, my childhood impressions of Afternoon of the Elves were all about the little fairy houses and not at all of the tragic reveals, so, like other commenters, I think that's how children approached and salvaged this trope.)

I still feel like there are remnants of this trope, but all the examples I can think of are YA and all of them are along the lines of "is magic real and/or is it the product of a troubled mind," see: vampire and/or psychosis in Klein's The Moth Diaries (2002), parallel world/portal fantasy or psychosis in Ancrum's The Wicker King (2017). There's actually fair bit of crossover in the resurgence of portal fantasy and its trope inversions, ex. the was it suicide or was she just going back to the portal world? ending of Weymouth's The Light Between Worlds (2018). Taking a serious, psychological approach to post-portal experience frequently hinges the same elements--magic as escapism; is magic real??--as the elves aren't real MG trope, except that the doubt is externally imposed or problematically internalized. I don't know if that's the readers of this trope grown up and interrogating/reapplying it or if it's just a more nuanced and interesting progression of the same concepts. I do know that I dig the approach.

I love a good straight up fantasy book, I read genre for the payoff of magic totally being real, esp. as a kid. But it also engages me as a reader to ask why I would want magic to be real, how far I would go to believe it, what would convince me of it, what I'm escaping into or from; they're interesting questions when they blur the boundary between the genre and myself. I don't think that's intent of the elves aren't real MG books were trying to do; I think I agree with

owlectomy that they're "standard Resign Yourself To the Bleakness of Life in General stories that use magic as a hook." But Afternoon of the Elves still works for me, those YA variants def. work for me; there's a seed of potential there that I honestly don't mind.

I actually enjoy Afternoon too, and did as a kid. And I think you're right - the ending is improved, greatly, by the protagonist consciously rejecting grim reality, despite the conviction of literally everybody she knows, in order to build a new elf village.

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When did we stop caring that elves aren't real?

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