![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ms_minervaI procrastinated on posting this because I was nervous!
I want to start by saying that the Harry Potter series was deeply important to me growing up, and it will always hold a special place in my heart. It’s a masterwork of storytelling and world building and taught me a lot about how to be a good person in a dark world. That said, it’s important to be critical of the media you consume; you can love something but still want it to be better and call out its flaws.
As I grew older and came into my own queer identity (aided by fanfiction and other seminal fanworks created by the Harry Potter community), I became more critical of flaws in the series—its lack of diversity, its lack of queer characters, its implicit sexism at times, and its writer’s unwillngness to own up to her mistakes and learn from the changing political climate and her own supporters. The immediate examples that come to my mind are using lycanthropy as a metaphor for HIV/AIDS while giving Remus Lupin an explicitly heterosexual orientation (much to fans’ chagrin), drawing from Nazism in her depiction of Voldemort and his followers without including any Jewish characters, taking credit for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’s casting of a black Hermione when she clearly intended for the character to be white (see her own art for the first book!), and defending her choice to make Nagini a Korean woman with an Indonesian name who remains permanently transformed into an Albanian snake(???) in the latest Fantastic Beasts movie.
I like the books and my favorite parts are the world-building and the fact that it’s a magical boarding school. I wish JK would stop adding to “canon” and digging herself into holes. Harry Potter is a weird franchise for me in that I tend to like a lot of the fan works more than the actual series.
Before I even get into Cursed Child I’ll point out some heteronormativity/sexism. For me the main issue I have with women overall in HP is that every single one gets married straight out of high school, and all except Hermione take their husbands’ last names—I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with women doing that, it just doesn’t make sense that they’d *all* do that. I guess that struck me more as old-fashioned than straight-up sexist. But Tonks is my biggest peeve! She was absolutely screwed over (and Remus as well re: the way he treated her). And even if she did have to end up with him, it really upsets me that she was out of commission for most of book 7 because she got pregnant (in the middle of the war! why would she and Remus have a kid in the middle of the war?!). And when she finally gets to appear at the Battle of Hogwarts she gets killed off. Tonks deserved so much better. Hell, she could have made Tonks queer too (she could have read as gender nonconforming to be honest, and I think that’s a real missed opportunity). Even if she couldn’t explicitly acknowledge that she could have kept Tonks as a badass, independent, colorful character instead of having her pine away over a man who rejected her. Ugh.
I’m negative on the play but would have embraced its lunacy and loved it (the trolley lady is actually an immortal monster? Delphi is literally a self-insert fanfic OC? Draco is a good dad and wrestles Harry when he thinks Harry is making his son sad?) if it weren’t for the SUDDEN HETEROSEXUALITY that they forced into the ending. Harry Potter and the Cursed Heteronormativity? Albus and Scorpius had amazing chemistry and were honestly the only good part of the play other than Draco’s character growth. I could go on about other issues I have with the play (Ron and Hermione’s character derailment, no Neville, Harry is ABUSIVE) but it’s all been said before.
Anyway, here’s my article round-up.
- https://www.dailydot.com/parsec/harry-potter-cursed-child-fanfic-albus-scorpius/
- “Nothing prepared us for the discovery that the Hogwarts Express snack lady is actually some kind of immortal cyborg Terminator.”
- https://www.vox.com/2016/9/4/12534818/harry-potter-cursed-child-rowling-queerbaiting
- https://splinternews.com/harry-potter-and-the-cursed-child-could-and-should-have-1793860881
- https://www.hypable.com/harry-potter-cursed-child-lgbtq-scorpus/
- the staircase ballet
- Albus and Scorpius are listed as Bait and Switch Lesbians on TvTropes: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BaitAndSwitchLesbians
- Also I looked up articles for the broadway production and an interviewer actually asked the Scorpius actor about queer baiting?? I’m happy that at least it’s in mainstream conversation!
no subject
Date: 2019-04-01 05:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-04-01 11:09 pm (UTC)Thank you for reading :)
no subject
Date: 2019-04-04 10:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-04-04 11:19 pm (UTC)Yay! Thanks for reading and commenting :)