![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Super-Fandom-y pre-US-Election-Day post for flist variety.:-)
I've been thinking about this for a while...it's perhaps almost a rant, but maybe not. It's about this phenomenon that probably reflects the HP books but also makes fandom less pleasant sometimes, or at least keeps people from communicating. And it drives me crazy because I'm always getting accused of it.:-) Perhaps not unjustly so, for all I know, so I want to talk about it.
My favorite part of OotP was the Sorting Hat song. Finally, I thought, a good idea. It got ignored, yes, and I assumed the students would learn they were wrong about doing that. But being in fandom, I feel like you can really see how difficult that's going to be, because damn, people love to see Gryffindors and Slytherins fight. It seems sometimes like they exist on a see-saw where cutting one down automatically raises the other or vice versa. I've seen this go both ways, where, for instance, somebody says a Slytherin did something bad in a scene, and the response is, "But the Gryffindor was doing this bad thing!" Or, "Gryffindor sucks. He did X," responded to with, "How can you say he's worse than Slytherin! Slytherin did Y!" Sometimes it gets tangled up in motive as well-“Well, yes Slytherin did X, but he was responding to Gryffindor doing Y!" or vice versa. Which is weird to me because honestly, you'd think that it was unheard of to examine the actions of someone reacting to something else! I mean, even if you're talking about a literal self-defense situation, you can still examine the actions of what someone did. If I killed someone to stop them from killing me or someone else I might feel I did the right thing but I could still accept that I actually killed someone without pretending I did something else (like "counter-killed" them). It doesn't mean I'm denying that the other person was about to kill somebody.
Now, there are some situations where bringing in one house to talk about the other makes a point--for instance, if one is pointing out a specific double standard, explaining somebody's motives in a scene or how it would look to the other person. Or contrasting a character's stated moral belief and the one they live. The houses do obviously egg each other on and often bring out the worst in each other, so it's hard to keep them completely separate. But I feel like those valid connections seep into places where they don't belong in fandom, just like they do in the books.
This kind of see-saw effect just seems to be everywhere and when I think about canon it seems fundamentally off. Gryffindor and Slytherin are not natural opposites the way they're often portrayed in the collective fandom mind. They're both, imo, representing certain different outlooks on leadership that have existed in the world. So rather than look at the qualities the hat lays out in PS/SS that people usually use to describe what makes a Slytherin or a Gryffindor, I want to try to look at exactly what we see in canon and what that tells us about the flaws and strengths of each house.
It's hard to find a strength for Slytherin because let's face it, they haven't really been given any. We barely see them, so there's little we can really say about how they function. This is what we do see: They judge people based on their breeding. They're snobs. Purebloods are better than half-blood, who are better than Muggleborns. They move in a pack (or at least are described as being a gang from the outside) which is exclusionary. They make fun of people outside their gang. It's not quite correct to say they laugh at others' pain on principle, because they have of course been shown to get upset over other peoples' pain as long as that person is one of them. Usually we see them acting on their own personal desires and that's it. So it seems like what they represent is a system where all people are not created equal, where the world is a strict hierarchy. They tease, humiliate and insult those who show weakness. At their worst they become Death Eaters and decide people not like them don't have a right to live.
On the positive side, they probably do appreciate history, can have a healthy (as well as an unhealthy) respect for authority, they can be creative and fun. Perhaps most interestingly, there are two Slytherins who potentially made difficult moral choices even when it didn't benefit them personally: Snape and Regulus. Both of these characters believed in Pureblood Superiority but rejected its most extreme conclusions with Voldemort and so perhaps had to rethink the whole idea. This is probably yet another reason I despise the idea of the "good Slytherin" who unites the houses by never buying into this stuff or figuring out it's bad off-screen.
So basically, what we seem to be dealing with, with the Slytherins is a particular side of human nature, one that's brought us such charming but different things as slavery, imperialism, and genocide.
Then there's Gryffindor. Well, off the bat we've got more positive qualities. Many of these students have been shown to *want* to be good people and *want* to be unselfish, protect the weak, have humility. They like to have fun--often of the slap you on the back hard kind. They don't openly judge people based on their bloodline (though it would be inaccurate to suggest they are free of prejudice, of course).
