Blaise Zabini

[sistermagpie]

I was reading this really interesting post here about a troubling fanfic trend I was unfortunately unaware of, which is that apparently post-HBP Blaise is less interesting than he was before...because he's black? Um, what? I recommend jazzypom's post because it is about fanfic depictions of black characters in HP in general. I don't read fic about the adults very often so I didn't know about the clichés concerning Kingsley Shacklebolt. As a Slyth fan I do know a bit about Blaise, though, and the post made me really think about

...how my own feelings about him have changed since HBP and I'm sticking them here too. Nothing coherent, just thoughts here and there:


I would never deny that one of the things about Draco Malfoy as a slash character is that aesthetically; it's interesting putting him with contrasting people. Harry, of course, is the main person I contrast him with. The two of them are like blood brothers with the black hair/white hair, green eyes/grey eyes, etc. I've always liked Blaise and was very happy with fics that created a sort of European Malfoy-ish family that probably taught the Medici’s a thing or two. I always saw Blaise as a boy, and pictured him as dark haired, tanned, big brown eyes.

My view of him shifted after I got the truth in HBP, but I honestly don't understand how the back-story we have for him could in any way be considered less interesting. The main difference for me is that where I used to imagine Blaise as part of a big family, now I see him isolated, more just him and his mother, though he probably has lots of relatives scattered around. He still seems continental to me, I think because I imagine his mother traveling around to all the hot spots to meet her rich husbands, with little Blaise in tow. How is this not a rich life for a Slytherin character? Especially one we now know is friends with Malfoy?

Plus he's also a Pureblood snob, so you figure his mother must be from a good family. She's not a little chorus girl who was pretty and so used that to snag a man of a better bloodline. Maybe she's from a family like the Blacks but they'd lost their money, so she took it upon herself to win back the life to which she was accustomed.

I wonder, too, if anyone would do anything with the fact that Blaise is the most sexualized kid in canon, and he has no father and a highly sexualized mother. Is this another woman who's bad because she's sexually aggressive? Is Blaise "bad" because of this quality of his mother? (The books don't have the best track record there.) Is anyone writing incestuous scenes where he and his mother engage in sexual conquest contests when they're bored in Monte Carlo? Somebody could probably write a really funny story where Draco visits Blaise over the summer and gets his mind blown at one of Blaise's mother's parties, or just in general gets an education.:-) Or he and Blaise wake up in Borneo with raging hangovers, wearing women's underwear. I mean, Blaise is totally cool by sixth year, but that's why it seems like it would be fun to see him at 12 when he hadn't gotten it down yet.

Perhaps Blaise's mother is distant. Perhaps they're very close and have a wonderful relationship that's lots of fun. Perhaps all the Slytherin boys adore her. Was Blaise close to any of his stepfathers? Did he hate any of them? Did he kill any of them? Perhaps the rumors about their death are just that, vicious rumors. Blaise is not the Slytherin boy who'd seen death, interestingly enough, so perhaps he and Draco are more alike in that way, surrounded by death but thinking it a game. Did Blaise help Draco out at all during the year?

What were anyone else’s thoughts about Blaise in HBP? Unfortunately anything about the character seemed to get overshadowed by the idea that ZOMG heez black and that totaly sux in a totaly non-racist way I swear but I'm gonna keep him white anywayz!!11!

Comments

[gramarye1971]

If I were JKR's editor, most of the backstory of Blaise Zabini that's been revealed in HBP would have had a line drawn through it with a red pencil.

I really feel that she went overboard in the amount of information she threw at us re: Blaise. I honestly wonder how much of this came from the fact that people have been pestering her for ages about this mystery Slytherin, whose only real claim to fame before this is that Zabini was the very last surname called out in Harry's Sorting Ceremony. Fandom grabbed hold of Blaise as an ambiguous character with an ambiguous name who could be used for anything the author wanted -- he (or she!) could be an Italian sex god or Snape's love-child or strega or the 'good Slytherin' or any of a hundred other fandom variations. And now that Blaise has been given a backstory (and once which feels a bit tacked on to me), I don't find it all that surprising that interest in him has dropped off. And I don't think it has so much to do with race as it does with a lack of the ambiguity that drew many fans to his character.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

That's a good point and one I was thinking of as I was reading the thread. Do you think if some of Blaise's backstory was given earlier on it would have been less of a problem? Because honestly, if we'd heard that little about him earlier I can see him having been incorporated into fanon easily. It's just that now he's working against a character that already exists in many peoples' minds in some form. It's not like Theodore Nott whose name was less interesting. Did people do much with Theodore Nott's information we got on the website? I seem to recall the only reactions I read about it were from people who immediately changed the information to fit what they wanted him to be.

