saiddcain

[saiddcain]

There's something very Victorian about Rowling's characters, and I actually think a Victorian reader would understand them a little more than we do -- and expect less from them. The characters are not just Victorian in who they are but in the social positions they represent. The Dursleys are a satire on middle-class airs that could have been pulled straight from the pages of Punch. As the warm-hearted matron of a large brood, Mrs. Weasley embodies all the solidity of an idealized working class. And Lily is a model for all gentlemen's wives, the household angel who brings out the best in her husband. Almost all of Rowling's characters could be straight out of a Dickens novel -- Harry too, of course, who's just the latest in a long line of noble orphans (I imagine that Victorian readers would never expect Harry to be anything but noble. Orphan or not, he is, after all, the son of a gentleman.)

In terms of social mores, the mores of the wizarding world seem to mirror those of Victorian times. Everyone is just exactly what they're supposed to be, and no one ventures outside of that or even thinks of doing so. It's unimaginable. In a lot of Dickens' stories, characters who try to move up the social hierarchy are either portrayed as ridiculous or wind up in some tragic circumstance. Rowling isn't writing with any sort of moral instruction in mind, so she doesn't bother with these scenarios, but it's obvious from the scenarios we do see that the wizarding world is far less socially fluid than our own. It's always made me wonder why anyone would want to stay in the wizarding world at all. Why would anyone, especially someone with supernatural abilites, want to stay in a world that seems as rigidly defined as the wizarding world does?

via Oselle & Sistermagpie's discussion in this archive thread discussing whether Rowling's female characters are 'cardboard cutouts', from 2007

[saiddcain]

“hes a woman to me” IS HE? or are you equating women with submissive character traits you've arbitrarily put on a random man

[saiddcain]

you're telling me a pink guard, whose relationship with a player was briefly shown as a subplot, could safely save and remove the player from the island and send him back to the mainland alive. while the front man, whose relationship with gihun is supposed to be "the heart of the show", did nothing but watch gihun with teary eyes the entire time and just let gihun kill himself?

after the director confirmed there was still humanity left in inho? after lee byung-hun said gihun made inho feel a slight wavering of heart, that inho saw himself in gihun and that inho was rooting for gihun?

(byung-hun, I'm so sorry they did your character so dirty. I know how much you love inho and everything you said about him and gihun is what should have been in the show. jung-jae, I'm so sorry gihun was done so dirty too. you both deserve so much better.)

netflix's a jerk for promoting season 3 as 'the clash between gihun and frontman' when gihun and frontman had one scene together that lasted 2 minutes and the rest was just frontman looking at gihun with teary eyes.

would have been so much better if s3 was about inho saving and removing gihun from the game, them actually talking and further developing their dynamics (wouldn't even have to be in a romantic way).

don't get me wrong, I love all the other characters and their stories too, and I'm glad noeul was able to save that player, but it's a terrible idea to shift the focus of the third season to all the side characters and their subplots. because now the two main characters whom netflix promote so heavily were overshadowed to the point they became the side characters instead.

and both of their characters were written so... I don't even know what the fuck that was.

[saiddcain]

the infuriating thing is that there is genuinely so much good queer literature out there, contemporary and not, but there is also a sizeable chunk of readers who think that a book only "counts" as good queer literature if it's a) unproblematic, b) contains romance as its central focus, and c) has the characters state their orientation and/or gender identity directly to the audience using socially acceptable 21st-century terms (as opposed to resorting to cowardly tactics such as Subtext and Themes)

[saiddcain]

you must always think about a mentor figure exploiting the power imbalance with their mentee. and you must sexualise it as well. otherwise a gazillion hungry angels are going to hell

[saiddcain]

the dynamic between two people who love a third person so much and come to understand each other because of that is so important to me. you would put them first, and so would i. you understand why we have to save them from themself. i trust you with their life, and so, that means more than if i trusted you with mine. the love doesn't have to be the same, but it's powerful enough that you understand why you're not the only satellite drawn into their orbit.

[saiddcain]

I hope that this ask finds you well. For the 'choose violence ask game: question 9, 12, 10, 18, 24. Sorry if it's a lot of questions to answer at once.