Their danger lies more in self-righteousness and having the Slytherins as rivals obviously don't help them there, because they represent things that modern thinking considers so obviously bad that they have little reason to question whether they're right compared to the other house. They're not snobs, they're not prejudiced against Muggleborns. Unfortunately because they "know" they're right they rarely examine their own actions and they too have scenes where they take pleasure in the pain of other people because those people “deserve it.” Being against Voldemort covers just about everything they do. Hermione's justification for her Polyjuice plan is that "killing Muggleborns is worse than brewing a difficult Potion." On the surface she sounds right, but if you actually look at the facts, she's presenting what she's doing in a pretty dishonest way. And those things are important because they are exactly the type of things that cause big problems in the story.
Sirius is not wrongly imprisoned on what one might call Slytherin principles. He's wrongly imprisoned on just these principles: we know we're right, we have to keep the bad guy from getting away. If we give him too many rights, he'll use them to trick us. So we'll only give those rights to the people we already think are good guys. That, I think, is where many readers wind up shaking their head, because you have characters who know they want fairness when it applies to themselves, but don't seem to realize this particular thing you don't get by destroying Voldemort. And that's another side of human nature that's brought us other charming but different things like imperialism, the crusades, and The Patriot Act. It's that line of thinking where questioning the mindset makes you the enemy. They risk throwing away a potentially fair system because they mistakenly think Voldemort and Slytherin embody every potential evil.
These two mindsets aren't completely different--obviously you can see parallels in both of them. Both sides cast people out for questioning the party line, and in OotP especially the reflections start coming more and more often. But while they echo each other, they're also two groups of people each moving on their own potential path of destruction. Sometimes they push each other further in a bad direction or a good one, but they aren't joined in terms of really causing each other's actions. One side may provide the thing the other is reacting to, but they don't choose their actions for them. Often in the same situation they would react differently. So they shouldn't be held accountable for the other side's actions, but they still can be held accountable for their own actions and the fact that they do have consequences. They might operate on different planes but neither one is free of potential danger or immorality. So pointing out that one side at least isn't the other side or finding ways in which something one side does is also done by the other has very limited usefulness, imo. You have to be able to take them both separately and not always leap for a comparison to the other side that makes them look better.
This, to me, is probably the one way that fandom makes me enjoy the books a lot less than I would if I weren't in the fandom. Because I can deal with the events that happen in the books, and the characters thinking this way. But when I see it translated into real life as if this is the way things should be, whichever side a person is on, makes me lose a little hope that we might straighten ourselves out. Sometimes it seems like the real danger/evil that Slytherin represents is the temptation to believe in evil as a tangible, outside force. By making Gryffindor often look good by comparison, they coax the characters into darker psychological places-and those places aren't bad in themselves. They may just be a place they need to be. What's scary isn't that they go there, but that they don't realize they've gone there because they've still got those evil Slytherins to compare themselves to and say, “Nope, I'm not them. I'm completely good and innocent.” That's a wonderfully freaky idea to me. While I doubt seriously it would happen, all the good guys could wind up having committed murder, torture and blackmail and be completely consumed by rage and despair while the “bad” kids die ignorant but innocent. Because already there have been times when actual actions of one side have been overlooked while potential actions in the other are bad enough. Or, on the other side, desires of one side are overlooked in order to condemn the actions of the other. Really you've just a bunch of really messed up people.
Obviously, this post is probably coming out amidst a flurry of election posts. On one hand the idea of a little distraction-I know I'm so afraid to think of what could potentially happen tomorrow I'd rather think of anything else. Otoh, though, while I'm usually a big believer in fantasy and imagination being a good thing, I will say that I hope the half of the population of my country that seems to be living in a fantasy world wakes up in reality tomorrow. I know it would be a nasty shock to admit, all at once, that the sunny heroic picture people seem to be fond of is all a lie, that the Bush administration isn't Dumbledore or Gandalf or Captain Kirk and that all those stories about deception and chaos and disaster in the world are not creations of the liberal media but the world they live in. I love searching for the reality within fiction; I prefer to vote against fiction in reality.
I've been thinking about this for a while...it's perhaps almost a rant, but maybe not. It's about this phenomenon that probably reflects the HP books but also makes fandom less pleasant sometimes, or at least keeps people from communicating. And it drives me crazy because I'm always getting accused of it.:-) Perhaps not unjustly so, for all I know, so I want to talk about it.
