TBAY (Mild): Slytherin and the Reader -- Sympathy for the Devil vs SYCOPHANTS

[ssk7882 <skelkins@attbi.com>]

No: HPFGUIDX 51448

Eileen wrote a terrific essay on reader sympathy for the
Slyths, to which I have only a few things to add.

Eileen:

> Or at least I think so. There is also that little matter of 
> a sneaking liking for House Slytherin. 

> In many people, it's a little more than sneaking. And
> this seems to be one of the issues that upsets people
> most when it comes to debates about "proper"intrepretations 
> of canon. 

If the author did not in fact want readers to feel a sneaking 
affection for House Slytherin, then she should have done a number of 
things differently.  She should be letting them win more often.  She 
should also be allowing them to do permanent damage to the 
protagonists without recourse to their adult allies.  She should have 
given their representatives in the text, chiefly Draco Malfoy,
some *real* form of advantage over our heroes, one that is not easily 
or immediately trumped by Harry and his allies.  And she should not 
have depicted the Slyth kids as, on the whole, not only nasty, but 
also stupid, incompetent, incapable of tactics *and* (for the most 
part) butt-ugly.

She should also have handled Snape's entire PoA plotline *completely* 
differently.

Hell.  She shouldn't have written Snape at all.

Now, interestingly enough, JKR does not seem to be a dolt when it 
comes to other aspects of story-telling.  She does know how to keep 
the reader from sympathizing too much with her secondary villains.  
Quirrell, Lockhart, and Barty Jr. are not sympathetically portrayed 
characters.  A few weirdos, like myself, do indeed feel affection for 
these guys (although even I can never muster much of anything but 
irritation with Lockhart), but it's very much a minority reader 
response.

Sympathy for the Slytherins, on the other hand, is a very common 
reader response.  It's hard to avoid the suspicion that the author 
herself is not altogether uncool with that.  If she had wanted to 
combat it, then she could have.  She has shown elsewhere in the 
series that she knows how it is done.  That she is not doing it in 
regard to the Slyths indicates to my mind that for whatever reason, 
the author doesn't really want to rule it out as a reader response.


Eileen:
 
> But hark, what is it Elkins is saying?
>
> >After all, it often turns out that other people 
> >are seeing things in the books that I find 
> >rewarding as well, once I'm willing to give them 
> >a try. 
> >
> >Or not. Sometimes when you try a new food, after 
> >all, it really *does* taste every bit as disgusting 
> >as you thought it would. That happens too --
> >especially to me. I'm a pretty picky eater. ;-)
>
> Is that C.R.A.B.C.U.S.T.A.R.D. you're talking about,
> Elkins?

Heh.  No, actually, you know, it wasn't?  I was using the same 
analogy, more or less, but your CRABCUSTARD hadn't even crossed my 
mind.

Besides, I *did* muster up some canon for that Dead Sexy Crouch Sr. 
of yours, didn't I?

No.  For reasons of politeness, I hadn't planned on mentioning 
precisely which readings of the text I've given the good ol' college 
try, but then rejected on the grounds that I find them unrewarding.  
There have been some, though: readings which are perfectly coherent 
and consistent, and which seem just as canonically plausible or 
canonically defensible to me as the ones which I prefer, but which I 
reject because their adoption does absolutely nothing for me in terms 
of leaving me with a *rewarding* vision of the series.

To reject someone's reading is, of course, nothing personal.  But it 
did seem to me that given that the analogy I chose was "disgusting" 
food, it might have been a bit harsh to give examples.  Really, I 
don't often find other people's readings of the text *disgusting.*  
Unpalatable, perhaps. . . . but not disgusting.  

And when I *do* find them disgusting, I try not to say so.  Not 
outside of Theory Bay, at any rate, where the standards of discourse 
are slightly different.  ("Dead Sexy Crouch Sr?  Ewwwwwww!  
Yuk! ::violent retching sounds::  You must be totally *Bent* to 
suggest such a thing!  What do you have, some sort of unresolved 
*Oedipal* issues or something?" <g>)    


Scott Northup wrote:

> PS A lot of the posts defending Snape (and Draco) 
> over the past few days have piqued my curiosity.
> Snape-defenders: do you stick up for Wormtongue
> and other slimy folks in literature in movies? Do 
> you say to your friends "Grima was a good guy! He 
> just hung around with the wrong crowd!"

Eileen wrote:

> Oh most definitely? Did you not know, Scott, that some
> of us listies practice a private devotion to St. Grima
> Wormtongue, patron of sycophants? The shrine is in the
> Garden of Good and Evil. Candles can be purchased at
> the front desk of the Canon Museum. 


::lights candle to Blessed Grima Wormtongue, the Patron Saint 
of SYCOPHANTS::

SYCOPHANTS = Society for Yes-men, Cowards, Ostriches, Passive-
Aggressives, Hysterics, Abject Neurotics and Toadying Sycophants.

