Pretentious Post on Plot and Personalities

[foudebassan]

There is much lamentation that a certain character doesn't behave in DH as one could have expected based on the previous books, hence some harsh criticism against JKR.

Leaving aside the fact that she provided us with an universe we all love to some extend even though she never said it was anything else than a children's series, I can't quite agree with that.

IMHO, there are two approaches to writing.

One is the Iliad. You dream up some situation, no matter how artificial, that brings characters together, and let it evolve by itself from there. They love, they fight, they live, they die, they grieve, all the panel of human emotion is etched out eventually in every single one of them, there are no good and bad people any more, just Humans Hector and Andromache's parting on the remparts of Troy in the end is the exact echo of Penelope and Ulysses' farewell in the beginning, for instance - and nothing really happens. It can be gut-wrenchingly beautiful and true, but since nothing happens it also can be pretty boring, like some angsty lyric poems I shan't name.

The second is the Odyssey. You pick out situations and force them against the characters. They won't have much space for human development save becoming tougher each time they've suffered another of the peripeties. They become archetypal - Penelope standing for faithful and quiet love, Circe for passionate and devastating love, Laerte for the Past, Anticlea for sorrow, Telemache for the Future, Nausicaa for Hope, the pretendants and the shipmates for Humanity in all its mediocrity, and Ulysses himself for Humanity in all its might. They don't matter that much, it's the situation that counts, the action, the rebounds, the danger, the crafty solutions. It keeps you awake and eager to know how it all ends, but it can turn out to be a bit shallow, like many whodunits.

I think HP is all about the second approach. The characters are nothing, they represent things. They don't live, they fulfill their destiny; they don't feel, they express a part of the bigger picture. Harry is the hero, The hero, there can only be one, he is at the centre of all the books, things can only happen through him, he is, like Ulysses, the link between the reader and the story. He managed to survive all six of the previous books, so he's become stronger and stronger. The other characters don't have to evolve that way; they don't have to change at all. They're the setting against which things take place; they represent something. Hermione and Ron are two facets of the same friendship (which is why they belong together); Ginny is love, the other Weasleys are the family substitute, etc. Sirius is a better man than Snape because his link to Harry is a good deal stronger, not because of their respective attributes (which don't matter all that much).

Now fanfiction does not belong to the same realm as the series. It is a hobby we share to please ourselves. We can write another epic if we so choose, but we can also allow the characters to wallow in emotion. We can make them feel and fuck and behave like real people, not like symbols. It's fun. But it doesn't make the books stupid or, God forbid, wrong.


ETA: spoilers in the comments

Comments

[deeble.livejournal.com]

I think it's the sense that there is extra depth to the series -- that we can have both action and true emotion -- that makes Deathly Hallows such a letdown. (Well, at least to me.) If you're not expecting something you don't get, then you're not disappointed, you know?

[foudebassan.livejournal.com]

Did you really expect something more? What exactly?

[catherinecookmn.livejournal.com]

Spoilers here, so I'm white-fonting:

I think that for a lot of people, there's a bit of a contradiction -- or an apparent one -- between her use of that framework and then her having the characters within it behave in ways we don't associate with that framework. In the heroic framework, heroes usually behave -- or are depicted as -- without flaws such as bad tempers or petty jealousy or insecurity.

In DH, the characters behave about 90% of the time as people with massive feet of clay, especially those we've come to view as saintly, in the sort of hyper-realistic and grim fashion associated with certain types of gritty modern fiction. But they operate within the black-and-white heroic framework, where there is no character growth, only toughening. This sets up the contradiction, or rather the dissonance, that many people apparently feel.

And boy, do they feel it. And not just because Snape got zapped, either -- though really, the people who have the most problems with DH tend to be the ones who are the most fervent Snape fans. (Interesting, how few people clamor for Lupin's revival. Yet lots of folks -- myself included -- were hit hard by Snape's demise, to the point that we started writing fanfic to either give him a nice afterlife or keep him from dying in the first place.)

[deeble.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's it exactly. I was very dissatisfied with the way Rowling chose to resolve, for instance, the thematic issues of Slytherin House and of the Good Side using the tactics of Evil ("I see what Bellatrix meant, you need to really mean it"? WTF?).

Of course she couldn't resolve everything to everyone's satisfaction. But the morals these literary choices suggest leave a bad taste in my mouth.

[foudebassan.livejournal.com]

She probably realised that and tried to correct it by having ASP worry about being sorted in Slytherin?

[deeble.livejournal.com]

I think that's where she was going with that, but she ruined it for me by having Harry finish up by saying, in essence, "But listen, you can always go to a BETTER house by asking the Hat nicely." I realize this might seem an unfair reading -- Harry is sharing with his son that he very nearly ended up in Slytherin -- but that's the way it immediately struck me.

I'm not bitter about the various deaths, I'm really not: They were largely expected. It's the thematic choices that trouble me.

[foudebassan.livejournal.com]

I don't know if we wouldn't read this differently if we were children - aren't we too used to thinking of Slytherin in association with "sexy"?

[deeble.livejournal.com]

I'm sure we would read it differently. But I'm not in the "Slytherins are sexy" camp: I thought they were thematically interesting, and I was under the impression that Rowling saw them that way too.

Alas, the corrosive power of high expectations.

[catherinecookmn.livejournal.com]

To make the magic white font, type the following, except replace use the chevrons instead of the [] keys:

[font color=white]text to be white-fonted[/font color]

Here's how it works:

I think that if Harry had said "Slytherin is a perfectly good House; I almost went there myself, and one of your godfathers is a Slytherin", it would have felt better to me. Instead, it was "they should be lucky to have you". (To which Portrait-Snape has, in this fanfic, the riposte we would expect.

[foudebassan.livejournal.com]

Oh that's neat.

*tries*

Yeah, Harry stays a bit clueless until the very end. He's true to himself that way...

I don't know how to white-font, so here be spoilers in plain view

[foudebassan.livejournal.com]

I didn't see it that way.

*thinks*

I actually like the epic story applied to normal characters. To me, it's part and parcel of the wizarding world - just like there is magic among us Muggles without our knowing it, there can be true heroism in a way that does not contradict our individual faults.

For the feet of clay - Albus might be dead, but his shadow is still taller than Harry's. To vanquish Voldemort where Dumbledore has failed, he needs to rise higher than his mentor; since she chose not to give him teh superpowahs, she had to make a lesser man of the Headmaster... can't that be read in a symbolic light?