On Sunday, January 31, 2016 at 4:14:26 PM UTC-8, Robert Carnegie wrote:
> On Sunday, 31 January 2016 18:14:26 UTC, Joe Bernstein wrote:
> > So I'm reading a book that sort of touches on the old trope of "child from
> > our world goes to the magical world". And for some reason this particular
> > one takes a bit of note of the impact of this on the child's parents,
> > although the author, in a way I'm starting to get tired of, quickly dodges
> > the issue.
> >
> > And this leads me to wonder about examples of the issue *not* being
> > dodged.
> >
> > And, in particular, about examples of that intersecting with examples of
> > the much-decried modern style of parenting known as "helicopter
> > parenting".
[rather distant examples]
> > But still, I'm confused that I don't know of anything closer.
> > Admittedly, I'm pretty out of touch specifically with YA or children's
> > fantasy, and admittedly the kind of secondary world story that works
> > with this is out of fashion. Still, there's tons of potential, both
> > tragic and comic, in the helicopter parent, and I should *think* as a
> > human extreme it would be fairly easy to fantasticate, especially
> > when brought into proximity with the mythopoetic plot normal to this
> > sort of secondary-world fantasy.
> What does "helicopter parenting" mean? When I look it up, it appears
> to be over-attentive hovering over the child - which makes a mysterious
> physical disappearance into fairy-land difficult to bring about
> unnoticed.
Well, yes, that's the point. Difficulties are, after all, the *point*
of adventure stories, and nobody ever promised that the disappearance
had to be unnoticed.
Well, OK, back in the day, authors like Nesbit actually promised that
the disappearance couldn't even be *remembered*, and that would
obviously play hob with the idea that the parents could notice it. Not
that it entirely rules it out - cf Tanith Lee's <Piratica>, where the
titular character, not yet using that name, doesn't remember why her
father treats her as he does, and when her memory does comes back, it's
wrong.
The can't-remember-it thing is probably the historical reason why this
angle of "child visits magical world" hasn't been much explored, though.
It occurs to me that much of the behaviour symbolic of helicopter
parenting not only implies but actually *requires* physical separation.
I mean, they wouldn't demand hourly check-ins by cell phone if they
were in the same house, and they usually wouldn't go and beard teachers
and professors in the child's presence. So I'm not sure the difficulty
is actually all that great.
> But could you be thinking of the "seagull manager"?
No. Many bad kings are like that, but that has nothing to do with
helicopter parenting.
Good.
> Children are recklessly wished away in the film _Labyrinth_ -
> by an elder sister - and in Mitch Benn's novel _Terra_,
> where the wish doesn't seem to be connected to an infant
> abduction by another flying saucer but must be sorely
> regretted anyway.
<Labyrinth> is actually kind of an example of what I'm after: the
fantasy is *built* around the response to the abduction. But, not to
fault <Labyrinth>, I'm thinking something really good could come of
playing with the reality vs. fantasy edges involved, which <Labyrinth>
doesn't do. How does the parent filing a missing persons report,
holding a memorial service, or whatever affect the fantasy world? Are
the parent's emotions a chain impeding the child, or a golden cord
enabling return? (And what happens when those emotions change?) Cf.
the games Nancy Kress plays with reifying psychology in <The Prince of
Morning Bells>.
This isn't to say that a story in which a parent goes to fairyland *in
pursuit of* a child would be any kind of bad - well, witness <Labyrinth>
again - although it might be criticised as derivative of that movie.
Oh, duh. This is <Lud-in-the-Mist>, isn't it?
> You do overlook Peter Pan,
The complicated textual history of Peter Pan convinced me a long time
ago that the way to deal with it was just to read Barrie in publication
order. This keeps getting delayed.