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I keep hearing the term "realism" used lately and I keep forgetting to say what I think about it. (I'm sure everyone's just been checking in to hear what I think!)
Sirius' death in OotP has nothing whatsoever to do with realism.
Think about it: A teenaged dueling club goes up against a gang of notorious assassins. The kids all live. Then the main characters' one family member, who is there because he is there to save the main character, who was tricked into needing to be saved, dies while taunting a bad guy. Who in their right mind would consider this some kind of gritty realism? Hello? In a realistic universe most of not all of the kids would have died, of course! Having only one person die, and that one person be the hero's father figure is about as artificial as you can get. That it's sad doesn't make it any more about realism.
Just had to say that. It was driving me crazy everytime I read, "People die. That's real life," because I'd always think, yeah, people die in real life. Particularly kids who get in the way of trained killers. Obviously this isn't real life.
Also, I was thinking today about respecting other people's tastes. This wasn't response to any particular thing on lj or anywhere else, but lj did make me think about it because obviously, this is where many people go to find people who share their literary taste.
I get frustrated when people come up with some easy reason that people like such and such a thing, especially when I'm one of the people that likes the thing and the reason makes me sound like an idiot. Like that slash article Ivy posted recently that claimed people read it because they're all 14-year-old girls who are afraid of boys in real life...um, right. I believe boys are supposed to like Tolkien for the same reason--afraid of real life. Again: no.
Sure I've had some not-so-flattering thoughts about other peoples' taste in things. But hey, maybe what that person gets out of something has nothing to do with what I get out of the same thing when I read it. My mother has always read romance novels and I've never seen the attraction. She's not an idiot--she reads other kinds of books too--but obviously she gets something out of the things. I can't say exactly what it is and maybe that's a good thing, that I can't reduce her enjoyment of something I can't stand to some demeaning psychoanalytical theory.
I know she's just as puzzled at the way I like horror movies. She can't stand them. In fact she was just telling me that she wrote to Sillhouette, which sends her four books a month, and requested they stop slipping vampire books in there because she didn't care for them. But I've been watching horror movies since I was old enough to turn the TV channel and it's not like she was clueless about what I was watching or didn't monitor things for content. Once when I was in college I overheard her talking some somebody about it. She said she was completely disturbed at my tastes, especially when I was like 5 years old, and her instinct was to keep me from watching that "crap" as she called it. But then she said she had to just admit that I obviously enjoyed them and they didn't upset me. I didn't have nightmares or get scared or torture animals so who was she to keep me from them just because they were horror movies? Despite being her kid I had totally different tastes. I always remembered that because...that was pretty cool of her, wasn't it? So many parents would probably have been unable to just respect their kids' tastes on something like that. My whole life, it seems, she's made it clear she doesn't like that stuff and said how much she wished I didn't like it (also everything I've ever given her to read that I've written she's bemoaned as being horror even when I didn't think it was...oh well) but damned if she didn't respect my right to choose it.
Sometimes I wonder if she'd ever get slash. I don't think she'd really get into it. Not because she's homophobic in the least. It just seems like whatever she likes about romance novels would be what she didn't like about slash. But me...I was always more interested in intense male friendships wherever I found them in fiction, movies or TV. When I was ten my mother presents me with the book Seventeenth Summer because she'd loved it so much when she was that age and I gave it a completely scathing review. (However, she did redeem herself with I Capture The Castle. This was one of her favorite books and I loved it. So see, we do agree on some things.) There have been het relationships I loved in fiction and TV too, but I still usually identified with the male character.
Anyway, I don't know where I'm going with this. I guess I'm just thinking how it's kind of weird I still like horror, still glom onto the male relationships, still read children's lit obviously. It's not that my tastes haven't changed at all. I guess I just feel like whatever I was trying to work out when I was 5 I'm still working out. Or maybe it's just that I found my favorite tools to work things out then and they still work.
Sirius' death in OotP has nothing whatsoever to do with realism.
Think about it: A teenaged dueling club goes up against a gang of notorious assassins. The kids all live. Then the main characters' one family member, who is there because he is there to save the main character, who was tricked into needing to be saved, dies while taunting a bad guy. Who in their right mind would consider this some kind of gritty realism? Hello? In a realistic universe most of not all of the kids would have died, of course! Having only one person die, and that one person be the hero's father figure is about as artificial as you can get. That it's sad doesn't make it any more about realism.
Just had to say that. It was driving me crazy everytime I read, "People die. That's real life," because I'd always think, yeah, people die in real life. Particularly kids who get in the way of trained killers. Obviously this isn't real life.
