H E L L O jfp-eyes pen (thats your new name btw)
i know its a little late but my mind keep going back to it and i also talked about a similar issue w several other people on here since and i was wondering if you can/want elaborate on what you said about this:
"like, u want potters to be desi? it’s not just the cute clothes and good food and linguistic differences u need to keep in mind. there’s so much more where it comes from, including several practices that will be considered highly objectionable by this rigidly judgemental crowd."
((i am v v interested but no pressure to answer this, i totally get if you dont want to get into this discourse))
dani—you’re gonna pull me into the desi potters discourse one way or the other, eh?
so. i’m not sure how much sense this’ll make because it’s like…half-baked thoughts but my problem with this scenario actually stems from a more macro, general trend i’m noticing in fandom behaviour. for some reason, puritan culture & veiled conservatism is coming back in the guise of progressiveness? and that’s leading to a lack of critical thinking in these spaces & randomly attributing buzzwords to things out of context bc u don’t have more than a shallow understanding of it.
which means that that comment was directed at a very specific subset of fandom that decided that idk ignoring the Bad Things & Flaws would somehow make them cease to exist. let’s only take the most ‘exotic’, fun aspects even if it’s a completely one dimensional reading & run with it. they wouldn’t be able to tell u what desi is beyond the barebones.
so, you’ll have people vehemently arguing that the potters can’t be anything but desi and white james is gross and i’m just like—why. why are u, as a non-desi person, so attached to this headcanon that you’ll ridicule real people for it? and then their attitudes as well. the incest thing, for example. there are communities in india that marry their first cousins—if i write a story tomorrow where james marries his mother’s imaginary brother’s daughter, then depending on how i HC him, that’s perfectly culturally acceptable (and desirable). if i write a story where euphemia and fleamont use corporal punishment for him, and he takes it super lightly and jokes about it, that’s also fine. (which is a direct contrast to how the western black family & sirius’ abuse is treated). there’ a community in india where the man ‘drinks’ from his mother’s breast, publicly, at his wedding to symbolise the last time he’d be her son before he becomes someone’s husband. another where a new mother can’t feed her son until her sister-in-law washes her breast thoroughly. caste is something that’s not even touched upon. it’s so complicated. but how do u think it’ll be received by most of the desi potter crowd if i actually do write any of this? will i be praised for my ~representation or called out on twitter for being a freak?
and that’s really where i get annoyed. the attitudes most of this crowd hold does not have any space for cultural subjectivity, what is ok to them has to be universally ethical. there’s no way other cultures do things their way and if they do, it’s barbaric/backward/problematic etc etc. pseudo-colonial, like i said.
(disclaimer: i want it to be made very clear i’m not demanding people nclude this stuff in their fics. i’m well aware of how escapism works, being the premier advocate for it. im just saying it won’t hurt to be mindful of these facts, that this is a whole culture that’s ridiculously diverse that doesn’t just exist for the sake of people’s headcanons)
and this isn’t even going into the cultural nuances of how desi families work. you can’t bring in american/european individualism & have james move out at 18 & write everything transactionally & do everything the way u would for a white character but only pay lip service when saying they’re brown ykno? when u say they’re a certain identity, there’s so much that comes with that. and if u don’t include any of that, then it really just makes me wonder why u want a brown james—feels like ego appeasement and falling to peer pressure half the time tbh.
another important thing for me is that so much of this crowd intersects with the ‘fandom is activism’ crowd and i just. fundamentally disagree with those people. and find their words/actions incredibly performative. by which i mean, the way they treat real people—people from the communities they’re adopting as HCs for their beloved characters. there’s this…hypocrisy, yeah? what i mentioned above, about how if i wrote some culturally different practice, i’d probably be attacked. they don’t want desi potter, they want white-lite potters that is palatable to & tailored for their own constitution but in a form that they can pass of as ‘oh look, my characters r diverse which makes me Morally Good and i can use that to shit on others’.
i think my problem is just that i don’t like it when people use the identity headcanons to portray themselves as being inherently better because they have ~equal representation. fandom is not a government institution—lateral visibility & membership is not a prerequisite to wanting to write about x and y fucking or going on a date or hugging or having a conversation. making a marauder group where each character—functionally an OC—is from a different community (often w/o considering how intersectionality works) for the sake of saying ‘oh i have a x in my HCs’ does not make u some radical leftist, yeah? and i strongly dislike people who pretend it does.
