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

[ljash.livejournal.com]

About the house points: I can totally see why a kid would fall for that, even though it was unfair from the beginning. Kids'll care about things like that even if they think it's unfair. But by book 5, I would think they'd stop caring. I mean, if Draco is going to be granted the power to give and take house points and to use it with the childish glee of a 10-year-old, I'd think they could conclude that House points aren't worth a whole lot. You get a cup. Whoop-de-doo. They're dealing with people dying; why do they even remotely care about house points? And yet they still do--it's baffling and a little annoying. But then book 5 was full of people getting pissed off about things that shouldn't have mattered.

Actually, I want to ask your opinion on something. Now, it seems to me that in each book (beyond book 1) there's some life lesson and it's tied in to the major magical learning of that year. The ridikkulous (sp?) spell was actually a profound maturation of the kids. I guess the protego ? one was the next year's. It's something that was valuable to learn and had a metaphoric meaning and tied in to the plot of the book in some way, at least a little. The 5th book's big spell seemed to be Occulemency (I dont' remember how to spell any of these, can you tell? :) and the opposite, legillimency or something. Since everything in book 5 was about people getting under each others' skin in petty ways and punching their buttons and making them nuts, I thought occulemency was supposed to be about developing a thicker skin and learning to not let those things bother you. Except everybody failed. Harry never learned the spell. Snape, who was supposed to be an expert, still chafed and snapped at Sirius.

I mentioned this to a friend and she said that she thought the occulemency was about lack of communication and lack of sharing, which is why it was supposed to fail. Dumbledore never told Harry anything, which is why things went wrong. Harry didn't tell Dumbledore anything, which is why things went wrong. So Harry never learned the spell because it was the wrong thing to do, all of which was proved by the end.

What do you think? It could be we're both right; Snape kept teaching it like it's about hiding your feelings so people can't get at them and use them against you. But the flip side of that is barriers and lack of intimacy and trust. They go together. But all that seems to complicated for what Rowling was trying to say--or if it's not then the implications are horrible.

(And it also gives more validity to the people who heavily criticized Dumbledore for making Harry do this incredibly intimate spell with Snape when they hated each other. And I have to agree with that. No matter how you look at it, this spell is more intimate than almost anything.)

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

But by book 5, I would think they'd stop caring. I mean, if Draco is going to be granted the power to give and take house points and to use it with the childish glee of a 10-year-old, I'd think they could conclude that House points aren't worth a whole lot.

Heh. That was EXACTLY what I was thinking in OotP. Wasn't it obvious by then that points were completely arbitrary? Honestly, I don't think I ever would have been able to get myself to care about them, but it seems ingrained in some people. I remember reading a book that took place in the 40's at an English boarding school and the main character kept getting points taken away by the prefects because she said, "Okay," (which was slang to them, only she'd spent the war in the States so to her it was normal speech). Then the girls would get angry because she was losing them points. Finally she said, "So stop taking them off me, you idiot! IGNORE me when I slip up." But it was like they just never thought about how stupid the whole thing was.

Really interesting thoughts on Occulamency (however you spell it!) and the spells they learn each year. It was definitely too intimate for Harry to be doing with Snape--or really for any student to do with any teacher. It shouldn't be done with anyone one doesn't completely trust, I think. I thought maybe it was about seeing someone for what they really were, being in someone else's shoes--like Harry feels Voldemort's hatred for Dumbledore, and feels humiliated along with Snape. But then there's also the other things that you mentioned about communication and not letting anger take over. I suppose one way it would be interesting would be to think about the emotional and understanding overlapping--you understand where a person's coming from, then you almost have to let go some of your own pov, which was where a lot of Harry's anger was coming from. But then it's not like Snape or anyone is *happy* to be seen from their own pov. Snape doesn't want Harry to see him that vulnerable--it just makes him feel vulnerable in front of Harry.

Man, it's a really hard concept--no wonder it doesn't work and everything falls apart. Meanwhile there's Dumbledore keeping himself safe in his office, guarding his *own* vulnerabilities, supposedly from Voldemort. So he's the only person who doesn't get anything used against him--and he's the one who has also been able to do legimens all this time, but has never used it to figure out anything important. (That, perhaps, is just another one of those traps that the books fall into with too-powerful spells--once you have mindreading and time travel, can any obstacle really not be overcome?)

[anehan]

(That, perhaps, is just another one of those traps that the books fall into with too-powerful spells--once you have mindreading and time travel, can any obstacle really not be overcome?)

I agree, it's defifnitely dangerous to have such powerful spells.

There's of course the question of the morality of doing those things. It does seem that Dumbledore uses Legilimency, what with him appearing to know 'everything'. On the other hand, he may just be good with reading people or he may, as some fanfic suggested, I think, that the portraits are his spying network. Perhaps Dumbledore doesn't use Legilimency because it's morally dubious. (Although he seems to do other this that are morally questionable.)

And how does Legilimency actually work? When Snape does it to Harry, he gets images that seem to be humiliating to Harry. Did he specifically search humiliating memories? Also, it seems so very obvious that he is doing Legilimency what with the memories being so powerful. So, can a very skilled Legilimens be more subtle?

And how do you exactly interpret the memories? I mean, you may get random memories, and I think it's difficult to know whether they are real memories or just fantasies or dreams. Also, if you see the memories out of context, it may be difficult to know what they mean.

So many questions. I hope future books will have some answers.

[ljash.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's way too complicated. But I think that such a spell could be learned from a teacher. I guess. Or maybe only adults should learn it like that, but then Harry needed to know it right then. But it certainly should be someone he trusted. He might have been able to learn from Dumbledore. Maybe even someone like McGonagall, whom he seems to trust (though he would still be embarrassed). But Snape was outright his enemy, and the whole thing was humiliating. It wasn't great for Snape, either. Harry wasn't happy to see Snape's childhood and have to see Snape as a person--I wonder how Snape felt about seeing Harry being victimized? He acted like it was all very funny but I'm not sure what he felt.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Yes, I wonder if that was a natural defense for Snape--or if he just went in with the same blinders people always have for their enemies. Sort of like how when Harry sees Draco taunted by Lucius he thinks it's funny, but if he saw Ron spoken to that way he'd probably be angry. Snape may just have this idea in his head that Harry is just like James so he really is able to get pleasure out of seeing him humiliated.

But still yeah, there's just no way doing this with Snape could have turned out well. It's the more realistic version of all those fanfics where Harry and Snape have to have sex to help the cause. They don't like it.