I think the female sex in HPMOR comes off poorly for three reasons:
The major adults are mostly men. “Female” ends up also signifying “childlike.”
The author doesn’t want to write sports stories. The girls get comic stories about relationships, but the boys don’t get comic stories about Quidditch.
Hermione and McGonagall are not tragic or ambitious. Draco and Dumbledore can “level up” in HPMOR to agendas worthy of Harry’s, but Hermione and McGonagall, being largely tame cooperators, are overshadowed by their even-grander-than-before comrades.
If we wanted to imagine alternate versions of the fic with less of this difficulty, some conceivable changes would be:
Give Hermione and McGonagall risk-defying agendas of their own. (Make them Aragorns or Boromirs, not Gimlis and Pippins.)
Make the boy students gossip improbably about the teachers’ and students’ Evil Overlord Plans just as much as the girl students gossip improbably about the teachers’ and students’ Romantic Entanglements. (“No way, dude! Snape’s going to take out Quirrell with his Godelian Braid Potion!”)
Make Harry need the help of other students more, so that we can understand the girls’ gossip as how they let off steam and not as what unimportant people do.
But I think this fic is too nearly done, and too big, to contemplate such changes at this point.
The author doesn’t want to write sports stories. The girls get comic stories about relationships, but the boys don’t get comic stories about Quidditch.
This is a very good point. As a reader, I think those ‘silly young boy’ conversations would probably get old for me faster than the girl ones.
Unless I’m misunderstanding you, there is a good way for sports stories to be about main characters—you have the main characters be a part of the teams being discussed, say with school sports. That wouldn’t work in this fic, of course, but it is possible in general.
The author doesn’t want to write sports stories. The girls get comic stories about relationships, but the boys don’t get comic stories about Quidditch.
This is much of the reason why in the real world I’m usually way more comfortable with being in all-female (except for me) groups than in all-male groups (unless they are particularly high-Openness). Sports bore the crap out of me.
This is kinda tangential, but this just now occured to me: I am male, and my too biggest hobbies are watching pro- sports and playing tabletop RPGs; while various folk ontymologies define these two activities as being on opposite ends of the jock-nerd spectrum, I have always maintained that they are actually quite similar (I am not the first person to comment on this similarity) Both fandoms have a reputation for being male dominated; my question is: is this a co-incidence, or is there something about emotionally investing in naratives that have been basically woven whole cloth from what is essentially a random number generator that is off-putting to girls?
(Possible confounding factor: I’m admittedly not your standard sports fan, though we’re apparently a sizable enough minority to get our own negative stereotypes and labels as sportsnerds/statheads.)
emotionally investing in naratives that have been basically woven whole cloth from what is essentially a random number generator
Video games and gambling also are more stereotypically masculine, and I can’t think of any stereotypically feminine thing in that reference class, so you might be on to something.
Also, the more stereotypically-female forms of gambling are things like slots, which have no narrative, while men stereotypically go for the more narrative games like poker.
Hermione is ambitious—she wants to be a hero. Unfortunately, it seemed to me as though it was mostly because it sounded cool more than because there was much she wanted to accomplish or protect. Since then, she’s taken it on more seriously, though.
Which adults do you consider major? Dumbledore, Quirrel, Snape, and McGonagall seem the definites, with Moody, Tonks, Flitwick, and Bones as second-stringers. That’s 1⁄4 or 3⁄8, which is majority-male but not absurd.
I do like your second suggestion, though, even if your first is hard to reconcile with canon, and your third is hard to reconcile with MOR!Harry.
You’re right, there’s nothing absurd, individually, about the mostly-male lead adults, the author’s distaste for sports comedy, and having Hermione and McGonagall be far less hubristic than the men.
The author is largely following canon in each of these, except for minimizing Quidditch (for which I, for one, am heartily grateful) and for adding in shipping humor (which I also like). The trouble is the cumulative effect.
I see not the slightest evidence that the author wants Hermione and the other females to come off as narratively second-best to the men.
But in the absence of a positive force impelling Hermione et al toward narrative grandeur, they end up being defined as compliant like McGonagall, or trivial like the romantic gossipers, NPCs rather than PCs in either case.
EY observes that Hermione doesn’t need more brainpower to be a force in the story. Unfortunately, since she’s in a story, not a collection of biographies, she does need more narrative impetus to get her to engage in story-like behavior alongside the men.
The same is true, at a smaller scale, for Padma as versus Neville and Blaise. The boys have tolerably specific ambitions; the girls don’t. Hermione wants to be “a hero”; Harry has a list of specific large problems he’s aiming to solve. The narrative outcome was inevitable.
When your main characters are as aggressive and grandiose as Harry and Quirrellmort, anybody without an active force to make them narratively prominent ends up looking second-rate.
