Brit Mandelo on "Queering SFF"

Over at the Tor.com website, Brit Mandelo has an article (part of an ongoing series) entitled, "Queering SFF: Where's the Polyamory?", in which she asks why more sf doesn't contain so-called polyamorous relationships and why, in particular, more love-triangles don't end in three-ways.

Here's a quote:

The original Twitter discussion [that prompted the article] was about love triangles in YA fiction (love ‘em or hate ‘em?), which spurred me to think about the trope as a whole: why does it have to be combative? So many books use the triangle to push plot but would never consider letting the three characters in question come together.  [more...]

It was a curious experience for me to read this article by Ms. Mandelo a day after re-reading the Song of Songs, which is Solomon's.  It is as if I stepped from one universe into another.

I'm not going to focus on the moral issues involved here, particularly the issue of depicting kinky relationships in stories aimed at older children (what the "YA" label actually means), because covering that thoroughly would require a great deal of time and space and would carry the conversation into a realm different from the one I'm interested in at the moment.  Instead, I'm going to focus more heavily on the artistic matters.

The brief answer to the question Ms. Mandelo poses is, because ending a love triangle with a three-way destroys the plot (or subplot) and betrays the reader.

Love triangles are of perpetual interest and popularity in fiction for at least two reasons:  first, they touch on common human experience with which a large number of readers can relate, and second, they produce tension by creating a situation--a competition of sorts--that at least one character must inevitably lose.  The build-up in that tension, with all the opportunities for shippers to argue rancorously on the Internet over who should lose and who should win, creates the pleasure of reading about love triangles.  Twilight is interesting largely because Bella cannot have both her vampire lover and her werewolf lover.  Girl Genius is interesting partly because Moloch von Zinzer cannot have his McNinja girl, his bucktoothed thief girl, and his creepy minion girl.  He must choose, and choose wisely, for just as the true girl will give you life, the false girl will take it from you.

Take any generic Japanese harem comedy as a further example.  Basically an exaggerated love triangle, the harem comedy is a story in which three to seven beautiful but eccentric girls are trying for improbable reasons to latch onto one erstwhile luckless loser.  The harem comedy is interesting and entertaining precisely because only one girl can get the guy in the end; if it were a literal harem rather than a harem comedy, there would be no plot.  If the story ended with the characters deciding to have a four-way, or an eight-way, it might be kinky, but it would be a dissolution rather than a resolution to the storyline, because the storyline is about one girl getting a guy--or perhaps more accurately, one guy choosing the right girl--and to end the story in such a way that the difficult choice does not have to be made, is cheating.  It is a letdown.  It is anticlimactic.  This is because harem comedies, although they have a tendency to get mired in anatomical gags and sexual hijinks, are when stripped bare (so to speak) basically boy-meets-girl stories.  They are love stories.  And love stories are by nature exclusive and monogamous.  More on that a little later.

Take Ranma 1/2.  Please.  How different would the story be if Ranma, instead of constantly fending off unwanted advances and trying awkwardly and halfheartedly to forge a relationship with the girl next door, simply made all comers, both and female?  Again, kinky, but no plot.  Susan Napier in her collection of essays on Japanese cartoons, Anime, has a chapter on Ranma 1/2 in which she makes a complaint somewhat similar to that made by Ms. Mandalo:  Napier complains that Ranma 1/2, even though it constantly depicts characters violating boundaries, particularly boundaries surrounding sex and gender roles, does not do enough to undermine traditional Japanese views of gender, but instead ends up confirming them.  I believe Napier has missed the point; a comical show like Ranma 1/2 cannot help but confirm traditional gender roles because the plot hinges on the protagonist's unintended transformations back and forth from male to female and the social discomfitures these transformations cause.  If all the social norms were swept away, Ranma's accidental appearances in drag and other embarrassing moments would have no ability to shock and therefore no ability to amuse.  Without social conventions to violate--and thereby pay homage to--Ranma 1/2 could not be funny.  If Ranma did not care about his masculinity, he would not be embarrassed and the viewer could not laugh at him.  Ranma 1/2 can only maintain its bouts of comedic boundary-transgression by simultaneously reinforcing the boundaries it transgresses, because it is dependent on those boundaries.  Without social boundaries, there would be no conflict in Ranma 1/2, no humor, and no story.  Similarly, if the "combative" elements were removed from a love triangle, there would be a kinky three-way relationship, but no conflict and no story.

