In Which We Discuss Whether Hermione is White

 I live in a society where the default is assumed to be white, male, cisgendered, heterosexual, able-bodied, and neurotypical. If you were to draw a stickman or mention the "hero" of a story, those are the traits that person has unless you specifically tell the audience that they aren't. This is why, for example, cartoons and costumes get things like eyelashes or bows added to them, to signify that they are women. In this society, people act like you need very, very weak evidence to assume a character matches that default and very, very strong evidence to think they are something 'other.'

Take Sherlock Holmes, for example. Personally, I think it's very clear that he is asexual. But, every adaption I've ever seen has treated him as straight, based purely on him admiring one single woman who appears in one story. Arguably, since he admires lots and lots of men, it would make more sense for him to be gay. But we don't imagine Sherlock Holmes as gay, because we would need something stronger to think that about him.

Similarly, take the Doctor, of Doctor Who. One of the earliest things that we learn about the doctor is that s/he is changeable. Their body changes. And yet, people argue that he is a man. Assuming he has some control over his regenerations, it does tell us something about him that he has repeatedly chosen white, male bodies, but that doesn't mean he must always choose white male bodies. If I got to have twelve different bodies - or twenty-four, or however many the Doctor gets now - I would definitely choose to be a man at least once, just to see what it was like. Why shouldn't the Doctor?

There's a concept called 'death of the author', that is, when you consider a work only based on what is in the work itself and totally ignoring the author as part of it. Alternatively, you can choose to include the author in how you interpret the work. Another way to think about that is to consider, when you ask "why did this happen?", are you asking Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or are you asking Dr John Watson? If you wanted to know "Why is Sherlock Holmes beating up a corpse when Dr Watson first meets him?" then Dr Watson would explain that Sherlock wanted to know what bruises looked like when they were caused after death. That's the Watsonian perspective. The Doylist perspective might be something more like "I wanted to show the reader the amount of research Holmes does, that he doesn't shy away from the gory elements, and that he is a strange man who cares more about the truth than about being polite."

So, when we ask, "is Hermione [of Harry Potter, not A Winter's Tale] white, are we asking JK Rowling or Hermione?". JK Rowling tweeted out her answer a while ago. 

[I should be totally clear here; Rowling is a TERF and has made multiple offensive tweets clearly stating her views, which are based on unfounded fears. I'm not saying or implying that her tweets are right or relevant to literally anything except the exact question of 'What does the author have to say on this element of her work?']

As far as Rowling is concerned, Hermione can be black. I suspect that Rowling intentionally avoided describing Hermione's race because it was totally irrelevant to the story. That's why she felt confidently able to say that "white skin was never specified."

And yet, some people have argued that, from a Watsonian perspective, Hermione is white. They base this on a quote about "Hermione's white face peering out from behind a tree." This is an example of what I was saying above, about people generally only needing very, very flimsy evidence to say a character matches the default, but strong evidence to say she is anything else. 

Let's think about the information being conveyed by that sentence. Do you seriously think that the middle of a dramatic scene, three books in, was when you would receive information about a character's race? You looked at that line and thought "yes, this is a good time to learn about Hermione's skin tone, that is very relevant information here"? Really? You're sticking with that? You're a fuckwit.

The sentence is there to tell you that Hermione is scared, that she is "white with fear." Guess what? I'm not white but I could go white with fear. Meghan Markle isn't white and she could go white with fear. Lots of non-white people are pale enough to go white with fear. And if you have any fucking doubt about whether Rowling was conveying information about race or emotion with that sentence, she outright told you. To think otherwise is to be wilfully ignorant.

This makes me very angry, because the context I see it brought up in is generally people of colour pointing out that it's totally fine to picture the character as looking like you/them, and then white people say "BUT YOU HAVE TO ACKNOWLEDGE THAT SHE ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE ME."

No. Sit the fuck down. Shut the fuck up.

No one told you you weren't allowed to picture Hermione as white. No one even said you were wrong to do so. I'm pretty sure Rowling was picturing Hermione as white, even though she decided that wasn't important enough to mention. But you, seeing other people happy to imagine a character looking like them, couldn't bear that it wasn't about you and pulled the flimsiest, stupidest reasoning out of your arse to make it about you again. If you do that then, yes, you are being racist. That is why people call you that when you make that stupid argument. They call you a racist because you are being racist.

