OMG, the werewolves. Isn't that awful? I am way, way not a fan. Writcraft wrote some excellent meta about this a while back, here, and there's really good discussion of it there, too. And I rambled on a lot there, so won't repeat, but YES I find that very very problematic.
I'm less keen on saying that one thing is more problematic than another. The werewolf stuff is both more and less blatant; if a reader don't catch the metaphor it's not much of anything, but if a reader does catch the movie it's awful. The race of a main character is less horrible and offensive, but it's something people are more definitely going to suss out for themselves. And you're right that JKR's overall reaction is to sort of hand-wave it all away (though that does make her inclusion of classism more interesting - why keep that?) but I've never been able to figure out whether that's her saying that her not dealing with it, or her saying that the magical world isn't bigoted. Mysteries. (And things I wish had been addressed.)
TOTALLY agree that that's where the rest of us come in!!! And that's one of my favorite things about fandom. So many minds working together to explore these texts....it's really, really, really cool. And I think really powerful!! I would not be at all surprised if the popularity of black Hermione headcanons had something to do with this casting, and that would be a really amazing thing, to see what can happen when people do get active about representation in fandom!
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Date: 2015-12-22 06:31 pm (UTC)OMG, the werewolves. Isn't that awful? I am way, way not a fan. Writcraft wrote some excellent meta about this a while back, here, and there's really good discussion of it there, too. And I rambled on a lot there, so won't repeat, but YES I find that very very problematic.
I'm less keen on saying that one thing is more problematic than another. The werewolf stuff is both more and less blatant; if a reader don't catch the metaphor it's not much of anything, but if a reader does catch the movie it's awful. The race of a main character is less horrible and offensive, but it's something people are more definitely going to suss out for themselves. And you're right that JKR's overall reaction is to sort of hand-wave it all away (though that does make her inclusion of classism more interesting - why keep that?) but I've never been able to figure out whether that's her saying that her not dealing with it, or her saying that the magical world isn't bigoted. Mysteries. (And things I wish had been addressed.)
TOTALLY agree that that's where the rest of us come in!!! And that's one of my favorite things about fandom. So many minds working together to explore these texts....it's really, really, really cool. And I think really powerful!! I would not be at all surprised if the popularity of black Hermione headcanons had something to do with this casting, and that would be a really amazing thing, to see what can happen when people do get active about representation in fandom!