Yes, Scott.  It's true.  Some of us -- a few, true, but a *happy* 
few -- do make it our practice, nay, even consider it our solemn 
*duty,* to defend those characters who receive, on the whole, less 
reader sympathy than any others: the cowards, the grovellers, the 
minions, the toadies, the secondary villains who don't even get snappy
lines of sadistic dialogue, who don't even have good *dress sense.*  

Those characters are always my favorites.  They always have been, 
ever since I was very small.  Not the *cute* versions, mind you.  
Ugh, no!  Not the Gurgis and the Dobbys and the like.  I can't bear 
Gurgis, those nasty little SYCOPHANTS wannabes.

No, I liked the *real* SYCOPHANTS, the *sincere* ones, the ones who 
had nothing in the least bit admirable or noble about them.  I would 
sometimes forgive them if they found redemption in death.  
*Sometimes.*  But I much preferred they not.  

I like minions.  I like Grimas and Smeagols, and all of those 
unfortunate Imperial officers in the Star Wars movies too, the ones 
who were always getting offed.  I like the DEs in the graveyard.  

I am particularly partial to Avery.

Hey, what can I say?  I just dig those characters.  Some people 
always like the villains, but me?  Nah.  I always like the villains' 
*minions* best of all.

I think, though, that you'd best be careful implying that Snape 
really fits into the same category -- the Snapefans will be after you 
in a heartbeat.  Seriously, Snape really doesn't seem to me to 
partake of the same appeal at all.  For one thing, the dude is 
seriously heroic in his own way, which is the one thing that you 
absolutely *cannot* say about SYCOPHANTS.  In fact, a profound lack 
of heroism is the unifying characteristic of SYCOPHANTS.  Snape, with
his redemption subplot, his past spying career, and his sense of 
integrity, doesn't fit the same mold at all.  He's a completely 
different type of character, IMO.

The dynamic of reader response that fuels SYCOPHANTS is, though, one 
that I think has quite a lot of bearing on the question of Sympathy 
For the Devil and related phenomena.


Eileen:

> The reason I don't think that Sympathy for the Devil is exactly 
> the same thing as rooting for the underdog is that you can often 
> be rooting for the underdog without feeling much for the character. 

There's another distinction that can come into play here as well, and 
I'm not quite sure what to call it.  I tend to think of it as the 
difference between "Sympathy For The Devil" and the operative dynamic 
of SYCOPHANTS.

I think of Sympathy For the Devil as "rooting" based purely in the 
readers' understanding of how the meta-text defines the 
ultimate "winners" and "losers" of the piece.  We understand that the 
villains are the designated losers, and we therefore feel inclined to 
pump for them.  Sympathy for the Devil leads people to sympathize 
with characters like Voldemort.  Darth Vader.  Milton's Satan.  Guys 
with *flair.*

There's another type of "rooting for the underdog" dynamic, though, 
which applies less to those characters one perceives as the 
designated losers in "game terms" as it does to the designated losers 
in terms of authorial portrayal.  This is the dynamic that tends to 
lead to reader sympathy for characters like Peter Pettigrew, 
Quirrell, Grima Wormtongue.  Guys who don't even have *style* to 
sustain them.

<Quoting myself here, from a SYCOPHANTS post back in March>

Part of the reason for this, I suppose, is pure sympathy for the 
underdog. Head Villains very rarely win in the end, it's true, but 
at least until they finally get what's coming to them, they *do* get 
to be powerful. (The story wouldn't be very satisfying if they 
didn't.) They may be doomed to failure within the wider scope of the 
narrative, but until the end of the story, they get to kill and bully 
and torment and otherwise lord it over everyone who crosses their 
path. And because it's genre convention that proper villains ought 
to be charismatic, they often get really snappy dialogue, as well.

Their minions, on the other hand, don't even get that much. Not only 
are they doomed to failure, they're also subject people even while 
their own side is winning. And not only that, but even the authorial 
voice often doesn't seem to care for them! If they're not cannon 
fodder, pure and simple, then they're secondary villains that the 
reader is supposed to roundly despise: they hardly ever get any cool 
lines of dialogue, they rarely have a decent dress sense, they're 
almost never good-looking, and their dignity is stripped from them as 
a matter of course. Minions just get no respect or sympathy from 
anyone: they're despised by their enemies and their evil overlords 
alike. They're losers, through and through.

<end excerpt>

I do view these as slightly different 'rooting for the underdog'
dynamics.

Characters like Draco Malfoy and the other Slyth students, of course, 
often get to partake of *both,* because while they *are* being 
presented to the reader as antagonists proper (rather than just as 
minions, or SYCOPHANTS), they are also just...

Well...

Oh, well.  You know.  They're just *ever* so lame!

(See message #39083)

----------------

Eileen also brought up reader self-insertion:

> The question here is "How would I as someone who is both cunning 
> and ambitious fit into Hogwarts?"
>
> If you see yourself as a Slytherin, you're going to sympathize with 
> the Slytherins, even if JKR doesn't seem entirely crazy about them. 

