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In reading around different threads today I happened to come across a couple of random "People just need to accept canon..." and it made me think about The X-files. Specifically
Signs & Wonders was, I think, a 7th season ep which got a very passionate response on alt.tv.x-files.analysis. I was one of the most passionate.:-) But I think of it now with regards to some reactions to HP interpretations. This XF episode used the narrative trick of a reversal, where you go through the whole story thinking one guy's good and one guy's bad, but when the crime is solved the bad guy's innocent. Obviously I don't think this is literally what HP is doing with the, for instance, the Slytherins, but I do feel like sometimes the reactions of people to the *idea* that there could be *any* sort of revelation about Slytherin where we see *we* were wrong about them in any way are like reactions people have to these kinds of endings--particularly S&W.
In S&W, Mulder and Scully investigate the killing of a young man by a snake. He's part of a snake handling church in Tennessee run by a Rev. O'Connor. O'Connor's daughter, Gracie, has run away from him with her boyfriend and is now under the protection of a Rev. Mackey. O'Connor is a bigot, a sexist, a fundamentalist whose religion is all about evil and condemning others. Rev. Mackey represents a more modern and compassionate form of Christianity that preaches understanding even to people like O'Connor. The trick, of course, is that in the end Rev. O'Connor is innocent and Rev. Mackey's the devil. Well, this did not sit well with people, no sirree! Some posters seemed very offended at the writer making the statement that intolerant Fundamentalist religions were true and that more civilized versions of Christianity were the work of the devil. Personally, though, I didn't think this is what the ep was saying at all. I thought it just used people's aversion to the O'Connors of the world to lead them astray. We want to believe one person is guilty, but that doesn't mean they are. This is definitely something that's been used in HP.
What the episode really worked on--and I think this infuriated a lot of people--was the way people were so eager to believe in Mackey because he was "like them" that they slid right over stuff he was doing. For instance, the compassion Mackey preached towards O'Connor was always had a subtext of, "I have to have compassion for him because I'm a reverend but I wouldn't expect you to, really." While he was saying how we should feel sorry for him he was almost always at the same time dropping hints about the bad things Mackey was doing. Most of the bad stuff we knew about O'Connor we got from Mackey.
What was very interesting was how at the end of the ep many people were unwilling to let Mackey's lies go, so in discussions they would condemn O'Connor for things he hadn't done but Mackey said he had--this, naturally, is what I tend to notice so much in HP, because people will so often remember things the way they didn't happen, or assume characters have done things they actually haven't done. It makes me wonder why this so often happens, and why, if this is the correct way to see it, it wasn't written the way people remember it in the first place. In O'Connor's case, for instance, people would talk about how he "kicked Gracie out" for disobeying him, when in fact she had run away with her boyfriend. Or how he had murdered his wife when canonically all we knew was that his wife had died of a snake bite, which is the risk of being in a snake handler church. Mackey taunted O'Connor with the fact that he (Mackey) hadn't stolen Gracie, but that O'Connor had driven him away with his intolerance and O'Connor seemed to have to accept that, so the shortcomings of his own church were shown to help the devil too. But meanwhile the things that Mackey did--having people tortured and killed--was never remarked upon because I think people still didn't connect it to him. People still chalked up those crimes to O'Connor, as if Mackey was the good guy who was the victim of a badly-done plot twist--and I understand that feeling because sometimes plot twists like that are badly done. Only in this case it really wasn't because, as I said, the solid case against O'Connor was all non-canonical.
Gracie, too, was continually described as being pushed around and being weak because she believed ultimately that her father was telling the truth, which he was. The good guys were just as ready to speak for Gracie as her father was--particularly Scully. It also played to people's RL prejudices as well--people kept bringing in stuff that they knew was bad about these kinds of churches and Fundamentalism, but O'Connor's church was never shown to do some of the things associated with these churches, so if you just took the information you got in the episode without adding on stuff you knew about this kind of church, you got a very different idea. So again people kept claiming stuff happened that hadn't happened, like claiming O'Connor must have been sleeping with female parishners and making himself God when the ep showed him specifically not doing those things.
