The old magic school trope. Yay. A bit more history: I'm a huge Harry Potter fan. I don't know how many times I have reread each book. But with how the author has let me down hard I don't feel comfortable giving money to the franchise anymore. And I'm desperately searching for a new magic school story to "fill the void" I guess. The problem? They're all either Harry Potter copies that don't understand what made those books special or actually are really original and well written... but still lack the things that made me fall in love with the HP series (so many of them have these interesting schools that barely get focus). So I said "Then I'll do my own magic school, with blackjack and hookers!" And I had this idea for a web serial that I really like, but I don't know if its too cliché for a public that's had all those HP copycats. A quick summary of what I think would differenciate it from other story: -The focus are the teachers, not the students. -The school building is a tower atop a sea side cliff. -The world is violent and dangerous in general, including the school grounds. In fact, part of the backstory is that most of the school staff were killed in a battle the previous year. -(This is more what I want to achieve since it depends on how well I manage to do it) I want to parody fantasy tropes like the Chosen One while also having it be its own thing. Kind of like how Discworld parodies many genre tropes while also being its own universe with original stories. So, what do you think? I'll probably write it anyway just for myself, but if you think it could shine a little amongst the sea of Magical Academy tales out there I'll probably upload it somewhere.
I'm not a big HP fan though my daughter loves the series and I appreciate what Rowling created. I'm curious, if you care to share: how did the author let you down?
If only JK Rowling had worried if a magic school was cliché... The focus on the teachers I think is enough of a differentiator, since it immediately gets the OP into different story structures using adult characters. The mentions of blackjack and hookers, the tower, the battle and the Discworld worry me though. There should be great potential to get humour just out of looking back on Harry Potter from an adult perspective - e.g. the ludicrous situation that many people now teaching English grew up with it. By comparison, most of the other elements in the OP seem forced. Harry Potter I think is beyond parody. Its tropes and even the parodying of them had already become utterly exhausted by the early 90s and virtually disappeared from the media. Its popularity is a unique result of humanity's readers having incredibly short memories (e.g. Philosopher's Stone - 1997, The Worst Witch All at Sea - 1993), plus declining levels of literacy caused by the socialisation of state education, plus the internet. And it's so blandly-written and flatly-characterized that there's not much to poke fun at (which also made it unusually easy to translate into hundreds of languages). There are bits that stand out - plot holes and contradictions - but nothing worthy of parody (in the books). Ron ejaculated loudly? https://dysfunctionalliteracy.com/2015/10/11/bad-sentences-in-classic-literature-harry-potter-and-the-sorcerers-stone It's almost too easy to mock this author - and she can hide behind the excuse that she was expanding children's literacy or giving the customer what they wanted - so the execution wasn't everything (as it is for all proletariat fantasy authors). There's something perhaps about the way that Harry Potter is a fantasy that has sucked up so much oxygen and crushed so much other creativity out of existence that it's made the real world even duller. But the OP's reading of Harry Potter will be better than mine. I think my suggestion is that if the themes, given to the adult teacher-wizards, are chosen carefully enough and targeted with laser-precision onto the reception and cultural impact of Harry Potter (its meta), the story might be able to avoid directly grappling with the franchise's yawning inanity and artlessness. The right characters could parody Harry Potter just by having a staff meeting.
She tweeted some transphobic stuff and published a book with a villain that was a caricature of a trans woman that entered women's bathrooms to hurt them, which is an argument that's often used to oppose giving trans folk the right to enter the bathroom that corresponds to their gender.
Parody must be motivated by love. If the OP holds any resentment or ill-feeling toward J K Rowling, it will spoil the work. Good parody is about kindly showing the subject how they could become a better version of themselves - and we can only do that if we love them.
But I'm not parodying her, I'm parodying her work, which I do love and still engage with the fanbase, if not with official releases.
Parody is intensely and inescapably metafiction. And from a metafictional perspective, the artist and their art are indistinguishable. A literary parody on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has to attack James Joyce's life story wherever possible, and the parodist would only acquire a right to do so by loving and wanting to improve its author. The work can't be improved - it's an exquisite corpse now. I'd suggest there might a further rule against parodizing the dead - the level of savagery has to reduce, and it can only operating by glorifying the deceased author's memory, or freeing them from critical misinterpretation. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies type stuff - lighthearted
my first thought was it sounded like Francis X Xaiver's school in Xmen first class rather than Harry Potter. But to be honest nearly everything is a cliche... like Hemingway said about the 7 types of story. Whether it matters is all to do with the execution (also with my hat on we're not going to let this thread turn into a discussion of JKR and transphobia- if anyone wants to do that, do it in the debate room)
The mention of the teachers being the focus brings to mind The Lecturer in Recent Runes, the Chair of Indefinite Studies, the Reader in Invisible Writings et al.
I echo the Moose: everything is a form of imitation, the important thing is the execution of the idea. If you write it in a cliched and imitative manner, then that's what it will be; if you write it in a fresh and unique way, it will be something worth reading. IMHO
At its most basic, Harry Porter was a fantasy, coming of age story. Which is set primarily in a magic school. The rest was the authors execution of that base. I see nothing wrong with another author using that base for their work. Cliche isn't the question in my opinion, but rather will it attract readers. The story basis, could potentially attract that fan base.
