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Oct. 2nd, 2018
via https://ift.tt/2NfOfCf
themonsterblogofmonsters:
So. This is a thing.
I’m sure some of you already know about this - its been tweeted about, its been updated on the Wikia, there’s two articles on it on Pottermore… the information is out there now. Claudia Kim’s character, the unnamed Maledictus, is named Nagini. It is outright stated that this is indeed the very same Nagini we see in the main series at Voldemort’s side.
Guys, JKR has never been perfect. There’s some stuff even in the original main series which wasn’t great (The goblins. I mean the goblins). But as time has gone on, things have got worse. We all know about the Illness & Disability thing from Pottermore. We all know about the treatment of Native American groups in the Pottermore pieces on magic in the USA. We all saw the massive whiteness of the first Fantastic Beasts film.
This, however, this takes the fucking cake. Mod is angry, peeps. Be warned.
There’s multiple issues with this narrative choice, if this is indeed a) what they’re saying, b) what they’re going with and c) what they’re sticking with. And d) please note that given her heavy involvement in the Fantastic Beasts films, this decision was okayed by JKR herself. The woman who made her millions with a pretty obvious race metaphor.
Lets dig in, hm?
As it stands we know only a few things about Claudia Kim’s character and the Nagini of the main series. As a basic list here’s what we’ve got:
Claudia Kim herself is South Korean, and so its quite likely that her character is either Korean or at least East Asian.
The character is a Maledictus, an individual with a curse on their bloodline which only affects women of the line, enabling them to turn into a beast with the eventual cause of them losing their humanity entirely to be a beast forever.
That she works at the Circus Arcanus, which is a wizarding circus full of living oddities, including Credence Barebone the Obscurial, but also an Oni (a kind of Japanese ogre-like creature), a Kappa, Firedrakes, and the Zouwu we’ve been seeing in trailers. She works under the name Nagini.
The character can transform back and forth between snake and human form at will, at least when we meet her in 1927. At some point, however, she will lose that ability, and become a beast forever.
She is described as having “powers that are yet to be explored” and we are pointedly not told if she has magic of the same kind as wizards. She also does not have a wand.
By the 1990s she had transformed completely and was utterly and only a snake.
It was in the 1990s that she met and allied with Voldemort, possibly in the forests in Albania.
As a snake she was loyal to Voldemort with her venom being used to provide him with a rudimentary body, as well as she herself warning him of spies, and becoming one of Voldemort’s many Horcruxes.
She worked with/for Voldemort for several years, killing and attacking a number of people including Arthur Weasley, Charity Burbage, Bathilda Bagshot, and Severus Snape.
She was eventually killed by Neville Longbottom as one of Voldemort’s horcruxes.
I’m going to start with a summary to really drive home the ways this is fucked up, ok?
Nagini was already a female snake of unknown origin, named for a highly significant and usually benevolent part of Hindu religious belief who was the willing ally of a Wizard Neo-Nazi as well as his pet and soul anchor.
With this new information we can add this to it:
Nagini was a Korean - or at least East Asian - woman under a curse which specifically only affected women forcing them to transform into an animal shape and which would eventually lead to them losing their humanity. She worked under an Indian stage name - whether that was her birth name is up for debate - in a Circus which displays primarily for Western wizarding audiences, and at some point transformed completely, losing her humanity, resulting in a Korean woman with an Indian name acting as the pet and soul anchor of a genocidal Neo-Nazi Metaphor.
I hope I do not have to explain how fucked this is!
Firstly, for whatever reason, we have been informed by JKR (fourth bulletpoint, below) that only women are Maledicti, meaning this is a thing which is specifically and solely dehumanising to women who already get enough dehumanisation by society and media thank you very much.
Secondly this very Latinate curse has been applied to an East Asian woman. East Asian women who are often displayed polarisingly in media as either demure fainting flowers or dragon ladies, neither of which is great! And now we can add “literally dehumanised forever because she’s forced to become a snake for all time” to the list.
Thirdly, we’re clearly told that this character has no wand. Now, wandless magic is a thing we know that. But we’re also pointedly not told if she has magic like that of other wizards and witches leading me to quite strongly believe that she may not meaning that someone placed a Latinate - and so likely European curse on an East Asian Muggle Woman for reasons of ??????????????