[gramarye1971]

Earlier on? Yes, I think it would've felt less jarring. Perhaps even a specific about gender, or even a sentence about physical appearance, or some casual remark about him being from a family with financial troubles (comparing him to Ron, even). One or two sentences back in PoA or even GoF might've lessened this impact of BLAISE!ZABINI! that we got in HBP.

Then again, I also felt as if Luna was tossed into the books rather haphazardly as well. We hear nothing about her for four books, and then all of a sudden she's introduced at the beginning of the fifth and by the end of the book she's fighting alongside the Trio and Neville in the darkest corridors of the Ministry. I can't be the only one who was a little 'bzuh?' about that.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

And apparently this incredibly weird girl--weird enough that everybody makes fun of her. Harry just never noticed.

[slinkhard.livejournal.com]

She was in the plot cupboard with the rest of Ginny's friends/hobbies/new found prettiness/wit.

[quivo.livejournal.com]

Oh, and went right back to not-noticing even after she helped him at the Ministry.

Guh.

[latxcvi.livejournal.com]

Earlier on? Yes, I think it would've felt less jarring. Perhaps even a specific about gender, or even a sentence about physical appearance, or some casual remark about him being from a family with financial troubles (comparing him to Ron, even). One or two sentences back in PoA or even GoF might've lessened this impact of BLAISE!ZABINI! that we got in HBP.

I think I get what you're saying. It's not necessarily that what we got of Blaise now makes it hard to fill in the blanks so much as "Dude, he's been around for *five years*. Why are we only hearing this stuff about him *now*, all sudden-like?" And yeah, I get that. It feels like overcompensation, and it's annoying. Because there's no reason some of these details couldn't have been dropped to readers all along the way.

[latxcvi.livejournal.com]

That's a good point and one I was thinking of as I was reading the thread. Do you think if some of Blaise's backstory was given earlier on it would have been less of a problem? Because honestly, if we'd heard that little about him earlier I can see him having been incorporated into fanon easily.

See, as I said over in jazzypom's thread, I'm still not seeing how what we were given about Blaise in HBP was so much information as to render it impossible to fill in the blanks with him the way people had been doing before HBP (and I'm drawing a distinction here between something like ataniell93's WWL - where it's simply not *reasonable* to expect that she go back and make the whole thing "canon compliant" or to make it canon compliant from this point forward; too much work's been done there for that to be feasible -- vs. people who've written Blaise in the past in one-shot type stories, i.e, they've written him in stand-alone stories, PWPs, etc.). What we were given of Blaise in HBP really is still pretty thin and sketchy: we know he's black, he's got a mom who's been married multiple times, and he buys into Pureblood ideology on some level (and really, is this a *surprise*? regardless of whether he's a *zealot* about it, he still got sorted into Slytherin House, and I actually don't think the Sorting Hat-as-written-by-JKR would put you anywhere else if you bought into/were in any way sympathetic to the Pureblood ideology; that Blaise is a Syltherin at all suggests to me that people should have always considered the possibility that while he may not have been a DE-in-training, he still thought Pureblood ideology *made a certain amount of sense*).

I really don't see how those things are such an impediment to writing about the character. Or is the idea that background tertiary characters like Blaise and Theodore Nott are only appealing if they're a *complete* tabula rasa? I can sort of see that -- any backstory makes this type of character a less appealing plaything. But I don't know. I don't think the information given about Blaise in HBP was so significant in terms of its substance to make it difficult or impossible to continue playing 'fill-in-the-blanks' with him.

[cleverthylacine]

I think a great many of us have a fantasy about being JK's beta. I know I do. My betas would not let me get away with that shit.

[kaskait.livejournal.com]

That is the real problem isn't it? All the extraneous information coming through as padding in the books. All this story sludge is getting in the way of the main event. And it contributes to the confusion among readers.

I don't think there is any editor in control of JKR's monster right now. It's running rampant,picking up speed, and getting set to crash with a big boom.