My favorite part of OotP was the Sorting Hat song. Finally, I thought, a good idea. It got ignored, yes, and I assumed the students would learn they were wrong about doing that. But being in fandom, I feel like you can really see how difficult that's going to be, because damn, people love to see Gryffindors and Slytherins fight. It seems sometimes like they exist on a see-saw where cutting one down automatically raises the other or vice versa. I've seen this go both ways, where, for instance, somebody says a Slytherin did something bad in a scene, and the response is, "But the Gryffindor was doing this bad thing!" Or, "Gryffindor sucks. He did X," responded to with, "How can you say he's worse than Slytherin! Slytherin did Y!" Sometimes it gets tangled up in motive as well-“Well, yes Slytherin did X, but he was responding to Gryffindor doing Y!" or vice versa. Which is weird to me because honestly, you'd think that it was unheard of to examine the actions of someone reacting to something else! I mean, even if you're talking about a literal self-defense situation, you can still examine the actions of what someone did. If I killed someone to stop them from killing me or someone else I might feel I did the right thing but I could still accept that I actually killed someone without pretending I did something else (like "counter-killed" them). It doesn't mean I'm denying that the other person was about to kill somebody.
Now, there are some situations where bringing in one house to talk about the other makes a point--for instance, if one is pointing out a specific double standard, explaining somebody's motives in a scene or how it would look to the other person. Or contrasting a character's stated moral belief and the one they live. The houses do obviously egg each other on and often bring out the worst in each other, so it's hard to keep them completely separate. But I feel like those valid connections seep into places where they don't belong in fandom, just like they do in the books.
This kind of see-saw effect just seems to be everywhere and when I think about canon it seems fundamentally off. Gryffindor and Slytherin are not natural opposites the way they're often portrayed in the collective fandom mind. They're both, imo, representing certain different outlooks on leadership that have existed in the world. So rather than look at the qualities the hat lays out in PS/SS that people usually use to describe what makes a Slytherin or a Gryffindor, I want to try to look at exactly what we see in canon and what that tells us about the flaws and strengths of each house.
It's hard to find a strength for Slytherin because let's face it, they haven't really been given any. We barely see them, so there's little we can really say about how they function. This is what we do see: They judge people based on their breeding. They're snobs. Purebloods are better than half-blood, who are better than Muggleborns. They move in a pack (or at least are described as being a gang from the outside) which is exclusionary. They make fun of people outside their gang. It's not quite correct to say they laugh at others' pain on principle, because they have of course been shown to get upset over other peoples' pain as long as that person is one of them. Usually we see them acting on their own personal desires and that's it. So it seems like what they represent is a system where all people are not created equal, where the world is a strict hierarchy. They tease, humiliate and insult those who show weakness. At their worst they become Death Eaters and decide people not like them don't have a right to live.
On the positive side, they probably do appreciate history, can have a healthy (as well as an unhealthy) respect for authority, they can be creative and fun. Perhaps most interestingly, there are two Slytherins who potentially made difficult moral choices even when it didn't benefit them personally: Snape and Regulus. Both of these characters believed in Pureblood Superiority but rejected its most extreme conclusions with Voldemort and so perhaps had to rethink the whole idea. This is probably yet another reason I despise the idea of the "good Slytherin" who unites the houses by never buying into this stuff or figuring out it's bad off-screen.
So basically, what we seem to be dealing with, with the Slytherins is a particular side of human nature, one that's brought us such charming but different things as slavery, imperialism, and genocide.
Then there's Gryffindor. Well, off the bat we've got more positive qualities. Many of these students have been shown to *want* to be good people and *want* to be unselfish, protect the weak, have humility. They like to have fun--often of the slap you on the back hard kind. They don't openly judge people based on their bloodline (though it would be inaccurate to suggest they are free of prejudice, of course).
Their danger lies more in self-righteousness and having the Slytherins as rivals obviously don't help them there, because they represent things that modern thinking considers so obviously bad that they have little reason to question whether they're right compared to the other house. They're not snobs, they're not prejudiced against Muggleborns. Unfortunately because they "know" they're right they rarely examine their own actions and they too have scenes where they take pleasure in the pain of other people because those people “deserve it.” Being against Voldemort covers just about everything they do. Hermione's justification for her Polyjuice plan is that "killing Muggleborns is worse than brewing a difficult Potion." On the surface she sounds right, but if you actually look at the facts, she's presenting what she's doing in a pretty dishonest way. And those things are important because they are exactly the type of things that cause big problems in the story.
