GoF 6

[pauraque_bk]

Happy birthday wishes to sistermagpie!


Discussion on Chapter 5 included Ginny's Great Personality Shift (+ love potions) and wizarding Imperialism.

This chapter is totally short and chock full of exposition. A holiday for my weary fingers.


GoF 6: The Portkey

[Mr Weasley] was wearing what appeared to be a golfing jumper and a very old pair of jeans, slightly too big for him and held up with a thick leather belt.

'What d'you think?' he asked anxiously. 'We're supposed to go incognito -- do I look like a Muggle, Harry?'

'Yeah,' said Harry, smiling, 'very good.' (62)

Since we've been ragging on Arthur's lack of Muggle skillz for the last few chapters, I thought it was only fair to point out his total success in dressing reasonably. Kudos, good sir!

And then a load of exposition about Apparition.

'We told you to destroy them!' said Mrs Weasley furiously, holding up what were unmistakeably more Ton-Tongue Toffees. 'We told you to get rid of the lot! Empty your pockets, go on, both of you!' (64-65)

And good for Molly. Speaking of Molly, she's the only one who doesn't go to the QWC.

And then a load of exposition about Portkeys.

Hermione came over the crest of the hill last, clutching a stitch in her side. (67)

This reminded me of something I almost pointed out in the last chapter, but didn't:

One, with very bushy brown hair and rather large front teeth, was Harry and Ron's friend, Hermione Granger. The other, who was small and red-haired, was Ron's younger sister, Ginny. (51)

It seemed odd to contrast Ginny with Hermione by saying she was "small". There seems to be no reason to point out that Hermione had a harder time making it up the hill (the sentence just sits there in its own paragraph, unrelated to anything else). Is it possible to read that Hermione is overweight, or is there something else to contradict that?

Cedric Diggory was an extremely handsome boy of around seventeen. He was captain and Seeker of the Hufflepuff house Quidditch team at Hogwarts. (67)

Cedric is so extreeeeemely handsome! It's been pointed out that the external reason for Harry to remark on the attractiveness of the guys he meets is that the books are being written by a straight female who doesn't know that straight teenaged boys don't think like that. But internally, it just makes Harry read as queer. Which doesn't bother me in the least. :D

'Ced's talked about you, of course,' said Amos Diggory. 'Told us all about playing against you last year ... I said to him, I said -- Ced, that'll be something to tell your grandchildren, that will ... you beat Harry Potter!!'

[...] Cedric looked slightly embarrassed.

'Harry fell off his broom, Dad,' he muttered. 'I told you ... it was an accident...' (68)

Aw, Cedric's so sweet. And he talks about Harry. OTP! Er.

Since we're here, let's talk about why Cedric exists. I've been thinking about this, and I can't quite pin it down. What happens if Cedric isn't present in the story? Harry is the sole Hogwarts champion. Crouch-as-Moody has to find a different indirect way to tell Harry what to do with the egg. Cho goes out with someone else, who (presumably) doesn't die, so she isn't all distraught in OotP. Fleur can't die because she has to marry Bill, so let's say it's Krum who gets killed by Peter. (Hermione would be affected by that.)

We don't know what (if anything) Krum will be needed for in Book 7. Does he make a worse martyr than Cedric? Is Cedric's death more shocking because he's from Hogwarts -- and because he's so inescapably good?


Quick, someone make me a Cedric icon!

Previous GoF posts are saved in memories here.

Comments

[pauraque]

I'm sure a lot of it is just what we've been accustomed to in slash fandom for the past, oh, forty years. If you were slashing Kirk and Spock in 1967, there was simply not any possibility that your interpretation would be canon. It had to do with what was and wasn't acceptable on television.

These days, that's less true, and I think fandom -- just like everyone else -- is still struggling to absorb that fact. People appear to think that Harry Potter is exempt from the possibility of queerness happening in canon because it's a young adult series, but I wonder if these people have read any other young adult literature lately. There's sex in YA lit. There are gay people in YA lit.

