chdarling

[chdarling]

He's never happy

[chdarling]

Image prompt

[chdarling]

Malcolm T. Liepke: In essence, I believe that no matter how alone we may feel in the world—how we imagine we are experiencing things in a vacuum—we all share the same human experiences. We all have the same basic needs for connection, love and understanding. I try to reach those universal needs; it’s what’s primal in art. I try to say it through mood, color, atmosphere and texture. Bottom line: It’s the [emotion], and I just want to get it out. It’s difficult to express through words things that are so beautiful that they have no words. I can’t explain it. I have to paint it. (1) Storytime, (2) Two Friends, (3) Comfy Chair, (4) Three in A Bar

[chdarling]

I was going through some of Rowling’s old interviews and came across one in 2004 where she spoke of Sirius:

“I am so proud of the fact that a character, whom I always liked very much, though he never appeared as much more than a brooding presence in the books, has gained a passionate fan-club.”

This wasn’t the only time she expressed surprise that Sirius became a fan favourite, and it’s honestly baffling to me??? He had an entire book named after and primarily revolving around him, and is canonically the closest thing to a parent that Harry, the protagonist of the series, ever had. Even if we disregard everything else we know about Sirius and his storyline, there’s no way in hell he wasn’t going to be popular. If I didn’t know better, I’d have said that a character like that was specifically designed for fan service (I mean...he's hot, has a flying motorbike, and is literally named after a star, lol). It’s bizarre that Rowling seems to have had no idea, and that she believed he was / intended him to be nothing more than a “brooding presence” in the series – which is at any rate an appalling and deeply unsympathetic way to describe his trauma and depression.

It made me think of how there's such a major disconnect between authorial intent and authorial execution when it comes to his character as well, especially in Order of the Phoenix. Characters like Molly or Hermione call him irresponsible/reckless/immature, claim he confused Harry and James, that he treated Harry like a friend rather than a godson, that he was biased against Snape, etc. Rowling’s interviews confirm that she intended to characterize Sirius in such a way and that Hermione and Molly are meant to be viewed as her mouthpieces. But Sirius’s actual behavior and relationship with Harry does not correspond with any of this and his actions + dialogue are for the most part very reasonable and sympathetic. (There’s also Kreacher’s storyline, which made me dislike Sirius a lot when I was younger, but upon my reread comes across as almost entirely nonsensical, contradictory, and seems specifically designed to paint Sirius in a bad light to the point where he’s compared to VOLDEMORT of all people by Hermione - who, in the process of criticizing Sirius, dehumanizes house elves entirely by claiming that none of them are capable of individual morality or have any ethical agency of their own. It's frustrating because she's 100% right that house elves should be freed but the way she infantalizes them is...pretty shitty and not the way to go about it. But I digress.)

Rowling seems to have done a complete 180 degree turn on how Sirius is presented by the narrative between Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix, and I can’t really understand why.

I get the sense that the creation of Sirius’s character in particular was, at the very least, partly accidental on Rowling’s part. She didn’t expect him to blow up the way he did, and I get the sense that she doesn’t seem to have been thrilled by how much the early HP fandom liked/valorized him. There was an interview where she was asked if she liked him, and she said that she did, only to immediately list down all his alleged flaws and emphasize that “I do not think he was wholly wonderful” (which character in the series is wholly wonderful, lol? Sirius came across as a great deal better than most to me). There have been so many other interviews where she’s done the same thing despite the fact that Sirius's faults or perceived faults had absolutely nothing to do with the questions at hand. It’s such a startling contrast how she talks about pretty much everyone else from his generation, all of whom she seems considerably warmer and more sympathetic towards in varying degrees.

As I haven’t been back in the fandom for very long, this is the first time I’ve come across her interviews - I’m not sure if I’m reading too much into them or not. I wondered if you agree/disagree, as you’ve been in the fandom for much longer and I love all your metas about the series. Thanks :)

You’ve hit upon my personal Rage Point for the entire series, anon.

I want to start by pointing something out about Sirius and Kreacher, which is that in GoF Sirius tells Ron and Harry (and Hermione, though he brings it up to compliment her observational skills) that Crouch Sr.’s mistreatment of Winky is an indicator of his character. (“If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”) This is, somehow, the same man who one book later is egregiously dismissive of and abusive toward his family’s house-elf, to the point that this dismissal causes his death (oh, and Albus blames him for dying, too.) Despite Sirius expressing two wildly different viewpoints from book to book, we’re intended to take that as his true self, as the authentic expression of his beliefs and position.