She could quote "Mary had a little lamb" for one whole chapter and her editors would let it go. Because she is making them mega-bucks.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Really, in any other book you'd be sitting there waiting for Blaise's mother to turn up. It's kind of a huge little trashy novel tossed in just so the character can get burned by Ginny.

[kaskait.livejournal.com]

LOL! Most of the minor characters are in the book so that Ginny can bitch!slap them around the chapters!

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

And they deserve it too! She's the ideal girl!

[gramarye1971]

All this story sludge is getting in the way of the main event.

Exactly. I would have started hacking away at GOF, cutting out 9/10ths of the stuff about house elf liberation and trimming away some of the fat around the meaty parts of the Tri-Wizard Tournament. (You don't even want to know what OotP would have looked like if I'd been able to get my hands on an early draft.)

It's lovely that she's building a world from the ground up, but when all is said and done you can't lose sight of the main goal of the story. And some of her detours have left her perilously close to doing so at times.

[kaskait.livejournal.com]

That is also a part of the problem. I think her editors wanted to cut out quite a few of those elements. But she wouldn't let them.

JKR has them all bamboozled because there could be CLUES in all that nonsense filler. She uses this "Where's Waldo" clue element in her books so much that it has made her editors nervous about touching anything.

[saturniia.livejournal.com]

Sounds like we all can learn from Ms. Rowling's mistakes, and create "yearbooks" of sorts for multi-volume stories. You know, the sort of binder that would contain statistics, calendars, maps, character sketches and etymologies, and "the storyline so far" and "where the story has to go. World-building and so on is great, but if it's the sort of thing that grinds the Hogwarts Express to a halt for anything less than a Dementor, the author should have enough modesty to pare it down!

[quivo.livejournal.com]

And besides, the license to world-build comes free ONLY with massive feasts like LOTR and so on, where the serious history is seriously needed. I mean, where would we have been in the Fellowship if there wasn't the careful documentation of the Hobbit, and of the actual wars and so on beforehand?

Learn from the masters, JKR, dammit.

The amazingly unbeta'd multimedia megahit!

[saturniia.livejournal.com]

The movies are just as bad... not even with little details being dropped for expedience, but am I the only one who's noticed that Percy is supposed to have glasses, but he doesn't?

Come on, costume director(s)! If McGonagal has glasses and Dumbledore has glasses and Harry has glasses and the author cares enough to include them, wouldn't you think that glasses symbolize something and include them in your wardrobe inventory for the character of Percy Weasley?

Re: The amazingly unbeta'd multimedia megahit!

[kaskait.livejournal.com]

Symbolism! You want symbolism? Don't you know that such a thing does not exist in these books?

After the whole hypogriff fiasco, I have stopped looking for deeper meanings in JKR's use of mythology. She doesn't use those symbols to add symbolic layers to her story. She just uses them because they are teh kewlest.

Obviously the filmmakers are taking a page out her pastiche. There were just too many characters in glasses. Hence, Percy now has 20/20 vision. Either that or he had lasik surgery before his film debut.

[gramarye1971]

*chuckles* Tell me about it. All I'd ask for would be a red pencil and a standard calculator.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

LOL--and a calendar showing what day of the week September 1st is for 7 years running...

[gramarye1971]

YES. How could I have forgotten that? ^_^

[quivo.livejournal.com]

And to think I would probably have checked that, nerd that I am, and she didn't.

Why the hell can't I have her job, anyway? Seriously, for one of my fics, I actually pulled up the 1997 calender in Publisher. Jeez, beta!geek alert.

[alula-auburn.livejournal.com]

One of the metaphors we CONSTANTLY throw around in my MFA workshops is the infamous backpack of Frank Conroy. As readers--at least, as good readers--we expect that the author tells us things because they are important. Therefore, every detail we get (and this goes double for details that are set off in some way), we tuck away and carry around with us, and if we get to the top of the mountain and realize we've been dragging around a phonograph and the complete works of Dickens and the sword of Damocles or whatever else the author threw out us for no reason, we are tired and sore and annoyed. (This becomes much more apparent when you're in a class with someone who's like, "Character's left-handed? Does it matter? Backpack! It takes place in Chicago? Backpack! Her friend has a tattoo on his ear? It's a Chinese character? For the love of God, BACKPACK!!!).

JKR, I think, would not be enjoy herself.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

LOL! What a great metaphor--I love it!