Tomorrow marks the start of the new semester. So tonight, I'm treating myself to the beginning of my shamelessly self-indulgent fannish fifty, first brought to my attention by the incomparable ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
delphi.
I've decided to do fifty recs, with the proviso that if I'm short by a lot in November or so, I'll intersperse professional work I think deals especially adeptly with fannish tropes--Naomi Noviks deconstruction of chosen one narratives etc. I'm beginning the festivities with the piece I most dearly wish I'd written; December will be for friends' works, because I want so many of you whose work is as dear to me for instigating our friendship as its theme and content to have the gift of having your art seen and praised throughout an oft-fraught holiday season.
Title: The Ministry's Man
Author:musamihi
pairings: John Dawlish/Bartemius Crouch Senior (unrequited), John Dawlish/Rufus Scrimgeour
Summary: John Dawlish has spent his career in the shadows of the Ministry's great men. One of the things they have in common is they never stay for long.
Rufus Scrimgeour is the character I will come back to at ninety, rocking on a porch and ruminating about decency warring with pragmatism in a world where the chickens wrought from generation upon generation of prejudice are coming home to roost. He's Churchill--riddled with trauma from the last great war, certain of his moral rectitude, but also bullish to a fault and embodying so many of the prejudices destroying the world around him--and! disabled, which makes the entire character arc a thousand fucking times better.
I'm not ashamed to admit, here in a circle of mostly mutuals, that at the darkest lows of suicidal ideation after Mom's death, I lived to read and write more fic about the flawed wartime Minister and Thorin Oakenshield--also a deeply flawed king trying to reclaim a homeland and let his better angels triumph (I have a type, y'all)
I can't now recall which HP Beholder Ministry's Man sprang from (GOD, I miss that fest and at least half the HP fics to be recced by me come from its brilliance) It feels like one of those pieces that is simultaneously a reflection on and deconstruction of canon so perfectly precise it must've always existed.
Of course, I first read it for the Scrimgeour. His portrayal is a masterclass: proud and prickly but also clever and discerning, ruthlessly exacting while being deeply compelling and empathetic in his desire to keep the state afloat. Ironically, though, it's the fic's use of Dawlish to elucidate moral concerns that leave me in awe and writerly envy.
For John Dawlish is a mirror, bland and blank and utterly loyal to the state, even when the state comes to be embodied by Voldemort. He's almost Harry's exact foil, unthinkingly obedient, merely present to be manipulated as greater forces of personality desire. But like any mirror, he's deeply observant, reflecting the question: how do you proceed in a world fundamentally premised on moral decay and prejudice? When the other side is worse, what means are acceptable? The fic is a philosophical tour de force, with no easy answers, casting as unsparing an eye on Dumbledore's refusal to engage as it does on the excesses of Crouch and Scrimgeour.
Early in the fic, we're treated this haunting dialogue: "It's going to get away from you, Barty," she says, stopping not five paces from me...."Extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary measures." Mr. Crouch looks her square in the eye and starts winding a muffler around his neck.
From that moment, the center cannot hold, forcing us to ask what these world-weary characters should have done, or if the outcome was inevitable all along.
And every time, I'm sucked along with the Ministry's man until I'm breathlessly returning to the beginning in the desperate hope this end will somehow be different.
delphi.I've decided to do fifty recs, with the proviso that if I'm short by a lot in November or so, I'll intersperse professional work I think deals especially adeptly with fannish tropes--Naomi Noviks deconstruction of chosen one narratives etc. I'm beginning the festivities with the piece I most dearly wish I'd written; December will be for friends' works, because I want so many of you whose work is as dear to me for instigating our friendship as its theme and content to have the gift of having your art seen and praised throughout an oft-fraught holiday season.
Title: The Ministry's Man
Author:
musamihipairings: John Dawlish/Bartemius Crouch Senior (unrequited), John Dawlish/Rufus Scrimgeour
Summary: John Dawlish has spent his career in the shadows of the Ministry's great men. One of the things they have in common is they never stay for long.
Rufus Scrimgeour is the character I will come back to at ninety, rocking on a porch and ruminating about decency warring with pragmatism in a world where the chickens wrought from generation upon generation of prejudice are coming home to roost. He's Churchill--riddled with trauma from the last great war, certain of his moral rectitude, but also bullish to a fault and embodying so many of the prejudices destroying the world around him--and! disabled, which makes the entire character arc a thousand fucking times better.
I'm not ashamed to admit, here in a circle of mostly mutuals, that at the darkest lows of suicidal ideation after Mom's death, I lived to read and write more fic about the flawed wartime Minister and Thorin Oakenshield--also a deeply flawed king trying to reclaim a homeland and let his better angels triumph (I have a type, y'all)
I can't now recall which HP Beholder Ministry's Man sprang from (GOD, I miss that fest and at least half the HP fics to be recced by me come from its brilliance) It feels like one of those pieces that is simultaneously a reflection on and deconstruction of canon so perfectly precise it must've always existed.
Of course, I first read it for the Scrimgeour. His portrayal is a masterclass: proud and prickly but also clever and discerning, ruthlessly exacting while being deeply compelling and empathetic in his desire to keep the state afloat. Ironically, though, it's the fic's use of Dawlish to elucidate moral concerns that leave me in awe and writerly envy.
For John Dawlish is a mirror, bland and blank and utterly loyal to the state, even when the state comes to be embodied by Voldemort. He's almost Harry's exact foil, unthinkingly obedient, merely present to be manipulated as greater forces of personality desire. But like any mirror, he's deeply observant, reflecting the question: how do you proceed in a world fundamentally premised on moral decay and prejudice? When the other side is worse, what means are acceptable? The fic is a philosophical tour de force, with no easy answers, casting as unsparing an eye on Dumbledore's refusal to engage as it does on the excesses of Crouch and Scrimgeour.
Early in the fic, we're treated this haunting dialogue: "It's going to get away from you, Barty," she says, stopping not five paces from me...."Extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary measures." Mr. Crouch looks her square in the eye and starts winding a muffler around his neck.
From that moment, the center cannot hold, forcing us to ask what these world-weary characters should have done, or if the outcome was inevitable all along.
And every time, I'm sucked along with the Ministry's man until I'm breathlessly returning to the beginning in the desperate hope this end will somehow be different.
