Deathly Hallows, chapter 2

[anehan]

In Memoriam

* The Dursleys are leaving tea cups outside Harry's bedroom door. What are they, house elves?

*Harry has never learned to heal wounds and thinks it's a serious flaw in his magical education. Maybe he ought to have, you know, studied during the six years at Hogwarts instead of letting Hermione do all his work for him. Sorry, Harry, but you have no one else than yourself to blame. Normal people, if they had a lunatic after their blood, would have actually devoted some time for making sure they weren't completely unprepared.

* Harry has never cleaned his trunk before. Gross. Our Harry isn't much for hygiene.

* Finding a fragment of the mirror Sirius had given him, Harry feels a sudden upsurge of bitter memories, stabs of regret and longing. He suffers, I tell you.

* Harry is going to take his photograh album and a stack of letters with him. Good lord, what does he think he's going to do with them. The boy is an idiot.

* And we come to the sickening obituary by Elphias Doge. One more person whom Dumbledore managed to hoodwink into believing he was a noble person.

* Dumbledore never revealed the remotest anti-Muggle tendency. Except when he bullied the Dursleys. But that doesn't count, because the Dursleys totally deserved it.

* Dumbledore became the most brilliant student Hogwarts had ever seen and constantly outshone his friends. Bet he liked that. It would have done good for him to be second-best at something. Instead, everything confirmed him in his belief that he was superior to others and that it was his duty to manipulate others for the greater good.

* According to Doge, Dumbledore never had Ministerial ambitions. True enough. He just wanted to take over the world.

* "Albus Dumbledore was never proud or vain". Ahahahahahaa!

* Dumbledore's losses "endowed him with great humanity and sympathy". Bitch, please. The man is clearly incapable of empathy.

* Doge was right in one thing, though: Dumbledore always worked for the greater good. Too bad his methods and definition of "greater good" were rather questionable.

* Harry had thought he knew Dumbledore quite well. What made him think that? The great openness Dumbledore displayed in his dealings with Harry, perhaps?

* Harry thinks that the idea of a teen-aged Dumbledore was odd, like trying to imagine a stupid Hermione. Much as I love Hermione, I have no problem in imagining her stupid. She isn't half so clever as she likes to think. For example, what good did it do to the DA to brand the traitor's face? It didn't prevent Marietta from squealing.

* The only personal question Harry had asked Dumbledore was the only one he suspected Dumbledore hadn't answered honestly. That's too naïve even for Harry.

* Unpleasant Skeeter may be, but I at least would rather read her book than any more of Doge's pennings. There might ever be a shred of truth in what she writes, if you manage to discount the more lurid details.

* Skeeter calls the Potter-Dumbledore relationship unhealthy, even sinister. Brava! At least someone finally got it right.

* Another chapter in which nothing happens comes to an end. I really need that alcohol to get through this.



Informed Attributes:
Dumbledore is noble. No, really.

Misdirected Answering:
Did you hear what Dumbledore got up to as a teenager? What do you mean, you're not interested?

Nut o' Fun:
Desiccated beetle eyes.

Final score: 3. Nothing happens in this chapter.

Comments

Re: pt 2

[violaswamp.livejournal.com]

1. Not really. I don't think anything "interesting" must necessarily be a component part of sexuality. So saying that putting in enough component parts of sexuality will suggest the whole isn't the same as saying that anything interesting will necessarily be taken as sexual.

2. Surely this is the same as any other category of interpretation? Of course you have the right to decide if something (erotic or not) is there in the text, but other people have the right to state that your opinion is wrong if they can back it up. Yes, there's an eye-of-the-beholder component to this, but IMO no more so than all other things involved in interpreting a book.

3. Then it's a good thing I never said that. I was talking about sexuality as "the whole," yes, but only because we had previously been discussing its component parts. I never said or implied that the non-sexual relationship isn't a "whole" relationship in its own right.

But you're limiting your sample to online fandom, and further to the portion of online fandom that expresses fannishness by reading and writing fanfic and meta.

Yes. Since we were, after all, talking about fanfiction and things like shipping archives and online commentary, that seems like a fair and reasonable limitation. And in my past experience when I've heard people talk about "fandom" they meant "online fic-writing fandom." Maybe this usage is more idiosyncratic than I thought. I'm not 100% up to speed on fan vocabulary.

But I'm talking about cues that point toward a sexual interpretation and only a sexual interpretation, with a minimum of ambiguity.

I see. That's a much narrower interpretation than I'd use about objective cues of any kind, because I think you can say that a text objectively contains hints of a given kind of interpretation without saying that it objectively mandates that interpretation, but that's a nitpicky point on my part.

Which, I think, answers my question about where slashers get their material.

Not to beat a dead horse, but if you're conceding that there's something in the text that can reasonably be interpreted as slashy, then doesn't that at the very least affirm the idea that there's some textual basis for the slashers' interpretation, and that it's not all down to outside factors?

Re: pt 2

[cressida0201.livejournal.com]

So saying that putting in enough component parts of sexuality will suggest the whole isn't the same as saying that anything interesting will necessarily be taken as sexual.

I would say rather, anything interesting will be used to make something sexual, even if other ingredients have to be added from outside the text in order to get to the sexual part. Some elements do lend themselves more easily to the technique than others, of course.

Surely this is the same as any other category of interpretation?

But that's my point. You're taking away my right to interpret.

Of course you have the right to decide if something (erotic or not) is there in the text, but other people have the right to state that your opinion is wrong if they can back it up.

I disagree. Opinions are neither right nor wrong; that is what makes them opinions and not facts.

Since we were, after all, talking about fanfiction and things like shipping archives and online commentary, that seems like a fair and reasonable limitation.

You were using the point that Sirius/Remus was a popular pairing with "fandom" to support your position. If it's only popular with a certain segment of Fandom (I'm using the capital F to denote a wider category than just the portion who are writing slash fanfiction), then that makes its popularity less significant.

And in my past experience when I've heard people talk about "fandom" they meant "online fic-writing fandom."

I've often seen it used that way too, but for purposes of this discussion, I don't think that limiting ourselves to online fic-writing fandom is especially productive.

Not to beat a dead horse, but if you're conceding that there's something in the text that can reasonably be interpreted as slashy, then doesn't that at the very least affirm the idea that there's some textual basis for the slashers' interpretation, and that it's not all down to outside factors?

Not to beat a dead cake, but I'm going to return to that metaphor once more. I have never denied that a text may contain eggs, and that it is possible to make cake with eggs. But I get annoyed when people claim that the text contains cake on the basis of the fact that it has eggs. Clearly this doesn't bother you, but it does bother me. I don't think either of us is going to convince the other of her opinion at this point.

Re: pt 2

[violaswamp.livejournal.com]

I disagree. Opinions are neither right nor wrong; that is what makes them opinions and not facts.

Ah, now we're getting into the question of whether an interpretation can be "wrong" or not. Perhaps "wrong" is, well, the wrong word, but I'd certainly say some interpretations can be better-supported or more fact-based than others.