But fanfiction has the space to ask what kind of person would routinely send a child to battle evil and what kind of person would groom a child to grow up into someone willing to die for their cause.

In the Harry Potter books, Harry’s mentor Dumbledore is constantly sending 11-year-old Harry to do battle with unspeakable evil because that’s what the tropes of the genre demand.

But because fanfiction doesn’t have to worry about conventional story structure - because the story is taken care of by canon - fanfiction has the luxury of picking apart those tropes without destroying the stories built on top of them. Rainbow Rowell is the best thing to happen to young adult literature in agesįanfiction recognizes that, as a genre, YA fantasy works with some bizarre tropes and that readers mostly accept those tropes without fussing too much over what they might suggest about the characters involved because we can understand that the tropes are necessary to keep the story functional. And it’s written with Rowell’s sensibility, which is one steeped in fanfiction: filled with simultaneous affection for its source material (which is YA fantasy in a broader sense and Harry Potter in particular) and a desire to critique it. Instead, Carry On takes place in the Simon Snow universe that Rowell established in Fangirl. Leslie Simon Snow book or Cath’s fic or Harry Potter fic, exactly. Leslie, and from Cath’s fic, “Carry On, Simon.” But Rowell’s Carry On isn’t quite either a Gemma T. Fangirl is interspersed with excerpts from both the “official” Simon Snow books of JK Rowling analogue Gemma T. It draws from Rowell’s 2013 novel Fangirl, about a college student named Cath who’s obsessed with writing fanfiction about a thinly disguised Harry Potter analogue, Simon Snow. 2015’s Carry On was an affectionate deconstruction of Harry Potter and its tropesĬarry On is ostensibly YA fantasy, but it’s a little more intertextual than you might gather from that description. Wayward Son, the Carry On sequel that comes out this week, is not quite so thrilling as its predecessor. It was like watching a pebble hurling itself against a boulder of enormous strength and solidity and then seeing the boulder move just a little bit.Ĭarry On is so intertextual that in many ways it reads like fanfiction, only fanfiction granted the weight and cultural force of original fiction. There was something incredibly thrilling about reading Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On when it came out in 2015.

Carry on rainbow rowell characters