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Mar. 4th, 2011 12:36 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
ladyhadhafang.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
deathtocapslockAm I the only one a little bothered by Dumbledore? Not only with the fact he could end up in the Guinness Book Of World Records for "Most Incompetent Headmaster of All Time" (though I'm sure there's worse. :P), but also because...he just bugs me. I know JKR was trying to write him as the "flawed Yoda", so to speak (and to be fair, he's nowhere near Yoda. XD), but it's also how...preachy he gets. Towards Fudge, for example. You know, in Goblet of Fire, with, "You place too much importance on purity of blood, yadda yadda et cetera et cetera" -- which considering how he treated Tom Riddle and the Slytherins is...slightly hypocritical isn't it? Probably bad writing on JKR's part, though. :/
Anyways, sorry 'bout the rambling. Thoughts?
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Date: 2011-03-05 03:33 am (UTC)Older reader, well some of them (the number of DD fans on the net is disheartening), know to question such garbage and to see it for horribly disturbing statement that it is.
But kids who are told that Dumbledore is good, kind and always right?
And while childbirth deaths are much rarer now they still do happen.
So, what is the moral of the story?
If you know somebody who dies giving birth that means she was week and not loving?
Horrible, horrible stuff.
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Date: 2011-03-05 04:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-05 08:04 pm (UTC)Most of them are written as shallow, petty, manipulative, nagging, clingy, weak or supportive motherly characters only there to serve the more important males.
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Date: 2011-03-05 08:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-06 02:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-06 04:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-06 02:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-06 03:41 am (UTC)Most of them are written as shallow, petty, manipulative, nagging, clingy, weak or supportive motherly characters only there to serve the more important males.
Yet there's an article on hp_essays that asserts hatred for Lily is caused by misogyny. A lot of people use that essay as "evidence" that if you criticize Lily, you must be a misogynist. These people also think if you don't see Lily as a role model for minorities, you must be a racist--even though Lily is white, and the people saying she's not a role model are usually white!
I don't get why Lily critics are misogynists, but Rowling herself is not, despite her negative portrayals of females. I call logic fail!
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Date: 2011-03-06 04:36 am (UTC)Haven't seen that essay, I'll have to go and find it later. I do need something entertaining to read.
It boggles the mind how far will hardcore Rowling's fan go to make excuses for the plot holes, lack of planing and blatant characters flaws.
Btw. I'll never understand the need some people have to turn their favorite characters into saints and the ones they dislike into monsters.
As far as I know it is not against the law to like a characters warts and all. Heck, some of my all time favorites are very troubled individuals but I can acknowledge that they are far from ideal.
"I call logic fail!" is a wonderful way to describe the whole HP series.
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Date: 2011-03-06 06:34 am (UTC)That's just stupid. I reserve the right--and it is my right--to love, hate, or be indifferent to any fictional character I damned well please, without having to defend myself from gratuitous charges of bigotry. Such automatic attacks are themselves nothing but a kind of bigotry designed to shout down people who say something the shouters don't like.
"I call logic fail!" is a wonderful way to describe the whole HP series.
Thank you. :-)
The link to the essay is here: http://ravenstar84.livejournal.com/8987.html
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Date: 2011-03-06 02:31 pm (UTC)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jYcW1nEsGk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgSMxY6asoE
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Date: 2011-03-06 02:28 pm (UTC)Btw. I'll never understand the need some people have to turn their favorite characters into saints and the ones they dislike into monsters.
As far as I know it is not against the law to like a characters warts and all. Heck, some of my all time favorites are very troubled individuals but I can acknowledge that they are far from ideal."
*This*, so very much! D:
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Date: 2011-03-08 05:00 am (UTC)Not just characters. Real people, too. I'm one of the world's biggest Beatle fans, but this movement to turn John into a martyred saint annoys the heck out of me. The man was severely messed up and kind of a jerk. That's not surprising, given that both his parents abandoned him when he was little. To his great credit (and to some extent because of Yoko's pressure), he admitted he had problems, got therapy, and tried to be a better person. But he was still far from an angel, and it's not disrespectful to his memory to speak that truth.
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Date: 2011-03-10 08:57 pm (UTC)That's an important thing to remember no matter *what* the circumstances, actually. :)
(Feel free to disagree/correct me)
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Date: 2011-03-06 02:29 pm (UTC)What? Just...what? *What*?!
