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Still feeling somewhat grumpy and disappointed by the current JKR sitch, but also whatever, the text exists outside the author and I do think this is cool: For some reason I don’t think I’ve ever posted about this theory of mine, so here goes: Harry is much, much more affected by the Sectumsempra scene and what he almost did to Draco Malfoy than he seems. Lest we forget, in the book he moves on amazingly quickly: Snape sends him to get the Prince’s potions book, Harry hides his real one and brings Ron’s, and Snape gives him detention. Harry at this point is literally covered in Draco’s blood, but he’s not thinking about that: he resists getting detention (and feels it’s unfair of Snape to give it to him!) for eviscerating a classmate, because of Quidditch. Even after that, there’s never any indication that Harry feels particularly guilty. He’s upset that the Prince has led him down this path - “as if a beloved pet had turned suddenly savage - what had [the Prince] been thinking” - but that’s not at all the same. He gets a twinge of conscience when someone brings up Draco’s injury but that’s it. It’s definitely not what we’d expect from a hero who’s just committed a very messy near-murder, even if it was unintended. But this is not a criticism of Harry! Or indeed the book. Because I don’t think this is Harry being callous. I think it’s Harry being kind of damaged already and then almost killing a classmate in bloody fashion (with a spell that’s for enemies, and Harry would’ve said Malfoy was his enemy but he didn’t mean this.) I think this is, canonically and concretely, Harry going into complete and utter denial. The denial reading makes sense of what is otherwise a weird lack of guilt. Like, even if you as a reader think Harry is 0% culpable for what happens and could have happened, that’s different from the experience as a person of “I did this thing and then HIS FACE AND BODY WERE SLASHED OPEN AND THERE WAS BLOOD EVERYWHERE.” Especially from a person who often feels guilty for deaths he actively tried to prevent! The Sectumsempra scene is by far the bloodiest in the books, and while Harry’s been through a lot, that’s the first time he ever sees violent injury on that level. But it doesn’t overtly affect him. Draco disappears from his consciousness after the Sectrumsempra scene in a way that’s really weird. We don’t see Draco coming back to class. (We saw that after Buckbeak, so why not now?) We don’t see the first time he and Harry lay eyes on each other after that spell; we don’t know anything about how Draco reacts. No patented Harry-and-Malfoy glares across the House tables at meals. Literally the next time Draco appears in the text after Sectumsempra is the Tower scene, and after a book in which Harry has become “obsessed with Draco Malfoy” that is such a sharp change. But it makes sense: ( Harry is unable to cope with what happened so he’s just ignoring it ferociouslyCollapse )But all of that is significant, I think, but not THE reason why I think denial is the only reading that makes sense. Harry spends most of HBP telling anyone who’ll listen - Arthur Weasley, Lupin, Ron and Hermione, Dumbledore - that Draco Malfoy has become a Death Eater. They all dismiss him. What Harry hears in that bathroom proves that Malfoy has been threatened all year by a man Malfoy believes can kill him, and that he’s working on a project for that threatening person. GEE I WONDER WHO THAT COULD BE. And Harry doesn’t tell anyone! WHAT? ( That really only makes sense if Harry is in deep denialCollapse )Ginny even brings up Draco’s attempted use of Cruciatus as a reason he should be taken seriously as a threat, and that it’s acceptable for Harry to have reacted that way. Harry has spent the whole book up to this point trying to convince people that Draco’s a serious threat, while the others - Ron and Hermione especially - doubted that Voldemort would have made Malfoy a Death Eater. Now there’s explicit discussion about Draco’s use of an Unforgivable - who trained him to do that, hmm? - and whether Draco should be treated as a real threat. And yet in this conversation, Harry somehow doesn’t bring up how he heard Draco actually say that he’s trying to do something, and his life has been threatened if he doesn’t do it! They never even ask Myrtle about it!!! DENIAL. This was originally posted at https://lokifan.dreamwidth.org/373606.html. Comment wherever you like :) | |
