continued Thatfucker discussion

[anonniemouse]

Since we've been kicked off FFA for the week, please feel free to continue the anon discussion here. Apologies if this is a big flop - I've never made a DW community before!

The rules are vaguely the same as they are over on FFA. Please refrain from being too much of an asshole, making personal attacks, posting identifying information or engaging in transfail.

ETA: If there's information you'd like to see archived (journal/blog posts related to Andy, etc.), please dump it here and link to it from the main post for discussing.

Comments

Re: Question

[(Anonymous)]

There was a lot of teary-eyed "word magic" about Seamus and his love of a child that ~*was not even his own*~ in DAYD.

Re: Question

[(Anonymous)]

There's some weirdness about kids in Sluagh, too (though nothing next to his evident hatred for people's mothers).
FWIW, I think Andy likes the idea of children and babies, or likes them in small doses (visiting, maybe babysitting), but I don't think he'd actually want the day-to-day reality. At all. And I think he has just about enough sense to know it, too.
~Carlanime

Re: Question

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah. He once talked about wanting to be "allowed" to babysit two babies at once (it was creepy), but I can't recall him gushing about wanting to be a parent.

Re: Question

[(Anonymous)]

I wonder if that's why he was always encouraging the friends he'd coupled up to have kids? As long as the parents remained in his thrall he'd have access to all the fun parts of being around children without any of the responsibility.

Christ, considering the anecdote about the mouse that Abbey shared the idea of Andy having responsibility of any children even in a short term babysitting context makes my blood run cold as much as the idea of him having any kind of influence over a child does.

Re: Question

[(Anonymous)]

Prepare to have it run colder:

http://andythanfiction.tumblr.com/post/43336687315/real-men-do-eat-quiche

I have never met a small child I can’t win over, and there are few things I find as beautiful as a sleeping baby in my arms.

I think this is why he's so fond of children, in a nutshell.

Re: Question

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, I think it was actually in Sluagh come to think of it, I meant DAYD as in the wider 'verse.

Re: Question

[(Anonymous)]

though nothing next to his evident hatred for people's mothers

Oh? I don't think I've heard about that aspect yet (and I've never read DAYD). If it's not upsetting to you, would you mind elaborating on it a bit? Like, does he seem to hate all mothers, or just some of them? Are there recurrent themes in his treatment of mothers? Things like that.

Re: Question

[(Anonymous)]

Sorry not to answer before now, but if you're still here: there's this really weird section where Neville is undercover, and one of the human thugs he's with gets shot, so Neville and the rest of the guys are at the hospital. And they story makes this BIG DEAL out of how much the guy's friends care about him, but it does this by casting his mother as the heartless person who doesn't care if her son lives or dies.

Here is an actual quote:

Mrs. Mulligan had shown up about an hour after they had begun their vigil, and she looked at him the same way everyone else at hospital did, the way they also looked when they gave useless non-answers to his questions about Sean. You disgusting hoodlums, you brought this on yourselves, you're lucky we're better than you are or we would just let him die like he deserves. The only sympathy seemed to be for his mother, though she oddly didn't seem to care half as much about her son as his friends outside, acting more like it was an annoyance than a possible tragedy.

Neville stared at her as she picked pieces off a chocolate bar from her handbag, her lips smacking unconsciously on each square while she rummaged through the out-of-date Muggle gossip magazines that lay on the tables of the almost wholly-deserted waiting area. She was perhaps barely past forty if you really paid attention, but at first glance she seemed closer to fifty-something, the lines on her face deep and harsh beneath way too much makeup and a black dye job that showed almost a half inch of her son's ginger at the roots. Her clothing might have been provocative on a woman twenty years younger and three stone lighter, but the bright yellow miniskirt and low-cut midriff top were just wrong and a little pathetic, and it made a lot more sense all of a sudden why his older brother had meant so much to Sean, why the RHD had called so strongly.

(http://archiveofourown.org/works/753566/chapters/1407543)

Re: Question

[(Anonymous)]

I don't know what you're apologizing for :D The time stamps say there were only 45 minutes between my question and your answer: that's pretty damn fast in my book!

Anyway. That quote really has Andy written all over it. He can't just say that the mother doesn't seem to care for her son. As usual, he has to go several extra miles, and vilify her in *every* possible way. All her actions are interpreted in the worst possible manner, with no room left for the possibility that maybe she's just a very private person who doesn't show her grief in public, for example. And *everything* about her appearance is criticized: the way she eats, her make-up, her hair job, her clothes, her face, and of course, as usual with Andy, her weight. It's like he filled a Bingo card, just so he could triumphantly bring in the supposedly obvious conclusion: she's clearly a horrible mother, so horrible that Sean's older brother (a man) had to step in and do her job. The fact that the conclusion is in no way related to the "arguments" he presented (for all we know, the woman is crying in agony inside, and a woman's appearance has *nothing* to do with how good of a mother she is), is pushed aside and pulled under by the flood of details, in typical Andy style. It's disgustingly fascinating, in a way.

If the rest of the DAYD fics are like that, then I see what you mean. Thank you for taking the time to share that snippet!