Anyway, I think this is something I'm just always interested in, the way people often find it hard to separate the different threads that make up a person that way, so that the person who's very nice but murdered someone really does deserve to go to jail over the really mean jerk that didn't kill anyone. I just remember being really struck by the way fans that usually go over things with a fine-tooth comb were much less interested in doing that with S&W. This sometimes happens in HP too, of course, where the person with the "straight" reading is also the one misrepresenting the text.
It's human nature to find information that validates our pre-existing views easier to believe than information tthat challenges them. Short aside here, but this is the problem with pretty much every attempt to talk about JKR that I've ever seen. Even people who start out being reasonable and positive about JKR--and there's plenty of things to be reasonable and positive about--seem to eventually just have to trash talk other fans based on their interests in the books. Really, when somebody has a problem you're trying to address, it kind of helps if you actually understand the problem they have and show minimum respect for it instead of coming up with a stupid problem the person doesn't have that makes them look bad and speak to that instead. Unfortunately, it does often wind up seeming to validate the criticism rather than defending against it, imo.
To use a fandom example, though, look at information we get from Sirius. He says at one point that Snape went around with a gang of Slytherins and was always trying to hex James in the halls and knew tons of dark curses even as a first year. But after the Pensieve scene, this came into question--why should we trust Sirius' version of Snape when he doesn't like him, particularly when it contradicts what we saw in the Pensieve? Personally, I believe Sirius' words here because I don't see any real reason for him to lie about those facts. It also makes sense given what we know of Snape's eventually joining the DEs, not to mention Sirius' later line to Snape's face about being Lucius' lapdog and Snape's own bullying behavior in canon. So while wouldn't trust Sirius' interpretation of Snape's actions, I see no reason to doubt these particular facts.
Sirius also introduces Phineas as the most-hated Headmaster Hogwarts. This seems often taken at face value. That is, I've seen people trying to figure out how to reconcile Phineas' likable portrait persona with his being so hated without questioning the reliability of Sirius here. But Sirius wasn't at school when Phineas was headmaster. As a Gryffindor he has reason to see the Slytherin head as hated. As somebody who hates his family he has reason to demean him. So why take Sirius' word about that?
Sometimes, admittedly, this is difficult in HP because there are reliable characters we're expected to believe in a meta-way. But other times what we're told contradicts what we see. I often feel uneasy about not knowing whether I should believe what I'm shown, or what I've been told. Not believing what I'm told is natural, especially when I'm shown something else, but the opposite can be harder, depending on the circumstances. I guess I can only hold out till the end and see if we get any surprises. Because if JKR isn't planning the tiniest whiff of a S&W reversal (which, remember, does not entail somebody suddenly turning good but just readers being led astray in assigning guilt for specific crimes) she's certainly done a damn good job setting up for one.
I don't mean to imply that anybody who has a problem with these kinds of endings just doesn't like to be wrong-there are other reasons they can not work. Sometimes they're not set up well, sometimes they're contrived or didactic. But still you have to admit that they work because writers intentionally depend on readers' bias and that can be a humbling experience. Often they telegraph the truth early on and people continue to defend the guilty party long after they've been outed. When that happens to me I usually want to look at back and figure out why I have trouble believing the lie rather than the truth. The other weird thing is, it's not like authors are immune to this either. They can miss stuff and be led astray by bias as much as the rest of us can.
*points to icon and squees*
Signs & Wonders was, I think, a 7th season ep which got a very passionate response on alt.tv.x-files.analysis. I was one of the most passionate.:-) But I think of it now with regards to some reactions to HP interpretations. This XF episode used the narrative trick of a reversal, where you go through the whole story thinking one guy's good and one guy's bad, but when the crime is solved the bad guy's innocent. Obviously I don't think this is literally what HP is doing with the, for instance, the Slytherins, but I do feel like sometimes the reactions of people to the *idea* that there could be *any* sort of revelation about Slytherin where we see *we* were wrong about them in any way are like reactions people have to these kinds of endings--particularly S&W.
