I'm just not sure what to make of those choices, except that maybe JKR didn't know what to do with these alternative stories when she came up with them along the way, but found them too interesting to suppress entirely. It's a tribute to the power of her imagination, though perhaps not to her ability to craft large-scale stories.
I admit that's often the way it comes across to me--and maybe it's why the books are so attractive to fanfic etc. I remember it was OotP especially that made me feel like characterization was always in the service of plot, and these things tie into that as well. The characters sometimes feel jerked from one point to the next instead of as if there's a continuous flow of development, and that goes with Harry as well as the other characters. Rather than getting the sense of Harry growing into something Dumbledore didn't expect, it's like Harry is a series of blocks that stand for scenes, and in some scenes he's got the chance to act like more of an individual, but eventually he always has to come back to the standard blocks where he's doing the soldier thing and agreeing with Dumbledore.
So he never has personal issues really overrunning his standard hero plot. I didn't need to have Harry mourning for Sirius in a way that was central to the book, but I do think people have a case for saying he didn't mourn him at all. That is, the book simply handled the mourning by having him say he would be going forward without him and then gave him a few moments when there would be a reason to think about Sirius. What we didn't get was a Harry profoundly effected by what happened to Sirius in a way that made him really think about what he was doing, who he was, life and death and all that.
I was talking to someone about Draco the other day, for instance, and said that while it may again be an accident of plot I loved the fact that there was emphasis put on Lucius being happy to be safe in prison in HBP because it suggested to me that Draco had reason to feel somewhat betrayed--in ways that this thread reminds me that Harry is not so much allowed to be. Lucius has not only turned out to be less than all-powerful but willing to save his own skin over heroics or possibly even saving his family. Draco has good reason to seriously question his father figures and what they taught, as has Percy and Barty Crouch, for instance. Harry really never has to do this. Sure he's disgusted with his father personally in OotP, but he doesn't have to rethink his own beliefs, just as his anger at Dumbledore never makes him question their shared beliefs. And yet this is so expected than even when Harry has that horrible scene in the bathroom with Sectumsempra he just moves on to the next order of business: Quidditch and dating. I would at least hope that Draco had some more interesting thoughts while he knew he was dying.
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Date: 2006-06-19 07:23 pm (UTC)I admit that's often the way it comes across to me--and maybe it's why the books are so attractive to fanfic etc. I remember it was OotP especially that made me feel like characterization was always in the service of plot, and these things tie into that as well. The characters sometimes feel jerked from one point to the next instead of as if there's a continuous flow of development, and that goes with Harry as well as the other characters. Rather than getting the sense of Harry growing into something Dumbledore didn't expect, it's like Harry is a series of blocks that stand for scenes, and in some scenes he's got the chance to act like more of an individual, but eventually he always has to come back to the standard blocks where he's doing the soldier thing and agreeing with Dumbledore.
So he never has personal issues really overrunning his standard hero plot. I didn't need to have Harry mourning for Sirius in a way that was central to the book, but I do think people have a case for saying he didn't mourn him at all. That is, the book simply handled the mourning by having him say he would be going forward without him and then gave him a few moments when there would be a reason to think about Sirius. What we didn't get was a Harry profoundly effected by what happened to Sirius in a way that made him really think about what he was doing, who he was, life and death and all that.
I was talking to someone about Draco the other day, for instance, and said that while it may again be an accident of plot I loved the fact that there was emphasis put on Lucius being happy to be safe in prison in HBP because it suggested to me that Draco had reason to feel somewhat betrayed--in ways that this thread reminds me that Harry is not so much allowed to be. Lucius has not only turned out to be less than all-powerful but willing to save his own skin over heroics or possibly even saving his family. Draco has good reason to seriously question his father figures and what they taught, as has Percy and Barty Crouch, for instance. Harry really never has to do this. Sure he's disgusted with his father personally in OotP, but he doesn't have to rethink his own beliefs, just as his anger at Dumbledore never makes him question their shared beliefs. And yet this is so expected than even when Harry has that horrible scene in the bathroom with Sectumsempra he just moves on to the next order of business: Quidditch and dating. I would at least hope that Draco had some more interesting thoughts while he knew he was dying.