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

[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.