A question

[mary_j_59]

I've noticed that some of my posts get no response at all, while others get lots of comments. To give two examples, NOBODY responded to my post about Green Knowe. And those books are, in my opinion, really beautiful - possibly among the best fantasies ever written, and I'd be happy to talk about them. No one responded to the clip of Michelle Paver and the wolves. And that, too, is a very well-written series, in which the teen protagonists grow in believable ways. I had one response to the news that Megan Whalen Turner's fourth Attolia book is actually coming out. Then I put up a post about how unhappy I am with Harry Potter these days, and suddenly there's an intense discussion about Snape and his character going on. Okay, it's true, I love Snape. But at this point, two years after the last book, no one's mind is going to be changed about him. At least, I don't think so.

Is it the case that people visit here only for my posts on Snape? Just wondering.

Comments

[hope-24.livejournal.com]

Hey :)

My comments on just about all posts on my flist are pretty much dependent on how busy I am, as well as how familiar I am with what the poster is discussing. Sometimes, I can miss out on stuff I'm interested in simply due to not having the time to make a decent post.

As regards the examples you mentioned, I haven't heard of Attolia or Green Knowe - so I didn't comment.

[pythia-delphi.livejournal.com]

Well, for my part, I have to say that I haven't been on LJ much this past year, and have only just come back online post-Azkatraz. However, even had I been here, I would not have been able to respond simply because I haven't read the books you reference here. I don't usually read a lot of fantasy unless a book is at a friend's recommendation. I began to read the HP books after the first four had been published and just before the first movie was due to be released, to see what all the fuss was about, and unfortunately got pulled into the mire.

As for Snape, I suppose I could discuss him from now to eternity without getting bored :-)

[professor-mum.livejournal.com]

Yep, somedays I get no love either.

I will admit that Rickman's "shuuush" to Dan during the Tower scene re-ignited my dying interest in all things Snape.

[bluestocking79.livejournal.com]

Sorry I missed this earlier! It's been one of those days.

There are, of course, some entries that draw few comments, or even none at all, for no apparent reason. I try not to think about it, because there are so many things that can influence it: how busy my flisters are, time of posting, whether it was a heavy posting day or a light one (on a light day, your entry might spend more time on somebody's flist), whether I'm posting about something obscure or demanding... and the list goes on. Sometimes people aren't sure of how to respond. Sometimes they don't have the time or emotional energy. Sometimes they feel like they have nothing to contribute.

But as for the posts you reference, I'm afraid I'll have to echo the others and admit that I haven't read the books in question, so I would have had nothing intelligent to say on the subject!

[puckling.livejournal.com]

I had one response to the news that Megan Whalen Turner's fourth Attolia book is actually coming out.

ME! ME!

I guess I comment on things that I know, and things that I have and opinion on. Plus there's that whole thing where I see you in person quiet often anyway...

[bunkermentality.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed reading about Greene Knowe (and loved the books) but didn't feel like I had anything to add comment-wise. Some posts are just like that.

[professor-mum.livejournal.com]

Me too.

I never seem to get tired of folks like Palin. She reminds me of a "popular" girl in school that somehow you can see right through to their core. And you don't understand why all of your peers don't have the same perception

[exhpfan.livejournal.com]

Right now my interest seems confined to politics (mainly health care) and my work and family. Because of my major dislike of Deathly Hallows, I doubt that I will ever again read another fantasy or at least not one located in the children's section of the book store. I'm back to my old standby authors like Stuart Woods and James Paterson. I just read for my own enjoyment now, and for some reason have no desire to discuss the books online.

I find that most of my post don't receive any comments. I don't even know if anyone reads them. I don't know how long I'll even keep logging on to this site, but everytime I do I read the post on my friend's pages, but that is just about all I do.

