The Importance of Blood in HBP: Meta Before It Cooks

[laguera25]

Before I natter about anything else, I must thank faylinn_drake for helping me map out a rough arc for my SVU/Tommy Dowd bunny. It was a welcome distraction from my money nightmares. As a bonus, she said she would actually get around to watching Eddie Cahill's SVU appearance. Eee! It will be interesting to see what she thinks of a Not!Flack role.

My stipend is still not here, but my trustee said a check should be here by Wednesday or Thursday. God, I hope so. The cable bill is past due, and I need money for bus fare when classes start a week from Tuesday. Food is covered, but if Comcast Man shows up, I'm screwed.

Roomie and I are re-reading HBP in preparation for Deathly Hallows, and we just finished "The Secret Riddle". The chapter bothers me. It's a fine and engaging chapter, to be sure, but the depiction of young Voldemort as a manipulative socio/psychopath belies the idea of choices defining who we are, as Dumbledore tells Harry in CoS. In fact, JKR goes out of her way to establish the Gaunts as mad, inbred loons. Dumbledore points out in "The House of Gaunt" that the line possessed a tendency to violence, and he implies a genetic predisposition. The idea is reinforced throughout the chapters that should be subtitled, "A History of Voldemort," and the inconsistency between thematic premise and narrative function just...bugs me.

I think I need to poke the idea a bit more; there might be some HP meta in it. Granted, it's a subject that's been dissected and bandied about ad infinitum in the fandom, but some lit crit would serve as a good warm-up for the analytical papers I'll be constructing in Religious Ethics this summer.

No ficcing last night, but maybe today...