fuck me sideways

[labellementeuse]

OK now. Of all the characters in fiction everywhere, Hermione Granger is the least likely in practically the entire WORLD to change her name upon marriage. She is career-motivated, widely-read, self-sufficient, politically aware and ACTIVE, and for fuck's sake, if that wasn't enough, she's marrying someone with FIVE LIVING MALE SIBLINGS.

Why is my fiction reading life so difficult, people.

Second question: do I get to count novel-length fics as 'books read'? I just read an epic Draco/Neville fic that I'm seriously considering counting even though I've never done that before. Thoughts? It was solidly novel-length, though I'm not sure how many words (averaging out a few chapters I would say it's about 150k, which is nearly four nebula novels; HP&tDH is apparently just under 200k and HP&tPS apparently 80k.) So it's the same amount of words as a novel. And they were pretty decent words, I guess. So... well, I don't know, you tell me.

PS I really mean it about Hermione.

Comments

[meigui]

I don't know how similar feminism in Britain is to feminism in America, but I do still spend quite a suprising amount of time explaining to strangers that, no, there is no Mrs. Zhou, because my mother kept her "maiden name"; and it takes all my self-control sometimes not to explain that, actually, "maiden name" isn't even entirely appropriate in this case, because women of Chinese decent generally don't do the whole changing-one's-family-name-upon-marriage thing. People sometimes have a lot of trouble understanding why my mother and I don't share a last name, and don't even seem to have the analogue of feminist practices for comparison.

(Which is, incidentally, the other reason I don't feel comfortable with "Miss" and "Mrs." as hypothetically applied to myself, feminist sensibilities in regards to that whole argument aside--I always thought that "Miss" implies "this is my 'maiden name,' which I intend to abandon upon marriage" while "Mrs." implies "This is not the name under which I was born," neither of which is appropriate for me personally.)

Anyway, I... think it's still too pervasively normative for Western women to change their surnames when they marry to be certain either way in regards to Hermione, although, personally--not having thought about it much before, given that HP isn't one of my primary fandoms--I do agree that it's quite likely she wouldn't.

Apropos of nothing--I think Dairine and Nita are less likely to change their surnames than Hermione, especially considering the differences between DD and JKR ;)

[labellementeuse]

Yeah, I have the same thing, only it's a little more complicated because I do actually share my name with my mother and my sister, it just happens to be a different name to that of my father and brothers (we have the other name as a middle name.) My mother sometimes hangs up on "Mrs. Herlastname" and ALWAYS hangs up on "Mrs. Hislastname". :P

I do think it's really interesting and you know, POINTED that it's a variable cultural practise, because so much of the Western women's attitude is it's just what's DONE/it's just what's PRACTICAL when obviously there are enormous chunks of women who it doesn't affect at all.

You probably know that we agree on the Ms issue.

Apart from anything else, I think 'Juanita Rodriguez' is just a little too pat, don't you?

[meigui]

I hate it when it's, like, a security question on your online bank account or something, because it's so common for "What's your grandmother's maiden name?" to be a security question, and I'm always like, "FU, MY GRANDMOTHER DOESN'T HAVE A MAIDEN NAME >8(" and my parents have both gotten to the point where they'll answer any and all security questions with weird family in-jokes. I haven't quite gotten there yet, but I'm pretty close :/

I think part of it is that Anglophone culture especially seems to consider the operative unit of familial interactions to be couples, while Sinophone culture is more focused on lineage, so getting married doesn't separate you as a unit from your parents if you're Chinese, but if you're USian, it does? IDK, man. Like, in English if you talk about "the Lees" you're talking about Mr. and Mrs. Lee and their one-and-a-half sproglings, but when you talk about "the Li family" in Chinese you probably mean a particular subtree of the hugemongous network of people named "Li" who can all trace their lineage far back enough that they know they're directly related to within a few generations. Or IDK, maybe I'm just pulling that out of my ass.

Yes, of course! Haha.

Haha, yeah, although I think Dairine is even less likely than Nita--Nita at least has some respect for tradition and cultural norms. Dairine is just like, what, you think these dumb arbitrary practices should have anything to do with me?

On the other hand, I think "Hermione Weasley" sounds kind of stupid. For one thing, it has way too much assonance on top of an amphibrachic meter.