It also plays upon the earnest megalomania that is fed by every good fantasy series. If she’s brave, she’s a Gryffindor, a lion if she’s brainy and artistic, she’s a Ravenclaw if she’s sweet and not much more, she’s a Hufflepuff-our apologies and if she’s devious and power-hungry, she’s a green Slytherin snake.įor the fantasy writer, this categorizing mechanism-the young book reader’s equivalent of a BuzzFeed personality quiz-is a neat trick: it defines the world of the series and the characters who populate it simultaneously. Rowling gives us the Sorting Hat: a shabby, oracular wearable that tells each incoming Hogwarts wizarding student which of the school’s four houses she will be sorted into-and, by extension, the kind of person she really is. Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians” trilogy divides the students at its school of magic by discipline in Veronica Roth’s “Divergent” series, citizens are split into “factions” based on their aptitudes and values. Of the various devices common to fantasy series, the one that most quickly binds a reader to a story is the sorting of characters into a handful of neatly defined groups. The script for “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” a two-part play currently being staged in London, is dotted with predictable and consequently satisfying twists.
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