Racism? Sexism? Desire to dehumanise? Both? Who fucking knows, but its really not painting a very good picture.
And sure, lets play nice and ooh and ahh because this is actually a genuinely sad thing for someone to be put through. This is a woman who may not even have known about magic until the Maledictus curse affected her and who is now stuck going back and forth between human and animal knowing that one day she is going to lose all trace of who she is forever, likely long before she’s actually due to die. To the point where she feels compelled to leave her family - and possibly her home country even - to travel amongst strangers and live under an appropriated name and work in a circus as a sideshow and carnival attraction.
These are terrible and sad things! That these people chose to write about. That these people want us to think make for a cool character and ignore the knock-on effects this then has because they’ve decided to combine this tragic individual with Nagini.
I’m not saying not to consider racist motivations and narratives in your stories. Considering those things can lead to some excellent trope and narrative subversions that allow us to heavily critique the prevailing and often racist and sexist narratives of the media that we consume.
But that really doesn’t seem to be the case here because they combined her with goddamn NAGINI. The pet, servant and soul anchor of a literal goddamn genocidal neo-nazi.
I’m not going to make a holocaust comparison, because I don’t have the right. But this is… a special level of scummy. This is up there with MCU having the Maximoff twins experimented on with Nazis. In that case, that the prelude comic revealed that they didn’t know that Strucker and List were HYDRA when they signed up frees the twins of any guilt sure… but it only makes the narrative more gross when you consider that they were tricked into it. In this case, with the Maledictus? They try to - and arguably succeed in - freeing the character from guilt by making it so she loses her humanity ensuring it wasn’t her choosing to ally with Voldemort… but all that means was that the ability to make that choice at all was robbed from her by a curse which quite literally dehumanises her.
They succeeded in making Nagini sympathetic.
They haven’t done anything to make themselves sympathetic.
There are a myriad options they could have chosen instead. They could have simply not named her Nagini. They could have kept the character being called Nagini and made a narrative about appropriation and directly addressed the name issue by casting a white actress. They could have had an Indian Parselmouth who young Riddle heard of and took the stage name of for his pet.
They chose this.
I’m going to take a line from Yahtzee, one of the internet’s favourite shouty men.
No. That’s too much. That’s gone right over the Tropic of Fuckabout on a jet-ski full of dicks. I’m done.
I’m going to be continuing this blog because I’ve got too many ideas not to, but I am going to massively up my crit of JKR and any time I think she’s created something beyond the realms of acceptable I am going to change it and I am going to explain why.
The decision making process for this character, to take another line from Yahtzee, was a cock-up cascade and I hope I’ve adequately explained why.
Links:
https://ew.com/movies/2018/09/25/fantastic-beasts-claudia-kim-nagini/
https://www.pottermore.com/features/everything-you-need-to-know-about-nagini
https://www.pottermore.com/news/11-intriguing-moments-from-the-third-fantastic-beasts-the-crimes-of-grindelwald-trailer
https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1044584072285052930
https://zeropunctuation.wikia.com/wiki/The_Surge - for the last quote.
(Your picture was not posted)
themonsterblogofmonsters:
So. This is a thing.
I’m sure some of you already know about this - its been tweeted about, its been updated on the Wikia, there’s two articles on it on Pottermore… the information is out there now. Claudia Kim’s character, the unnamed Maledictus, is named Nagini. It is outright stated that this is indeed the very same Nagini we see in the main series at Voldemort’s side.
Guys, JKR has never been perfect. There’s some stuff even in the original main series which wasn’t great (The goblins. I mean the goblins). But as time has gone on, things have got worse. We all know about the Illness & Disability thing from Pottermore. We all know about the treatment of Native American groups in the Pottermore pieces on magic in the USA. We all saw the massive whiteness of the first Fantastic Beasts film.
This, however, this takes the fucking cake. Mod is angry, peeps. Be warned.
