Scarred Sirius - Out-of-character - Remus Esq. - Humor - Doomed Hagrid

Fri Feb 1 10:29:53 UTC 2002

No: HPFGUIDX 34444

Cindy wrote:

>you probably see Sirius as a 30-year old man who should have
>developed the maturity to acknowledge his culpability for what he did
>to Snape.

>I don't.  When it comes to maturity and personal growth, Sirius is
>frozen in time, in suspended animation, really.  He's a walking case
>of arrested development.  Still stewing over decade-old grudges,
>showing no more emotional maturity or growth than the day he left
>Hogwarts.  Still smirking about Snape's greasy hair like a pre-
>adolescent, locked in the same old tired battles.

>And why is that?  Well, he's been locked up for 12 years.  It is hard
>to manage much personal growth when one is lying on the floor of a
>cell in solitary confinement.

My thoughts exactly--except that it's much, much worse than 12 years of 
solitary <shudders, trying to imagine such a thing>.  It's been 12 years of 
almost constantly being forced to relive the worst moments of his life, and 
some of them are pretty damn bad.  I have never found a friend's murdered 
body, nor had anyone threaten to set me on fire <never mind Elkins--*I* want 
to hunt the little buggers down one by one>, yet still, being locked into my 
worst moments of loss, fear, guilt and despair is one of the worst tortures 
I can think of.  No one who had just gone through that is likely to be very 
forgiving or self-reflective.

So watch out for those Lestranges etc. when they get out of Azkaban.

Elkins wrote:

>Tabouli's identification is canonically sanctioned
>(presumably she does not feel that Rowling *ever* gets
>Hermione "wrong" -- how could she?

Just to digress, I do think authors can get a character wrong.  They are 
writing along, creating a very believable character, and then they slip and 
make the character do something that just rings false.  Characters can and 
should change, they can and should be complex, they can and should say 
things that are a bit unexpected coming from them, but sometimes an author 
ignores who the character is--typically it's in comedy, when someone says 
something out of character to achieve a joke--and that's an o.o.c. moment.  
Early Doonesbury comes to mind; Trudeau occasionally made B.D. say something 
way smarter than he was capable of in order to put the punch line in his 
mouth.  I'm a fan of character-based humor, so these things rankle.  I can't 
think of an example from HP because JKR is just really good at this stuff.  
She creates cartoonish characters at times, but so far no inconsistent ones 
that I can think of.

Cindy wrote:

>Cindy (confident that Lupin could find paid work as a lawyer)

What a mean thing to say about our favorite guy.  <bg>  (Notice that my 
warning about bewaring of generalizations does not apply to lawyer jokes.)

Gwen wrote:

>2. One-upmanship. This can slip into low comedy pretty quickly, >especially
>as insults become less about wit and more about "Yo' Mamma."

Cultural note:  "Yo' Mamma" is the shorthand for "the dozens," an 
African-American form of one-upmanship wordplay that can be very witty 
indeed.  Schoolkids might not get past uncreative insults, but insults 
beginning with "Oh yeah?  Well, YOUR Mamma is so fat . . . " and ending with 
something wildly improbable and humorous have a long and deservedly honored 
tradition.  JM2K.

I'm not sure where the character-based humor I was referring to above fits 
onto this list.  E.g., one of my favorite lines is "'Someone attacking you, 
Harry?' Seamus asked sleepily."  At the risk of dissecting the frog:  that 
line is funny not because of any wordplay or humorous physical situation, 
but because of an entire context of history and character; Harry gets 
attacked so often that his roommates can't really get too worried about it.

And I'd love to know where you'd categorize the sorts of verbal humor in 
which JKR is very adept; they usually get classified as some kind of irony, 
e.g. "Just then, Neville caused a slight diversion by turning into a large 
canary" (that's physical humor, but it's the "slight diversion" phrasing 
that makes me LOL) and "Professor Trelawney kept predicting Harry's death, 
which he found extremely annoying."

uncmark wrote:

>I didn't see the A&E interview, but did hear several JKR interviews
where she said Hagrid would be around all 7 books

Please cite?  Aberforth's Goat's site doesn't turn up anything like this.

Amy Z

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The full list of these fouls, however, has never
been made available to the wizarding public.  It
is the Department's view that witches and wizards
who see the list 'might get ideas'.
                      -Quidditch Through the Ages
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