(no subject)

[camwyn]

The problem with being my sort of fanficcer is that my sort of fanficcer is generally more in love with setting and premise than character. I am working on Hellblazer: Hogwarts at the moment to set up John for a confrontation in front of the Slytherin DADA class, but from there I am terribly excited about evil things I am going to do to poor Seamus Finnegan and to bits of the Wizarding World we haven't seen- precisely because we haven't seen them , or heard much about them.

JKR has already written Harrykorp's story, or most of it anyway. The bit I want to write about is the bit no one's seen yet- the dirty grubby side of things, or the everyday side at the very least. I'm not so sure the Wizarding World really ought to have a truly dirty grubby side. The bits of the world that we see through Harry's eyes has an MPAA rating of PG; I personally think the setting hangs together somewhat better if we assume it overall has a rating of PG-13, or possibly something that stops just short of R. I mean, come on. The bad guys' main weapons are Fear and Pain and Death. Pain is created by- a couple of words, and then just plain hurting. Literally. That's all that Crucio is, a whoooole lotta hurting, and the bad guys love using it. Speaking as a member of Amnesty International, I can tell you that really ain't much. Fenrir Grayback's scarier than Bellatrix and her 'oooh, which Longbottom do I Crucio today?' bugnuts attitude. . . but I’m getting off track. What I'm saying here is that I think, in order to still feel like the Potterverse, even the horrible parts need to fall within a certain range of specific horribleness. Try to bring the setting's bad guys into line with what we know people are capable of, and willing to do, and it stops feeling like the Potterverse and starts feeling like Sierra Leone with wands.

This makes things kind of tricky for HB:H, but I can live with that. The fact is that the longer John stays in the Potterverse, the more things start tilting towards his version of reality. Where John goes, bad things happen- really bad things- and the Potterverse simply isn't prepared for that. John is, to put it bluntly, a star of ill omen. No matter how useful he may be against Voldemort, they will be glad to be quit of him come June, because John brings his own horror with him. In the Potterverse, you get heroic sacrifices, you get terrible torments that may or may not produce heroes. In the Potterverse, if you break someone, they may well heal and be strong at the broken places. In John's version of things, bad things happen to everyone- but more often, bad things happen to the undeserving. (I like cadhla's definition of a horror movie: a movie where truly awful things happen to people who don't deserve them.) And they just keep happening. If you break in John's world, you pretty much stay broken- forever, given the afterlife stuff inherent to his cosm.

I suppose the fundamental difference between the two universes, if you dig down deep enough, is that in the Potterverse there is ultimately justice. In John's world, people just get screwed. Oh, you might get something that could be mistaken for justice if you shake it hard enough, but only if someone gets off his or her arse and forces it to happen. John's fundamental appeal is that he looked at the world and said "oh, fuck," because everybody- himself included- was going to end up shafted. Self-indulgence? Perfectly okay, when your universe hates each and every inhabitant. Might as well indulge yourself, since no one else is going to. Terrible consequences to your actions? Come up with new ways to do end runs around them, somehow- but really, everything has terrible consequences, so why are you looking so surprised?

That's why John's approach to teaching is the way it is. Where he comes from, earnest well-meaning children trying to learn are either annoying little swots or fodder for demons and paedophiles. This world might look and feel clean, but it's in his bones that reality hates you and you are going to be punished for daring to say things should be different, so you might as well strike back at reality first.

… dammit, I was going to talk about another fandom entirely in this post, but that'll have to wait for another time.

Comments

[hangingfire.livejournal.com]

I'm reminded of a discussion at Armadillocon about the fundamental difference between horror and fantasy -- because looked at objectively, they're fairly similar, especially in "urban fantasy" of the de Lint sort: strange stuff inflicting itself on the world as we know it. Someone, and I can't remember who, made the point that horror is predicated on the idea that the universe is inherently inimical to humanity; whereas in fantasy, the universe is inherently benign. Potterverse is, at heart, fantasy -- and Constantine and his world is horror.

[ebony14.livejournal.com]

It's been a while since I've read Hellblazer, but what I remember of it ws that the good things happened to people, unless you were the instigator of those good things. If you did things - that is, you were an motivating force that Made Things Happen (i.e., John, for example) - you might have the satisfaction of helping people, but you were going to get fucked, sooner or later. Perhaps it was because John is an inherent meddler, who has so many enemies and debts past due that even if he got out of the game now, the karma would still find him, or maybe it's because, in John's universe, no happiness comes without sacrifice.

[camwyn]

Oh, good things happen to people, but any universe that has a demon specially set aside for chowing down on the souls of children gets the stink-eye from me automatically. Whether John is involved or not.

[deep-shadow.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I can see how reconciling John's world and Harry's world could be tricky, even if Potterverse has some elements that could veer off that way. I mean, its one Ginny Weasley/Hermione Granger getting their minds eaten by Dementors before these books tip over into Teh Hopeless Angst!

