It’s real for us

30 days of hp ⟶ day five: favourite house (hufflepuff)

‘Yes, yes, well done, Slytherin,’ said Dumbledore. ‘However, recent events must be taken into account.’ The room went very still. The Slytherins’ smiles faded a little.

One of my professors was straight up like "I don't want you reading papers about this book until we finish it!" and we had writing things for the first 20 minutes of every class because he wanted to know what WE thought, not what we had become convinced was THE thing to think.

When I was in my second year of college, I spiraled out into this whole "Jane Eyre is a lesbian!" thing, and my professor (not the same guy as above but delightfully insane in her own right) was like, "Wow, I've never heard this from anyone," and instead of being like, "um this is not what has been agreed upon by everyone else" went "Tell me more." Now, as a forty year old woman who has never stopped engaging with stories on both an enjoyment and academic level, the paper I would write with age and distance would be more "Homosociality, desire, and the domesticated male in Jane Eyre" or something like that, nineteen year old me was a little reductive and simple, but same vibes.

But my professor did not think I was right, she thought I was being INTERESTING, and so she encouraged me and championed me to write that paper and I actually presented it at the student division of a conference! The cool thing about that was, that when I was defending it, I was having to think about it, but it was in the spirit of collaboration, it felt like. No one was trying to 'win' the conversation.

Doc, what the fuck are you--I saw a really interesting thing this morning, someone talking about Shrek, of all things, and how they thought it was about how you cannot turn an ogre into a man, but he can make you become an ogre. And I immediately went, "Wow! Okay, interesting, not how I read that at all, TELL ME MORE." It was really jarring for me, then, to see pretty much every comment be like, 'uh you are wrong and also stupid." Sure, maybe that's not the intention of the work, but I don't for one goddamn motherfucking second think Charlie Bronte was sitting down going "I am going to write a woman so gay..." nor do I think the read of her as same sex-attracted is the end all be all of interpretations. It's mine, for sure! But like...talking about stories is supposed to be fun and it's supposed to be about possibility.

That one post got me thinking about how we are, in fandom often all looking at this same text, and there's immense pressure to have a 'right' interpretation--I was at the nexus of so many Sailor Moon fandom wars, and while I got into a few tussles, I was also stupid to do that. This characters are not real, and I was shutting down POSSIBILITY. And even after I was like, 'Wow, I don't think this is actually a very fun way to do stuff" it turns out you can't magically give everyone the same revelation you have simultaneously. Which is upsetting. And I see these same patterns repeat over and over and over again.

In my old age, I'm less interested in he "He would not say that" and more interested in "Cool, tell me why he would say that?"

Don't misunderstand me, there are points of view and ideas on different texts where I'm like, "Hm. I don't care to engage with that." Remember that the window we're looking out of is as important as what we're looking at, and will DOUBTLESS change the appearance. But the whole reason we have each other is to try and find other windows! It's not actually to find someone who is the next pane of glass in your same window. I miss that environment, where you could trust that everyone coming to the table was engaging with the same ground rules and that there was an expectation of, detachment doesn't quite get to the heart of what I'm talking about, but we were expected not to take the text or the analysis of it personally, even when it was hard. And sometimes it was. But I think it led to me having--for example it's crazy to me to have one 'right read' on any given text. I had a SUPER FUCKING ANIMATED conversation with a fellow lit nerd about whether or not GdT's Frankenstein was emotionally faithful to the text (which is not the same as being literally faithful nor the same as being good)and it was so fun, EVEN THOUGH we were coming at it completely opposed. But it was so fucking fun.

I wish I could do that with anime and cartoons, but you can't. People take Shrek personally. So I'll never have that same fun.

I need to pay this month’s bills, so I’m opening commissions 2/5

Please Dm

HP is something that so many of us read the most in childhood and adolescence, with formative memories of the text coming for most readers well before they had any solid education in literary analysis and criticism. also, many of us read the books less and less as we became more dissatisfied with them due to plots not turning out the way we wanted or characters dying despite being our favorites. also, as @heartoftheserpent pointed out to me in a recent conversation, the final two books came out in an environment of drastically different Internet fandom than the first five and there were movies to be watched and rewatched that added character beats or idiosyncrasies or adaptational changes into the conversation. for most people over the age of 25, the experience of Reading Harry Potter is doing archaeology on one's own childhood and adolescence and early fandom days as much as it is engaging in any kind of scholarship or genuinely getting lost in the story.

and I actually think that the story itself, as experienced by adults as adult readers, if you're able to separate it from your memories or preconceptions or anticipations of particular moments and interactions, solves a lot of problems that early fans "identified" due to their own dissatisfaction. there have been a number of times where I've gone "if I were reading this for the first time right now in my thirties I'd come away with X impression", and that impression happens to align much more closely with what the text says than my previous thought, without either exonerating Rowling for her genuine flaws or misinterpreting her writing to paint her in a worse light.

it makes me feel like a large part of the tragedy around her turn to bigotry is that there is worth in actual Harry Potter Scholarship, there is worth in returning to the books as an adult with an adult's experienced eyes, but actually doing that (and even doing fandom scholarship where structured arguments against common fandom positions are made!) would come across as apologetics for Joanne herself.

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

You know that part when Harry learns about how his father treated Snape, the one person he absolutely hated and believed hated him, he didn’t go “Oh you deserved that because of who you are now.”

No. Harry James Potter, who had likely idealized his parents growing up, and had heard nothing but praise from anyone except Snape about his father, looked in disgust. His perfect image of his father was actually shattered. He felt sympathy for what had happened.

He called his dad out on his bullshit basically (as best he could for not being able to actually speak to him). He questioned everything.

“No!” The scream was the most terrible, because he had never expected or dreamed that Professor McGonagall could make such a sound.