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So Salon.com did article on Phoenix Rising here.
There were two bits in particular that made me think and want to response.
The first quote was this:
I was interested in this common idea that the female characters are cut outs--though basically this author is just having her first experience running into people who don't like her favorite character. Hey, my favorite character gets called a "little cumstain"--I feel your pain. Get used to it.
My feeling on the female characters is that no, they're not cardboard--at least no more than any other character is. JKR writes all her characters basically the same way. I remember someone wonderfully once saying that listen, Snape was cardboard too--he was just very thick cardboard. Rowling seems to generally create characters around a central conflict, and writes them in a way that they can pop off the page right away. (My favorite example of how well she does this will probably always be Amos Diggory in GoF--he gets one scene early on that sets up just how devastated he's going to be hundreds of pages later. I can't read his first scene now without thinking: ouch.)
What I would say about the female characters in general is just that the male characters tend to...drive the story more, somehow, often by being fuck-ups. People have noticed, for instance, how Lily is "better" than James, but that this sort of just leads to Saint Lily saving Harry while James gets to make things happen and be a far more dynamic character even while acting like a dick.
Of the main student girl characters, for instance, Luna is no less developed than Barty Crouch or Neville, but she's a bit self-contained. She's weird, and appears to be comic relief for Harry and get him in the Quibbler. Ginny is one character whose characterization I do have issues with, but leaving that aside as strong a character as she has, she's basically again self-contained and appears to support Harry. Even with her experience with Voldemort in CoS, she doesn't drive things.
Hermione's an even more interesting case. She's a major character, and she's got plenty of issues and drives and flaws and strengths. But still, she's self-contained. For instance, compare her to Sirius. Sirius pulled a stupid Prank on Snape. This Prank is still driving a lot of things in the plot. He and Snape are still bristling at each other, creating tension. Harry himself is affected by this Prank. He circles back to it in OotP and in Snape's Pensieve learns more about the relationship again. It's very personal and still happening.
Hermione, by contrast, is far more efficient but also--I keep using this word self-contained, but I just really mean that if you're looking at the story of the books she's not taking actions that go all over the place, but ones that have limited effects. For instance, while Sirius pulled one bad Prank on Snape with bad results, Hermione has faced a number of female adversaries and taken care of all of them in a way that is so far totally efficient. She and Rita clashed in GoF, and Hermione took care of her--so much that in the next book she controlled Rita to write the article in the Quibbler. So far, at least, her relationship with Rita does not seem to be as messy as Sirius/Snape. Likewise, Hermione hated Umbridge and took care of her with the centaurs (with some luck involved--her planning wasn't so great there). Marietta ratted out the DA and Hermione's curse took effect. These events don't have the same emotional impact as the more dramatic emotional clashes between the Marauders and Snape or Barty and Barty Jr. or whoever.
Also it's Harry who is the one to deal with a lot of these things. Harry is angry to see Umbridge at the funeral, and presumably Hermione still hates her, but it's not making the plot sprawl out or creating ugly emotional fall-out. We've never even heard about Hemrione's reaction to her own hex on Marietta. It's Harry who has a fight with Cho, which partly encourages him to go into the Pensieve, which leads to his learning of Snape's Worst Memory.
So while I do think there is often a troubling dismissal of women in slash fandom, it actually doesn't surprise me that people are more interested in male/male relationships within the story. I remember asking![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jlh once why Sirius/Remus was considered so canon when everyone talked about Sirius/James being best friends, and she said because Sirius/Remus was the relationship with the conflict and the betrayal. I think that perhaps something that draws people to female characters less in terms of stories is that they're just less messy. Their roles in the story often are as helpers to men--which doesn't have to be a bad thing. Ron helps Harry too, and that doesn't make him subservient. (But I think also there's a reason that as much as many people hated the Traitor!Ron trend, Ron's character could support such an ugly personal betrayal in ways I don't think Hermione's does as much.)
