Freckles & Doubt

The start-of-academic-year hell continues apace, with the attendant 12-hour days, failures of student (and advisor) reading comprehension, random system glitches, horrible database processing queues, and the usual seasonal infestation of load shedding, sigh. It is randomly leavened at infrequent intervals by Stardew Valley, student and advisor gratitude, light rain, affection from my cat, and the smug glow occasioned by getting the daily Wordle third go for five days in a row, the last in under 30 seconds.

Wordle 229 3/6

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I have also retreated, as is my wont under admin pressure, to only the lightest and fluffiest fanfic reading, which currently appears to mean Drarry. I find that reading Harry Potter fanfic these days comes with a side order of defiant glee, as it's the only way I will henceforth interact with the franchise, I am fucked if I am going to spend any further money on it in any way which will accrue to Rowling's smug, bigoted, hateful, TERFy coffers, the horrible cow. But even in the leaden haze of reg exhaustion, I have found the last couple of weeks' reading to have vouchsafed me an Insight, possibly sizzling.

I love Drarry because it tends to recoup the awful, deterministic condemnation of Slytherin in the novels; it humanises, complicates and adds nuance to Rowling's mean-spirited Slytherin Bad Griffindor Good reductionism, and it invites you to see the Slytherin kids as victims of Voldemort's war even if technically their families allied with him. This isn't a feature of the books, in which Slytherins are pretty much all bad and for always; even the vague semi-redemptions she allows Snape and Narcissa manage to insist, in both cases, that it's not real redemption, that self-interest plays a part; they remain unchanged in essentials despite the redemptive act. Draco, struggling with fear and threat under Voldemort's sway in book 6, nonetheless sticks to his Slytherin allegiances more or less uncritically. Rowling doesn't, fundamentally, believe that essentials can change. Which is, of course, why she's a TERFy bigot in particular, because somewhere at base she thinks identity as much as character are burned into you from the start, fixed and immutable, and no change is real.

Which has always annoyed me, but actually takes on a whole new meaning when you think of it in the context of contemporary internet culture. Tumblr and Twitter in particular, but actually social media in general, have enormous problems with callout culture, with dogpiles on popular social media figures for the least transgression - and, often, single transgressions somewhere in the past. (Note that here I am obviously not referring to obvious/horrible/ongoing abusers such as those targeted by something like #metoo, but things more like the cancellation of Thomas Sanders in some circles). The current culture doesn't allow for the idea that people can screw up, admit they were in the wrong, learn from their mistakes, consciously not repeat them, and grow as people as a result. Nope! you said/did Heinous Thing back in the day, so now you are Invalid, and nothing you say is ok, and no-one should listen to you ever again. You were always in Slytherin, in fact, and can never be anything else. Worse, let's now revisit everything you have ever said and decide that it was never actually OK, because condemnation is retroactive as well as permanent.

And I'd say that this was Rowling being simply a reflection of her generation, but actually it isn't. Rowling was born in 1965, she's older than I am by a few years; our generation was not, in fact, raised to black/white divisions and wholesale condemnation. Those have been a feature of the internet landscape only in the last decade or so. The black/white thinking thing isn't characteristic of her generation, but it's sure as hell characteristic of a lot of people who were raised on HP.

The first HP book came out in 1997, the first film in 2001. A lot of people who grew up on the series are now in their 30s. And the question is: did Rowling only reflect an inherent cultural trend which has become worse in the last ten years, or did she directly contribute to it? if you're the kind of person who cancels a media personality now for a single incautious statement or stupid response, is that not at least partially because, somewhere in your adolescent identity formation, you had internalised the idea that Slytherin is Bad and anything they do is Bad and they can be simply written off? And, yes, a lot of it is broader cultural pressures and the tendency to retreat into reductionist thinking as a response to excessive complexity, but if the cultural zeitgeist is pushing you in that direction anyway, doesn't it simply entrench and exacerbate the tendency, to have a ready-made, catchy, whimsical mythology which gives you lovely symbolic terms in which to authenticate your bigoted thinking?

It's just that, reading fic which explores and attempts to recoup anti-Slytherin prejudice in the novels, it's all horribly familiar, suddenly. And I think that Rowling's TERFy kick is an inexcusable use of her platform, but I'm actually starting to wonder if, in fact, she's guilty of a whole lot more?

Oh, dear. In pursuit of watering the burgeoning and increasingly verdant collection of pots in my back courtyard, I seem to have accidentally watered the Hobbit. He is slinking about the house at half his usual volume and twice his usual density, looking matted and hedgehog-spiky and somewhat cowed. I would be feeling more guilty except he's amusing like this :>.

In the Department of Random Ongoing Fangirling: so it turns out that if you slow the Sherlock theme down it sounds like something from a Tim Burton soundtrack.



I am obscurely charmed by this. Particularly since it beautifully accompanies fanart such as, for example, that by La-Chapeliere-Folle on deviantart, which won't let me link to the image, phooey. The Sherlock/Burton crossover appears to be inevitable. I blame Sherlock's silhouette.

Random fanfic rec! surprisingly, not Sherlock. This is an exceptionally beautifully-written slow-burn Harry/Draco fic which does my favourite thing in Potterfic, which is to explore the manifest iniquities and logical flaws inherent in Rowling's Slytherin/Gryffindor stereotyping. She really doesn't do nuance or sophistication or real human impulse in her moralities. Fortunately many fanfic writers absolutely do. This one is set mostly in pub arguments and is amusing as well as true.

The subject line is because it's a beautiful sunny day and my car sound system is onto The Life Pursuit, the Belle & Sebastian album voted most likely to make me randomly happy. It's all catchy, boppy, whimsical tunes, and I am a slut for catchy.

Just to prove that I don't actually hate romance, only Valentine's Day: Harry Potter fanfic. H/D slash fanfic, wantonly perpetrated by the wonderful mistful. Featuring Harry as a part-Veela love-magnet in an Auror partnership with Draco. Because it cheers me up. (And because jo needs reading material).

Drop Dead Gorgeous, Part One
Also parts 2, 3 and 4.

The Army of Reconstruction has recently, in a magnificent display of stupidity, put in my bedroom ceiling in the wrong place (i.e. a foot higher than it was, thus entirely obviating the whole point of raising the roof, which was to increase the airspace). They have also covered my study floor with random sprays of wet plaster and my printer with a thick film of dust, and are embarking on the pleasing project of digging up the kitchen floor just in time for tonight's SCA cookfest. The irritation levels are not combining well with my current Season of Dark Academic Despair, in which I curl into the foetal position in a dark corner at regular intervals, convinced that I am a worthless and futile entity incapable of coherent thought or insight. My apologies to anyone down whose unsuspecting front I have recently wept. It'll pass.