*Sighs*
Palpy, take this one...
http://palpatinenonono.ytmnd.com/
Seriously, I think the Nostalgia Chick would like a word with them. :P
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Date: 2011-03-06 03:34 pm (UTC)I don't think that the point that the author was trying to make about Lily being a minority was because of her real-life race (being a white English girl), but because she's Muggle-born. The argument pretty much says, "Imagine if Lily were Jewish/black/Hispanic, etc., and Snape had called her a real-life, corresponding racial epithet, Would you side with him then?" Basically, Muggle-borns represent minorities in the real world, and the budding Death Eaters are stand-ins for real-life supremacist groups like Neo-Nazis and the KKK, etc. So, in this view, not understanding why Snape was a bigot and Lily was right to reject him for being a bigot is equivalent to not understanding why a black girl rejects the friend who calls her the N-word.
I don't agree that all criticism of Lily is caused by misogyny. I do think that Severus was wrong to call her a Mudblood and I do think that it was ultimately his choice to join the Death Eaters. But I don't think that pointing out Lily's flaws is sexist. She *was* a bad friend. How exactly can someone who stands by the sidelines and tries not to smile while a supposed friend of theirs is being bullied be considered a "good friend?" How exactly is someone who ignores their best friend, to the point where people can't even definitively *tell* that they're best friends in OotP (I certainly couldn't), a nice person? Was Snape wrong to ally himself with people who considered his best friend to be trash? Yes, and so was Lily, since she practically did the same thing.
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Date: 2011-03-07 04:28 am (UTC)And criticizing Lily on specific points of behavior is I agree in no way necessarily sexist. In fact, putting women on pedestals and saying they are perfect (and by implication expecting them to be perfect) is IMHO just a subtler form of misogyny. It's still denying the fact that women are real, living individuals with their own strengths and weaknesses, equal with men. To me Lily may not be more likeable as a character with such definite flaws, but she is far more human and therefore easier to relate to than the perfect idol we were given before. And more interesting.
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Date: 2011-03-07 05:19 pm (UTC)*Claps*
Well-said, my friend. Well-said. :)
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Date: 2011-03-07 05:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:Why Lily Was Not an Oppressed Minority, Part 1
Date: 2011-03-08 06:50 am (UTC)Oh, yeah, I get all that, and I think it makes sense--as far as it goes. The problem is, that parallel requires the reader to import a lot of background from RL that doesn't fit Lily's particular situation.
For example, a RL minority person belongs to that group their whole life. They learn their inferior position in society very young and have to deal with it their entire lives, in nearly every context and nearly all the time. Lily didn't even know she was a witch until she was 9 and didn't know she belonged to a supposedly-despised minority until she got to Hogwarts. She never suffered any oppression for being a witch that we see, and the only magical people who regard her as inferior are clearly jerks whose opinion doesn't matter anyway. Eventually things heat up to where her life is threatened because of her ethnic group, but--and this is a BIG but--that doesn't happen until just a few years before her death. Having a few jerks think you suck for a few years of your life is entirely different from having all of society beat down and/or threaten you your whole life for belonging to the "wrong" ethnic group.
Furthermore, the population of magicals in England is tiny in comparison to the general population, about 5,000 vs. 56 million in the 1970s, and both populations were over 90% white. My main point is that Lily was an oppressed minority only as long as she stayed in the wizarding world. As soon as she left Hogwarts for Harrod's or Heathrow, nobody would see a Mudblood magic-stealer. They'd see a pretty young white woman, with all the privileges that go along with her race and looks. Unlike a real minority person, whose oppression is permanent and inescapable, she could not only leave her oppression and bigotry behind, but also join the ruling class, any time she wanted, just by leaving the magicals and going to the Muggles. Yes, that would require her to deny a part of herself, at least in public, but she was clearly prepared to do that anyway, or she would not have abandoned her family of origin for the wizarding world. Belonging to the ruling ethnic group from birth would have conferred on her a bone-deep confidence in the rightness of her existence that a few years of occasional mean remarks by a fringe group could not do much to undermine.
