An abominable genre

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I am an unashamed Harry Potter fan and keen fan writer and reader. Nevertheless, there is one sub-genre I will never touch, that I have never read nor reviewed nor ever will, that I loathe from the depths of my soul: Marauders slash. Other kinds of slash I can put up with; indeed, I tend to write a gay Harry myself. But this particular slash seems to me revolting, an assault not only on the characters and their relationship, but on a basic kind of human decency and kindness on which rests much of our happiness on this Earth.

In Joanne K.Rowling's novels, the Marauders are a group of four teen-age friends at Hogwarts School of Wizardry and Witchcraft. The group forms when childhood friends Sirius Black and James Potter, the stars of their year, handsome and successful, befriend the lonely Remus Lupin and accept the somewhat star-struck friendship of the feeble Peter Pettigrew, a fat little boy with a need for strong friends. Remus is a boy with a terrible secret (he is a werewolf); his friends discover it, and, far from rejecting him, support him. The whole is a celebration of what a blessing is a warm, unconditional friendship for a lonely teen-ager. Friendship is the operative word: the four are happiest together, pulling pranks and breaking rules, learning magic and playing Quidditch.

I do not think I give much away when I say that this depiction of free, warm, luminous friendship, of the happiness of meeting and talking and doing things together, means an enormous amount to me. Friendship has been one of the great things in my life, and I regard it not only as a source of joy but as a positive value.

Anyone who reduces this world of mutual unselfish contact to sexual desire simply has no idea what friendship is about; has never had a friend, and is probably incapable of having any. As for the Marauders themselves, anyone who has read JKR's wonderful account of what the friendship and acceptance of James, Sirius and Peter meant for him in his loneliness, and still can conceive of their relationship as in any way sexual, is as grossly insensitive a reader as anyone can conceive. It simply shows a brute failure to understand any of the higher functions of human nature; a failure which is first and foremost a failure of taste, a failure to understand and appreciate what is in front of their eyes. A good book is a shared experience, an experience in which the author involves the reader. A reader who claims to love what the author has done, and yet, in her own work (for, in this case, it is pretty nearly always a woman), distorts or perverts the very experience that the author provided - in this case, the splendour and refuge of friendship, the discovery of this wonderful world of equals in one's teens - is a person who is not only out of touch with the author, but with herself. She has read; she has had the experience; she has even enjoyed it. Yet, when it comes to elaborating the experience in her own words and adding to it, she does not elaborate, but perverts it. She has failed to appreciate her own experience; in effect, she is lying to herself about herself. The failure is a failure of the self, even before it becomes a failure in relating with others.

This is not only, of course, in evidence in the miserable and ever-growing breed of Marauder slash fics. Just as blatant is the sheer and incomprehensible refusal to come to terms with what the character of Draco Malfoy represents. Anyone with a sane appreciation of storytelling would think that, after the events of ORDER OF THE PHOENIX, it would be impossible to conceive of Draco as anything but a particularly loathsome villain. Every sentence Mrs.Rowling puts in his mouth deepens his moral abjection. He is not only a monster, but a recognizable monster: my God, how many Dracones there are in classrooms and offices, workplaces and clubs, families and regiments. And yet the tide of "redeemed Draco" fics keeps flowing relentlessly onwards, and hundreds of writers write as if it was simply natural that this loathsome toad of a boy, who has done enough to imprint himself indelibly in the memory of all his victims, will marry either Ginny or Hermione or have a homosexual relationship with Harry. (An admittedly brilliant variation, in the context of an excellent story, has him in bed with Neville Longbottom.) Not only is this perversion of the Rowling canon carried out routinely, but it is treated as obvious, as natural; most writers of Draco/Ginny and Draco/Hermione romance fics hardly feel the need to justify their stories.

Nonetheless, there is more to be said in favour of redeemed-Draco fics than of Marauders slash. For one thing, the idea of former enemies getting either physically or metaphorically in bed has an undeniable piquancy; and the better redeemed-Draco fics at least show him dealing one way or another with his abominable previous character.