One thing I will grant is that it's still very rare to get "surprise" queerness. TV shows, movies, and YA books can have queer characters, but their queerness is part of the premise -- you know it going in, which makes it easy for readers/viewers who don't like it to reject it. Counter-examples that come to mind are Homicide: Life on the Street and ER, which both had main characters realizing they were queer several seasons into the show. But that's still unusual.

So, normally you'd say it would be very unlikely for a person writing a YA series to shout surprise! in the last couple of books and make the main character queer. That's usually not the way it's done -- you could write a series about a gay wizard, but you'd say up-front it was about a gay wizard.

However, HP is a growing-up story. When Harry's eleven, in the first book, it wouldn't really be appropriate (in the eyes of most) to address his sexuality at all. But by the end of the series, it would seem silly not to address it. We're talking about the time most of us do consciously realize we're queer. So if Harry is "really" (in JKR's mind) queer, the time to address it would be sometime in the midst of the series, not at the beginning. Which is what JKR's done, really, whether she meant to or not.

Is some of this making sense, or am I just rambling? I guess my point was that we still expect to be presented with a text's queerness up-front, rather than surprised by it halfway through. And it's beginning to be silly that we still expect that.

Moreover, I think HBP's obsessive surface heterosexuality seems to contain elements of parody, and some deliberate if sly pointers that we should not take it quite seriously, and I wonder if this reflects a dialog with WB about acceptable content, and some subversiveness on JKR's part.

I agree that it sometimes reads as parody, and I would love it if you were right about the reason for that!

[scarah2.livejournal.com]

Even if Harry stays with Ginny and never kisses anyone else for the rest of his short-ass life, that still doesn't mean he is a Kinsey 0. I'm not sure what it would take for me to think that he is.

PS my commenting skillz suck.

[pauraque]

Yeah, rather like the rest of the world, fandom seems to have trouble accepting bisexuality.

[scarah2.livejournal.com]

Yeah, like all the S/R shippers barbecuing their books over Remus/Tonks! I was like, what?

It hasn't even been proven that she can't grow a dick for herself. After all, Polyjuicing into a MOTOS is now canon.

[caesia390.livejournal.com]

Well, having read the Love Potion Theory referenced... somewhere else... I wonder if that is the surprise. The unmasking at the end of Book VI/VII (or the beginning of Book VII?). Not necessarily that Harry is queer (though I think he is), but that his abrupt and extreme attraction to Ginny wasn't real.

But anyway. My most profound revelation was that I had been wrong about JKR not messing with my head over Book VI. I'd thought it was simple. Thought she'd simply gotten rich and busy and bored and didn't give a shit about her characters anymore.

Well. Now I think I could be wrong, have been plunged back into conflict and confusion... XP Blah.

And then to bring it back to Meta: It's odd to think that an insanely popular YA series could do that - because it would be guaranteed to piss off many many many fans (obviously not the slashers). But JKR didn't come up with the concept of this series when it was popular.

However, if you look at Dent's reading of lycanthropy in Book VI as a metaphor for AIDs/homosexualty, it doesn't look like Rowling would be consciously aware of the homosexual subtext and sympathetic enough to the degree that she would intentionally make Harry gay.

[pauraque]

Now I think I could be wrong, have been plunged back into conflict and confusion...

So have I!

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

It had to do with what was and wasn't acceptable on television.

And yet, even in the '60's, there was that infamous bath scene that Gore Vidal wrote for -- what was it, Spartacus? I don't remember. But I think you can definitely find coded homosexual types, not always flattering ones, in older movies if to a lesser extent on TV. Happily, the queer have always been with us, not least among the screenwriters’ guild. I'm not enough of a pop culture junkie to expand the point in detail, but I guess I'm not quite sure that the repression of homoeroticism was ever a completely straightforward thing even in mainstream media.

Now it's probably true that early slashers took no responsibility for "true canon" characterization -- I mean, canon!Kirk is straight, straight, straight, though Spock has fascinating depths. :) But I wonder if it might be fairer to say that early slash was based on a playful, "you never know" sort of reaction to characters rather than just a willful inversion of the originals. Again, I'm a little cautious because I just don't know enough about it.

