/high fives in solidarity/ Tumblr was really fun when I needed it, but I've come to realise the endless-scrolling-with-0-engagement just isn't healthy for me, even leaving aside the drama - and god knows there's plenty of that, but that wasn't helped by the fandoms I was in. (I look at some of what the idiot children over there are getting up to and pray to anyone who might be listening that I wasn't nearly as bad at that age. Then again, the very format of the site seems to encourage fanbrattiness and wank, so.)
/grins/ No problem! You might regret asking, though, I will happily talk people's ear off about HP (as evidenced by the fact that I have MULTIPLE 50k+ fix-it fic in the works to deal with all the things about canon that drive me batty.)
For me, HP is an unfinished series for a couple of reasons:
a) There’s a genre shift in the middle of the series and it breaks things. The thing about the first four books is that they're basically magical boarding school stories, a genre I love and grew up reading (Enid Blyton is/was very popular in my part of the world, and she did two really popular series - St. Clare's, and Malory Towers) and I-IV are very much in that tradition - they’re also very Dahl-esque, in that nobody seems to notice that Harry’s being abused, or that he’s never met his best friend’s older brothers until the plot of IV calls for it, or even that he knows practically nobody outside of his core group, not even two of the girls in his House and year. V-VII… are (or, at least, are trying to be) Adult Novels of Great Pathos, and the rules of the first four just don’t work with the genre shift.
b) The story I got is not the one I wanted or that I-IV got me to expect. I think I would have liked book VII better if the foreshadowing had been better, rather than the Hallows being such an utter Macguffin. Add to that so many potentially wonderful storylines falling by the wayside (what’s in the Chamber? are people going to set aside House divisions? Dare we hope for a Draco vs Lucius showdown?) in favour of Jesus Potter and the Confrontation That Didn’t Even Fit The Prophecy. Add to that the utter bugfuckery that was the epilogue, and I just… nope.
c) JKR has said that Hermione is in some ways a self-insert, and I can believe it, because JKR - like Hermione - has what I like to call Modern Muggleborn Syndrome, the idea that just because something is modern it’s necessarily more progressive. We don’t see good proper purebloods - where are the people who have no problem with Muggleborns but still worry about losing their culture? The people who understand that Muggles are, actually, a threat to a tiny population that’s already in the middle of a cultural genocide because from what I can tell, Hogwarts doesn’t, actually, teach anything about wizarding culture and traditions? Hell, we never even see much of any culture and as a child of colonialism whose own heritage was stolen from her by well-meaning parents, that distresses me on multiple levels.
… er, that got long. But yes. That is why I live very happily in AUs, or at most, a canon that only goes up to Goblet, because the thought of making the rest of it makes sense sends me utterly spare.
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Date: 2017-05-26 11:35 am (UTC)/grins/ No problem! You might regret asking, though, I will happily talk people's ear off about HP (as evidenced by the fact that I have MULTIPLE 50k+ fix-it fic in the works to deal with all the things about canon that drive me batty.)
For me, HP is an unfinished series for a couple of reasons:
a) There’s a genre shift in the middle of the series and it breaks things. The thing about the first four books is that they're basically magical boarding school stories, a genre I love and grew up reading (Enid Blyton is/was very popular in my part of the world, and she did two really popular series - St. Clare's, and Malory Towers) and I-IV are very much in that tradition - they’re also very Dahl-esque, in that nobody seems to notice that Harry’s being abused, or that he’s never met his best friend’s older brothers until the plot of IV calls for it, or even that he knows practically nobody outside of his core group, not even two of the girls in his House and year. V-VII… are (or, at least, are trying to be) Adult Novels of Great Pathos, and the rules of the first four just don’t work with the genre shift.
b) The story I got is not the one I wanted or that I-IV got me to expect. I think I would have liked book VII better if the foreshadowing had been better, rather than the Hallows being such an utter Macguffin. Add to that so many potentially wonderful storylines falling by the wayside (what’s in the Chamber? are people going to set aside House divisions? Dare we hope for a Draco vs Lucius showdown?) in favour of Jesus Potter and the Confrontation That Didn’t Even Fit The Prophecy. Add to that the utter bugfuckery that was the epilogue, and I just… nope.
c) JKR has said that Hermione is in some ways a self-insert, and I can believe it, because JKR - like Hermione - has what I like to call Modern Muggleborn Syndrome, the idea that just because something is modern it’s necessarily more progressive. We don’t see good proper purebloods - where are the people who have no problem with Muggleborns but still worry about losing their culture? The people who understand that Muggles are, actually, a threat to a tiny population that’s already in the middle of a cultural genocide because from what I can tell, Hogwarts doesn’t, actually, teach anything about wizarding culture and traditions? Hell, we never even see much of any culture and as a child of colonialism whose own heritage was stolen from her by well-meaning parents, that distresses me on multiple levels.
… er, that got long. But yes. That is why I live very happily in AUs, or at most, a canon that only goes up to Goblet, because the thought of making the rest of it makes sense sends me utterly spare.