So, a lot of people go to great lengths bending popular YA novels to fit into the sort of general "Hero With a Thousand Faces" framework. TV-tropes may be more hip these days for this kind of thing, but call me old-fashioned; Joe Campbell's book had an indelible effect on the way our culture-industries produce stories.

I've gradually come to my own opinions on the book -- I think this expresses them more amusingly than I could here -- but the fact remains that people seem to be interested in telling these kinds of stories.

Which leads to the question: is Harry Potter actually a Hero's Journey? Everyone seems to talk about it like it is, and when the first books were coming out it certainly seemed primed to be one - all the archetypes were present, and everything was all laid out for a typical, even cliche, bildungsroman.

But around Book 5 something slips. Maybe it was JKR becoming self conscious in the face of the massive hype surrounding the books -- or alternatively, becoming comfortable enough to extend the narrative to include her rather contrived messages about love, and death, rather than letting the story explore these things more naturally. In any event, by Book 7 the jig is up -- Harry defeats Voldemort with all the overture of sacrifice, all the trappings, but little actual sacrifice.

If anyone else wants to chime in here maybe we could find specific places where the typical archetypes are flouted, or followed. But what I'm really getting at is that there is something profoundly psychologically unsatisfying about the conclusion of the series. Monomyths are quite satisfying, they embody an intuitively understandable developmental and aesthetic series of events; the archetypes crop up in stories so often because there is something inherently pleasing about living that story through hearing it told.

Harry Potter sets us up for this kind of story -- and then pulls the rug out from under us, leaving the reader a bit bewildered and gypped. I think the general unpopularity of Book 5 and the epilogue are part and parcel of this.

Hence Harry Potter and the Great Year of Revision. Hence Forging the Sword and all its lesser incarnations. This is my real point here: it's almost as if all this fanfiction exists to correct a psychological deficit in the story itself. Harry never really comes into his own. The Hero's Quest, for whatever reason, is never truly consummated. So now all these fics come into being to try to explore alternatives in order to make the story actually satisfying.

I don't want to get too academic about this, or worse, try to "analyze" fanfiction. And fanfiction is obviously inevitable for anything these days. But I think there's something here, something that in particular keeps these forums running. Something got lost in the telling the first time around, which may be why people keep writing this stuff.

Thoughts?

 

Unfortunately I have yet to read Hero With a Thousand Faces (not for lack of trying, my uni's library certainly isn't cooperating) so I may be saying wrong stuff, but I think you have to remember that JK not necessarily read that book, however she did grow up in the ocidental culture, and if you look closely to pretty much every tale of a 'hero' you will notice plenty of similarities. Actually I'm pretty sure that HP wouldn't fit all the stages purposed by the book, but if you twist a few facts well enough...

About the fanfiction, there are a lot of factors to consider (popularity of the series, target audience etc) and I wouldn't call the end unsatisfying, there were unsatisfied readers but the popularity of the series speaks by itself. Also, you forget that everyone that writes fanfiction is putting a part of themselves into their work, something that is pretty obvious in those Dark!Evil!GodLike!Harry, where people write as a way of wish fulfillment. They certainly aren't unhappy about the ending, the writing is just a way to express the sort of desires you can't really fulfill in real life.

I can understand what you mean though. The most prevalent complain in HP fandom is that Harry wasn't a competent enough protagonist. Most readers wanted him smarter, more powerful, proactive and all that stuff, and that's the major divergence from the archetype. Rowling wrote a Harry that wanted to be "just Harry", not some Messiah or Savior and perhaps that made some people unsatisfied. However, as I said, there are other factors to consider, not all HP fanfiction is about Harry after all, in this forum and others there are plenty of discussions about the mechanics of magic and other characters. What we can say for sure is that Rowling created an intriguing magical universe, with tri dimensional and complex characters that appeal to many's imagination.

That and people have a lot free time these days.

 

I think this is something that has been articulated several times on DLP, though never in such academic terms.

 

I do agree that after GoF something slips. The plot takes over, to the detriment of characters, and she tries to pack too much crap into too few books. The Horcruxes for one, the Deathly Hallows for another, the crazy contrived plot of DH...

I don't, however, think that Campbell's archetypal story applies to the extent that it applies to, say, Star Wars. That one was basically constructed AROUND Campbell's stuff. Harry Potter goes off that track rather early - I'd say PoA is the divergence point. That's also when it becomes less episodic in nature.

By the way, I like your signature.