On the one hand, with all these imperfectly good and imperfectly bad characters on display, I'm amazed that anyone would hold up her favorite character and say, no, no, mine is the good one! Even those characters portrayed in a generally very positive light - Hermione, for example - have their weaknesses (lack of focus in a crisis) and vanitites (grades).
On the other hand, though - if one imagines that one is to take the author literally in her interviews (and why shouldn't we?), well, she's come out and said that some people "are just evil". (Which, if I remember correctly, was a reference to Voldemort, and from an interview before HBP came out...where we see his most human side.) Which I think is one thing that sets people on a "these are innately good" sort of path, though maybe all she meant was that some people, out of awful situations, turn out well, while others do not. Heck, some people turn out awful from perfectly good situations, for that matter. And, unless I missed the memo, this disparity isn't something understood and Scientifically Explained. Maybe it's luck or maybe it's genetics or maybe it's complexity or maybe it's grace - but the point is, we don't know.
I like that in HP, we also don't know - and a part of me hopes that at the end of Book 7, we still won't know why Snape Can't Just Get Over It, for example. (Of course the other part of me hopes for a "director's voiceover" of all 7 books...)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 05:25 am (UTC)On the other hand, though - if one imagines that one is to take the author literally in her interviews (and why shouldn't we?), well, she's come out and said that some people "are just evil". (Which, if I remember correctly, was a reference to Voldemort, and from an interview before HBP came out...where we see his most human side.) Which I think is one thing that sets people on a "these are innately good" sort of path, though maybe all she meant was that some people, out of awful situations, turn out well, while others do not. Heck, some people turn out awful from perfectly good situations, for that matter. And, unless I missed the memo, this disparity isn't something understood and Scientifically Explained. Maybe it's luck or maybe it's genetics or maybe it's complexity or maybe it's grace - but the point is, we don't know.
I like that in HP, we also don't know - and a part of me hopes that at the end of Book 7, we still won't know why Snape Can't Just Get Over It, for example. (Of course the other part of me hopes for a "director's voiceover" of all 7 books...)