I don't hate het. It's just I can see why there's often more to work with with male characters. It's not that there aren't interesting dynamics between any m/f characters. (I love Draco/Pansy, and Pansy is also a character more there for support.) I just wonder if that is more what people mean when they casually say the females are cardboard and the men aren't.
Okay, I was going to go on to the fanfic part next, but maybe it should be two posts. There's tl;dr and then there's wtl;dbf (way too long; died before finishing)
There were two bits in particular that made me think and want to response.
The first quote was this:
At this point, the "prefect" in charge of the room for the night, a writer who calls herself Fyrdrakken and who'd been knitting quietly through the readings and interview, piped up to offer, "Some of the women are cardboard caricatures. A lot of people don't like Hermione at all. She is self-righteous and kind of creepy." Maudlin nodded.
Hermione? A cardboard cutout? The smartest in the class, with the frizzy hair and muggle parents, the responsible girl who maintains friendships with the irresponsible boys, the girl who has the good taste to pine not for our dashing hero but for his red-haired, dunderheaded friend? "A lot of people don't like Hermione at all?" This was heartbreaking.
I was interested in this common idea that the female characters are cut outs--though basically this author is just having her first experience running into people who don't like her favorite character. Hey, my favorite character gets called a "little cumstain"--I feel your pain. Get used to it.
My feeling on the female characters is that no, they're not cardboard--at least no more than any other character is. JKR writes all her characters basically the same way. I remember someone wonderfully once saying that listen, Snape was cardboard too--he was just very thick cardboard. Rowling seems to generally create characters around a central conflict, and writes them in a way that they can pop off the page right away. (My favorite example of how well she does this will probably always be Amos Diggory in GoF--he gets one scene early on that sets up just how devastated he's going to be hundreds of pages later. I can't read his first scene now without thinking: ouch.)
What I would say about the female characters in general is just that the male characters tend to...drive the story more, somehow, often by being fuck-ups. People have noticed, for instance, how Lily is "better" than James, but that this sort of just leads to Saint Lily saving Harry while James gets to make things happen and be a far more dynamic character even while acting like a dick.
Of the main student girl characters, for instance, Luna is no less developed than Barty Crouch or Neville, but she's a bit self-contained. She's weird, and appears to be comic relief for Harry and get him in the Quibbler. Ginny is one character whose characterization I do have issues with, but leaving that aside as strong a character as she has, she's basically again self-contained and appears to support Harry. Even with her experience with Voldemort in CoS, she doesn't drive things.
Hermione's an even more interesting case. She's a major character, and she's got plenty of issues and drives and flaws and strengths. But still, she's self-contained. For instance, compare her to Sirius. Sirius pulled a stupid Prank on Snape. This Prank is still driving a lot of things in the plot. He and Snape are still bristling at each other, creating tension. Harry himself is affected by this Prank. He circles back to it in OotP and in Snape's Pensieve learns more about the relationship again. It's very personal and still happening.
Hermione, by contrast, is far more efficient but also--I keep using this word self-contained, but I just really mean that if you're looking at the story of the books she's not taking actions that go all over the place, but ones that have limited effects. For instance, while Sirius pulled one bad Prank on Snape with bad results, Hermione has faced a number of female adversaries and taken care of all of them in a way that is so far totally efficient. She and Rita clashed in GoF, and Hermione took care of her--so much that in the next book she controlled Rita to write the article in the Quibbler. So far, at least, her relationship with Rita does not seem to be as messy as Sirius/Snape. Likewise, Hermione hated Umbridge and took care of her with the centaurs (with some luck involved--her planning wasn't so great there). Marietta ratted out the DA and Hermione's curse took effect. These events don't have the same emotional impact as the more dramatic emotional clashes between the Marauders and Snape or Barty and Barty Jr. or whoever.
Also it's Harry who is the one to deal with a lot of these things. Harry is angry to see Umbridge at the funeral, and presumably Hermione still hates her, but it's not making the plot sprawl out or creating ugly emotional fall-out. We've never even heard about Hemrione's reaction to her own hex on Marietta. It's Harry who has a fight with Cho, which partly encourages him to go into the Pensieve, which leads to his learning of Snape's Worst Memory.
