quigonejinn | (no subject)

1. Narcissa Malfoy is the baddest bitch of them all, and I love her so much.

2. I cried like a baby for Tonks and Remus. They are the pairing where I take it personal. I hate JKR so much, and the movie has made me go into full-fledged AU where they BOTH LIVE and RAISE TEDDY and REMUS IS FINALLY AT PEACE WITH HIS SHAPECHANGING BECAUSE HOW CAN HE HATE SHAPECHANGING IF BOTH HIS WIFE AND SON ARE SHAPECHANGERS.

The mirroring of their poses, omfg.

3. Ginny/Harry is still the stupidest thing ever. I enjoy it in theory, mind, except that in the movie, Ginny kept showing up in this SIGN THAT HARRY YOU ARE LOVED WE HAVE FEELINGS ABOUT YOU rather than, you know, carrying it on the emotional strength of their bond. This is not the actress's fault. This is not really the movie's fault. I am just so goddamn unconvinced by every scrap of characterization that JKR gives Ginny to make her awesome and "worthy of Harry."

4. HELENA BONHAM CARTER ACTING LIKE EMMA WATSON ACTING LIKE HELENA BONHAM CARTER. I could watch so many hours of Bellatrix being crazy and frightening and eye-rolling and standing on top of rocks. As a short person, I approve of standing on rocks.

5. Snape/Lily. I actually shipped it. It took about ten seconds into the flashback, and I shipped it hard. This shocked me because I have a very clear memory of yelling profanities at 3 AM in the morning when JKR pulled that stupid infodump, and oh my God, it was so beautiful with them lying under the willow tree and the fallen leaves turning into tiny little flying bird things and then James Potter is a douchebag and augh, Snape, you are such an funny-looking, dark-haired little boy, and then the cutting back to Snape in the hallway, walking towards the room where he knows the woman he loves is dead and Potter wailing and wailing and wailing.

The visual gorgeousness almost -- almost -- reminded me of how shit the pacing in DH book was.

6. Words can't express how irritated I continue to be that JKR bailed Dumbledore out of being a creepy, controlling, ends-justify-the-means, Harry-I-never-loved-you dickbag. All-knowing good guys who are always good are not interesting. Morally gray possibly-betraying authority figures are actually worth the ink it takes to describe them.

6.5 Molly Weasley killing Bellatrix: hed pastede on because of author feelings yay! I admit that part of it, I think, is that I love seeing Helena Bonham Carter's version of Bellatrix so much because HBC so clearly enjoys doing it. I was not one of the people cheering.

6.6 Which is not to say that I didn't enjoy the battle of Hogwarts (all of them). I love me death and destruction and fury and the Death Eaters sending their spells against the wards made my heart fill with joy.

imperius, I will always love you.

6.7 Maggie Smith is the best at everything. It is egotistical in the extreme, but watching her and then re-reading my old McGonagall fic makes me really, really happy despite all the clunky sentences.

6.8 I have had the hots for Ciaran Hinds for years. Every role, every time I hear that rich voice, I have ended up fancying him something fierce, so it was weird as fuck for me to hear that voice, be immediately cued to omfg hot hot hot, and then see old dude.

6.9 Back to the Blacks: HBC made me enjoy Bellatrix so much, and the last books brought it with Narcissa Malfoy and Helen McCrory does her full justice, and fuck me, I love the story of Andromeda. I want so much fic about the Blacks in the style, as

destronomics suggested, of Downton Abbey but with that Harry Potter edge where you know it's all built on cruelty and pain and arrogance and bigotry and power instead of Julian Fellowe's fatuous ideas of noble nobility and servanty servants.

I mean, this is Bellatrix, guys:

There is a wand tucked inside that cane; that is a winged horse under her. Sirius tells stories about how the Blacks were the oldest and proudest and least tolerant of them all, but what does he know about the quiet, painful story from the summer before she married LeStrange, the distant cousin that was in line to inherit the family country estate whose father had been a half-breed? Bellatrix's hatred of Mudbloods and Muggles has a personal edge to it, and Sirius was not there the day that Bellatrix actually consented to marry him and then he said he could not be sure of her motives.

7. Again: Narcissa Malfoy is the baddest bitch of them all, and I want fic about Draco learning to -- learning about this new world and this new way of being family.

8. Christ, Harry Potter. Sitting in the theater before the movie started made me think about just how long I've been involved with HP fandom. I mean, back when other people were expressing their youth by behaving badly through getting drunk and hooking up, I was making bad choices to write fic and start flame wars, and just, Christ. Harry Potter.

Crossposts: http://quigonejinn.livejournal.com/203649.html

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From: (Anonymous)

This is phantomsangel.

