[ SECRET POST #5038 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5038 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


01.



__________________________________________________



02.


__________________________________________________


03.


__________________________________________________



04.


__________________________________________________



05.


__________________________________________________



06.


__________________________________________________



07.


__________________________________________________



08.












Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 18 secrets from Secret Submission Post #721.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

04. https://i.imgur.com/WUZP4f1.png

[(Anonymous)]

lol based

[mishey22]

That art made me chuckle though, and that was nice.

[(Anonymous)]

I always wonder why people 'racebend' James Potter when he's probably the whitest of white characters in the books. He's a pureblood from a well-established wealthy family and let's be honest, the magical world is probably as racist as the non-magical world so the likelihood of a non-white Potter family being so established is very unlikely (same goes for Sirius Black and the Malfoys).

Lily could of course come from a non-white background but do you think someone like Vernon Dursely would marry a non-white woman? I doubt it so it's unlikely that the Evans family are non-white.

Snape would fit better as someone from a mixed background but I rarely see him 'racebent'.

[(Anonymous)]

+10000 to all of this.

[(Anonymous)]

ALL OF THIS.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, the Wizarding World's bigotry seems to lie in magical blood and wizards versus other magical beings (goblins, elves, giants, etc.), so I think a case could be made for the Wizarding World being less mindful about people of color.

But I do absolutely agree that Vernon Dursley would never marry a non-white woman and that the Dursleys would bring it up and be pretty awful about it if Harry was multiracial due to his father being of Indian descent.

And I think that if Hermione is Black, then some of the stuff about her hair takes on different connotations.

[chamonix]

Honestly, the people doing the racebending usually don't seem at all familiar with the UK's cultural structure/makeup in the first place, which always takes me out of it. It's like they heard "lots of Indians live in the UK" and that's the beginning and end of their research. Nevermind that Pakistani arguably has a larger majority.

[(Anonymous)]

They racebend James because he's a bully and if they make him a POC then they can feel better about it. Pretty sure it's not conscious, but yeah. That's my bet.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think it's that big of a deal. It doesn't change their physiology either so it's not the same as genderbending at all.

I get if they randomly inserted a bunch of racism because Harry's all of a sudden not white, but other than that I don't see how it make any difference at all.

[(Anonymous)]

Disagree. The experience of being a visible minority isn’t nothing. Adding that to a character’s lived experience is fairly significant, IMO.

[(Anonymous)]

The PoC experience isn't just racism you know.

There's a lot of stuff that racebenders who are fishing for woke points would never bother researching.

[(Anonymous)]

If you think the difference between genders is significant but the difference between races are not...I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that you're white.

[(Anonymous)]

...the fact that you can only think of racism as the sole (and apparently negligible) factor in how a POC's life would be different is quite sad.

SA

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah- sorry. I know I'm late, but something tells me some of you hard-pressed fuckers are desperate for some sort of rebuttal to your pearl clutched sensitivities that I've apparently steamrolled over in the less of a handful of words I offered to the actual OP of this secret.

Get a reality check and realize I'm talking 'bout fictional wizards, in a fabricated environment. If you are so obsessed to figure why deliberate Muggle racism matters more than established continuity.
If you expect every Indian!Harry story should devolve into racism... then perhaps you should look at yourself first before you judge the people who write said stories without the boatloads of angst and racism you both expect and then hate them for.

It's one thing to disagree with a canon rational interpretation, but it's a whole 'nother to be offended by the very idea of Harry being half Indian. It's a genuine identification. It changes nothing- Harry it still treated like absolute shit by Vernon, the level of which is a direct result of bigotry. Hiding him away under the cupboard, assaulting him on the swing as he mourns Cedric's death- all of it enforces the idea that more than just being a wizard, that they were trying to hide his ethnicity as well.

The insistence that racism of this type should proceed unto fictional realms, into a wizardry society that already has its bigotry laid out on a fucking plate, via the purity of bloodmagic- is the most racist sentiment of all.
You people /insist/ that there is no way a fictional society could every look at Harry other than his skin colour. It's both pathetic and racist as all hell. On his own Harry is seen simply as an object, an ideal- 'the boy who lived'. He's more fantasy than human in the wizarding world and treated worse than dirt in the muggle...
So tell me how /EXACTLY/ your prejudice fits into a story where canon events already circumnavigated whatever arguments you think you still have left? Really.

[(Anonymous)]

I dislike any visual descriptions that differ from the canon character's look.

I'm really visual so when I'm reading I'm seeing things play out in my head. When an author throws in a whole sleeve of tattoos or a facial piercing it breaks my flow because I have to try to integrate that into how I see them, but my brain wants to revert back to what I know they look like.

I'm not in the HP fandom but having seen the movies so many times I would struggle to picture those characters differently from the cast.