Re: Question

[(Anonymous)]

Aha, I see that now. When I was answering I was comparing the time stamp on your comment to the actual time in my house, and it looked like I'd wandered off for hours. :)

Yeah, the whole fic is like this. It's grammatically sound, even well-written at points, but the weird attitudes towards women are hard to wade through. As is the constant Oirish, and also the Laddish comments by some of the characters. It's difficult not to see it as a seething mass of issues. And I KNOW my reading of it must be being influenced by my knowledge of who wrote it, but I think some of it would be pretty blatant anyway.

Re: Question

[(Anonymous)]

I recently looked at an overview of the DAYD cast that Andy posted a long time ago, as well as one of his posts about the various "diversity" categories into which each character falls. Is it just me, or did he kill off literally every single LGBTQIA character except Susan (who I gather is bi, married to a man, and not out)?

I mean, I might have missed something; it's been a long time since I actually read DAYD and I've never gotten all the way through Sluagh. But it sure looks that way to me.

TB

Re: Question

[(Anonymous)]

Careful, TB. Any minute now concern!troll is going to show up and accuse you of bi erasure, followed by an ANGRY CAPSLOCK lecture about ethics and marginalized orientations.

But yes, I think you may be right.

Re: Question

[(Anonymous)]

IIRC her orientation never came up in the actual fic, but was in one of those "20 random facts" things. I remember that really pissing me off.

TB

Re: Question

[(Anonymous)]

Hahahaha, and he claims to be so much better than that hack JKR.

Seriously, we get enough 'bury your gays' in mainstream media, I'm not looking for that shit in my fic as well. I'd actually rather read a fic where everyone is relentlessly het than one where all the LGBTQ+ characters are killed off.

Re: Question

[(Anonymous)]

Most of the characters that he introduced (or elevated from background) to increase diversity ended up dead. The survivors pretty much all had terrible things happen to them, but to be fair, I don't think anyone was immune from that in DAYDverse.

The one that comes most readily to mind is Li. Andy was really unimpressed with Cho Chang, as I recall, and Li Su was supposed to show how much better he could write an Asian character than JKR. Li ended up losing her entire body below the waist. She somehow lived through it and married Tony, a double amputee, and then Andy wrote porn about them to show how much he respected the sexuality of people with disabilities.

TB

Re: Question

[(Anonymous)]

Haha, didn't he criticize the idea that Dumbledore being gay was representation when you'd never know it in the novels?

Re: Question

[(Anonymous)]

Well, I'm only on chapter eight (of Sluagh), so as of right now Seamus is still alive and he's gay (or possibly bi).
~C

Re: Question

[(Anonymous)]

When did Andy write Sluagh? Was Brittany alive when this was written??

Re: Question

[(Anonymous)]

Wait, I thought Seamus was violently homophobic...and Andy excused it because he grew up in a "rough area" in Belfast, so he couldn't help it. Ugh.

TB

Re: Question

[(Anonymous)]

Well in Sluagh, Neville just polyjuiced himself into Dean and then went to Seamus' apartment, and Seamus kissed him and started undressing him.

Idk, I really don't.

~Carlanime

Re: Question

[(Anonymous)]

I am so confused right now. I may actually have to read it...

TB

Re: Question

[(Anonymous)]

IRCC he does it out of guilt because Dean died for him right after confessing his love, which Seamus hostilely rejected.

Re: Question

[(Anonymous)]

I thought Seamus was straight as a rod and had a homophobic freakout toward his best friend just before he died.

He marries Susan Bones later and Andy's drawn all sorts of NSFW art of them happily fucking, so at the very least, he's bi. But I'm pretty sure that's not the case.

Re: Question

[(Anonymous)]

What I find interesting about this is that it reads as though Neville is upset that his mother is getting more sympathy (read: attention) than he is.

I feel like this is author bleed. If I had been seriously injured and my mother was there, I don't think "Who is getting the most sympathy?" would even enter my thought process.

My mind jumps to Abbey's mother. Abbey mentioned that she said upset Andy because he would wail loudly at night, and then complain to Abbey about how heartless her mother was for not checking on him. What I suspect was actually happening is that Andy was getting frustrated that his manipulations weren't working on Abbey mother, and he decided to make lemons into lemonade by using that as a tool to alienate Abbey from her mother again.

https://kumquatwriter.wordpress.com/2011/11/08/operation-catch-and-release-part-2/

I loathed the way he would sob, loud and wailing, making sure Mom overheard and then later criticizing her (to me) for not coming to “check” on him.

Re: Question

[(Anonymous)]

That kind of behavior is genius in its simplicity, because no matter how people react, Andy always wins. If Abbey's mother had given into his manipulation, he could have made everything be about him. But Abbey's mother didn't, so instead he got to complain to Abbey. If Abbey had told him off for criticizing her mother, he would have forced her to choose between him and her mother before she was ready to make such a decision, or whatever else. *Any* way Abbey and her mother chose to react, he was going to get the drama he wanted. So simple and efficient that there was literally nothing they could do to escape it without drama.