In S&W, Mulder and Scully investigate the killing of a young man by a snake. He's part of a snake handling church in Tennessee run by a Rev. O'Connor. O'Connor's daughter, Gracie, has run away from him with her boyfriend and is now under the protection of a Rev. Mackey. O'Connor is a bigot, a sexist, a fundamentalist whose religion is all about evil and condemning others. Rev. Mackey represents a more modern and compassionate form of Christianity that preaches understanding even to people like O'Connor. The trick, of course, is that in the end Rev. O'Connor is innocent and Rev. Mackey's the devil. Well, this did not sit well with people, no sirree! Some posters seemed very offended at the writer making the statement that intolerant Fundamentalist religions were true and that more civilized versions of Christianity were the work of the devil. Personally, though, I didn't think this is what the ep was saying at all. I thought it just used people's aversion to the O'Connors of the world to lead them astray. We want to believe one person is guilty, but that doesn't mean they are. This is definitely something that's been used in HP.
What the episode really worked on--and I think this infuriated a lot of people--was the way people were so eager to believe in Mackey because he was "like them" that they slid right over stuff he was doing. For instance, the compassion Mackey preached towards O'Connor was always had a subtext of, "I have to have compassion for him because I'm a reverend but I wouldn't expect you to, really." While he was saying how we should feel sorry for him he was almost always at the same time dropping hints about the bad things Mackey was doing. Most of the bad stuff we knew about O'Connor we got from Mackey.
What was very interesting was how at the end of the ep many people were unwilling to let Mackey's lies go, so in discussions they would condemn O'Connor for things he hadn't done but Mackey said he had--this, naturally, is what I tend to notice so much in HP, because people will so often remember things the way they didn't happen, or assume characters have done things they actually haven't done. It makes me wonder why this so often happens, and why, if this is the correct way to see it, it wasn't written the way people remember it in the first place. In O'Connor's case, for instance, people would talk about how he "kicked Gracie out" for disobeying him, when in fact she had run away with her boyfriend. Or how he had murdered his wife when canonically all we knew was that his wife had died of a snake bite, which is the risk of being in a snake handler church. Mackey taunted O'Connor with the fact that he (Mackey) hadn't stolen Gracie, but that O'Connor had driven him away with his intolerance and O'Connor seemed to have to accept that, so the shortcomings of his own church were shown to help the devil too. But meanwhile the things that Mackey did--having people tortured and killed--was never remarked upon because I think people still didn't connect it to him. People still chalked up those crimes to O'Connor, as if Mackey was the good guy who was the victim of a badly-done plot twist--and I understand that feeling because sometimes plot twists like that are badly done. Only in this case it really wasn't because, as I said, the solid case against O'Connor was all non-canonical.
Gracie, too, was continually described as being pushed around and being weak because she believed ultimately that her father was telling the truth, which he was. The good guys were just as ready to speak for Gracie as her father was--particularly Scully. It also played to people's RL prejudices as well--people kept bringing in stuff that they knew was bad about these kinds of churches and Fundamentalism, but O'Connor's church was never shown to do some of the things associated with these churches, so if you just took the information you got in the episode without adding on stuff you knew about this kind of church, you got a very different idea. So again people kept claiming stuff happened that hadn't happened, like claiming O'Connor must have been sleeping with female parishners and making himself God when the ep showed him specifically not doing those things.
Anyway, I think this is something I'm just always interested in, the way people often find it hard to separate the different threads that make up a person that way, so that the person who's very nice but murdered someone really does deserve to go to jail over the really mean jerk that didn't kill anyone. I just remember being really struck by the way fans that usually go over things with a fine-tooth comb were much less interested in doing that with S&W. This sometimes happens in HP too, of course, where the person with the "straight" reading is also the one misrepresenting the text.
It's human nature to find information that validates our pre-existing views easier to believe than information tthat challenges them. Short aside here, but this is the problem with pretty much every attempt to talk about JKR that I've ever seen. Even people who start out being reasonable and positive about JKR--and there's plenty of things to be reasonable and positive about--seem to eventually just have to trash talk other fans based on their interests in the books. Really, when somebody has a problem you're trying to address, it kind of helps if you actually understand the problem they have and show minimum respect for it instead of coming up with a stupid problem the person doesn't have that makes them look bad and speak to that instead. Unfortunately, it does often wind up seeming to validate the criticism rather than defending against it, imo.
