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I didn't think I was going to have much to say about the "Responsible Fanfic" discussion--that is, I had plenty to say but I said it in comments mostly. But I did read one comment that I responded to that made me think about a little tangent. Here's the exchange here.
From the post (I'd recommend the original post this is linked to, btw:
So this just really struck me because I honestly couldn't figure out why anyone would react to Voldemort and 11-year-old Ginny as a happy couple by heaping condemnation on you. Not because I think that in reality this kind of couple--or really any couple made up of a man in his 70s and an 11-year-old--would be a healthy relationship. But I couldn't help it...the mere suggestion of "happy Tom/Ginny" for me called to mind not fics where anyone was condoning rape but pretty much everything but.
For instance, somebody who is just attracted to stories of innocent young girls seduced by dark male figures. Or people who like stories about possession. Or people who are interested in the parts of human nature that have a dark attraction to being controlled or possessed. Or how people get into relationships like that and think they are good. The writer was having a problem with rape being treated lightly, and that made me think of The Fantasticks, a show that has gotten in trouble because, in case anyone isn't familiar with it, it has a whole SONG about taking rape lightly. Because The Fantasticks is basically about deconstructing the standard Western love story, and rape has always played a big part in it, like it or not. So when the two fathers want their kids to fall in love they know they need to hire a bandit to "abduct" the girl so that the boy can save her. The bandit sings a song about what this "rape" is going to cost them--oh, he knows they prefer the term "abduction" but the proper term is "rape" (it's short and business-like)--or at least attempted rape. And what happens in the second act? The girl finds the bandit hot. He's "her" bandit.
Ran for years off-Broadway. It's not exactly non-mainstream. It did get picketed by groups who didn't like the rape song, but the show itself is actually doing a meta-commentary on what these archetypes mean. Off the top of my head I'd say the bandit represents danger and excitement in sexuality. The girl doesn't really want to be raped in any sort of realistic sense, but the danger of his desire means something. (And let's not even talk about the poster couple for the rape love story, Luke and Laura!)
The thing about Tom/Ginny, though, is that my first thought was: um, this is canon. Not that they're a happy couple, obviously. But I think a person could very much defend writing a fic like that as a response to CoS, which has some of its own wonderfully perverse things going on there. I just finished re-reading it. Why, after all, after Ginny has figured out that she is the one attacking people, and that the diary is the thing making her do it until she gets rid of it and the attacks stop...why does she steal it back and begin writing in it again?
The most obvious answer is: for plot reasons. But that doesn't cut it. Canonically Ginny crosses the line between being an innocent victim into someone covering up her and Tom's crimes, and while canon itself doesn't acknowledge this, it's no surprise that fanfic writers sometimes decide to take a different view of the whole thing and make it more of her characterization. I don't read that ship at all, or much Ginny!Fic at all, yet even I was aware that writing Ginny as still belonging to Tom in creepy and willing ways was common. It wasn't a fluffy ship, I imagine, but it could be fluffy in its own screwed-up way.
And the thing is, I think it's a perfectly valid fanfic approach that deals with very real things about girls and sex through Ginny. It's The Fantasicks again. Ginny's even writing about her own unrequited love, and Harry saves her from Tom. (Though one could probably say something interesting about the fact that Harry isn't saving Ginny because she's "his" and Tom isn't interested in really possessing Ginny at all-he wants Harry, while Matt in The Fantasicks does want Luisa, and El Gallo is more teaching them something.) The point is her "abduction" by Tom is being told for romance and adventure with no apologies. And maybe if actual survivors of sexual assault do eventually like rapefic as a fantasy, so could Ginny. The whole point of what Tom is doing to Ginny in CoS is sucking the life out of her--iow, he's a vampire. And vampires have long associations with and seduction and pleasurable fantasy rape. In this scene in Dracula, Jonathan Harker really doesn't want to have his blood sucked, does he?
Btw, I found that quote easily enough doing a search because I read it when I was 12 and thought it was really hot and knew to just google "saw perfectly under the lashes." Pleasurable rape, which I'm sure is considered the most irresponsible of depictions because it is not the reality, is nevertheless a common and understandable fantasy where it is about something totally other than what being assaulted in real world is about or is like.
I'm sure there are people who would be horrified at the suggestion that Ginny wanted anything. But I don't think that angle is a bad one to explore, especially from the pov of the dark impulses we all have. Hell, it's not like JKR doesn't play with rape in lighter forms throughout HBP with Slughorn's words on "obsessive love," and all the love potions, especially Merope. To me what she does to Tom is obviously rape of the drug variety, yet I've talked to plenty of people for whom she's a woman or poor or unloved and is totally the victim in ways I can't imagine a creepy, ugly male character being if he'd forced a beautiful girl to marry him. Harry himself looks at his parents' love/hate courtship and leaps to the idea that his father's got his mother under the Imperius. Maybe that's why however much Ginny is portrayed as totally innocent in CoS, a darkfic where Ginny is having sex dreams about Tom coming back for her now that she's old enough seem strangely more fitting with the tone of the books that a realistic study of Ginny dealing with issues about abuse based on case studies.
Btw, I also just read a really odd, good book. Harriet by Elizabeth Jenkins. I mention it because it's basically a straightforward telling of a crime committed, based on a real crime, and while the criminals in this case are clearly the ones in the wrong, it's basically a story about how easy it is for these people who probably seemed normal, especially the one that seems the most "good" on the surface, to commit truly horrible crimes, if you do it in stages. The last little bit of the book seriously creeped me out and I found myself dreaming about it this morning.
