in our rags of light

[lotesse]

random thought (I'm not panicking, I'm not): now that I'm old enough to identify more with the adult Harry Potter characters than the teen ones, I think maybe the reason why I found capslock!Harry in the books so upsetting, and the fandom dismissal of the issue with "yes teenagers are often little shits this is realism" so utterly didn't work for me, is that I see that sort of sullen withdrawn angry stuff in a canonically abused child character and think "this kid needs help that's too much pain." Which would have been a fine direction for the books to go in, if anyone ever actually acknowledged that Harry was fucked up, if the books in any way dealt with his damage, either by forcing him to struggle against it or by working to process it and heal. But they don't. And that feels really dismissive, to me, of abuse survivors' pain. Not to mention teenagers' pain, which is routinely denigrated and normalized.