The alternative is that you genuinely think the author decided to randomly inform you of a character's race three books in, in a scene where it could not be less relevant, and then, when she told you she didn't, decided that actually...what? She's lying? She's mistaken? The "true wording" of Harry Potter exists objectively apart from her and she just wrote it down and didn't understand it properly? Rowling invented Hermione. If she says Hermione doesn't have to be white, you can't use her own words to claim that Hermione does have to be white. At best, that argument shows that she misspoke, that she did not make it clear enough to you that she wasn't randomly bringing up skin tone three books in. That argument does not mean that Hermione has to be white. Sit the fuck down. Shut the fuck up.

On a lighter note, guess what? If you want to picture Sherlock Holmes as a trans man, go ahead. I do not believe there is anything in the text to contradict that. We never hear anything about his chromosomes, hormone levels, genitals, he never impregnates anyone...It's unlikely that he would be trans, but it's not impossible. Dumbledore could also be a trans man or McGonagall could be a trans woman, based on the same reasoning. Reading is an entirely personal experience that happens between the reader and the page. If you don't like those interpretations, you don't have to like them. You can totally ignore them and carry on picturing those characters in your preferred way. You can even picture Dumbledore as straight, with a totally platonic brotherhood with Grindelwald if you want to. Like how the Russian commentator explained the 2018 Irish Eurovision entry. Point out that you can technically "go out" with someone platonically, or say "till death do us part" in circumstances other than a wedding. You're not technically wrong, but if you insisted everyone else had to agree with you, including the author, that would be as ridiculous as claiming that the only people who can go "white with fear" are white people. White people aren't literally white, you dribbling ham sandwich.

"Ah, such a beautiful platonic brotherhood"

- Russia, probably

If some people picture Holmes, or Dumbledore, or McGonagall as trans, that does not affect you or your experience of the books in any way at all. Sit the fuck down. Shut the fuck up.

If you want to point out that the authors did not intend those interpretations...so what? If Sir Arthur Conan Doyle cared about Sherlock Holmes' chromosomes, or genitals, or hormone levels, and he thought they were important to the story, he would have put them on the page. He didn't. He doesn't get to stand at my bedside every night telling me how he wants me to interpret each sentence, and nor do you. Well, he can, if that's really what he wants to do with his afterlife, but I can't see ghosts so I don't care. You can't do that, I'll call the police.

Note that, because of the 'strong evidence to assume non-default' thing, I don't think Rowling deserves much, if any, credit, for want of a better word, for writing a gay character in Dumbledore or a black character in Hermione. By not writing that on the page, by letting readers still picture those characters as the 'default', she's having her cake and eating it. That stage - of telling her readers "I saw this character as gay", or "it's cool if this character is black" - was a sadly necessary step, but we should be long past it now and able to freely show the audience that characters are non-default. It's not enough to just whisper, "Psst, weirdos, there's something for you too!" (google Queer-baiting, Race-baiting, etc for more on the subject). It's not good enough. Put it on the page, you coward.

NB, Rowling does get credit for writing a character with a amputation, because I can count on one hand the number of books I've read that portrayed that, and that one was actually on the page. That isn't to say or imply anything other than "hey, cool,  some people are amputees, it's weird more of them aren't openly portrayed in fiction."

Actually, if anyone wants to find a quote that proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, Sherlock Holmes does not have a wooden leg (left, specifically) please let me know. Otherwise, feel free to picture him as an amputee as well. Or not. It's your reading experience. You can always call an exorcist if Conan Doyle doesn't like it.

In Which We Discuss Flirting

 As you may have noticed, I've been reading and thinking a lot about storytelling and writing recently. I'm trying to write a love story, so one of the things I'm focussing on is how to show that two people like each other, that they're attracted to one another, that their feelings are growing and changing, and that they love each other. Here are some of my thoughts, just as I'm figuring these things out.

The big, obvious part of that is in the decisions characters make throughout the plot. For example, the climax of a love story typically involves the lovers being separated until one or both makes a sacrifice that allows them to be together. That sacrifice, made purely for selfless reasons and not in the expectation of winning the other person back, shows that one person truly loves the other. Even though it does usually result in the other person being won, the person making the sacrifice can't do it with that intention or it's not a true sacrifice, it's manipulation. 

