A Certain Slant of Light

I’ve never gotten the appeal of Harry/Draco, or indeed any of the Draco ships, given that his main canon characteristic is referencing his father at all possible opportunities: “My father says…” and “When my father hears about this!” and so forth and so on. He’s also a bully, but at least if he were a bully who stood on his own two feet and fought his own battles there might be something to him. But no! He’s always riding on Daddy’s coattails.

To be fair, I realize that H/D fandom does not write him like this at all. I think Harry Potter may have been the first fandom where the fanworks, rather than the original books, eventually became the source material for a large proportion of fic? (You can see a similar dynamic in 2012-era Les Mis fanworks about the Amis: their primary source material was neither the movie nor the music nor the original book, but other fanfiction about the Amis.)

Actually, I’ve read that Sentinel fandom was also like this, but that was because many people didn't have access to the TV show. IIRC some 1990s anime fandoms had the same difficulty, and there were fans who had only seen a few episodes, or read episode descriptions, or what have you? But that’s a different dynamic than rejecting a freely-available canon and substituting your own.

God, remember how hard it used to be to watch a TV show if your local cable company didn’t happen to show it? We’re truly living in a golden age.

Yesterday I posted a meme, and today I am beginning to tackle the answers! In the interest of not spreading the answers over too many posts, I’m sticking these two questions together.

landofnowhere asked: 20. If you could ‘unkill’ any character from any story, who would it be?

Sirius Black. After I finished the fifth Harry Potter book, I basically went into mourning and walked around for the next week with my own personal raincloud over my head. It just strikes me as so incredibly sad - not just that he died - but that he spends years in prison, and then he breaks out and he’s on the run and he’s forced to take shelter in his family’s old house (which he hates) and he’s not even exonerated before he falls through that stupid veil. No chance at happiness or freedom. Just misery and imprisonment and a few miserable years in hiding and then pow, that’s it, a completely unheroic death.

There are other characters whose deaths I would undo if I could (...still hoping the MCU will see the light about Natasha, frankly), but the combination of miserable life followed by death with no chance for happiness in between is mercifully rare.


redrikki asked: 15. What kind of character do you wish you saw portrayed more often?

Cranky girls. Not justifiably enraged revolutionary types (not that I have anything against the justifiably enraged revolutionaries - viva Katniss! - but I feel that they’re easier to find) but girls who have a low-grade fire of omnidirectional crankiness always burning in their souls for no particular reason, and it makes them sarcastic and short with people. Like Jaye from Wonderfalls or Joni from Saints Rest. (Catra is the OTT version of this who is not so much “cranky” as “constantly enraged.”)

At last I’ve seen Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them! Although now that I’ve seen it, I’m more sorry than I was before that I didn’t make an effort to see it in the theaters: it’s a vast and visually sumptuous movie and I think it must have really popped on the big screen. The magical special effects are for the most part delightful; I particularly loved the scene where Queenie is conjuring up a strudel, and all the plates and napkins and pastry dough are flying around.

I was afraid that Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them would have the same feeling of poorly-done fanficishness that Harry Potter and the Cursed Child did, but in fact the movie doesn’t suffer from that at all. Of course it helps that all the characters are new to us, and the American Wizarding World is also a different beast than the British one.

Although Fantastic Beasts did have the most British New York I’ve ever seen, I must say. But then I don’t go to Harry Potter for historically accurate and in-depth view of the Muggle World, anyway, so this is more in the lines of something amusing I noted than something that actually detracted from my pleasure in the movie.

I enjoyed Newt and Tina and Queenie, but probably my favorite character was the Muggle baker Kowalski. (I don’t think I’m ever going to come to terms with the word No-Maj.) He’s just been bitten by a magical creature, been dragged into a world of flying plates and food that cooks itself, is holding a conversation in which he doesn’t need to say anything with a magical mind-reading girl, and he’s - perhaps a bit disoriented, but he just keeps on going with it. You want me to climb into your magical suitcase, Newt Scamander? The one that unleashed the creature that bit me? Okey dokey.

Having said this, I’m not sure that foregrounding a Muggle like this is a good idea, because it really highlights the heartlessness of the wizarding policy of erasing Muggle memories of magic. Kowalski helped save the world New York! Surely he deserves to remember it? And not just bits and pieces of it that tug at his brain and suggest odd pastry creations to him. It hits me in the same sad place as the ending of The Dark is Rising.

However, Queenie’s appearance in his bakery at the end suggests that they may do more with this storyline in future movies - which I clearly ought to see in theaters like a proper Harry Potter fan - I’m just not sure if they can go anywhere satisfying with it, given that we know from Harry Potter itself that the Statute of Secrecy remains in place. I guess I’ll just have to watch and see.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Ngaio Marsh’s Killer Dolphin, which is a cracking good read despite the lack of murderous cetaceans. It’s one of her theater mysteries, which always seem to be excellent (Marsh was a theater director when she wasn’t writing mystery novels), and this one is set in a lovely atmospheric old Victorian theater to boot.

It’s also the first Marsh book I’ve read with a gay character who is not a walking bundle of stereotypes, so that’s nice.

