#me deciding pepper is trans is just getting to write trans joy about gender :)

[izzysarchivedblogs]

reminder my pepper potts is proud to be a trans woman :)

trans your characters. trans your faves. nature will heal.

[liketolaugh-writes]

I know I've talked about this before, but God, I'm never going to stop resenting the hold that Harry Potter has on me.

As an autistic person, special interests never really leave you, and that's more true for longer-standing ones. I really can't explain how all-consuming they are, how much time and energy and love you pour into them, how much joy and comfort you get from them. I'm kind of between special interests right now, after finishing both Constellations and Blue Food Project, and it's unsettling. Makes me restless, leaves a lot of time in my day. (Time I can use to look for jobs! Positives.)

Anyway. Harry Potter was definitely my longest-standing special interest to date. It was my SI through most of elementary school, and given the choice, I would do nothing except reread them, over and over and over and over again. My parents had to institute a rule where every time I finished the series, I had to wait a certain amount of time before I read it again, and I always did as soon as the time was up. There are parts of it, useless stupid lines, that I can still recite from memory. ("And he was even brave enough to nibble the end off a funny gray one that turned out to be pepper" has always been my favorite example.) I don't engage much with the Harry Potter fandom, because it's a mutant factioned thing that kind of scares me, but the story stays with me nonetheless.

Like many other fans, this letter broke my heart; I'm sure you know the one even without clicking the link. She's only gotten worse since then (every so often I still look at her Twitter account and mourn) but this was the beginning of the end. Most authors, I can forgive their transgressions; I can trust that they've grown, I can accept that their work is flawed, and I can enjoy what I read despite that.

Every since that letter, and plenty of the subsequent scandals besides, I've been unable to do that. I read any part of Harry Potter and I can see nothing but flaws. I see sexism, and ableism, and cultural appropriation and colonialism and hypocrisy. I think, why are there so many crowds of tittering girls? and why does everyone hate Fleur seemingly just for being French and pretty? and why did she design the Slug Club without any acknowledgement of 'this is literally how to break into a career field?' There is nothing there for me but frustration and hurt.

I've seen people in the trans community complain about cis folk asking if they can 'still enjoy' Harry Potter, which I understand. (I consider myself nonbinary, but my gender identity is so unimportant to me that I still consider my place in that community tenuous.) But this isn't that. This is frustration. Harry Potter was carved into me years ago, and I can't seem to dig it out, and I have yet to decide what to do with that.

But the story stays with me. The memory of it is inescapable. I don't even really need to reread the books to write fanfics, most of the time; I know every plot point by heart. How could I not? And every unanswered question, every point of shoddy worldbuilding that drives me nuts about that world - I can fix those. I do it all the time in other fandoms. It's really not that hard to create the answers to the plot holes that bother you.

Most of the Harry Potter fics I write are crossovers - Harry Potter goes well with just about any world, kind of like Avengers does. But there's one I've been playing with that bugs me in a special way.

I mentioned finishing 'Constellations,' my two part series where Percy Jackson goes to therapy for everything he goes through in the PJO and HoO books. That was a love letter to Percy Jackson, to Rick Riordan's writing. Like any writer, he has his flaws and weak points, but I love it nonetheless, every part of it. I wrote it with the intent to supplement and highlight canon for everything I love about it.

Now, I find myself writing a similar fic for Harry Potter, with Harry Potter going through therapy. It's in the beginning stages yet (such stories are obviously difficult) but it's such a fascinating topic that I can't shake it. What happens when a survivor of such vicious neglect suddenly is accused of seeking attention at every turn? How can someone so victimized by the Ministry come to trust them enough to work as an Auror? Did Dumbledore truly understand what he subjected Harry to with the Dursleys?

But with Constellations, I had respect for Riordan's writing that I don't have for Rowling's. Such a story would come from a completely different place. And that's fascinating, too. It's just complicated.

I'm not going anywhere with this, I guess. It's just- frustrating, to so thoroughly resent a story and a cast that I also love so much.