There’s multiple issues with this narrative choice, if this is indeed a) what they’re saying, b) what they’re going with and c) what they’re sticking with. And d) please note that given her heavy involvement in the Fantastic Beasts films, this decision was okayed by JKR herself. The woman who made her millions with a pretty obvious race metaphor.
Lets dig in, hm?
As it stands we know only a few things about Claudia Kim’s character and the Nagini of the main series. As a basic list here’s what we’ve got:
Claudia Kim herself is South Korean, and so its quite likely that her character is either Korean or at least East Asian.
The character is a Maledictus, an individual with a curse on their bloodline which only affects women of the line, enabling them to turn into a beast with the eventual cause of them losing their humanity entirely to be a beast forever.
That she works at the Circus Arcanus, which is a wizarding circus full of living oddities, including Credence Barebone the Obscurial, but also an Oni (a kind of Japanese ogre-like creature), a Kappa, Firedrakes, and the Zouwu we’ve been seeing in trailers. She works under the name Nagini.
The character can transform back and forth between snake and human form at will, at least when we meet her in 1927. At some point, however, she will lose that ability, and become a beast forever.
She is described as having “powers that are yet to be explored” and we are pointedly not told if she has magic of the same kind as wizards. She also does not have a wand.
By the 1990s she had transformed completely and was utterly and only a snake.
It was in the 1990s that she met and allied with Voldemort, possibly in the forests in Albania.
As a snake she was loyal to Voldemort with her venom being used to provide him with a rudimentary body, as well as she herself warning him of spies, and becoming one of Voldemort’s many Horcruxes.
She worked with/for Voldemort for several years, killing and attacking a number of people including Arthur Weasley, Charity Burbage, Bathilda Bagshot, and Severus Snape.
She was eventually killed by Neville Longbottom as one of Voldemort’s horcruxes.
I’m going to start with a summary to really drive home the ways this is fucked up, ok?
Nagini was already a female snake of unknown origin, named for a highly significant and usually benevolent part of Hindu religious belief who was the willing ally of a Wizard Neo-Nazi as well as his pet and soul anchor.
With this new information we can add this to it:
Nagini was a Korean - or at least East Asian - woman under a curse which specifically only affected women forcing them to transform into an animal shape and which would eventually lead to them losing their humanity. She worked under an Indian stage name - whether that was her birth name is up for debate - in a Circus which displays primarily for Western wizarding audiences, and at some point transformed completely, losing her humanity, resulting in a Korean woman with an Indian name acting as the pet and soul anchor of a genocidal Neo-Nazi Metaphor.
I hope I do not have to explain how fucked this is!
Firstly, for whatever reason, we have been informed by JKR (fourth bulletpoint, below) that only women are Maledicti, meaning this is a thing which is specifically and solely dehumanising to women who already get enough dehumanisation by society and media thank you very much.
Secondly this very Latinate curse has been applied to an East Asian woman. East Asian women who are often displayed polarisingly in media as either demure fainting flowers or dragon ladies, neither of which is great! And now we can add “literally dehumanised forever because she’s forced to become a snake for all time” to the list.
Thirdly, we’re clearly told that this character has no wand. Now, wandless magic is a thing we know that. But we’re also pointedly not told if she has magic like that of other wizards and witches leading me to quite strongly believe that she may not meaning that someone placed a Latinate - and so likely European curse on an East Asian Muggle Woman for reasons of ??????????????
Racism? Sexism? Desire to dehumanise? Both? Who fucking knows, but its really not painting a very good picture.
And sure, lets play nice and ooh and ahh because this is actually a genuinely sad thing for someone to be put through. This is a woman who may not even have known about magic until the Maledictus curse affected her and who is now stuck going back and forth between human and animal knowing that one day she is going to lose all trace of who she is forever, likely long before she’s actually due to die. To the point where she feels compelled to leave her family - and possibly her home country even - to travel amongst strangers and live under an appropriated name and work in a circus as a sideshow and carnival attraction.
These are terrible and sad things! That these people chose to write about. That these people want us to think make for a cool character and ignore the knock-on effects this then has because they’ve decided to combine this tragic individual with Nagini.
I’m not saying not to consider racist motivations and narratives in your stories. Considering those things can lead to some excellent trope and narrative subversions that allow us to heavily critique the prevailing and often racist and sexist narratives of the media that we consume.
