I'm So Grateful To You For Creating All These Truly Marvellous Characters. Especially The Parlour Girls

I'm so grateful to you for creating all these truly marvellous characters. Especially the parlour girls who own my heart. I adore Theodora and Antonia, the temper and fierceness beneath all that iron control. And I would read all seven books from their perspective and more. Thank you for giving us these stories.

Thank you so much!

What an interesting series of books those would be. They would be so far removed from Harry’s adventures and experiences as to be hardly recognizable, I think. It was fun enough to imagine what all the trio’s shenanigans would look like to Ginny who is only peripherally involved, but still is. Imagine what all of that looked like from older students who are wholly unconnected to the Weasleys and not privy to the actions of the Order. I’m sure someone has to have written that fic–the war through the eyes of a background character.

Of course with Theodora and Antonia, we would get a glimpse into two very different family dynamics–Theodora from an elite, upper class Pureblood family, trying to work within the constraints of tradition and yet achieve every single one of her ambitions without apology or compromise, and Antonia from her rather unique family of heterodox women who society is often too scared to look down on (hags, some might call them with a sneer, but only once).

I would quite like to read that myself. Someone else please magically remove this vague image I have of them from my head and flesh it out. Thanks, I appreciate it. 

From PoA

And OotP

We can conclude Dean Thomas is Professor Lupin’s biggest fan or he had a massive crush on Remus, how many students had a crush on the young, angsty Professor Lupin?

Do you think Ginny’s need for everything to be under her control (which we still have to discuss how different it is from Hermione’s), besides the emotional and traumatic aspects, may also come from her fear of being powerless? Better put, of not having power? And that makes her strive for it more? If it is, it’s a very Slytherin trait for sure

Oh, yes. She would much rather be in a position to have power that she chooses not to use, than to not have power at all. I think it is definitely a Slytherin trait. But also definitely out of her trauma from Tom, from being completely powerless and swearing to herself that she would never find herself in that position of weakness again. I think this is something both Ginnys have in common, and was honestly one of the reasons I thought she could actually work in Slytherin. She isn’t interested in controlling others, only interested in controlling her own destiny and path, and anyone who would try to take that away from her.

And, yes, I think Hermione’s need to control comes from a different place. Primarily the belief that she knows better than everyone else. It probably sounds egotistical, and it is a bit, but it also comes from what I imagine is Hermione’s feeling that she is Very Smart, that this smartness has been ingrained in her as being her core characteristics, her one valuable trait. (She’s bad with people and emotions and does not easily make friends, and maybe panics under stressful situations and doesn’t make the best leader or dueler, but she can always count on being smart, on Knowing Useful Things, and it’s the one thing that if she puts her effort into it, it always pays off, whereas other areas it never seems to matter how hard she tries, it always goes wrong.) Hermione isn’t interested so much in power in and of itself, as in Doing What’s Right, and Knowing More Than Everyone Else What’s Best.

How did the parlor come to exist? Who would Ginny be by the end of the changeling if it didn’t??

I imagine The Parlor was born out of information, practices, and people being slowly marginalized, maligned, and outlawed. In ancient cultures women’s knowledge might have been valued, but it was also probably also always secret or protected or at least ‘kept to the women’s quarters’ so to speak. But as male knowledge, power, and systems evolved and grew more powerful, women’s knowledge had to go underground--back to the earth from which it came, one might say. Both to protect itself, but also to ensure that it was never lost.

The Parlor is an extension of this vast network, this vestige of beliefs, practices, and knowledges patriarchy says is all better forgotten. And it far predates Hogwarts.

It’s hard to say who Ginny would be by the end of The Changeling without it. She would still be Ginny, she would still be tested, still find strength. I keep thinking of what Antonia said to her in in my head we do everything right when Ginny say she didn’t know who she would be without Antonia and she answers, “You’d be you. Only less interesting.” But something else Ginny might have been, was far more like Snape. Though what kept Ginny from that fate was a combination of The Parlor and the DA. So it’s hard to know. It’s all so thoroughly entwined.

Hello! I’m rereading The Changeling and I can’t remember for the life of me what Ginny meant by ‘more like power is the weakling’s ambition’, Antonia’s pride and her own conclusions after that. Could you elaborate please?

She forces herself to tune back in to what Antonia is saying about a letter she just received from her parents. Apparently some wizards came by their bookshop to get her family to pay a “protection fee” in these unsettled times. Common enough in Diagon and Knockturn Alleys these days apparently.

Antonia scoffs. “They didn’t count on my Auntie Victoria.”

Ginny huffs. “Probably were just hoping your family would be too scared to do anything,” she says scathingly.

“Fear is the weakling’s power,” Antonia says, sash drawn dramatically across her chest.

“More like power is the weakling’s ambition,” she counters.

Antonia looks at her in surprise, delicately penciled eyebrow crawling up under her fringe.

“What?” Ginny demands, shifting uncomfortably under her gaze.

Antonia smiles then, a dazzling spread of red lips over perfectly white teeth. “So you’re learning at last.”

Ginny scowls at her, not liking to be spoken to as if an unruly child, even as she knows Antonia has a valid point. Ginny hadn’t understood when she first met Antonia, mistaking ambition for maliciousness, unconventional thought for something as simple as evil. There is no easy corollary to be found between ordinary –normal?—and good. An entire world of nuance and subtlety and extraordinary exists in the spaces between.

She can see that. She just wishes other people could too.

I assume this scene from chapter five is what you are referencing.

Ah, the great foible of Slytherin. Assuming that to be ambitious means to lusting after power. Ginny is at once acknowledging that ambition is much more complex than merely wanting to have power over other people, and also beginning to see how that thirst for power more than anything else is perhaps a sign, ultimately, of weakness. The weak hoping to not be weak, but also a weakness of ambition to see so narrowly.

Remember, this conversation around power started in the previous year in the context of Umbridge and her actions, as ultimately being about trying to have power over all decisions, over Dumbledore and his supposed 'army', and over the whole school--and what that mean and how it landed on the students in really disturbing ways. And in the scene you are talking about above, it's in the context of Harry and his narrow of view of Slytherin and her, and her anger over it. They've just had their big fight over Draco Malfoy that is really more about Ginny thinking Harry isn't capable of seeing nuance when it comes to Slytherin. That maybe all he can see is that they are all after power and therefore are all evil. That there is no difference between ambition and evil. When she knows very well that there is far more grey than that, that the grey is the entire point. Ginny, at this point, does not crave power over people. She never really does. When she does wield power over people, it is merely as a tool, not an end in and of itself. Controlling people itself is never the point. Her ambition is ultimately about being true to herself, to the knowing and accepting of her own strengths and weaknesses both. She just wishes she could be seen for them by others (Harry) too.

Craving power as an end in and of itself is both a weakness in understanding and in a weakness in ambition. True ambition would reach far beyond it.

Remus Lupin: Sirius you did what.

Inspired by this post and others by lotstradamus