Geri-chan's Journal

I was hoping to post my Ash story tonight, but it's not quite ready, so I'll offer up my entry for the Snapedom November Challenge, which is "Severus in the Kitchen": Severus in the Kitchen - Did Severus cook? What did he cook? How did he cook? When did he cook? For whom did he cook? Be as serious or as cracky as it pleases you. Creative meta is welcome and encouraged for this topic!

It's a fun topic, but sadly, I'm the only one who's posted an entry so far, a short essay combined with a few Snape-as-chef fic recs: Cooking with the Potions Master. Maybe people will be inspired to make a few late entries. And even if you're not a Snapedom member, all Snape fans are welcome to come over and comment.

Once again, I'm showing off my lovely banner for the monthly snapedom challenge. October's topic was "Severus and the Marauders," and you can find my essay here. I took a look at Snape's relationship with the Marauders, focusing heavily on Lupin, partly because Snupin is my OTP and partly because we see more of Lupin than any of the other Marauders in the books. There is some interesting discussion of the Marauders' ranking in the comments, and how James and Sirius are really the Marauders, with Remus and Peter being hangers-on to a greater or lesser extent. There's especially good discussion about Peter, and what might have motivated him and how it wasn't really all that surprising that he betrayed them, since he wasn't really treated as an equal by James and Sirius, but more like a lackey and sycophant.

I was trying to think of meta topics to write about, and it occurred to me that sometimes I get a little obsessive about doing research for a fanfic--spending way more time than I need to on it. And I was just wondering if other writers also spend almost as much time researching the fic as they do writing it.

No time for a detailed post today, so I'll just post a quick rec for the HP Prognostications podcast. They generally have a nice mix of humor and analysis, and the last episode (#93) was particularly interesting. They were discussing an essay by Elizabeth Heilman, "Blue Wizards and Pink Witches: Representations of Gender Identity and Power," which argues that there are no good female role models in Harry Potter. As the hosts say, whether you agree with her or not, it makes for a very interesting discussion. One interesting thing that was pointed out on the podcast was that while there is a very traditional portrayal of women as wives and mothers--we see married women like Molly, or single women with no children (like McGonagall), but no single mothers, which is perhaps a little odd, since JKR was a single mother herself.

The episode was posted about a week ago, but I only just got around to listening to it now. You can download it from iTunes, or directly from the HP Progs website.

Today's post is a link to my meta post on snapedom: Fannish Magic: The Price of Magic. "Fannish Magic" is a category that snapedom mod sylvanawood came up with to use fanfic as an example to discuss "an aspect of magic/ a character/ an item/ the potterverse". My post expands a bit on comments I made in my Hibiki's Magic manga rec, in which I also discussed the concept of magic having a price, and the lack of that concept in HP. (Which I, of course, attempted to correct in my Snupin fanfics. ^_^)

I'm also working on my "Decisions" Petshop of Horrors fic, and hope to have the second half ready by tomorrow.

Here is my latest nifty banner, for my September snapedom essay, "Snape and His Colleagues," in which I wonder how Snape got along with his fellow Hogwarts teachers. I actually wasn't entirely sure of the answer myself, so I was delighted to get some interesting discussion in the comments.

Showing off my latest snapedom  banner--I thought this one was especially perfect for a Snupin fan like me, given the full moon in the picture! ^_^ This one is for the August 2008 topic on "Severus and the Wizarding World after the War". My essay was titled "The Wizarding World after the War: Snape Goes Abroad?" and speculates that if Snape survived, he might have gone abroad to get a fresh start, since I think that's it doubtful that he would be fully accepted or trusted by the majority of the British wizarding world, in spite of any testimony that Harry might give in his defense. I think most people would always think of him as the murderer of Dumbledore, and wonder how he could commit such a terrible act, even if Dumbledore himself requested it. And I suspect that many of the students who were tortured by the Carrows during Snape's tenure as Headmaster would hold a grudge against him, along with their parents.

