Let the ranting begin!

[lebateleur]

First up, for fer_de_lance, who requested (in this order): fanon!Draco, spellcheck, and toast, and who did not specify rant or rave, and thus gets a little of both.

First of all, fanon!Draco. While I'm much more of a Snarry person myself, there is a fond place in my heart for well-executed fanon!Draco. Well-executed is the key however, and here's why:

Truth be told, I'm not a very big fan of the HP books for their own sakes. Everything that's amusing or engaging about HP has been done better in other novels. What I do like is the potential to take JKR's half-finished bits and finish them, and this is where fanon!Draco comes in. JKR's stated in an interview or two that she doesn't plan to flesh out his character, which is certainly her prerogative, but it means we fans will never hear from the horse's mouth why Draco is so popular (or at least influential) among the Slytherins. And well-executed fanon!Draco - the snide remarks, the cleverness, the moral ambiguity, the sexuality - improves my reading of the source material because it gives a one-dimensional character complexity.

On the other hand, fanon!Draco done badly is awful. Yes, I'm sure the silver hair and pointed features are sexy, but it's going to take more than that to make Harry/Hermione/Ginny fall madly in love with him. Remember, they've already had five years (give or take) to notice these attributes, and nobody seems particularly willing to forgive Draco his faults for them yet. And don't forget that Draco has faults. Boy does he have them. He is not 'misunderstood.' He is petty, prejudiced, and quite possibly a Junior Death Eater. Just because that gets in the way of your prettyboy love doesn't mean that you can just make it disappear - otherwise, you're left with a prettyboy, surely, but it isn't Draco Malfoy.


Spellcheck

I have a love/hate relationship with spellcheck. It makes my life easier and my fannish activities less embarrassing. It also makes me lazy, because I no longer have to remember how to spell words myself. Spellcheck also gets on my nerves a great deal in the HP, and especially the Japanese, fandoms, because yes that is a word, dammit!, despite what microsuck may think. (The same goes for html coding, which I usually include in my stories as I write.)

I find a computer screen loaded with little red scribbles intensely annoying, but on the other hand, I don't want to add words to my dictionary because lord knows that with my luck I'll accidentally 'correct' a misspelling into jism or similar while writing a resume or recommendation letter and boy howdy, that'll be a fun one to try explaining.

That said, fangirls! Spellcheck is both free and yours at the click of a button! Use it! It won't solve all of your problems, but it will make you look a great deal more intelligent.


Toast.

Heh. Toast, and more broadly, bread: the bane of my 'Do you have [...] in America?' existence. The thing is, even when I lived in America I primarily cooked Asian food for myself. I've had a rice cooker for years. I'd eat two bowls of jasmine rice for breakfast each morning.

While I like toast, I'm tired of answering 'No, I do not eat toast for breakfast. No, not even in America. Yes, it's a little unusual. No, we have rice cookers in the States as well - they were invented by an American company, you realise? Yes, I sometimes eat toast, but no, not every American eats bread all the damn time...' you get the picture.

A redeeming point is that toast also inspired 'Yeah Toast', Bob & Tom's ode to the quintessential breakfast food. I recommend that everyone reading this utilise the mysteries of the Internet to take a listen for yourselves.


これで以上です

Comments

[mikeneko.livejournal.com]

But you *can't* cite Bob & Tom and use British spellings in the same sentence. Cue Twilight Zone music.