To use a fandom example, though, look at information we get from Sirius. He says at one point that Snape went around with a gang of Slytherins and was always trying to hex James in the halls and knew tons of dark curses even as a first year. But after the Pensieve scene, this came into question--why should we trust Sirius' version of Snape when he doesn't like him, particularly when it contradicts what we saw in the Pensieve? Personally, I believe Sirius' words here because I don't see any real reason for him to lie about those facts. It also makes sense given what we know of Snape's eventually joining the DEs, not to mention Sirius' later line to Snape's face about being Lucius' lapdog and Snape's own bullying behavior in canon. So while wouldn't trust Sirius' interpretation of Snape's actions, I see no reason to doubt these particular facts.
Sirius also introduces Phineas as the most-hated Headmaster Hogwarts. This seems often taken at face value. That is, I've seen people trying to figure out how to reconcile Phineas' likable portrait persona with his being so hated without questioning the reliability of Sirius here. But Sirius wasn't at school when Phineas was headmaster. As a Gryffindor he has reason to see the Slytherin head as hated. As somebody who hates his family he has reason to demean him. So why take Sirius' word about that?
Sometimes, admittedly, this is difficult in HP because there are reliable characters we're expected to believe in a meta-way. But other times what we're told contradicts what we see. I often feel uneasy about not knowing whether I should believe what I'm shown, or what I've been told. Not believing what I'm told is natural, especially when I'm shown something else, but the opposite can be harder, depending on the circumstances. I guess I can only hold out till the end and see if we get any surprises. Because if JKR isn't planning the tiniest whiff of a S&W reversal (which, remember, does not entail somebody suddenly turning good but just readers being led astray in assigning guilt for specific crimes) she's certainly done a damn good job setting up for one.
I don't mean to imply that anybody who has a problem with these kinds of endings just doesn't like to be wrong-there are other reasons they can not work. Sometimes they're not set up well, sometimes they're contrived or didactic. But still you have to admit that they work because writers intentionally depend on readers' bias and that can be a humbling experience. Often they telegraph the truth early on and people continue to defend the guilty party long after they've been outed. When that happens to me I usually want to look at back and figure out why I have trouble believing the lie rather than the truth. The other weird thing is, it's not like authors are immune to this either. They can miss stuff and be led astray by bias as much as the rest of us can.
*points to icon and squees*
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I do like how the presumptions about Slytherins do come from such very dodgy sources. I mean, Sirius and Hagrid and Ron - *well.* Whereas Dumbledore, and to an extent Hermione, are far more believable and say far more interesting and ambiguous things like 'you and Draco remind me of your dad and Snape.'
She is setting it up! It must be true! I am always filled with hope by your posts. *wheedles* do let me buy you coffee some time this week, or weekend.
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You shall buy me something this week/weekend, it's decided. Now we just have to arrange it, can you get e-mail where you are...?:-)
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And Phineas... hmmm... I really can sort of understand why he might be the most hated Headmaster in Hogwarts. He probably spent most of his days as a Headmaster ridiculing the students of Hogwarts-- though admittedly for good reasons, since fully half of the school seems mad. He's the sort of character that people probably most appreciate at a safe distance. :D
And very interesting essay/speculation on the topic of perception of character, Sistermagpie! It's true what they say... what would be a crippling evil in a loathsome person often turns into a sad and tragic flaw in a good one (who is also likely to be attractive in some way.) People too often think that other people are all of a piece. If a person is good, then anything and everything he does must be at least well-intentioned. And vice versa. Thus we get the standard cliche of all the neighbors being interviewed after the nicest person on their block is found out to be a notorious mass murderer, or something like that. "But he seemed like such a nice person! I can't believe he'd do such a thing!"
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You know, that's how I imagined it when I read it too--I thought it was just funny that he was described as being so hated but it turned out he wasn't hated in an Umbridge-way, but just because he made all the kids feel stupid by having no patience for their teenaged angst and snivvely kid problems. He doesn't seem really actively against anyone, I think he was just sarcastic.
Thus we get the standard cliche of all the neighbors being interviewed after the nicest person on their block is found out to be a notorious mass murderer, or something like that. "But he seemed like such a nice person! I can't believe he'd do such a thing!"
Heh--Like Jerry Seinfeld says, the best place to live is next door to a serial killer. They're always good neighbors and don't play their music too loudly.
It also makes me think of this spy tour I took in London where the guide said he once had a guy on the tour who knew Kim Philby of the Cambridge 5. The guy kept insisting it was a mistake and Philby was not a spy and the guide was like, "Uh, this is a known fact now. There is no question about it. Why do you think he was innocent?"