Another thing I recommend is![[livejournal.com profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kayan's post on Agents of Desire in HP. It's long, but I totally enjoyed it. I especially liked the description of how Harry goes from a character constantly being plotted against to one who wants to write his own plot in OotP and HBP, and so messes himself up that way.
From the post (I'd recommend the original post this is linked to, btw:
"If you write about the violation of someone's rights in a way that makes that seem happy and good and lovely and wonderful, then you are advocating for the violating of people's rights. If you write about it in a way that shows that action to be bad - in an obvious way, or in a satyrical way, or in a morally ambiguous way that just leaves the audience uncomfortable and forced to think about it very hard - then I don't care. I'm fine with that. Hell, write it well and I'm thrilled with that. I'm all in favor of fic tackling tough issues. But write Simon and River as a happy romantic couple, or Voldemort and 11-year-old Ginny, and you deserve every bit of condemnation that can possibly be heaped on you. If you're writing it because you've got your own issues that you're working through, fine, I think that's a valid excuse. But yes, it does need excusing.
So this just really struck me because I honestly couldn't figure out why anyone would react to Voldemort and 11-year-old Ginny as a happy couple by heaping condemnation on you. Not because I think that in reality this kind of couple--or really any couple made up of a man in his 70s and an 11-year-old--would be a healthy relationship. But I couldn't help it...the mere suggestion of "happy Tom/Ginny" for me called to mind not fics where anyone was condoning rape but pretty much everything but.
For instance, somebody who is just attracted to stories of innocent young girls seduced by dark male figures. Or people who like stories about possession. Or people who are interested in the parts of human nature that have a dark attraction to being controlled or possessed. Or how people get into relationships like that and think they are good. The writer was having a problem with rape being treated lightly, and that made me think of The Fantasticks, a show that has gotten in trouble because, in case anyone isn't familiar with it, it has a whole SONG about taking rape lightly. Because The Fantasticks is basically about deconstructing the standard Western love story, and rape has always played a big part in it, like it or not. So when the two fathers want their kids to fall in love they know they need to hire a bandit to "abduct" the girl so that the boy can save her. The bandit sings a song about what this "rape" is going to cost them--oh, he knows they prefer the term "abduction" but the proper term is "rape" (it's short and business-like)--or at least attempted rape. And what happens in the second act? The girl finds the bandit hot. He's "her" bandit.
Ran for years off-Broadway. It's not exactly non-mainstream. It did get picketed by groups who didn't like the rape song, but the show itself is actually doing a meta-commentary on what these archetypes mean. Off the top of my head I'd say the bandit represents danger and excitement in sexuality. The girl doesn't really want to be raped in any sort of realistic sense, but the danger of his desire means something. (And let's not even talk about the poster couple for the rape love story, Luke and Laura!)
The thing about Tom/Ginny, though, is that my first thought was: um, this is canon. Not that they're a happy couple, obviously. But I think a person could very much defend writing a fic like that as a response to CoS, which has some of its own wonderfully perverse things going on there. I just finished re-reading it. Why, after all, after Ginny has figured out that she is the one attacking people, and that the diary is the thing making her do it until she gets rid of it and the attacks stop...why does she steal it back and begin writing in it again?
The most obvious answer is: for plot reasons. But that doesn't cut it. Canonically Ginny crosses the line between being an innocent victim into someone covering up her and Tom's crimes, and while canon itself doesn't acknowledge this, it's no surprise that fanfic writers sometimes decide to take a different view of the whole thing and make it more of her characterization. I don't read that ship at all, or much Ginny!Fic at all, yet even I was aware that writing Ginny as still belonging to Tom in creepy and willing ways was common. It wasn't a fluffy ship, I imagine, but it could be fluffy in its own screwed-up way.
And the thing is, I think it's a perfectly valid fanfic approach that deals with very real things about girls and sex through Ginny. It's The Fantasicks again. Ginny's even writing about her own unrequited love, and Harry saves her from Tom. (Though one could probably say something interesting about the fact that Harry isn't saving Ginny because she's "his" and Tom isn't interested in really possessing Ginny at all-he wants Harry, while Matt in The Fantasicks does want Luisa, and El Gallo is more teaching them something.) The point is her "abduction" by Tom is being told for romance and adventure with no apologies. And maybe if actual survivors of sexual assault do eventually like rapefic as a fantasy, so could Ginny. The whole point of what Tom is doing to Ginny in CoS is sucking the life out of her--iow, he's a vampire. And vampires have long associations with and seduction and pleasurable fantasy rape. In this scene in Dracula, Jonathan Harker really doesn't want to have his blood sucked, does he?
All three had brilliant white teeth that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips. It is not good to note this down, lest some day it should meet Mina's eyes and cause her pain, but it is the truth. They whispered together, and then they all three laughed, such a silvery, musical laugh, but as hard as though the sound never could have come through the softness of human lips. It was like the intolerable, tingling sweetness of waterglasses when played on by a cunning hand. The fair girl shook her head coquettishly, and the other two urged her on.
One said, "Go on! You are first, and we shall follow. Yours' is the right to begin."
The other added, "He is young and strong. There are kisses for us all."
I lay quiet, looking out from under my eyelashes in an agony of delightful anticipation. The fair girl advanced and bent over me till I could feel the movement of her breath upon me. Sweet it was in one sense, honey-sweet, and sent the same tingling through the nerves as her voice, but with a bitter underlying the sweet, a bitter offensiveness, as one smells in blood.
