Over-Sugared @ SugarQuill

Historic day: yours truly has been suspended from longtime Harry Potter discussion-home, the Sugar Quill, for (allegedly) not playing nice.

Which leads me to my bigoted statement of the day - God, I hate women. Especially groups of women. The steady frustration has been building in me since early this year, and it was just as well they threw me out before I blew up all over their extremely sugary parade.

If there's one trouble with the Harry Potter fandom, it is that it is predominantly female. Adult discussion groups, in particular, are overrun with oestrogen. That in itself is irritating: a living demonstration of subtle sexism at work. Comparable fandoms of Phillip Pullman, Tolkien, or Frank Herbert, for example, don't seem to have this problem... but let it get out that hiding behind those asexual initials of "J" and "K" is (gasp) a woman, and the men leave in droves. And they'll come up with any number of rationalisations: it's not "hard SF" (as if Narnia is); it doesn't show rigour in the little details (as if Dune does); it's childish (dude, if you think Star Wars is the height of maturity...) etc. But this is a rant for another day.

One thing you can be sure of when large groups of women gather for anything other than a specifically feminist purpose, they will behave true to every bloody stereotype. Cliques and exclusiveness? Check. Fawning praise of the object of the gathering (and themselves)? Check. Pathological avoidance of open disagreement? Check. Ever-smiling back-handed bitchiness? Check.

Perhaps I'm a little slow on the uptake, but I didn't begin to notice this stuff on Sugar Quill until early this year - but it sure got old fast.

Let me give you an example of a discussion that got me scathingly polite warnings from the moderators. On SQ, any character formerly seen as one of the good guys who suddenly starts sprouting dark shades of grey has its fangirls willing to defend his unsullied (in their minds) persona to death. Consequently, there are no hotter wars than those on such threads.

The Percy thread is a good example. One poster went to great pains to list the incidents of all the books as seen from Percy's point of view in an effort to prove that his desertion of his family was completely rational and not at all disloyal.

CoS-- Things are seriously wrong at Hogwarts. A deadly monster is on the loose and all the people who are supposed to fix it, the teachers, the headmaster, and Percy himself are unable to do anything except try to limit the damage. His girlfriend Penelope is attacked and petrified. At this critical moment, Dumbledore leaves the school even more vulnerable than before and there is talk of closing it.

In other news, the twins stole Dad's car and didn't really get in trouble for it. Then, obviously following their bad example, Ron and Harry stole the car and created an incident that nearly exposed the entire wizarding world. Ron never did anything like this before. If Harry wasn't such a good Quidditch player, Percy'd worry about his influence on Ron....

I couldn't let that fly, obviously. This is what I wrote in reponse -

I do believe this is a very selective and highly biased view of Percy's CoS-year. After all, Harry saved Ginny's life at the end, saved her from possession and annihilation by Voldemort - doesn't that count for anything in Percy's book? Or does he think even then that his sister is lying, that Voldemort never possessed her?

As for not being able to protect the school - very laudable instincts for Percy to have, indeed (if he really did have them, but let's give you that). So what does Percy conclude from this? Never trust Dumbledore again, and let's trust the Ministry instead (which was revealed in CoS to have been responsible for expelling the innocent Hagrid, and to be rather incompetent in general). Never mind that the Minister is in Lucius Malfoy's pocket, and that Lucius Malfoy is the man who tried to kill Ginny AND got Dumbledore fired by threatening to curse the Board of Directors. And next time some monster is thought to be on the loose, let's just deny it and refuse to believe it, because the world is too pretty a place to allow it.

Forum moderators got in touch with me for this one: "Tone it down, respect other people's feelings, play nice."

My response was along the lines of O RLY?, obviously, and I went right on. Woman, if you're threatened by someone disagreeing with you, what are you on a discussion forum for? Go build a shrine fansite.

Tune in for tomorrow's thrilling conclusion of the SQ saga: I'll tell you all about the latest squabble that got me ejected and my posts modded out completely.