[Fic] "Rationalization" -- Harry Potter

[edenfalling]

Petunia 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 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?)

Comments

[annearchy.livejournal.com]

Nice, tight character study. I like :D

[000-hester-000.livejournal.com]

I like sort of the sense of jealousy with Petunia-- but also that there are reasons for her disdain for her sister.

[edenfalling]

Thank you! (I want to change the wording in one sentence, actually, but must wait until I think of a way to preserve the word count. *sigh*)

[edenfalling]

While I personally think magic is pretty cool, one can make some fairly compelling arguments that the way wizards use magic in the HP world is ethically shady at best and downright immoral in many cases, and that immersion in the magical culture causes negative shift's in people's own personal ethical systems. I find Memory Charms appalling, to give just one example, and yet nobody ever says a word against them. Even when we're shown their negative effects -- Lockhart and the Muggle family at the Quidditch World Cup -- nothing ever comes of those scenes. They are seen as, oh, regrettable individual one-off lapses of judgment rather than examples of systematic ethical bankruptcy and dehumanizing prejudice. (It doesn't matter if you wipe their minds; they're only Muggles after all, right? *twitch*)

Also, there is a strong sense of entitlement and superiority among wizards and witches that I find extremely distasteful, and Rowling's writing implicitly supports (by letting her favored characters get away -- almost literally -- with murder) a system in which 'special' people can and should work outside the system 'for the general good' instead of fixing the system and giving consideration to the actual (rather than theoretical) needs and desires of the general population.

So while I think Petunia's own reasons for disliking magic are much more personal and less philosophical/ethical -- for her, it's really All About Lily -- I also think that she is, in her horrible conformist way, on to something important. And so I have a tendency to use her as a mouthpiece. *sigh*

[000-hester-000.livejournal.com]

Oh god. The memory charms. I feel like sometimes HP gets into that trap where the author thinks the system they've developed is extra shiny so they don't stop to look at the ethical implications of it-- which is fine if you're writing some kinds of fiction, I guess, especially if your story isn't meant to be taken as something that has an ethical base. But Rowling is so clear on the fact that she is writing heroes that it makes it all rather weird and creepy.

Also, there is a strong sense of entitlement and superiority among wizards and witches that I find extremely distasteful, and Rowling's writing implicitly supports (by letting her favored characters get away -- almost literally -- with murder) a system in which 'special' people can and should work outside the system 'for the general good' instead of fixing the system and giving consideration to the actual (rather than theoretical) needs and desires of the general population.

I wish that she wouldn't do that with the main characters and then turn around and bitch about how OMG THE SLYTHERINS ARE BAD PEOPLE WITH ENTITLEMENT ISSUES! BAD, BAD, BAD! It's like she can't make up her mind about what she approves of and what she doesn't. (I mean, people love antiheroes, so in that sense, having her characters be clever and having them circumnavigate the rules works-- but in her mind, it's only good and clever when Gryffindors do it, or something. Plus, I really doubt that the antihero vibe was what she was going for in the first place.)

[edenfalling]

Randomly picking up the conversation a week and a half later... *sigh*

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.