Post by rice on Mar 8, 2008 11:56:59 GMT
There's an old and common genre that's been made popular with the Harry Potter novels. The formula goes like this: ordinary person discovers they have special abilities, is discovered by other special people, goes to a school for special people, discovers that they're even more special than most special people, saves world/school/something important. I can't help feeling that there's a gap to be exploited here . . .
Alright, say there's some teenage girl who discovers that she has psychic powers, but not particularly powerful ones. However, as her society needs all the psi-power they can get, she is sent to a special school founded by - and this becomes increasingly apparent - a group of people with more money and power than sense or architectural skill. And she just hangs around, develops her abilities, and endures the classic school-life problems as applied to people with these abilities. She's not the Chosen One, she's not the super-attractive girl all the guys fight over, she's not the wise-cracking Earthling who constantly makes funny pop-culture references, and she's not the sympathetic klutz that manages to pull through in the end with the power of a pure heart and good intentions. In fact, she interacts with incarnations of these archetypes on a semi-regular basis, mostly just for the lulz. Alright, just to make things interesting, maybe she's from a different plane of existence than most of the characters, and maybe she's got an almost-unmatched flair for pyrokinesis, but that's more or less the limit to her special-ness. Do you think this kind of story would be popular? I mean, some of my favourite parts of the Harry Potter series were the ones in which Harry and his friends were just enduring normal troubles and being normal teenagers, but in a decidedly abnormal setting.
EDIT: I'm just using this genre (sub-genre?) as an example because it's where the trend is most prevalent. I can't think of one fictional superpowered school where the main character in it doesn't save the day in the end. What I'm getting at here, in an incredibly roundabout way, is that I think it would be kind of nice to see more fantasy books/movies/stuff where it's just 'special' people living their lives and possibly sitting through someone else's attempts to save the world. And, um, I'm kind of curious as to whether it's just me.
Alright, say there's some teenage girl who discovers that she has psychic powers, but not particularly powerful ones. However, as her society needs all the psi-power they can get, she is sent to a special school founded by - and this becomes increasingly apparent - a group of people with more money and power than sense or architectural skill. And she just hangs around, develops her abilities, and endures the classic school-life problems as applied to people with these abilities. She's not the Chosen One, she's not the super-attractive girl all the guys fight over, she's not the wise-cracking Earthling who constantly makes funny pop-culture references, and she's not the sympathetic klutz that manages to pull through in the end with the power of a pure heart and good intentions. In fact, she interacts with incarnations of these archetypes on a semi-regular basis, mostly just for the lulz. Alright, just to make things interesting, maybe she's from a different plane of existence than most of the characters, and maybe she's got an almost-unmatched flair for pyrokinesis, but that's more or less the limit to her special-ness. Do you think this kind of story would be popular? I mean, some of my favourite parts of the Harry Potter series were the ones in which Harry and his friends were just enduring normal troubles and being normal teenagers, but in a decidedly abnormal setting.
EDIT: I'm just using this genre (sub-genre?) as an example because it's where the trend is most prevalent. I can't think of one fictional superpowered school where the main character in it doesn't save the day in the end. What I'm getting at here, in an incredibly roundabout way, is that I think it would be kind of nice to see more fantasy books/movies/stuff where it's just 'special' people living their lives and possibly sitting through someone else's attempts to save the world. And, um, I'm kind of curious as to whether it's just me.