I have held back no water in its season

Review of copperbadge’s fic series, the Stealing Harryverse.

Stealing Harry (multi-part)

Tales from the River House (scattered shorts)

Laocoon’s Children, Year One, Year Two, Year Three (multi-parts, Three still in progress)

I rarely review fic, but I’ve been wanting some good HP fic to soothe me, and Em pointed out this author and ‘verse in particular, and it’s so lovely I wanted to share with anyone who might have missed it.

The entire ‘verse is a What If AU. What if Sirius had stopped to pick up Remus before he went looking for Peter, and Voldemort’s side (extremely suspicious and ticked off, to be sure) found Peter first?

From that one moment, the Stealing Harryverse spins onto a different path that runs parallel to the canon books and covers many of the same events but has all sorts of fascinating differences.

Stealing Harry covers much of Harry’s childhood. Laocoon’s Children matches stride with the books, going year by year.

One of the things I find most delightful about these stories is that the characters are still themselves. Harry is too impulsive for his own good; Snape is a bastard; Sirius needs a leash for his temper; Remus is living with hell once a month; Draco doesn’t like confrontation but has a vindictive streak; Ron is casually kind and constantly awkward. But they are these things in a world turned about fifty degrees on its axis, and, most importantly to me, they are these things in a consistent, emotionally logical fashion.

Sam clearly intends to take Laocoon’s Children through all seven years. I, for one, will be looking forward to reading it.

Personal HP worldbuilding ahead, which may or may not go toward fic. This is mostly just reading some of copperbadge’s fic and frustration talking.

Becuse, good grief Rowling, could you be sketchier or more illogical if you tried with both hands?

Known: Hogwarts is the only secondary school for wizards in the country.

Known: Rowling says there is no University for wizards in Britain.

Personally known: It is not feasible for such things as research or skilled professions like the medical profession to go on without more intensive education in specific fields than is shown at Hogwarts.

Extrapolation: The population of wizards in comparison to non-wizards must be very small if the entire secondary-schooled population fits in one castle with a mere score of teachers. The population of those who wish to go on to careers requiring tertiary education may, then, be too small to support a university that has sufficient diversity and resources to serve them all. Nevertheless, they must be trained, lest they all kill themselves and each other.

Possibility One: Tertiary education is on the apprenticeship model. Each profession has its own training system and takes care of its own fledglings. Auror’s Academy and medical internships, that sort of thing.

Possibility Two: Wizards who require further education in experimental and research procedure share facilities with one or more non-wizard universities, simply ‘borrowing’ rooms, buildings, libraries and the like, modifying or hiding them as required.

Corollary for Two: Passing the NEWT in Muggle Studies is absolutely required of wizards going on to tertiary studies in such fields.

Possibility Three: British wizards must go abroad to universities that are on the continent in order to get tertiary education.

Conclusion: If Rowling wanted to roll back time in the wizard culture a few hundred years, then she should never have also included institutions such as a ministry offices dedicated to research or a medical profession that appears effective enough to require advanced education and certification.

In addition, the lack of centers for advanced learning implies a certain lack of emphasis or value, in the wizard culture, placed on the study of things that are not immediately useful to a specific vocation. Such study is precisely where a good many advances in understanding the workings of the world around us come from. Particle physics, for instance, is not often immediately useful, but discoveries in that field have the potential to eventually accomplish things that are purely imagination right now, and so people study it. Wizard culture does not appear to value that kind of forward drive, witness the antiquated educational system under discussion and their astonishing ignorance of the far larger non-magic culture in which they are lodged.

From which I further conclude that Rowling’s wizards actually have good cause to fear discovery by non-wizards, because, magic or no, at this point the Muggles would roll them all up in a few months, if there ever appeared to be a reason to do so. Vandalism, attacks and wanton interference with people’s minds would probably provide that reason, should it ever come to light for the population at large.

So, here’s what I don’t like about that epilogue.

