(slightly loony about Luna)

[reenka]

It just occurred to me as a sort of struck-by-lightning thing, that I -can-, in fact, see why/how someone would dislike Luna on principle. It's that whole loopy-but-with-no-real-substance thing. Like, those people who prance about spouting nonsense and acting oh-so-silly-and-odd with those over-the-top outfits and multi-colored beads and ten necklaces and five Zulu charms and three rabbit's-feet and eleven little mice strung on a string around their waists or whatever. I myself would probably avoid that sort of person if I saw them on the street. This reminds me of BtVS, y'know, with that vision of Andrew and Warren prancing around in 'heaven' singing 'we are as GODS', etcetc.

I think it's degrading and a silly stereotype of what 'wild' or weird girls are like, really. Of course they're crazy, moon-mad, completely out there swinging from clouds and eating daisies. Oddness, weirdness, intuitive brilliance-- that's one thing. Acting like you're on crack and happy about it is another thing altogether. I don't nod and smile if people eat daisies and sing silly songs in make-believe languages, I wish they'd get some sort of help.

Insanity is a touchy subject with me, of course.


On the one hand, I'm deeply fascinated with madness and particularly its connections to genius and 'truth', as well as truth-seeking. For instance, you could see a character like Fox Mulder as being 'mad' by societal standards, but he's not, really. The point of Luna, to me, and why I identify with her, is that she's not mad, not that she is. Sure, people think (perhaps even the author thinks) that she's loopy and 'out there' and so on, but she just sees things in a different way-- she doesn't sing at shadows and prance about with some wild light in her eyes.

It just bothers me because I keep seeing Luna portrayed with an emphasis on her 'madness', her complete goofy untetheredness, and it sort of hurts because I was a lot like Luna (as I imagine her) when I was a child. The funny thing is how little that sort of behavior-- distant gazes, non-sequiturs, idiosyncratic beliefs, a sort of otherworldly calm-- has to do with madness, really. It's a dreaminess, instead, really. A real Luna type isn't that loud, mad, raving hippie-- she's more of a quiet childlike fey creature, paying attention to invisible things and not quite touching the world and drawing her own conclusions. In the quiet of a childhood spent in isolation-- especially without one's mother (or father, in my case)-- the whole world silently blossoms into strangeness. Things acquire layers of make-believe 'secret' aspects where flowers talk and the moon shows you the path into faery and the dark is full of unnameable, glorious monsters.

Honestly, I don't know anything about these bright, falsely happy empty-eyed people that pass for Luna for so many people. Do they really exist? They probably do. I have had no traffic with them, and want none. Quiet doesn't mean dull; alone doesn't mean insane; different doesn't mean one's mind is scattered to the winds but rather often that one's mind is overly focused on the things others don't bother paying attention to, instead.

I don't care about Luna's earrings or her odd eyes, but it seems that's all most people notice. People are so distrustful of belief, even when the person is on a search for their own truth, while most of them simply accept a whole array of stranger and more frightening dictums as Truth, completely wholesale. I myself spent a childhood lost in a sort of twilight forest of fleeting beliefs and daydreams, picking things up and abandoning them. I know what it's like to see things and want to see more, no matter how strange. Luna is not mad. It's more like Luna is saner than the rest of her peers, maybe.
~~

EDIT - Er. I am interested in what other people think of Luna, positive and negative, btw....

Comments

[aiglet.livejournal.com]

I think we're getting into fanon/canon again. *Canon* Luna is seen as being a dippy little girl who can't really connect with reality because that's how the Trio see her. They're so very into being *connected* with things (Hermione has knowledge; Ron has his family; Harry has, well, the two of them) that they can't understand someone who doesn't have external coping mechanisms. We never really get to see into Luna's head, so we tend to just agree with the Trio's assessment of her.

*Fanon* Luna has a much greater scope to express why she is the way she is, and how the insides of her head works. I think that one of the big things that people relate to in written characters is how they *cope* with things, and since we only get that for Luna in fic, only fanon Luna can be comprehensible.

That notwithstanding, this is a wonderful and eloquent defense of "different" children, and I'm glad you wrote it.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

I'm kind of floored by this idea...why would anyone think Luna was crazy? To me she seems perfectly sane and intelligent. She's got her "thing," the way she acts, but it never seems to me that she's really disconnected to reality at all. It seems more like the way she is, the way she communicates, the things she loves and likes to talk about, are just things she needs right now to deal with life, you know? Like for whatever reason she likes being this way right now, and since people don't treat her that well anyway there's no reason for her to conform to please them. The way she acts isn't mainstream but it's never occurred to me she was crazy.

Man, people have the narrowest views of "okay." If any kid in Harry's class has ever struck me in any danger of going mad, it would probably be Draco--and even then I just mean the way he's been set up it's a way you could go with the character, not that he's ever done anything insane up until now. And other characters I could see crossing the line into insane behavior, which is different than being insane yourself--like the people at the Salem Witch trials weren't insane but their behavior was. Plenty of characters could go that way. But Luna seems actually more in touch with reality, maybe because she knows herself. I remember hearing a quote about Oscar Schindler once where somebody said something about how in bad times it's often the oddballs that prove surprisingly able to resist evil. That sounds like Luna to me.

