4:45am December 27, 2013

I don’t know what to call myself in-character.

Witch or wizard.

I like the connotations of witch, mostly.  Especially as associated with magic as practiced in the Terry Pratchett novels.  (And there seems to be some kind of idea that witchcraft is different than wizardry, even in Harry Potter:  "Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.“  I know there’s headcanon with some people that witchcraft and wizardry are two related branches of magic that wizards can practice, that got bound together at some point and taught as one.)

But I don’t like the way witch is pretty intensely gendered in the series, and in real life.  I know that in paganism, people of all genders can be witches, but that’s not how it’s used in Harry Potter.

I do like that wizard is used for male and female characters (they don’t mention any other genders in the series, let alone a near-total lack of gender which is what I feel like I have) in the Harry Potter series.  But I don’t like the association with more intellectual and less instinctual magic that it seems to have.  I generally use wizard when I’m talking about myself in-character so far, because of the gender-neutral thing, and also because the Young Wizards/Feline Wizards series has rubbed off on me.  But I still don’t like the association with that particular kind of magic, because I’m pretty sure that’s not what my character is best at, given how thoroughly she’s based on me.

I’ve heard the term wix as gender-neutral.  Problem is, I hate it.

I almost want to say witchard, but nobody would know what that meant, and I still don’t like it.

And nobody would know why I was saying ‘witch’ if I used it that way, because in the Harry Potter universe they don’t explicitly consider witchcraft a specific style of magic.

7 notes