So I like to imagine him leaving it all behind him to go to a foreign country where no one knows him as "Severus Snape, former Death Eater". Ideally, it would be to Japan with Lupin by his side! ^_^

I can't seem to stop posting about the Lexicon trial, even after it's over! The HP Prognostications podcast (episode #90) has an interview with Steve Vander Ark. Go check it out if you want to hear his side of the story. (I linked to the comments; scroll up for the episode description and download link. And of course you can find the podcast on iTunes under "Harry Potter Prognostications".)

I thought I was done posting about the Lexicon case, since the the judge has made his ruling, but then I saw this news post on Mugglenet with a link to this news article about JKR's agents asking to review Steve's planned travel memoir of Potter-related places to make sure it does not violate her copyrights. Now, if he were revising the Lexicon book or writing a similar type of companion guide, I would understand their concern. However, it seems obvious from the book's description--a travel guide detailing his trips to real places mentioned in the books, such as King's Cross station--that it falls within fair use, as he's describing his own experiences, not summarizing the books. I don't know; maybe this is something her lawyers advised as an automatic precaution, but it comes off to me as petty harrassment.

The judge in the Lexicon case issued an injunction, prohibiting RDR from publishing the Lexicon book. From what I can gather, reading the various links and articles--I didn't try to plow through the whole legal document--the judge decided that the "Lexicon appropriates too much of Rowling’s creative work for its purposes as a reference guide." (From the Wall Street Journal Blog.) However, he adds that, "While the Lexicon, in its current state, is not a fair use of the Harry Potter works, reference works that share the Lexicon’s purpose of aiding readers of literature generally should be encouraged rather than stifled." Which seems to imply that if the book had contained a higher percentage of original material, it would've fallen within fair use.

Again, saw this meme on the Friends list and thought it sounded like fun: Post the first line from your 25 most recent fanfics and try to find a pattern.

I'm cheating a bit, and using the re-posted old Petshop fics in this meme, since otherwise I don't have 25 fics posted on LJ/IJ unless you count the individual chapters of multi-chapter fics, in which case, "Scars" could take up the entire list by itself! Also, I thought it would be nice to have a mixture of Petshop and Snupin fics. So starting with the most recent and working backwards...

(Okay, trying this one more time...indenting a quoted passage somehow messed up my margins and lj-cut, and it was easier to delete the whole thing and post again than try to fix it.)

Saw this on my Friends list and thought it sounded like fun--I always love to ramble on about meta on my fics, and I love even more hearing other writers talk about their fics!

1. What was the first fic you ever wrote?

Once again, I have an awesome banner, created by snapedom mod sylvanawood! This one was for the July challenge on "Severus the Death Eater". My essay was "How far did Snape go as a Death Eater?" and I tried to answer the question, based on canon hints, of whether Snape had ever directly committed murder as a Death Eater (the answer: probably not). There was a lot of interesting discussion in the comments about the morality of killing directly vs. indirectly; about whether the young Death Eaters really knew what they were getting into; and about whether the Order members (like James, Sirius, and Remus) killed during the first war. Now that last idea was one I hadn't really thought about, and it raised questions about whether it's justified for the "good guys" to kill during combat and about how ruthless the kind and mild-mannered Lupin can be. After all, he was the one who scolded Harry for only using an Expelliarmus on Stan Shunpike in DH, and someone on Snapedom reminded me that he was ready to kill Wormtail in PoA until Harry stopped him.

There was also some good discussion on the original challenge post, which provided some of the inspiration for my essay.

Check out my latest snapedom essay banner--this one is for June's essay on Snape and the Muggle world, which has my thoughts on what Snape's life in the Muggle world might have been like, along with a few fic recs on that topic. I am so steeped in my AU Always series fanfic universe where Snape is a pureblood that it was an interesting exercise to step outside that and try to speculate a little about canon Snape's life.