[allectofromlj]

Personally, (a) I love your interpretation of Luna and (b) I *think* JKR is trying to go for the trope of the blind/seemingly crazy person actually having greater insight into life than other people, as in Teiresias in Greek mythology or Mercutio in Shakespeare. Because they don't see things as we see things, they see more/better.

I don't think Luna's crazy at all. I *can* see some kind of interpretation where she has forced herself to believe in certain things the outside world finds crazy so that she can win approval/attention from her father, as he's her only care-caregiver from a very early age, but I don't like it as much as the interpretation you gave her.

The real problem is that we just don't know enough about her, because it's clear Hermione thinks she's loony and Ron thinks she's annoying and Harry thinks she's odd *except* there's that bit at the end when Sirius has died and he asks her (or maybe she volunteers, I forget) and she tells him her theory about the veil and an afterlife, and he clings to it. But since the whole narrative of HP is from Harry's POV and since Harry has a very narrow scope of interest and is not the most reliable of narrators, bless his little heart, it's hard to know what she's "really" like. But I do think/hope JKR is going for the trope I mentioned above, because it's a nifty trope and also Luna deserves better than just being some crazy kid all the Ravenclaws laugh at.

(Off topic, but I find it interesting that the people who lingered by/heard voices from the veil were Harry, Luna, and Ginny, the former two who lost people and the latter who was touched by death and evil in CoS...)

[slinkhard.livejournal.com]

I didn't really warm to Luna.
I think it's some kind of dignity issue (which is odd coming from a Draco/current Slytherins fan, I know!) - I didn't really 'get' why she would want to associate with people who didn't seem to care about her.

But I haven't given her much thought I'm afraid. I'm not particularly interested in characters that are too 'obvious', if that makes any sense, and Luna is kind of like Neville, in that I'm very aware as a reader that I shouldn't misjudge them because There's More Than Meets the Eye, and that they'll play a Larger Role in things and maybe Help Harry's Understanding.
Which is great, but there's no big shocks or huge character development is store, which is perhaps more interesting to me.

[go-back-chief.livejournal.com]

As for reasons for why someone would dislike Luna on principle, it makes me think of something I read once on the site "Television without Pity". The recapper said that she didn't like characters like Willow (BtVS) or Phoebe (Friends), because their respective "ditziness" were "pasted on", in order to make them "cute" and "endearing" to the viewers. Instead, the recapper liked Drusilla, whose paceyness "had a real reason", aka, she WAS insane. Now, I don't necessarily share the views of this recapper, but I could most definitely see where she was coming from. And I imagine she'd have the same reaction to Luna, thinking that JKR has made her "dreamy" to make her cute and endearing. This is not how I see Luna, but I can understand that other people may see her like that, and if they do, I can definitely see why they'd dislike her.

I guess, the reason why I don't see her like that, is because to me, she
-like many of JKR's characters- seems real. That is, I can agree with Luna-critiques that there are stereotypical things in her characterisation, but I think she exceeds the stereotype. (I fully understand that she might not do so for everyone, though).

I remember when we read OotP, my sister said Luna reminded her very much of me. I could understand what she meant, but it annoyed me to a certain extent, because of the stereotypal aspects of the character. Also, it annoyed me, because though I can understand that there are similarities between the two of us, there are also great differences (I don't have the faith Luna has for instance, and I think I'm much more logical and skeptic, read cynical;-)). Likewise, I remember when we started watching "Friends", my sister said Phoebe reminded her of me. This annoyed me even more, because I percieve Phoebe as more of a stereotype and comic relief, but yeah, I could see where she was coming from even then.

What I think my sister referred to, in both these cases, was something these two characters seem to have in common; they're both absentminded, live a bit in their own world and they think in a way that's different to others. Like, from other people's POV, Luna may say something that seems to be completely out of the left field, but it makes perfect sense to her, and the point is, it would make sense to most people, if we only could follow her thought-process. We can't, therefore she doesn't make sense. But if we could, she would, and I think that's extremely important to remember when you write fics that's from Luna's own POV; no one sees themselves as weird, and thus, Luna shouldn't either.

My personal pet-peeve about Luna, is when people think she's stupid. I've seen threads questioning why she is in Ravenclaw, and that completely drives me up the wall. She's NOT stupid!!!! (Here is, of course, where I start project my own issues.;-)) She thinks in a way that's different from others, but she's very much capable of thinking, in fact, she probably uses her brain more than many people. But I think she uses all of her brain, or at least more of it than is common. It's hard to explain, but I think she often thinks one step ahead of others, as well as from the sides, and looking back, and thus it may take a little longer until she draws a conclusion. Reversely, I think it also happens that she draws her conclusion far too quickly for others to follow, because she doesn't work herself through details first, but she begins, rather than ends, with the broad perspective, and thus she might throw out the conclusion at a time when other people, who haven't been following her line of thinking, aren't ready to recieve it. I think the forrest-scene, where she suggests they'll fly to MoM, is an excellent example of that, in fact.

The thing is, if someone tends to say things that seem (but really aren't, once you've given it some thought) completely out of the blue, and if you're not always focusing on the "here and now", and if you sometimes answer questions when the person who asked them has already forgot they posed them, many people can mistake that for stupidity.