One thing I will grant is that it's still very rare to get "surprise" queerness. TV shows, movies, and YA books can have queer characters, but their queerness is part of the premise

But as you imply in your conclusion, wouldn’t it be luverly if this weren’t the case, if queerness were just there, as an unremarkable part of the thematic environment? Does everything that references queerness have to be about queerness? Harry’s queerness is relatively unobtrusive, certainly not a major point of the story. But among all the other things that define and preoccupy him, we notice – almost in passing, but persistently, again and again -- that he pays attention to attractive boys, has a diminished response to Veelas and girls, falls into fascinations with other boys that rise to the level of significant plot drivers – in the case of Cedric, of Draco in HBP, and so on. And yet it’s no big deal, even though it’s there. I find the casualness of this, the offhandedness of it, kind of delightful. :)

But by the end of the series, it would seem silly not to address it. We're talking about the time most of us do consciously realize we're queer. So if Harry is "really" (in JKR's mind) queer, the time to address it would be sometime in the midst of the series, not at the beginning.

You know, it’s worth considering how our own experiences affect our own take on the mainstream-media depiction of queerness. I mean, a comfortable gay identity is such a hard-won thing that I think you and I both probably resist a depiction that doesn’t make it a major or central issue for a character, that doesn’t subsume it in a compelling “coming out” arc. I agree there may be an issue of realism here – if Harry is queer, would he really take it in stride, wouldn’t it be a bigger thing in the story? But he may just be bisexual enough, and preoccupied enough with other things, to evade the issue for now. (Although I love it that his first girlfriend was so closely connected to his crush-object, Cedric, and that his second girlfriend is basically a boy with alternative genitals. :D ) I guess it’s hard to know if this is a characterization question, or whether the issue of media censorship is the most relevant framework for looking at it. But I kind of like the fact, again, that Harry’s queerness is an un-fraught issue, is there without being obsessively about itself. That may represent an idyllic developmental or cultural ideal, and it may in fact be the product of a sort of negotiation between the author and the marketplace, but it has its own attractions to a gay reader.

[millefiori.livejournal.com]

But as you imply in your conclusion, wouldn’t it be luverly if this weren’t the case, if queerness were just there, as an unremarkable part of the thematic environment?

I think (whether JKR intends/intended it or not) that this is a real possibility, and the strongest case for it is JKR's talent for characterization. She has a real knack for sketching out characters that feel remarkably true to life. HP is an adventure story, not a story about a boy's sexual identity, so she has no reason to make a point/issue of Harry's sexuality, nevertheless, the character of Harry *does* have this queer thing going on and I think that's because of how JKR sees the character.

(I hope that makes sense....)

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

I'd mention too that JKR has said recently (I saw it quoted somewhere) that Harry has less sexual experience than a boy of 16 might have. To me it's very believable that at this stage of his life he could be gay and not realize it. There are no gay people in Harry's world that we've met so far--or more precisely, there are no gay people Harry as far as Harry knows. (Harry being sometimes dense about these things.) In fact, the only reference to homosexuality I can remember in the series is Dudley's sarcastic, "Who's Cedric, your boyfriend?" (If he'd said Ginny's name or Hermione's name and he asked if this were his girlfriend, don't you think that would be taken as foreshadowing?) So it may be that Harry has good reason to be resistant to the idea of being gay and easily dismisses his feelings about boys as not possibly sexual.

Plus with Ginny, as you say, not only is she a boy with alternate genitals but there's so many other issues surrounding her. She's like his mother, she's female and therefore like *a* mother, she's his ticket into the Weasleys. There's good reason for Harry to want his feelings to go in a romantic direction. Not so for Sirius, where the guy is *supposed* to be a father figure and yet Harry keeps describing how good-looking he is.

Also I just wanted to add Samantha's Uncle Arthur on Bewitched to the gay-when-it-wasn't-allowed crew. Paul Lynde was just "funny."