I’ve spoken before more than once about other drastic character shifts that happened as a result of the Three Year Summer, both as a writing break and as a paradigm shift in the notoriety of and ubiquity of the series thanks to the movies being released starting in 2001. I was in elementary and middle school while the books were being published, and OotP was the first book I remember seeing large-scale advertisement for in my school outside of a book fair - there was a big larger-than-life poster teasing the book cover with a release date during the summer to get us all hyped up for it. I’d obviously heard of Harry Potter before that, but that was the moment when the books went from “famous book series” to “cultural phenomenon,” at least in my mind. And I think that we can trace this shift in opinion on Sirius Black back to the Three Year Summer, too.

In my opinion it’s obvious that Joanne really liked Sirius, when she first developed him. I don’t think she’s telling the truth when she says she doesn’t think he’s wholly wonderful - when she first came up with him she absolutely did. He’s got pride of place as a Cool Character in all the ways she loves to lavish attention on someone. He’s set up with a phenomenal entrance in PS chapter one and then he spends all of PoA in the spotlight. He has a dramatic reveal of his true allegiances and his innocence, and he’s Harry’s best and most supportive parental figure throughout GoF who consistently gives good advice and who risks his own life and liberty to make sure his godson is safe. He considers coming back to England and living in a cave and eating rats to be his duty as a godfather, and while Harry feels responsible for his circumstances he’s always really clear that he (1. doesn’t care about the risks to his health and safety (2. will gladly sacrifice comfort and stability if it means being able to protect this boy (3. will not let Harry feel guilty.

These aren’t the actions of a man who confuses Harry with James - throughout GoF he continues to insist that his decisions are his own, made as an adult trying to parent and support a kid who desperately needs a stable presence in his life. Harry’s used to taking the blame for the actions of adults (my heart is still rent asunder by his expectation that Lupin is going to gaslight him about denying him the chance to face the boggart in their first DADA lesson) and he’s also used to feeling like he has to manage the emotional state of a household (see: all the times he plans out what to say or not to say to the Dursleys to get them to do what he wants), and Sirius doesn’t let him sink into either of those pits. He also prevents Harry from bottling up his feelings or concealing his distress, and never lies or twists the truth. He’s being very deliberately written as someone who serves as a positive role model and positive mentor figure for Harry, and then suddenly come OotP he’s moody and immature and subject to a number of very strange smear campaigns from characters the author confirms are intended to reflect her real opinions.

So… what happened, over the course of the Three Year Summer, to make her change her mind? We can’t ever know for sure, obviously, because Joanne hasn’t ever bothered to lay out how her feelings on each member of her cast changed and evolved, and she’s unlikely to do so at any point in the future because now when people talk to her they mostly talk to her about transphobia. But I have a theory.

See, between 1998 and 2003, the HMS Wolfstar set sail. While most of the seminal meta came out after OotP (see “The Case for R/S” as probably the one I and others my age are most familiar with as an introduction to the ship) and most of the really famous fanfics started trickling out around that time (The Shoebox Project started in 2004), there were fanfics before that point, a growing fan community, and a number of pieces of fanart and fancomics (check out the list of doujinshi in the linked Fanlore article, some of those date back to 2001). Edit: here is an archived humorous/gently snarky list of Wolfstar fanfic tropes created in 2002 - while I can’t personally remember the names of fics from before 2004 or so I want to point to this as evidence that there was an established fan community, even using the “WolfStar” name, prior to the publication of OotP.

Normally, I wouldn’t think that fanfic from prior to 2010 or so had much of anything to do with the author’s opinions on their work, because norms and fan culture around fanfic were much more focused around keeping these stories private and away from the prying eyes of The Powers That Be/TPTB.

I say normally, because Joanne was aware of fanfiction, and aware of fanfiction remarkably early in her career as a public figure.

Younger fans are almost certainly not going to know this, but one of the first real fandom divides in HP had to do with fanfiction, and specifically the question of how to treat fanfiction written by and for adults that featured sex scenes or other mature content. Since the books were children’s books (though there was an adult fandom since the start, especially online - the Harry Potter For Grown-Ups/HP4GU mailing list and its descendant communities still loom large in fan history as some of the early pillars of today’s digital scene) a lot of people didn’t know what to do or how to treat fanfic. This was also compounded by fanfic being a lot more subject to legal action or takedown notices - Anne Rice, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, and Anne McCaffrey all became infamous either for pursuing individual authors and archives until they took down their stories or instituting guidelines about what kinds of transformative works were acceptable, or both in McCaffrey’s case.

Rowling, however, was different. Rowling said that noncommercial fanfic was completely fine, that she wasn’t going to pursue any kind of legal action against fanfic authors, and that as long as adult-oriented fanfic was appropriately warned for and not shown to or targeted to children, she didn’t care if it existed.

This laid the groundwork for the founding of Fanfiction.net, for fanfic communities on LiveJournal, and eventually for Archive of our Own and the Organization for Transformative Works. In an era where legal disclaimers were common on fanfics as a mostly-useless attempt to prevent being shut down by IP holders, Rowling threw the doors open and democratized her stories in a way she - I would argue - ultimately came to regret.