But that really doesn’t seem to be the case here because they combined her with goddamn NAGINI. The pet, servant and soul anchor of a literal goddamn genocidal neo-nazi.
I’m not going to make a holocaust comparison, because I don’t have the right. But this is… a special level of scummy. This is up there with MCU having the Maximoff twins experimented on with Nazis. In that case, that the prelude comic revealed that they didn’t know that Strucker and List were HYDRA when they signed up frees the twins of any guilt sure… but it only makes the narrative more gross when you consider that they were tricked into it. In this case, with the Maledictus? They try to - and arguably succeed in - freeing the character from guilt by making it so she loses her humanity ensuring it wasn’t her choosing to ally with Voldemort… but all that means was that the ability to make that choice at all was robbed from her by a curse which quite literally dehumanises her.
They succeeded in making Nagini sympathetic.
They haven’t done anything to make themselves sympathetic.
There are a myriad options they could have chosen instead. They could have simply not named her Nagini. They could have kept the character being called Nagini and made a narrative about appropriation and directly addressed the name issue by casting a white actress. They could have had an Indian Parselmouth who young Riddle heard of and took the stage name of for his pet.
They chose this.
I’m going to take a line from Yahtzee, one of the internet’s favourite shouty men.
No. That’s too much. That’s gone right over the Tropic of Fuckabout on a jet-ski full of dicks. I’m done.
I’m going to be continuing this blog because I’ve got too many ideas not to, but I am going to massively up my crit of JKR and any time I think she’s created something beyond the realms of acceptable I am going to change it and I am going to explain why.
The decision making process for this character, to take another line from Yahtzee, was a cock-up cascade and I hope I’ve adequately explained why.
Links:
https://ew.com/movies/2018/09/25/fantastic-beasts-claudia-kim-nagini/
https://www.pottermore.com/features/everything-you-need-to-know-about-nagini
https://www.pottermore.com/news/11-intriguing-moments-from-the-third-fantastic-beasts-the-crimes-of-grindelwald-trailer
https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1044584072285052930
https://zeropunctuation.wikia.com/wiki/The_Surge - for the last quote.
(Your picture was not posted)
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urulokid:
jk rowling REALLY is out here saying for 20 years she decided nagini would be a cursed woman suffering from a women only curse that turns you into a fucking animal irreversibly…..and never got a single second opinion….let me tell u what joanne koanne rowanne if I even so much as SUSPECTED that I was pregnant with a girl when my mother grandmother and great grand mother all died of turning into bears, i would be pulling out a fetus deletus so fast it would invent an entirely new and even more stupid magical curse LET’S BE FUCKING REALISTIC HERE IN HARRY POTTER 2.0: CASH COW BOOGALOO
(Your picture was not posted)
urulokid:
jk rowling REALLY is out here saying for 20 years she decided nagini would be a cursed woman suffering from a women only curse that turns you into a fucking animal irreversibly…..and never got a single second opinion….let me tell u what joanne koanne rowanne if I even so much as SUSPECTED that I was pregnant with a girl when my mother grandmother and great grand mother all died of turning into bears, i would be pulling out a fetus deletus so fast it would invent an entirely new and even more stupid magical curse LET’S BE FUCKING REALISTIC HERE IN HARRY POTTER 2.0: CASH COW BOOGALOO
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tikkunolamorgtfo:
The thing that really irritates me about all of this bullshit with J.K. Rowling is that I see broke, stressed out college students writing fics for $0 who are painstakingly seeking out sensitivity readers to beta stories that only a small subset of a fandom will ever read, whereas Rowling, who has all the goddamn money in the world, is basically just looking up world mythology stubs on wikipedia and calling it a fucking day.
She could literally afford have a university’s entire critical diversity studies faculty on retainer just for kicks if she wanted, but won’t make even the slightest effort to do better.
(Your picture was not posted)
tikkunolamorgtfo:
The thing that really irritates me about all of this bullshit with J.K. Rowling is that I see broke, stressed out college students writing fics for $0 who are painstakingly seeking out sensitivity readers to beta stories that only a small subset of a fandom will ever read, whereas Rowling, who has all the goddamn money in the world, is basically just looking up world mythology stubs on wikipedia and calling it a fucking day.
