Well, the original Terri was religious, morbidly obsessed with being good (internalized for a girl as hyper-obedient, unquestioning, feminine, and quiet) and girly (I wore dresses for quite some time after jeans had become fashionable; I played with dolls, I baked, I did crafts because that's what girls were supposed to like, I tried to hide my reading or to restrict it to acceptable girls' stories).
New Terri almost never wore dresses, stopped doing crafts, did math problems compulsively, read science and science fiction, starting asking questions that stymied my teachers, deliberately participated in speech and debate to get over my fear of speaking up, became an atheirst and eventually a feminist....
It's not, I think, that Ginny was trying to reinvent herself as Harry's perfect girlfriend--how was she to know what that was? That he hated "hosepipes" (which Ginny was, in PoA, as understandably as Cho was in OotP) and admired athleticism and "spunk"? (Urg, the implications of that word!) It's not like Harry had dated a lot of people and Ginny had identified Harry's "type" and tried to match it.
No, it's more, I think, that reinventing yourself is something you tend to do after a trauma like that. (At least, I did; the origin of this fic was thinking, what if Tom Riddle had been what happened to me, instead of what actually did?)
(And potionpen's take on Peter Pettigrew helped too--especially given that I personally liked original Ginny better than any of the new versions. But then, my mom liked my original version better too.)
You want to be someone other than the person who'd been that victim.
And in my case, as least, I wanted to be someone who couldn't be victimized like that again. Whatever one thinks of the new Ginnies, they wouldn't have been caught by Riddle's diary the way original-Ginny was.
New Terri almost never wore dresses, stopped doing crafts, did math problems compulsively, read science and science fiction, starting asking questions that stymied my teachers, deliberately participated in speech and debate to get over my fear of speaking up, became an atheirst and eventually a feminist....
It's not, I think, that Ginny was trying to reinvent herself as Harry's perfect girlfriend--how was she to know what that was? That he hated "hosepipes" (which Ginny was, in PoA, as understandably as Cho was in OotP) and admired athleticism and "spunk"? (Urg, the implications of that word!) It's not like Harry had dated a lot of people and Ginny had identified Harry's "type" and tried to match it.
No, it's more, I think, that reinventing yourself is something you tend to do after a trauma like that. (At least, I did; the origin of this fic was thinking, what if Tom Riddle had been what happened to me, instead of what actually did?)
(And potionpen's take on Peter Pettigrew helped too--especially given that I personally liked original Ginny better than any of the new versions. But then, my mom liked my original version better too.)
You want to be someone other than the person who'd been that victim.
And in my case, as least, I wanted to be someone who couldn't be victimized like that again. Whatever one thinks of the new Ginnies, they wouldn't have been caught by Riddle's diary the way original-Ginny was.
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