Sirius is not wrongly imprisoned on what one might call Slytherin principles. He's wrongly imprisoned on just these principles: we know we're right, we have to keep the bad guy from getting away. If we give him too many rights, he'll use them to trick us. So we'll only give those rights to the people we already think are good guys. That, I think, is where many readers wind up shaking their head, because you have characters who know they want fairness when it applies to themselves, but don't seem to realize this particular thing you don't get by destroying Voldemort. And that's another side of human nature that's brought us other charming but different things like imperialism, the crusades, and The Patriot Act. It's that line of thinking where questioning the mindset makes you the enemy. They risk throwing away a potentially fair system because they mistakenly think Voldemort and Slytherin embody every potential evil.
These two mindsets aren't completely different--obviously you can see parallels in both of them. Both sides cast people out for questioning the party line, and in OotP especially the reflections start coming more and more often. But while they echo each other, they're also two groups of people each moving on their own potential path of destruction. Sometimes they push each other further in a bad direction or a good one, but they aren't joined in terms of really causing each other's actions. One side may provide the thing the other is reacting to, but they don't choose their actions for them. Often in the same situation they would react differently. So they shouldn't be held accountable for the other side's actions, but they still can be held accountable for their own actions and the fact that they do have consequences. They might operate on different planes but neither one is free of potential danger or immorality. So pointing out that one side at least isn't the other side or finding ways in which something one side does is also done by the other has very limited usefulness, imo. You have to be able to take them both separately and not always leap for a comparison to the other side that makes them look better.
This, to me, is probably the one way that fandom makes me enjoy the books a lot less than I would if I weren't in the fandom. Because I can deal with the events that happen in the books, and the characters thinking this way. But when I see it translated into real life as if this is the way things should be, whichever side a person is on, makes me lose a little hope that we might straighten ourselves out. Sometimes it seems like the real danger/evil that Slytherin represents is the temptation to believe in evil as a tangible, outside force. By making Gryffindor often look good by comparison, they coax the characters into darker psychological places-and those places aren't bad in themselves. They may just be a place they need to be. What's scary isn't that they go there, but that they don't realize they've gone there because they've still got those evil Slytherins to compare themselves to and say, “Nope, I'm not them. I'm completely good and innocent.” That's a wonderfully freaky idea to me. While I doubt seriously it would happen, all the good guys could wind up having committed murder, torture and blackmail and be completely consumed by rage and despair while the “bad” kids die ignorant but innocent. Because already there have been times when actual actions of one side have been overlooked while potential actions in the other are bad enough. Or, on the other side, desires of one side are overlooked in order to condemn the actions of the other. Really you've just a bunch of really messed up people.
Obviously, this post is probably coming out amidst a flurry of election posts. On one hand the idea of a little distraction-I know I'm so afraid to think of what could potentially happen tomorrow I'd rather think of anything else. Otoh, though, while I'm usually a big believer in fantasy and imagination being a good thing, I will say that I hope the half of the population of my country that seems to be living in a fantasy world wakes up in reality tomorrow. I know it would be a nasty shock to admit, all at once, that the sunny heroic picture people seem to be fond of is all a lie, that the Bush administration isn't Dumbledore or Gandalf or Captain Kirk and that all those stories about deception and chaos and disaster in the world are not creations of the liberal media but the world they live in. I love searching for the reality within fiction; I prefer to vote against fiction in reality.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
From:
no subject
Let's start at the very beginning, it's a very good place to...
*shuts off little voice in head that sounds suspiciously like Julie Andrews*
PS/SS, though, is probably the easiest place to begin. What we have before the sorting ceremony is, in the most basic narrative terms, just enough back story to determine that Harry's home life (the story's representative of the Muggle world) is worse than most, Professor Dumbledore sends guardians who are usually truthful in addition to being infinately preferable to the company of the Dursleys, Harry's parents were in fact not killed in a car crash, Draco Malfoy (the first Slytherin or Slytherinesque character Harry encounters) is a spoiled brat, and the Weasleys are nice because their mother, a former Gryffindor, is still alive and she helped Harry get onto platform 9 3/4.