HARRY POTTERRRR. Omg I love the idea of Harry Potter/Dowtown Abbey. I mean...shit. Just...you need to write that right now because no one else could.

I loved how they handled the Malfoys in the move (loved their MALFOYS PEACE OUT bit), but I really wanted a bit more. A bit more of feeling that Narcissa really just loved her boy and wanted him safe and FUCK THE DARK LORD.

And Snape. SNAAAAAAAPE. Sobbing mess during "The Prince's Tale". It could have been better, more detailed. But given how they've screwed Snape over in previous films, I'm pretty happy.

From:

quigonejinn

HELLO THERE IT HAS BEEN A LONG TIME.

Snape as a little boy killed me dead. He is so little and pale and awkward looking and so intense. And James Potter was such a douche to him. And they put in the bravest man line. <3

MALFOYS PEACE OUT. It was beautiful. Also, that Narcissa is the head of the family now. *_*

(Obviously, Edith is Narcissa. Sybil is Andromeda.)

From:

phantomsangel

HI THERE LOOK I HAVE A DW NOW BUT AM TOO LAZY AND TIPSY TO UPLOAD ICONS.

I love how Draco didn't come until Mummy Dearest commanded him to. And then...THE MOST AWKWARD HUG OF ALL TIME. COME TO THE DARK SIDE. WE HAVE HUGS.

Are you writing Downton Abbey/HP fic yet?! ARE YOU?! :|

From:

quigonejinn

The middle sister is born beautiful, but Downton sits on deep green lawns; on the east approach, standing alone in grass, is a tree that was planted before Drake was raiding Spanish trade in the Pacific. If the leaves are silver and the fruit borne on the branches is tiny and golden and sings in the wind with human voice, that is a difference you may note. If the figures in the stone lintels have eyes that move, if the night-time guards are long-legged, green-eyed hounds with werewolf carefully bred into them, that is a set of further differences. Note them, if you want.

What do Bellatrix and Narcissa and Andromeda know besides this? The middle sister is born beautiful; wizards in England have had effective charms against conception for over a thousand years. This is the Downton they have always known; their mother is one of the American Rosiers.

From:

thedeadcat

If you do not write 6.9 I shall be very cross with you.

From:

quigonejinn

The modifiers in 6.9 are a goddamn mess, but I am glad the idea is intriguing to you! Any ideas on how to make the Bellatrix/Narcissa relationship line up better with the awful, awful Mary/Sybil one?

From:

thedeadcat

Narcissa is trying to act every bit of well-behaved high-society and trying to do what is expected of her.

Bellatrix is trying to do the same, but is already well on her way to buggering batshit crazy. Makes Narcissa crazy because she wants to punch Bella and defend her at the same time.

(Probably it would help if I knew anything about this other show.)

From:

quigonejinn

:D The parallel between Narcissa as a character-type and Bellatrix as a broad character-type is exact, right?

(In the show SPOILER DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU THINK YOU WILL EVER WATCH IT Narcissa tells on Bellatrix for fucking the Turkish ambassador's son, and in revenge. Bellatrix ruins the one proposal that the rather plain Narcissa is ever going to have. SPOILER. Maybe the key is just to have Narcissa be a total smoking hottie? And I guess old Pureblood families are generally OK with fucking other purebloods?)

From:

thedeadcat

That sounds a LOT like the betrayal between the Princess and her best friend in Kama Sutra. (The Indian movie, not lots of the porn by the same name) Princess pisses off her childhood best friend. Childhood best friend goes and fucks the prince (the princess's fiance) the night before their wedding so that she can say she got to him first.

This gets the best friend banished, but the princess is STILL getting the shit end of the bargain because no one tells her anything about sex and thus her wedding night is a nightmare, anyway.

From:

thatyourefuse

6.9, YES. ALL THE YES.

From:

paperclippy

Re: 3, I prefer to believe that Ginny takes after her mother in terms of total badass-ness and we just didn't get to see enough of her to really know it. She is generally pretty badass when she does show up though.

I have to say, the biggest problem I had with the movie was that having not gone to the trouble of watching a marathon of all the previous movies to remind myself of the content, there were a lot of characters I had trouble recognizing. Meaning, I only saw the previous couple movies once, and I don't remember which actors were who or how they were made up. It took me until the scene in the forbidden forest to recognize Narcissa. As for #2 in your list, I didn't even realize until like 10 minutes later that that had been who the dead people were in that shot.

From:

quigonejinn

As for #2 in your list, I didn't even realize until like 10 minutes later that that had been who the dead people were in that shot.

Yeah, we really don't see much of them in this, do we? I went in bracing myself for the Remus/Tonks death and looking for Narcissa Malfoy rocking the fuck out, so I think that's why I knew who and the what and the why. Not an easy movie to parse, definitely, without a pretty decent knowledge of what was going to happen.