I was afraid to raise my eyelids, but looked out and saw perfectly under the lashes. The girl went on her knees, and bent over me, simply gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed to fasten on my throat. Then she paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and I could feel the hot breath on my neck. Then the skin of my throat began to tingle as one's flesh does when the hand that is to tickle it approaches nearer, nearer. I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the super sensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in languorous ecstasy and waited, waited with beating heart.
Btw, I found that quote easily enough doing a search because I read it when I was 12 and thought it was really hot and knew to just google "saw perfectly under the lashes." Pleasurable rape, which I'm sure is considered the most irresponsible of depictions because it is not the reality, is nevertheless a common and understandable fantasy where it is about something totally other than what being assaulted in real world is about or is like.
I'm sure there are people who would be horrified at the suggestion that Ginny wanted anything. But I don't think that angle is a bad one to explore, especially from the pov of the dark impulses we all have. Hell, it's not like JKR doesn't play with rape in lighter forms throughout HBP with Slughorn's words on "obsessive love," and all the love potions, especially Merope. To me what she does to Tom is obviously rape of the drug variety, yet I've talked to plenty of people for whom she's a woman or poor or unloved and is totally the victim in ways I can't imagine a creepy, ugly male character being if he'd forced a beautiful girl to marry him. Harry himself looks at his parents' love/hate courtship and leaps to the idea that his father's got his mother under the Imperius. Maybe that's why however much Ginny is portrayed as totally innocent in CoS, a darkfic where Ginny is having sex dreams about Tom coming back for her now that she's old enough seem strangely more fitting with the tone of the books that a realistic study of Ginny dealing with issues about abuse based on case studies.
Btw, I also just read a really odd, good book. Harriet by Elizabeth Jenkins. I mention it because it's basically a straightforward telling of a crime committed, based on a real crime, and while the criminals in this case are clearly the ones in the wrong, it's basically a story about how easy it is for these people who probably seemed normal, especially the one that seems the most "good" on the surface, to commit truly horrible crimes, if you do it in stages. The last little bit of the book seriously creeped me out and I found myself dreaming about it this morning.
Another thing I recommend is
kayan's post on Agents of Desire in HP. It's long, but I totally enjoyed it. I especially liked the description of how Harry goes from a character constantly being plotted against to one who wants to write his own plot in OotP and HBP, and so messes himself up that way.
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From:
re: Tom/Ginny
I may not have known all the specifics of sex at the time, but among my contemporaries there was a keen interest. The other girls used to gather round after lunch as I wrote up all our fantasies about (at the time) Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Burt Reynolds, Michael Landon and Donnie Osmond. One of the other girls would find books with nude art in it and we'd read and giggle and talk about how people "did it", etc.
People who think girls that age aren't interested in sex or considering it or who try to keep kids in a neat, tidy box "total innocence" are deluding themselves. What better way for a kid to explore their own sexuality or interests than fanfic and, for that matter, fiction itself. Most of my friends learned about sex from books and/or fanfic. It may not have been completely accurate, but it was certainly more information than most were getting at all. That's what comes of attending a Catholic parochial school. ;)
From:
Re: Tom/Ginny
From:
Re: Tom/Ginny
That's why the whole diary thing, with a little girl with a crush (so already wanting to experiment in that area) writing to the serial killer and deciding he's her only friend...it's so twisted and right there in canon!
From:
no subject
I can totally see your point about how a dark Ginny/Tom fic could be interesting. Canon suggested/Harry thinks Ginny got over it all right away. The only mention of it is in OotP. I wonder if there's going to be a twist in DH about this.
I was always too scared to read Dracula, but that passage makes me think I might like it. ;)
From:
no subject
That's a good point about different areas of fandom because it really is so true--it also links to a post I was meaning to write about fanfic, where people forget how hard it is to take the step into fanfic that's not "trying" to imitate canon as its priority. Like, a lot of people start out with fics that they feel "could happen" more than, say, slash. Once they get comfortable with fanfic they can sometimes get more comfortable exploring stuff farther from what they think is the norm.
And maybe it's the same with darkfic and things like that. If it's new, it seems strange and you might just have a knee jerk reaction that you don't really understand because you've never really considered it yourself. You might misunderstand what the person's doing or what other people get when they read it.
From:
no subject
As for her writing in the diary again after she'd thrown it away: Per Tom Riddle, when Ginny saw that Harry had the diary, she stole it from him because she was afraid that he would read her secrets. She was also afraid that Tom would reveal Ginny's guilt and complicity in the attacks at the school. Secrets, guilt, shame, and complicity are all classic components of child abuse. She was tied to Tom through fear and guilt...but also, I think, because she had come to think of him as her only friend. She may even have loved him, even though she hated him for abusing her. It's all quite twisted. I was surprised that JKR had this SL in a children's fantasy book. (I was also really shocked at the adult reaction after the fact: Her dad screams at her as if it's all her fault, and her 'caretaker' Dumbledore pretty much just pats her on the head and gives her some chocolate. Nice.)
So far as fanfic goes, if you read the Ginny/Tom SL as an allegory for child abuse (which I do), I think that portraying the pairing as a darkfic romance works really well. CoS says that Riddle poured his soul into her and vice versa. On that fundamental level, Ginny will never be as close to anyone else as she was to him. That's pretty creepy. She was a victim, but at the same time she did like Tom Riddle if for no other reason than that he paid attention to her. Her adolescent crush on Harry Potter might have gone nowhere, but she had an even better 'secret lover' in the pages of the diary. I'm sure that Ginny ended up with extraordinarily conflicted feelings about Tom Riddle. I can't conceive of writing happy, fluffy Ginny/Tom stories because the relationship is founded in abuse (not to mention that canon Tom Riddle is incapable of feeling love). I can easily picture writing bent, emotionally twisted romances though.