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Literally on Tuesday night when I couldn’t sleep I wrote a post about this theory I have about Sectumsempra and Harry’s reaction to it, and then before I could post it I saw this and now I have way too much of a sour taste in my mouth. The sexism in Labour (and the left in general) is a problem but you know what’s NOT a solution? Attacking women for being women. Refusing to hate some of the most vulnerable women around or call them “men in dresses” doesn’t make you non-feminist. That’s really the opposite of true. To be clear: I don’t think JKR is some frothing-at-the-mouth queer-hater. I don’t really follow the JKR #discourse but I’ve never seen her do anything I’d describe as queerbaiting. I do think she’s shown time and again (the Native American stuff, the Dumbledore stuff etc) that she is basically the platonic ideal of a certain kind of middle-class white liberal - well-meaning, kind, but ignorant and unwilling to learn. I thought she might’ve got better on trans stuff; I saw a criticism of her for having deleted old transphobic tweets, and I don’t know the story there, but my immediate assumption at the time was that she’d said transphobic stuff and learnt better. That would be a GOOD thing. Apparently not so much. There’s been this really scary rise in transphobic stuff in the papers here in the UK, in the last couple of years, particularly in uncritical reporting of TERFs doing a publicity tour attacking trans women and the myth of kids getting gender-confirmation surgery. The Tories have tried using trans people as human shields in updating the Gender Recognition Act - basically our right-wing leading party plans to make it possible for people to legally transition without medical requirements. Which is fantastic, if probably coming out of a desire to showcase the fluffier side of a party that’s been recently investigated for human rights abuses by the UN over their cuts to disabled people’s benefits. But it’s also unleashed a tsunami of transphobia on the left, and made a bunch of TERFs way more relevant and able to get publicity. JKR hates Corbyn but she’s absolutely a Labour voice, and a relatively prominent one. Certainly she’s a celebrity who takes a definite interest in party politics as well as more general causes. This is probably the most minor way she could indicate a side but it really, really sucks seeing her back this kind of ‘supporting trans women is misogyny’ bullshit :( This was originally posted at https://lokifan.dreamwidth.org/373206.html. Comment wherever you like :) | |
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I had a lovely day, but I’ll post about that tomorrow...  Day 11
Share a book/song/movie/tv show/fanwork/etc that changed your life. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.This is gonna sound like it’s cheating but I’ve been meaning to post about it for a while, so… Obviously being in fandom has changed my life in innumerable ways - I mean, many of my close or best friends are people I met through fandom. But being in fandom, and especially reading fanfic and meta, has influenced my ethics. A lot. Which sounds terrifying, haha, and the start of some kind of clickbait article about fandom ruining young people - which will definitely become more of a thing as fandom gets ever more mainstream. I was sixteen when I entered fandom and I’m about to turn twenty-eight, so those are some influential years. Now I don’t exactly mean that fandom has influenced what I think is right and wrong - it probably has, but not in any way I could easily unpick, and I suspect that it’s a feedback loop to the extent that it’s true. Like, what I already thought was right and wrong was perhaps settled and entrenched by being in fandom - after all, fandom has lots of disagreements within itself, we’re a bunch of people who often strongly disagree more than a monolith, even when we’re just talking about the smaller communities I’ve been part of within wider fandom. I was already interested in fighting inequality, I already had ideas about responsibility and community-building and kindness in the face of vulnerability, and fandom just gave me new ways to express them and new examples of them. But there has been a change: ( the way fandom looks at characters influences the way I look at peopleCollapse )This was originally posted at https://lokifan.dreamwidth.org/372720.html. Comment wherever you like :) | |