Also, I was thinking today about respecting other people's tastes. This wasn't response to any particular thing on lj or anywhere else, but lj did make me think about it because obviously, this is where many people go to find people who share their literary taste.
I get frustrated when people come up with some easy reason that people like such and such a thing, especially when I'm one of the people that likes the thing and the reason makes me sound like an idiot. Like that slash article Ivy posted recently that claimed people read it because they're all 14-year-old girls who are afraid of boys in real life...um, right. I believe boys are supposed to like Tolkien for the same reason--afraid of real life. Again: no.
Sure I've had some not-so-flattering thoughts about other peoples' taste in things. But hey, maybe what that person gets out of something has nothing to do with what I get out of the same thing when I read it. My mother has always read romance novels and I've never seen the attraction. She's not an idiot--she reads other kinds of books too--but obviously she gets something out of the things. I can't say exactly what it is and maybe that's a good thing, that I can't reduce her enjoyment of something I can't stand to some demeaning psychoanalytical theory.
I know she's just as puzzled at the way I like horror movies. She can't stand them. In fact she was just telling me that she wrote to Sillhouette, which sends her four books a month, and requested they stop slipping vampire books in there because she didn't care for them. But I've been watching horror movies since I was old enough to turn the TV channel and it's not like she was clueless about what I was watching or didn't monitor things for content. Once when I was in college I overheard her talking some somebody about it. She said she was completely disturbed at my tastes, especially when I was like 5 years old, and her instinct was to keep me from watching that "crap" as she called it. But then she said she had to just admit that I obviously enjoyed them and they didn't upset me. I didn't have nightmares or get scared or torture animals so who was she to keep me from them just because they were horror movies? Despite being her kid I had totally different tastes. I always remembered that because...that was pretty cool of her, wasn't it? So many parents would probably have been unable to just respect their kids' tastes on something like that. My whole life, it seems, she's made it clear she doesn't like that stuff and said how much she wished I didn't like it (also everything I've ever given her to read that I've written she's bemoaned as being horror even when I didn't think it was...oh well) but damned if she didn't respect my right to choose it.
Sometimes I wonder if she'd ever get slash. I don't think she'd really get into it. Not because she's homophobic in the least. It just seems like whatever she likes about romance novels would be what she didn't like about slash. But me...I was always more interested in intense male friendships wherever I found them in fiction, movies or TV. When I was ten my mother presents me with the book Seventeenth Summer because she'd loved it so much when she was that age and I gave it a completely scathing review. (However, she did redeem herself with I Capture The Castle. This was one of her favorite books and I loved it. So see, we do agree on some things.) There have been het relationships I loved in fiction and TV too, but I still usually identified with the male character.
Anyway, I don't know where I'm going with this. I guess I'm just thinking how it's kind of weird I still like horror, still glom onto the male relationships, still read children's lit obviously. It's not that my tastes haven't changed at all. I guess I just feel like whatever I was trying to work out when I was 5 I'm still working out. Or maybe it's just that I found my favorite tools to work things out then and they still work.
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From:
Realism
long time....
regarding realism, you know what really piqued me from book one? i think the whole separation in four houses with all the villains being in just one house is somewhat unrealistic. i mean, imagine you are dumbledore - would you teach your future enemies your skills? and enable them to harm anybody - especially harry, the hope of the wizard world? i wouldn't. either - if i thought they were unredeemably evil - i would send them all home and let them find schools anywhere or get homeschooled or what, or - if i thought they are just children and can be shown other ways - i would split them up and divide them about the other houses so they can experience other influences. but to have them all bunched up in one house in a we-against-the-world situation is totally unsensible for a superior being like dumbledore and therefore unrealistic, imo.
From:
Re: Realism
This is the source of my total obsession with the HP books! It's like the whole point of this school is to turn out cannon fodder for the bad side. You have a bunch of kids from ages 11-18 for most of the year and it never occurs to you to turn them into better people? Isn't that, like, the job of the school?
Ugh. It just gets worse with every book!
From:
Re: Realism
yes, the school thing is somewhat nonsensical, isn't it? also it is OOC for dumbledore to not care about those kids, i think (even if rowling wrote so herself). i don't remember having him ever seen in a nice and quiet conversation with any of them. or even seen him worrying what will become of them. are they all to be killed in the final battle against voldemort? i don't think they will be suddenly enlightened when voldemort falls. so probably they will just look for another dark wizard to take his place. no solution at all. poor things.