Finally the guy just sputtered, "But dammit, man. He was in my club!"
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Heh, no wonder the quintissentially Gryffindor Sirius thought that Phileas Nigellus would be so hated! If Harry's anything to go by, the worst thing you could ever do to a Gryffindor would be to laugh at them and expose their "chivalry" and "bravery" as the poses and pretensions they really are.
That said, the patent disbelief that affected Phileas Nigellus after he heard of Sirius' death was immensely touching... especially that description of him leaving Dumbledore's office to call for Sirius through portraits in the Black house. That was more affecting and real than any amount of shrieking Harry did-- and was possibly the most human moment any Slytherin has gotten so far in the books. Though as is typical, the Slytherin in question wasn't even a living or real one!
"But dammit, man. He was in my club!"
Heeee! But hey, it's hard not to like a guy who gave you so much business!
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Yes! YES!
Her filthy actions towards Umbridge in OoP were bone-chilling. That's not to say I have any sympathy for Umbridge, just that Hermione's actions were sociopathic.
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Ah, here we go! Here's No_Remorse's excellent essay on the Umbridge-Granger connection.
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some ramble
I watched S&W a lot of times, even taking notes. :D I thought the twist was very well built, and the anvil not overly didactic, quite the opposite. Have you ever seen The Others? It's quite a more general take on the tricks of perspective when dealing with conflict (well, it's called The Other), but I feel the message isn't so different.
So again people kept claiming stuff happened that hadn't happened
I'm not commenting on that, just snickering quietly in my corner. Then I'm going to write my daily rant about how hard JKR sucks if she doesn't let Draco sex-up the Patil twins before letting the terrorists win.
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Re: some ramble
What was great about it was just what you said--O'Connor wasn't suddenly redeemed, it just turned out hey, just because he's wrong about one thing doesn't mean he's wrong about another. When I think of Draco being "redeemed" in canon (using the word reluctantly) that's usually as far as I go. Not that he's suddenly heroic or sweet or whatever--which people seem to want to jump to--just that the accusations toward him completely overshoot the mark. It just seems like that's his main power in canon, that whatever is going on Harry will suspect him even when he's literally got nothing to do with it. And then later on he'll remember things wrong so that he had something to do with it.
Then I'm going to write my daily rant about how hard JKR sucks if she doesn't let Draco sex-up the Patil twins before letting the terrorists win.
LOL! This should be our new motto: Draco Fans Let The Terrorists Win!
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I'd have a much easier time believing that she's doing that deliberately if I hadn't read her interviews. Whether she's going to have a plot twist or not - I really dislike being hit over the head with her "no, don't expect a plot twist, how dare you even suggest such a thing!" talk.
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No, really. The woman is a menace to her own work.
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(To put this in context, I was re-watching the Pretender finale, "Inner Sense," and the imposed Jarod/Zoe relationship just seemed designed as a ship-sinker directed against all the Jarod/Miss Parker shippers. And then I connected that with the Star Trek: Voyager finale, where something similar was done with Chakotay and Seven of Nine... and I wondered... are the creators using their last opportunity to assert their authority over the text because they hate our readings so much, or just because they aren't *their* readings? ... Well, it made sense in my head.)
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I also have a hard time with what I"m shown and what I"m told. I have a tendency now to go with what I'm shown and not really believe anybody anymore, though, but that might be because of a firm distrust of JKR that I'm currently enjoying. :) I like her as a writer, I just think she's deeply flawed and I find those flaws interesting. So I'm more inclined to mistrust characters' POVs, though not in a way that means much. I don't buy much of what Sirius has to say about Snape, but not because I think he's lying. That's just how he remembers it. I'm sure Snape and James were enemies, and that Snape ambushed James sometimes. I kind of doubt he ran much of a gang, though. He just doesn't seem, as a kid or an adult or any glimpse of him we've ever had, the sort with the inclination or ability to run a gang. Snape and James probably hated each other and probably hexed the hell out of each other about equally, at least in their later years. The difference that strikes me is that Snape was miserable and vindictive and attacking a hated enemy, whereas James seemed more like a cheerful teenage sadist who was picking on Snape because he didn't count.
