I Won't Grow Up, Not Me!
Eileene recently began watching The Dresden Files TV series, and liked it enough to pick up the books upon which it is based. Always ready for sources to mine for my current Mage campaign, I read the first book in the series, Storm Front. It was okay: coherent, but uninspired, a story of a mage making a living as a private detective, but without sufficient grit to be noir. I found it funny when I tried to capture that sense of mediocrity by telling Eileene it felt like a book for teens (“Young Adult” is the preferred euphemism.), and she replied that she had originally asked the book store for a copy describing it as a young adult novel.
It turns out it isn’t. Or at least, it isn’t marketed as such. But I decided to examine my pronouncement a little more closely. If we independently decided it must be a young adult book, it can’t just be because the book is bland. So I went back and picked out some salient features that didn’t seem so important the first time around…
1. Harry Dresden is a slob. He wears a black duster over grungy t-shirts, gets up late, and forgets appointments. That doesn’t stop him from complaining about how hard it is to secure contracts, or how he doesn’t have any nice stuff.
2. Dresden is surrounded by hot chicks. Four women are significant enough to have speaking roles: the femme fatale who hires Dresden, his contact in the police department, a vampire madame, and a hooker who knows something but plays coy. All of them are at least superficially attractive; three are flirtatious.
3. Nevertheless, Dresden never gets laid. Events conspire to make sure he doesn’t even get a kiss. As often as not, the “event” is Dresden saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.
4. The world just unfairly dumps on him. Everyone thinks he’s a bad guy, or a loser, or both, just like Harry Potter in his young adult series. Karmic fallout hits Dresden in a variety of ways: a demon smashes up his apartment, an evil sorcerer decides to kill him, and he can’t go to the hospital for fear that his aura will cause dangerous malfunctions in the medical gear. But what occupational hazards of magic does Dresden dwell on? Driving an uncool car. Junky clothes. And especially the way powerful figures blame him for everything, and it’s never his fault. You just know that, no matter how many times Dresden saves the day, or how overtly supernatural the events surrounding him become, Detective Carmichael will never, ever believe in magic, or that Harry is anything but a con artist.
Is there anything there for a young male, sufficiently geeky to be reading fantasy novels, not to identify with? I don’t know where the television series is aimed, but the books are being sold to the wrong audience. A slobby but genuinely decent guy, surrounded by hot babes who won’t have sex, and authority figures who dislike Dresden for no reason at all? That is publishing gold in the YA section.