From:
no subject
And you're right, if anything canon sort of gives it its own strange fluffy spin, as if Ginny is completely fine. There's not even, so far, hints about her own guilt, which is odd. The nature of the relationship means it would probably be very difficult for her to just think that "Tom did it" and she was another victim not complicit at all.
From:
no subject
Exactly! We're talking about a highly romantic, 11 year old girl here. I'm sure that she formed the same intensely fluffy, little girl crush on Tom that she had for Harry. And with Tom, who knows? Her feelings may have been even more intense because Tom reciprocated her feelings (seemingly). Tom did not just fling her to the floor and rape her, he seduced her, which made his ultimate violation of her trust, her mind and her soul all the worse really. It would have made Ginny truly believe that she was complicit in the crimes she committed. She was only a child. She lacked the experience to understand what was really being done to her, so she would have acted just as JKR showed us. When she thought that she was doing something wrong, she turned to her abuser first because by then he had become her sole confidante. 'Oh Tom, I think I killed the roosters...etc.' She was scared off of talking to Harry because she truly believed that she was guilty of the student attacks, not Tom Riddle. Again, at only 11, she had no way of comprehending that she was being victimized. She really did think that she was guilty.
To circle back around, given all of this, I think it's fair to assume that Ginny probably imagined that she was in some sort of fluffy, adolescent girl's notion of a loving relationship with Tom. That would fit the circumstances and also where she was in her psychological development. Her feelings were all imbued by guilt and shame, which also fits the child abuse pattern. And once it was all over with? The treatment she received from her adult caretakers was so shockingly shoddy at the end of CoS (which is all that we have to go by), that it is impossible to know if she ever resolved that mess of the conflicted feelings that she wasleft with.
This is one of those HUGE background issues that JKR shows us just a peek at and then drops so that she can get back to HP's POV. JKR, as author, certainly hasn't forgotten what happened to Ginny. When the dementors attacked the train, Ginny was as devastated as Harry. When Harry whined about being victimized by Voldemort, Ginny reminded him that she too had been possessed. JKR is paying attention and keeping track of this, so I'm expecting that damaged little Ginny is going to have a significant role to play in the final book.
What in the hell is going on inside of Ginny's mind? Because we only see HP's POV, we don't know, but we do know this much. Ginny is an excellent liar, so what you see on the surface may not be the truth. She has become aggressive. She gets incredibly defensive and angry when Ron implies that she is a slut. When Harry dumped her at the end of HBP, she said, "I knew it would happen." She may have smiled sweetly at him, but she was furious. That girl is a mess. And that's why she's one of my favorite characters in the series. While most of fandom turn their noses up at her and call her a Mary-Sue because of her behavior in the last couple of books, I am not surprised at all by her 'new' personality because it's exactly what I expect from a neglected child abuse victim.
So far as her feelings for Tom Riddle are concerned, I wouldn't be surprised if she still carries on a running, internal monologue with him (no longer a dialogue since he no longer has the diary to respond through). I also wouldn't be surprised if she still desires him in some, bent fashion. Based only on what we've seen in the books, no one ever helped Ginny to work through what happened to her. So yeah, I can see writing 'fluffy' initial romances that are set during the early chapters of CoS. I can also see writing dark, latter day sick romances based on Ginny's unresolved feelings for Riddle. About the only thing that I cannot ever comprehend would be stories in which Tom Riddle actually fell in love with Ginny.
From:
no subject
But I like this interpretation much better. This, to me, is, is an interesting character that would be more interesting with Harry. A girl who's still putting on a front, too, and lying to Harry (because how exactly would he react to the idea she's still tied to Tom?) is very interesting and seems to have a lot of potential for a story. I just feel like everything the author says puts it in the realm of fanfic. And that this is also why the reaction to her aggression is what it is in canon, rather than being about Ginny's issues. There's this disconnect for me--almost like the one between canon and fanon Draco where the two are both recognizable and different.
From:
no subject
What we see in canon is filtered on two levels: we see only what Harry sees (in the events of the stories), but we also see only what Harry himself is mature enough to see. Do we know Percy Weasley's 'real' story? No, and I doubt we ever will. Do we know what is really motivating Draco Malfoy? No, not entirely. Until HBP, we could only infer that Draco was more than just a one-dimensional, cardboard creep. It was illogical for him to be that one-dimensional, but until it was necessary for JKR to demonstrate Harry's dawning maturity, she did not give us any real evidence on the page that Draco was the complex, emotionally vulnerable person that we fans assumed that he had to be. We fans debated about him endlessly, and ultimately those of us who always believed that Draco was more complex than Harry thought were proved right. We now know (because Harry was finally mature enough to see), that Draco has a whole world of issues all his own that he is working through.
I'm making the same assumption here about Ginny. I don't think that we'll see the 'real' Ginny Weasley until book 7. As of the end of HBP, Harry was not mature enough to see her as anything other than a cartoon girlfriend; therefore, JKR has not shown us the real Ginny on the page. What she has done is drop little reminders along the way about Ginny's possession by Tom Riddle. JKR would not have included those reminders if they weren't meant to be clues to a future event. That's her writing pattern in this series. Drop clues, follow through later, sometimes much later.
At the end of HBP, Harry was still not really seeing/acknowledging Ginny's real thoughts or feelings. She was/is still a cartoon to him. He imagined that she would have a big smile on her face when he dumped her, and he was quite uncomfortable when she didn't play along with his fantasy scenario. He doesn't really see Ginny Weasley as a real person yet, and because he doesn't, we in the audience have still not been shown the real girl, IMO.