And again, if JKR didn't anticipate this, then she was a fool.

It's often occurred to me, you know, that one of the reasons that 
these books are probably so *very* popular is that they have a 
personality test built right into the narrative?

Seriously.  People *love* personality tests.  People always claim to 
hate being categorized...but they don't.  They really don't.  They 
eat it up.  They *love* being categorized.  They like nothing better 
than to be put in little boxes, and then telling other people which 
little box *they* belong in, and then getting to make assumptions 
about other people based on which little box those other people fit 
in, or even which little box they *think* that someone else might 
properly fit in.  They love astrology, and they love Myers-Brigg, and 
they love Enneagrams, and they love that 'Celestine Prophecy' stuff, 
and in Japan, a lot of people even believe that *blood type,* of all 
the wacky things, is a reliable indicator of personality!  Books
that purport to turn readers on to some new and even *better* way
to categorize them become best-sellers.  "What sort of X are you?" 
quizzes sell magazines.  People flock to websites in droves to take 
little tests that will tell them *what they are.*  

I mean, people really do just love that stuff.  I imagine that it 
largely derives from a terror of anonymity, a fear of having no 
identity, of not being *known.*  At least if you can give people some 
handle to hook you on, you figure that they might have *some* chance 
of distinguishing you from every one of the other nameless lumps of 
clay littering up the face of the planet.  You have to share your 
category with a whole bunch of other people, true, but hey.  It's
better than nothing, right?

Or maybe not.  

But anyway, for whatever reason, people really do enjoy systems of 
interpersonal categorization.  And the HP books have one as a part of 
the narrative *itself.*  

You may laugh when I say this, but I'm not joking.  I truly do 
believe that this is one of the factors contributing to this series' 
mass popular appeal.

But here's the thing.  If part of the appeal of the books is the 
built-in personality test, then you *cannot* expect for House 
Slytherin to somehow get exempted from the dynamic simply on the 
basis of its members being the designated enemy.  It just doesn't 
work that way.  It would be like inventing sun signs as a part of 
your novel, and then telling your readers that Scorpios are Evil.  It 
just doesn't work.  If people are being drawn to the books in part 
because they find the whole Sorting thing so darned appealing, then 
some people *are* going to find themselves in sympathy with House 
Slytherin.  It's just unavoidable.

So again.  If JKR didn't actually want some of her readers to find
themselves in sympathy with House Slytherin, then she's only got 
herself to blame.

Bad Move JKR, indeed!


Eileen:

> If you see yourself as a Slytherin, you're going to
> sympathize with the Slytherins, even if JKR doesn't
> seem entirely crazy about them. 

Yeah.  Although, you know, this can cut both ways.  I myself happen
to have the opposite problem with House Slytherin.  No offense at all 
intended to Eileen's brother, or to any of our many ambitious, 
cunning, ruthless, power-minded listmembers (all of whom are, I am 
sure, perfectly lovely people), but when *I* read the Slytherin House 
descriptors, you know what my immediate emotional response was?

"Oh lord, *no!*  She means people like my *family!*"

As it happens, you see, I *really* don't get on too well with the 
rest of my family.  

The affective fallacy is a double-edged sword.  ;-)

This is also, however, largely why I always find myself feeling so 
*very* uncomfortable by the "like father, like son" sentiments 
expressed by the series.  For heaven's sake, don't *any* apples fall 
far from the tree in the Potterverse?  

It annoys me, it does, and while I'd like to think that my annoyance 
is purely philosophical and ethical, deep down inside, I know better.

----------

Eileen also mentioned the possibility that for some readers, 
Cheering the Slyths is just a roundabout way of Dissing the
Gryffs.

Eileen:

> And, if you have unresolved issues with Oliver Wood, as I do, you 
> just might start cheering on Marcus Flint, as I ended up doing. And 
> that's helped on by the fact that we don't know anything about 
> Flint. 

You really must tell us about your...*issues* with Wood sometime, you 
know, Eileen.  You really must.  Is there some unpleasantly cliquish 
RL jock lurking around somewhere behind that antipathy?  

'Cause I have to say, Oliver Wood was such a flat-liner for me that I 
didn't even have a mental image of his physical *appearance* until I 
was led to one by, er, fanfic contamination.  And that's really 
unusual for me.  I tend to visualize things quite vividly while 
reading fiction.  Oliver Wood, though?  Nah.  He was just a blank 
slate in my mind.

Good old Marcus Flint, on the other hand, I visualized quite 
clearly.  So *strange,* how that works!


> Eileen, who is considering writing an overview of the portrayal 
> of Slytherin in fanfiction, and how it relates to reader uneasiness 
> with the canon portrayals, but thinks that might be a little too
> ambitious

Too ambitious?  For a Slytherin sympathizer like you?  Nonsense!

Seriously.  I'd love to read this.  Please write it.


Elkins