Outside of a Dog: Claire, Cassandra: Draco Trilogy

Cassie Claire

Cassie Claire wrote on July 13, 2002 at 11:57 AM:

Kate -- thanks for the mention. :) While I happen to like Draco-centric stories, there are whole fanfic archives dedicated to the proposition that Draco is Evil and Boring -- since you seem to have fallen into our pro-Draco corner of the fandom, I thought I'd mention the opposition. :D

"Why heterosexual female fans would want canonically heterosexual male characters falling into bed with each otherâ€”nope, sorry, don't understand. Second, I just don't find reading about sex between men very interesting. (I also don't understand something else I've encountered poking around HP fandom, which is " ships," or people rooting for a specific character pairing. As far as I'm concerned, there's not enough in canon for me to have any opinion; they're barely into puberty, after all. I'll buy a relationship if Rowling or any other does a good job of it, and that's all."

I shall now resist the urge to write a fifty-page essay on both those points -- not that I could explain either of them, either.

Cass

Kate

Kate wrote on July 13, 2002 at 1:35 PM:

Re: Draco--I will almost be disappointed if he stays evil and boring in canon, since so many of the adults have turned out to be more complicated than they seemed at first glance. Yes, adults are harder for kids to figure out, but still. (He's really good at being nasty and evil in canon, though, so I would not be completely disappointed.)

As far as ships, Teresa Nielsen Hayden makes the good point that a lot of the time, "If you tell kids that one character is in love with another, they'll accept it as part of what they are, like their eye color, rather than something that they do." (That's in a comment to a post, the archived version of which doesn't have the comments enabled for it, for some reason; it's May 23 on the huge front page of Making Light.) Of course, we haven't been told yet that any character is in love with anyone, not seriously (and while there must be Harry/Cho ships out there, I haven't run across them. Then again, as you point out, I've been in a smallish corner of the fandom.).

I wouldn't be suprised if the slash impulse was unexplainable, in much the same way that, oh, liking coffee is unexplainable. "It tastes good" is no help to someone like me, who insists it doesn't. Of course, some slash is good enough that I'll read it anyway, and I've yet to find any coffee that I'll drink. =>

Pam

Pam wrote on July 13, 2002 at 3:23 PM:

Damn your eyes! The bit you quoted was enough to make me interested in reading the rest of that story, and while I agree that reading Harry Potter slash is somewhat more respectable than John Ringo, it's still not something I'd want to publicly admit to reading...

Anyway, Draco doesn't have to be evil and boring, or non-evil and non-boring. It's entirely possible to be evil and interesting. I don't have high hopes in that direction, but it's always possible. I never would have expected that Snape would turn out to be such an interesting character.

Re: characters in love w/ each other, we haven't been *told* that any characters are in love with each other, but I think we've been *shown* that Ron's got strong feelings for Hermione, even if he's a dorky teenage boy, and doesn't know how to deal with it.

Re: the appeal of slash, (in the sense of improbable romantic pairings of male characters), I've been told that part of it is that readers are interested in relationships between strong, interesting characters, and often, in genre fiction, those aren't the female characters. Similarly, there's an appealing notion of rivalry being a front for hidden romantic feelings. It can be done with a male-female pair (e.g. Princess Leia and Han Solo), but the more intense fictional rivalries tend to be between same-gender characters. Taking a broader view (why heterosexual women like to read about homosexual male relationships), one of the key elements of a romance story is the obstacles the couple must overcome in order to realize their love. In a society which generally frowns on same-sex relationships, homosexuality provides an obstacle which isn't found in a heterosexual romance (although differing social class often serves a similar function in historical romances).

Anyway, that's enough for now. I should really be working on my slides for my thesis committee meeting...

Katxena

Katxena wrote on July 13, 2002 at 5:04 PM:

Re: Slash. I read somewhere that heterosexual women wrote homosexual slash because they wanted to imagine their favorite characters in romantic relationships, but not with *women*. It's sort of like, "if I can't have you, only another man can."

I don't know if that makes sense though. It seems like a reasonable intellectual explanation, but I don't really grok it.

Trent

Trent wrote on July 13, 2002 at 6:19 PM:

Wow. Harry Potter slash, and Draco/Neville slash at that. No doubt when the mind recovers from stunned insensability, it will creep into the corner for a good boggle. I suppose I will have to take refuge in that shopworn but well-tested truism about mileage, and leave it at that (although I suppose I could go check it...nah, what am I saying).

(And at least my guilty pleasure gets to blow stuff up with anti-matter bombs. So there.)

Kate

Kate wrote on July 14, 2002 at 9:15 PM:

Pam: As far as that quote and strong, interesting characters go--I stopped that quote before it got to what, precisely, Narcissa did. C'mon, you know you want to read it... (even if you are working on thesis stuff: it's online, you can read a chapter while you take breaks...). And the other reasons you give seem sensible, but seem like a roundabout way of getting to write a good romance: if you want strong characters, rivalry, and obstacles, you can get those without having to twist well-established sexual orientations (put it in the future of the canon, give them traumatic personality-changing experiences, whatever). Also, part of it is just a YMMV thing as far as the explicit sexual elements goes.