What we don't see until later is that Dumbledore is in effect engineering a Gryffindor. I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing, but it certainly colors the situation. What would happen if Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon were a bit nicer? What would happen if Harry had discovered his letters' content on his own? What would happen if Draco wasn't quite such a brat? Or if Harry's guardian had been brusque Prof. McGonogal, cold Prof. Snape, diminuative Prof. Flitwick, or kindly Prof. Sprout? Or Madame Hooch? Or Prof Vector or one of the other professors we rarely (if ever) see? What if the only place for Harry to sit had been with a group of students destined for one of the other houses?
No... Harry the Gryffindor was made, not born. Change one of the variables mentioned above, and Harry would seem to have a different personality. Change two, and he could very well have chosen to be in Slytherin.
That's probably why he's actually scary, most times. He embodies the best of Gryffindor in many ways, but the worst of Slytherin in many others. Looking at him without Gryffindor goggles, we can see his elitist attitude and his self-centeredness most easily.
His snobbery, though not related to bloodline, tends to exclude any non-Gryffindors who aren't Quidditch players, many Quidditch players who are non-Gryffindors, the Creevys, Percy Weasley... basically, anyone who isn't a Gryffindor he likes. Professors are exempt from this because he doesn't have to like them to respect them, or respect them to like them. (How many times has he gone against what Hagrid suggested, even though the half-giant seems to be his favorite adult on campus?)
Also, we've seen him operating on his own desires more than once: personal curiosity in PS/SS, wanting to clear his own name in CoS, selfish anger when he blew Aunt Marge up in PoA, school pride, among other things, in GoF, and the selfish desire to save his godfather in OotP. For these desires, he risks his friends' lives and reputations. For these desires, he risks exposing magic to the Muggle world. Sometimes, like at the end of GoF, things are out of his control, but when he could stop the process (like when Hermione brewed the Polyjuice Potion), he didn't really want to stop. In fact, it seems like the only time he even questions his own actions is when he's feeling guilty. Sounds pretty Slytherin to me.
What makes this dangerous, like you said, is the fact that Harry seems to justify all this by saying to himself "I'm not in Slytherin. If I were truly Slytherin, regardless of my desires, it would have put me there. Therefore, in this society, I'm better than Slytherin," or something along those lines. He recognizes he makes mistakes, but he doesn't take responsibility for them. It's like that Dashboard Confessional song:
Vindicated
I am selfish
I am wrong
I am right
I swear I'm right
Swear I knew it all along
Harry knows what he does is wrong, but he doesn't care, either because he can justify his motives to himself, or because he has acted to avenge a wrong he's seen done to him. It seems, though, that sometimes he picks the smallest issues to get righteous about, and fails to see his own shortcomings or mental (as well as physical) myopia.
From:
no subject
And who taught him that logic? Dumbledore. That man scares the piss out of me.
Hell, if you want to take paranoia to Moody-levels, you could always say that isn't it funny that Dumbledore's helpful Weasleys were just there when he needed them...
(Actually, on your line of thought about the logic of Harry being a Gryffindor or not, Kiri (
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
Absolutely. I agree 100% with everything you've said - Harry is being programmed to turn into the kind of wizard Dumbledore wants and needs him to be. It's quite frightening.
From:
no subject
It's influenced so much about him. Even his first meeting with Draco, for instance, is influenced by his upbringing. Had he grown up in the WW Draco might have come across as a kid trying to hard with flaws but not someone who made Harry so angry. Instead he hates him first for having parents who buy him things like Dudley, for making Harry feel silly for not knowing about the WW and for being harsh about Hagrid. Had Harry grown up in the WW he probably would have wound up talking about Quidditch and Draco might not have been so offensive so soon!
And yeah, I totally agree on how Harry's learned so far. He learns lessons that don't really challenge him. Dumbledore is a master at this too. He seems to be able to disavow responsibility for just about anything that makes him look bad. Harry's furious all summer at the Dursleys and at the end of OotP Dumbledore describes 11-year-old Harry as simply a little underfed and asks for sympathy.
From:
no subject
Yup... that's just the tangent my thoughts went on after reading your post. Right now, though, I think I'm going to think a little more about the "myopia". Harry has glasses. Percy has glasses. Dumbledore has glasses. Doesn't McGonogal have glasses?
Yes, I'm going to think about this a little more.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
Talk about confusing someone with her character!
