The Dumbledore Thing and The Binding Contract
Okay, so I could put this in two posts, but I've decided to keep it as just one.
So:
Apparently...
Dumbledore is gay and had an infatuation with Grindelwald.
To be honest, my opinion of this keeps changing. And that's because I have multiple personalities who have different opinions. Since I know about them, and understand where they're coming from and won't let any of them decide to start killing people, I'm pretty sure I still qualify as sane... in a psychological sense.
Anyway, there's the left liberal in me who is very, very happy. I think it's great that such a popular writer created a gay character. I think it's doubly great that it was someone like Dumbledore: not just a sympathetic character, but a wise mentor.
Then, there's my dark side, who is also happy. I'm happy that she chose *Grindelwald* of all people for him to have an infatuation with. I love seeing the "good guys" make bad choices, and that was one of the things I liked about the Deathly Hallows. I love the moral conflicts that this relationship encouraged.
Then, there's my skeptical fan side that thinks this is all a big joke on her part. A little "Ha! After you've been making just about every other character gay and writing slash about it, it's Dumbledore who actually is!" Prior to Deathly Hallows, I think I heard of one Snape/Dumbledore story, but normally, Dumbledore was either paired with McGonagall, another woman, or not paired off at all. We know she read fan fiction and disliked slash, so I can see her deciding to spite everyone with this.
And then we come to my writer self, who pretty much agrees with everything![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
gmarian said in her post on the subject. That is, that most of the new Deathly Hallows Dumbledore stuff felt like it was sort of just thrown in without any real build-up. It was, to put it bluntly, lazy, rash, and haphazard. As a writer whose first four books were excellent mystery novels (in addition to having fantasy elements), Ms. Rowling really ought to have known better.
In fact, there are a number of things about Deathly Hallows that I felt that way about. Maybe not while I was reading, because all I cared about then was whether she was going to destroy Snape by making him a loyal Death Eater, but thinking about it afterwards, there were just too many things that came out of nowhere. Slipshod writing.
And the Dumbledore stuff is part of it. Some of the Dumbledore stuff was good. I think it was good for Harry to learn some unsavory things about his hero -- but by golly, they should have been *hinted* at before. Where's the Dumbledore equivalent of young Sirius Black lending his motorcycle to Hagrid?
So, overall, I think that socially, it was a good move. But it was a terrible writing decision.
Now, onto something a little more positive. A week ago, I finally screwed up the courage to reenter the world of fan fiction. I finally read A Cloak of Courage, by WendyNat. One of the results of Deathly Hallows was that I stopped caring about Snape. This is described in another post. I don't know what made me decide to try A Cloak of Courage, but I did. And it was wonderful.
More importantly, it rekindled my interest in my own long work of Hermione/Snape fiction that I wrote for last year's NaNoWriMo. The title is The Binding Contract, and the basic premise is that Hermione has created a pro-Muggleborn group that grew beyond her (a revolution devours its own children) into an anti-Pureblood group. I based this group (S. P. A. M.: The Society for the Pureblood Acceptance of Muggleborns) on Stalinist Russia and France's Terror (after the 1789 Revolution). Like Stalinist Russia, you can't really *leave* the party, and Hermione is struggling to fight the system from within. Part of this means taking advantage of her right as a Wronged Muggleborn to take a Muggleborn Hater (from the list of such people -- similar to our lists of sexual predators) as a slave. Intermingled in the story is the truth of why Snape killed Dumbledore.
I finished the story on November 30, 2006, at something like 11:00 p.m. (yikes!) with 117,000+ words. I did some editing in January, but mostly it just sat there. Reading A Cloak of Courage gave me some new ideas on where I could take the story, and have been enjoying editing it again. Maybe this means that eventually it will be to a state where I can think about sending it to a beta or two.
In any case, it's going to be terribly AU now that Deathly Hallows has come and gone.
So:
Apparently...
Dumbledore is gay and had an infatuation with Grindelwald.
To be honest, my opinion of this keeps changing. And that's because I have multiple personalities who have different opinions. Since I know about them, and understand where they're coming from and won't let any of them decide to start killing people, I'm pretty sure I still qualify as sane... in a psychological sense.
Anyway, there's the left liberal in me who is very, very happy. I think it's great that such a popular writer created a gay character. I think it's doubly great that it was someone like Dumbledore: not just a sympathetic character, but a wise mentor.
Then, there's my dark side, who is also happy. I'm happy that she chose *Grindelwald* of all people for him to have an infatuation with. I love seeing the "good guys" make bad choices, and that was one of the things I liked about the Deathly Hallows. I love the moral conflicts that this relationship encouraged.
