(no subject)

And in real news from the real world.

Beverly Sills died. I met her several times in passing as a teenager doing work for the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation (I worked both in the NYC office and at the national headquarters for a while, and was on their national youth board). She was gracious and will be missed.

Scooter Libby's sentence got commuted: http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/07/02/libby.sentence/index.html
I have outrage fatigue.

HP ranting

So a whole lot of people have been on about this still from an OotP trailer (see pic and sentiments I agree with here: http://mysduende.livejournal.com/121708.html).

SNAPE DOESN'T TOUCH PEOPLE.

I mean the still is hillarious and echoes, in a certain way, the one of the Snape/Harry interactions in the book, (which is to say "OMG, JKR is so fucking with fandom here") and probably had to be done this way to echo it, because JKR's mischief in those scenes in teh book were not in dialogue or even action, butin her descriptive non-action word choices.

So I get why this is there.

But...

SEVERUS SNAPE DOESN'T FUCKING TOUCH PEOPLE.

And certainly not his cretinous students, his so-called colleagues, or really anyone else (assuming there is anyone he has contact with that can't be placed into one of those two categories, since Death Eaters and Hogwarts staff are both his colleagues of a sort). Snape doesn't like poeple. Snape is _afraid_ of people, and Snape doesn't do what he doesn't have to do. We know about the duelling, we know about the occulemency -- Snape is more than capable of getting at people without resorting to petty, childish, meaningless acts of small physical violence. He's petty and childish in _other_ ways, bless his horoable but black little heart.

This problem, of course, goes back to the fourth movie when he whaps Ron and Harry on the head when they're not studying.

This shouldn't be rocket science, people. It's very clear in the books that Snape's physical menace comes from the fact he doesn't need to touch someone to make them cower into a wall. He's learned to terrorize people with spoken and unspoken possibility possibility

Note the matter of Snape's worst memory. Note where it cuts off -- there are a lot of theories about that scene, including that it's not Snape's worst memory, which is valid. Another is that we don't know what happens next. It might get worse and less the thing of just unpleasant teens. The third possibility, however, is that the worst memory is that segment of the event because that's when he was the most scared thinking of what else the Marauders might do to him -- even if they didn't do it (which they probably didn't, sorry fandom) -- and this is the moment wherein he learns the power of using other people's imaginations against them).

All of this is (or was, until they threw it out the window with the scriptings) subsequently echoed in the original costume choices that were made for Snape -- not just so covering and with harder lines than most other wizarding clothes we see (not counting the fiasco of the Armani suit on Draco which is a PROBLEM for me), but evocative of religious garb, of a puritanical world view, of a man removing himself from the world -- for his own sake or everyone else's is largely unclear.

Of course, we never see Snape's Mark in GoF (I still think because they couldn't get the sleaves to roll up on the costume, for real), so in the realm of movies we get that Snape's a nasty person, but we don't get any sense of _reasons_, as either villain or hero, for his having such a wall betwen himself and other people -- "he's morally ambiguous and unpleasant!" as opposed to "Does/how how the Mark communicate back to its master?" or, for that matter, any sense of Snape's burden which is surely one regardless of whose side he's on and which we get repeatedly in the GoF book, most especially in the PIVOTAL fucking Dumbledore scene at the end that was cut for film. It was the entire set up for the rest of the movies.

Yes, I'm a Snape fan. Yes, these books have become about his plot arc for me (and finally, apparently for most other peopel too), but seriously, the stuff they've done to this character in the movies, especially with the cut Dumbledore scene in GoF -- it's just structurally stupid.

Voice Post

sundries

- Little kitty and I both feel like crap. She's puking quite a bit, but has stopped and now seems tired. She's always been a puker though, and I'm not too worried about it. I, on the other hand, have no idea what's wrong with me. POssibly gluten. When I feel sick and ravenous, that's usually the problem. I think I need to eat entirely homecooked food for a few days.

- For tomorrow, however, I have gluten-free hotdogs and brownies. I even found gluten-free teriyaki flavoured (made with wheat-free soy sauce) beed jerky to bring as a snack down to the water for the fireworks. This is gladening. Most of the day I'll spend on the house. All of this assumed my intestinal recovery, of course.

- I continue to read an epic Snape/Hermione, that has a lot of cliches that should annoy me (and often do), but is good anyway. It's not one of those stories I'm having a meaningful moment with, but it's definitely the right story at the right time.

- The closer Patty gets to coming home, the stupider the fucking post office seems to get. I could expand on that, but really, why bother. Actually, a detail: aside from my postal clerk inquiring as to the reality of Cyprus, and a crazy woman rushign in and shrieking for security for no reason ever discerned, the idiot on line in front of me had wrapped birthday presents in no appropriate mailing container that he was trying to mail directly as they were -- bright blue paper and ribbons and bows.

- I should be back in teh writing groove by Thursday. I feel it percolating, and the next scene has to be right; I owe the characters, big time. Has to be. First draft aside.