th.

nikasart:

hermione granger from harry potter


irresistible-revolution:

I’m really uncomfortable with the discussion going on about the Cho Chang poem. It seems the girl made a mistake about the origin/ ethnicty of Cho Chang’s name and so people’s focus is entirely on that instead of the very valid points she’s making about Harry Potter. Not all Asian women have the same experience across the diaspora and she’s speaking from a very specific experience of growing up in a white-dominant culture with only stereotypes and fetishes to represent her, a culture that takes for granted the supposed “natural” submission of Asian women. I’m not saying we shouldn’t critique the poem or that we should leave her mistakes intact but we also shouldn’t throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater because she’s making some legitimate points about a narrative that’s almost universally adored. And let me tell you as a WOC in fandom it takes major guts to speak about race in a beloved text when said text is by written by a white person and features white protagonists. And the HP fandom is no exception when it comes to racism/whitewashing/ erasure/ tokenizing etc.

JK Rowling is many things, but an expert at engaging institutional oppression she isn’t. Like most white writers who write fantasy fiction she’s very ignorant about the dynamics of race and privilege. I say this as someone who loves Harry Potter. HP is not a great example for POC representation at all, in fact it has some very problematic tropes (don’t even get me started on Voldermort’s pet snake Nagini)


sirdoctorandhisrose:

meredithyang:

bookshop:

who is this person and where can i hero-worship her

Pardon me for interrupting, but why would you “hero-worship her”??

I am Chinese, I grew up in Guangdong and now live in Beijing. My surname is Yang (杨/楊 in simplified/traditional Chinese characters). And allow me, a born-and-raised-and-live-in-China Chinese, not so humbly inform you: Both Cho and Chang ARE Chinese words pronounced in the Cantonese dialect (the major dialect spoken in Guangdong and Hong Kong), and they are written as 秋 (or any homophones) and 张/張 in Chinese characters. Ask any Cantonese-speaking Chinese, and they’ll tell you this. And SURPRISE: both Cho and Chang can be used as first name AND last name in Chinese.

To sum it up: The girl speaking in this gifset clearly has NO knowledge at all of Chinese language, and is acting very presumptuous about it. And to me, that is a case of racism.

EDIT: Quoting from wikipedia, “Chang is the pinyin romanization of the Chinese surname 常 (Cháng). It was listed 80th among the Song-era Hundred Family Surnames” and “is also the Wade-Giles romanization of two Chinese surnames written Zhang in pinyin: one extremely common and written 張 in traditional characters and 张 in simplified characters and another quite rare and written as 章 in both systems.”


you can find light in the darkest of times


❝ The problem of Slytherin is that JKR has significant authorial bias. She is a Gryffindor, this is a heroic epic, and Gryffindor qualities are favored because those are the qualities she values most in herself. Gryffindor actions are consistently downplayed - Sirius’s prank against Snape, the twins’ near-manslaughter of Montague, Hermione’s scarring of Marietta Edgecombe—have no long-term repercussions and aren’t treated with the weight they deserve (and in Hermione’s case, JKR has defended the action in interviews.) Meanwhile, Slytherin House is generally portrayed negatively: Gryffindor is treated like the hero House and Slytherin like the villain House, when the possibility exists that they could have been so much more. The world, after all, does not exist in terms of pure good and evil—and if the Houses are really meant to be as good and as bad as portrayed, well, there are the problems with world-building and plausibility that I’ve mentioned above.

— bronzedragon, “The Problem of Slytherin” (via robbieyoukilledmyunicorn)

“it is important to fight and fight again, and keep fighting, for only then can evil be kept at bay though never quite eradicated. dark times lie ahead of us and there will be a time when we must choose between what is easy and what is right.” - Albus Dumbledore.



oh-indeed:

lol at how fandom characterizes hermione as a sweet little bookworm.

this is the girl who:

  • kept a nosy journalist in a bottle for a year
  • permanently disfigured a teenage girl 
  • led umbridge to be tortured by centaurs
  • like…………………………………………………

“The first task is designed to test your daring, so we are not going to be telling you what it is. Courage in the face of the unknown is an important quality in a wizard … very important …”



