Some rambling about Harry Potter

[laleia]

It starts off with a fic rec. I just read In Loco Parentis, and I really enjoyed it. It's not a happy story, but it does have a happy ending. Warning: it's super-long.



Harry Potter is what I often refer to as my default fandom. It's certainly the fandom I've written the most of in recent years -- I haven't finished (key word being finished) a Sailor Moon fanfic that I can read over without feeling shame at the bad writing.

Harry Potter is also the fandom I am most thinky about. And this fanfic gave me that -- it had a female character dealing with the effects that a fandom-popular-slash couple have on her life (which is an id-plot for me, apparently), and it has a lot of political issues, both about autonomy of body and about blood racism.

Digression: One reason that I absolutely despise Marriage Law fanfics with a passion is that people are always so eager to surrender autonomy of their bodies, or don't fight for them. You are ordered and told who to sleep with and who to have sex with, and you're telling me that Hermione (or Harry, or anyone we may be talking about) wouldn't fucking die rather than give in to someone else telling me what they can and cannot do. I mean, this is Hermione who starts campaigns about House-Elves.

This fanfic brings to light a lot of the inequities that we see in the wizarding world that Rowling presents us, and I love it because the issues and the activism and the campaigns and the fights mirror the inequities that exist in the real world we live in, but because this is a fictional fanfic, we get a happy ending.

Whereas in the real world, happy endings take centuries, and I will most probably be dead by the time the Real World happy endings I want to see actually come about.

So anyway, my only quibble about this fanfic is that there is not enough Ron (though his characterization is very realistic, I think) and that the revelation about Ginny makes me sad, even though I think it is also possible. But then, I like to think of Ron, Harry, and Hermione as an inseparable Triumvirate who, despite what characterizations may or may not occur in canon, are friends with each other first and foremost and forever.

But anyways. This fanfic really got me thinking, about all the thinky thoughts I get about Harry Potter that bubble up when I read fanfic but that I never tell anyone because they're not conversations I want to have with people who are not exposed to fandom, or who consider Ginny/Hermione a Mary Sue, which limits the number of people in my timezone I can talk to.

So I figured I'd get some thinky thoughts out here.

One of the things that I like about the wizarding world is that it has so many flaws, some of which I'm sure JKR intended, some of which she probably didn't.

With all the prejudice in the wizarding world (against dark creatures, against Slytherins, against Muggles, against Muggle culture, against Muggle-borns, against house-elves, against beasts/beings), and with the way they are isolated from whole swathes of the world, and the way it is so easy for their government to be co-opted, and with the mere existence of the Obliviate ... I mean, it makes me glad that fandom exists that write all that dystopian fanfic, whether it's the Voldemort's-in-charge-thinly-veiled-dark-PWP or it's the very realistic striping away of individuals' rights little by little.

I want more fanfics like the one I rec'd, that addressed the little, non-genocidal-but-equally-devastating ways Muggle-borns can be marginalized. I want someone to use the Tone Argument on Hermione, and I want her to tear them apart.

I want fanfics that address that Slytherins should not be discriminated against and tarred with the same brush, but at the same time that also address the fact that some Slytherins were evil and did evil things. Like, I feel like either fanfics have Evil Slytherins, or they have Put-Upon Slytherins Who Are Discriminated Against. There is no in-between.

I mean, I also want fanfics where Harry, Ron, and Hermione are friends and not in relationships with each other BUT ALSO is not EWE or Epilogue-fixit with divorces and breakups all around and ... that's not even logistically possible, I don't think.

I don't know. I also want people to address the fact that James/Sirius/etc. were terrible bullies and terrible kids, but also that they weren't just terrible bullies and they had logic for everything they did and that they only gave as good as they got.

(I mean, I also want to ponder on how far kids can go you bring magic in the equation. I mean, kids do an awful lot of terrible things to each other, and they get in fights, and they do stupid pranks. When you bring magic in, the amount of pain/damage/destruction they can inflict on each other completely magnifies, but probably normalizes. Like, if you break someone's arm, that's clearly terrible. But at Hogwarts, when broken arms can be fixed overnight, it ... might even be considered the equivalent of a black eye? I mean, when it's so easy to blind someone, and then presumably easy to fix them, that's a whole new level of horror that both children and adults can go to, and have it be considered acceptable.)

I want fanfic where Remus watches James or Sirius bully Snape and just coldly watches and doesn't even think anything about it because he doesn't see anything wrong with it.

I want fanfic where the fanfic writer obviously dislikes Draco and thinks he is evil, and yet Draco doesn't do anything evil in the whole story because he is not a good person, but he is not an evil person.

I want fanfic where the magical equivalent of going off the grid is when a Muggleborn goes to the Muggle world and never uses magic, or even when you cast a spell where you literally burn the magic out of you, so nobody can track you.

I want fanfic about what magic is like in China, and how wizards/witches were doing throughout Chinese history, but you know,I want it done a certain way and the few fics I've read so far that were set in China were not doing it in a way that I believed it would happen. (They were perfectly well-written fanfics, I just don't agree with how they think magic works. Personal opinion.)

I don't know where I'm going with this.



I'm going to end with a random list of fics I'm currently toying with:
-Harry Potter fic about how everyone casts Avada Kedavra differently
-Glee fic about how being Asian in Lima Ohio is NOT like being Asian American in the East/West Coast, and that there's probably just the one authentic Chinese restaurant there and it sucks, and uh ... it will be like an ode to being Asian American in the Midwest even though I have no idea what being Asian American in a small town is actually like
-the White Collar fic where Neal/Peter have sex and Elizabeth is one the giving them orders and telling them exactly what to do
-the one where Molly Hooper is secretly Irene Adler and/or otherwise secretly awesome

And a couple of Vorkosiverse fics, and the next chapter of unTalent.

Comments

[lilyayl.livejournal.com]

A note on Asian stuff in the midwest-- the midwest has car plants. If the factory sends over workers to keep the plant on track/etc, then the towns surrounding learn to accommodate a bit. Evansville, while granted is not a small town, but rather a small city, has a couple international markets, several Chinese and Japanese restaurants of varying quality, and a Japanese school so that children who relocate with their parents don't lose their language. At the same time, Asian students are still quite a minority in schools. So *shrugs.* I don't know how any of this comes across to someone who actually is Asian, but I thought I'd point out that it might exist near Lima, though you're right on probably not in it.