Average Harry?

[Amy Z]

No: HPFGUIDX 18901

This and all quotes are from Ebony, the eloquent, the erudite, the (yes) 
extraordinary.

>Why would Riddle be afraid of an average wizard?

Once again, I don't think Harry is average, and I haven't heard from anyone 
who does.  Just normal, as in plain old human, with lots of talents, 
including some very rare ones, but nothing that places him beyond the range 
of human ability.  I realize the line is fuzzy, but it's important.

Riddle is afraid of him as opposed to, say, Ron Weasley, because his adult 
self tried to kill Harry Potter, not Ron Weasley, and failed.  Being an 
intelligent young diary entry, he is made nervous by this fact.

>So what you're saying is that the perception that There's Something Special
>About Harry will protect him?

Actually, I forgot to say one bit:  I don't think we can draw any 
conclusions about Harry's vulnerability or lack thereof by the fact (or 
hope) that Harry needs to be safe from assassins after Book 7.  Okay, there 
will still be people who hate him after the story ends.  This is true of a 
lot of heroes, and I don't close the book thinking, "But what if a bitter 
lackey-of-villain comes after him and gets him?"  Maybe I ought to.  I do 
think it's unlikely that any leftover Death Eaters are going to risk their 
necks to kill Harry once their master is gone, but even though it's 
possible, I'm not going to lose sleep over it.

To skip to the end of your post, we agree that evil ebbs and flows, 
sometimes personified by a particularly strong and evil person (e.g. Hitler, 
Stalin, Amin in our own world), and good and brave people rise up to 
struggle against it (and him/her).  So, to look at a real-life example:  
Hitler is dead, and Nazism very weakened, but it isn't gone.  The Holocaust 
is over, but there are still stragglers, inspired by their dead master, 
whose passion is to murder "the enemies of the Third Reich."  There aren't 
tidy endings in real life, and it's okay with me if Harry is not safe and 
happy forever when Book 7 comes to a close.

Amy: >For my part, I don't for a moment think that Harry can't be hurt by
>Voldemort.  <snip>

Ebony: >I totally agree with this, and even tried to start a thread on it 
some time
>back (January?)... "how could Voldemort go about killing Harry?"  There 
>were
>no takers.  I suppose no one wanted to talk about Harry head.

Yes, I can see why.  It made me feel a bit queasy just writing the bit about 
V cutting his throat.  Ugh, I did it again.

>I don't believe in luck, but for the purpose of the discussion, let's just
>say that luck, the Sacrifice, and strength of character all played a role 
>in
>Harry's protection in the past and continuing protection.  This threefold
>combination still makes him special... how many other kids fall into this
>category?

Again, maybe we're only disagreeing on this point (or rather, appear to be) 
because we're talking at cross purposes.  I do think Harry is special.  
Don't we all?

The Everyman myth as I understand it is not incompatible with "special," 
"gifted," even "unusual."  Harry is all those things.  I'm not sure if he's 
Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan rolled into one, but I agree with Jim that 
even if he is, he's still not superhuman (though when I've seen Jordan play, 
I have wondered . . .).

>After reading this, I finally understood why I'm in the less popular camp.
>It goes beyond Harry Potter... it's a way of seeing life, I think.
>
>My personal worldview is that everything that happens, everything that ever
>is, was, or will be is by intelligent design.

Yes, you're right--this is where we diverge.  I don't know if it puts you in 
the less popular camp, though, at least out in the world beyond HP.  Most 
people I know believe some version of "everything happens for a reason."

>I wonder what role prophecy will play in future books.  There will be a
>role, if only a comic one.  JKR seems to poke fun of it through the guise 
>of
>Trelawney.  Yet... there are prophecies, and then there are *prophecies*.  
>I
>hope she doesn't intend to toss the baby out with the bathwater.

I actually don't think she does.  In the "HP and the Bible" thread recently, 
several people argued that JKR thinks divination is a lot of hooey.  I'm 
sorry to give any ammunition to the "HP is leading us all into SATAN 
WORSHIP" camp, but I disagree; I think that at the very least, the jury's 
still out, and I told Richard Abanes so in an offlist post.  Dumbledore says 
that true Seers and prophecies are very rare, but he doesn't say they're 
unheard-of; I think that he, and by extension JKR, probably does believe in 
them.  (Or maybe she just likes them because they're such a delicious plot 
device, especially if one is never sure if the person speaking is Trelawney 
the Tired Old Fraud or Trelawney the True Seer.)

