make me choose: @lysatullys asked ~ fleur delacour or zoya nazyalensky
a young woman was standing in the doorway, a woman of such breathtaking beauty that the room seemed to have become strangely airless.
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the veela thing or, alternatively, jkr is the worst in too many ways to count, so here’s another one.
fleur delacour is one of my favourite characters in harry potter and her treatment in canon hurt my lil’ feminist heart so fucking much.
here’s a girl who is obviously someone who is capable and smart and a powerful witch but let’s reduce her to the fact that she’s beautiful. let’s also ignore her massive bravery in getting involved in a foreign war while she’s barely out of school. let’s ignore the huge misogyny behind the belief that a girl can’t be beautiful and smart/capable. that if she’s pretty, it must mean she’s shallow and not good enough.
jkr’s treatment of veelas is just another show of misogyny on her part and honestly, it’s very uncomfortable to read.
veelas at the world cup - arthur's casual comment: 'and that, boys, is why you should never go for looks alone' implies there's no other value to being a veela than being some thing that's pretty, and i'm using 'some thing' very deliberately here because throughout the hp books, they're reduced to pretty, shiny things. it also, once again, heavily implies that beautiful girls are nothing more than their looks.
the veelas are also reduced to...animals and female hysteria in their moment of anger, acting completely wild which is... pretty fucking terrible. especially when you put it into perspective on how angry women or women with opinions on literally anything have been treated throughout history, and, what’s worse, still today.
let’s get back to treatment of fleur - maybe 80% of what we see of her in goblet of fire is ...variations on how beautiful she is and how men behave around her and interact with her. which is, frankly, a fucking awful way on jkr's part in treating a badass female character who is a triwizard champion. she's always shown as being the weakest in the tournament and in the second task, the only one who fails...oh silly girl, right? later - strong female characters like molly, ginny and hermione treat fleur like garbage for absolutely no reason except that they don't consider this beautiful, shallow girl as good enough?! and then the male weasley family members are your standard 'ogling her and drooling over her' type of people. men, who, up until their interactions with fleur, were mostly acting like normal human beings towards women.
ugh.
let’s just abuse women’s sexuality and also let’s reduce it to manipulation.
are girls worthy of badassery and respect only when they’re not feminine and/or beautiful?
fuck that. fleur delacour is fucking amazing.
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