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Jul. 23rd, 2020 12:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feotakahariI didn't much like A Prayer for Owen Meany, but I just realized something that makes me respect it a bit more,
There's a kind of fantasy story where there's a hero figure who does all the things a hero does, except they're not automatically presented as good things. The hero kills monsters, so this hero figure kills anything monstrous, even if it's not actually evil. The hero marries the princess, so this hero claims the princess for himself, even if she wants nothing to do with him. The Brightest Shadow, The Long Look, and Beast: The Primordial all fit into this in one way or another.
There was a post recently about a woman who burned to death. The post was about the miraculous survival of the woman's Bible. The woman's death was treated as irrelevant by comparison--it was simply God's will. When you take that kind of story, where God's arbitrary will brings salvation or suffering, and you strip out the assumption that this is good and not horrifying, that's how you write A Prayer for Owen Meany.
There's a kind of fantasy story where there's a hero figure who does all the things a hero does, except they're not automatically presented as good things. The hero kills monsters, so this hero figure kills anything monstrous, even if it's not actually evil. The hero marries the princess, so this hero claims the princess for himself, even if she wants nothing to do with him. The Brightest Shadow, The Long Look, and Beast: The Primordial all fit into this in one way or another.
There was a post recently about a woman who burned to death. The post was about the miraculous survival of the woman's Bible. The woman's death was treated as irrelevant by comparison--it was simply God's will. When you take that kind of story, where God's arbitrary will brings salvation or suffering, and you strip out the assumption that this is good and not horrifying, that's how you write A Prayer for Owen Meany.