(no subject)
From:From:
no subject
From: (Anonymous)
no subject
And this idea that there was not a single person in the wizarding world who could raise Harry without spoiling him? And that Dumbledore brushes off his experiences at the Dursleys so mildly? There's something really brutal about Dumbledore in that exchange I think--and the truth is, it wouldn't bother me if only the books would acknowledge it. Sometimes you do need pragmaticists, or even tunnel-eye people who are willing to pay any price to stop something really really evil. But to me, being against EVIL (whether embodied by Slytherins, or, um, wolves) doesn't by default make you GOOD. To me, good is pro-active, not just re-active.
It's not that I don't like Harry; I think that given what he's had to work with, he's remarkably whole (and does have some sense of empathy--more so than Dumbledore, I'd say at this point). The further I get in the series, the angrier I get at the adults, who to me seem to be really failing ALL the WW kids. Dumbledore has never made any effort that I can recall to actually TEACH the Slytherins anything, and meanwhile the Gryffindors seem to be caught in this vicious cycle of being offered up as sacrificial lambs, than being allowed to wink at any kind of rules, then being rewarded for "bravely" doing something against the rules, ad nauseam. And of the Puffs and the Claws--who knows? (Actually, I have this fantasy where the Hufflepuff house is the nice, structured one, where Sprout provides adult guidance--the kind of house that Cedric Diggory would be Prefect for. I don't think he'd let his housemates pull that Luna-schtick on each other--but then again, my OC is Cedric's co-Prefect, so I'm well into the fanwank here).
From:
no subject
Plus, there's the fact that not only would he get in trouble in the wizarding world (if he even got out of the situation with his soul intact), but that his aunt and uncle would refuse to shelter him. While this sounds like a "good thing", it actually isn't, if we're to believe that Dumbledore's statement about bloodlove magic has any credence.
Actually, wolves aren't all that evil. They just get a bad rap in symbolism but they're actually quite necessary to the ecosystem, being the top predators or something... oh. Yeah, the comparison makes sense.
From: (Anonymous)
(same anon)
From:
no subject
Yes, there is this sense that criticising Harry (or any of the Gryffindor children, really) is verboten; and that any attempt to suggest any motives that aren't 100% pure and sweet is trying to 'twist' canon or 'misinterpret' it (and likewise, that any attempt to view the Slytherins, or to an extent, various other children - Marietta Edgecombe's a good example! - as something other than Evil people who deserve to die; is 'fangirlish'.)
It just seems to me like a really depressing worldview, where the status quo is horrible behavior, so any effort at all becomes heroic.
And of course, it only works one way, that argument.
So arguments based around Harry's moral strength in 'not leaving Dudley behind' or 'not being able to cast Cruciatus fully', or Ginny's in 'not dumping Neville at the Yule Ball' (Ginny fans seem very fond of this example, for some reason...) are common, but an argument that 'Hey, the Inquistorial Squad did nothing more than restrain and take points from students, they could have got away with much worse' is dismissed on the basis that you shouldn't attribute great morality to characters based on negatives like what they don't do given the opportunity.
From:
no subject
That makes for a scary moment for Harry, one that's got all this potential to be dealt with...unless you brush it off like he's just a sweet little boy who didn't really mean it, which people sometimes do. Or worse yet, think the scene is proof of how Harry could never throw a "bad Crucio" because he throws one out of righteous anger. I mean...huh? If that's really true in this universe than people should pack their bags before Harry takes control of the world if they don't want to be on the receiving end of his righteous anger! It's not even like you can say Harry was just reaching for the worst thing he could think of (as you could say for other characters) because the books have made a point of Harry knowing just what this curse is about. Plus, he casts it on his first try even if he can't sustain it.
It is a scary way to look at things no matter which character you're doing it to--it's kind of, I don't know...Gollum-like. That cringing, "Oh, it's not my fault! Everybody feel sorry for me because I'm such a victim!" mentality that you just can't trust and gets kind of crazy. Either that or it's a kind of sadistic, "Who cares what happens to anybody who pisses me off?" sort of thing. So if Harry and George beat Malfoy up on the Quidditch Pitch yes, look at the whole scene to see what led up to it. But are you honestly saying that Malfoy's incredibly silly lines about Harry's mother absolve Harry of complete responsibility for his actions to the point where he's a victim in the situation instead of an angry boy fighting with another boy he hates? And that, I think, is also where people start bringing in Slytherin again to turn it around: if Harry insulted Malfoy's mother (as he does in GoF) and Malfoy and Crabbe jumped on him and started beating him up should we see them as victims?
