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this passage got me over-analyzing on main again, lol. this part right here, in the GOF, is pure ginny and it really kinda cements why i don't get HBP ginny (the book). because this ginny and the ginny we get from POA all the way to OOTP are the same ginny: she's concerned for the safety of others, fiercely loyal, occasionally bashful but also bold, kind of an outcast and otherwise ordinary.

first of all, i never had a problem with quidditch-lover ginny. if anything, i loved the idea of her becoming bold as a response to being (basically) raised by fred, george, ron and bill and pursuing quidditch in spite of them. before HBP, we see her stand up to ron and even harry. we know she's used to standing up for others especially when it comes to her brothers.

but then in HBP, all of a sudden, we get this super popular, super beautiful, snarky, petty girl that just seems out of left-field. the book relies more on telling us that ginny is all these things instead of showing us. we hear slytherins talk about how good looking she is, but harry himself at the height of his attraction to her never really describes her looks as much of anything but "blazing." there's so many other words he uses to describe characters looks, whether he finds them attractive or not (he describes cho's freckles and ponytail), but there's so little for ginny.

but that's minor.

the big problem here is that we're supposed to believe ginny is suddenly popular because . . . she is. she makes mean spirited jokes and hexes people that merely irritate her. not being a pushover is one thing. being that petty is another.

this behaviour isn't a problem for me because i think ginny should be perfect and ordinary and a good girl, but because there's very little character development to warrant any of these changes, and what we know of her in other books is almost completely abandoned for hinny endgame.

and the best example i can use is tom riddle's diary.

in CoS (one of my top three, personally), we have a ginny who is responsible for the near-deaths of at least three students and then herself. so three important things to keep in mind is:

She felt like an outcast and lonely her first year (she didn’t fit in despite her siblings’ notoriety) and so turned to riddle's diary for solace.

She probably got a bad rep for nearly killing all those students, which couldn't have been easy for her (remember how strongly the kids reacted when they merely suspected harry).

In OOTP, she confessed to feeling traumatized about her experience in the chamber.

In book 5, we know that she felt some kinship with luna, even after initially calling her "loony" and regretting it, and it's likely because she knows what it's like to feel like an outcast. she didn't have a very good first year and we barely read about what she had to endure as a result of her actions in her second and third year (bc pov harry literally doesn't care until book 6), and she's also the only girl in her family who must stick up for herself and her own interests.

so it's disarming to see ginny suddenly popular in book 6, very mean-spirited and thoroughly unfunny, and so disloyal to her brother that she goes out of her way to publicly humiliate him. ginny was not above teasing her brother in other books, but she was never mean to the people she loved or even in general. ginny may have fought many times with ron and the twins, but her defining trait has always been loyalty. not just to harry, but her friends and family.

furthermore, HPB ginny is VERY liberal with her hexes and jinxes. she even goes as far as to defend harry's use of sectumsempra against hermione! now one can say this is because of her loyalty to harry, and you'd almost have me there! but it's still quite a ways away from GOF ginny who stood up to ron and harry making fun of girls and literally tag-teamed with hermione in calling them out. ginny was loyal, but she usually stood up to her friends and family when they did something wrong because she had a soft-spot for the downtrodden.

and i speak of the curses because if ginny didn't have to be shoe-horned into a relationship with harry in HPB so that harry got Barrows citizenship, her character would have been grounded in the horrors she faced in CoS--meaning that she felt regret for all the trauma she caused others and experienced some anxiety about her ability to control herself. or we could all just assume that she didn't ever address what she did to others (like saying sorry), making her a profoundly sociopathic character (and very different from who she was in earlier books). either she was badly written (that is written exclusively to titillate Harry) in HBP or just a terrible person all along.

i prefer to go with the first one.

i think ginny was terrified of what she did under the possession of tom riddle, and it's mentioned in OOTP that it traumatized her. why wouldn't she be afraid of becoming vindictive and hurting people? why would she all of a sudden become very liberal and nonchalant about performing powerful and painful hexes on people who simply annoyed her? why would she be barrelling into players during quidditch matches when she, at heart, values fairness and others well-being? why wouldn't she be scared, like harry is when he starts sharing voldemort's visions, of herself and hurting the ones she loves? wouldn't that have been a better basis for their eventual romance?

it annoys me that JK Rowling says that the reason ginny is harry's soulmate is because of their strength and passion rather than their shared care for the marginalized and their sensitivity toward the people they love. because the ginny that shared that with harry is gone in the book where she has to get with him.

and while i know the books aren't written to be romantic or focus on any romances, the fact remains that in stories, if anything is to be believed, it must be well-established, and hinny's romance isn't.

the failure of the relationship isn't that it isn't romantic, but that it isn't believable in the first place based on what we know of the characters. because when ginny was her true self, harry didn't notice her. and when ginny was with harry, she wasn't herself.

maybe what's romantic about it is it's practically a greek tragedy in that sense.

