#a curséd day like. truly

[queerofthedagger]

god I've seen so many slightly annoying to downright horrible takes on just so much stuff today, I think I should like. not interact with people for a few days actually

[scarletwitching]

Has Wanda ever had short hair? Has she worn her tiara while having shorter hair?

Short Hair Wanda is a curséd artifact. Don't think I'm a short hair hater, but Wanda's short hair period was from Avengers West Coast vol. 2 #55-68, and that is truly one of the worst periods of her entire history. For reasons unrelated to hair. After that, her hair became long again overnight (was it a wig? I don't think they ever said) until it became short again in the last issue of AWC (#102). Then it was short in the first volume of Scarlet Witch, but went to a shoulder length in Force Works.

Did she wear the tiara with her short hair? Not really, mostly for plot-related reasons. The closest you get is issue #68 where you see in some panels that her hair is still short-ish, but in the ones where she is specifically wearing the tiara, it's short visually confusing and the hair length is unclear from those panels alone.

Avengers West Coast vol. 2 #68; writers: Roy & Dann Thomas; penciler: Paul Ryan; inker: Danny Bulanadi; colorist: Bob Sharen; letterer: Bill Oakley

I love when a crimson witch gestures at a robot and it topples over.

Without getitng into alternate universes, like Days of Future Past, the other notable (arguable) Short Hair Wanda is from X-Men vol. 2 #-1 where her hair is in a short bob style. Your mileage may vary as to whether or not that qualifies.

[dukeofriven]

I have something truly terrible, utterly vile, and deeply shameful I need to confess. It has been sitting with me for the better part of a week now, every element of my soul has cried out in anguish to come forward, and my guilty conscience has demanded I hide the shame no longer. All I ask is that you hear me out, let me explain and contextualize, let me try to make you understand the good reasons behind the awful thing I am doing.

I…

Oh God…

I... I have started to re-read Harry Potter-

NO WAIT COME BACK THERE’S A VERY GOO- oh, no, fuck, they’re gone.

Sigh.

Well, to the three of you who are left, please come in close, you can’t really have a sharing circle this spaced-out, it just looks like we’re social distancing on the internet like a bunch of weirdos. Come close, my remaining friends, and listen to my tale.

I fell out of love with Harry Potter long, long before it became a social necessity. I think my break-up with the series came in the years after the publication of Order of the Phoenix - which I’d liked but, on reflection, hadn’t loved 0 and it was firmed by the publication of Half-Blood Prince, a really depressing and glum book (Liz Rosenberg of the Boston Globe said of it that “the book bears the mark of genius on every page,” which is just… well, it’s a bit much, Liz. It’s a bit much.) By the time Deathly Hallows came out I didn’t rush to pick up a copy, and not just because, after six great, striking book covers, Bloomsbury/Raincoast absolutely shat the bed with Harry Potter and the Body-Oil Treasure Bukkake Threesome. By that point I simply didn’t care about the series and when I eventually got around to reading Hallows, I didn’t like it. My love of Potter - which had started all the way with buying Philosophers Stone as a voracious-reading nine-year old back in 1999, was over. I liked the movies, thought Curséd Child was a fascinatingly bizarre bit of dreck, thought the Fantastic Beasts films were pretty appalling. Go read Diane Duane instead, I tell people all the time - imagine if Potter was written by a smart, kind, progressive person who wasn’t full of hate. That’s an imperative, by the way - go buy her books, damnit.

Right now.

I’ll wait.

Rowling’s reputation has slipped somewhat in recent years. Curséd Child was too outré a script to be very beloved (though I understand that seeing the stage show was a really incredible experience), and the FB films didn’t show off her best qualities, but we all know that what tanked her in many fandom spaces is her toxic, noxious, somewhat shockingly virulent doubling-down on a kind of antiquated, second-wave feminist transphobia. If you’ve gotten this far you don’t need me to explain all the details - there are many think-pieces out there on the subject, good ones by people far more affected than I. Go and read them.

But as I said the other day, this fandom backlash against Rowling-the-person has led to some pretty lousy criticism about Potter-the-Book-Series, criticism that isn’t rooted at all in the text of Potter but in the anger, hurt, and pain caused by Rowling’s late 2010s behaviour. And frankly as someone who has been calling the books mediocre for years, this really bothers me - there are serious issues in the series, but people are wielding Rowling’s Modern Betrayal as a cudgel of critique. I’ve seen so many bizarre, bad takes come across my dash - you know the kind that are all about feeling satisfied that you’ve taken a slice of flesh out of something despicable, those feel-good mutual-hate sessions where everyone adds on with their two cents about ‘another thing’ Rowling did once, and everyone goes ‘oh yeah that was awful’ even if it was something totally mundane or completely unobjectionable because in the moment all anyone really wants is a shared community of commiseration? There’s nothing wrong with that, I get it - I just found a creator I love is an anti-vax PETA zealot and it really hurts and were I of a different temperament I’d probably go start my own kind of reckoning thread.