When I think of stories containing relationships that might be called polyamorous, the first thing that springs to my mind is Paint Your Wagon, a so-bad-it's-good musical filmed near my home town (and entrenched in an annual celebration there), starring Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood, neither of whom can sing.  The story takes place in a California gold rush town, No-Name City, where there are no women until a Mormon arrives with two wives.  After an Irish miner complains, "It's no fair you havin' two of what the rest of us ain't got none of," the Mormon agrees to auction off one of his wives, and she ends up with Lee Marvin's character.  While Marvin is on a mission to kidnap some French prostitutes to populate No-Name City's new house of ill repute, he leaves his wife in the care of his pardner, Clint Eastwood, who promptly falls in love with her.  On Marvin's return, the three of them all decide to be married together, and this unusual situation leads to most of the strained jokes after the intermission.  Yet again, Paint Your Wagon is ultimately a love triangle; in spite of its intentionally boundary-violating premise, which again forms the basis of the humor, the ultimate question to be answered is which guy gets to keep the girl at the end of the film.

I am convinced romance is at its heart monogamous.  This would seem to be best in tune with our biology; romance is about sex, and sex is our method of reproduction, and sexual reproduction can only occur between two people.  But besides this, romantic desire itself seems to have something of exclusivity about it.  The aforementioned Song of Songs, written in a society where polygyny was generally accepted, necessarily has a monogamous bent when it describes romantic love:

As a lily among brambles,
so is my love among maidens.

And again:

My dove, my perfect one, is the only one,
the darling of her mother,
flawless to her that bore her. (NRSV)

Romantic passion inspires vows of fidelity and exclusivity.  When lovers describe what they love about one another, they emphasize uniqueness.

I am not claiming, of course, that only chaste stories leading to happy marriages can make moving love stories.  I am much moved by the story of Abelard and Heloise, a real-life tragic tale as full of melodrama as any bodice-ripper, but which is basically about a tutor fornicating with his student. I am also much moved by the story of Tristam and Isolde, which is about a knight committing adultery with his lord's wife.  I am moved, too, by Romeo and Juliet, which is the story of silly teenagers having a hasty, secret wedding and then offing themselves.  I am even rather moved by Romeo x Juliet, which is the story of silly teenagers having a hasty, secret wedding and then offing themselves...IN SPACE!!!  Also, in that version, Juliet is a superheroine.

But compare those, which are about exclusive love (even the ones with complications like unwanted marriages), to, say, Stranger in a Strange Land, a novel by science fiction's original advocate of polyamory.  I don't mean compare the style, of course.  I mean compare the quality of the stories, specifically the love stories.  In Stranger, Robert Heinlein takes the love triangle and intentionally twists it.  More than one woman is in love with Valentine Michael Smith, and the reader naturally expects that Mike will have to choose between them, but the story takes a turn when Mike finally makes one of the girls in the pool--and we never find out which girl it is.  Heinlein purposely refrains from naming her.  Her identity is unimportant because denying the exclusiveness of romance and opening the story to polyamory means the lovers cannot be unique to each other.  If this were a book about the exclusivity of love, Heinlein could never have gotten away with neglecting to name the girl.  Her identity, her person, would have been everything.

This is a pristine example of exactly what I was talking about above:  to conclude a love triangle in this way is to destroy the plot and betray the reader.  In this case, Heinlein did it on purpose as a sort of twist, but the story that develops from there, whatever else it may be, is decidedly not a love story.  It is more like an anti-love story:  it makes the claim that life would be happier if all the things that go into love stories were done away.

Some time ago, I had in my possession an interview with sf author Nalo Hopkinson featured in the Novel and Short Story Writer's Market.  I no longer have that volume, but I remember the salient parts.  Hopkinson argues that exclusivity in sexual relationships is absurd, akin to making arbitrary taboos dictating that people can only eat in certain rooms with certain other people at certain times of day.