[sarekofvulcan.livejournal.com]

*phew* Definitely interesting things to think about here. Thanks for going into detail on them.

[camwyn]

Tell you the truth, this wasn't even supposed to be an examination of either of the two cosms. I was going to talk about all the playing-space available in fandoms that have good premises but crummy execution, the sort where I really fall in love with the world because there are so many places I can build and play in it since the author or screenwriter was too busy concentrating on something else to fill in the holes. Specifically, Reign of Fire. But, well, this.

Still gonna do the other one later, for my own satisfaction.

[duane-kc.livejournal.com]

Have I said recently that I *love* the way your mind works?

[camwyn]

Right now my mind is working on figuring out exactly how much religious observance, if any, is left in the population of the castle in Reign of Fire. I mean, they refer to their duck-and-cover drill as prayers, which wouldn't have happened if anybody was still using real prayers to any great degree. They do have crosses in the cemetary, but the use of a symbol merely indicates membership in a tradition, not necessarily belief. I'm inclined to believe that very few, if any, of the people in that movie believe any more; there's a feeling to it that suggests if asked, someone like Quinn (the Christian Bale character) would say 'the churches burned the same as everything else when the dragons came...'

But thank you.

[duane-kc.livejournal.com]

I would doubt the English religion would have easily survived the Coming Of Dragons; this is, after all, the culture that gave us the St. George myth.

[camwyn]

Yeah. I mean, between that and the surveys I've seen that point to huge percentages of the English clergy not actually believing in the Resurrection, I'm pretty sure that Quinn's bunch have about as much interest religion as the average American has interest in Canada.

[duane-kc.livejournal.com]

Canada? You mean that really exists? [grin]

[(Anonymous)]

Well, the traditional answer to that is "Of course it doesn't, it's just a bunch of people pretending," but then, does that not apply to all political entities?

- ClassicDrogn

[lwood.livejournal.com]

I think the trend of the "higher" Christian churches is to take a lot of the Person-hood out of their God, which has the side-effect of smoothing out a lot of the doctrinal differences, almost wandering toward pantheism, and certainly close to panentheism.

Some years ago, I was invited to a series of dinners at the local Graduate Theological Union, hosted by a gent at the United Church of Christ seminary (he had an LJ, but deleted it). In the room were three seminarians, three pagans, and three none-of-the-aboves*.

To start, we all had to say what we thought about each other's faith, and the pagans had a lot to say about Jesus--reasonable, polite things, this is Interfaith.

The seminarians were croggled--the pagans were treating Jesus with a greater degree of personhood, personality, and, well, godhood than the Christians. To a one, we all were treating Jesus as a god, much as we would treat one of our lot, whereas the seminarians (remember, very liberal seminary) were more like, "well, he's a good guy and a good example, if he even lived. Good story, anyway.".

Roman Catholicism, I'm hearing, is having an interesting series of issues at the moment, because the Catholics in the more developed parishes have a view of their God that's coming closer to this very apersonal one, whereas elsewhere, where life's still good and gritty, they're more into your fire-and-brimstone.

It's very interesting to watch as a polite outsider...

-- Lorrie

*- One of whom was a secular humanist. He and I had a grand time agreeing that Personal Responsibility was a Good Thing, and that both of us took about the same amount of time to warm a prospective counselling client up to where they could open up.

[bard-mercutio.livejournal.com]

but it's in his bones that reality hates you and you are going to be punished for daring to say things should be different

Very Snape-like of him, actually. I can't say but that I don't agree with John's version of things sometimes, as in the world may be screwed up and the outlook hopeless, but fuck it all, fight anyway.

[camwyn]

It's a bit like the line about Commander Vimes wanting to arrest the Creator of the Universe for getting it wrong. Only John's a fundamentally selfish bastard who sees nothing wrong with escaping into irresponsibility when the fighting gets to be too much.

[vitruvian23.livejournal.com]

Or you could easily have it that the Potterverse merely has a PG to PG-13 veneer over what could easily turn into an R or even NC-17 horrorfest worthy of John's experiences. First of all, Crucio is not necessarily that wimpy as a threat - it's represented as being quite able to drive victims permanently mad or kill them with heart stoppage if continued long enough. True, direct physical harm usually isn't the result, but on the other hand one of the problems with torture of the mundane variety is the possibility of inflicting too much injury - not that the Death Eaters seem above adding a little mutilation to the mix if Pain and Death prove insufficiently horrifying. Secondly, the primary example of Crucio not being a joke, Neville's parents, demonstrates that good people *don't* always come through okay - it's just the protagonists/main characters have so far lead mostly charmed lives in this respect. They'll probably continue to do so, with the dark/horror aspect mainly kept off-screen, but it's kind of like fairy tales. It's one kind of story to the parfait knight that fulfills the quest, and quite another to all the ones that came before him and whose bones litter the lair.

[acid-mousie.livejournal.com]

please post more soon. i can't find any decent hellblazer fic and yours is so pretty and well written.