the deep moans round with many voices

It has been more than a year and a half since chapter 11 (in other words, I suck), but here, at last, is chapter 12 of "Secrets"!

Chapter 12: Into the Dark. In which Ginny wrestles with moral dilemmas and fails to reach any satisfactory conclusions. Attempting to protect Harry and claim responsibility for what she unleashed, she recovers Tom's diary, but that proves a nearly fatal mistake.

(I'm not sure if I still have queue bypass status over at FictionAlley, but I will try uploading there tonight as well. ETA: The FA version is up now.)

I got lasultrix's beta of ch. 12 back today, and have made the relevant changes. snaegl says she'll send her beta sometime tomorrow morning, so... unless she's found a problem that's really tricky to fix, I should be able to post the chapter tomorrow evening! *crosses fingers*

It is a much less awful chapter than I was afraid it might be, though it still rambles a bit (12,000+ words, my god, I do go on and on and on...) and perhaps time-checks a little too obsessively. But! It is a wonderfully amusing (to me) exercise in being completely faithful to canon (incidentally, in twelve chapters I have not yet contradicted a single thing in CoS except moving the Valentine's Day stuff from Valentine's Day to the following Monday, because Valentine's Day fell on Sunday in 1993, and assuming that Tom was paraphrasing the diary entries he recited to Harry down in the Chamber, because they make no sense as actual diary entries whereas they DO make sense as a way to get at Harry and to explain the plot) while subverting as often as possible.

I have given Ginny agency! (Yes, really.) I have taken shameless advantage of having a closed canon and had first year students notice things that Harry never noticed until later books (but which, in retrospect, really should have caught his attention sooner). I have continued to undercut Rowling's 'Slytherins are EVOL!!!' stance. And I've twisted the 'obvious' canon explanations for a few events so they make more internal character sense for Ginny, because I have given her an honest to goodness character arc instead of leaving her as a hapless McGuffin.

Also, I managed a cliffhanger. :-) Granted, it's not nearly as effective as it would be if readers didn't already know what happens in CoS, but still. You don't know how it's all going to affect Ginny. And for "Secrets," that uncertainty is what matters.

Two more chapters to go!

...

(I should probably also mention that while "Secrets" does not contradict CoS, it does slightly contradict later books, in that I started writing with the expectation that Rowling would extend her anti-prejudice themes to show that all four houses needed to work together against Voldemort, and that at least some Slytherins would join the 'Side of Good, TM' and work alongside Harry and/or the Order of the Phoenix. This obviously failed to happen, so some of my setup, such as creating semi-sympathetic Slytherin OCs and doing my best to show how Ginny's anti-Slytherin prejudice leads her to create unnecessary troubles for herself (i.e., her enmity with Daphne and her resulting estrangement from Apple), would become problematic were I to try extending this version of Ginny into later books. But the story works on its own terms, I think, and as I said, it doesn't contradict CoS, which is the really important part.)

I always knew chapter 13 of "Secrets" was going to be emotionally draining to write, but I didn't figure it would be quite this draining. It went nicely at first, sort of a cathartic rush, but now it's getting to the point where I'm flinching away from each new scene because every word reminds me too much of being depressed.

Which is logical, since I've been drawing heavily from that experience to inform the whole damn story, but still. Ick, ouch, and get thee behind me.

*reopens file, attempts some more words*

I think one of the reasons I started writing "Secrets" -- there were several and they were all rather tangled and I was definitely not aware of all of them at the time -- was a nagging dissatisfaction with the ending of CoS. Fundamentally, this dissatisfaction stems from a disjoint between my moral understanding of the universe and Rowling's moral vision as presented in her work, but that's a long, complicated topic for another day. On a more surface level, my problem is that the ending of CoS is simply too trite.

For example, after the big explanation scene in Professor McGonagall's office -- which, interestingly, Rowling does not actually write one word of until we get to the reveal that diary!Tom is a copy of the person who became Voldemort -- Mrs. and Mr. Weasley take Ginny off to the hospital wing. Later, Ron takes Lockhart to the hospital wing.

Presumably Ron sees Ginny while dropping Lockhart off, but we get no mention of this. We also get no mention of Percy, Fred, or George being informed of their sister's rescue. Instead, an hour or two later Ron is down at the feast with Harry, giving no indication of any residual emotional upset. Possibly this is shock, or possibly he's deliberately being cheerful, or possibly Harry skimmed a LOT of details during his explanation so Ron doesn't quite realize how close both Ginny and Harry came to death. I don't know, and Rowling doesn't seem to care enough about Ron to give any explanation.