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Hello darlings! It’s my birthday today, and I’m not doing anything tonight (it’s a school night, so people couldn’t). It’s been a nice day and a special friend visited last weekend and this weekend is a houseparty and dinner with the family. Still, I’d like some attention :D And I’d like to give you things. Soooo, MEME PARTY. I’m doing three at once, participate as much as you like :D Shag Marry Kill - you can give me three characters, or you can say CONVERSE in comments/as an ask and I’ll give you three (or both). 2. Ask me a question and I’ll answer, and ask you a related question (this is just my default I miss you/getting to know you meme, haha) 3. First ten people who give me a word and a ship (anywhere, this is cross-posted) get a drabble. Fandoms for writing: Final Fantasy XV, Harry Potter, some MCU, Buffy/Angel Fandoms for meme-ing: Final Fantasy XV, Potter, Buffy/Angel, MCU (including TV except for Agents of Shield), Steven Universe, Supergirl, Flash, Glee, Dark Angel, AtLA/Korra, Orphan Black, Doctor Who, White Collar, Black Butler, #6, Pretty Little Liars. Also Diana Wynne Jones books. IDK I'm pretty flexible :D This was originally posted at https://lokifan.dreamwidth.org/372124.html. Comment wherever you like :) | |
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Aka Day 10
In your own space, share your love for a trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme. (Or a few!) Tell us what makes it work for you, and why it appeals to you so much. Talk about what you like to see in fanworks featuring that theme most. Feel free to include recs and examples!I thought I’d go back to this, cos I finally came up with a good answer, even if it’s really specific to my current main fandom. MT!Prompto. It’s so great. Prompto is so cheerful and extroverted and emotional and generally the exact opposite of a robot, or even a trained-to-be-a-weapon type character in canon. But there’s this AU just begging to be used, because he was taken out of Gralea as a baby - an accident? A random aside from a Lucian spy? All the fic I’ve read using MT!Prompto has been fucking amazing. Plus it really lends itself to other tropes I love. Hurt/comfort most obviously, of course - the trope I look for first in every new fandom. Learning to be loved -- Prompto’s shock at people being nice to him is heartbreaking in all these fics, but omg my id. Touch starvation -- my second-favourite scene in Running Behind is when Prompto gets his hair cut by Ignis, and leans into the touch all overcome, and Ignis is startled but recognises the need in it, and is so kind. There’s also Noct being adorable and using the ‘strange blue substance’ of his hair gel to make Prompto a rock star. In Engine Heart touch-starved Prompto has Gladio doing his eyeliner after Iggy does is hair <3 Related to that - defamiliarisation probably isn’t quite the word I want here, but it’s also not outsider POV, quite… Basically MT!Prompto’s perspective on the bros and everybody else, when he doesn’t know them as he does in canon and comes from a completely alien culture, but of course he likes them or is in the process of learning to… it’s just a delight. Found family <333 I wouldn’t have expected to fall for Daddy!Cor like this at ALL, but I completely have - it’s gorgeous, and especially for the ways he tends to flail around and not be that good at it, but try very hard. And obviously there’s something lovely in the bros finding each other and becoming a unit no matter how their world has changed. Noct recognising vulnerability and being kind in the face of it - I mean I love that from all characters, it speaks to me on such a deep level, but from Noct, who can be thoughtless and oblivious but wants to save people, who has such power and privilege, I love it sooooo much when he realises how other people can be hurt in ways he hasn’t been and tries hard because of it. It’s the best of him <3 Daddy!Cor is a delight, but there are also special moments that get repeated in different ways, as MT!Prompto learns to be more like the Prompto we know in canon, as he’s allowed to be more himself. Hair, clothes… MT!Prompto discovering photography is a really lovely process that makes me super emotional in all these fics. Which brings me to - ( recs time!Collapse )This was originally posted at https://lokifan.dreamwidth.org/371726.html. Comment wherever you like :) | |
