[HPforGrownups] Speculations re: Cho, also Pain & Aesthetics

[Aberforths_Goat]

No: HPFGUIDX 5172

I know this is three days old, but I liked it so much I had to come back to
it as soon as I had some spare time!

> Or perhaps she might approach him, saying, "I
> don't know if you would be willing to talk to me about it " ....
>
> If they could talk about this, it might be a comfort to Cho.  It would
> probably be exquisitely painful for Harry ...

Peg, has anyone ever accused you of sadism? ;-) It sounds like one heck of a
scene, though. Perhaps someone could write it up for us as a very short
fanfic ... (hint, hint)

> And who knows what the conversation might lead to?  (Scenes
> where your hero is in exquisite pain are GREAT for character development.)

Now that was a let down! A conversation with that much burgeoning tension
leads to nothing more exciting than character development? Darn. I coulda
sworn we were about to get some action right on the outer limits of the ...
bother ... which Virtue wasn't it again?.

> The interesting thing about such a conversation is that it would give us a
> really good look at Cho's character for the first time ....
> [A] number of fans seem to dislike
> Cho--this shows up in fan fiction a lot--and I've speculated in past
> messages that it might be because people are emotionally invested in
> Hermione, whereas they don't quite know whether they should be with Cho.

It's the oldest trick in the books. The more they hurt, the more we love
'em. Take Tolstoy: He brings Anna alive by driving her insane, then killing
her. Take Lawrence: I couldn't make heads or tales of Gerald till D.H. made
a frozen corpse of him. Take Homer, take Hemingway, take any of them. Take
Cho: her tears at the end of GoF made her more real to me than ever before.

The question is why! This bridge of tears from their worlds to ours--do we
cross as perps, as victims or what? Is it voyeurism--do we feel the
connection of a wife beater to his sobbing wife? (There are female parallels
too, I think.) Or is it sympathy--do we cross into a sort of litereary
support group, the entrance price being the communal experience of grief? Or
what?

(The questions aren't meant to be provacative; I'm just puzzled.)

Baaaaaa!

Aberforth's Goat (a.k.a. Mike Gray)
http://profiles.yahoo.com/aberforths_goat