One for Sorrow

I saw a link on my flist this morning to some answers JKR gave about DH, one of which I found didn't really work for me. I mean, I think she undermined what she was going for a bit ( at least for this reader. )

Oh my god, this meme ate my entire weekend almost! It's hard! Which I should have known. But I think I finally finished. I'm going to post it before I change my mind on everything.

(  Top Five Favorite (Not Fanfic) Authors )

( Top Five Self-Indulgent-But-Undeniably-Appealing Fanfic Tropes )

( Top Five Characters You Ended Up Loving More Than You Thought You Would At First )

( Top 5 websites )

( Top 5 books )

( Top 5 Moments of Glee )

( Top 5 Fanfics, The Ones You Read Again And Again )

( Top 5 Actors )

( Top 5 Songs You Associate With Anything Fannish )

( Top 5 Cities You’ve Ever Visited )

( Top Five Missing Moments/Scenes/Episodes )

( Top Five Horror Stories, Can Be Movies, Books, Etc. )

( Top Five Favorite Endings To Books )

( Top 5 Villain Archetypes )

( Top Five Ideas Or Themes You Find Yourself Concerned With When Interacting With Fannish Works )

( Top 5 favorite fictional characters, answer in picture form (either pictures of them, or pictures of something that represents what you like about them; whatever. Pictures!). )

( Five best episode endings )

( Top 5 Batman stories, Top 5 Robin stories? )

( Top five successful adaptations of books to films. )

( Top 5 fictional worlds )

( Top 5 Fictional Friendships )

( Five Top Fannish Meta Pet Peeves )

( Topo five things about Dick Grayson/Robin )

There was an article posted in The San Francisco Chronicle about the Avatar: The Last Airbender question, which led to a long discussion on avatar_fans about the casting again. This discussion included arguments from both sides, and after a while it made me want to make this opinion clear. It got way long—sorry. ( Whether or not the Avatar world is Asia is beside the point. )

That got much longer than I meant it to be. It's just what's tricky about these arguments is they sound so obvious and succinct but actually hold a ton of unexamined assumptions.

Recently I’ve read a couple of conversations that made me think about shipping. Specifically I've been thinking about the criticism: Why does s/he like her/him? As in: We don't understand why s/he likes her/him. The sudden attraction comes out of nowhere. If we don't understand that it's not realistic/it's badly written or whatever.

I'm going to use actual ships to talk about this, but hopefully this will not set off a ship argument or make anybody feel criticized for liking or not liking a ship. One of the ships I'm going to talk about I don't like (Harry/Ginny from HP) and one I do (Zuko/Mai from Avatar), so hopefully that separates it from liking or not liking the ship straight off.

( But where did that attraction come from? )

So here's what JKR has recently said about Dumbledore, getting more into his sexuality:

( Cut for anybody who doesn't want to read that )

I watched the first episode of the US "How to Look Good Naked" and it made me all happy inside--yay for the girl to figure out she's pretty! There was only one moment that annoyed me because it referenced my pet peeve. When they put the girl's body on the side of a building and asked passersby what they thought of it most people complimented her, but one woman said, "That's what a real woman looks like."

This annoys me on two levels. First because I hate that phrase. I'm not a supermodel by any stretch, but it's gotten applied to me because it's always used to mean that a "real woman" has to have a certain body type--usually whatever body type the person using the phrase thinks she has, or thinks she looks better than, and that's bullshit. All women are "real women." Even supermodels before they're airbrushed. The whole point is there isn't one way women look, everybody's different and they can all still be beautiful. Trying to change the aesthetic to put your own body type on top isn't freeing you from anything.

Secondly in the context of this show I thought--why can't you just give her a compliment on her own? Why does there have to be this implied comparison to some other "non-real" woman, who we all know is a supermodel, so that basically you just said, "She doesn't look like a supermodel." I'm sure the girl knows she doesn't look like a supermodel. That's why she's insecure. We're trying to get away from comparing her to people whose body types she was not born with and celebrate what's good about her. I just feel like while everybody else was complimenting the woman, this statement is more a political statement about the agenda of the person making it--down with supermodels. It's a weird day when "nice rack" is the more empowering thing said to a woman, but there it is!

Anyway, this also made me think about something I was talking about on New Year's Eve about fan fiction and bodies, specifically in media fandoms. ( More about that within. )

I'm not dead--but my computer almost is. At this point opening Internet Explorer takes something like 30 minutes. Sometimes things just disappear too--oh, you've just written 8 pages of something in word? Zap! Where did word go? Ha ha! It's gone!

So I apologize to the many posts I've managed to read in the past week and not comment on. (And to my icons that no longer get used because that adds another 15 minutes to a post!)

I was just reading this post on whether fanfic authors should try to conform to the "morality" of original authors. That kind of question always interests me because on one hand it's usually a yes/no answer, but really it gets into that whole central tangle of issues about fanfic. ( Really, how would you even begin to recreate somebody else's morals? )

So mere weeks before the release of DH I somehow have something to say about a storyline in HBP. It's two years late, but I need to pick every bone. I was reading stuff today about strong and weak characters, some of which I disagreed with, and unsurprisingly the Tonks storyline came up. I'm not really taking a position here on whether the story was good or bad for whatever reasons, but what I do think was that ( Tonks' storyline was useful. )

I had mentioned kayen's essay Agents of Narrative Desire earlier and still recommending it--it's long, but I really enjoyed it. So I feel a bit guilty having a response here that's sort of "Okay, now how can I make it all about Draco and H/D?" but hey, I wouldn't be me if I didn't do that. And besides I really love the assassination plot storyline in HBP and it doesn't get talked enough for me so--( Isn't it cool how that storyline is all about the H/D? )

Btw, best response to The Sopranos finale I've heard, from a radio caller this morning.

( Barely a spoiler, but just in case. )

This came from an exchange in the comments on bookshop's post about women in HP that I'm sort of elaborating on. Rowling has said, looking at the series that it is "a litany of bad fathers" because that's where she thinks "evil" tends to "flourish"--where people didn't get "good fathering."

( It made me think about mothers in canon. Longer than I expected, with weird stuff about Hagrid! )

I saw The Year of Magical Thinking last night, btw, with Vanessa Redgrave. I liked it better than I thought I would. Might write something about it later.