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So, on Wednesday I’m going to run a professional-development workshop at my school, for my colleagues (i.e. other teachers) on how to react when students say openly bigoted stuff. So not the subtle things (although that’s also a massive issue) but like, using slurs, or ‘in Algeria we don’t have any gays because we kill them’, or ‘bisexual people are just greedy and selfish’, or ‘being gay is a birth defect’. (All RL examples from my classroom! Anti-Semitism and xenophobia also crop up semi-regularly, and racism every so often.) It’s a tiny little forty-minute session, so I’m going to start off with what made me think about the topic and the school policy, then teachers discuss in pairs, then we discuss as a group, then I round it off with some tips and ideas. Most of the discussion will be different techniques for responding to this in the classroom, what we’ve tried and what’s worked, and also what the goal is - i.e. do we want to be ‘neutral arbiters’ (hint those don’t exist and also no), are we changing hearts and minds, do we just want the student to shut up, etc. Keep in mind I teach at a language school, all my students are studying English as a foreign language and most are adults who are explicitly in London to learn some British culture too. I’m happy to host a wider discussion, though, and interested to hear POVs and difficulties from the various state school teachers and university lecturers I know. Basically, I’d love to know if you have any thoughts! And not just from teachers - you're all former or even current students. I have thoughts of my own but I’ll keep those to the comment replies... This was originally posted at https://lokifan.dreamwidth.org/371693.html. Comment wherever you like :) | |
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1. Where did you go the last time you took an airplane ride?Back to London from my six months living in Sardinia. 2. Are you a nervous flyer or a comfortable flyer?Comfortable. 3. Window seat or aisle seat?Window for sure. Nice view, and it’s generally easier to hide behind your book if you want to. 4. What is the worst experience you've had flying?I did get upgraded from economy to nice-economy, but my first flight by myself was anxious-making - because I was worried about logistics and making mistakes, not crashing or anything. I was on a flight from London to San Francisco for Azkatraz, the 2009 big Potter con in the States. The dude next to me was reading a Daily Mail article about how women are unhappy after divorce and then occasionally glancing at my laptop screen, where I was writing dub-con Pansy/Hermione. 5. What is the best experience you've had flying?My flight from Manila to London definitely wins because it was an eighteen-hour flight, the longest flight in the world, and yet not hellish. Because it was almost entirely empty. Hurricane Haiyan had just torn through - I got a hurricane day off school right before I left Vietnam - and I don’t know if that was why, but the flight was probably less than 10% full. I lay down across five economy seats and went to sleep. Although I totally embarrassed myself at the end, because we flew over central London into Heathrow, and the pilot was like ‘look down and you’ll see London Bridge.’ And I didn’t even consciously decide to do it, my mouth just opened and I said “it’s TOWER Bridge!” really loudly. Because I'm obnoxious. This was originally posted at https://lokifan.dreamwidth.org/371187.html. Comment wherever you like :) | |
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I had a great time at Kupocon, a one-day Final Fantasy thing here in London. I met new people and hung out with friends and had a blast. One of the big things that helped ![[tumblr.com profile]](https://imgprx.livejournal.net/b60752ac4a2c78ba0347ce0a73a5b3eb7c372977/-FvCoxJuD9QB2kl4pnkl6qJZbIlo8cxDThkL0ThHLP7FGmKo2-OqD5Kig7q422ecOEMkb1oZ2a_uX9rvjac1Dg) bestchocobro drag me into FFXV fandom was him having a blast at cons and saying how lovely the fandom was, and he’s totally right <3 I came up in fan-run cons - which Kupo absolutely is, actually, but what I mean there is ‘where the standard thing is fan-run panels and events, rather than the key being getting as many creators as you can and doing signings.’ And like, the vivid Kupo memories are mostly gonna be about playing cards with interesting forfeits, and watching my cardsharp friend do tricks, and helping a mate in amazing MT cosplay to navigate the dealers’ room, and - Okay, okay, I’m just embarrassed about this post being all How Adam Croasdell Made Me Cry (Not In A Bad Way). BUT WHATEVER ( LET ME TELL YOU ALL ABOUT ITCollapse )TL;DR: I’m partially blind, which was diagnosed as permanent around the same time I (a spoiler-free n00b) found FFXV, and I told Adam Croasdell Iggy had been really helpful and he was really nice and possibly psychic and I managed to not cry until later but omg I am EMOTIONALLY COMPROMISED. This was originally posted at https://lokifan.dreamwidth.org/370884.html. Comment wherever you like :) | |
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