But for Marauder slash there is no justification. It is simply the result of a brutal and narrow, old-maidish mentality, that cannot see a few men showing a pleasure for each other's company without imagining that sex must be at the heart of it. And as this kind of fic is written largely by women, one also suspects a sort of creeping suspicion and jealousy for an all-male circle of friends: the writer sees a group of men going out alone together - of course, they have to have a reason other than just pleasure in each other's company! Of course, sex is at the bottom of this. After all, we know that men are incapable of thinking of anything else.... Well, actually, experience of certain female writers on the FICTION ALLEY site has convinced me that it is a certain kind of woman who is incapable of thinking of anything except in sexual terms. I will say no more about this; and as this entry has already taken so much space, there will be no piece of writing other than this today.

Comments

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The nice thing is that - cutting out and cutting out and cutting out the flamers - some decent people are turning up, writing in decent human tones. Would it be too much to ask you to write to me at my e-mail address, and we can continue this discussion without involving the kind of people who comment on the size and shape of my penis? And yes, there have been that kind of people. The thing is that, when I wrote this, I had never received so much as a single comment and I did not have any idea that anyone would even pay attention. Perhaps I should have expressed myself differently, but I am afraid that anything that touches on certain contemporary pieties is inevitably going, if certain people take hold of it, to produce flames.

[latxcvi.livejournal.com]

The thing is that, when I wrote this, I had never received so much as a single comment and I did not have any idea that anyone would even pay attention.

You posted it on the Internet, though. And while yes, this is your 'personal' space, it is not, in fact a 'private' space. It's understandable, to a degree, that you'd think to yourself, "Oh, it's my journal, I can say whatever I want" and of course, you *can* say whatever you want in your journal. But, by virtue of your journal being on the *Internet*, you're still saying whatever you want in a vast, *public* forum; you're still standing in the marketplace of ideas saying something to which other people are going to respond because other people are also in the marketplace to hear what you're saying. If you wanted to say this in the virtual, Internet equivalent of your living room, then you probably could (should) have locked the post so that only those you'd invited inside could see it. It's a lesson a lot of people, with the explosion of LJ, have had to learn (and some have learned it in a harder way than others): 'Personal' no longer automatically equals 'private'.

Perhaps I should have expressed myself differently, but I am afraid that anything that touches on certain contemporary pieties is inevitably going, if certain people take hold of it, to produce flames.

Yes and no. It's true that some people are simply jack-asses; they're going to be unpleasant and descend to ad hominem attacks regardless of the topic because that's merely how they are. However. Lots of other people are going to expect a person making somewhat controversial statements in a public space to be ready, willing and able to defend those statements. Honestly, there is quite a bit in your original post that can be criticized. The logic, for example, behind your distinguishing of a "gay Harry" from other people writing what, for all intents and purposes, are "gay Marauders" is somewhat specious, particularly when the basis of your criticism of Marauders slash is that it messes with Rowlings' canonical portrayal of their friendship. Carrying the logic of your argument to its natural conclusion dictates that gay Harry also should not be possible, as many of the other canon characters with whom Harry could possibly be slashed - Ron, Hagrid, Sirius, Neville, to name but a few - are people who are also his friends. It's reasonable for someone to expect you to defend the logic of your argument - as well as the basis by which you're drawing a distinction between slashing Harry and slashing the Marauders - because you've put the argument out there where other people can see and consider it. I don't think you should be personally insulted for holding this or any other opinion, but I absolutely think you can, and should, be expected to defend it when you put it out there for other people to see.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

If you had read further down the thread, you would notice that I have in fact slashed Harry with a canonic character - Moody. And I repeat, you have no idea of the viciousness and stupidity of the stuff I deleted. As for my views about JKR characters, I am thinking of writing another essay; it gets a bit stupid to say things by bits and bobs in response to mostly hostile and frequently uncomprehending posters.