But the critic in me bristles. I’ve have been saying for years that Potter has serious structural problems, that Rowling’s world building is not very good if anyone would actually stop and think about it for a little while, that her characters make weird choices, that’s there’s some dreadful moral failings that nobody ever focuses on, that Hogwarts is a really badly run school, and that from a textual standpoint Voldemort has the curious distinction of being a villain who is defeated but never proven wrong. I’ve been ranting fo years! Years I say! I built this little anti-Rowling clubhouse and I have lived here by myself for the better part of fifteen years and all of a sudden this huge angry crowd has pushed into the central hall and knocked over everything, eaten my larder dry, given some very wrothful speeches and now y’all are singing a song about smashing my plates and I don’t want to go to the Lonely Mountain and fight a Rowling Dragon but I guess I don’t really have a choice do I?!

Essentially y’all are making me go on an adventure - to set out into the wilderness of Harry Potter and come back with some of that Treasure Bukkake of wisdom and understanding, and yes this extended Hobbit metaphor is going really well, thank you for asking. The thing is, in order to properly critique Potter, well… there are insanely wealthy Tik-Tok stars who weren’t even born when I stopped reading the series, so I kind of need to do that again if I want to do this right.

Because here’s the thing: Potter isn’t going away. Its the most insanely successful creator-driven franchise of our time, and it has a momentum and an inertia all its own. Most people don’t care about Rowling’s embrace of hate speech - I am sorry, they really don’t. Entire Twitter scandals of career-defining proportions have come and gone without the majority of consumers being aware of them, or giving a shit (this is why cancel culture only ever ends up affecting people whose entire audience is always-online internet folk.) This is no-less true of J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter profits hit a record high this year - people don’t care that she’s full of hate! Not on numbers that seem to be meaningful! There’s equally no rival to the Potter throne in Pop Culture. Twilight, Game of Thrones, Hunger Games - all of these touted as the next Potter-level franchises haven’t gone the distance, and I am not entirely certain anything ever will again. Potter is sui genesis - we’re stuck with it. Forever. It will never go away.

And so we need to talk about it - and I mean REALLY talk about it, not just fume because an author that meant so much to so many of us turned out to be an absolute piece of shit. That sucked, but she also always had some real odd failings, and we didn’t seem to care about it at the time. And that matters too. I said this the other day:

“That the most profoundly popular work of our time - one beloved by millions of us - is what it is despite its flaws says something about us as a society, and its also worth critiquing ourselves and our own mythmaking, historiography, and hagiography when it comes to Harry Potter.”

And that’s what I want to do.

The upsetting thing is that there is good in Harry Potter, and we don’t know how to live with that. That’s what makes some of these bad takes so lousy - they’re so angry and hurt that they need to rewrite the past to make it bearable. The fact that Potter is as big as it is is, in the viewpoint of some of these takes, nothing but a fluke, an accident. Something that happened in and of itself.

It would be so much easier if that we true. But it wasn’t then, and it’s not true now. We loved, and in many cases clearly still seem to love, these books for a reason, and it wasn’t that we were all transphobes back in the late 90s happy to financially support a kindred spirit. (Okay, culturally speaking I’d argue we totally were almost all transphobes in the late 90s, but the Potter books really aren’t about that - that’s not what made them popular.) And so if we’re going to live with this deeply, deeply problematic franchise that all this outrage, anger, fury, and shock have done absolutely nothing to halt their popularity - again, record profits - well damnit, then at the very least we’re going to critique it properly!

(And I guess I’m going to have to do it, because a lot of y’all are just… super bad at it. Really you are. I am so, so sorry, but your takes are… they’re dreadful. Can’t put it any nicer than that. I mean, I won’t say that mine are the only correct takes, but they definitely are. You’re welcome in advance.)

So that’s why I am re-reading Harry Potter. Because I loved this series and I fell out of love with it, and that the love died well and away before we all found out that Rowling’s such a shitty person.

And I want to talk about why.

[aconissa]

I'm so so sorry I know you said no more embarrassing crushes BUT I've been wracking my brain all day for one and I just remembered my like, second ever celeb crush was. Willy wonka. Yes, the j*hnny d*pp one. I had a Nickelodeon magazine with him on the cover that I would occasionally smooch. I hope this was curséd enough to warrant the ask 😔

it really and truly was <3 you have my deepest sympathies, I'm praying your taste has vastly improved since then