I don't know what this business is about rooms and times of day, and I note, looking at the news articles about obesity, that casually eating what we want when we want where we want with whom we want hasn't exactly been the best thing for our health, but that doesn't matter because the analogy is invalid; eating, at least when engaged in rightly, is a pleasurable activity that keeps the human body in good health, whereas sex is a pleasurable activity that produces other human beings and so should be expected to be freighted with peculiar moral obligations and maybe even some mystical mummery.  But more importantly for this particular essay, Hopkinson's depiction of sex is decidedly unromantic.  Good sex, as she depicts it in this interview, is the orgasmic equivalent of junk food--it is utterly casual, and once again the identity of the other person is of little importance.

So, to the question of why more love triangles don't end in three-way polyamorous relationships, the answer is, because that is not a love triangle.

Apology

It has come to my attention, partly through my own reflection but also through a reader comment, that I have been misdirected in my criticism of Catholic author Michael D. O'Brien.  Although I disagree with his opinions, my comments have sometimes gotten personal.  I'm trying to strip personal attacks and rancor out of my writing (as well as out of my personality), so I apologize to readers.  I will seek to keep everything on a more even keel in the future.

Thank you, and I should have a real post up by tonight.  That will, I hope, get us back into a schedule of regular posting.  Also, I am nearly through The Stoneholding by James G. Anderson and Mark Sebanc, a book I was graciously offered to review, and which I have been rather sluggish about completing.  Look for the review sometime this long weekend (fingers crossed).

Real Content Coming Soon, Really

Okay, we now have a reliable internet connection and the first week of my return to seminary, during which I don't have time to spit, let alone post, is coming toward its close, so there should be some actual content here soon.  Maybe I'll get Lucky on the job; she, of course, has to use my computer, so when I can't post, she can't post.  And as for Snuffles, I don't even know what he does during the school year.  Flies to a library or something.  Come to think of it, I don't know what he does most of the time, and I think I prefer it that way.

Technical Difficulty

Sorry for the gap in posts.  I am back at the seminary, but I'm experiencing some difficulties with the internet connection.  Posts will resume in the near future.

A Brief Reflection on Michael D. O'Brien's Landscape with Dragons

I've been posting a lot about Michael D. O'Brien lately, enough that sooner or later a reader is going to say, "Get off it, already!"  Fair enough, reader, but please indulge me this one more time.  I want to share a single paragraph from O'Brien's book on fantasy literature, A Landscape with Dragons.  The paragraph is a little gem, and, I think, it reflects some of issues with the book as a whole.

Here is the paragraph, in which O'Brien is discussing kid lit horror writer R. L. Stine.  Pay close attention to the words he chooses:

Stine does not descend to the level of dragging sexual activity into the picture, as do so many of his contemporaries. He doesn't have to; he has already won the field. He leaves some room for authors who wish to exploit the market with other strategies. Most new fiction for young adults glamorizes sexual sin and psychic powers and offers them as antidotes to evil. In the classical fairy tale, good wins out in the end and evil is punished. Not so in many a modern tale, where the nature of good and evil is redefined: it is now common for heroes to employ evil to defeat evil, despite the fact that in the created and sub-created order this actually means defeat. [pp. 67-68]

Wait a minute, did he say "psychic powers"?  He starts out talking about sexual content in YA literature, which is indeed a problem whether or not "most" YA fiction actually contains it, but where did the psychic powers come from?  I can certainly understand parents being concerned about their children indulging in sexual sin, but are parents really worried about their children developing psychic powers?  I halfway wonder if he threw that in there just to check if we're paying attention:  "Dude, did you just say psychic powers?"  "Yeah, didn't think I'd say that in a conversation about sex, didja?"

Regarding sex in YA fiction, probably the best opinion on the matter that I've seen comes from the great Orson Scott Card, who once at SF Signal told a room full of horny sf author/libertines that the YA label is a promise to librarians and parents that the book is restrained in content, so if they want to write sex scenes, they should write adult books without the YA label.  He was immediately attacked, and viciously, for saying things other than what he said.

