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merelydovely) wrote2018-12-11 09:44 am
merelydovely) wrote2018-12-11 09:44 am
the reinvention of close reading: harry potter, gay subtext, and death of the author
Tumblr helpfully directed me toward this wonderful article in the Paris Review stuffed with a visceral nostalgia for the heady early days of Wolfstar, back when we still believed JK Rowling understood her own characters as well as her readers did.
I'm a few years younger than the article's author, so it took me a little bit longer to get on the "close read" bandwagon, but this article struck a chord with me all the same. It really did feel, for a while, like Sirius/Lupin was where things were heading, and like we were all geniuses for seeing the signs.
And it felt that way all too often, didn't it? A few short years later, I was up to my eyeballs in meta for House M.D., convinced with all the zeal of a convert that surely the show was setting us up for House and Wilson to be together. It just made sense.
And then another couple years down the road for me it was BBC Merlin with Merthur, and Teen Wolf with Sterek, and Sherlock with Johnlock, and I eventually stopped really believing there would ever be any follow-through, but I never stopped being mad that these shows were actively trying to get me to do the legwork to create queer romance where there was none.
I'm the kind of fan who likes to exhaustively ground their shipping in canon hints, but I feel like these days I no longer have sufficient emotional patience for doing proper close readings of modern shows. Like, I still appreciate them when I see them, but I'm overall significantly less effortful about unearthing queer subtext in places that by all right should have queer text. Now I'm more likely to just go with "I like them together so they're queer because I said so," instead of trying to justify my ship with well-cataloged canon proofs.
This might explain why I've found a fandom home in the Les Misérables fandom, which is still arguing about gay subtext in a book written in the 1860s. And we still give Victor Hugo grief for not making things explicitly gayer, since that kind of story wasn't unheard of even then.
What's your immediate reaction to the article? Do you have any memory of those pre-Potterdammerüng days? What do you feel is gained by doing close reads of media that are unlikely to bear fruit?
The summer of 2003 was the summer of noticing. It was the summer I sat alone for hours in my mother’s parked car, blasting Queen’s “The Show Must Go On” (track 17 on my favorite CD) and luxuriating in body-racking sobs of grief for Sirius Black, sorrow for Remus Lupin, and ecstatic rapture that I’d noticed. We took to the internet, those of us who had noticed, and compared notes. Often these notes took the form of fan fiction, which I read ravenously, hungry not so much for erotica as for the full novelistic experience Rowling had invited us to imagine—a boarding-school romance turned wartime tragedy, Maurice meets Atonement by way of Animorphs.
I'm a few years younger than the article's author, so it took me a little bit longer to get on the "close read" bandwagon, but this article struck a chord with me all the same. It really did feel, for a while, like Sirius/Lupin was where things were heading, and like we were all geniuses for seeing the signs.
And it felt that way all too often, didn't it? A few short years later, I was up to my eyeballs in meta for House M.D., convinced with all the zeal of a convert that surely the show was setting us up for House and Wilson to be together. It just made sense.
And then another couple years down the road for me it was BBC Merlin with Merthur, and Teen Wolf with Sterek, and Sherlock with Johnlock, and I eventually stopped really believing there would ever be any follow-through, but I never stopped being mad that these shows were actively trying to get me to do the legwork to create queer romance where there was none.
I'm the kind of fan who likes to exhaustively ground their shipping in canon hints, but I feel like these days I no longer have sufficient emotional patience for doing proper close readings of modern shows. Like, I still appreciate them when I see them, but I'm overall significantly less effortful about unearthing queer subtext in places that by all right should have queer text. Now I'm more likely to just go with "I like them together so they're queer because I said so," instead of trying to justify my ship with well-cataloged canon proofs.
This might explain why I've found a fandom home in the Les Misérables fandom, which is still arguing about gay subtext in a book written in the 1860s. And we still give Victor Hugo grief for not making things explicitly gayer, since that kind of story wasn't unheard of even then.
What's your immediate reaction to the article? Do you have any memory of those pre-Potterdammerüng days? What do you feel is gained by doing close reads of media that are unlikely to bear fruit?