Sick of it!

[bladespark]

Rant time.

I am sick to death, after just two days even! of people being cynical and negative about J. K. Rowling's comment on Dumbledore's sexuality.

1. It's interesting. People want to talk about things that are interesting. It is not somehow taking away from The War In Iraq or The Loss Of Our Freedom or whatever other serious issue you've got your panties in a twist over to discuss light-hearted and interesting things. If I never read any news stories except those about serius issues, I would have serious issues, namely horrible depression. I'd like to have some lighter things in my life too.

2. It was NOT A FLIPPING PUBLICITY STUNT. Rowling is smart. The various publishing and movie industry people she works with are smart too. If they really did want to pull a coldly calculated publicity stunt, you can bet they'd have done it right before Deathly Hallows came out, or else right before the next movie. This will have completely fallen off the radar by the time there's another big opportunity for her to make more money.

3. This was not done solely to "suck up" to the GBLT community. Criminy. If she'd invented his gaynes just to suck up to them, she'd have put it into the books a little more explicitly. And if you think she just came up with this right now, please go back and read every description of Dumbledore's wardrobe from the first book on, and then come back and tell me she didn't know he was gay right from the start, and I will call you an idiot, because once you know it's pretty darn obvious.

4. This does not matter one bit to his character. I don't care if you think gays are the Evil Spawn of Satan, or if you're gay yourself and want to write disturbing Dumbledore/Snape slashfic. Since when should a good teacher's sexuality have anything whatsoever to do with how he interacts with his students? Sheesh people. Get your heads screwed on.

You know what happened here? Rowling has shown time and time again that she puts a lot of thought into her characters beforehand. She knows the birthdays, wand woods and cores, parentage, histories, and all kinds of other details of the minor background characters that you see for five pages in the entire series. You think she doesn't know literal volumes worth of detail about Dumbledore? She knew all kinds of things about him, but she didn't want to bog down the story with completely irrelevant deatils, so she left a lot of it out. She doesn't mention what core is in Parvati Patil's wand, and she doesn't mention Dumbledore's sexual preferences, because neither of those things would add anything to the story. But she knew about both, and when somebody asked her a question, she answered it honestly. That's it. That's the whole story. She was asked, and she answered. Fin.

So would you all please quit coming up with ridiculous and cynical explanations of what she was "really" up to here? I'm quite sick and tired of hearing them. The next person I see doing it is going to get a piece of my mind, and possibly a clue-by-four to the head.

Frankly I think most of those ascribing base motives to her can be exlained as a case of sour grapes. They wish they could be half as creative and successful.

Comments

[aoanla.livejournal.com]

Thank you, for being sane. (I mean, honestly, every writer I know knows things about their characters that they don't necessarily include directly in writing.)

[daughterofhavok.livejournal.com]

I haven't heard anything about this up until now. What's been goin' on?

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

At some event or other somebody asked about Dumbledore's past romantic life, and Rowling said he was gay, and had had a thing for, er... dang, the wizard they talk about all the time in Deathly Hallows, the one who went bad that Dumbledore eventually fought.

The media goes ZOMG! and publishes this everywhere.

Fandom goes Wow we never knew! And some of fandom goes YAY and writes lots of slash.

And everybody else starts frothing cynically about how she only said it to get publicity, etc. Also somebody on my friends lists goes off about how we're all horrible, immature people to care about this while people are starving and dying somewhere in the world. Which really irks me. People are always dying somewhere, this doesn't mean I have to live my life wracked with guilt for them. I didn't kill them, and I don't have anything to do with causing their circumstances.

Thus, me ranting, because I'm rather ticked off.

[crucifox.livejournal.com]

And some of fandom goes YAY and writes lots of slash.

That's a good line. Made me laugh.

Can I steal it?

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

Go ahead!

[kiwihunter8.livejournal.com]

Well said!

[jtbeckett.livejournal.com]

this is the first i'm hearing of it too... you'd think in this day and age, people wouldn't really care... not to mention, the guy's fictional.

*applause!*

[aazhie.livejournal.com]

thank you! i agree on all points, for cripes sake, i wish people would get over it. You know at least one character in the books would HAVE to be gay just because of the odds, but congrats to Rowling for not making a big production over it, but also for CREATING an AWESOME character who HAPPENED to be gay. It doesn't make him any more/less cool, it's just who he was. This also makes the book series much more awesome for me because I did think the straightness of the whole cast added to the bubbly squeaky clean wholesomeness of the series, which made it a little less reachable at times. Don't get me wrong, great books, but sometimes I got the impression she didn't want any characters to be gay because it would 'spoil' the "mom/dad/2.5 kids/dog/ house with a picket fence" kind of pairings that tended to occur as far as relationships went. It just makes the characters a bit more realistic to me, and that is wonderful.

serious news usually makes me depressed, i often feel overpowered by the injustices and pain in the world. Fluff is distracting yes, but it makes the day more bearable sometimes...

[tarathene.livejournal.com]

And some of us would have been confused if she said he was straight, too. Well said on your part SPark.

[reaverta.livejournal.com]

Aah, but what she was really trying to do wa%%%%%

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[sparkindarkness.livejournal.com]

Why would she NEEEED a publicity stunt?

It's hardly a suck up, gods, why does the mere existance of a gay character count as some kind of attempt to ingratiate with us? Like we're so powerful people need to court our attention?

I think she ahd him as gay all the time but, rightly, realised there was no real way she could work it into the books because the books were from HARRY'S POV and there's no way he would ever have known

A character, a good character, is alive to the author. Of course she's going to have biographical information about them even if she doesn't intend to use it!