So what are characters anyway?

[sistermagpie]

So there were these big wanks recently, and they got me thinking about the whole process of being a fan, using the examples from my own experiences, especially with The Boy (you know, the one who inspires all that wank).

Here's the exchange. Not angry face! (I have some suspicions about who this is, but that's neither here nor there.)

So I tried to answer exactly why I insist on this analysis and interest of a minor character in a children's series, and the main part of my answer that seems relevant is: "People are drawn to fictional characters for all sorts of reasons." With fictional characters, there almost seems to be two different levels. On the first level, you identify with them as if they were real people: you and people you know. Sometimes people see themselves as the character. Arguing with someone like that is impossible because it's personal. If you say Scully could quit working with Mulder if she wanted you're suggesting Esme could leave her job where she's so unappreciated as well and that would ruin the passive-aggressive martyrdom that is Esme's life. If you say why Draco seems to be doing something, you are suggesting that the person who picked on them in high school was human and not the forces of evil they are continually fighting with their own equally aggressive behavior.

slytherincess, I recall, did a really wonderful post once where she explained how she was very much like the Slytherin characters growing up--and not in some idealized way either. She learned and changed, and this was partly why she did not like people dismissing those characters as unable to do the same. Even though she identified with the characters, she could also look at their faults objectively. It reminded me of Edmund, my favorite character in The Chronicles of Narnia. I love how the narrator tells us that Edmund grew up to be a "graver and quieter" man than Peter and was Just rather than Magnificent (that Peter, still showing off). If someone accepts the parts of himself or herself that are in ugly characters (without romanticizing the ugliness into something else) they can offer a lot of wisdom about them. Even though it's them, it's not always personal, because they're talking about parts of themselves they struggled with and got to know until they weren't afraid of them.

So that's the straightforward way people respond to characters. It's always kind of fun to see that--fun or disturbing. But on another level we know they're fictional characters and are therefore free to live through them in totally different ways. You can, imo, like them because they let you live out parts of yourself you don't show the world, or approve of. It's like I said about the Thief archetype--it's not that I think stealing is cool, it's just that things about this character are very satisfying for me to live out fictionally.

So I'm trying to think about these Slytherin characters--how exactly do I react to them on both those levels? First as real people--well, I'd never be friend with them. Draco reminds me of different people in different ways, but here's two in particular. A girl I knew at camp, D1, and a boy I knew at another summer program, D2. Hated them both. D1 was generally mean, and while I usually stayed off her radar she occasionally would pick on me for no reason (we were in the same tent--imagine being stuck with Draco for rest period). That was awful. D2, for whatever reason, targeted me the first day and went after me whenever I was around--and what was worse was that this was a sailing thing and I had never sailed and had no idea what I was doing there, while he was an expert with his own boat. I seem to recall him locking a younger boy in a locker for several hours--yeah, he was charming.

So I hated both these people. D1 wound up leaving camp a bit early. Her father was a photographer who came to take pictures at the camp. Mysterious drama ensued. Her mother, stepfather and sister came to get her. Her best friend informed us her father was not allowed near her, as there were some sort of abuse charges--either spousal or child--in existence. D2 stayed the whole summer, but I did learn his parents were both psychiatrists, and that his beloved older brother had committed suicide.

My reactions to these revelations was pretty much the same:

1. A pleasant feeling of schadenfreude: You make me miserable, and you are miserable. Good. Be miserable.

2. Firmly deciding that their being hurt did not excuse their hurting me--this is such a strong belief for me it drives me crazy when people accuse me of trying to "excuse" bad behavior in fictional characters. Really, I don't. I would just rather stop it than punish it.

3. Some guilty fantasies about what it would be like if, the next time they taunted me, I said I could certainly understand why D1's father hit her or D2's brother killed himself, because they were such awful people they inspired such actions. This was followed quickly by the thought that if I did say these things the person probably would not collapse in tears, but kick my ass. That was followed by the realization that I really didn't want to say these things anyway, even if it would cause them to collapse in tears, because I didn't want to hurt them, I just wanted them to leave me alone, and saying those things would be a shitty thing.

