AbanesRespondsMore

[heidit at netbox.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 17544

I swore I wasn't going to hop onto this discussion, but the best laid 
plans of mice & men....

> -----Original Message-----
> From: rabanesss at yahoo.com [mailto:rabanesss at yahoo.com]
>  ANSWER: _________ I see the point about Gabrielle, but I still 
> do not believe that this in any way changes the fact that Gabrielle 
> was yet another "good" character, whether he knew her or not. 
But we don't know that she is/was. All we know is that she's a little 
blonde girl whose grandmother was a Veela. Up until that point, Fleur 
hadn't been particularly nice to Harry ("leetle boy" that he was) and 
he had no reason to believe that Gabrielle was a "good" character 
(and by that, I *think* you mean that Gabrielle was a good person 
(i.e. not an enemy of his))

> Regarding Harry letting Peter go -- 
> TRUE, this is an act of mercy. HOWEVER, how does Rowling 
> handle this rare good deed??? She ends up having the good 
> deed turn out to be the WORST thing Harry could have ever 
> done!!! Because Peter was allowed to live, Cedric dies in book 4 
> and Voldemort rises. So, here we have a truly good deed 
> causing evil, but in other place many times we have bad deeds 
> (lying, cheating, stealing, breaking wizard laaws) bringing about 
> fun and goodness. If that isn't cockeyed for a fairy tale/ fantasy, 
I 
> don't know what is.
I am really confused here. Given that the story isn't over yet, we 
don't know what the end result of Harry's letting Peter go would've 
been. Obviously, if Harry hadn't let Peter go, then Cedric's and 
Frank Bryce's and Bertha Jorkins' deaths wouldn't've happened, and 
they were obviously evil and horrible things, but I have a feeling 
that if Harry had allowed Sirius & Remus to kill Peter, commentators 
would've condemned him for that - and they would've been right to do 
so.
I also can't see many instances where bad deeds bring about fun and 
goodness. 
If you deem Hagrid's taking Harry to see the dragons "cheating", or 
use the same term to apply to Moody's providing the information to 
Dobby about gillyweed, who then provides it to Harry, then what fun & 
goodness, in the long run, results from that? Cedric dies! I guess 
the potential fun result of this, in future books, would be the 
Weasley's Wizard Wheezes, which will likely be fun, but while one is, 
to some extent, a direct result of the other, all it really shows, in 
a linear sense, is that the repercussions of certain things are 
impossible to predict.
Good, bad, or "natural", every decision creates a million possible 
results - some are out of one's control, others can be manipulated 
and developed - that's what JKR is trying to show, not some 
simplistic "If you do this, then this happens" linearity.