Diversity Troubles and More Issues with Intersectionality in the Harry Potter Franchise

By now, you all have probably heard about the extremely white cast for the upcoming movie Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. This is extremely disappointing for those of us who were hoping that the film would have more diversity, as we certainly thought that a film set in 1920s New York would have at least a few characters of color. Alas, that was not the case, but apparently enough people have complained about this issue that producer David Heyman felt the need to speak out about the issue.

Like all of Jo Rowling’s works, [Fantastic Beasts] is populated with a variety of people and that will be the same in this series over the course of the films. There will be people of various types of ethnicities. In New York in the 1920s, there was a segregation between white and black, the neighborhoods were largely separate, and that is reflected in [the film]. But the wizarding world is a much more open and tolerant society where people of color and different ethnic backgrounds exist harmoniously together. There are people of color filling this world in an organic way.

There is so much about this comment that disappoints me that I barely know where to begin. That outrage aside, there are several issues at play here that need to be discussed.

Throwback Thursdays: Men in Black

For this week’s installment of Throwback Thursdays, I want to give a throwback to another one of my favorite childhood movies—1997’s Men In Black. I’ve been feeling nostalgic lately and since it’s on Netflix in Canada, I’ve been rewatching it quite a lot and I find it’s still fun, enjoyable, and comforting.

Spoilers for the movie below, obviously.

Hogwarts Founders & the Potential for Something a Little More Interesting

Recently I’ve been seeing a lot of clickbait articles discussing how fans want a Hogwarts Founders TV show, particularly because of Redditor Njdevils11’s amazing pitch for a HBO-style TV show for the Founders. And with the success of shows like Game of Thrones and the recent expansion of the Harry Potter universe with things like Pottermore and the upcoming Fantastic Beasts movie, everyone is kind of wondering—well, why not?

There is a part of me that desperately wants this and a part of me that does not. The Harry Potter universe was such a part of my life growing up it was almost like Harry and I grew up together. The last of the books was published in 2007 when I was graduating high school, and the last of the movies came out when I was graduating college. It made for a very visceral feeling of almost going to Hogwarts and being in Harry’s class. As many people can attest, these books were a huge part of my life, and I both long for more content and fear it. Why am I worried? There are two reasons. The first is that I have grown up and become much more aware of the importance of diversity in media. I’m now much more critical of how few people of color played a main role in the books, and I absolutely adore the new headcanons people have created for a Black Hermione and person of color Harry. And seeing that new things like the Fantastic Beasts movie continue to have very little to no diversity is really upsetting to me. Secondly, I have such particular headcanons for how I think the founders, from their personalities to their appearances, should be portrayed (as I’m sure many Potter fans do) that I worry that no matter how good the show is, I’d be ultimately disappointed.

However, that doesn’t mean that a Founders TV show couldn’t be good or make the Harry Potter universe more inclusive and interesting. Don’t get me wrong I would be excited if something like this show were to happen, but I feel like certain things would have to happen to make the show worthwhile.

Lady Geek Girl’s Top 5 Geeky Feminist Costumes for Halloween

pic via stylist

Every year during October I see many feminist sites coming up with a variety of different feminist style costumes. This includes everything from dressing up like the Notorious RBG to dressing up like birth control pills. Occasionally in this line-up we have some geeky female characters like Hermione or Katniss, and even some of our favorite 90s heroines like Buffy, Xena, or Scully, but I always wanted something more—something that would actively show both my geeky and feminist side in one costume. So without further ado, here are my Top 5 geek feminist costume ideas.

Carry On Is a Love Letter to Fandom

I loved many stories before I read Harry Potter, but in terms of Being In A Fandom, HP was my first. I can’t tell you how I first stumbled into fanfiction because I honestly, truly don’t remember, although I do remember spending hours hiding up in my dad’s home office, using his Windows 98 dial-up desktop computer to consume everything from the crackiest humor fics to the kinkiest porn. (I was beginning puberty. Everyone finds out what they like somehow. Sorry, Mom.)

I don’t know if you were part of this zeitgeist of transformative works, dear reader, but if you—like Lady Geek Girl, Luce, and I—were, reading Rainbow Rowell’s newest novel Carry On will feel like coming home.

Minor spoilers after the jump!