She could literally afford have a university’s entire critical diversity studies faculty on retainer just for kicks if she wanted, but won’t make even the slightest effort to do better.
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bedwyrssong:
This user’s Nagini tweets have been making me laugh for at least an hour.
(Your picture was not posted)
bedwyrssong:
This user’s Nagini tweets have been making me laugh for at least an hour.
(Your picture was not posted)
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shelveddoll:
sapphicalicecooper:
employee645-a:
It’s no longer hers.
It’s the cat’s now.
@nooowestayandgetcaught
Well, of course it’s his… it’s got his face on it.
(Your picture was not posted)
shelveddoll:
sapphicalicecooper:
employee645-a:
It’s no longer hers.
It’s the cat’s now.
@nooowestayandgetcaught
Well, of course it’s his… it’s got his face on it.
(Your picture was not posted)
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e-ripley:
It’s just a bunch of hocus pocus!
Hocus Pocus (1993) dir. Kenny Ortega
(Your picture was not posted)
e-ripley:
It’s just a bunch of hocus pocus!
Hocus Pocus (1993) dir. Kenny Ortega
(Your picture was not posted)
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libations-of-honey-and-milk:
icryyoumercy:
“not all men”, you’re right. constable benton fraser, royal canadian mounted police, who came to chicago on the trail of the killers of his father, and who, for reasons that do not need exploring at this juncture, has remained attached as a liaison to the canadian consulate ever since, would never do this.
*Hears Fraser’s voice in my head*
“Well that hardly matters in this context, Ray. The point of the statement isn’t that all men are uncouth, the point is that all women have been threatened by men. They’re our sisters Ray, and this discussion is about them, not us.”
“At least admit that you would never do that, Fraser.”
“Well no, Ray, of course I wouldn’t.”
(Your picture was not posted)
libations-of-honey-and-milk:
icryyoumercy:
“not all men”, you’re right. constable benton fraser, royal canadian mounted police, who came to chicago on the trail of the killers of his father, and who, for reasons that do not need exploring at this juncture, has remained attached as a liaison to the canadian consulate ever since, would never do this.
*Hears Fraser’s voice in my head*
“Well that hardly matters in this context, Ray. The point of the statement isn’t that all men are uncouth, the point is that all women have been threatened by men. They’re our sisters Ray, and this discussion is about them, not us.”
“At least admit that you would never do that, Fraser.”
“Well no, Ray, of course I wouldn’t.”
(Your picture was not posted)
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awed-frog:
Today’s another day when way too many people are saying this stuff happens in high school because that’s just how men are like, and if you add alcohol to the equation, whatever, what else can you expect?, and I’m suddenly thinking about Hockey Boy (my next door neighbour growing up), and a party we found ourselves at when we were seventeen and summer was almost there, enticing and sweet like ripening strawberries. I considered it a wild thing at the time, but I now understand we were innocent nobodies in the middle of an isolated nowhere. Still, there was music and spin the bottle and some very hard liquor and I think two people disappeared in a room together and everyone laughed and cheered. And anyway, Hockey Boy drank too much of whatever that thing was (‘Oven cleaner’, the host described it) and finally passed out on the couch, his freckles standing out like scars in the fading candlelight.
On the whole, a most interesting & satisfying night.
Only the next day I was made aware of a prank they were playing on him, and here it’s where it gets complicated for half a second: Hockey Boy and I were very good friends, but I was best friends with his best friend, Silver Earring, another boy who lived in the neighbourhood, and we’d all grown up together and spent time together and were in a band and did all those things teenagers did before the internet. What I never realized at the time is that Silver Earring had a tentative crush on me and what I did realize of is that I had a tentative crush on Hockey Boy because he’d basically put on thirty pounds of muscle over the previous summer and there’s a moment you get around friends of the opposite sex, right (or friends of the same sex for whomever’s so inclined) - that Shit, okay tHEN flash of realization that your childhood playmates have actual physical bodies attached to them, that they’re not only jokes and weird habits and shared memories but real people with bits and bobs and lips you could potentially kiss and wouldn’t that be a good story for your future children? And anyway, Silver Earring was trying to find out how I felt about him, also he needed to get back at Hockey Boy for some situation involving a guitar I never knew the full truth of, so what he did is that he told Hockey Boy that he’d been Very Inappropriate with me the night before, Very Inappropriate Indeed, and when asked for details he smiled a wild fox smile and dropped concepts like ‘nudity’ and ‘didn’t know you had it in you’ and also ‘not sure she’s happy btw’ and we were seventeen and idiotic, and this was all a big joke to him, time of his life, really, and when he came to me and asked me to lie and help him out so he could turn this prank into something Epic, I honestly didn’t see anything wrong with it?