I hope that I'm right because it makes Ginny far more interesting to me. It does fit the pattern of how JKR has treated the secondary characters. Ginny has been a continual presence, but a cartoon presence...so far. When Harry went into capslock of rage mode in book 6, we were shown that his behavior was due to his rage over Voldemort. When Ginny went into full on aggressive mode (ramming into people during Quidditch, etc., her defensiveness about being called a slut and taunting Ron about his romantic inexperience), everyone just yawned and said, "Yuck, Mary Sue," instead of asking themselves why her behavior changed so markedly. JKR is not a sloppy writer. Everything is a clue. I assume from the background reminders about Ginny's own history, that her behavior is caused by her own unresolved issues. And since Ginny's issues all tie into her possession/abuse by Tom Riddle, I expect that she's going to do something significant about it in the final book. I also expect that it'll be something significantly stupid because one of the other background clues that we've been shown about Ginny is that she cannot fight well. She is sickened by violence even in Quidditch, and she is a failure as a fighter, as shown in the attack at the Ministry. She is all sass and show, with no follow through.
I'll see soon enough if I am right or wrong. If I am wrong, then... that's what fanfic is for. ;>
From:
no subject
But I love the detail that Ginny is bad at fighting really--and I had never noticed it so I'm glad you pointed it out, that she's not this character that's very aggressive and shown putting people down in these minor situations where the people *don't fight back* (witness Michael Corner in the DA where Harry notices that he feels he shouldn't hex his girlfriend so Ginny takes him out easily). She goes up against Ron, who loves and wants to protect her, and boys who like her, and Zach who isn't really a threat, and other boys in school who aren't really antagonistic towards her to begin with.
But yet her more major experiences in canon are not victories. She doesn't triumph at the MoM and she is completely overcome by Tom. She openly loves Harry when he's being ruthless in dispatching enemies. (This is another place where JKR I think undermines the more interesting impression by calling Ginny compassionate when it's more interesting if she's *less* compassionate because she feels threatened and needs to have Harry able to decimate them.
Interesting that Hermione sometimes has a similar difference between school and real situations. Like when she's first cornered by the troll and freezes.
From:
no subject
I agree. None of the Weasleys are particularly compassionate people to start with. Passionate yes, compassionate, no. Ginny's primary male role models appear to be the twins, and they are thoughtlessly mean people with a savage sense of humor. To come back to your original topic, this may have been one reason why Tom was able to manipulate Ginny as he did. He utterly lacks compassion and he may have appealed to, and even encouraged this lack of compassion in her. She has no basis to know that this is an undesirable trait, because her own family are not compassionate people. The example you cited about how much Ginny admires Harry when he is being ruthless is a good case in point. There would likely have been many aspects of Tom Riddle that Ginny genuinely liked... much that she would be horrified by that later on.
From:
no subject
Tom seems *awfully* confident that those two younger children that he terrorized in the cave at the age of about 10 or at most 11, aren't going to be telling any tales against him. And that's before he even knew that magic was real. Certainly before he had any formal training in it.
I think that if he could wipe Ginny's mind of what she had done while under control, he could have certainly laid on a geas that she speak to no one about the matter afterward.
JKR even underscores it with comparing her to a House Elf attempting to betray his master when she does try to tell him what is happening.
From:
no subject
I think that Ginny's combined shame and fear of discovery kept her from talking about Tom during the events in CoS. She did try to approach Harry, but fled because she thought that Percy suspected her of being involved in the student attacks. Significantly, she did not want Percy to find out because she was afraid it would lead to her being evicted from school. Right there, that tells us something: even when Ginny was starting to realize that she was involved in the attacks, she kept the news to herself partly for selfish reasons. And actually, that's okay with me. She's not perfect. It was the wrong thing to do, but it was a very believable. One of the things that I love about JKR's characters is that they are all horribly flawed people. Not even the children are portrayed as 100% innocent lambs.
This is the same little girl whose brothers wouldn't let her play Quidditch with them, the only girl in a family of boys. She wanted to go to school and make friends of her own and finally be able to do all of the things that she wanted to do without any of her older siblings telling her to get lost. She feared that she would be evicted from school, and so she 'hid' her shame from the others.
Later on, when she and Harry are comparing their 'possession' experiences, she says that she doesn't remember most of what happened while she was possessed. If she's telling the truth, that may be anothe reason why Ginny doesn't talk about it much later. She genuinely may not remember the details, so all she's left with is the bitter knowledge that she was just a weakling puppet who was seduced by her own desires for attention and friendship and love. In my mind, that would explain her current behavior: she's determined to be fierce, and to never be perceived as weak or unwilling to fight.
OTOH, since we know that Ginny is an accomplished liar, she may remember more than she said about what she did while she was possessed. In this particular instance, I'm tempted to believe that she was telling the truth.
From:
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I think that one of the things JKR does (intentionally or not) is to drop incomplete hints about what is going on with the secondary characters. I think this is why fanfic has taken off in such a dramatic way with the HP series. (If you check a place like Fiction Alley, you see roughly 100 times more HP fanfic than anything else).
We get these tantalizing hints about Ginny (or Draco, or Snape), and it's enough to stimulate the imagination without making things definitive. With Ginny, we get 12-year-old Harry saying she's "perfectly happy" after being rescued. But we get a hint in the next book that she's not--when she reacts to the Dementors. We also get the "Lucky you," comment in OotP.
I've read many a fanfic where that moment is expanded with Ginny explaining to Harry how violated she felt and how she's never been able to talk about it before. I've seen other fanfics where this shows how well she's gotten over it. The great thing is that we can take it either way.
