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Summary: "Chamber of Secrets" from Ginny's point of view. Ginny's guilt over Colin's Petrification drives more wedges between her and her family, while the Dueling Club disaster and third attack rekindle students' terror of the Heir. Thank goodness Tom is still there to listen and comfort her!
Tangentially, I find my chapter summaries somewhat amusing to reread in their own right. They're mostly literal summaries -- a list of things that happen in the chapter in question -- but I was trying to write them in such a way that the references would be unclear until after a reader finished the chapter. Hence things like "Snape oozes nastiness," or "an Herbology class presents unforeseen challenges." There's also a strong tendency toward irony and/or rhetorical questions.
The spoiler-avoidance only applies to things that aren't canon, by the way. Anything that happened on-page in CoS basically gets described as-is, since I figure anyone reading HP fanfiction already knows that story. *wry*
Anyway, chapter stuff.
( cut for length )
Hmm. I think that in this chapter alone, Ginny and Harry exchange more words than in the entirety of CoS, which is just ridiculous. That's an aspect of CoS -- Ginny's sidelining -- that has always annoyed me, by the way. CoS should properly be Ginny's story -- she's the one who hurts the most and the one whose choices drive the plot -- but she is shoved offscreen almost entirely so Rowling can focus on Harry's relatively trivial worries about his Slytherin character traits. Then her recovery -- which by all rights should be long and painful -- is glossed over in a grand total of one flippant paragraph. Which is both incredibly insulting on its own, and also REALLY STUPID from a series perspective, since apparently one thing that's supposed to make Ginny a good match for Harry is that she has also faced Voldemort (or at least a shadow thereof) and lived... but since her struggle was given no narrative weight whatsoever, to use it as a connection between her and Harry feels more like a deus ex machina than a natural development. And that is just plain bad writing. :-/
Anyway, Bechdel Test = PASS
Tangentially, I find my chapter summaries somewhat amusing to reread in their own right. They're mostly literal summaries -- a list of things that happen in the chapter in question -- but I was trying to write them in such a way that the references would be unclear until after a reader finished the chapter. Hence things like "Snape oozes nastiness," or "an Herbology class presents unforeseen challenges." There's also a strong tendency toward irony and/or rhetorical questions.
The spoiler-avoidance only applies to things that aren't canon, by the way. Anything that happened on-page in CoS basically gets described as-is, since I figure anyone reading HP fanfiction already knows that story. *wry*
Anyway, chapter stuff.
( cut for length )
Hmm. I think that in this chapter alone, Ginny and Harry exchange more words than in the entirety of CoS, which is just ridiculous. That's an aspect of CoS -- Ginny's sidelining -- that has always annoyed me, by the way. CoS should properly be Ginny's story -- she's the one who hurts the most and the one whose choices drive the plot -- but she is shoved offscreen almost entirely so Rowling can focus on Harry's relatively trivial worries about his Slytherin character traits. Then her recovery -- which by all rights should be long and painful -- is glossed over in a grand total of one flippant paragraph. Which is both incredibly insulting on its own, and also REALLY STUPID from a series perspective, since apparently one thing that's supposed to make Ginny a good match for Harry is that she has also faced Voldemort (or at least a shadow thereof) and lived... but since her struggle was given no narrative weight whatsoever, to use it as a connection between her and Harry feels more like a deus ex machina than a natural development. And that is just plain bad writing. :-/
Anyway, Bechdel Test = PASS