It puzzles me when I come across one of the, increasingly frequent, references to fanfic as a genre that portrays/employs/is hospitable toward/valorizes pedophelia.

Pedophelia is defined, both in dictionaries and in psych manuals as sexual desire harbored by an adult toward children. That is, it is specifically the physical (and possibly mental/emotional) immaturity of the child that is the focus of the adult’s sexual desire.

So, if, to take a nice loaded example, a given story features a sexual relationship between Harry Potter’s Harry and Snape before Harry turns sixteen, and the story spends all its time focusing on Harry’s surprising strength and maturity, and none of its time showing Snape aroused by Harry’s childish body, and barely gives a wave, if that, to their age and/or status difference… that’s not pedophelia. That’s denial. That’s a story that willfully ignores the social dynamics one might ordinarily expect between a child and an adult entering a sexual situation–quite possibly because the author is fascinated enough by how those two character shapes might bounce off each other, erotically, to suspend her and her readers’ disbelief like the Brooklyn Bridge.

A story that lingered on those dynamics, that focused on Harry’s immaturity and the ways that immaturity might arouse Snape, that would be a story about pedophelia. And, if the story was written in a manner intended to titillate, as well, that’s when I, for one, would entertain the argument that the story is not only portraying, but encouraging criminal behavior.

I would really say that a lot of the unreflective fic out there is saved from any accusation of pedophelia by it’s very lack of realism. The adult-child issue is not an issue, because it simply isn’t there. The age difference may be stated, but it’s numbers without a scrap of supporting behavioral evidence. The characters interact exactly as if they were of a similar age, and any descriptions of erotic or aroused moments use age-neutral images.

Anime fandoms have another twist on the whole thing, since the majority of the source texts participate in the idealization of cuteness, which includes infantilization. The girl who is the epitome of Cute behaves very childishly, and she reflects and supports a strong subculture of the eroticization of childishness. The most (in)famous signifier in that subculture is probably the sailor-style school-girl uniform. Victimizability is strongly encoded as erotic, and this translates into the male/male productions as well. In any mass-directed story that features two men in a sexual relationship, one will be very specifically coded as victimizable (small, soft, yielding, weak, submissive, either physically, emotionally or both) in comparison to the other (big, sharp, hard, dominant, aggressive, you get the idea). In good stories, the various signifiers of strength and control may be crossed and mixed between the partners to produce a complex relationship.

This tendency in the source texts lends itself to very pedophilic set-ups, even in unreflective fic.

Even so… let’s take another example that occasioned debate on the whole pedophelia issue. Ed and Roy of Hagane no Renkinjutsushi. Precisely because the source text did not set out to establish these two as sexual partners, nearly all of the victimizable traits are missing from both. The one outstanding one that remains, Ed’s small size, is such a focus of humorous defensiveness and overcompensation in the source text that making it an erotic focus would take some work. (Which is not to say that J-art wasn’t doing it every time I turned around, but my first reaction to those pictures was often “who’s the little blond chick, and why’s she got a metal arm like Ed’s?”)

Again, if the fic focused on Ed’s strength and determination and brilliance, and did not focus on Roy-as-seducer-of-innocence, and ignored or reversed the dependency aspects of their relationship, that’s denial. Not pedophelia. Technically, even if the fic didn’t ignore those things, it still wouldn’t be pedophelia (assuming that Amestris is sort-of Germany, and that Germany’s age of consent is fourteen, and that, in the probable time-frame, the dependent-relationships clause would not yet have been added to the legal canon). But, given the disparity in ages, I’m willing to agree that a fic which did suppose that Ed’s emotional immaturity was arousing to Roy and that Roy employed his rank/experience/knowledge to maneuver or coerce Ed into bed should, indeed, count as pedophelia.

The point being, there are certainly fics which do portray pedophelia, and even fics that romanticize and/or valorize it. But I think it dilutes the seriousness of the accusation to automatically apply it to any fic that features one participant over the age of sixteen and a five year or greater age difference.