But regarding this paragraph from O'Brien, it demonstrates, I believe, one of A Landscape with Dragon's biggest flaws, aside from baffling non sequitur:  dishonest argument.  The subject is sex in YA fiction, and the author given as an example is R. L. Stine, who, O'Brien tells us, does not put sex in YA fiction, but O'Brien accuses him of it anyway.  He would put sex in there, mind you.  He just "doesn't have to."  He "leaves some room" for other authors to write about sex, as a favor to them.  And I don't even know what that means; can one YA book with sex crowd the others out?

Blech.  The only one with psychic powers around here is Michael O'Brien himself, who is apparently clairvoyant enough to discover why R. L. Stine doesn't write what he doesn't.*  Even when an author is restrained in the content he puts in a book, O'Brien can still invent a reason to attack him.

*D.G.D.:  But it hasn't given him clairvoyance enough to find the Rebels' hidden fort--*choke*
O'BRIEN:  I find your lack of faith disturbing...

August Christian Science Fiction & Fantasy Blog Tour: A View to a Review, Preliminary Thoughts on The Stoneholding

The Stoneholding by James G. Anderson and Mark Sebanc. Legacy of the Stone Harp, Book 1. Baen, 2009.  605 pages.  ISBN:  978-1-4391-3349-1.

This is emphatically not a review.  The review will come later.  All comments made in this post may be entirely superseded and swept away at a later date.

This is a book of which I have a free reviewer's copy graciously offered me by co-author Mark Sebanc and sent to me by Baen.  Unfortunately, I'm so busy now that I've wound up in the embarrassing position of having not read my reviewer's copy in a timely manner.  I probably need to stop accepting reviewer's copies, much as I love free books.

Anyway, the blog tour this month is blogger's choice, so I am taking the time to give preliminary thoughts on the first 212 pages of this novel.  The blog tour's only requirement for this month is that what I discuss must be "Christian speculative fiction," but I don't know what that means.  Is that speculative fiction by a Christian?  Is that speculative fiction from a Christian publisher?  Is that speculative fiction specifically aimed at Christian audiences?  I don't know.

But I do know that Messrs. Anderson and Sebanc are Catholic, so there.  Also, I know this novel has received high praise from Michael D. O'Brien.  I admit I was wary of The Stoneholding when I read his laudatory quote because the last time I encountered a novel praised by Mr. O'Brien, it was Bud MacFarlane Jr's Pierced by a Sword, which, as a Catholic Da Vinci Code knockoff with Catholic conspiracy theorists standing in for the gnostics and evil Mormons standing in for the evil Catholics, quickly went on my Bottom Ten somewhere around the vicinity of Piers Anthony's novelization of Total Recall, and just to be clear, that's really, really low on my Bottom Ten.

But here is Mr. O'Brien's laudatory quote on The Stoneholding:

Vast in scope, profound in its cosmology, this first book of the Legacy of the Stone Harp stands head and shoulders above the swarm of new fantasy literature that has emerged during the past half century. Indeed it is not so much fantasy as it is a mythology rooted in the ultimate Real. That its author also tells a gripping story and consistently exhibits a mastery of language, freshness of invention, erudition and wit, ensures that long after 99% of contemporary imaginative literature is forgotten, this series will be read and reread. A maximum bravo!

Fully appreciating that might require familiarity with O'Brien's other writings on fantasy, especially his Landscape with Dragons, a decidedly vague but heartfelt criticism of a handful of fantasy works, including a number of Disney movies and some well-known novels.  Among the "new fantasy literature" of the last fifty years destined to disappear while The Stoneholding lives on are books such as A Wrinkle in Time, A Wizard of Earthsea, and of course, Harry Potter.  High praise indeed.

I have never been able to determine from O'Brien's writings on fantasy exactly what it is he wants, only that he's very earnest about it.  From reading his work, I have gathered, probably unfairly, that he wants all fantasies to be Lord of the Rings-derived sword-and-sorcery books, but with as little sorcery as possible, and he wants the characters to be one-dimensional because he thinks that's how an author avoids confusing the reader into thinking good is evil and vice versa.