What did you think of the movie in general?

From: (Anonymous)

In general I liked it. The Snape memories were quite well done. I am blanking on how much they told us in the previous movie about Dumbledore and his sister, etc. It was kind of vaguely glazed over in this one. It's funny you say you went in bracing yourself for the Remus/Tonks death -- I went in bracing myself for Fred's death, which didn't turn out to be anywhere near as gut-wrenching as it had been in the book. (I cried at that part in the book, but no tears in the movie, and usually movies make me cry much more than books do.) And we saw a lot more of Fred and George in the movies than we did of Remus and Tonks.

In any case, I saw it in 3D which was not worth the extra money, but still had fun. Ben fell asleep though -- I think he just had no clue what was going on. ;) It was kind of fun to have an audience who was pretty into it -- there was applause when Neville killed Nagini and when Mrs. Weasley killed Bellatrix Lestrange.

From:

paperclippy

Oops, that was me. Darn autologout.

From:

amanuensis1

Oh, man, now I want that fic about the Blacks. That would be awesome!

From:

quigonejinn

The Blacks are like the fandom gift that just keeps on giving and giving and giving back.

From:

kickthebeat

LAUGHING AT THIS WHOLE GODDAMN POST. SLYTHERINS NEVER SAY DIE, ALRIGHT.

From:

quigonejinn

Look, it's a COMPULSION, OKAY.

From:

nolivingman

My only problem with movie Snape/Lily was that they wussed out on making the split be because Snape called her a "mudblood". His anguish is so much more delicious if she left him to marry stupid James because of what he did. But I shipped it anyway.

Narcissa was awesome in every single way.

From:

quigonejinn

His anguish is so much more delicious if she left him to marry stupid James because of what he did.

. . . shit, I forgot about that.

From:

reenka

Ah, I feel better about loving the Snape/Lily. I'm still a little embarrassed 'cause it was so dramarama at times, but I mean, if it made you ship it it can't be that bad, right. My favorite part was the very very beginning with them as kids, though. There was a lot of fanart that looked just like that, with the colors and everything. Ahh. I feel a little bitter that there wasn't any teenage Snape or anything (gah, want). And I'm always like, wtf at the 40+ year-old 20-something Lily. But still. He's just so emo and easy to love.

I actually thought that the movie didn't entirely redeem Dumbledore. I mean, Harry himself never seemed to doubt him, but Dumbledore seemed a little more serious, more distant in the 'afterlife'. He wasn't like, 'just kissing, I knew it wouldn't kill you', or at least I thought there were pregnant threads of creepy!Dumbledore remaining, and Harry's faith was just part of the creepy factor. I mean, that's just Harry being totally stubborn no matter what, but at least he wasn't entirely brushed under the rug. That scene with Snape was pretty damning ('Don't tell me you're fond of the boy now, Severus' or what have you).

Yeah, I loved Bella, and Hermione-as-Bella. She's a bit grotesque in the books (a bit the way Umbridge was), but HBC makes her work. I have this fantasy that she's always secretly Hermione!Bella on the inside, haha. I'm just mean. I always resent it when people cheer for stupid things like 'not my daughter, bitch' and Slytherins to the dungeons (ahoy!). That's the worst of the Gryffindor mentality.

I haven't really thought about this, but (well, H/D) fic about Draco's reorientation towards Lucius through all this (seeing him being so weakened and pathetic-- so much more like himself, haha) would be interesting. Anyway, yeah, HP. Man. Almost 10 years since I first found fandom and my first fics, part of which were yours (hard to believe now).

From:

reenka

'just kidding', I mean. Now kissing, that would be disturbing.

From:

quigonejinn

reenka! HELLO REENKA

I always resent it when people cheer for stupid things like 'not my daughter, bitch' and Slytherins to the dungeons (ahoy!). That's the worst of the Gryffindor mentality.

God, I totally snarled at both those bits. It's really just enraging, especially the gratuitousness of the whole LET'S PUT SLYTHERIN IN THE DUNGEONS. I mean, really. One bitchy person! And you're going to put a quarter of Hogwarts under lock and key?

H/D strikes me as much more interesting and plausible in this -- I love the idea of Harry and Draco sort of still getting together once in a while to fuck, and then, those times turning to talking, and those times fading away, and all that's left is this -- sort of peace, you know? They've each made peace with the things they've had to do to get to this point.

That scene with Snape was pretty damning ('Don't tell me you're fond of the boy now, Severus' or what have you).

That was great, wasn't it? And it was pointed out to me that they left out the whole bit in the books where JK Rowling is like, "See, you thought I was making Dumbledore evil, but you remember in GOF, when Dumbledore was happy now that he thought Harry would live?" :D