So while I do think there is often a troubling dismissal of women in slash fandom, it actually doesn't surprise me that people are more interested in male/male relationships within the story. I remember asking
jlh once why Sirius/Remus was considered so canon when everyone talked about Sirius/James being best friends, and she said because Sirius/Remus was the relationship with the conflict and the betrayal. I think that perhaps something that draws people to female characters less in terms of stories is that they're just less messy. Their roles in the story often are as helpers to men--which doesn't have to be a bad thing. Ron helps Harry too, and that doesn't make him subservient. (But I think also there's a reason that as much as many people hated the Traitor!Ron trend, Ron's character could support such an ugly personal betrayal in ways I don't think Hermione's does as much.)I don't hate het. It's just I can see why there's often more to work with with male characters. It's not that there aren't interesting dynamics between any m/f characters. (I love Draco/Pansy, and Pansy is also a character more there for support.) I just wonder if that is more what people mean when they casually say the females are cardboard and the men aren't.
Okay, I was going to go on to the fanfic part next, but maybe it should be two posts. There's tl;dr and then there's wtl;dbf (way too long; died before finishing)
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if Hermione had feelings for Ron and knew that he had feelings for her, why didn't she make a move, and I always got answers like "she's an old-fashioned girl" and "it's the guy job to make the moves".
As mentioned earlier in the thread somewhere, though she seemed to realize she fancied him she acted as if she was annoyed she did and wanted him to be more mature and grown up and such. I think it fits, if she's comparing Ron to Viktor, Ron in the superficial comes up lacking in some ways during that time period so I can see Hermione being quite annoyed that she feels that way about Ron instead of Viktor, the much more logical-to her-choice.
And she finally does make move, prompted, of course, by Lavender's obvious interest and Ron's seeming receptiveness to it so she is capable of doing so. Though I'm pretty sure if Lavender hadn't come along she'd not have made a move and would have continued treating Ron like she had in OOTP and the first part HBP.
As for Hermione not returning Ron's crush, I felt, from GoF on, that she did, if only because she usually got her knickers in a knot whenever another girl paid attention to him or vice versa.
I agree with you. I was just making the point that Ron didn't have much to go on and the little he had was definitely not a clear ask-the-girl-out message. He didn't necessarily see or understand the times you mentioned where Hermione's jealousy was evident. I think Hermione's response to the perfume Christmas present of OOTP is indicative. She gushes about Harry's present, a book, but merely says something like "The perfume is unusual, Ron" with little apparent enthusiasm. Now I imagine unusual was a polite way of saying terrible, but she dismisses the thought behind the perfume as well, which suggests Ron realizes she is a girl. Taken as a whole, Hermione did nothing that would suggest to Ron he ought to make a move that could potentially damage their friendship.
I figured it had to be jealousy because the alternative, that her opinion of Ron is so low that the idea of him getting any kind of female attention literally drives her to anger, is just too nasty. IMO, she would have to really hate him, platonically or otherwise, to feel that way.
Yeah, that would say absolutely nothing good about Hermione's character. I've even come across some H/Hr shippers that seem to think Hermione's behavior in HBP was driven by frustration at his immaturity.
The idea that after HBP she would turn out to have been pining for Harry or Draco or someone else the entire time would render her character unforgivable and unredeemable to me.
I feel the same. I just unlocked this post from a ship debate thread in which I went through HBP finding all the examples that, taken as a whole, would need a lot of explaining if the series turned out to be H/Hr. If Hermione has been pining away her treatment of Ron is completely horrible and says absolutely nothing good about her character. There is a certain segment of H/Hr shippers that still feel the series will end in H/Hr and that all the R/Hr stuff is a red herring. I don't understand how they would even want Hermione to end up with Harry if she's been that awful to someone she doesn't fancy but supposedly likes as a close friend. Unforgivable and unredeemable are apt words.