Well, as least at the 212-page mark, that is exactly what he gets in The Stoneholding, a Lord of the Rings-derived sword-and-sorcery with one-dimensional characters and as little sorcery as possible.  It's not bad by any means, but it's not great.  Unless it gets awesome fast, I will counter O'Brien's prediction with one of my own:  I predict it will fall away into humble but respectable obscurity with 99% of the rest of the fantasy paperbacks.  I believe it's a first novel for the authors, though, so their future work will be worth keeping an eye out for.

The story is of two young men, neither of whom I can recall the name of off the top of my head (a bad sign), who live in the Highlands of Arvon, which is being invaded by the evil Overlord (his real title) of Gharssul, who wants to kill the last remaining Arvonian prince, who he believes is squirreled away there somewhere.  These two young men whose names I can't remember must warn everyone in the valley before they're all slaughtered.  These two are thoroughly generic characters, akin to the indistinguishable heroes of old-timey boys' adventure novels.  They may as well be the Hardy Boys with broadswords.  The Overlord, on the other hand, is a cackling villain type.

The narrative flows quite nicely; Sebanc and Anderson are clearly competent wordsmiths, which should be expected, as Sebanc is a translator and Anderson is a poet.  If it's a matter of mere style, they really are head and shoulders above, say, J. K. Rowing, but the yarn thus far has been rather leaden, for reasons I believe can all be tied back to the poor characterization.

First, although the dialog in the prologue is peppered with decidedly forced but nonetheless enjoyable anachronisms, the dialog after that swiftly descends into frequent bouts of dull exposition.  By about a hundred pages in, all the characters seem incapable of speaking for less than half a page at one go, and most of what they have to say is a summary of the plot.  By about the fifth time a character summarized the plot for another character, I was getting bored.  And because I can't distinguish between the two plucky lads, our protagonists, I quickly lost track of which one was speaking whenever they had a conversation.  Any new character usually begins by spewing his life story for a page or three.

Second, the plot is largely idiot-driven.  Let me give you an example.  The prologue introduces a plucky hero, not one of the aforementioned youths, who is on a mission to rescue a queen, and to do so he must perpetrate a ruse on a wicked villain.  As soon as hero and villain meet, they start tossing the Idiot Ball back and forth. The villain sees through the hero's ruse and makes it obvious he sees through the hero's ruse.  The hero realizes he's found out, but decides to go ahead anyway because he thinks the villain will for some reason take him to the queen before revealing that he's seen through the hero's ruse.  The villain, for no reason I could figure out, actually does take the hero to the queen before revealing he's seen through the hero's ruse.  Then, even though the villain has numerous cronies he could call upon to vanquish the hero, decides to fight the hero man-to-man because it's more fun that way.  Guess who wins?  This brand of plot-induced stupidity shows up frequently, so we have a scene where the evil Overlord is explaining his entire nefarious plan, in long-winded detail, to an underling who already knows the nefarious plan--just when the plucky heroes happen to be hiding nearby.  A little later, one of our plucky heroes is attacked by a villain who should be able to easily overpower him, but doesn't because he wants more of a challenge, so the hero wins because evil makes you stupid.  Although the villains usually hold it, the heroes are by no means exempt from the Idiot Ball; shortly after defeating the stupid bad guy, our hero, the most important of the plucky two, allows himself to be drugged and captured by someone acting obviously suspicious.

So, there you go.  That's the preliminaries.  Now if you'll excuse me, I have reading to do, and I hope to post a full, honest review in the very near future.

Father Thomas Euteneuer on Harry Potter

The Christian Science Fiction & Fantasy Blog Tour is currently on, and this post will actually prove relevant to it.  Really.

In a recent post at Conversion Diary, Jennifer Fulwiller interviews Fr. Thomas Euteneuer about exorcism and the conversation stumbles into the subject of fantasy literature, so it seemed good to me to quote him at length and offer some comments.

I would encourage anyone who [enjoys the Harry Potter seriest] to read the articles by Michael O'Brien on Harry Potter and other occult phenomena. The best one is "Harry Potter and the Paganization of Children’s Culture." He has recently come out with a book of a similar name. He holds that Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling writes out of a completely pagan worldview, and even though there may be some points of contact between paganism and Christianity (some basic notions of good and evil, for example), the totally pagan mindset of the Harry Potter 400-million-book-onslaught is what is dangerous.

