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

[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.