Dumbledore said that Harry and Draco resemble James and Snape, and I kind of still believe Dumbledore's opinion on things... he does have a wider view of who's human. He does believe in Snape and believes in the shreads of humanity left in Tom Riddle. In some ways he seems quite fair. But in other ways he seems to have huge blind spots and this kind of arena might be one of them. He does have favorites.
Perhaps Snape and James achieved a kind of archenemy equality. Or... or at least the kind of pseudo-equality that Harry and Draco have, which is to say none at all. Draco does run a gang, and he is personable enough to want followers. But he never succeeds at anything with Harry. Snape might have really gotten James sometimes (Snape being willing to fight physically, which Draco almost never is), but I doubt he came close to achieving equality.
hmm, a side note, I read an essay recently that mentioned how Draco will never fight physically, even when all three of the main characters will eventually beat on him. He did fight Harry magically, though, which would have had physical results had they not both missed. But for the most part Draco tries to set up elaborate traps for Harry, or teases him and provokes him, or tries to set the school against him. In a way, Draco's gang resembles James's gang more than Harry's does. That whole thing with the werewolf trap is more something Draco would do, both in its cruelty and in its complexity. Even when Harry wants revenge on Draco, he'd never bother with something that intricate.
One of the reasons I find HP so wonderful for fanfic is that there are all these contradictions between what we're told and what we're shown. A few are intentional (misdirection with Snape being the enemy and all that) and I think a few are not. (But I could be wrong--go ahead, give us all false hope about Draco and Slytherin! :) Stories where everything is really well-written and sinks right into you beautifully aren't so good for fanfic. There's nothing to really improve upon. There's nothing to struggle with and sort through. We can argue all day between what we're told and what we're shown, and in the end I think we have to decide for ourselves because the information is not there in JKR's writings. I find that fascinating. I'm really not sure why.
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It's funny, because it's not really that Draco has never fought physically, exactly. Ron jumps on him in PS/SS and they come out pretty even. He might have fought back in OotP except that it seems like he got barrelled into by two people at once and never recovered. He tries to ambush Harry on the train, though I have a hard time imagining that as being a beating because it really does seem more in his nature to either jump out with a wand or threaten him before doing anything to him, when he thinks Harry can't get away (like Voldemort, he suffers from a little James Bond Exposition problem, is my guess) and a train hallway seems awkward for a physical beating. It doesn't seem like him to start a physical fight, though. I think if he's faced with one his response is to get scared and want to run.:-)
But yeah, Harry would really never have to set an elaborate trap for Draco since he always comes to Harry..though wait, I just realize that's not exactly accurate either since the polyjuice potion kind of was that, though it was part of solving a mystery as well. The Trio used to sit and talk about ways to get Malfoy expelled from school back and first year, iirc. But yeah, they've got their eye on other things and I can't see Harry plotting to get Draco, but I can see the opposite--failing, of course.
I also agree that JKR's flaws can just make things more interesting--it's good authors can be that way.:-) There's a difference between doing something badly and being flawed, sometimes. It is really frustrating to think that a bunch of flaws can seem to be leading to something coherent, though, so I try not to look for evidence of what's going to happen, really. When I read something that sounds promising I tell myself it won't.
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I was thinking later, though, that the werewolf plan wasn't really something Draco would do. He'd do something that elaborate, but I can't really see any one of the current kids doing something that dangerous. Snape was right to be really pissed and James was right to call it off. I know that the Hogwarts students risk their lives all the time on random things and so it's hard to say what's fantastical exaggeration and what's actual danger, but that was more than the usual.
sigh. I want the next book to come out. I only started all this speculation after the fifth book and so I've not had the experience of coming up with all these theories and then seeing what the author did next.
Though right now I'm going to be distracted by being sucked down into Lord of the Rings, again, as soon as I get ahold of the extended RotK. :)
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*just pops in to squeee over icon* Sooo cute!
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From: (Anonymous)
Slytherins
JKR's favorite book as a child, she says, and there's massive affectionate borrowings from it in HP. It's my main talisman against the Slytherin situation remaining unchanged, as the whole point of LWH is the healing of a split between 'dark' and 'light' sides of an ancient family, and the correcting of misconceptions and demonizations on both sides. I HIGHLY recommend it.
Sydney
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Re: Slytherins