The Harry Potter series will not make a person demon possessed; it will, rather, normalize the existence of demons and infuse the occult language and imagery that celebrates them into the minds of the young. It is absolutely not true to say that this stuff doesn’t get people involved in the occult. Go and look at the Harry Potter section in Barnes and Noble and see what occult and witchcraft phenomena this series has spawned for our youth.

It is also my contention that the vampire craze is a direct result of a decade of Harry. Pretty soon the Harry Potter generation, who are now a decade older, get bored with the childish "Hogwart School of Witchcraft and Wizardry" and spell casting, and they need a little more "mature" form of occult entertainment.

...

Tolkein's and Lewis's works come entirely out of a Christian worldview, despite the use of magic and some occult powers. In Lewis and Tolkein, the use of these preternatural powers is not ambiguous like it is in the Harry Potter series, and the figures who use them are either totally good and Christ-like (Gandalf, for example, becomes a Christ figure in his use of power to heal and protect people from evil) or they are totally evil and use power like demons do to harm and control (i.e., Saruman and Sauron).  [more...]

Michael D. O'Brien's writings on fantasy, which Fr. Euteneuer offers as his only sources here, are filled with visceral emotional reactions, self-contradictions, and factual errors.  I'm surprised that Fr. Euteneuer finds O'Brien's writings convincing.  I've discussed O'Brien' before, here and here, particularly.  His writing on fantasy has gotten wilder of late, and his latest finds him thoroughly unmanned, quavering and having nightmares because of a silly kids' book.  But we need not discuss O'Brien now; now, I want to focus specifically on Fr. Euteneuer's comments.

First, the vampire craze does not grow directly out of Harry Potter.  I suppose there may be some relationship in that Harry Potter increased the interest in fantasy books generally, but the popularity of vampire romance grows out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which draws on the works of Anne Rice, except reinvigorated with elements from ye olde Dracula.  If we're speaking of one series in particular, from what I've read, the "occult powers" in Twilight are quite minimal.  Twilight is about super-powered bishie boys, not about witchcraft.  Although the popularity of Twilight is indeed something of a mystery, it probably has more to do with the beefcake protagonist who doesn't treat his girlfriend like dirt, rather than a hunger for "occult entertainment," which I assume means, "entertainment had in secret."

(Is it just me or do some people like to toss around the word occult to make certain things sound sinister without having to go through the hard work of actually explaining why they're sinister?)

Second, notice his comments about Lewis and Tolkien, those entirely Christian authors, and the "occult powers":  "...the characters who use them are either totally good...or they are totally evil."  Once again, we see that the enemies of the Harry Potter series are inevitably the enemies of good character-building; for some strange reason, fantasy heroes are not allowed to have weaknesses, and fantasy villains are not allowed to have virtues, a rule that doesn't limit other genres.  Also, Fr. Euteneuer is wrong; Saruman is not totally evil, but a good man who becomes corrupted, and Gandalf has character flaws that made his own corruption a possibility.  Lucy in the Narnia books uses magic, and she is a simple human; in fact, her own character flaws become most starkly obvious when she casts magic.

Third, Harry Potter has a "totally pagan mindset"?  It is to laugh.  The Bible gets quoted.  All belief in an afterlife is referred back to Christianity.  In the world to come, the good are rewarded and the evil punished.  Death and wickedness are overcome by love.  Parents should have freedom to homeschool.  Harry finds the key to his salvation, which is shaped like a cross, when he is baptized.  Innocence is powerful.  Eternal life sought through artificial means is abominable.  Harry brings healing to the masses by dying and rising from the dead.  And so on.  Harry Potter isn't anything like "totally pagan."  If anything, it's not pagan enough.  J. K. Rowling is a nominal Christian, and she wrote nominally Christian books.  This is evident both in the numerous Christian elements of the series, and also evident in the very real moral failings.

Harry Potter's seven-volume meditation on death is better than most anything else that's come out recently, but it is still too wishy-washy, too accommodating:  there's probably an afterlife, but we can't say for sure, and it's probably best to be a good person just in case, but who knows?  If Harry Potter were really pagan, it could be more forceful.  If it were stoical pagan, it would deny any tomfoolery about an afterlife, but it would demand virtue and nobility of soul as necessary to the preparation for death; its characters would look death in the face unperturbed, going to their inevitable destruction with passions thoroughly mastered by intellect.  If it were Norse pagan, the characters would fight the long, hard, good fight, knowing they are destined to be destroyed in the end, but standing for good nonetheless because it's the right thing do to.