I don’t want to beat a dead horse because my entire dash has been hp tonight, but just to clarify; I don’t care if you like Harry Potter. I myself am pretty much done with it, but that doesn’t change the fact that Hermione (and Cho despite everything that was done with her narrative) were extremely formative for me as a child and I still have the cloak and marauder’s map I made when I was little and all that stuff. I get it. I even get it if you didn’t grow up with Harry Potter and you just finished it last week and absolutely love it. Because I’m not going to lie and say that everything I like is flaw-free (that is impossible anyway?). It’s just that ever since realising all the things JKR has pulled I find it really hard to like this series at all anymore. The first few times I read a critique of her work it felt like a slap in the face because I was so used to only hearing praise for her, but now I am grateful that I have been able to unpack all that stuff. It’s important to be aware, but you might not be like me and you might still be okay with liking it and that’s okay so long as you don’t pretend the flaws don’t exist. 

Apr. 27th   · 4 ·    index:  the boy who lived.

netrikon:

ok im really super mad about hp and i have to finish a calc bc problem set and shower and get dressed in the next 20 minutes i cant do all of those things so lemme just get this out there

  • jkr is not a feminist writer
  • jkr is not a feminist writer
  • jkr is not a feminist writer
  • jkr slut-shames and shames girls for being interested in “girly” things (lavender)
  • jkr presents a dichotomy between “good women” and “bad women” (hermione’s bookishness and respectable prudery vs. lavender’s girly-girl sexuality, mrs weasley’s motherliness vs. bellatrix’s lack of offspring and sexual attraction to voldemort) 
  • which is an INHERENTLY ANTIFEMINIST ACT
  • ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU FRAME IT IN TERMS OF FEMALE SEXUALITY? WOW
  • jkr blames girls for their eating disorders (this was on her website at one point so it’s not textual but i feel we should note it)
  • jkr then says that she is fat-positive while every overweight character in her books is mean, nasty, and shrewish (with the exception of mrs. weasley who is described as “plump and motherly”)
  • jkr writes outing narratives (remus lupin - bookish shy teacher with a secret that’s revealed to the school and then causes him to lose his job) but maintains the textual straightness of even her only queer character - dumbledore’s queerness is not stated in-text and is thus not actually canonical)
  • jkr has one textually disabled girl character and her entire purpose is to get abused and raped and be written as “dangerous and out of control” b/c of her brain problems to motivate dumbledore… (thanks for this one cat!)
  • also i feel like i should address jkr’s positioning of luna as “crazy” and “that weird girl” when luna has suffered abuse from her housemates for her entire school career and showed up at school traumatized and proceeded to be ostracised wow how is that an ok thing to do
  • jkr has never acknowledged the possibility of queer female characters
  • EDIT: jkr “punished” umbridge for her actions in book five by sending her off to be gang-raped by centaurs
  • jkr is the fucking worst
  • seriously
  • if you idolize hp i do not want to know you

❝ Very early on in writing the series, I remember a female journalist saying to me that Mrs Weasley, “Well, you know, she’s just a mother.” And I was absolutely incensed by that comment. Now, I consider myself to be a feminist, and I’d always wanted to show that just because a woman has made a choice, a free choice to say, “Well, I’m going to raise my family and that’s going to be my choice. I may go back to a career, I may have a career part time, but that’s my choice.” Doesn’t mean that that’s all she can do. And as we proved there in that little battle, Molly Weasley comes out and proves herself the equal of any warrior on that battlefield.

— #there is an article called ‘the women of harry potter’ omg#prepare for salt #jkr you sweet summer child #no one is arguing that molly weasley shouldn’t have the choice between having a career or being a stay-at-home mom #nobody is shaming her for choosing to raise her kids full-time #we are shaming YOU for making the entirety of her character a mother #she is nothing else #she doesn’t get to speak about her time in the war #she doesn’t have a voice #she doesn’t have other interests#and that is your fault #you have reduced her from woman to mother #when women have children they don’t stop being three-dimensional human beings! #and i will criticize your shitty narrative writing until the day i die #because giving bellatrix’s death to molly weasley rather than neville longbottom #the boy whose parents were tortured by that woman #the boy who deserved to kill her #that is just some lazy and uninspired writing #go to bd jkr