I Hate Fairyland – Skottie Young

This blog is a fair amount of work. I don’t mind all that much, because frankly I was going to read this much either way. But it is something that at time does necessitate a break of some kind. Not from the reading itself, but from things that require any kind of thought after the reading. Every diet needs a cheat day, and in case of this blog, I went with a comic book.

I Hate Fairyland follows Gret, a young girl who gets trapped in Fairyland (largely due to her own incompetence) for the better part of 30 years. The humor follows from having an eight year old girl with the jadedness of a middle aged woman, and the tendency towards violence of a person who is truly desperate.

The experience of reading this really is the equivalent of junk food. I don’t mean that in any kind of demeaning way – I like junk food, I just have the foresight to not eat it every day. In a world without consequences, I just might. In a world free of consequences I might spend a lot more time reading things like this.

If you read books on writing, other authors talk about character growth in writing like it is absolutely fundamental thing. It’s talked about in a way like, should this lack, your code won’t compile. That is absolutely not the case. There are plenty of good stories that forgo some of that, and they work just fine. This is one of them. I don’t think you can spot anything that you could call character growth here, except for a few ham-fisted event towards the end. But that isn’t really anything demeaning towards the book – it should be clear that it truly is fine without it. But in fairness, it works because of the comic book nature of the work, and the fact that in a respect, it is what the story itself is about – stasis.