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The book seemed like it had a lot of promise, but it felt like a slog in parts, and its central anti-hero, Quentin Coldwater, is a pain in the ass. When I first read Lev Grossman’s The Magicians (2009) six years ago, it made me angry. TW: Sexual assault is discussed in the context of the trilogy and a specific scene. If you haven’t read The Magicians trilogy and don’t want any reveals, don’t read on.
GROSSMAN THE MAGICIANS LAND TV SHOW FREE
If you’d like to yell at her, feel free to do so over Twitter.This essay is rampant with spoilers from the start, although I begin with a 2009 book. Sarah Arboleda lives with a human and two cats in British Columbia, Canada and writes for a number of blogs including her own - the pop culture-based Tea Leaves and Dog Ears.
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Until we reach a point where people find it easier to identify with nerds, rather than laugh at them, The Magicians won’t work. But where The Guild takes a realistic look at the lives of a group of World of Warcraft gamers, The Big Bang Theory offers up a cast of one-dimensional nerds who drop Star Wars jokes. Ultimately, it’s one thing for a show to offer up pop culture references to garner easy laughs, but it’s quite another to ask the audience to invest in and understand the nuances of a particular subculture.
GROSSMAN THE MAGICIANS LAND TV SHOW SERIES
Take a show like The Guild and compare it to The Big Bang Theory: one is a web series with a tiny budget, the other is the biggest comedy on TV. Mainly because I think the mainstreaming of fan culture is still in its infancy even if nerd culture is still in vogue. Would you want to go to Narnia if it turned out to be far more dangerous and corrupt than advertised? Would the allure of Hogwarts rub off if your classmates were a group of arrogant, navel-gazing grad students? I didn’t love Grossman’s first two books (the third and final novel, The Magicians Land, is set for release on August 5th), but as someone who has fallen down one too many fandom rabbit holes, I understood and appreciated the novelty of his intent. Grossman’s answer is, first and foremost, that it wouldn’t be anywhere near as rosy as you’d hope. This means the heart of Grossman’s story is its examination of fan culture by posing the question, “What if it was all real?” The author and his characters drop references that run the gamut from The Godfather to Young Frankenstein roughly five times a page. They’re not only aware of Harry Potter (sly comments about wizard’s chess and magic wands are thrown around now and then), but they’re established as being full-out pop culture junkies. This is where Grossman’s novels can be set apart from other Young Adult fantasy stories: Quentin and his friends aren’t the kind of characters who’ve been raised in an alternate universe away from modern popular culture. Delighted in that he gets to visit a world he’d spent hours imagining as a child, horrified when he discovers the rather stark differences between fiction and reality. This elite distinction also has the side-effect of making Brakebills students insufferably arrogant, like the worst kind of grad students imaginable.įillory, meanwhile, is unabashedly a Narnia clone. We’re told Quentin was a big fan of the book series as a kid and is delighted and horrified to learn it’s a real place. This distinction leads to drama down the road, but also helps to position Brakebills as elite rather than just a local catchment district for any and all magic-prone youths. If you fail, your memory is wiped and you get to continue your sad, magic-free life. Instead, you’re invited for an entrance exam which, if you pass, grants you admission into Magic U. The main difference between Hogwarts and Brakebills is that Brakebills doesn’t just let any old magically-inclined student through its doors. Brakebills is the Hogwarts stand-in, located in upstate New York (with a satellite campus/testing center in Antarctica).