![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
schemingreaderI am sure you will see many recommendations for this story. I wish I had known about this festival in advance; there is a fest ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
hp_fairytales and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rinsbane took on the Black sisters and Baba Yaga. The resulting story, The Bone Mother just kept me totally enthralled. It's NC-17, femmeslash, scary, and not for every reader, okay?
Like a lot of Blackcest stories I've read (I haven't read that many, to be truthful, but I've read a few) there is this sense that the protagonist has lived in a world upside down, where the dark arts are kind of cozy and familiar. Incest? Yeah, it's kind of part of the picture of using all the power you have, and so it's normal in their family. This story takes that moral inversion a step further. It's not just that the normal family boundaries are unreal, it's that all kinds of scary magic are real, are normal.
One of the problems that a lot of fan fic writers seems to find with JKR's magical world is that it's so matter-of-fact and really bureaucratic about magic. Many writers playing with her characters try to reinfuse the magic of the HP universe with mystery, blood, terror, mysticism.rinsbane integrates the magic of the Old World with HP magic in a different way. She makes the terrifying magic of Baba Yaga more real by putting a matter-of-fact British witch into her house.
busaikko has described the way the HP series has unfolded as being sort of like a cartoon that suddenly turns into live action. Someone falls off a cliff, ha ha! but then they aren't a cartoon who bounces back, but a person who bleeds. This fic does so much with the reality of magic. It's very frightening that some of these fairy tales could be real!
hp_fairytales and rinsbane took on the Black sisters and Baba Yaga. The resulting story, The Bone Mother just kept me totally enthralled. It's NC-17, femmeslash, scary, and not for every reader, okay?Like a lot of Blackcest stories I've read (I haven't read that many, to be truthful, but I've read a few) there is this sense that the protagonist has lived in a world upside down, where the dark arts are kind of cozy and familiar. Incest? Yeah, it's kind of part of the picture of using all the power you have, and so it's normal in their family. This story takes that moral inversion a step further. It's not just that the normal family boundaries are unreal, it's that all kinds of scary magic are real, are normal.
One of the problems that a lot of fan fic writers seems to find with JKR's magical world is that it's so matter-of-fact and really bureaucratic about magic. Many writers playing with her characters try to reinfuse the magic of the HP universe with mystery, blood, terror, mysticism.
rinsbane integrates the magic of the Old World with HP magic in a different way. She makes the terrifying magic of Baba Yaga more real by putting a matter-of-fact British witch into her house. busaikko has described the way the HP series has unfolded as being sort of like a cartoon that suddenly turns into live action. Someone falls off a cliff, ha ha! but then they aren't a cartoon who bounces back, but a person who bleeds. This fic does so much with the reality of magic. It's very frightening that some of these fairy tales could be real!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-10-17 09:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-17 09:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-18 12:05 am (UTC)I also like to play with magic. It's something I do in a lot of my fic, not uniquely, as you say. It might be more overt here, though. The dynamic of the fairy tale gave me great leeway.
Thank you so much for this rec! It's appreciated.
no subject
Date: 2006-10-18 12:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-18 01:18 am (UTC)There's a lighthearted "discussion" of magic in HP in a Harry/Luna I wrote. Not about old world magic, but about taking magic for granted. And there's a very odd kind of magic at work in a Snape gen fic I wrote - about the magic of hopes. I had been reading "Little, Big" by John Crowley, and he had a paragraph, magical in itself, about the place where hopes go. It's probably in other fic as well. Like I said, I like it. *g*
I think what JKR is doing - in her own clever way - is the precise opposite. She's playing on our expectations of what magic is - making a Ministry of it, for instance. Making laws about it. Because it's charming, really. So we're inverting the order once again - we're taking her unexpected inversion of what we first thought magic was, assimilating it, and then reverting it to deal with what we always thought magic was. But in the process of all these spins, we don't come back out at the same place.
Er. Not sure if that makes any sense.