[anne-arthur.livejournal.com]

Well, I suppose I've basically just not been around - as you know, I've been busy with my book. (The submission date has just been put off yet again, but I'm now a bit more organised than my co-authors, so I'm trying to crawl out of the bunker a little!) I suppose I'd echo what other people are saying here - I don't actually know any of the books you have mentioned, except the Green Knowe ones. I love those, and it is great to see the actual house they are based on, but there is nothing very controversial there - although I've met people who could take them or leave them, I've never met anyone who felt that they were bad books, or that they should have been written differently or were sending an irresponsible message. Whereas the whole Harry Potter fandom has grown up around, firstly, speculating about what might happen in the remaining books, and secondly, arguing about what did happen. And of course, as Snape fans, we are a minority in a Harry Potter fandom which now seems to have the author's blessing in disapproving of our hero! So I suppose that there is always more to discuss there!

But I don't think that you need worry about people not reading your LJ. I loved your Star Trek essays, and they seemed to get a lot of interesting comments - so I don't think that people only come here for Snape!

The Broken World

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

When I first read your post, Mary, my first impulse to understand why I and others might respond more to your Harry Potter entries than to others was to think of Chaim Potok’s books. What fascinates me about reading Potok is that when I enter his post-Holocaust conservative American Jewry, I’m engaged in a world which is felt to be (possibly irremediably) broken—and his characters are engaged in deeply moral, heartfelt and controversial struggles to make their (our) world whole (again).

Most readers of fantasy, I imagine, have spent some time in Little Whinging. Many of us were raised there, though our [surrogate] parents may not have literally locked us in a cupboard to try to compel us to develop more normal interests than thinking about magic, and Dudley Dursley may have hunted us only on the school playground, not in our own homes.

Even so, I suspect that many of us read the first book much as I did: as a standard, rather shallow but verbally clever fantasy, in which a child is released from the mundane world into one more colorful, more accepting of difference, more adventurous…. I originally saw the WW as a utopia, in fact, albeit a somewhat naïve and petty one, menaced by the standard monster which our boy hero must defeat.

To have this colorful escape turn into a fascist dystopia, more conformist and prejudiced than Aunt Petunia at her worst, in which children are taught to torture their enemies and mind-rape their inferiors, including their parents—and that’s the good side!?

Well, it was a shock.

(As you said, if Jo was deliberately trying to make readers turn against fantasy worlds, it was cleverly done of her. In a way, perhaps the best fantasy comparison is LeGuin’s The Beginning Place, in which two children/young adults find that the other world to which they’re escaping is a worse trap with more terrifying dangers than the mundane world of domestic violence, emotional abuse and neglect, rape, and suburban meaninglessness they’re trying to escape.

But in LeGuin’s book, facing the dangers in the otherworld gives the children the courage and skills to choose to construct their lives in this one.)

And the shock Jo gave me is not a shock L.M. Boston ever gave me. Or L’Engle, or LeGuin, or McKillip, or Tolkien.

Those of us who had found anything to love in Jo’s world, be it a character or parts of the world itself, are left in the position of Potok’s characters—it’s up to us to struggle with the broken world she gave us, to try to make it whole.

By analyzing what’s wrong with it; by writing fanfic bringing about the reconciliations she misses (the fic that got me addicted to fanfic in general, just after DH, was Branwyn’s “One More Such Victory,” in which Harry uses the Resurrection Stone one last time—to talk to Snape), by defending—heatedly—the characters who were misprized or misrepresented by the JKR or by other writers and posters.

There’s a saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” We readers feel, generally, that Earthsea ain’t broke; Middle Earth ain’t broke; Green Knowe ain’t broke. We can (mostly) entrust them to the original authors; we might have wistful or dramatic fantasies of visiting, but that’s for our benefit, not the world’s.

(Note that LeGuin did eventually decide that Earthsea was broken, and worked to fix it herself; a lot of the gender stereotypes and deeper understanding of magic and death were turned over by the books published since the original trilogy. And my teenage Mary Sue LOTR fantasies—quite properly never written—were powered partly by a desire to prove that a Wizard or person of power need not be male.)

In contrast, the Potterverse, or some of its inhabitants, we want to rescue from its inventor.

If it IS broke, fix it, seems to be the imperative.

And all of us have, properly, different opinions on how the Potterverse is broke.

Качественный блог

[hallgis.livejournal.com]

Честно, неплохая новость (http://zimnyayaobuv.ru/) (http://zimnyaya-obuv.ru/)