I'm hoping that JKR doesn't clear up every mystery that we're obsessing about, because that way we can continue to interact with the mythology she's created. I'm also hoping that more authors will be able to follow this model in the future--whether with fantasy or another genre, because I feel like we're at the beginning of a new literary form in which the author and the reader are able to interact in a more interesting fashion than has ever been possible before.
But that's another rant for another day... and one I'm not particular articulate about.
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She's mimicking real life: Do you really know why other people around you act the way that they do? No. You make assumptions based on the little fragments of behavior that you observe. Even the people who are most close to us somethings say or do things that seem inexplicable to us. JKR is showing us only what Harry Potter sees and thinks. All of these other stories are happening at the exact same time in the book, but we'll never see them. We'll only even get a hint about things when they get brought to Harry's attention. Fans all scream when JKR tosses in 'major' plot twists involving secondary characters without providing lots and lots of exposition about it first, but that's exactly how we find out about events in real life. The Tonks/Remus love affair is a perfect example. Everybody was all, "WAAAAAAHHHH! Why didn't JKR show us this happening instead of just springing it on us????" Well, because in RL, that's how you find out about events like this involving tertiary people in your life.
So far as Ginny is concerned, JKR held her off the page so much between CoS and OotP, that when she was suddenly brought to Harry's (and our) attention again, she seemed shockingly 'out of character.' But that's not true. She was in character (of course) but we simply weren't privy to how she got that way (because Harry didn't see it and didn't care). We can only guess based on the few clues that we've been given in the text so far. We see a lot of her in HBP because suddenly Harry's hormones kick in and he starts to lust after her.
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I thought she meant 16-year-old Tom Riddle from CoS and 11-year-old Ginny. But I think she would oppose to this scenario too - it's against the law, you can't write about it, if it's too fluffy, don't you know?! Who can define what is or isn't too fluffy or "shows that action to be bad - in an obvious way, or in a satyrical way, or in a morally ambiguous way", btw? I don't think there is a natural wide consensus on this matter. Should we use a voting method, reinforcing a mob mentality in at least some of the cases? It isn't possible btw – there are thousands of fics out there in private ljs, fic archives, etc. You hardly can control such database/Internet. This almost sounds as if she proposes to have a somewhat stricter censorship on Internet than we have on TV.
I completely fail to understand what she means in practice by "If you're writing it because you've got your own issues that you're working through, fine, I think that's a valid excuse. But yes, it does need excusing." First, what does working through your own issues mean? That only somebody, who survived rape, incest, domestic violence, etc, can write such fics? Can a survivor of domestic violence or not incestuous rape write about incest according to her or have they a moral right to write only about their own experiences? Second, my first thought was – how do you know that the writer really works through his/her own issues [whatever that means] or just put such declaimer on the fic to avoid "condemnation" at best and having the fic/lj deleted at worst? I hope I didn't say anything offensive to rape/violence survivors here. I simply meant that not only they write/read such fics and that I don't understand where the writer of this excerpt draws the line in two cases – who has the right to write what & what should be done with people, who dare to write something without having a right to write it.
To me what she does to Tom is obviously rape of the drug variety, yet I've talked to plenty of people for whom she's a woman or poor or unloved and is totally the victim in ways I can't imagine a creepy, ugly male character being if he'd forced a beautiful girl to marry him.
I can understand where those people come from since I myself feel pity and sympathy for Merope. Were she a man, most likely those people (including me) would feel only contempt, disgust & anger. Perhaps this attitude derives from our subconscious cultural assumption that women are weaker, more vulnerable than men and thus need special protection. When people believe that men are naturally dominant and women submissive generally and in romantic relationships/sexually in particular, some of them have a difficulty to sympathize with male victims of rape or domestic violence. Most of the time various sexist attitudes hurt women, but here is one of the times, when they hurt men too. I understand this isn't discussion on a feminist blog, but I think my comment is relevant here since people take their real life attitudes & project them on fictional characters. That's what we do in fandom meta/fics by definition, don't we? :-)
Written by somebody, who is crept out by incest, but loves Harry/Tom [in the fics I read they were mainly of the same age, though].
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Oh yeah--you're probably right. But still, good fodder for darkfic there!
Who can define what is or isn't too fluffy or "shows that action to be bad - in an obvious way, or in a satyrical way, or in a morally ambiguous way", btw?
Yes, that's very very problematic and gets rid of a lot of valid stories. It's like writing by the comics code where criminals have to be shown punished (I think that was a rule). But punished how? And if you're writing from the criminals pov how do you show that its bad? What about The Sopranos, for instance? Does that show show that this stuff is bad?
This almost sounds as if she proposes to have a somewhat stricter censorship on Internet than we have on TV.
Yes, I didn't see how it didn't come down to a real possibility that stories not understood by some people would no longer be able to be written.
I completely fail to understand what she means in practice by "If you're writing it because you've got your own issues that you're working through, fine, I think that's a valid excuse. But yes, it does need excusing." First, what does working through your own issues mean?
Right--because isn't everyone working through some sort of issue when they write? Is feeling pushed around by your boss enough of an issue to write darkfic about? Honestly, it seems to almost mean that if you've gone through these things you're still sick in the head, but it's not your fault so you can't be held to the standards other people are. We'll blame it on your abuser. Not to speak for survivor's of abuse, but I feel like that marks them out as different in a way that isn't very respectful of them. And sort of would out them (which they may or may not care to be) just by the fact that they're writing this kind of fic.
