I was going to go on a long political rant today, based off a couple of articles I read this morning. But then I read a book instead, and now I've got all these other things tumbling around in my head. The book Plain Kate, by Erin Bow, is about witches and revenge and family and an orphan named Kate (and it uses a Slavic legend!).
So I was thinking about witches and witch hunts in books, since one of my main characters is a witch and they aren't well liked in the country at the time. In contemporary fiction, though, witches and wizards are more often portrayed as good and less likely to be burned at the stake. Didn't a lot of us who read the Harry Potter books wish for our own letter from Hogwarts? We've done that to a lot of the things people used to be scared of - werewolves are more like trained dogs, vampires would rather play baseball than kill people, zombies can be the comic relief.
Instead of fantasy creatures and magic powers, people are scared of terrorist attacks and robbers and going bankrupt. These fears are a lot more real, but our reactions to them seem to be the same. Witch hunts? We have the Red Scares, racial profiling, immigration raids.
Well, erm, to avoid the ranting that would come if I stayed on that topic...I think using fantasy elements to represent humanity's fearfulness is a lot more exciting than writing a book about real evils. For me at least. All of the ideas I have that happen present day are terrible. I'm not even being modest - I really should just throw them all out. Some people can write good contemporary fiction; I much prefer making up my own world, with its own rules and people. And lots of magic :)
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