TBC
Re: Why Lily Was Not an Oppressed Minority, Part 1
Date: 2011-03-08 02:47 pm (UTC)/Unlike a real minority person, whose oppression is permanent and inescapable, she could not only leave her oppression and bigotry behind, but also join the ruling class, any time she wanted, just by leaving the magicals and going to the Muggles. Yes, that would require her to deny a part of herself, at least in public, but she was clearly prepared to do that anyway, or she would not have abandoned her family of origin for the wizarding world./
However, this part made me a little uncomfortable because it made me think of the different circumstances that gays and lesbians face. Unlike racial minorities, their minority status isn't extremely noticeable because it can't be ascertained from appearance alone. So, homosexuals do have the option of "denying a part" of themselves by pretending to be straight, which is a painful experience in itself. Those who are targeted for their religious beliefs also have an option that racial minorities don't have, since they can pretend to disavow their religion.
I don't mean to equate the struggle of LGBTs and religious believers to hide themselves in order to avoid persecution to Lily's simple option of pretending to be a Muggle, since I know that one is real while the other is fictional. It's just that I'm not sure if Lily's option would be so simple. Magic is an intrinsic part of her and I'm not sure that it would be so easy for her to live in a world where she'd be forced to deny who she is just to hide from people who are prejudiced against her.
Re: Why Lily Was Not an Oppressed Minority, Part 1
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From:Why Lily Was Not an Oppressed Minority, Part 2
Date: 2011-03-08 06:51 am (UTC)The "racism" in HP is more like going to a college with a few thousand students where a certain social group or club bullies you. If you don't want to put up with their garbage, just go to another school. You can easily leave the bigotry behind by disappearing into the larger population of non-magicals, so do that. Given how ludicrously low-tech the WW is, they'd never be able to find anyone who truly wanted to escape them.
That's another example of Rowling's logic fail. She takes the internecine squabble of a tiny population that killed a few dozen people in a single country and equates it with the biggest war in history, one that involved 5 continents and killed over 50 million people. I kept thinking how silly that was while reading DH.
Speaking of WWII, if anybody from the Rowling nether kiss forums sees my remarks and is offended by them, I can do no better than to quote FDR: "They are unanimous in their hate for me. And I welcome their hatred!"
Re: Why Lily Was Not an Oppressed Minority, Part 2
Date: 2011-03-08 01:27 pm (UTC)Re: Why Lily Was Not an Oppressed Minority, Part 2
Date: 2011-03-08 02:56 pm (UTC)Yes, but the problem is that Lily and Severus literally can't go to another school. As far as we know, Hogwarts is the only wizarding school in Britain. If they wanted to go somewhere else to learn magic, they'd have to go abroad. So, Snape doesn't have a way out to escape the bullying at school and Lily can't go to another school where blood purity isn't an issue.
But you are right; Severus seems much more trapped than Lily does.
/She takes the internecine squabble of a tiny population that killed a few dozen people in a single country and equates it with the biggest war in history, one that involved 5 continents and killed over 50 million people./
I agree. That's why Grindelwald's reign of terror seemed much more massive and bore more of a resemblance to WWII, since it involved more of Europe. England was familiar with him, but so was Viktor Krum and his family, as well as Gellert's home country of Germany. I used to wonder why only Britain (not even Britain - mostly England) was affected by Voldemort. The Bulgarian prime minister knew who Voldemort and Harry Potter were at the Quidditch World Cup, but did that mean that Voldemort's influence had spread to Bulgaria during the First War?
Re: Why Lily Was Not an Oppressed Minority, Part 2
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From:Re: Why Lily Was Not an Oppressed Minority, Part 2
Date: 2011-03-11 09:58 pm (UTC)Tell me about it. Besides the rampant discrimination against non-magics, this is probably my biggest beef with the series. How she thinks she's showing the horrors of World War II in a dinky fantasy series with a plot-device villain and a bunch of children I have no idea. But here's the thing: World War II, the Holocaust, and related subjects were such horrible and influential events in the history of the world that they can't BE duplicated in a fantasy setting, especially not one as childish as Rowling's. I am Jewish, I've studied the Holocaust on and off for several years, and to say that the situation Rowling's set up is in any way equivalent to the Nazi war crimes is just plain insulting.
Re: Why Lily Was Not an Oppressed Minority, Part 2
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