[Fic] "Rationalization" -- Harry Potter
Jul. 8th, 2009 01:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingPetunia and Lily; one of these girls is not like the other. Strict-form drabble, 100 words exactly.
[ETA: The AO3 crosspost is now up!]
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Rationalization
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Lily is beautiful. Petunia is not.
That's fine. Beauty is a lie. Beauty makes a woman stand out, makes her different. Beauty makes other women jealous, makes other men see nothing but a mindless body. Beauty twists you up and drives you to bitter envy of other, more normal people, or to willful blindness to the ugliness behind people's eyes: the seething need to hammer down anything out of the ordinary until the whole world is flat and equal.
Beauty makes people into freaks.
Lily is beautiful. Petunia is not.
She would not take her sister's place for the world.
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Inspired by the 7/6/09![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
15_minute_fic word #115: aesthetic
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For future reference, when I say 'drabble,' I always mean a strict-form drabble. When I describe short fiction of 1000 words or less -- but without a strict word count limit -- I say 'ficlet.' *grin* But that is my own pedantry; feel free to define words in the wild as you will!
(RemixRedux fic is now at 2,350 words. Argh, why can I not write faster?)
[ETA: The AO3 crosspost is now up!]
---------------------------------------------
Rationalization
---------------------------------------------
Lily is beautiful. Petunia is not.
That's fine. Beauty is a lie. Beauty makes a woman stand out, makes her different. Beauty makes other women jealous, makes other men see nothing but a mindless body. Beauty twists you up and drives you to bitter envy of other, more normal people, or to willful blindness to the ugliness behind people's eyes: the seething need to hammer down anything out of the ordinary until the whole world is flat and equal.
Beauty makes people into freaks.
Lily is beautiful. Petunia is not.
She would not take her sister's place for the world.
---------------------------------------------
Inspired by the 7/6/09
15_minute_fic word #115: aesthetic---------------------------------------------
For future reference, when I say 'drabble,' I always mean a strict-form drabble. When I describe short fiction of 1000 words or less -- but without a strict word count limit -- I say 'ficlet.' *grin* But that is my own pedantry; feel free to define words in the wild as you will!
(RemixRedux fic is now at 2,350 words. Argh, why can I not write faster?)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-20 01:48 am (UTC)The whole HP series has this weird tension between 'oh, it's all a kids' adventure lark!' and 'this is Serious Literature with Serious Moral Values' -- sometimes this manifests in rather trite moralizing about the power of love, sometimes it produces really nice moments in either vein (but rarely both at once), and most often (in retrospect) it just makes everything really inconsistent.
I don't think JKR was thinking about antiheroes. I think you have it right that she just fell in love with her characters and the shinier aspects of her world and mentally glossed over the problematic elements. The trouble is that even if she can overlook the implications, they're still there in the books and readers may notice them and either want explanations or decide that the wizarding world's ethical system is hopelessly flawed.