Dumbledore's methods of dealing with the school definitely creep me out. They wouldn't if the storyline wasn't also hammering things about making "choices" and things like that and telling me Dumbledore's doing a good job here. It just seems like too many people are set up as hate objects in a universe that needs more than hate objects.
From:
no subject
Definitely. At least with someone like Malfoy, or Ron; there's an innocence there - they're angry, they express it negatively; but they're not wildly talented like Harry, they can't see Thestrals, they've never seen an Unforgiveable performed on a person and they've never felt it. And if they wanted to cast one, it would be odds even as to whether they even could.
It's kind of like if a person gets mad and says 'I want to drop an atomic bomb on X!' - not very nice, but understandable.
Whereas Harry, it's more like someone who's survived a similiar disaster (like a bomb, as I'm using in this incredibly flawed analogy!) who's been through it all, seen how horrible it is, and not only wants to do it to someone else; but has control of the Big Red Button.
Brr...
From: (Anonymous)
no subject
But I also think it's really important to remember that Harry's stake in this fight isn't because of the philosophical battle, but because of the personal family legacy. I don't understand why anyone would want to strip him of motive and conflict--how boring!
I absolutely agree about the hypocrisy of Dumbledore lecturing about choice but actively perpetuating the hateful cycles (which I think the bait-and-switch at the end of PS did). It just bewilders me--if Dumbledore really has an ethical commitment to the cause, why on Earth isn't he taking advantage of his leadership? He has virtually total authority over those kids for most of the year, and no amont of fiddling has taken him out permanently yet. Why doesn't everyone have to take a term of Muggle Studies? Or do inter-House projects? Why don't they take advantage of the Prefects as a diverse unit? Why doesn't he insist on teaching them some REAL history, that they might find relevant? Why don't they have a memorial to former students who died in the first war? That's another thing that really infuriates me about Dumbledore and makes me reject him as a moral center for the book, because it just seems incomprehensible--unless he really is about consolidation of personal power for his own questionably "merit-based" oligarchy? I do feel like all the adults bear some blame here, but I think the Heads of House would cooperate--even Snape (maybe especially Snape).
From:
no subject
I do think it's weird when Harry's personal battle is tied to philosophical ideas more than it really can be. It's like the whole idea that Harry objects to Slytherin on purely idelogical terms--um, actually he hates it because it's Voldemort's house, and Malfoy's house and Snape's house...and they hate him and he hates them. So when Dumbledore pats him on the back for making a moral choice in rejecting it it's a little odd, to say the least. Slytherin had absolutely nothing Harry wanted.
(no subject)
From:From:
no subject
Well, he sends Hagrid. So Harry won't see Dumbledore as any kind of parental figure or bestower of any emotional support.
Dumbledore's strictly for free passes from trouble, flashy magical hijinks and cool presents, yo! Don't want to get too involved.
I always thought it was kind of interesting he sent Hagrid to pick up Harry. Hagrid, who immediately hexes those nasty relatives (does he even know they're nasty? Or is it just 'Insult my boss? I'll hex your kid, you stupid Muggle!')
And what's the first thing Harry wants to do with this cool new magical power? Hex Dudley, just like Hagrid.
And now Hagrid and Harry both have assured loyalty to Dumbledore, and if that means a few Slytherins (or Ravenclaws. Or Hufflepuffs.) end up hexed (or beaten. Or slashed. Or dead, in Cedric's case!); then it's a small price to pay, eh?
Had Harry grown up in the WW he probably would have wound up talking about Quidditch and Draco might not have been so offensive so soon!
Consider Harry's ego now. Had he grown up in the WW, we'd be looking at Liza Minelli, I should think!
(Actually, I've read a few AUs in which Harry is raised by WW parents/Lily and James, and in almost all, he was fairly arrogant...interesting. Maybe Dumbledore's inadvertently done the best thing he could have, for Harry's personality?)
He seems to be able to disavow responsibility for just about anything that makes him look bad. Harry's furious all summer at the Dursleys and at the end of OotP Dumbledore describes 11-year-old Harry as simply a little underfed and asks for sympathy.
