One for Sorrow

roxannelinton made the mistake of pointing me to an Elkins essay on HP4GU. Naturally this got me stuck reading other essays because they were all so good. One in particular was close to my heart, about *why* exactly we like the characters that we do, and it brought up the fact that we usually naturally associate fictional types with people we know in real life, and our reactions to the RL people naturally influence that. I was going to think about the characters I like and think about who they remind me of (Snape totally reminds me of the teachers in school that were feared and hated but *I* always wound up getting along with and liking a great deal), but in the course of thinking about this I wound up having a big personal revelation about Draco and me. It's long because it's about ME ME ME.

( Naturally I had to share it. )

ETA: Here's the original essay. It's a great read, and may make this more coherent. She actually lays it out much better than I do here, as I seem to have sometimes put across the exact opposite idea than I intended in this post! The point is, there are reasons we just plain like characters, and that probably often leads us to cut them slack where we might not with others. I know very well that I *like* this character, and am wondering maybe why. It's not a defense of why this character is likable or should be liked by others.