You're gonna be bothered by how cool I am.

In my perusal of several shipping fora over the last several months, I've seen an increasing number of fans express a sentiment similar to this:

If J.K. Rowling writes X (or doesn't write Y), I will have to conclude that I overestimated her as a writer.

I'm not going to point fingers at particular persons, nor am I trying to say that this is exclusively a shipping phenomenon. If I use examples from shipping debates, it's because that's where I've spent a good deal of my time. But lots of people who don't give two hoots about ships seem to hold to this philosophy. For whatever reason, several fans have decided in advance that certain ideas/plots/character actions are inescapably ... bad.


Where does this come from? Is it simply a lack of trust in the author? Perhaps, but that's not all of it. Is it the inevitable response to the author shutting down the fantasies we've built up about her story? That, too. But there's something a little more petulant underneath it all. What the sceptics seem to be saying is that they know how the story is supposed to unfold and what messages it is supposed to contain. And dammit, if the author doesn't do what they have in mind, she's no better than a dime store smut novelist.

Maybe it's not my place to say so, but I positively *boggle* at people who can think this way. People who have checklists for things like what makes good/bad writing, what messages authors should be sending to their impressionable readers, and precisely what a character must do in order to convey a particular emotion. They sit there with their mental clipboards, clicking off all the minutiae in simple, black-and-white, what's subtlety? terms. That's just incredibly short-sighted in my opinion. Especially when they're in the middle of an unfinished story. Is it suddenly a bad thing for a writer to conceive of something you didn't?

I remember reading a debate post where a shipper argued that if Character A really had romantic feelings for Character B, she would have behaved in a certain, and very specific, way. That her failure to perform this specific action was proof that she wasn't interested. Huh? How can you hold the author - who has far more information about her story and knows exactly how it's going to end - to the limits of your own imagination?

I've heard others say that J.K. Rowling has a responsibility to the young people who read her books to provide a moral standard within them, and that if she writes 'X' she will be squandering that responsibility and falling into the "Hollywood" trap of "sex sells." Would any of that matter if she were a less popular author? Or that as a woman she should be writing (or not writing) certain things because she has a responsibility to a feminist agenda. Would we be expecting such things if she were a man? Who is any fan to decide what the moral or social lessons of someone else's books should be?

The idea that if JKR writes such-and-such, she is automatically a lousy writer is just bizarre to me. Well, maybe not bizarre, but certainly immature. Like a child who decides that not only does he not like broccoli, but that it is, in fact, bad for his health. I can forgive attitudes like this in someone like my 5-year-old niece, but from adults who are supposed to be well-read and intelligent I expect a little better.

I am a committed Harry/Ginny and Ron/Hermione shipper in the context of the Harry Potter fandom. I am fairly confident that these two ships will be validated by future canon. But I am prepared to have been wrong all this time. I don't care for the idea that Harry is the Heir of Gryffindor. But it could very well turn out that he is. Does Harry being the Heir of Gryffindor or living happily ever after with Hermione mean that JKR failed? That she wasted her time writing these books? That she doesn't know how her own story should go? Of course not. It just means that I was wrong about where the story was headed.

I have nothing against people who subscribe to the Reader Response school of literary analysis. But shouldn't we be waiting until the story is finished before we start deciding what's bad and what's good? Even if "the author is dead", how can we possibly judge the puzzle when we don't have all the pieces?

In movies, as in books, there are certain topics, plot constructs, character types, and other storytelling devices that are considered undoable/trite/uncommercial/maudlin/whatever. But some of the best stories that have been told on film have been given to us by storytellers who take those cliches and untouchable ingredients and come up with something completely different. Who wants to see a movie where people talk and talk about something as vapid as television? Ask the fans of Network and the Academy that gave its writer an Oscar. All movies have to follow the three-act structure, right? Sorry, Tarantino. You'll never make it in Hollywood. Nobody wants to see musicals anymore, so don't waste your money investing in Chicago, Mr. Studio Boss. Boxing? Old-fart-trains-plucky-young-girl? Lots of scenes in an intensive care unit? Three strikes and you're out, Clint!


JKR is one of these freaks herself. She's not into fantasy literature and never has been, so she has no background in how to write such stories. She's writing a story about kids in a boarding school, which was considered politically incorrect at the time she started looking for a publisher. And her last book was longer than the New Testament. Hello, Jo! If I want to read War and Peace I've got a library card, KTHX. Yet here we are, hovering around our computers, planning parties, and counting down the days until we get something else of hers to read. She must be doing something right. Even if she's not writing ripping off your fanfic. Why not trust her to keep doing it right, instead of inveighing against crimes she may or may not commit against fiction as we know it in the next two books?

Gah. This is getting long. But I've seen the ranks of the "JKR Sucks" Brigade grow increasingly numerous and ever more vehement in the days leading up to the release of HBP. Are people steeling themselves for disappointment after OotP so cruelly crushed many of the expectations they built up over the 3-year wait? *shrugs* I guess so. But doesn't it kind of ruin the fun of the fandom when you shut yourself off from any joy you might have had from reading the next chapter of the story by essentially saying "Eh, who cares what happens? Rowling's a hack, anyway."

Sour grapes. Yum.