As far as specific characters. Yes, I didn't mean to rule out Draco as bad and non-boring. It's hard to do, of course--I don't think Rowling is quite up to Tigana levels--but something along the lines of the villains in The Element of Fire would be pretty good, too. Ron is a dorky teenage boy, you're right, but I forgot him for not encountering many Ron/Hermione fics (I'm sure they're out there--it is a bigfandom).

Katxena: "they wanted to imagine their favorite characters in romantic relationships, but not with *women*." I can't say I grok it either--not only do I find it actively distasteful, I find it odd, because I'd imagine the more usual response would be a Mary Sue where the author could put vicariously herself into the fic.

Trent: Phbbt. At least my guilty pleasure gets great dialogue while in the midst of Evil Overlord plots... ("Is it just me," Chris demanded plaintively. "Or have you spotted that those two seems to conduct life as though it were Greek tragedy re-scripted by Monty Python?")

The thing is, if you were able to get over the boggling, I bet you'd really like this. Unfortunately, it would sort of miss the point to search-and-replace all of the names. Oh well.

Mahoney

Mahoney wrote on July 16, 2002 at 8:52 AM:

You know, I never read fanfic reviews/recs (well, unless I solicit them) and I've read only the barest minimum of HP fanfic (by fearthainn, actually, stories can be found at ffnet), but I saw my handle in your entry and swooned under the desk with geeky abashed gratification and then figured the least I could do was read the fic you were reviewing.

If the fic were a book, I'd buy it. It's fantastic! I think I'm kind of reading it like 'historical fiction' - not *really* HP, but speculation using HP history and details; but it's really wonderful that way. I rarely feel as if I need to know who these people were before they showed up in the story, because for the most part the characterization is so strong and is well-supported by refer-backs. And it's unbelievably funny.

Thanks for leading me to it! I'm off to read the last chapter, and then effuse obnoxiously to the author.... :)

Kate

Kate wrote on July 16, 2002 at 2:32 PM:

Oh dear; I see elsewhere that the Epilogue ended up considerably reducing your enthusiasm. I'm glad you liked the first eleven chapters, at least (I hate it when people read things on my recommendation and then don't like them). I'd be interested to hear what quirk it was that affected you, in e-mail of course if it's a spoiler.

Zoe

Zoe wrote on July 27, 2003 at 3:46 PM:

Yes, but is DV actually finished? Anywhere? At all? And slash is mainly just plain odd.

Yonmei

Yonmei wrote on August 17, 2003 at 7:56 PM:

I don't know if that makes sense though. It seems like a reasonable intellectual explanation, but I don't really grok it.

It makes no sense at all to me, though it's been the classic "explanation" for why-women-write-slash for as long as I can remember.

I am a lesbian and a slash fan, and have been consciously aware of both these impulses in my sexuality for about the same length of time (nearly 20 years, by now). I prefer Joanna Russ's explanation, collected in Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts, if I must have just one. But on the whole I prefer Pat Califa's attitude to the whole thing, which is: "Men don't have to explain or excuse themselves when they find two women together sexually attractive: so why do we keep thinking we have to?" and I like Marilyn Hacker's attitude, too: "Some people are just hardwired to find two men together, or two women together, sexually attractive: it doesn't matter whether they're hetero or homo." (All of these opinions are seriously paraphrased, since I have no intention of getting up and tracking them all down at this time of night.)

All we can honestly say about it is: Some men, mostly straight but some gay, find that imagining two women having sex is a sexual turn-on. Some women, mostly straight but some gay, find that imagining two men having sex is a sexual turn-on. As far as we can tell, this is as much a natural part of human sexuality as being heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual.

And, which is my conclusion ever since I figured out that I was a lesbian who liked slash: Since it feels normal for me, I'm really not going to worry about it. I like it.

Kate

Kate wrote on August 17, 2003 at 8:28 PM:

Zoe: DV is still a work in progress. Schnoogle is up-to-date.

Yonmei: in the year since writing this originally, I've determined: 1) people have varied motivations for writing slash, many of which are unexplainable; 2) I don't really care what a person's motivation was, as long as it doesn't get in the way of a good story; 3) almost any setup can work in the hands of a good writer who pays sufficient attention to the characters; 4) there are, nevertheless, things I'm not interested in reading, but I generally try to chalk it up to YMMV and leave it at that.

How dreadful that looks. Short version: I've stopped trying to figure out why, because it doesn't really matter: all that matters is the story. =>

What's Joanna Russ's explanation?

Ellen

Ellen wrote on June 15, 2007 at 9:44 PM:

ohmigosh, does anyone, na di mean ANYONE have the draco trilogyon thier computer? if so, i want it! omg, i've been looking for it EVERYWHERE! i wish it was available atthe bookstore-sigh-

Mousy

Mousy wrote on January 20, 2008 at 6:27 PM:

The Secret Country and The Hidden Land were not originally one book. The Draco Trilogy was not good, was not even unique (and fanfiction can only be so unique to begin with), it was all Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Crap.

Kate

Kate wrote on January 20, 2008 at 6:57 PM:

Mousy, thank you for reminding me that I needed to edit this entry.