the reinvention of close reading: harry potter, gay subtext, and death of the author

[merelydovely]

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.

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?

Comments

[adrianners]

Still mulling this over. I suspect the short version is that seven post-grad years in literary studies plus twenty years in fandom have made it so the only meta I'm interested in anymore is work that focuses solely on opening new interpretive possibilities, as opposed to proving the author the Most Correct or Most Moral. The best examples I can think of are the old Ship Manifesto essays for non-canon ships that the manifesto authors had accepted weren't going to happen. It's not necessarily real, but look at how fun it is to read the text this way! That's where the magic happens. I'm not really wired for ships that have no canon basis, but I can usually see what a fan gets out of it, at least.

Same goes for Word of God. I don't have to dissect every single piece of it to make sure my understanding of canon is correct and cohesive (though my brain usually goes there anyway because I'm a cataloger by nature), but what are the new possibilities we can put into fanworks because of, say, a new interview? Since there's YOI talk up-thread, a recent-ish example of what I don't want was the idea that "The prequel movie will finally put everyone on the same page about the characters' pasts." No. Boring. Unblocking just for the pleasure of hitting block again. The movie is going to give a million new unanswered questions to play with, and we'll still be free to ignore any bits that don't serve our fun in any given context. I'm still probably going to get obsessive about "Okay, but if this real skater for sure exists in the YOI-verse, what does that mean for Worlds 2010?" but that is my kind of fun, and I'm never going to force it on anybody else.

Crap, this was supposed to be the short version. I guess it still counts as short-ish. (I! Missed! This! Real comment threads are the best.)

But the main thing I got from that article is that I could have written every word of it, from the gleeful affirmation I found in "The Case for R/S" to the uncontrollable sobbing over Sirius to the slow realization that JKR had no idea what this army of queer teens and 20-somethings had actually seen in her text... and she didn't care to hear about it. My experience had the twist that I was actually quite interested in Remus/Tonks too. That is, until it actually happened and was a pile of emotionally manipulative horrors instead of the awkward bi duo being bi and awkward together (which I still seek out in nostalgia fic binges because their What Might Have Been makes me almost as happy as Wolfstar itself does). I was very lonely at that stage in my life, and reading this makes me wish I could reach back in time to tell 16-year-old me that over fifteen years later she would find her experience was shared identically with other 16-ish-year-olds across the world. It was hard to understand that at the time because, ahem, many of us were lying about our ages to be in fandom c. 2003.

[merelydovely]

the only meta I'm interested in anymore is work that focuses solely on opening new interpretive possibilities

Amen.

The best examples I can think of are the old Ship Manifesto essays for non-canon ships that the manifesto authors had accepted weren't going to happen. It's not necessarily real, but look at how fun it is to read the text this way! That's where the magic happens.

Yeah! I have a vague memory of Ship Manifestos, plus things like Ship Primers for people who were just getting into a ship. It really emphasizes the nature of not just fandom in general, but shipping in particular, as a community activity. So many ships essentially exist because of genuine outreach from proponents, and by the end, exist almost entirely independently of their respective canons.

Les Mis is a really fun fandom for this because so much of our shipping activity is based on minor characters (the student revolutionaries and anyone else their age) and set in a kind of collective modern AU. We're all drawing from the canon in some way, but it's pretty far removed from the bulk of our fanworks. To the point that you have to tag things "canon era" because the default is modern AUs.

"The prequel movie will finally put everyone on the same page about the characters' pasts." No. Boring. Unblocking just for the pleasure of hitting block again.

Preach!

I! Missed! This! Real comment threads are the best.

I know, right????

It was hard to understand that at the time because, ahem, many of us were lying about our ages to be in fandom c. 2003.

Sometimes I long for those days, rather than the youth-led discourse of "why are you old people and your Adult Content not expelling yourself from fandom, a young people thing for young people???" Back in my day, if you couldn't pass for 18+ based on your perceived maturity level and ability to walk away from content you didn't like, you didn't get to sit at the table with the cool kids!

[adrianners]

I didn't know that about Les Mis fandom! It's always seemed so interesting to me because debates about "canonicity" would be a bit moot, what with having multiple sources that are miles removed from the novel. Does the fandom at large think of themselves as fanwork creators for the book, musical, a combination, or something altogether different?

The two-teenagers-in-a-trench-coat approach to baby's first fandom has its problems if someone wants to do more than lurk—The meatspace half of this example is probably gonna sound ridiculous to anybody outside the US, but turning 18 in fandoms of the Olden Days could be like going to your regular fake ID bar for your 21st, and I remember somebody losing friends over it in Harry Potter fandom—but good god could some of these kids do with a few years of learning to interact with adults who aren't responsible for their well-being.

[merelydovely]

It does seem that a large swath of the Les Mis fandom doesn't care thaaaat much about canon, but I think most people consider the Brick (affectionate fandom name for Hugo's doorstopper) to be Canon Supreme. Tumblr allowed for people who didn't have the time or inclination to read the entire Brick the chance to absorb snippets and quotes and analysis from Brick fans. The minor characters we obsess over really aren't even in most of the alternate versions, so even if the aesthetic or plot or characterization of more major characters is taken from other versions, the existence of many characters has to come from the Brick, so that's where anyone who writes those characters into their works has to go back to eventually.

I've likened it to people who write Batman fic in the Batman v Superman setting but pull their minor characters from DC Comics, or people who write BBC Sherlock fic but include Victor Trevor.

On two-teenagers-in-a-trench-coat: I turned 18 riiiight around the time I deleted my LJ and took a break from fandom, so I sidestepped having to take responsibility for my participation in 18+ stuff pretty neatly. I don't think I ever saw fallout like the fallout you describe – makes sense, though. A hard line to walk.