What I’m Reading Now

Sara Jeannette Duncan’s An American Girl in London, which is about, well, an American girl in the late 19th century visiting London, and as such a gold mine of fascinating detail about English life and manners at the time (and also, in a sideways sort of way, about America: it’s always interesting to see what Duncan chooses to comment on). Duncan is a delightful and sprightly writer, and I’m very much enjoying it.

What I Plan to Read Next

I put Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on hold, but as I’m forty-eight on the holds list, it’s probably going to be a while...

I’ve also realized that I will in the not-too-distant future finish reading War and Peace (!!!), so I’m going to need a new book for bedtime reading. I contemplated diving into The Count of Monte Cristo, because it’s also a million pages long and after all reading War and Peace each night has proven a successful strategy to get through it. But the thought made me feel tired, so I think I’ll do a shorter book for a breather. Perhaps Eva Ibbotson’s The Star of Kazan? It’s been sitting on my shelves, waiting to be read.

I finished Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On, which I very much enjoyed! It starts off a bit slowly - not in that it’s boring; it’s interesting all the way through, but in that the plot slowly gathers propulsive force until it takes off about halfway through (I think about the time that Simon goes to Baz’s house for Christmas), and I was reading along and reading along and the big confrontation was coming AND THEN I HAD TO GO TO WORK NOOOOOOOOO. I wanted so much to finish that I almost convinced myself to go in late, but I couldn’t quite manage it.

Anyway, I liked the book a lot. I’m particularly partial to the world-building - and I think upon reflection that it is mostly criticisms of Harry Potter’s world-building that Carry On is building on, not specifically criticisms of the seventh book; it’s just that I saw many of these criticisms after book seven came out, I think because the release of the final book made it clear that, say, the Problem of Slytherin was not going to be addressed in the text.

I think it’s doing something different with it’s world-building than Harry Potter is, so it’s not quite fair to say one is better than the other. Rather, they’re going to appeal to different people (or to the same people but for different reasons; I love the first few Harry Potter books, after all).

Harry Potter is much heavier on whimsy and sense of wonder: the magical world is clearly very dangerous, but it’s almost impossible to imagine anyone wanting to opt out on that basis, because the magical world is just so awesome and the danger, generally speaking, feels like boys’ own adventure danger: more exciting than scary. It may be deadly, but it’s not traumatizing. (This is the general tendency in the worldbuilding, not an absolute, because there are moments of genuine pathos: the scene when Harry sees Neville’s parents in St. Mungo’s comes to mind.)

Incidentally, I think this is the reason why the “but he’s a trauma victim! Of course he’s cranky!” defense of Capslock!Harry in book 5 has always fallen flat to me. Previously Harry bounced back from everything like a rubber ball, and just in general, realistic trauma reactions aren’t a high priority in Hogwarts world-building.

They are a priority in Carry On (at least in comparison to Harry Potter). Simon Snow and his friends Penelope and Agatha (and his nemesis Baz) are starting their final year at Watford, and after nearly a decade of magical brushes with death, they’re all fraying and frazzled, bitterly aware that they’re not likely to survive to the end of their schooling.

And the darkness is much closer to the surface than it is in Harry Potter - although the darkness is definitely there is Harry Potter once you start looking. Carry On simply makes it explicit. The tensions between mages and magical creatures are obvious from the beginning; the fact that the political system is corrupt to the core is obvious, if not from the first pages, then quite quickly as soon as we get out of Simon’s POV. (Simon is almost tragically naive, but it’s fairly clear that this is the result of careening from one crisis to another so swiftly that he doesn’t really have a chance to think through the larger situation.)

The magical world doesn’t feel as insular as Harry Potter’s: the students are aware of and use modern technology - and this despite the fact that, except for Simon Snow, all the mages in this world are to the magic born.

(I think one of my favorite examples of this is the time that Agatha starts complaining about people making up a spell to make stuff stick to the walls. “This is exactly the sort of thing I’m sick of,” she complains to herself. “Like, just use some tape. Why come up with a spell for sticking paper to the wall. Tape. Exists.”)

I did not expect to like Agatha as much as I did. She’s the character who would really rather not be having adventures at all, thank you very much, and usually I don’t like that character at all (they tend to gum up the narrative). But with Agatha I could totally feel it; their adventures did not sound fun and if I were Agatha I too would probably be gloomily moping about the magical ramparts thinking about how I’m probably going to have to fight yet another fucking dragon when really I’d rather be reading. (Or riding horses, in Agatha’s case.)

And I think one of the things that I find most interesting about the world-building in Carry On is that the narrative allows space for this reaction - the rejection of the magical world - without trying to force it on you. It just presents its world and presents different characters having different reactions to it and lets the characters have their feelings without signposting any particular reaction as right, and I think that’s really nice.

***

And I also think that Carry On is a sign that I should start that Harry Potter reread I've been thinking about for a while. Perhaps once I've finished the Betsy-Tacy books? I think that a reread of Harry Potter could fill a similar bedtime reading space in my life.

Back from Edinburgh!



( Cut because I have a couple more pictures )