In spite of her Christianity and in spite of her long thinking about it, Rowling doesn't manage to come up with anything on the subject of death as potent and moving as, say, the thoughts on the afterlife that appear in the thoroughly atheist John C. Wright's fantasy series, War of the Dreaming, in which the characters are warned sternly that there is life after death, that they are placed in the world to learn virtue, and that murder is the one crime that will not be forgiven.  Harry Potter isn't pagan or atheist, but weak-tea Christian, and so its worldview is weak-tea Christian.  A good dose of paganism would have done it a world of good.

Speaking of John C. Wright, he has recently posted an essay, at the end of which he quotes a poem from C. S. Lewis, that thoroughly Christian author.  I wish to borrow the poem, for it seems relevant here, and after that I will give a final thought on this matter.

Cliche Came Out of its Cage

by C.S. Lewis

1

You said ‘The world is going back to Paganism’.
Oh bright Vision! I saw our dynasty in the bar of the House
Spill from their tumblers a libation to the Erinyes,
And Leavis with Lord Russell wreathed in flowers, heralded with flutes,
Leading white bulls to the cathedral of the solemn Muses
To pay where due the glory of their latest theorem.
Hestia’s fire in every flat, rekindled, burned before
The Lardergods. Unmarried daughters with obedient hands
Tended it. By the hearth the white-armd venerable mother
Domum servabat, lanam faciebat. At the hour
Of sacrifice their brothers came, silent, corrected, grave
Before their elders; on their downy cheeks easily the blush
Arose (it is the mark of freemen’s children) as they trooped,
Gleaming with oil, demurely home from the palaestra or the dance.
Walk carefully, do not wake the envy of the happy gods,
Shun Hubris. The middle of the road, the middle sort of men,
Are best. Aidos surpasses gold. Reverence for the aged
Is wholesome as seasonable rain, and for a man to die
Defending the city in battle is a harmonious thing.
Thus with magistral hand the Puritan Sophrosune
Cooled and schooled and tempered our uneasy motions;
Heathendom came again, the circumspection and the holy fears …
You said it. Did you mean it? Oh inordinate liar, stop.

2

Or did you mean another kind of heathenry?
Think, then, that under heaven-roof the little disc of the earth,
Fortified Midgard, lies encircled by the ravening Worm.
Over its icy bastions faces of giant and troll
Look in, ready to invade it. The Wolf, admittedly, is bound;
But the bond wil1 break, the Beast run free. The weary gods,
Scarred with old wounds the one-eyed Odin, Tyr who has lost a hand,
Will limp to their stations for the Last defence. Make it your hope
To be counted worthy on that day to stand beside them;
For the end of man is to partake of their defeat and die
His second, final death in good company. The stupid, strong
Unteachable monsters are certain to be victorious at last,
And every man of decent blood is on the losing side.
Take as your model the tall women with yellow hair in plaits
Who walked back into burning houses to die with men,
Or him who as the death spear entered into his vitals
Made critical comments on its workmanship and aim.
Are these the Pagans you spoke of? Know your betters and crouch, dogs;
You that have Vichy water in your veins and worship the event
Your goddess History (whom your fathers called the strumpet Fortune).

Lewis of course speaks of the nobler parts of paganism, the parts Christianity, of the non-weak-tea kind, absorbed, while the uglier parts she rejected.   Among those uglier parts was the superstitious pagan fear of witches and the violence to which it led.  The Medieval Christians, in love with reason, nearly stamped out that superstition, but when Christendom began to break apart, it came back with a vengeance in the form of the infamous witch-hunts.  Now that we see Western civilization once again collapsing around our ears, it is no surprise that superstition rears its ugly head.  They say that history repeats itself, first as a tragedy and then as a farce:  and so, the first time around, they try innocents as witches and hang or burn them, but the second time around, they cower before a children's book.