Hi darling I missed you on my inbox and I’m sorry for taking so long to answer!

9, worst part of canon

Ugh, so many. The movies are awful, despite the strong supporting cast (Jude Law as Dumbledore and Dame Maggie Smith as McGonagall were very inspired choices). The books are incredibly sexist. Ginny calling Fleur “a cow” (whatever for???). Mrs Weasley considering FIFTEEN YEAR OLD Hermione an evil seductress based on wizard gossip tabloids. Ginny’s character arc from being Ron’s haunted, traumatised, metaphorical csa victim to Harry’s Cool Girl. Harry’s sixth year dumb jock interlude (what the fuck was that). Readers being told that Voldemort is smart but never being shown that. The second war being completed before the end of the seventh school year because JKR wanted to keep the one year—one book shtick. The Deathly Hollows coming out of nowhere in the last book. Harry surviving. Fantastic Beasts: Secrets of Dumbledore being a failure and a cash grab trying to appeal to both adult fans and selling toys for kids instead of being an erotic masterpiece written by James Ivory and directed by Cronenberg.

12, the unpopular character that you actually like and why more people should like them

DUMBLEDORE!!!!!!! He’d have been given the Snape treatment if he had been presented as a hot dilf on book one instead of an old wise man

10, worst part of fanon

The misogyny, the racism, the character bashing, the unwillingness to face head on the problems the canon gives you without making characters OOC/character bashing/turning everyone into a college student in a low stakes AU.

18, it's absolutely criminal that the fandom has been sleeping on...

Kingsley!!! Also the Crouchs as a family. And what about Moody’s past? I just want to take everyone from the first Order of Phoenix out of the Marauders’ fandom’s hands.

24. topic that brings up the most rancid discourse

I think there’s many but the insistence on Slytherins/purebloods being the Actual Oppressed Characters is particularly amusing

[saiddcain]

do you get deja vu

[saiddcain]

Their husbands are also abusers who’d lock them up as attic wives in the blink of an eye and I love that for them ❤️

Imagine how unlucky Gihun, Dumbledore and Charles are with their husbands. Their husbands are tyrants-manipulators, responsible for mass murders and genocides and they always cause their loved ones pain and suffering.

I feel so sorry for them 😭

[saiddcain]

i cant ship in-ho and gi-hun in a fluffy way i think in-ho is too cruel and obsessed for that although i do think he, once he overcomes the desire to kill that hope in gi-hun, will go in the completely opposite direction and think that some of gi-huns hope and humanity will rub off on him if he fucks spends more time with him. think in post s3 au him where gi-hun lives, he wouldn't be able to let go off him honestly

[saiddcain]

actually, no, i do have something to add. if your work of fanfiction can be easily rebranded and sold as original fiction, then there’s a high possibility that it was never good fanfiction in the first place—and, in all probability, it won’t make for very good original (well, “original”) fiction either, instead remaining suspended between these two forms that each operate on a different paradigm. while i have a lot of love and respect for all kinds of derivative works (perhaps unsurprisingly, considering my perennial love affair with postmodernism), i also believe that the most rewarding fics are the ones that actively and continuously engage with their source material, therefore making it all but impossible for anyone—even the author—to simply file the serial numbers off and promote it as something else entirely; at least not without damaging the work’s internal integrity. something something mutualism (the derivative work deconstructing and expanding on the source material and so keeping it alive) as opposed to parasitism (thinking you can simply lift your blorbos wholesale and run but failing to realise that uprooting them from their respective stories will render them but a shadow of a reflection of their original selves).

[saiddcain]

When I say "I find him compelling" I mean I want to spread him on a petri dish and study him under a microscope.

[saiddcain]

maybe the single funniest twitter comment I've ever seen

[saiddcain]

Saint Sebastian (c.1625, oil on canvas) | Guido Reni

[saiddcain]

some of y'all fundamentally misunderstand my favorite characters but im being sooooo normal and mature about it. i haven't even killed anyone yet

[saiddcain]

shirt that says I ❤️ PSYCHOSEXUAL OBSESSION

[saiddcain]

dear vincent