This is a wonderfully sane and reasonable take on such an insane and unreasonable situation. Some of the trauma and acting out has just been bizarre, but I think I'm enough of a bad person that I mostly just find it funny ;)
I totally agree that the first step in reacting to all the shipping craziness is just to take a deep breath and do some mental housekeeping: "why this works or fails" goes over here, and "why I personally care" goes over there -- they are two separate issues. A critical reaction to JKR goes on one shelf, and a free appropriation of her characters in fanfic goes on another. Look! Much tidier already. :)
I think you're absolutely right, too, that you can disagree with what JKR does with her characters without being guilty of high treason (or excessive self-involvement). It's all a question of your reasoning, of making an argument for your case rather than getting too worked up over whether JKR is validating one's own personal vision. Anyone who's writing fiction is, after all, pushing a view of what people are like, and the reader is free to see that vision as profound, silly, or some inconsistent mix of the two. So a fic that presents a plausible alternative development, of a character or a romance, is really contributing to a debate that JKR has raised in the first place, and that has significance outside of her books themselves.
I mean, just to take an example, I would have predicted canon H/H and I don't personally see R/H as well matched at all. (Not that I care a whole lot while my hero is really obsessing over Draco, but that's my private delusion, thank you.) The fact that JKR has chosen, in her world, to go with the fireworks over the calm, steady love does nothing to change my ideas about love in general, in the larger world that we're all ultimately making reference to. And it is certainly true that people make the R/H kind of choice in real life all the time (and others make the opposite choice) so if this particular case goes that way, what's to argue with?
Harry/Ginny, I'm sorry to say, is also perfectly plausible as normal teen idiot behavior, though it feels like a very superficial infatuation and in my optimistic moments I think JKR has actually coded it that way, that she sees it as ironically as many of her skeptical readers do.
Remus/Tonks, on the other hand, feels suspect to me, based on the text itself. And in my post (which you way-too-kindly plugged, thanks!) I was sort of getting at why it felt like things couldn't be what they seemed on the surface, and sort of groping for an alternative explanation. One thing that really intrigues me, and that I haven't heard much discussion about, is JKR's comment in her interview that a romantic plot was sometimes, in detective fiction, a misdirection, a way of distorting or hiding what was really going on -- and she said, in kind of a throwaway line, that that applied specifically to Tonks. So, I have to wonder if my suspicions here are well-grounded -- and I hope that's not just a shipper talking, but a critical reader.
Stepping back from the specifics a little, I wonder if the interview isn't looming too large, after all, in this whole debate. In the past, I've always deliberately tried to ignore interviews in interpreting the books, on the theory that I'd take something JKR said as definitive, once she found a way to write it permanently into her text. And it's probably true that a fast, fun, interview with two crazed fans is not the place for subtleties. She's going to simplify, overgeneralize, provoke, tease -- it's anything but the last word. So I'm really looking forward to going back to a second read of HBP, and thinking all this through more carefully, after all the ground that's been turned over in these first couple of weeks has had a chance to settle again.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2005-07-31 11:47 pm (UTC)I totally agree that the first step in reacting to all the shipping craziness is just to take a deep breath and do some mental housekeeping: "why this works or fails" goes over here, and "why I personally care" goes over there -- they are two separate issues. A critical reaction to JKR goes on one shelf, and a free appropriation of her characters in fanfic goes on another. Look! Much tidier already. :)
I think you're absolutely right, too, that you can disagree with what JKR does with her characters without being guilty of high treason (or excessive self-involvement). It's all a question of your reasoning, of making an argument for your case rather than getting too worked up over whether JKR is validating one's own personal vision. Anyone who's writing fiction is, after all, pushing a view of what people are like, and the reader is free to see that vision as profound, silly, or some inconsistent mix of the two. So a fic that presents a plausible alternative development, of a character or a romance, is really contributing to a debate that JKR has raised in the first place, and that has significance outside of her books themselves.
I mean, just to take an example, I would have predicted canon H/H and I don't personally see R/H as well matched at all. (Not that I care a whole lot while my hero is really obsessing over Draco, but that's my private delusion, thank you.) The fact that JKR has chosen, in her world, to go with the fireworks over the calm, steady love does nothing to change my ideas about love in general, in the larger world that we're all ultimately making reference to. And it is certainly true that people make the R/H kind of choice in real life all the time (and others make the opposite choice) so if this particular case goes that way, what's to argue with?
Harry/Ginny, I'm sorry to say, is also perfectly plausible as normal teen idiot behavior, though it feels like a very superficial infatuation and in my optimistic moments I think JKR has actually coded it that way, that she sees it as ironically as many of her skeptical readers do.
Remus/Tonks, on the other hand, feels suspect to me, based on the text itself. And in my post (which you way-too-kindly plugged, thanks!) I was sort of getting at why it felt like things couldn't be what they seemed on the surface, and sort of groping for an alternative explanation. One thing that really intrigues me, and that I haven't heard much discussion about, is JKR's comment in her interview that a romantic plot was sometimes, in detective fiction, a misdirection, a way of distorting or hiding what was really going on -- and she said, in kind of a throwaway line, that that applied specifically to Tonks. So, I have to wonder if my suspicions here are well-grounded -- and I hope that's not just a shipper talking, but a critical reader.
Stepping back from the specifics a little, I wonder if the interview isn't looming too large, after all, in this whole debate. In the past, I've always deliberately tried to ignore interviews in interpreting the books, on the theory that I'd take something JKR said as definitive, once she found a way to write it permanently into her text. And it's probably true that a fast, fun, interview with two crazed fans is not the place for subtleties. She's going to simplify, overgeneralize, provoke, tease -- it's anything but the last word. So I'm really looking forward to going back to a second read of HBP, and thinking all this through more carefully, after all the ground that's been turned over in these first couple of weeks has had a chance to settle again.