I think the female sex in HPMOR comes off poorly for three reasons:
The major adults are mostly men. “Female” ends up also signifying “childlike.”
The author doesn’t want to write sports stories. The girls get comic stories about relationships, but the boys don’t get comic stories about Quidditch.
Hermione and McGonagall are not tragic or ambitious. Draco and Dumbledore can “level up” in HPMOR to agendas worthy of Harry’s, but Hermione and McGonagall, being largely tame cooperators, are overshadowed by their even-grander-than-before comrades.
If we wanted to imagine alternate versions of the fic with less of this difficulty, some conceivable changes would be:
Give Hermione and McGonagall risk-defying agendas of their own. (Make them Aragorns or Boromirs, not Gimlis and Pippins.)
Make the boy students gossip improbably about the teachers’ and students’ Evil Overlord Plans just as much as the girl students gossip improbably about the teachers’ and students’ Romantic Entanglements. (“No way, dude! Snape’s going to take out Quirrell with his Godelian Braid Potion!”)
Make Harry need the help of other students more, so that we can understand the girls’ gossip as how they let off steam and not as what unimportant people do.
But I think this fic is too nearly done, and too big, to contemplate such changes at this point.
This is a very good point. As a reader, I think those ‘silly young boy’ conversations would probably get old for me faster than the girl ones.
They’d get old really fast for me, considering that there isn’t a good way for sports stories to even be about main characters.
Unless I’m misunderstanding you, there is a good way for sports stories to be about main characters—you have the main characters be a part of the teams being discussed, say with school sports. That wouldn’t work in this fic, of course, but it is possible in general.
This is much of the reason why in the real world I’m usually way more comfortable with being in all-female (except for me) groups than in all-male groups (unless they are particularly high-Openness). Sports bore the crap out of me.
This is kinda tangential, but this just now occured to me: I am male, and my too biggest hobbies are watching pro- sports and playing tabletop RPGs; while various folk ontymologies define these two activities as being on opposite ends of the jock-nerd spectrum, I have always maintained that they are actually quite similar (I am not the first person to comment on this similarity) Both fandoms have a reputation for being male dominated; my question is: is this a co-incidence, or is there something about emotionally investing in naratives that have been basically woven whole cloth from what is essentially a random number generator that is off-putting to girls?
(Possible confounding factor: I’m admittedly not your standard sports fan, though we’re apparently a sizable enough minority to get our own negative stereotypes and labels as sportsnerds/statheads.)
Video games and gambling also are more stereotypically masculine, and I can’t think of any stereotypically feminine thing in that reference class, so you might be on to something.
Also, the more stereotypically-female forms of gambling are things like slots, which have no narrative, while men stereotypically go for the more narrative games like poker.
Hermione is ambitious—she wants to be a hero. Unfortunately, it seemed to me as though it was mostly because it sounded cool more than because there was much she wanted to accomplish or protect. Since then, she’s taken it on more seriously, though.
Her motivations might make her less pure as a hero, but they emphasize that she is ambitious.
Which adults do you consider major? Dumbledore, Quirrel, Snape, and McGonagall seem the definites, with Moody, Tonks, Flitwick, and Bones as second-stringers. That’s 1⁄4 or 3⁄8, which is majority-male but not absurd.
I do like your second suggestion, though, even if your first is hard to reconcile with canon, and your third is hard to reconcile with MOR!Harry.
You’re right, there’s nothing absurd, individually, about the mostly-male lead adults, the author’s distaste for sports comedy, and having Hermione and McGonagall be far less hubristic than the men.
The author is largely following canon in each of these, except for minimizing Quidditch (for which I, for one, am heartily grateful) and for adding in shipping humor (which I also like). The trouble is the cumulative effect.
I see not the slightest evidence that the author wants Hermione and the other females to come off as narratively second-best to the men.
But in the absence of a positive force impelling Hermione et al toward narrative grandeur, they end up being defined as compliant like McGonagall, or trivial like the romantic gossipers, NPCs rather than PCs in either case.
EY observes that Hermione doesn’t need more brainpower to be a force in the story. Unfortunately, since she’s in a story, not a collection of biographies, she does need more narrative impetus to get her to engage in story-like behavior alongside the men.
The same is true, at a smaller scale, for Padma as versus Neville and Blaise. The boys have tolerably specific ambitions; the girls don’t. Hermione wants to be “a hero”; Harry has a list of specific large problems he’s aiming to solve. The narrative outcome was inevitable.
When your main characters are as aggressive and grandiose as Harry and Quirrellmort, anybody without an active force to make them narratively prominent ends up looking second-rate.
That’s a fair criticism.