Harry Potter

[anotherusedpage]

So, I saw the movie and it rocked. All the bits I was worried about sucking didn't. Which was nice. I'd post a proper review except its three in the morning, so I'll just leave you with three short thoughts.

1) My inner feminist says, 'was Fleur that useless in the book? Why did the only girl in the tournament finish last in every competition? Yah boo sucks'

2) My inner fangirl (well, mebbe not so inner) says EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE SLASH SQUEEEEEE!

3) My footballslash brain says, hmmmm. If you had to feild an England Quidditch Team with the players taken from the England football squad, who'd play what positions? Should strikers play seekers or chasers? (Unless they're Wayne Rooney, when they should clearly play beaters). Also, I wonder if Denis Bergkamp would be scared of flying on a broom...

Answers on a postcard.

Comments

[shreena.livejournal.com]

Fleur in the GoF book really irritated me. Why, exactly, could JKR not let her do anything at all well in the competition? The film didn't invent that. Not only does she come last in everything but she doesn't even have any flashes of brilliance or intelligence.

JKR does have female authority figures but the strange thing about the book series in general is that the impression you get is that there are just fewer women in the Wizarding world than there are in our world. It appears that JKR's default is to make a character male unless it is necessary for the plot that she be female - there are two boys, one girl in the Trio, more male Gryffindors than females in Harry's year, ditto on the Slytherins, ditto the Order of the Phoenix (and the women there are there are much less prominent than, say, Sirius, Lupin, Moody), ditto the Quidditch teams both in the school and at the world cup, ditto the Weasley family, the Triward champions, the Death Eaters.. it runs on and on through the books, there are just plain fewer female characters and even in the few areas that there are equal numbers - like the teachers - the male characters have larger roles - Snape may be parallel to McGonagall in authority but he's a helluva lot more important to the plot and gets much more page time. I don't think JKR is consciously sexist or anything, but I do think that she suffers from the typical bias that many authors have whereby a male character is human and normal and default but a female character has to be distinctively female rather than just there. I do like what she's done with gender roles in the trio - Ron the emotional one but still clearly a bloke, Hermione the logical one but still clearly a girl - but I think she still suffers from ingrained attitudes.

[anotherusedpage.livejournal.com]

unless it is necessary for the plot that she be female

Yeah, me and opportunemoment went through the plot trying to work out the changes she'd have had to have made in order for Fleur not to look so damn crap, but every change we made wrecked the plot (Cedric being female, Fleur being male, Fleur and Krum swapping roles...)

At least in the film you can pretend she aced her dragon-fight. Although having said that, she was even shitter in the maze than she was in canon.

and at the world cup

Ah, I had a rant about the World Cup Quidditch Teams a few years back (how come it's ok to have girls on the amateur school team but there aren't any on the professional teams, damnit!) and it was pointed out to me that other than the two seekers, the genders of none of the world cup players are confirmed. They are reffered to by surname only, and never by pronoun. You can split them male/female as you like in book canon, it's possible the only two men on the pitch were Krum and the other seeker...

[shreena.livejournal.com]

Is there any particular reason why she has to come last in all three tasks? I don't think there is. She has to do badly in the water one so that Harry rescues Gabrielle because that's vaguely important for the plot, but she doesn't have to be last in the first one, she could beat at least one of the guys there, nor does she have to fail so quickly in the maze or do worse than Krum, altho' clearly she can't do better than either Cedric or Harry for the plot to work.

Hmm, for some reason, I thought it was mentioned that only the Irish team had women on it. I could be misremembering though. But, even when it comes to the amateur teams, there are fewer girls than boys, it's only the Gryffindor team that has a balance. My point tho' wasn't just that women are crap in the books, it's that there quite simply aren't that many - if you tottled up every named character in the book, the Wizarding world would end up being about 70:30 male:female which is just silly....

[anotherusedpage.livejournal.com]

She has to come last in the third task, because Harry and Cedric have to win it, and it has to be Krum under the imperious curse so you think it's Karkaroff who's the bad guy, and he has to take someone out but it can't be Harry or Cedric, which only leaves Fleur. The only task she could possibly win would be the Dragon task...

[lucy-lupin.livejournal.com]

I think the Irish World Cup team has some women on it. I vaguely remember one of the Chasers being female. And there is one entirely female Quidditch team in canon, the Holyhead Harpies.

[lucy-lupin.livejournal.com]

I think the problem with Fleur is that she is depicted not so much as a woman but as a stereotypical French person (ie. complaining about the heavy food and crude furniture in Hogwarts, being very judgemental and frivilous). I've always wanted to read The Goblet of Fire in French just to see how they deal with the bias against their country.

It appears that JKR's default is to make a character male unless it is necessary for the plot that she be female - there are two boys, one girl in the Trio, more male Gryffindors than females in Harry's year, ditto on the Slytherins, ditto the Order of the Phoenix...

I was actually talking about this with my mother recently. I wondered why when JKR was a female, the book seemed to deal more with males and be told from a male perspective. She made the interesting point that girls are more likely to read "boy" books than boys are to read "girl" books. So in other words my mother thought it was a marketing ploy. Which makes sense if you think about the way children dress, for example. It's perfectly alright for a girl to wear blue or pants, but if a boy was to wear pink, he would get bullied at recess - and as for a skirt, well...that would be even worse. I guess that because in some ways women have more "gender freedom" than men, if an author is trying to target both audiences, he or she veres more towards men.

I'm not accusing you or anotherusedpage of doing this, but I think there can be a tendency to look at male and female characters in fiction too allegorically. For McGonagall having a smaller role in the books than Snape, I could argue that of the other two househeads, Flora Sprout's role is just as small as Filius Flitwick's. In fact, if anything she seems to be mentioned more giving instructions, whereas Flitwick has a more laissez-faire approach to classroom management.

And yes, sometimes the female characters do seem to be distinctively female rather than there in their own right. But the story is told from the point of view of a teenaged male who is interested in girls. Perhaps if the narrator was Harriet Potter who was a straight female, we may have similar bias in the other direction.