I can understand where those people come from since I myself feel pity and sympathy for Merope. Were she a man, most likely those people (including me) would feel only contempt, disgust & anger. Perhaps this attitude derives from our subconscious cultural assumption that women are weaker, more vulnerable than men and thus need special protection.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of stuff floating around in that situation. Especially because Merope *is* a victim through most of her life, and she even makes the right choice at a later point and lets Tom go. There's an element of revenge against the whole gender there--and the whole situation turns the usual one on its head. Usually the rich landowner totally would take advantage of the ugly poor girl and get away with it.
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qHell, it's not like JKR doesn't play with rape in lighter forms throughout HBP with Slughorn's words on "obsessive love," and all the love potions, especially Merope.
I do think love potions are the wizarding equivalent to rape drugs and that Merope did rape Tom. But I don't really understand JKR's take on love potions. She seems to condemn them with Merope. But, maybe in GOF, Molly, Hermione, and Ginny are giggling about them and Ron was played for humor when ate the cakes or whatever. It does leave me wondering what would have happened if he'd actually ran across Romilda, though. I know there is a love potion theory out there that has Ginny, likely with Hermione's help, using a love potion on Harry in HBP to get him to like her. That's too big of a stretch for me and I think between Ron and Merope JKR has said all she's going to on love potions.
What's interesting is the poor victim Merope view. She definitely was in relation to her family but she was the one in the position of power with her and Tom. Additionally, in the wizarding world women generally seem to be as powerful as men. Maybe. Even if they don't drive the plot.
Back to Ginny. Definitely an interesting discussion with her being an abuse victim and the potential dynamic with Tom/Ginny. I really like
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JKR's use of love potions is very odd and yet at the same time maybe she's just mirroring the confusion about lust and things like that in the real world. How do people usually think about love potions in general in our world, for instance? Date rape drugs are sinister and wrong, yet we also treat them as jokes. Even the whole way that the *girls* are the ones who constantly use them in HP as if guys are always the victim of this sort of thing, maybe as a metaphor for their hormones or something. Yet there's no note of the way boys would probably find more use for love potions for women if they were short-lasting potions. Except for the stairs to the girl's dorm that suggest that of course the guys are going to be trying to get up there.
It's just very interesting to pick apart if you could with how girls are aggressive and guys are clueless almost all the time, no matter who the girl is.
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The example of Tom/Ginny does seem like an odd one to focus on--I don't read chan, or much darkfic or incestfic (pretty much only if it comes via a recommendation for some other factor), and I can think of things I've seen, if not read all the way through, that seem way more perverse and bizarre!
Especially because, as you said, a lot of the troubling dynamics of that relationship are explicitly canon. I don't have a lot of confidence in JKR playing this out in a complex and pyschologically rich way--it seems to be another one of those situations where she's almost accidently set up a really interesting problem of characterization, even if it was just in the service of story. People--not just children, even--do end up cooperating with or being complicit with people who've abused them or victimized them for tons of reasons, and I think it does Ginny a disservice when JKR postions it as being because OMG! Harry might find out she's crushing on him and then to seal it off as a finished story arc with no repercussions or character progressions, except maybe to grow Ginny up a bit so she can eventually be Harry's ideal girl once she's also hexed some people and knocked a guy off a broom. I'd like to think this is one of her red herrings, but I'm not optimistic.
I will say that I tend to be troubled by people who extrapolate Ginny's complicity in the situation to evidence of a pre-extant evil nature or something like that--and I'm definitely not a fan of New!Ginny. (I don't mean that's what you're doing, just a not on things I've read elsewhere.) It is interesting though, now that I think about it, that iirc, the only comment on it in the text is Arthur's "haven't we told you never to trust anything that thinks if you can't see where it keep its brain?" That does seem about on par with the general sophistication of psychological nuance when it comes to the WW, but it seems a little bit like collecting your kid FBI agents who just busted the guy who kidnapped her and saying "We told you not to take candy from strangers!" Just. . .maybe kind of not the moment for the lecture? Didn't they think she was dead, like, five minutes ago? Oh, Weasley parents.
Oh, and I sort of get the feeling, though I can't quite articulate it in JKR-terms, that the way love potions "work" is that "good guys," like Harry and co., have no need of them, because girls are just throwing themselves at them anyway and "bad guys" wouldn't bother with the potions that make the girls actually like them, even temporarily, but just go straight for the rape and pillage option. It's just us women who are wily and conniving like that (you know what we're like!).
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/end not-terribly relevant ranty rant. Sorry!
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I think the OP I was responding to probably just tossed in Tom/Ginny because it was the most channy thing she could think of, but even that just seemed to reveal how different her pov was from mine, because why wouldn't you write fluffy Tom/Ginny? That is, not fluffy exactly, but I don't think that's what she meant anyway. A fic with two people just named Tom and Ginny who have a happy life probably wouldn't be so much disturbing as OOC. I think the idea was the mixing of the two, so that you were showing the canon relationship but making it hot instead of making it all about how awful it was for Ginny.
Later on in the comments on that post
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Ooh, that is a really good point, and it touches on why the discussions about Ginny's complicity sometimes make me feel uncomfortable and ultimately like a Ginny-apologist, which is totally not my natural position. It seems to me that in the fandom discussions I've read, talk about what exactly happened between Tom and Ginny frequently gets derailed on semantics: was it "mental rape," a metaphor for rape, the more nebulous trope of "violation," some occasional, non-useful (IMHO) dithering about rape vs. molestation and so forth, with a side order of "Yeah, well, if possession is mental rape, what about Imperius and Memory Charms, huh?"