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The Scarlet Cuff

“Dear diary, forget it”

for context: those red cuffs are used against highly dangerous criminals going to Azkaban. Once deployed, it automatically alerts backup…

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Here's the thing. The main reason voldemort's circle is mostly male is not entirely because they're purposefully keeping it that way. Lyk I'm not saying they were feminists lol, but we barely get any evidence of the DEs being sexist. The only piece of evidence we get towards this is the old inheritance rule in the pureblood families that the property passes down to the male heir and his children, and only passes on to the female if there's no inheritor, but lyk i said, that's not the main reason for the DEs being exclusively male. Interestingly enough, we hear more misogynistic stuff from Rita Skeeter and Molly Weasley than any of the DEs, and from ron than draco (don't get me wrong, i actually like how rowling didn't shy away from representing ppl's views in a way that's, tho not acceptable ofc, appropriate to their age and time period, but it's interesting nonetheless)

The main reason the DEs are mostly male is because of Rowling's idea of what is and isn't acceptable behavior for a woman. She seems to have this belief that women are inherently 'purer' and more morally superior compared to men; even when they do morally questionable or downright criminal stuff, it's either not viewed as such or is justifiable according to her (like with hermione scarring marietta's face and merope essentially drugging and raping tom riddle sr). Yes, there are female villains, but they are very limited in number and don't have the nuance and complexity given to the male ones. Hell, most of the time they don't even have a proper backstory. The only complex female character who is not amongst the good guys is petunia. Umbridge imo is very interesting, and ik the fandom loves bellatrix, but personally I'm not that taken by her canon version, tho i love how she's written in the fandom as ppl make her way more fleshed out than she actually is. Alecto Carrow is mentioned a couple of times ig. Narcissa's beliefs and association with a terrorist organization are forgiven because she apparently redeemed herself through mother love (funny how harry's long list of father figures can remain interesting, flawed human beings with a well rounded personality and story, and still die for him. Almost as if they're allowed to exist without gender specific obligations).

So in Rowling's view, the women in question are not just villains because of their actions and beliefs (you'd think that would be enough), but also because of the added factor of not fitting into her idea of conventional womanhood, which is the actual reason why the ratio of female villains to the male ones is soo disproportionately low; it has little to do with Voldemort and his DEs or their ideology.

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fem drarry 🤤🤤🤤

Yeah I sort love them

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Local Writer Shocked As She Realises Planned 'Short Fanfic' Is Turning Into Multi Chapters Plot Oriented Slow Burn Fanfic

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what i would give to see a graphic novel/webcomic(??) version of the captive prince with your art! im always so charmed by it--thank you for making such pretty art!! :D

i can't be trusted drawing a capri graphic novel... it'd be all chibi 🤏

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Analysis so bad you don't even know what it's talking about anymore.

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and all the tears we cry tell us we're made the same; and when we fall aside, let's hope we fall in place; we built our different lives, but they all break the same;

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What do you think of the double standard between How Regulus is treated vs Draco?

I saw a few who believe that it’s hypocritical and strange Rowling treated Regulus as redeemed even though he was technically worse than Draco.

Regulus Actually made a shrine to Voldemort while he was active, and neither of his parents were death eaters. Regulus seemed to actively seek him out and only defected because Voldemort was mean to Kreacher or he thought a Horcrux was too far.

While Draco only enjoyed the stories his parents told him while Voldemort was gone, his parents actually were death eaters and Voldemort was the one who went to him and ordered/threatened him into working for him. He defected because he actually felt bad about the evil actions that he didn’t know much about when he was younger.

Truly, the biggest sin Draco commits is surviving the book.

JKR has sort of a thing about death (and/or willingness to die) being inherently redemptive and noble. There is a reason the climax of Book 7 revolves around Harry "Master of Death" Potter martyring himself. Then the epilogue revolves around Harry's sons... named for a string of men who did some pretty not-great things... but y'know, they all had noble sacrificial deaths, so they're cool. According to JKR, Voldemort's main problem is that he doesn't want to die. In the Harry Potter books, death - and especially the right kind of death - purifies you.

So Regulus dies stealing a horcrux and protecting a house elf. And Draco... doesn't.

I've thought quite a bit about the scene in Malfoy Manor, because to be perfectly honest, the framing is so all over the place that I'm not sure how I'm supposed to read it. Because I would have said that Draco buying Harry time with "I can’t — I can’t be sure,” is an effective and brave example of passive resistance. You'd think it would represent some sort of turning point... except no, Draco spends the rest of the book with no agency, needing to be saved multiple times by Harry. He ends the book unimportant, and mildly pathetic (with his receding hairline.)

I think the intention was to have the Malfoy Manor scene read as a sort of symbolic castration. Draco loses his wand, just like his father - (and oh boy is Lucius' loss of a wand treated as a castration.) We learn later that Draco lost not only his wand, but the Elder wand as well, and then to top things off... Dobby shows up to free the prisoners for him, and Dobby's the one with the noble, heroic death.

It might even be a deliberate flip of what happened with Regulus. Regulus dies destroying horcruxes and sacrificing himself for a house elf. Draco survives preventing horcruxes from being destroyed (at least, he's letting the sword that destroys horcruxes be taken away from Harry.) And then he lets a house-elf die doing the job that (narratively) he was supposed to so. Freeing Harry & Friends, dying in the process.

When it comes to Regulus himself... @saintsenara has written this fantastic analysis, and specifically about how he functions as both a Draco parallel and a Snape parallel at different times, and I absolutely could not say it better.

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✨✨

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Strongianos 🏋‍♂️

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Nap date!

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Pt.2 of my previous post:

Baadahil joined in

Mods were a mistake.

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