Then, there's my skeptical fan side that thinks this is all a big joke on her part. A little "Ha! After you've been making just about every other character gay and writing slash about it, it's Dumbledore who actually is!" Prior to Deathly Hallows, I think I heard of one Snape/Dumbledore story, but normally, Dumbledore was either paired with McGonagall, another woman, or not paired off at all. We know she read fan fiction and disliked slash, so I can see her deciding to spite everyone with this.
And then we come to my writer self, who pretty much agrees with everything
gmarian said in her post on the subject. That is, that most of the new Deathly Hallows Dumbledore stuff felt like it was sort of just thrown in without any real build-up. It was, to put it bluntly, lazy, rash, and haphazard. As a writer whose first four books were excellent mystery novels (in addition to having fantasy elements), Ms. Rowling really ought to have known better.In fact, there are a number of things about Deathly Hallows that I felt that way about. Maybe not while I was reading, because all I cared about then was whether she was going to destroy Snape by making him a loyal Death Eater, but thinking about it afterwards, there were just too many things that came out of nowhere. Slipshod writing.
And the Dumbledore stuff is part of it. Some of the Dumbledore stuff was good. I think it was good for Harry to learn some unsavory things about his hero -- but by golly, they should have been *hinted* at before. Where's the Dumbledore equivalent of young Sirius Black lending his motorcycle to Hagrid?
So, overall, I think that socially, it was a good move. But it was a terrible writing decision.
Now, onto something a little more positive. A week ago, I finally screwed up the courage to reenter the world of fan fiction. I finally read A Cloak of Courage, by WendyNat. One of the results of Deathly Hallows was that I stopped caring about Snape. This is described in another post. I don't know what made me decide to try A Cloak of Courage, but I did. And it was wonderful.
More importantly, it rekindled my interest in my own long work of Hermione/Snape fiction that I wrote for last year's NaNoWriMo. The title is The Binding Contract, and the basic premise is that Hermione has created a pro-Muggleborn group that grew beyond her (a revolution devours its own children) into an anti-Pureblood group. I based this group (S. P. A. M.: The Society for the Pureblood Acceptance of Muggleborns) on Stalinist Russia and France's Terror (after the 1789 Revolution). Like Stalinist Russia, you can't really *leave* the party, and Hermione is struggling to fight the system from within. Part of this means taking advantage of her right as a Wronged Muggleborn to take a Muggleborn Hater (from the list of such people -- similar to our lists of sexual predators) as a slave. Intermingled in the story is the truth of why Snape killed Dumbledore.
I finished the story on November 30, 2006, at something like 11:00 p.m. (yikes!) with 117,000+ words. I did some editing in January, but mostly it just sat there. Reading A Cloak of Courage gave me some new ideas on where I could take the story, and have been enjoying editing it again. Maybe this means that eventually it will be to a state where I can think about sending it to a beta or two.
In any case, it's going to be terribly AU now that Deathly Hallows has come and gone.
But what, exactly, did that story do to Snape for you? I was just wondering. Did she just make him too... good? Or something? Sappy? Or was it something else?
And as for Snape -- I'm not entirely sure. I think ... mostly the Lily stuff. I was convinced that he turned because, well, who'd want to be a Death Eater? He just seemed a lot smarter and less willing to grovel than the rest of Voldemort's crowd. The fact that it was Lily -- well, I can't say I didn't expect it, but... it completely changed the nature of his character.
Again, though, what it basically did was make everything easy. And it turned him into a romantic hero.
Yes, that was the easy way out for JKR. I would have liked to have seen more complexity in Snape's decisions. Because up until book 7, he was a complex man. And I think it's his complexity that we, as adults, really liked.
*hopes the answer is yes*
As for a polished version -- provided I do finish editing the thing and then getting a beta or two and editing some more, etc -- yes.
Eventually.
Probably at Sycophant Hex and the Petulant Poetess, but not Mugglenet, since it's, ahem, rather adult.
And under a different username which I will post separately (since I know at least one person who knows me personally and who is underage AND whose mother does not want her reading such things -- of course, by the time I'm ready to post it's possible she'll be of age :) ).
Let me put it this way:
It's almost a year old. I'm about a third of the way through my first pass, which is ONLY deciding whether to keep a scene or not. It's going to take even longer to actually *make* changes, and then there's the whole beta thing, which, if it goes chapter by chapter (which would be the ideal)... it's 18 chapters with a prologue and an epilogue at present -- so figure at *least* 18 weeks (that's if the beta has easy to make changes and doesn't want to see a second draft)).
Right. So. Yes, eventually.