Shipping: from Jo to Shakespeare. Also: Girl Quotient

[Aberforth's Goat]

Weeee!

I hadn't read a shipping thread in almost a year. And even if I can't say
they I've spent the whole time missing them terribly, it *has* been fun to
get a new glimpse of amorous bucaneers swinging from deck to deck in
clouds of canon fire - rhetorical knives in their teeth, hermeneutical
cutlasses jingling at their sides. All told, it's quite a show.

And suddenly, I found myself wondering: But is *Rowling* a shipper?

I mean, sure. She writes about relationships, and she presumably has
pre-ordained who ends up with whom. But how do the relationships stack
up on her list of plot priorities?

And specifically: In many areas, we know that she is deliberately dropping
clues - not to mention red herrings. The books have a strong whodunnit
element. But do relationships belong to the whodunnit  elements? Put
otherwise: Are they one of the areas in which she is deliberately playing
hide and seek - or has is she just letting nature take its course?

I pose the question because many shippers - of all flags - seem to assume
that Jo is interested in the guessing game - and that a sufficiently cunning
analysis will lead us to the bowers of shipper-island.

* * * * *

BTW, about a year ago, I got to wondering what sort of shipper Shakespeare
would have been. The Winter's Tale seemed to provide some interesting clues,
so I did a pastiche of it. I was so embarassed at the result that I never
posted the attempt. But I was so vain that I couldn't bear to destroy it,
and put it onto my website. For the very board:

http://www.angelfire.com/magic/aberforthsgoat/WinterTale.htm

* * * * *

One other shippingish thing before I go to bed: I've heard an awful lot of
people say they find Harry's romantic adventures unreaslistically tame. The
axiom seems to be that if Harry were a real, live teenager, he and his
various lady-friends would have had their Kama Sutra backwards, forwards
and upside down by now.

This is disconcerting.

When *I* was 15, my enitre hands-on experience with sexuality was confined
to an exhaustive perusal of the Song of Soloman, DH Lawrence, my father's
family counseling manuals, and the lingerie section of my mother's mail
order catalogues. I dreamed of kissing a real, live girl in more or less the
same
hopeless way Voldemort dreams of conquering the galaxy.

To me, Harry's experience level seems a just about right - I mean, I never
got to snog any of my wouldbe Chos, but then again, I wasn't a dashing
quidditch player who won Cups and saved the world every year either. Heaven
knows I would have used those advantages to good effect if I had anything
even remotely comparable ...

Was I *hoplessly* backward - or is Harry's GQ (Girl Quotient) perhaps not
entirely implausible for a 15-year-old?

Baaaaaa!

Aberforth's Goat (a.k.a. Mike Gray)
_______________________

"Of course, I'm not entirely sure he can read, so that may not
have been bravery...."

NEWS: Check out chapter 2 of the Viagramus Curse. Fanfiction
that puts the dense back in decadence.
http://www.riddikulus.org/authors/agoat/VC02.html