bitterfig

Thursday was my day off and also the first day of Terminus, a huge ass international Harry Potter Fan Convention that just happened to be taking place in my home city of Chicago. 

 

An on-line friend pointed me to a website of informal meet-ups that were being held and I ventured out to a couple of them.  The S.P.E.W. Intersection (named for Hermione Granger’s society to emancipate House Elves) was for vegetarian/vegans and people interested in raising social consciousness.  We met at Kramer’s, a health food store in the Loop with a café area (though sadly no bathroom).  About 10 people came, a diverse group including a woman from Canada, a couple from San Francisco, and a mother and her teenaged daughter from outside of Syracuse, New York.   

 

It was a lot of fun.  My toehold is Harry Potter fandom is writing fan fiction but most of the others were into Wizard Rock so it was pretty neat to learn a little about that whole phenomena which I know almost nothing about.  I talked quite a bit to the guy from the San Fran couple—he had a background in hardcore music and had gotten into Harry Potter and Wizard Rock through his girlfriend.  He seemed to find it a relief after the drugs and violence in the hardcore scene.  We got to talking about vegetarianism and it turned out that he was originally from the Philippines.  When he was growing up his family had raised pigs and chickens for food and he’d actually participated in the butchering.  I thought it was interesting that rather than hardening him to animals this first-hand with the violence inherent in meat eating eventually made him receptive to vegetarianism. 

 

The teenaged girl wasn’t really participating in the conversation (I think she was busy being mortified by her mother who was describing how she converted to vegetarianism after reading the life changing book Skinny Bitch) so I asked her what Wizard Rock bands she liked and would recommend and that sort of drew her out a bit.  In a way, that interaction put me in mind of my very back burner goal of teaching.  It’s something I periodically toy with then dismiss.   After all, how could I handle a classroom of teenagers?  It’s all I can do not to start crying when a customer gets irked because the pomegranate kefir is ringing up at the wrong price.  Yet I feel like I have an affinity with teenagers.   And I enjoy talking with them, finding out what they’re into and what’s important to them which I think is usually appreciated as a lot of people tend to dismiss their interests. 

 

After the S.P.E.W Intersection I went to another meet-up.  This one was called Siriusly Snaped and it was for the slash pairing of Sirius Black/Severus Snape and was more focused on fan fiction and art.  It was really neat to meet other writers and artists whose work I’d seen on-line.  I’ve never been to any kind of convention or fan meet-up before and have only ever tentatively broached the subject of my fan writing with people I know in real life a couple of times (“By the way, I write gay porn about fictitious characters for fun!”) and I think most of them are pretty baffled so it was really fun to be able to talk about slash and writing fan fiction with people who not only knew what it was but enjoyed it. 

 

So basically I rode the El into unfamiliar territory and spent about several hours meeting and talking to new people; all and all not a bad day for someone with a touch of social anxiety. 

A couple of weeks ago I was read the manga Earthian.  It’s an earlier work Kouga Yun the mangaka (writer/artist) responsible for Loveless, a series I’ve had an ambiguous fascination/revulsion relationship with since I started reading it last year because of the eroticized, highly romantic manner in which it deals with the relationship between a 20 year old man and a 12 year old boy. 

 

Earthian was disturbing in different and similar ways.  Like Loveless, Earthian focuses on male characters but what bothered me was the manner in which the primary female supporting-- Aya, Elvira and Miyuki-- were portrayed. 

( cut for length and spoilers )