OP

[(Anonymous)]

I'm really visual so when I'm reading I'm seeing things play out in my head. When an author throws in a whole sleeve of tattoos or a facial piercing it breaks my flow because I have to try to integrate that into how I see them

I think this is the main reason it's not my cup of tea as well.

[(Anonymous)]

Black Hermione I have no strong feelings about one way or the other (unless the creator make a huge annoying fuss about it) but Indian James/Indian Harry being a massive thing bugs me because unlike Black Hermione, it came out of NOWHERE and the sole explanation I've ever been able to dig out of anyone is "well, there are a lot of Indians in England and the books don't say 'James and Harry are not Indian' in those precise words." I usually like racebending art a lot, but I don't care for the fact that one particular racebending which has absolutely no basis in anything whatsoever has somehow become the default pretty much everywhere (at least everywhere I go in fandom myself.) Black Hermione makes sense because she's been played by a Black actress and it was a whole thing that even JKR got in on. Indian James/Indian Harry doesn't come from anything except "lol can't disprove a negative." I think I'd be a bit less annoyed if I hadn't seen as many people being precious about it, or acting like it's somehow suspicious to not draw/headcanon Indian James/Indian Harry, or acting like it ought to be treated like canon. I am dead sure that all of these people are white, based on their everything, which makes it worse. If it was Indian people doing it at least it would be out of wanting to see themselves represented, rather than trying to play "woker than thou" games.

[(Anonymous)]

And lo! the sort of person you have mentioned is just bellow your own comment.

[chamonix]

I absolutely agree with this. If the James/Harry racebending was done in a way that actually leaned into the social and cultural history of the UK and its Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi community, I'd actually be really interested to read that. But I get the feeling that most of this racebending is done by white Americans who have no fucking clue about UK social culture.

[(Anonymous)]

You're all mental. It's a book with very little direct physical description. I don't have a horse in this race but Indian James makes perfect sense - a reasonable name, wife's dull family thought he was wild and horrible, green eyes, the 'wrong' kind of hair. What, you don't think Indian people can come from a classy background? Absolute fucking shit for brains.

Rowling might be a turd and she might have declared it retroactively, but the racelessness of Harry Potter makes at least as much sense as Homestuck, and in 2020 even the most committed racists aren't fighting that one.

[(Anonymous)]

I mean literally ANY ethnicity that is capable of producing green eye genes "makes perfect sense" and is equally valid. the issue isn't that Indian!James exists as a concept, the issue is that Indian!James is now considered essentially canon and if you don't consider Indian!James (and therefore Indian!Harry) to essentially be canon, and treat the concept as canon, people get extremely bent out of shape. White people who want to be seen as woke, specifically, get bent out of shape when someone doesn't consider Indian!James as essentially canon, in my experience.

[(Anonymous)]

At this point I can't be bothered being annoyed with woke fanart.

The fic writers are the people who do my fucking head in. Either take the character that you are racebending seriously and actually fucking explore the cultural changes that they would experience as a result of being a poc or stop with the lazy tokenism.

If i am multiple chapters into a fic before i discover that Harry Potter is now of Indian descent... you are taking the utter piss.

You can't racebend Harry Potter and then have nothing different happen to him as a result.

It just screams out that the writer hasn't placed a moment's thought about the realities of being a poc in 90's Britain.

I grew up in the same time period this series was set in (1991-1998).
Open racism was a common occurrence in the UK. Stephen Laurance was murdered in 93. I was hearing people using the p slur well into my childhood. My little brother was frequently called the p slur growing up because his skin was darker due to childhood jaundice!

The people who use the 'the book doesn't say he was white and therefore he is now poc' argument need to understand that the book actually does say that he's white. It says it by not saying anything. Because if he was anything other than white British, every other word in Vernon Dursley's dialogue would have been racial slurs.
Harry wouldn't have just been picked on by Dudley and his friends at school.

[(Anonymous)]

Is anyone else confused that this piece of fanart has Hermione declare that she is English, but says Harry is Indian as if he were not English?

[meadowphoenix]

for some reason this stuff specifically in HP really gets my goat, like actually grinds my gears, and it's so sudden in fic like suddenly harry's talking about curry, and i really record-scratch.

and I think it's because it makes it so clear that Rowling didn't really think deeply about race (or culture or history or the interaction of the them all) AT FUCKING ALL. just.....not at fucking all, just decided wizards had different shitty issues (also based on a shallow understanding of history) and that's all that would be affected, not race, not magic in different racially distinct countries and the historical migrations between them, nope all of uk wizardom has no actual cultural divides except blood purity! just no thought, ugh.

and so i'm at the point where I'm reading how much reason authors want to put in their racebends, and honestly for most fic, it's none.