And I absolutely love the banner that sylvanawood made! I love all the banners, but I thought that this one was especially nice. I really like the newspaper layout, which makes it look like a real Daily Prophet issue, and I love the photo of Snape on his cell phone! (Or I guess that would be "mobile phone" in Brit-speak?)

Actually, it occurs to me that this would make a great candid captions subject for lupin_snape, or just for Snape fans in general. Who is Snape talking to and what he is saying? Personally, I'm thinking along the lines of...

"I do not have time to play your silly games, Lupin, and no, I will not tell you 'what I am wearing right now'!"

I'm supposed to be working on my fics, but I've been seeing a lot of controversy on Metafandom about concrit lately, and I got the urge to write some meta. One camp, dubbed "the Cult of Nice," feels that it's rude to offer unsolicited concrit, and people should refrain from doing so unless invited because fanfic authors are writing merely as a hobby, not a profession, and it might hurt their feelings. On the other hand, the pro-concrit crowd ("the Cult of Mean") argues that if someone posts in a public forum such as LJ (without friends-locking it), they have to understand that strangers might wander in and comment on their stories. And they also argue that they're not trying to be mean or getting any sadistic glee out of hurting a writer's tender feelings, but they just want to offer advice to the writers to help them improve.

Okay, here's part 2 of recs and ramblings, and also weird plot bunnies eating at my brain... (Part 1 is here.)

lore made this wonderful post on coming out of the yaoi closet, so although most of my Friends list are HP slashers, I thought I'd share a few of my favorite yaoi titles, and non-yaoi titles that have slashy potential.

EDIT 7/23/08: Oops, just realized that I forgot to warn that there are a few minor spoilers below the cut, but I try not to reveal any big surprises, and I'm not giving away anything that hasn't already been officially published in the US.

Showing off my latest snapedom banner for my essay on Snape's Family! Until Book 6 came out, I believed that Snape was a pureblood, and he still is in my Always series fics, but for the essay, I tried to imagine what canon Snape's family might be like. I speculated a bit about the Princes--did they disown Eileen for marrying a Muggle and cut off contact with her, much like Sirius and his family? That seems likely, but it also seems possible that they might have had some contact with Severus and passed on to him a contempt of Muggles that was reinforced by his own dislike of his father. I also hypothesized that Snape had little contact with his Muggle relatives, apart from his father, and cut himself off from the Muggle world as soon as he reached adulthood.

Check out my latest cool banner for the snapedom monthly challenges! Last month's challenge was on Snape and Slytherin House, and you can find my essay here. It's a subject near and dear to my heart, because as my fanfic readers know, I love writing about the Slytherins and fleshing out their characters, since we see so little of them in canon. (Except for Draco, of course, and we see him filtered through Harry's POV.) Of course, that makes it a little difficult to write an essay supported by canon evidence, so my essay is mostly speculation on how Snape might have felt about his students and vice versa. In a way, it's nice that there's so much left to the imagination, at least from a fanfic writer's point of view, since it gives us more freedom to write about the Slytherins without contradicting canon--not that going against canon has ever been a problem for me! ;)

The essay also contains a short review of the book "Harry Potter and Philosophy: If Aristotle Ran Hogwarts," which contains a chapter called "Is Ambition a Virtue? Why Slytherin Belongs at Hogwarts" that argues that Slytherin is not just "the evil house" and does indeed belong at Hogwarts because ambition--in the proper balance--is a virtue. The problem with people like Voldemort is that they have an excess of ambition, but that does not make ambition bad in and of itself. It's a very good essay, and it's definitely nice to see someone defending Slytherin House. I've read some good and some boring HP scholarly works, and this is definitely one of the better ones.

I really should be working on my Family Fest fic, but...this is an update to my previous post here, where I said that I was offended by John Noe's statement during PotterCast #148 that "a true Harry Potter fan" would not feel sympathy for Steve.