(no subject)

[oiran]

It's the fault of that damn stone_princess

I have issues with...

sadness fame patience failure past

Take Word Association Test

um, duh?

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Clever rhiannonhero is developing new talents, i.e., vidding, but she needs to get off of QaF and do SV instead, so everyone please pester her with that goal in mind.

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I keep reading about a new HP story by pandarus that is apparently incredible, and I'd believe it, but I don't want to read an HP story. The idea just squicks me, frankly, and I wish someone would tell me why it shouldn't so that I might readily justify enjoyment of stories by authors I already like very much. I've tried to circumvent the squicks, even. I haven't read all the books, and I have no clue who Sirius and Remus even are (contemporaries of Harry's dad, I'd assume), so I thought I'd be safe: I read a Sirius/Remus story the other day that was just devastatingly lovely and romantic but the word "Hogwarts" ruined it for me, and it was as though I was suddenly a Very Bad Woman reading porn to my 10-year-old niece and trying to force her to act it all out with Harry Potter Legos.

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I'm at the end of writing something, and I'm >this< far from sending it to beta, but I haven't got the fucking last line(s). I never do. It took me a day to write the story, and now another day to avoid nonexistent last lines.

Comments

[j-bluestocking.livejournal.com]

I haven't read this new story, but I once shared your squick. When I first heard of HP slash, I thought, "Some people have to slash everything," as I disapprovingly imagined a couple of ten-year-old boys burrowing under their robes.

Then I read shalott's "Weather" stories. Here's her home page, btw:

http://www.trickster.org/~shalott/

She's a fine writer, so even if you never get into HP, you might try her other stuff. Also, she's written gen HP -- "The Eleventh Doorkeeper" is pretty interesting, for example.

Anyway. I read the first story, and realized I'd had the wrong mental picture in my mind. I'd been imagining ten-year-old boys and the children's-book illustrations of the first couple of Potter novels, and I was in the wrong tonal universe entirely. Fanfic writers were aging Harry and his friends forward long before the world realized Rowling was doing it, too.

Did you ever see a movie called "Another Country"? A British boarding school in the 1930s, young upper-class men/boys on the eve of adulthood, about to go off to university. A deliciously young and attractive Rupert Everett, a ditto, ditto Colin Firth, and a story loosely based on the early friendship between Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean, who spied against Britain for the USSR in later life. In the best literary tradition, the movie is not at all about politics on the surface; it's about Everett's character nailing boy after boy sexually as Firth's character watches, quietly appalled. And it's about ambition, rejection, and the sheer sensuality of sunlight on a desk on a long afternoon of youth.

Of course, it's a cliche that British boarding schools in the old days were chock full of young men/boys (that is, boys right on the edge of adulthood) who were experimenting with each other and forming intense attachments right and left because girls lived on some entirely other planet. I only know about it from books; CS Lewis, that sort of thing -- but as someone who was there, Lewis seems to think it's a pretty valid picture.

I'm telling you more than you need to know, because I'm setting the stage. You have to entirely clean the HP films out of your head, take the characters of the Potter books, form your own picture of them, and imagine them further along. Rather like imagining Superman and Lex Luthor in Metropolis, ten years from now. Where's your comfort level? Age eighteen? Seventeen? Put these characters in a non-children's world, not unlike the world of "Another Country." Where has the magical world taken them? Into what thickets of ambiguity? What does growing up mean?

Anyway, it worked for me. Or you could just try something heavily removed from school life entirely -- Lust Over Pendle, for instance; I've never met anyone who didn't like that, including people who can't stand slash in general.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/russell.baldwin/ebooks/lop/

Good luck in this noble attempt to refurbish your mental world!

[velvetglove.livejournal.com]

I saw Another Country many, many times. Many times. I might need to see it again ;) And that actually is the mental model I use for, er, schoolboy antics.

Of course, fanfic writers need to use the names, but they are currently my greatest source of horror. Hogwarts. Hufflepuff. Dumbledore. They're child-friendly, outlined in heavy black and ready to be colored in by clumsy little hands. A werewolf named Lupin, for god's sake! Doubtless, I can work up some sort of highly-personal behavioral modification program that allows me to enjoy Potterotica, but I'm having difficulty imagining success at this point.

Even so, thank you so much for the recs. I trust your judgment, so I will give these a chance. However, should I find myself horrified, I shall arrange to have my loud, petulant hissy fit in your corner.

[djinanna.livejournal.com]

Lust Over Pendle can also be found at Shoes for Industry, along with the sequel and other companion stories. Excellent post-Hogwarts story, a mixture of whodunit and comedy of manners. And Draco Malfoy coping with a brace of springer spaniels is not to be missed!

pandarus's Invisible To See is also excellent, though the setting is Hogwarts for that one.