David V. Stewart has some interesting comments on the Dungeons & Dragons Strixhaven campaign recently announced by Polygon, a site famous for its trashy reporting:
The first thing I did, upon reading that tweet, was wonder what the hell D&D has to do with college. Last I checked, it was about being a murder hobo crawling through underground mazes with the option to build a fiefdom if so inclined. But then again, the last time I checked was back during the Satanic Panic when I played occasionally as a forbidden pleasure.
Now, of course, D&D has a vaguely medieval veneer, and it was in the Middle Ages that the first universities were invented, so we might argue that colleges could conceivably exist in D&D—but we know very well that it isn’t medieval universities that this Strixhaven thing has in mind. That’s obvious from the artwork accompanying the post.
Stewart writes the following:
What I’ve realized from interacting with these sections of millennial fandom is that the escapist feeling they pursue is not so much escape from this world and its limitations per se, but an escape to a life that is somehow better and (most importantly) more meaningful than their own. Thus, the return to high school is about experiencing an alternate memory, one in which the high school experience was all they were promised it would be by shows like Saved by the Bell and Beverly Hills 90210, or even (perhaps more so), Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
This is a reality in which they are special, they are well-liked, and they are doing important things that give their life purpose and meaning. This is almost the exact inverse of what high school actually is for 90% of normal people, including the popular jocks. Real high school is a prison experience, where you are merely a single interchangeable member of an infinite line of grey-goo nobodies who are immediately forgotten (even by your friends) and almost everything you do while in school has no purpose or point beyond getting a grade so you can eventually be released from your captivity.
My own comments:
Someone could point out that the original post says “college,” not “high school,” so Stewart is arguably off base, but since college today had dgenerated into a more expensive high school with less adult supervision, the distinction is irrelevant. However, it’s difficult to know whether his explanation of the endless parade of fantasy schools is right or not.
At least one reason we see so many schools in fantasy settings is the success of Harry Potter, as such success naturally breeds imitations. But Harry Potter didn’t originate the idea. Another reason schools are common settings is the YA demographic of a lot of fantasy, a demographic that is usually in school (though why they’d want to read about school while in it is another question). A third reason is that a school setting makes it possible to intersperse sit-com humor and situations with more action-oriented material, a formula that has proved successful for a lot of anime and manga. I do that myself in Jake and the Dynamo.
But then again, a lot of the school-focused YA fantasy material that’s come out recently is fixated on certain hang-ups. You can see that in the artwork at the top of the post. And that suggests that Stewart is on to something. A lot of this really does look like small-minded people screaming, “Look at me! I’m important!” Or like the products of adults who just never got over high school and moved on.
Another example of this high-school fixation is the recently released and much-derided YA graphic novel from DC Comics, I Am Not Starfire, in which the antisocial authoress stars as the self-insert protagonist. This protagonist is of course in high school:
So Stewart may be basically correct: The rash of high-school fantasies is due to authors who have failed to grow up.