I can’t prove that her sudden slander of Sirius was a result of latent unexamined homophobia and a desire for revenge against the fandom for daring to claim one of her favorite characters as a gay man. I can’t prove that his backstory of being kicked out of his house (for unspoken Family Drama reasons centering around him being filthy and disgraceful) only to be shoved back into it, or Trustworthy Adults suddenly painting him as dangerous to children and inherently irresponsible and reckless, or all of his trauma being ignored and painted over, or every scrap of his heroism being erased, has to do with Joanne deciding that if we’ve made him gay he shouldn’t get to be a character anymore.

I can’t prove it.

But I do believe it. I believe it because when you ask yourself “is this queercoded character being subjected to authorial homophobia”, suddenly everything about Sirius’s arc in OotP makes complete and total sense in the worst way possible. This is also why I think Tonks and Remus were paired off, why Tonks suddenly becomes more gender-conforming, and why Bill Weasley transforms into Normal Settled-Down Hetero William. It feels like her desperate attempts to take her characters and shove them back into a box that she controls. I don’t think she was at that point consciously and virulently homophobic, but I think her clear and evident discomfort with fans interpreting these characters who she wanted to be straight comes through in her writing.

I also believe it because she does the same thing to Albus, after his death. Someone who’s been uncomplicatedly heroic and praised by all parties and even used as her mouthpiece to pass judgment on Sirius suddenly becomes morally suspect and untrustworthy and shady and secretive, with enemies lining up as soon as he’s dead to slander him - and again, just like with Sirius, we’re meant to accept this as the correct version of events. He even confirms all of this to Harry himself in the King’s Cross afterlife. The old Albus can’t come to the phone right now, he’s dead, and only his critics remain. Coincidentally, Albus is of course the only confirmed gay character in the entire story. Funny how that works out, isn’t it?

I’ve been angry at her for 20 years for killing Sirius, and angrier still at her straightwashing efforts. I wouldn’t believe her if she said she wasn’t doing that, at this point.

It’s not as if I expected her to be a perfect ally as a center-left moderate cishet white woman in the late 90s/early 2000s, and I do think that Dumbledore being gay was revolutionary in a way that most modern audiences seriously fail to appreciate, but I wish she wasn’t so damned insistent that no one else could be queer in any way at any point. She’s also really evidently uncomfortable about any displays of affection between confirmed same-sex pairings - she was absolutely neurotic about the amount of physical contact between Mads Mikkelsen and Jude Law during FB3, to the point that she fought with David Yates about it. And her behavior contributed to the intense homophobia I and others experienced in our formative early years in fandom - no-slash mailing lists and archives, the immediate classification of all queer fanfic as inherently more mature or more sexual simply by virtue of having queer people in it, Wizards For Bush, etc. As a result, boycott or no boycott, I hope that Wolfstar is canon in the new series, I hope Mundungus stays the crossdressing icon that they are, I hope Tonks is canonically nonbinary, and I hope Joanne loses sleep over it.

[chdarling]

The Onion continues to never miss

[chdarling]

bahahaha get fucked alodie

[chdarling]

in honour of you deciding to reread the masterpiece that is TLE 2, I wanted to show you the lovely (fully legal, self-done) book bind I did after you finished it almost a year ago (?!?!?! Oh my god ?!?!?! How has it almost been a year?!?!?! That is so wild?!?!?!) I hope you’ve been enjoying your break, taking care of yourself, healing from the bitch that is burnout, etc etc. Much love :)

ahhhhhh omg these are incredible 🥺🥺🥺

I am so so impressed by you talented book binders!! Thank you for sharing!!! ❤️

[chdarling]

kill the imposter syndrome in your head because not only is there someone out there doing it worse than you, they’re also using chat gpt to do it

[chdarling]

[chdarling]

You know, I have been accused more than once of writing Lily as a self-insert (usually by people who hate TLE Lily, which is interesting), and I have always found this rather amusing because while I certainly aspire to Lily's best traits (though rarely achieve them), and as a writer I believe I put some aspect of myself into every POV character, in real life I am not very much like Lily at all.

However, there is some truth to the self-insert criticism, as I was forcibly reminded during my reread of chapter eight. They just picked the wrong character.

Ladies and gents, Remus Lupin:

“The castle?” Remus pulled his gaze from the marvelous Cloak at last. “What’s the castle got to do with it?” James’s grin broadened. “The castle is the whole point, Moony. We’re going to create something that no one in the history of Hogwarts has ever managed.” “My twelfth stress ulcer?”

He is me. I am he.

Alas.