The 'I just did it because I love you so much!' excuse is probably the creepiest I can think of. It smacks of like, domestic violence and child abuse.
And that part about Harry not being a pampered prince (like presumably, Dudley or Draco) is revolting.
Yes, having a spoilt child is so disgusting that the alternative of an emotionally abused, angry, loose cannon is much more preferable!
(There is this continuing theme, that, to be fair to JKR, is present in a lot of children's lit; that the best parent is an emotionally uninvolved (or dead ;) one, or that loving a child means spoiling them - Molly spoils Harry, lavishing him with attention and food over her own children; Petunia's a dark mirror of her (because of course, the child she spoils is icky!); the Malfoys are criticised for being overly involved by questioning the school authorities instead of presumably telling their son to suck it up; the Weasleys despite Molly's over-protectiveness don't visit when Ron's leg is broken, they only arrive in CoS after Ginny has been found (interestingly when do they visit? When Harry needs them - GoF at least twice, for example.); Dean and Hermione don't tell their parents anything whatsoever; Seamus and family is criticised for Mrs. Finnegan's worry over recent events...
From:
no subject
Yes, but is Dudley icky because he's spoiled, or is he spoiled because he's icky?
Wow... I never stopped to ponder that before. Not a very deep thing to think about, but it kinda gets to the heart of everything.
As far as the whole "emotional attachment" idea goes with Harry, Hagrid, and Dumbledore, yes, Hagrid was sent so Harry wouldn't get too attached to Dumbledore (emotionally). However, Hagrid makes it clear that he's acting on Dumbledore's behalf, thereby creating a sense of gratitude for the old wizard. There are certain types of loyalty, after all, that don't spring from any personal love.
From:
no subject
There's this kind of meritocracy running through the books and the fandom, I think - there's this idea that the Dursleys spoiling of their child, for example, is so repellent precisely because he's not what they imagine him to be: they say he's 'sensitive' or 'popular'; we know him to be a cruel bully.
Or that prejudice against the Muggleborns is wrong because Hermione is more intelligent than a lot of the purebloods we've seen.
Or that Draco Malfoy shouldn't be so arrogant when he doesn't have the skills to back it up.
But this kind of provokes the idea that the only reason this behaviour is wrong is because of the merits or lack thereof of these characters, rather than because prejudice, for example; is never a good idea.
I mean, there's little criticism from both audience and text when Harry for example, is the benefactor of favouritism, as he frequently is.
Likewise, when/if Draco gets victimised, characters and fans are quick to mitigate it with 'he deserved it!'
Which weakens the ideal that 'wrong' behaviour is immoral on it's own terms.
Clearly, the only problem with bias is when it doesn't favour the characters the reader/Harry likes; and if Hermione and the other Muggleborns were slow and untalented magically, it would be perfectly all right to despise them.
From:
no subject
After all, look at what the remaining DEs did to the Longbottoms--a pair of fairly bad-ass Aurors (no canon on the bad-ass part, but let's assume). One might be able to assume that, from the simple fact that he's still alive, whatever guards Privet Drive is insanely powerful.
That isn't a complete excuse by any means, but I think it's a perpetually underrated issue.
From:
no subject
http://www.livejournal.com/users/vesania_aeterno/21378.html
From:
no subject
What makes this dangerous, like you said, is the fact that Harry seems to justify all this by saying to himself "I'm not in Slytherin. If I were truly Slytherin, regardless of my desires, it would have put me there. Therefore, in this society, I'm better than Slytherin," or something along those lines. He recognizes he makes mistakes, but he doesn't take responsibility for them.
This is true, and what I find interesting is that Slytherin is villainized from square one. Hagrid tells Harry that all the bad witches and wizards were in Slytherin, Ron tells him that it's bad (I think), Draco, Crabbe, Goyle, Lucius, etc are all mean - isn't there a good side to the house? Being ambitious and cunning can actually be useful if you were, say, an entrepeneur.
Another thing that gets me is that some people will just say "they're evil!" as a motivation. Yes, they want to kill Muggles and Muggleborns. But why? What makes them want to? Why are they mean? And on the other side, the randomly nice [insert Slytherin here]. People like Draco and Prof. Snape are, in canon, not nice or fond of Gryffindors, our Hero and co., or anyone else, really.