With Maybe Some Pacific Rim Spoilers Past the Jump
Earlier today, on my tumblr site, I posted a link to a talk given by Meghan Cox Gurdon, given at Hillsdale college earlier this year. In it, she talks about the need for “Good Taste in Children’s Books.” I guess a couple of years ago, she got into a bit of a scrum online when she lamented the state of children’s literature – particularly how dark YA was getting.
And it has me thinking a little bit today about authors and what it is that we’re doing, and a little about parents and what it is that we’re doing, and how to best raise kids.
Now, this is normally the place where people say they’re not going to tell you how to raise your kids. Which is a bunch of bull, because then they go on to give advice which can’t be interpreted as anything but “here’s how I think we can all raise our kids better.” Even when it’s presented as “here’s what I’m going to do with my kid,” there’s a narrative that gets left off there which says something like “because I think it’s right and I’m sharing this because I think other people should do it to, blah blah blah.”
Look, I don’t know your kids. Take this for what it’s worth.
Growing up is occasionally hard. We who have been through it a while ago can, with the benefit of perspective and some emotional distance, laugh at a lot of stuff. But while you’re in the middle of it, it’s not easy. And kids are looking for examples – for ideals. So, when we put “protagonists” in front of our kids, is it too much to ask that they be heroes?
PACIFIC RIM SPOILERS
I went again to see Pacific Rim last night, as I have a Brother-in-Law who had not seen it yet. And This Was Not To Be Borne. I’ve written before how much I really enjoyed Pacific Rim. Some people have criticized it because the protagonist didn’t really have a character arc. There was some other criticism about “another American rides in to save the day” (which, as an American, I’m actually pretty stoked about, but, hey, let’s all ignore the fact that without the Japanese lady, the protagonist wouldn’t have been able to DRIVE his giant war-robot, and oh yeah the African guy and the Australian guy who sacrificed their lives to give them a shot to get where they needed to be, the Hispanic guy who was running the com boards… yeah. Whatever.)
But the characters in Pacific Rim were people who could be looked up to. They were working for something bigger than themselves. Some of them were broken, some of them were jerks, but they were fighting for something worthwhile. Is that something you could say about the protagonists in the books you’ve been reading lately?
Is it something you could say about the books your kids are reading?
I think that kids wind up reading stuff that their parents do, at least I did. And the main reason for that is because those were the books I had access to. I had a deep love of reading early on, and when I picked up A Spell for Chameleon at eight years old, I was hooked. Sword of Shannara at ten. Tarzan, John Carter, as much Conan as I could find… they were great stories. And except maybe for some of the Conan, they were also deeply moral characters, showing strength not just of flesh and sinew, but strength of will, of conviction, and of character. Those characters remain the same kind of people they are at the end of the book as they are at the beginning, largely. They were heroes.
Where are those characters today?