Love stories usually involve characters developing small rituals together, like in-jokes or just parts of their daily routine. For example, in the movie Eurovision: The Story of Fire Saga, the two main characters have a little routine they do when they greet each other. You probably have little rituals, habits, or nicknames between yourself and specific friends or lovers, unique to those relationships. That's what happens when you build a loving (platonic or romantic) relationship with someone. You develop a shared history and language. 

There are also 'tie signs', little signals that people give out, intentionally or not, to show their relationship to one another. Say you go to a party, filled with people you don't know. Some people will introduce themselves and outright tell you, e.g., "This is my husband, this is my daughter." But a lot of the time, you won't need to be told. You'll recognise couples by their wedding or engagement rings, or by their body language. For example, they'll stand closer than friends or strangers usually would, or hold hands, or one will have their arm around the other, or they'll use terms of endearment or in-jokes when they speak to each other. Or perhaps they have some sort of verbal shorthand, so they'll be able to have a conversation without needing to say some of it out loud, because they already know.

Actually, the show Chloe is quite interesting there, because the main character will use 'tie signs' usually reserved for friends to imply a closer relationship than exists. For instance, she'll introduce two characters to one another, giving each one the impression she knows the other well. Why would someone be taking charge of the introduction if she's not the hostess and doesn't know either of the people she's introducing well? People don't usually do that.

Flirting and 'chemistry' are quite interesting. Flirting, as far as I can pin down, is about testing the waters. One person knows they would like to explore a more intimate relationship, and they are making small checks to see if the other person would also like that. That greater intimacy might be sex, or it might be a romantic relationship, or even just friendship. I've been googling, but a lot of what I've found is a very broad overview. It'll be a list of body language, or lists of "flirty lines." The former is useful, because body language plays a huge role in flirting, but the latter isn't really how most people flirt. Sure, some people do go up to strangers in a bar and say a line as an opening gambit, but most of the flirting I want to write about isn't that. So, what I've been doing instead is noticing when I realise characters are flirting and trying to figure out why I think that. What did they do that made them sound/seem flirtatious? Most of my examples are from TV shows simply because I can watch more TV in a day than I can read books. There is another reason, which is that TV shows and movies are made by lots of people, not just one, so you'll get a broader range of body language and dialogue. Plus, you then have to figure out how to turn that into words yourself, so you're not at risk of just copying someone else's writing.

There's a moment in Taskmaster (season 6, episode 4) where something Alice Levine said to Russell Howard struck me as oddly flirtatious. To be clear, I am not saying Alice was flirting, and that made it more interesting. What was it about what she said that came across that way? It was during the "have the most fun" task, and Alice Levine's suggestion was that she should mime having a bath while Russell Howard played football. The first thing is that those are quite couple-y things to do, like you could imagine if they were dating they might easily spend an afternoon that way. If someone were intending to be flirtatious and they said that, it would basically be an invitation to roleplay being a couple, to see if the other person might be interested in the idea of actually being a couple. Plus, suggesting you mime having a bath might prompt the other person to think of you having a bath, which is quite an intimate image. Again, I'm not saying this was Alice's intention, I'm saying this is why someone else could say exactly the same thing with the same tone and intend it as flirtatious. I think Alice was just trying to win the task and said the first thing that popped into her head.

There's also a moment at the end of the videogame Shadow Hearts II, where the director uses camera angles to trick us. Normally, when someone is thinking about kissing someone else, their gaze moves in a triangle, from eyes to lips. If you're looking at someone's eyes and lips while slowly moving closer to them, you're thinking of kissing them. I think most of us understand that when it happens, even if we don't think about why we understand that. By this point in the game, one character has made her attraction to another clear, but whether he responds to her feelings is less clear. He's spent most of the game trying to revive his true love who sacrificed herself for him at the end of the first game, so I thought it was obvious he wasn't ready to move on, but I didn't know if the director of the game knew that. Anyway, they trick us with camera angles. The camera focuses on eyes, lips, eyes, lips, making us think that is what the characters are looking at and making us feel like they're about to kiss.

Speaking of kissing, Hitch had it right. You go 90% of the way and wait for the other person to complete the last 10%. That's what flirting is. You put something down and see if the other person picks it up. If they do, great. If not, back off.  