4. From that moment, everything both of them did I tried to think of from the perspective of their new knowledge. What was D1 like with her older sister and her mother? She was so mean and tough to me, but she cried when she ran out of the mess hall because her father was there. What was her father like? Did he have a creepy, "You love your daddy don't you honey?" air about him? How long had her mother been married to this new guy? Was he like her father at all, but a nice guy? Did she get along with him? Did he have to consciously work on helping her through this trauma? And how about that best friend telling us her secret and probably loving the attention as she did it? Well, what do you expect from a girl who brushed her hair 200 times a day and took 40 minutes to get her pigtails just right.

With D2 it was even weirder, with the psychiatrist parents. Were they workaholics who made a lot of money for boats but didn't spend enough time at home? My mother always said a lot of people became psychologists to fix their own problems (heh--my sister's a psychologist)...did they struggle with suicidal thoughts too? Did D2 really look up to his brother? Were they close? Did he feel betrayed? When did it happen? How did he do it????

I didn't have all these thoughts at once, of course. I've thought about it now and again for 20 years now. Like I said, these incidents didn't make me suddenly like the person or feel sorry for them. But it did make me incapable of seeing them as just D1 the girl who's mean, or just D2 that little shit. They had families and histories and were different people with them. Most of the time you don't get this kind of dramatic information--with D1 even at the time I thought it was almost too after-school-special to be true that her big secret would be revealed to me. But I think you get more than you might think if you pay attention to people. I guess that's why the B&B scene is so significant to me in CoS--if I'd witnessed the scene that Harry did it would have totally changed my view of Draco.

So I do respond to Draco and Pansy as I would if they were real people in terms of wanting to know motivation. Only I like them...but why? I didn't like D1 or D2. I think part of it might be the nature of narrative. I don't really look at any of the kids in this universe and see myself, mostly because this universe seems to clearly come out of the head of someone very different from me. It's very concerned with justice in a way that I just am not--that's why it's so made up of power struggles. There are victims, and bullies, and heroes who protect the victims from bullies. Everyone is supposed to aspire to the hero who protects the victim from bullies--just like in CS Lewis, Peter the Magnificent is elevated above Edmund the Just (where just, imo, refers to wisdom and mercy instead of pardon and punishment).

For people who are more in tune with this personality, I think the differences between the Gryffindors and the Slytherins are more prominent. For me, not so much. I feel out of balance with the world, and that's probably why I often find Draco and Pansy refreshing. Not because they're better people than the main characters, but because they do sometimes say what I'm thinking, like that Hagrid's a menace or Dumbledore is a whacko. Or other times they're just different, not taking things seriously that the heroes take more seriously than I do, or something. Plus they're so obviously vulnerable, walking around announcing their insecurities, getting rejected and screaming about it for five years instead of accepting it and moving on. Screaming for approval and affection and continuing to love passionately and stupidly without it because you can't seem to stop it. Also maybe I think the actions of people all around him are so calculated to make him act even more badly, I am distracted by that. Most importantly, I am drawn to them for all the reasons I outlined in the post a couple down, about what the ultimate judgement on this character "says" about morality, people, etc.

The important thing is, that it's hard to say why you're drawn to a character, and it's a bad idea to assume the answer is so straightforward. It's really not always that this is the character that is like you, or the one you want to date, or the one you'd love to be if you could. I think it's just the character that says something about what you need to work out at any given time. That's why people's characters change. I knew people who read LOTR as a teenager and loved Aragorn, but years later loved Frodo. (One person even referred to coming to identify with Frodo in canon as "growing up") It doesn't mean you "were" Aragorn and now "are" Frodo, or that you used to crush on one and now the other. It can mean those things, but it could also just be that as a teenager you were working on different issues. That's one way fictional characters aren't like real people: they don't change. *We* change, and they look different because of it.

