#ooww

[With Hinny, it’s not so much something fundamentally wrong with it as just the way it’s written in canon. It feels VERY forced and rushed. Ginny gets sidelined for aaages before swinging back in at the last minute to be Harry’s manic pixie dream girl, and she deserves better. 

There’s also the awkward detail that they both kinda chew up and throw away their non-white exes, as does Ron. Literally every interracial relationship in the series is presented as shallow and/or unhealthy, and FIVE are trampled underfoot to make way for the Hinny and Romione classic endgames with 2.5 kids and a very white picket fence. It’s like they all go off and have their Exotic Flings before settling down with the perfect fellow white person we all knew they were going to be with from Book 1. :/// I don’t think JKR is racist, but she can be rather dense, and I think she missed the implications of setting stuff up like that.

HOW TO REDEEM HINNY (to me): literally just give it some history and depth. I actually like seeing this RPed. Dw about the interracial ships, I’ve got them covered.

With Jily it’s the opposite. I don’t necessarily have a problem with how it’s written in canon so much as I dislike how sugarcoated it is by Marauder stans. I was surprised by its popularity when I first got into the fandom tbh? Like it seems to me like the typical “perfect popular girl dates jock bully” and I couldn’t be less interested in shipping it, myself. But to each their own. The issue is not that James is a bully. The issue is that people like to pretend he isn’t.

Yes, Sirius says he changed, and narratively it makes sense to believe he did, though realistically Sirius isn’t the most reliable source. But actions speak louder than words and we’re not shown any of that change. It seems like whenever a fan mentions what a jerk he is, someone else writes a 5000-word fic based on the line “his head deflated” and then points to it like SEE HE’S A GOOD PERSON and I’m like you do realise you just made all of that up right?? I sincerely doubt James was sainted in his seventh year, and tbh I think it’s a discredit to JKR to pretend he was.

(“Asher are YOU seriously defending JKR” she did so much wrong that she deserves to have the things she did well appreciated ok)

As I say often, one of the things that I found best-executed about HP was breaking down the dead angel parents trope, and in that sense I like James as a character even as I loathe him as a person. Sometimes people are losers and relationships are unhealthy, and it’s interesting to see Harry come to grips with the darker reality of James after building up this golden image of him all his life. In a series of one-dimensional stagnant characters, James is a really gloriously messy and complicated and controversial individual, and intentionally or not, canon emphasises his flaws. It’s unfortunate that the fandom is hellbent on turning him right back into a perfect dead angel parent.

tumblr: no means no. ‘boys will be boys’ is toxic. respect women’s right to choose what they do with their bodies and relationshipsalso tumblr: aww how cute that James wore Lily down by harrassing her for years and terrorising her best friend to literally threaten her into dating him. he was just trying to show how much he liked her! True Love™

To reiterate, I do not take issue with people shipping “problematic” things. The way I write Frangelina and all of Fred’s ships tbh is pretty unhealthy. It’s fiction; conflict is what makes it interesting. I actually wish more people would realise that, so they can stop trying to downplay or straight-up erase the ugly parts of their favourite characters and ships. Fred fans are the same way, and in my other main fandom people are always trying to push the narrative that Darth Vader spent twenty years crying over his mistakes when he was actually just straight-up slaughtering people. With ships especially, it’s like there’s this cycle of falling in love with a ship for its problems, realising “oh no I’m not allowed to ship problematic things,” and then desperately trying to explain away those same problems, defending things like bullying and abuse that they would never defend in any other context. You don’t have to explain anything ok?? Just stop???