The other thing people do when flirting is to slowly invade each other's space. One might ask the other to dance, and, through words and body language and depending on the dance, invite them to hold hands, or place their hands in certain places, or just to be within each other's space in a more intimate way. Each moment is a small invitation, which can be accepted or rejected. It's another little check, another tiny step towards closer intimacy.

In stories, sometimes you can have the hero grab the heroine (or vice versa, or hero/hero or heroine/heroine) rather than invite her. Sometimes that's because you're creating tension between the two in a different way - they're enemies, or they're arguing about something, like in a love-hate or Slap Slap Kiss relationship. Those are all viable options, since romance novels are, by definition, set in a universe where the two main characters are into each other so consent does exist whether or not they check (if it didn't, it would be a horror or a thriller, not a romance, e.g., You), but I'm trying to write a gentler, more realistic kind of flirting.

Where I am with this now is that it doesn't so much matter what your characters say. They might use words to suggest ideas to one another, like how suggesting you pretend to have a bath could be used to prompt someone to picture you in the bath, or they might make an ambiguous statement that the other person could take in a romantic way if they wanted to. But, more important than what they say is what they do. For example, say you're writing in first person or third person restricted, from your heroine's point of view. If you mention that her love interest licked his lips, you've told the reader two things - that the love interest licked his lips and the heroine was looking at his lips when he did. If she notices the colour of his eyes, the fact she's noticed enough to think about it means she was looking at them. The last thing I tried was a scene in which, after every bit of dialogue, one character moved closer to the other or some other bit of body language was noted. I think that was quite successful, in terms of conveying the increasing tension that I was going for.

The other evening, I was flicking through channels and came across the end of Naked Attraction (this is how everyone watches Naked Attraction). That's a TV show in which one person - in this case, a man - comes out on stage to meet six people he might be attracted to - in this case, I think five women and one non-binary person - they might be interested in. Those six are all completely naked and standing in boxes which expose them bit by bit. First, everything below the waist, then everything below the neck. At this point, the person doing the choosing strips off and they're all naked when the faces are finally exposed. Nothing is censored. I am not exaggerating about any of this.

Anyway, by the time the faces are exposed, the chooser has already removed three (I think) of their potential options, leaving three. In the episode I watched (the second half of season 9, episode 1, with tree surgeon Dmitri choosing), I paid attention to the body language. You'd think the nudity would help, but it actually didn't - it was the faces that revealed the most. When the boxes went up and their faces were exposed, that was the first time the options got to see the chooser and one, green, was clearly not into him. I knew that, but how did I know that? I'm pretty sure it's the way her smile faded, from real to fake. Her smile stopped going to her eyes once she saw the guy doing the choosing. There was also the way she gave her reply to his question as if it were a line she'd memorised (which I'm pretty sure they all are) rather than as something she was saying to him. Luckily, Dmitri either picked up on this or was also not that into her, and she was able to leave. 

Conversely, another contestant, Kate, was really into Dmitri, or at least that's the vibe I had when I saw her face. Again, how did I know that? I'm not sure. Some of it is that her smile was real, but so was the third contestants' (Lucy), and I didn't get the same vibe from her. I think Katie was more smiley, but that can be personality, not attraction. According to the host, Katie's nipples hardened when she spoke to Dmitri, but I didn't notice that and I think, realistically, most characters won't be outright looking at each other's nipples while flirting.

Dmitri chose Lucy (who had a forked tongue) over Katie, but, Lucy didn't show up for their date and Katie came instead. Apparently, the date is held at 9am the next day. If I hadn't read that, I'd have thought Lucy had started a relationship with someone else and that was why she'd cancelled, because I don't think she was disinterested, even if she wasn't as interested as Katie. Instead, I wonder if Katie and Lucy had a word, and together decided Dmitri had made a mistake and Katie should go instead.

Either way, after their date - in which both Dmitri and Katie showed interested body language - we got another update, a few weeks later. In this one, their body language was totally different. They sat on a sofa together, but Katie perched right on the edge, sitting on as little of the sofa as possible. Her body - knees, feet, hands, etc - all pointed away from him. Her entire body was signalling discomfort and a desire to escape. The relationship had fizzled out because, reading between the lines, he'd realised she was looking for a relationship while he was only interested in sex. He did "jokingly" suggest they have sex anyway - a "joking" suggestion being another way of testing the waters while flirting, since the other person could choose to take it seriously if they want or they can both pretend it's a joke if they don't - and she turned him down.