One for Sorrow

One time gettingshitdone took a 'leadership training' seminar (for personal reasons of my own, the word 'leadership' makes me gag violently) in which they did an exercise kind of like this; they told everyone a long story about a princess who left her neglectful husband, ran away with a minstrel who abandoned her, wound up in a forest inhabited by an evil wizard, sought succor from her uncle who turned her away because he disapproved of her behavior, and on the way back through the forest was killed by said evil wizard. After the story you were asked to pick who was responsible for the princess's death and the 'right' answer was the princess, because she was the protagonist and the class was meant to promote the myth that we, as little protagonists, succeed and fail entirely based on our own choices. No one picked the evil wizard as responsible, perhaps because for the narrative to make sense in the context of the seminar's bullshit you basically had to take as given that the evil wizard was a force of nature and not a character in his own right.

Nothing to do with Harry Potter really, I just wanted to get that off my chest.