![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
giggle. furries!
I seem to be going all HP again all of a sudden. Hmm. I wonder why. And what's up with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mistful and epicyclical always updating their fics within 24 hours of each other? Are they sekritly the same person or something? I knew it!
And then there's that JKR chat, which everybody, including my mother, is discussing incessantly. I've been having far too much fun with it over onmaeglinyedi's journal.
But for now, I want to talk about the animagus question. I was utterly puzzled when I came into the fandom and found it was a matter of *debate* whether people chose their forms or had them thrust upon them; it had never even occured to me it might be a voluntary choice; that's just silly.
And yet, it's been a matter of controversy; I clearly read too much cheap fantasy. In the discussions I've been reading, I've been hornswaggled to note, several times, people comparing that idea to Pullman's daemons, as if it was some great coincidence or parallel. And these are the same people who would be horrified if it was suggested that a three-headed dog was Rowling's idea . .
Now, granted, the daemons were about the only thing that let me hold on for the thirty pages or so I endured of The Golden Compass, but it wasn't like the idea of a familiar was exciting and new to me, any more than the idea of a shifting into a totem animal. Long before Padfoot was a twinkle in his mistress's eye, I was rooting for Boyer's elves to find their fylgja forms (... hm, come to think of it, I wonder if JKR's a Boyer fan? Crookshanks reminded me of Truffa from the beginning.) Was fangirling Har's wolf and Suth's vesta and Mathom's crow and Talies's hawk and Danaan's tree. And others I can't think of because I'm separated from my fantasy collection at the moment. It's not like there's no folkloric precedent, either. Wizards shapeshifting into personality-matching animal forms was enough of a cliché to me that I designed a whole world-- including the farthest I've ever gotten on a conlang-- which was a derived equally from Norse/Celtic and Native American sources, *solely* so that I could have wizards with shapeshift forms like raccoons and 'possums and flying squirrels and skunks instead of those boring deer and wolves and foxes. (In case you care, I had decided for reasons that don't need to be gone into at the moment that mine was capybara.)
. . . oh, I said I was going to talk Mars, didn't I? Eh, I just wanted to brag that I'm only two degrees of separation fromopportunitygrrl and spiritrover: My S/S prof's masters advisor is one of their handlers, so yay! Go geology! I was going to rehash the insider presentation he gave us yesterday, but it's pretty much all up on their website anyway. Suffice that I'm now fully convinced of the standing water on Mars.
Note on music (look, still not HP fandom): Hm. If I was insane enough to have an M/K theme song, this would be it. q:
mistful and epicyclical always updating their fics within 24 hours of each other? Are they sekritly the same person or something? I knew it!And then there's that JKR chat, which everybody, including my mother, is discussing incessantly. I've been having far too much fun with it over on
maeglinyedi's journal.But for now, I want to talk about the animagus question. I was utterly puzzled when I came into the fandom and found it was a matter of *debate* whether people chose their forms or had them thrust upon them; it had never even occured to me it might be a voluntary choice; that's just silly.
And yet, it's been a matter of controversy; I clearly read too much cheap fantasy. In the discussions I've been reading, I've been hornswaggled to note, several times, people comparing that idea to Pullman's daemons, as if it was some great coincidence or parallel. And these are the same people who would be horrified if it was suggested that a three-headed dog was Rowling's idea . .
Now, granted, the daemons were about the only thing that let me hold on for the thirty pages or so I endured of The Golden Compass, but it wasn't like the idea of a familiar was exciting and new to me, any more than the idea of a shifting into a totem animal. Long before Padfoot was a twinkle in his mistress's eye, I was rooting for Boyer's elves to find their fylgja forms (... hm, come to think of it, I wonder if JKR's a Boyer fan? Crookshanks reminded me of Truffa from the beginning.) Was fangirling Har's wolf and Suth's vesta and Mathom's crow and Talies's hawk and Danaan's tree. And others I can't think of because I'm separated from my fantasy collection at the moment. It's not like there's no folkloric precedent, either. Wizards shapeshifting into personality-matching animal forms was enough of a cliché to me that I designed a whole world-- including the farthest I've ever gotten on a conlang-- which was a derived equally from Norse/Celtic and Native American sources, *solely* so that I could have wizards with shapeshift forms like raccoons and 'possums and flying squirrels and skunks instead of those boring deer and wolves and foxes. (In case you care, I had decided for reasons that don't need to be gone into at the moment that mine was capybara.)
. . . oh, I said I was going to talk Mars, didn't I? Eh, I just wanted to brag that I'm only two degrees of separation from
opportunitygrrl and spiritrover: My S/S prof's masters advisor is one of their handlers, so yay! Go geology! I was going to rehash the insider presentation he gave us yesterday, but it's pretty much all up on their website anyway. Suffice that I'm now fully convinced of the standing water on Mars.Note on music (look, still not HP fandom): Hm. If I was insane enough to have an M/K theme song, this would be it. q: