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

[rachelmanija]

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?

Comments

[juushika]

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.

[conuly]

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.