moments of otp

[wisdomeagle]

By the end of the lesson, only Hermione Granger had made any difference to her match; Professor McGonagall showed the class how it had gone all silver and pointy and gave Hermione a rare smile. - HPSS/PS page something or other.

++++

Not really unrelatedly, in Matilda the movie, I really think Miss Honey/Matilda reads more as, well, Miss Honey

Comments

[wisdomeagle]

Well, it depends. I'm averse to books-made-into-movies and especially to Dahl-books-made-into-movies (early Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory trauma) in principle, and I have serious problems with a couple of the changes from book to movie. OTOH, I do enjoy the movie rather a lot and have seen it several times. For one thing, Embeth Davidzt, who plays Miss Honey, is so pretty. I developed a minor fixation with her four or five years back. Mara Wilson plays Matilda, and I seem fated to love Mara Wilson but have issues with her roles - she plays Susan in the remake of Miracle on 34th Street, and the whole concept of remaking that film is woeful to me, but Mara Wilson! *loves*

[hermionesviolin]

Dude, the ads for the Matilda movie commenced and I was like, "RAGE!"

I saw the Mara Wilson Miracle at some point after it came out on video and quite enjoyed it (able to suspend my Santa issues? impressive, I know). I considered watching the 1947 original first but just couldn't get into it and have never been one for b&w films. (So yes, the 1994 Mara Wilson was my intro to that film. I fail at normative cultural references and am so okay with that.)

[wisdomeagle]

I can suspend my Santa issues for Miracle as well. It's totally impressive.

have never been one for b&w films.

We didn't have a color TV for the first several years of my life, so I couldn't tell the difference between b+w and color. I watched lots of Three Stooges and classic Shirley Temple films borrowed from the library, and movies that I did see in color pretty much terrified me.

[rogueslayer452]

This is very intriguing, since I've never considered looking at the Matilda/Miss Honey relationship before in this light. Nevertheless, reading what you've written explaining their relationship with each other and those around them, it all makes such wonderful sense. Of course, you are a perv and all. ;P

[wisdomeagle]

Cool, thanks for reading and responding. It was your comment about how Miss Honey was a mother figure to Matilda that got me thinking about how I really didn't read their relationship that way and trying to articulate why. :)

[alixtii]

Damn if you're not persuasive. You're right of course; they do relate to each other as peers.

Now this has me thinking about other child characters who can act as a peer with adults. It's a common trope in kidslit, of course, and also in my own writing, fanfic and original (which is littered with teenaged supergenius girls). It's the place from which Dawn/Giles comes from, I suppose, as well as other things.

[hermionesviolin]

Dawn is at the age Buffy was when she was Called, so does it even make sense to think of her as a child? Of course, the ability to relate to adults as peers is relevant for teenagers as well.

What strikes me particularly about your mention of Dawn/Giles is that that gets my brain going along the lines of non-adults who want to be (treated like) adults, which is where my interest lies (having been one of those children/teens), whereas thinking about Ari's talk about the Matilda movie (which I haven't seen) I find myself thinking that Matilda found a person with whom she could safely be a child (Ari's description of the ending montage sticks with me particularly) and I secondarily think of the idea that Matilda is an adult figure for Miss Honey, which makes sense to me (esp. given Ari's talk about the movie playing up Matilda's Gryffindor-ness) and is interesting also because I'm not sure I see Miss Honey as being able to be on Matilda's level intellectually. (I know at the end of the book we have Matilda finally finding sufficiently

[alixtii]

Oh, I wait until Dawn is in her mid-to-late twenties to make the Dawn/Giles happen, so it's certainly not the same thing logically. But I think it sort of comes from the same place--it's Dawn's adolescence which attracts me to her character, because she's able to live out the adolescent fantasy which to me Buffy is all about. That "child" aspect of Dawn is forever associated to her with me, so that even when she is on paper an adult her acting like an adult hits one of my kinks (which is why I love writing her post-"Chosen"). Becoming an adult and a possible lover and thus equal to Giles-the-father-figure (the ultimate expression of her maturity) is for me a type of coming-of-age story, just as the romance Ari's painted between movie!verse Maltilda/Miss Honey is a coming-of-age story where Matilda earns her independece (rather than, Ari argues persuasively, merely transferring her obedience to a more palatable parental figure) and becomes an equal to the adult. A lot of potentially squicky pairings--basically any parent!kink or

[wisdomeagle]

This brings up a really interesting point about the perceived age of characters; I know for me and many viewers/fans, Dawn as younger-sister is really hard to shake, even though she's almost an adult by series end and can be aged up regardless, she feels like a younger-sister to me. Likewise Joyce-as-mother. We-as-viewers take the viewpoint character (Buffy)'s age to be the norm and point-of-identity... it's illogical but it's how I react to text. Like, in the BSC the viewpoint characters are 13, and yet I still cannot think of them as anything but Older Than Me (or maybe Just About My Age) since I started reading them when I was in 2nd grade. So when writing/conceptualizing BuffyversexBSC crossover, I find it hard to imagine that Dawn Summers when we meet her is actually older than the babysitters are.

