Well, sometimes it's what you say. For instance, when someone in your immediate family brings home the person he's in love with, and you make it clear with your every word that you despise her, constantly calling her by a disgusting, extremely juvenile nickname, that's technically words. But it still says a *hell* of a lot about who you are as a person and your level of maturity and morality that you would do that.
And I agree for Lily as well, that she's supposed to be great, but everything we actually see contradicts that. As soon as Slughorn started talking about Lily in HBP, I knew she was intended to be the same type of girl that JKR clearly loves and most of us hated -- I commented at the time that she was probably going to be described as "spunky" next. I didn't think much of her intervention in the OotP flashback. She came of as better than the folks who were torturing some kid just because they didn't like him, but the driving force was obviously, "What's that Potter prick up to now?" (which in JKR's world is a form of flirting, anyway), rather than, "OMG, that's my best friend up there," or even, "This is wrong and why is no one stopping this?" I suppose in that case, the action was technically right, but not really right enough, you could say.
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Date: 2008-03-12 01:40 pm (UTC)And I agree for Lily as well, that she's supposed to be great, but everything we actually see contradicts that. As soon as Slughorn started talking about Lily in HBP, I knew she was intended to be the same type of girl that JKR clearly loves and most of us hated -- I commented at the time that she was probably going to be described as "spunky" next. I didn't think much of her intervention in the OotP flashback. She came of as better than the folks who were torturing some kid just because they didn't like him, but the driving force was obviously, "What's that Potter prick up to now?" (which in JKR's world is a form of flirting, anyway), rather than, "OMG, that's my best friend up there," or even, "This is wrong and why is no one stopping this?" I suppose in that case, the action was technically right, but not really right enough, you could say.