(Of course, my bias may be slanted in that I've always thought Memory Charms were creepy as hell, even the version in the Men in Black movies. I'm both fascinated by and deeply creeped out by amnesia/controlled amnesia movies--it's one of my deepest control-issue fears, because I live so much in my own damn head. So it's not like the use of Memory Charms by Our Heroes makes me feel any better about the VSD.)
Actually, now that I think about it, it reminds me a little bit of one of John Sutherland's essays about Tess of the D'urbervilles where he briefly talks about the way critical modes change in describing whether Tess is "seduced," "cunningly seduced," "violated," or "raped" by Alec, and the sleight of hand Hardy does in the relevent text. Because I've definitely always felt from the descriptions we get, and from Tom's interactions with Harry, that it is a seduction (albeit not necessarily a carnal one), and older and wiser people than eleven-year-olds away from their parents for the first time have fall for less. It's really about how cannily he presses the right buttons--I've never seen one, but I wonder if there's a fanfic out there that speculates what might have happened if Ron got the diary, or Hermione (or Percy or Draco or. . .). I'm not convinced they'd be significantly less susceptible.
But the more I think about it, it seems a little. . .ignorant is probably too strong, but sort of looking-with blinders, both about the breadth of perversity in fandom but also about the way those kinds of relationships (and a lot of dysfunctional and abusive relationships) work. I definitely would not position myself as an expert in either field, but I have met people sometimes, while I was doing research or volunteer work, who become so much about advocacy that they somehow think it strengthens their case to bulldoze over any ambiguity, even though I think real people (despite what news teasers says) actually can comprehend nuance.
I made the mistake of dipping into some forum archives, so I got months worth of Merope being a weak mom who abandoned her baby and Ginny obviously being a bad seed, slutty little girl for succumbing to the diary again.
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I think it's really ironic--and presumably intentional--that this *is* being done by Lucius Malfoy when his own kid is blatantly even more vulnerable to this sort of thing. If Draco had gotten the diary he would have probably been dead because he's just longing to be used in some important way, to matter to someone that way. It's not so different than Ginny, really, with his romantic fantasies and obsessions with Potter (he recognizes Ginny's poem etc.). Lucius also threatens the school board by saying he'll curse their families, which is what happens to him, basically, in HBP.
And also in HBP Draco essentially does wind up in Ginny's shoes being forced to do things that he's halfway complicit in, frantically covering up things he's ashamed of doing--although in his case the possession isn't literal and he's ashamed also of the shame he feels. He, too, gets isolated from everyone, becomes paranoid, feels he's got no options.
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Who do we here about Ginny? Tom Riddle, of course, and he tells us that she loved him. Originally I took that to mean that Riddle acted as a kind of love advisor to Ginny. Which if the Love Potion subplot had stayed in COS, it would have made so much more sense. I think Ginny became addicted to Riddle's advice and unconditional "love". So much so that despite everything, she took that diary back. Then again the very fact that she didn't trust his allegiance also says volumes. Ultimately, she let selfish desire win the day over thinking about everyone's safety. According to Piaget, Ginny was well within the age to reason, be logical and to empathize. She did none of those things. So I feel she does hold some responsibility in the COS events.
I was also expecting Ginny to become a partner with the trio. I honestly thought that girl on the POA cover was Ginny. It was strange that Ginny was sent to backstory hell. But I don't buy the fact that Ginny was not affected by her time with Tom. However that is the way she comes across in the books.
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Sometimes a writer’s purpose can be a bit worrisome too. I remember a disconcerting fic - recommended by the Daily Snitch - in which Harry Potter was tortured and sexually abused. Eventually he was freed (not by his abuser) and impressed his abuser no end by immediately getting on with his task of vanquishing Voldemort despite the abuse he had undergone, and in the end the abuser was killed (not by Harry). The focus of the fic was the torture. The fic was not an exploration of abuse, or of the relationship of abuser and abused, or an examination of the character and motivations of an abuser - though some of these things made an appearance - it was a description of torture, and describing torture was evidently what interested the author. In canon, of course, Harry does suffer abuse and torture but endures. It seemed to me that the author of the fic had appropriated this aspect of canon Harry in order to make the torture s/he described into something harmless, something that writer and reader could safely enjoy, and with no other purpose than to enjoy it. Having the abuser die at the end tidied the whole thing up neatly with a touch of spurious morality.
You mention a book which shows how normality can tip into evil. Evil and normality aren't distant from one another, they go hand in hand. Obviously writing about torture isn’t the same as carrying it out, but it can’t be held to be intrinsically acceptable or harmless simply because it is fiction. I'm not saying that this is your view, it's a view widely held on lj. (Along with an assumption that we’re all terribly nice people being terribly nice!) Of course, the thing is that one cannot generalise - context is vital, and taste comes into it too - and any fic has to be assessed on its own merits, but it does have to be assessed.
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Not that this means that any fiction is just meaningless. You put anything down it's out there and it can effect people, though as you say, context is everything. The torture fic has its own recognizable context in fandom that it doesn't outside of fandom, and there are probably a lot of people who more get what's really going on in it.
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Very good essay.
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Oh gosh, I love how much depth the HP story has, there's always something new to discover & delve into.
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Must Read
http://penknife.livejournal.com/271
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For instance, somebody who is just attracted to stories of innocent young girls seduced by dark male figures. Or people who like stories about possession. Or people who are interested in the parts of human nature that have a dark attraction to being controlled or possessed. Or how people get into relationships like that and think they are good.
And this makes me wonder if you happen to remember a post I remember seeing on
(Also, I don't know if this has changed since you posted or if you were aware of it, but
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Didn't realize the essay had been locked! I'm pretty sure it was open when I first posted it. I try not to link to stuff that's locked--for obvious reasons!
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