Becoming an adult and a possible lover and thus equal to Giles-the-father-figure (the ultimate expression of her maturity) is for me a type of coming-of-age story, just as the romance Ari's painted between movie!verse Maltilda/Miss

[hermionesviolin]

[[ But looking at everything in light of the love-at-first-sight Dickens moment, I'm more inclined to view Matilda as a love story, in which they triumph over terrible odds in order to be together and to live happily ever after. The montage at the end - they play with hula hoops, they sew, they roll around on the lawn, they read together - to me reinforces the image of them as peers. ]]

Interesting. Reading that montage litany I thought, "That sounds like peers like whoa, and that bothers me" -- because Miss Honey is an adult acting like a child, and I like adult adults, even though thinking back to the book she is far more child than adult. And I rather suspect that the ideal in Dahl's children's books is eternal childness (the only positive real adult I can think of is the grandmother in The Witches). But it has been years since I read any of the Dahl books

[wisdomeagle]

There's also Grandpa Joe in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, setting aside the troublesomeness of Willy Wonka himself (it's been far too long since I've read the book and so can't really remember). But yeah, adults suck is a not-exactly-subtle theme in Dahl.

OTOH, the children are very... adultlike. I mean, part of who Matilda is is a little girl who thinks like an adult - I haven't read the book recently, but I don't think there's anything really equivalent to that ending montage with its reclaiming-of-childhood ideal. Huh.

I love Matilda's Ravenclawness (if we must use HP metaphors) and the idea that they make her into more of a Gryffindor in the film adds to my reasons not to see the film -- because I am way more comfortable with her bookishness than with her tricksiness.It's not just tricksiness, it's stupid-frelling-pointless-bravery, which is how I define Gryffindor and which makes me want to slap her. Her intelligence isn't really downplayed so much as her bravery is played up, but there is a shift from Matilda as generally

[hermionesviolin]

There is Grandpa Joe, yes. I feel like he acts primarily as an agent to move storyaction along than anything else, however. Though thinking back now (I reread the book after the Johnny Depp movie came out so I could at least chime in re: source text in the discussions) he consistently acts as a counter to Wonka -- pressing him with questions about his logic, etc. The text itself problematizes the character of Wonka through Grandpa Joe.

Definitely agreed re: adultlike children. I think that inversion is a major part of Dahl's critique.

I am now home and can pull out my copy of the book. The end scene is your icon, with the Wormwoods running away, all too happy to have someone take Matilda, but what I always think of as the end scene is her loss of her powers, her having finally found her niche.

Skimming, I come across:

"I'm glad it's happened," Matilda said. "I wouldn't want to go through life as a miracle-worker."

Oh the wonderfully adult child.

Sidenote: From the facing page, after the heartbeats conversation:

This

[wisdomeagle]

Really don't remember Charlie well enough to comment.

I really ought to reread Matilda the book, and probably will, so I can discuss more (and try to avoid just posting book vs movie, since I think both are interesting in their own right and not just in the ways the movie desecrates changes the book.

*wins!

Yeah. I'm not a fan of Gryffindors or Gryffindor-type heroes in most 'verses and associate them with blind idealism and the Gene Roddenberry heroes - the Kirks of the world. And yeah. Not a fan. (Though in the HP-verse itself, I do like the Gryffindors more than the Slytherins. In the larger 'verse, characters who'd be sorted Slytherin are interesting, but Rowling's villains, not so much [except for Snape]).

And that's a bizarre unrealism the movie is working if she's supposed to have all her knowledge from books and superpowers she retains even after finding her intellectual niche.Yup. It's wicked annoying. I think there's something to be said about the shift in values from Dahl's book to the American cinema... I think there's

[fly_again_hero]

Well.

I just watched this movie again the other day...and I was thinking this, but I didn't know I was thinking it.

This is awesome