Comments

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

You have such interesting posts, and how you do it I know not.

Thanks! Because seriously, when I write this stuff I think maybe I'm just strange for devoting so much time and energy to it. Which might be true, but I do always hope it's interesting to anybody who takes the time to read it!

I must confess that when I first read PS/SS I felt good when Dumbledore stole the House Cup from the Slytherins. That tells somethign about me that I'm not proud of.

Well, the book does set it up as a good thing, and I think when I first read it it seemed fairly harmless. Had there been no further HP books I probably would still think of it that way. But seeing how much anger continued to build over the years, and how the favoritism became such a big thing that could have tragic consequences, it started to be more sinister. When the Slytherins are possibly at risk for becoming DEs, and there's the example of Snape walking the school, Dumbledore's methods of ignoring the Slytherins' behavior except to occasionally make it clear he doesn't like them anymore than anyone else starts to seem like a serious mistake, like he's trying to make them DEs, or that their futures don't matter at all. It's not that someone can blame someone else for choosing to be a DE, but if I worked at the school I think I'd feel some responsibility if I saw all this happening and did nothing.

Part of the reason I resented the Slytherins at first and liked the Gryffindors unconditionally is perhaps that I've never really learned to read critically. That wasn't taught to us at school, and I really did take the narrator at face value.

That's really fascinating! And I do think that discussing canon on boards and things like that is probably a great way to learn to read critically. It makes you have to learn to look at canon for what is a fact and what is coming through an unreliable narrator. You have to think about why you've drawn a certain conclusion, and then you can sometimes see how the author's made you do that. Plus hearing other people's interpretations makes you see it's not as straightforward as it always seems when you first read it yourself!

Many people confuse 'understanding' and 'excusing'. I understand why Snape might behave the way he does, but I still don't accept his behaviour. (And although this is off-topic your point (was it yours?) about Snape being the only one who has had to make a conscious moral choice is really a good one.)

Yup, that's me! That's what I love about Snape--he's the not-nice person who seems to be suffering for making a moral choice. To me this makes him much more interesting than other characters who were either raised to believe the right things so never had to question it, or those who were even forced into the right side by circumstance. Sometimes when you look at the more vicious good guys, like Pensieve James (and the other Pensieve Marauders) and the Twins it starts to seem like they're not really heroes, but bullies who just happen to have been born into a time when their bad behavior can be channeled into something productive. History is probably full of such people.

I'm afraid that the HP books will end with the 'light' side winning and punishing the 'bad' people, only because they were at the different side of a civil war (and that really happens in real life, happened at least in Finland after the civil war in 1918-1919, I think),

Yes! That's just what I fear too because the situation you describe is so common. Look at how the need to punish Germany so absolutely after WW1 contributed to WW2. It seems like Slytherin's always been some kind of scapegoat since the founder left--and by that I don't mean to make them out as big victims since obviously they hate the other houses just as much and before Harry got to the school they appeared to be dominant in terms of winning Quidditch and the house cup. But the fact that Hagrid says so casually that there was never a bad wizard that didn't come out of Slytherin says to me that they have been saddled with the "bad" image. Meanwhile bad behavior can get overlooked in other houses (Gryffindor especially) as just boys having fun.

[anehan]

And I do think that discussing canon on boards and things like that is probably a great way to learn to read critically.

I think that's the best part of fanon. Reading is all nice, but it's the discussions that make this so enjoyable. I love discussions, and that's actually the way I learn best. It's really sad that there's so little discussion at schools, at least in Finland, which is probably mainly because of the big classes.

before Harry got to the school they appeared to be dominant in terms of winning Quidditch and the house cup

Yes, and before that it was presumably the Gryffindors, what with Charlie Weasley as a Seeker (and I now ignore Rowling's blunder). It really seems that those two Houses fight for the dominance, and that's why I believe that if Hogwarts is to be united, those two Houses will have to play the main part in it. If Gryffindor and Slytherin can achieve a truce, the other Houses will probably follow suit.