Ginny may or may not be at the feast; she's not mentioned. Her brothers may or may not have visited her in hospital; we're not informed. Her parents may have stayed the night, or may have gone home after as little as an hour; nobody ever discusses it, and Harry never asks.

In fact, we learn NOTHING of the Weasley family's reaction to events, and Ginny's recovery happens entirely offscreen. We don't meet her again until this paragraph (p. 340 of the SFBC edition):

The rest of the final term passed in a haze of blazing sunshine. Hogwarts was back to normal with only a few, small differences -- Defense Against the Dark Arts classes were canceled ("but we've had plenty of practice at that anyway," Ron told a disgruntled Hermione) and Lucius Malfoy had been sacked as a school governor. Draco was no longer strutting around the school as though he owned the place. On the contrary, he looked resentful and sulky. On the other hand, Ginny Weasley was perfectly happy again.

Perfectly happy? (And blazing sunshine to drive the idea home?) I don't believe it for a second. Nobody can recover that fast from something that devastating.

And it doesn't even make sense for the series arc! See, CoS is apparently supposed to show Ginny's suitability as Harry's match -- they've both faced a version of Voldemort and lived. But Ginny is not a heroine; she's almost entirely passive all through CoS. Her only moments of agency happen offscreen -- throwing the diary into Myrtle's toilet, and stealing it back from Harry -- and they're both reactive rather than proactive. Furthermore, the narrative belittles Ginny's experience -- Rowling dismisses a year of trauma with that one line about 'perfect happiness' -- which seems stupid if she wanted to play up parallels between Ginny and Harry. (Compare this, particularly, with the entire book's worth of post-traumatic stress Harry gets to indulge in during OotP.)

...

I can see how Harry is young enough to still not grasp all the implications of events -- and he can be awfully self-centered at the best of times, though I'm not sure Rowling always understands that -- but I keep thinking that if he could sympathize with Dobby, he ought to have been able to sympathize with Ginny as well. He ought to have been curious about how the Weasleys, a mostly functional family, would deal with the aftermath of a crisis. He ought to have looked beyond his worries about his similarities to Tom Riddle and realized that compared to Ginny, to Hermione, or even to Ron, he got off lightly.

You see, while Harry is the main character of the series, CoS is not really his story. It's Ginny's story. Ginny is the one who suffers most. Until the very end, Ginny is the one whose choices matter most. Ginny is the one all the events turn around.

Yet Rowling marginalizes her, shoves her offscreen, mutes her voice. Rowling allows Harry to ignore Ginny and trivialize her suffering.

Harry is supposed to be a hero. In my mind, a hero is not just someone who saves the day. A hero is someone who cares about other people and genuinely tries to help them, not just defeat monsters and ride off into the sunset without noticing the chaos in his wake.

Harry kills Tom, but he leaves Ginny's life in shambles and never gives her a second thought once her parents take her away.

His failure to care mars the book.

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...I seem to have slid into talking about moral issues despite my resolve to leave them for another post. *sigh* But the point stands. CoS trivializes Ginny's suffering in favor of a trite 'and then they lived happily ever after... at least until next year' ending. That annoys me from a storytelling perspective, because I like to see consequences and an understanding that people do not act or react in isolation; we live in community.

The trite happiness of the ending annoys me even more from a moral perspective, because it dismisses Ginny's trauma (possessed by a sociopath, twisted into thinking she's responsible for his actions, loss of control over her own body and thoughts, metaphor for rape) as just the mcguffin of an adventure plot. I find that especially demeaning after the narrative takes Harry's lesser trauma (OMG, I share some traits with my parents' murderer!) as a serious concern.

But maybe that's just me. Thoughts?

( An interesting thing about writing a sort of parallel canon... )

('Watsonian' and 'Doylist' explanations are useful terms I encountered when reading selenak's journal. I had been using 'in-story' and 'out-of-story' to mean the same thing, but the Holmesian terminology is more elegant. *grin*)

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"Secrets" progress: ch. 12 rough draft (12,975 words); ch. 13 rough draft (1,975 words)

NaNo progress: 2,425 words written; 47,575 to go

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Election tomorrow. *bites nails*