“But Artemis Fowl Problematic”

“But Artemis Fowl problematic”

Yes, and that was the fucking point. Especially in book one, he was the villain. He did bad things for mostly bad reasons. He was  well written and sometimes sympathetic, he had his doubts about what he was doing, but he was undeniably 100% the villain of book one.

And if you take that away, and start out with him as a mostly good person, not only do you make him much less interesting, you remove Artemis’s growth and redemption. Some of the deeply emotional and meaningful moments of the later books wouldn’t mean anything at all if Artemis doesn’t start off as a terrible person with tiny glimmers of hope.

At the end of book two, arguably one of the most significant moments is Holly doing this.  “Captain Short plucked a gold coin from her belt, flicking it fifty feet into the moonlit sky. With one fluid movement, she brought her weapon up and loosed a single blast… …Holly held out her hand, revealing the still raw scar on her finger. “If it wasn’t for you, I would have missed altogether…..“You keep it, to remind you.”

“To remind me?”

Holly stared at him frankly. “To remind you that deep beneath the layers of deviousness, you have a spark of decency. Perhaps you could blow on that spark occasionally.”

Artemis closed his fingers around the coin. It was warm against his palm.

“Yes, perhaps.””

That scene would mean absolutely nothing, might not even be includable, is Artemis were not a problematic brat. Another meaningful scene, Artemis begging to save Butler’s life, not for gain but because he loves Butler like a second father, would mean jack all if Artemis were emotionally open and less selfish.

The fear, at the end of the eternity code, that losing his memories will erase the emotional growth he has made, what happens to that? Or the gut wrenching realization in the epilogue and start of book four that yes, almost all of his progress did get erased along with his memories. And though we get much of his progress back by the end of book four, there is still the strong sense that we still aren’t where we were pre-memory wipe.

I could continue like this for all the books, pointing out how Artemis’s growth from terrible villain, to major brat, to a reasonably good person is one of the huge, important, overreaching plot arcs through the whole series. It’s part of why I absolutely love the books. 

I can not see any version of the movies without this plot line, this slow growth and backtracking and eventually redemption as complete or even the same story. So yeah, book one Artemis is an utter brat of a villain. But you can’t erase that. Because that’s the entire fucking point of the series as a whole.