(part 1 since apparently part 2 didn't get marked as spam aha) Hey! It's cassiafrankincense so we've already talked about this a bit but whatever I'm always ready to talk about being angry/disappointed (no I will never be that mom that says "I'm not angry, I'm disappointed" because I'm usually both) in representation in HP.
I had thought about all your other points before wrt Hermione's character depth/motivations both in terms of her race and just as character history things, but not about the Yule Ball scene until you made that post, and it is super gross if she was always intended to be black. (I've been trying to think of a way Hermione "getting pretty" for the ball could be worded in a way that's not so. nah. something like her hair being tamed in a way Harry had never seen and that brought out the shape of her face, or something about how she'd pulled it back and twisted it in a seemingly impossible knot that brought attention to her gleaming brown eyes and the shining earrings. Or something that doesn't imply her hair was straight and in its straightness she became attractive. (honestly though I never thought her hair was straight in that scene but in some weird up-do that required a lot of hair gel or something, not to disagree, but because that's how most girls wore their hair at dances when I was in school))
But yeah my reaction to seeing that tweet was the same kind of stomach-cold type of annoyed that I felt when I was sitting in my friend's dorm and she told me about the news of, "Did you hear that JK Rowling said Dumbledore is gay?" before I started ranting in heated anger. It just read as trying for gaining unearned "representation cookies" which, honestly, is what a lot of her tweets and canon additions have read to me as since she took to social media. I never really had much of an opinion of Rowling as a person, I didn't really care, she wrote books I loved and that was enough to know about her. The way she acts like because she wrote white as default means there's open interpretation for characters but cannot accept open interpretation for one character in particular and condemns fans of him just is so two-faced and gross to me (I'm talking about Draco's possibility for redemption/the fact that Draco fans exist and not because he's a "bad boy") and also no, you wrote white as default and intended these characters as white, yes it allows in ways for fans to have their own headcanons of the characters as other races and cultures but you don't get credit for that. You didn't do that. The fans did. I'm just disappointed so much by her that I've tried to block any way of seeing her tweets because I don't need to know how she's claiming she put representation in her series when she really super didn't. But oh man thank you to gracerene for linking that post by Maggie Stiefvater because the whiteness of The Raven Cycle has been disappointing and upsetting since I started it because I am in love with this series and these characters and I've headcanoned the lead female as mixed while knowing that wasn't the intent. And it's just, it's just so lovely to see an author saying that hey it isn't okay that they did the thing and they want to do better and it's okay if you tell them they did a thing that isn't okay because they want to learn, they want to do better. And gosh that makes my heart feel so much better.
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Date: 2015-12-22 02:43 pm (UTC)I had thought about all your other points before wrt Hermione's character depth/motivations both in terms of her race and just as character history things, but not about the Yule Ball scene until you made that post, and it is super gross if she was always intended to be black. (I've been trying to think of a way Hermione "getting pretty" for the ball could be worded in a way that's not so. nah. something like her hair being tamed in a way Harry had never seen and that brought out the shape of her face, or something about how she'd pulled it back and twisted it in a seemingly impossible knot that brought attention to her gleaming brown eyes and the shining earrings. Or something that doesn't imply her hair was straight and in its straightness she became attractive. (honestly though I never thought her hair was straight in that scene but in some weird up-do that required a lot of hair gel or something, not to disagree, but because that's how most girls wore their hair at dances when I was in school))
But yeah my reaction to seeing that tweet was the same kind of stomach-cold type of annoyed that I felt when I was sitting in my friend's dorm and she told me about the news of, "Did you hear that JK Rowling said Dumbledore is gay?" before I started ranting in heated anger. It just read as trying for gaining unearned "representation cookies" which, honestly, is what a lot of her tweets and canon additions have read to me as since she took to social media. I never really had much of an opinion of Rowling as a person, I didn't really care, she wrote books I loved and that was enough to know about her. The way she acts like because she wrote white as default means there's open interpretation for characters but cannot accept open interpretation for one character in particular and condemns fans of him just is so two-faced and gross to me (I'm talking about Draco's possibility for redemption/the fact that Draco fans exist and not because he's a "bad boy") and also no, you wrote white as default and intended these characters as white, yes it allows in ways for fans to have their own headcanons of the characters as other races and cultures but you don't get credit for that. You didn't do that. The fans did. I'm just disappointed so much by her that I've tried to block any way of seeing her tweets because I don't need to know how she's claiming she put representation in her series when she really super didn't. But oh man thank you to gracerene for linking that post by Maggie Stiefvater because the whiteness of The Raven Cycle has been disappointing and upsetting since I started it because I am in love with this series and these characters and I've headcanoned the lead female as mixed while knowing that wasn't the intent. And it's just, it's just so lovely to see an author saying that hey it isn't okay that they did the thing and they want to do better and it's okay if you tell them they did a thing that isn't okay because they want to learn, they want to do better. And gosh that makes my heart feel so much better.