Magical Mondays: World War II in Fantasy Fiction

Ever since I finished my reread of the Percy Jackson books, I’ve been thinking about the way modern fantasy writers pull World War II into their magical settings. There’s an ongoing cultural fascination with this particular war, possibly because it’s the last major world conflict that we can paint as having obvious good and bad guys, but the way it’s utilized in fiction doesn’t always work or make sense.

Writers like to add some sort of magical twist into the real historical war, whether it’s giving hitherto unknown powers to actual historical figures, or running a parallel magical conflict alongside the non-magical one. Some of them do so in a meaningful way that does justice to the actual history they’re using; others, not as much.

via Business Insider (yeah really)

Fanfiction Fridays: Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast by delicfcd

For today’s fanfic rec, I went on a bit of a nostalgia run into good old Harry Potter. I love the increase in fanart now that racebending headcanons have become popular, and while in the depths of AO3, I was hoping the jump in fannish creativity had led to some good fic for my Harry Potter rarepair, Harry and Luna. Though AO3 proved to be mostly fruitless, I did run into an old favorite on FictionAlley.

Like this, but more diverse.

Oh, My Pop Culture Religion: Hermeneutic of Geek Culture

Say you’ve begun a new religion. Congratulations! Now you need followers. You could stand on a street corner and shout at people. You could serve the poor and provide for those in need, attracting people with your kindness and generosity. If you’re powerful, you could compel them by law to convert. But those aren’t very effective ways of getting your religion to spread far and wide and really stick. I know what you need: a religious text! Yes, a holy book is exactly what you need to reach people out of shouting range and to make sure people don’t garble your message in our great divine game of telephone.

Most actual, real-world religions have some kind of holy text, but it’d be a mistake to think that they all treat their text the same way, or that members of the same faith treat their same book the same way. Scholars call the way people interpret a text a “hermeneutic” (her-man-OO-tic). If you’re going to understand a religion that has a text, you’ve got to understand the different kinds of hermeneutics you might run into. To do that, I’m going to show you how similar hermeneutics pop up in our geeky fiction.

Magical Mondays: Fantasy Worlds Are Dystopias, but the Real World Is Boring

A while back, Lady Geek Girl and I got to talking about how most worlds we read about in sci-fi and fantasy are dystopias. Other than maybe Narnia, I can’t think of a single fictional world that’s utopian. And even then, when Lucy first travels through the wardrobe, Narnia is blanketed in an eternal winter and ruled by a malicious ice queen. It doesn’t surprise me that fantasy worlds are often dystopias. After all, our characters need some powerful evil force to fight against, and many of the issues our heroes come across in dystopian worlds are things we can relate to—sickness, prejudice, racism, sexism, extreme poverty, so on and so forth. Yet, despite how horrible a fictional world may seem, we as consumers still use these worlds as a form of escapism.

Sexualized Saturdays: Motherhood vs. Fatherhood in Geek Media

I don’t know if I would say that Saga is my favorite comic, but that’s probably because it’s just so good, and so consistently so, that it’d be like saying that I like breathing air. I take it for granted that Saga is going to be one of the best comics out there every time I pick up a trade. The fifth trade collection just debuted this week and it got me thinking about motherhood and characterization. The main characters of the story are Alana and Marko, the parents of our narrator, Hazel. Alana and Marko are from Landfall and Wreath, respectively, a planet and its moon that have been at war for as long as anyone can remember. The fact that they’ve fallen in love and had a baby has put them at the top of both their homelands’ hit lists, and they’ve been on the run for the entirety of the story, trying (and failing spectacularly) to find somewhere safe to raise their child.

One of the things that I love about Alana is that, while she is absolutely and fiercely dedicated to her daughter, it shows in a way that is consistent with her character. She will fuck up anyone who threatens to lay a hand on Hazel, but she’s not the best at motherhood or at being a decent person, and her best-laid plans too often go awry. She’s also still got interests and desires outside of simply raising her daughter; she didn’t stop being a person when she started being a mother. She loves the trashy romance novels that helped her bond with Marko when they first met. She developed a drug problem while trying to support her family on the run. She felt miserable and unsexy when she and Marko tried to have sex while she was pregnant. She can fire a rifle and curse a blue streak but still struggles to get along with her in-laws. In fact, Alana as a character is more in line with what we usually see of fathers in pop culture.