Hummers and Potters

[sartorias]

Why is it (she grumped) that one can be standing at the sink washing dishes and look out to see all kinds of hummers being enchanting around the feeder, and occasionally the yellow and black bird stoking up, but as SOON as one races upstairs for the cell phone cam, they all vanish for hours

Comments

[marfisa]

Perhaps some of the writers you're thinking of were also influenced by Spike on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," who was also attractive, had pale blond hair, and spent much of the series as a villain before beginning to help out the good guys (initially reluctantly). Even before the unwanted restoration of his soul forced him to belatedly grapple with guilt over all the atrocities he'd committed as a vampire, Spike was intermittently angsty over his relationship with his mentally unstable vampire girlfriend Drusilla. As shown in flashbacks, Drusilla had been turned into a vampire by Angel back during his original evil Angelus phase and was Angelus' girlfriend first, with Spike as a sort of smitten tagalong member of their pack (or whatever the show's term for a clique of vampires was). Even decades of separation later, whenever Angel reverted to Angelus and started coming around again, Dru tended to more or less forget that her supposed current squeeze Spike was even there, which was obviously upsetting for him. In fact, Spike was pretty angsty even before he became a vampire, due to his less than stellar human past as a sort of aristocratic nerd whose poetry was so bad all his peers made fun of him for it.

Later, of course, after getting his soul forcibly restored, Spike wound up falling for Buffy. Even when she eventually more or less reciprocated, it was in a sort of violently folie a deux way that was obviously self-destructive (literally) for both of them. In any case, their latter-seasons-of-the-show romance (if that isn't too delicate a word for it) actually did constitute a heterosexual--but still sexually unconventional--analog of the kind of Chosen One/angsty bad boy pairing that the Harry/Malfoy shippers spun out of the Potter series. I suspect that Rainbow Rowell in particular drew upon elements of both series at least to some extent when writing "Carry On," although her angsty bad boy doesn't have pale blond hair.

[sartorias]

That is an excellent observation about Buffy and Spike. The influence is certainly all OVER Cassie Claire's fan work.