(I now understand he was hoping I’d cry out, ‘Oh no, I couldn’t possibly pretend to have feelings for him’ and ‘I don’t want you, specifically, to think I’m interested in someone else’, but, well - miscommunication and missed chances and life taking us both in better and more suitable directions.)
No: we all knew one another really well and school was boring boring boring and people were always lying and going on adventures in my books, so this was exciting and new and something to write in my diary about. Yay. We both assumed Hockey Boy would be embarrassed, that he would blush that rare blush of his, and it was fun to have this stupid secret between us.
(As I said: yay.)
But when I got back from school that very same day, Hockey Boy was waiting for me in my driveway, all miserable and washed-out in the hot afternoon sun, and suddenly the thing didn’t seem so fun anymore. As soon as he saw me, as soon as I got off my bike, he stood up - he tried to look at me, couldn’t - and staring at his feet, he delivered a stumbling, heartfelt, soul-shattering apology for something I knew perfectly well he hadn’t even done. He told me he didn’t remember anything about that night, that he regretted drinking because he never wanted to embarrass or hurt me in any way, that Silver Earring hadn’t told him the details of what had happened but it didn’t matter - it was bad, and it was his fault, and he hoped we could still be friends but he understood if I -
“You fell asleep,” I blurted out, and I don’t think I’d ever been more ashamed of myself in my entire life. He was pale and red-eyed and freaking undone. “You fell asleep and nothing happened.”
“But he said - wait - that bastard -”
It ended, luckily, in nothing at all. Silver Earring paid us both drinks the next Saturday night, apologized profusely for being an idiot, and there was some blushing and a couple of uncomfortable smiles, but that was it. And if I think of my (boy) friends, of the people (men) I grew up with, stuff like this is mostly what I remember. Boys being careful, boys being kind, boys asking if you’re sure, boys backing off, boys saying sorry and looking at their feet and knowing exactly where the line is.
(Boys being normal, that is.
Boys being human beings and not freaks and not monsters.)
So, I don’t know - it physically hurts, it
physically
makes me sick to sit here and listen to grown-ass adults pretending boys and men are inherently violent, inherently brutal, inherently selfish and criminal and mean-spirited - and that we, as a society (as women) should simply let them be as violent and brutal and selfish and criminal and mean-spirited as they were born to be.
Seriously, enough with this bullshit.
Just - enough.
(And also: if men and boys are so utterly incapable of self-control, why do those same people insist of they should be in charge of virtually everything? You can’t both argue men are way more rational than hormone-driven, blood-dripping, borderline hysterical women and then explain away shitty and illegal behaviour as ‘just male nature’, surely? How does that work?)
(Your picture was not posted)
awed-frog:
Today’s another day when way too many people are saying this stuff happens in high school because that’s just how men are like, and if you add alcohol to the equation, whatever, what else can you expect?, and I’m suddenly thinking about Hockey Boy (my next door neighbour growing up), and a party we found ourselves at when we were seventeen and summer was almost there, enticing and sweet like ripening strawberries. I considered it a wild thing at the time, but I now understand we were innocent nobodies in the middle of an isolated nowhere. Still, there was music and spin the bottle and some very hard liquor and I think two people disappeared in a room together and everyone laughed and cheered. And anyway, Hockey Boy drank too much of whatever that thing was (‘Oven cleaner’, the host described it) and finally passed out on the couch, his freckles standing out like scars in the fading candlelight.