BTW, one doesn't have to believe that the events of life are by intelligent 
design to believe that true prophecy is possible.  I believe (agnostically, 
to be sure--I'm not so arrogant as to imagine that I =know=) that events are 
contingent:  each the product of so many other events, some of which are 
random, that it is all but impossible to predict far into the future.  But 
rare people with the gift of the right kind of perception may be able to see 
likely outcomes.  They'll never be 100% right, but there are patterns to 
existence, and some people perceive them better than others, the way some 
people can look at a chessboard and see 5 moves ahead.  Most of us have to 
make our decisions based on experience, common sense, and gut-level decency, 
so that we save the cringing Pettigrew (I hope) even though we can't 
possibly know whether it will lead to good or evil in the long run.

>no one in the Special!Harry camp thinks that the poor kid's the Second 
>Coming, now.

Oh, good!  He has quite enough on his shoulders, don't you think?  <vbg>

Both of us take positions solidly between "Harry's just like everyone else" 
and "Harry's the Second Coming."  I just sit closer to the former and you 
closer to the latter.

>Rather, the art of story is about conflict, about struggle, about change 
>and upheaval and all sorts
>of things.
>
>Now, it can be argued that these sorts of things happen to ordinary people
>all the time.  But when ordinary people are the protagonists of the story,
>the narrative focuses on the factors causing the upheaval (circumstances,
>the environment, etc.) rather than the people themselves.

I'm having trouble thinking about the protagonists of some of my favorite 
works of fiction and sorting out whether they are ordinary or extraordinary, 
or whether the key factors are internal or external to them.  Things are 
such a mixture, in fiction as in real life.  But one comes to mind who is a 
prototype for the best in modern fiction, fantasy, and scifi, in my view.  
Sorry, all of you JRRT unenthusiasts, but it's Frodo Baggins.  Is he the 
ordinary or the extraordinary?  Both.  Does the drama in his story come from 
external events or internal qualities?  Both.  There's this magic Ring and a 
world war on and all that, but the most gripping chapters of the drama, for 
me, are the ones about Frodo's internal struggles, which are responses to 
these grand events but also responses to himself.  The conflict and change 
he experiences has as much to do with his own character (ordinary though it 
is) as with the events that are shaking his world.  He has no X-ray vision 
or superhuman strength to move the story along, but he does have remarkable 
integrity, and seeing it under fire =from his own other qualities= (not just 
from the Eye) makes for thrilling reading.

>The characters we remember are the ones with larger-than-life characters.
>The characters who stand out in our minds for some reason.  Not just 
>because
>of what happened to them, but because of *who they are*.

I'm on board with your last two sentences, but not with the first.  Shevek 
of Anarres (protagonist of Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed) will never stop 
haunting my mind, because of who he is more than because of what happens in 
his world (which in many ways is nothing extraordinary at all--just the 
social and political wranglings of humans everywhere).  But it's not because 
he has any superhuman qualities or is in any way larger-than-life, even 
though he is a brilliant, groundbreaking physicist.  Quite the contrary.  
It's because I feel like I have gotten inside his skin the way I do only 
with my closest friends.  He is a remarkable person, like Harry, but it is 
the intimacy of knowing him so well that makes him live on in my mind--which 
is true of Harry as well.  "Larger-than-life" interferes with this for me.  
The heroes who stay with me for years and years are the ones who are 
life-sized.  Perhaps we're just defining "larger-than-life" differently?

I am in awe of Harry in lots of ways--just for a start, his physical courage 
puts me to shame--but I think he and I are the same size, metaphorically 
speaking.  He's not out of reach.  I think Amber drew the distinction pretty 
well.  So far JKR has kept Harry very down-to-earth and believable, partly 
through the time-honored method (beloved by comic book authors) of giving 
him metaphorical weaknesses such as untidy hair and bad eyesight, and partly 
by making him a flawed person.

Amy Z

-----------------------------------------
"This is the weirdest thing we've ever
done," Harry said fervently.
       --HP and the Prisoner of Azkaban
-----------------------------------------
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