*presses hands into temples* Oh, yay, JKR talking about people being 'innately good'. And love. And gayness. This is going to be a peach.
I just don't understand what JKR means by 'love'. Not just in this instance, in ANY instance in the whole series. So it turns out in the Dept. of Mysteries they study Love by.. drinking love potions, which as we see are a purely chemical mind-control device that's just creepy and soulless and has nothing to do with the psychology of either party, or connecting to another person, or finding mutual understanding and reassurance. Or any of that spiritual stuff in my innocence I was looking for when she kept saying the series was about Love. It's just a chemical, without any inherent moral component.
Dumbledore is 'innately good' so this external love thing just took over his brain; Snape, ditto in reverse, innately bad but he has a Manchurian Candidate trigger that brainwashes him to Do Good. Harry has a chest monster that appeared roughly around the same time as Ginny grew breasts, and Tonks looses her powers like she's caught some kind of virus. Love as a sickness or as brainwashing is an old trope and its not without some truth, but wow, I just can't square this bleak, cynical concept (which would be quite cool in a bleak, cynical book), with this hearts-and-flowers Harry-is-Jesus ending. In terms of anything approaching Christian love, or even what I'd consider base-level healthy relationship love.. I just don't see it in series ANYWHERE.
What's bizarre is that.. there's no question that Rowling has a preternatural genius for creating characters, and the story as it stands-- Dumbledore, the self-deluding, self-adoring megalomaniac, would of course fall in love with someone so similar to himself, who could express these characteristics that maybe he was a bit ashamed of. It only falls down where there's JKR's superego or whatever it making her say these things, trying to impose this thing where Dumbledore is "innately good". And love is a brain disease or a virus or something that INFECTS YOUR BODILY FLUIDS!!
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Date: 2008-03-09 10:46 pm (UTC)I just don't understand what JKR means by 'love'. Not just in this instance, in ANY instance in the whole series. So it turns out in the Dept. of Mysteries they study Love by.. drinking love potions, which as we see are a purely chemical mind-control device that's just creepy and soulless and has nothing to do with the psychology of either party, or connecting to another person, or finding mutual understanding and reassurance. Or any of that spiritual stuff in my innocence I was looking for when she kept saying the series was about Love. It's just a chemical, without any inherent moral component.
Dumbledore is 'innately good' so this external love thing just took over his brain; Snape, ditto in reverse, innately bad but he has a Manchurian Candidate trigger that brainwashes him to Do Good. Harry has a chest monster that appeared roughly around the same time as Ginny grew breasts, and Tonks looses her powers like she's caught some kind of virus. Love as a sickness or as brainwashing is an old trope and its not without some truth, but wow, I just can't square this bleak, cynical concept (which would be quite cool in a bleak, cynical book), with this hearts-and-flowers Harry-is-Jesus ending. In terms of anything approaching Christian love, or even what I'd consider base-level healthy relationship love.. I just don't see it in series ANYWHERE.
What's bizarre is that.. there's no question that Rowling has a preternatural genius for creating characters, and the story as it stands-- Dumbledore, the self-deluding, self-adoring megalomaniac, would of course fall in love with someone so similar to himself, who could express these characteristics that maybe he was a bit ashamed of. It only falls down where there's JKR's superego or whatever it making her say these things, trying to impose this thing where Dumbledore is "innately good". And love is a brain disease or a virus or something that INFECTS YOUR BODILY FLUIDS!!
Guh. So creepy.