[chdarling]

Oh my GOD, this is so outrageously beautiful I’m gonna cry 😭

🕯️ Fanfic binding of @chdarling 's The Last Enemy Series.🕯️

I was originally not going to post this, but I thought - why the heck not. All my love goes out to C.H. Darling. This Marauders fic has brought so much comfort and whimsy into my life, and it’s been a privilege to have this sitting on my shelf, waiting to be re-read again and again.

Honestly, this long-term project has helped me through a really stressful period of my life. Putting this together has brought just as much comfort as reading TLE, no regrets!! For personal use only. Never resell fanfic. Please ask permission or check an author's FAQ before binding fanfic. You don't need fancy supplies to bind, and there are a lot of tutorials, budget friendly options, and ways to achieve binding your own copy. Details:

• Typeset created in Word. Graphics from Canva. • Text block using 80gsm copy paper. Coptic stitch. Rounding and backing. Oxford hollow.

• Book cover using recycled book board, paper shopping bags, and 120gsm paper. Cover art by Heinrich Gogarten and Frances Ridley Havergal. Printed with Inkjet.

• Endpapers designed in Canva. Printed using Laserjet. Foiling done using toner-reactive foil & a laminator.

[chdarling]

most of my internal commentary thus far as been unfun stuff like "the typos!! the typoooooosss!!!" or "wow this chapter should've been about 1000 words shorter ugh."

HOWEVER, I have reached the first TLE2 interaction between Lily and James and ohmygosh, I had forgotten how much I loved writing early 6th year mutually-combative Jily:

“Hello, partner,” said James as he dropped himself into the empty seat next to Lily. She startled and turned towards him. He noticed her eyes scan the room. “Only seat left,” he assured her. “Trust me, I checked.” Lily pursed her lips. “What are you doing here?” “Believe it or not, I go to school here. Small world, eh?” “I mean here. This is Advanced Potions.” “That would explain all the pickled salamanders,” said James pleasantly. “Oh…you thought I’d fail my O.W.L., didn’t you?”

James, you are such a little shit <3

I love writing lover boy James, but I think I love writing snarky little shithead James just as much. >:)

ok pray for me, I’ve decided I’m finally emotionally ready* to reread TLE2 for the first time in full since I finished writing it. Depending on how fun/painful of an experience this ends up being, I may or may not spam this space with commentary. You’ve been warned. 🫣

*debatable, but I’m doing it anyway.

[chdarling]

ok pray for me, I’ve decided I’m finally emotionally ready* to reread TLE2 for the first time in full since I finished writing it. Depending on how fun/painful of an experience this ends up being, I may or may not spam this space with commentary. You’ve been warned. 🫣

*debatable, but I’m doing it anyway.

[chdarling]

the world is getting so ugly and bleak and it’s hard not to feel so hopeless. but we have to remember that they want us to feel that way.

it reminds me of this quote by dan savage - “During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night, and it was the dance that kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for.”

joy is resistance. it’s really scary times but we are all in this together.

[chdarling]

Ok I’ve done some reflection and deep breathing and radical acceptance and have decided that simply existing in the world in 2025 is to be plagiarized by AI and while I’m by no means ok with this (I would like to burn the tech bros at the stake, actually!), there’s nothing I can do to stop it save remove myself completely from the internet and thus community, and I don’t really want to do that, not really, except maybe in those unpleasant insomnia moments around 3am when retreating from the world and becoming a nun seems the only reasonable course of action, but as I haven’t yet found a convent for agnostic little freaks who still want to keep their cats and laptops, TLE is public again and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future until I fully lose my cool and disappear into the woods forever. 😎

But AI or no, please don’t post TLE to other websites, it makes me sad. :(

Hi friends.

It pains me to do this, but I have locked down my fics for the foreseeable future, so now they can only be accessed with an AO3 account. THEY HAVE NOT BEEN DELETED. I did this because I have learned that TLE has been stolen by an AI scraper yet again. This is not the first time this has happened, and I’ve also been having issues lately with finding my work posted elsewhere on the internet against my wishes. Frankly, I’m fed up. I do not have the bandwidth to monitor this crap right now, so lockdown mode it is. Sorry to those this will inconvenience, but selfish assholes and evil tech bros are why we can’t have nice things, I guess.

Anyway, fuck AI and fuck anyone who steals other people’s art, particularly art that is shared for free out of nothing but love and community spirit. I know I’m not the only fan writer who’s been fucked by AI bullshit. This shit is a plague. Sending you all love and encouragement through the relentless commodification and devaluation of human creativity.

I hate this timeline.

[chdarling]

i love the conclave. what do you mean the entire world has tv cameras trained on the chimney of an old italian palace waiting for days or weeks until the color of the smoke changes and we find out who’s been elected as the next supreme dictator of catholicism