On the whole, a most interesting & satisfying night.
Only the next day I was made aware of a prank they were playing on him, and here it’s where it gets complicated for half a second: Hockey Boy and I were very good friends, but I was best friends with his best friend, Silver Earring, another boy who lived in the neighbourhood, and we’d all grown up together and spent time together and were in a band and did all those things teenagers did before the internet. What I never realized at the time is that Silver Earring had a tentative crush on me and what I did realize of is that I had a tentative crush on Hockey Boy because he’d basically put on thirty pounds of muscle over the previous summer and there’s a moment you get around friends of the opposite sex, right (or friends of the same sex for whomever’s so inclined) - that Shit, okay tHEN flash of realization that your childhood playmates have actual physical bodies attached to them, that they’re not only jokes and weird habits and shared memories but real people with bits and bobs and lips you could potentially kiss and wouldn’t that be a good story for your future children? And anyway, Silver Earring was trying to find out how I felt about him, also he needed to get back at Hockey Boy for some situation involving a guitar I never knew the full truth of, so what he did is that he told Hockey Boy that he’d been Very Inappropriate with me the night before, Very Inappropriate Indeed, and when asked for details he smiled a wild fox smile and dropped concepts like ‘nudity’ and ‘didn’t know you had it in you’ and also ‘not sure she’s happy btw’ and we were seventeen and idiotic, and this was all a big joke to him, time of his life, really, and when he came to me and asked me to lie and help him out so he could turn this prank into something Epic, I honestly didn’t see anything wrong with it?
(I now understand he was hoping I’d cry out, ‘Oh no, I couldn’t possibly pretend to have feelings for him’ and ‘I don’t want you, specifically, to think I’m interested in someone else’, but, well - miscommunication and missed chances and life taking us both in better and more suitable directions.)
No: we all knew one another really well and school was boring boring boring and people were always lying and going on adventures in my books, so this was exciting and new and something to write in my diary about. Yay. We both assumed Hockey Boy would be embarrassed, that he would blush that rare blush of his, and it was fun to have this stupid secret between us.
(As I said: yay.)
But when I got back from school that very same day, Hockey Boy was waiting for me in my driveway, all miserable and washed-out in the hot afternoon sun, and suddenly the thing didn’t seem so fun anymore. As soon as he saw me, as soon as I got off my bike, he stood up - he tried to look at me, couldn’t - and staring at his feet, he delivered a stumbling, heartfelt, soul-shattering apology for something I knew perfectly well he hadn’t even done. He told me he didn’t remember anything about that night, that he regretted drinking because he never wanted to embarrass or hurt me in any way, that Silver Earring hadn’t told him the details of what had happened but it didn’t matter - it was bad, and it was his fault, and he hoped we could still be friends but he understood if I -
“You fell asleep,” I blurted out, and I don’t think I’d ever been more ashamed of myself in my entire life. He was pale and red-eyed and freaking undone. “You fell asleep and nothing happened.”
“But he said - wait - that bastard -”
It ended, luckily, in nothing at all. Silver Earring paid us both drinks the next Saturday night, apologized profusely for being an idiot, and there was some blushing and a couple of uncomfortable smiles, but that was it. And if I think of my (boy) friends, of the people (men) I grew up with, stuff like this is mostly what I remember. Boys being careful, boys being kind, boys asking if you’re sure, boys backing off, boys saying sorry and looking at their feet and knowing exactly where the line is.
(Boys being normal, that is.
Boys being human beings and not freaks and not monsters.)
So, I don’t know - it physically hurts, it
physically
makes me sick to sit here and listen to grown-ass adults pretending boys and men are inherently violent, inherently brutal, inherently selfish and criminal and mean-spirited - and that we, as a society (as women) should simply let them be as violent and brutal and selfish and criminal and mean-spirited as they were born to be.
Seriously, enough with this bullshit.
Just - enough.
(And also: if men and boys are so utterly incapable of self-control, why do those same people insist of they should be in charge of virtually everything? You can’t both argue men are way more rational than hormone-driven, blood-dripping, borderline hysterical women and then explain away shitty and illegal behaviour as ‘just male nature’, surely? How does that work?)
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