Characters you hate

[ssk7882 <skelkins@attbi.com>]

No: HPFGUIDX 51242

Derannimer asked:

> Um. . . how are we defining "hate" here? 

An excellent question.  

What Does It Mean To "Hate" A Character? <g>

My answer to "what characters do you hate" is utterly dependent on 
what definition of "hating" people are asking about.

> Look, here's the thing. There are *plenty* of characters whose 
> company I would not especially enjoy were I to meet them in real 
> life. But I enjoy *reading* probably every single character in the 
> books. And I've read people on this thread saying things that give 
> me the impression that some people don't even like to *read* 
> certain characters. 

Well, a lot of the time people really *don't* like to read certain
characters.  Sometimes characters just don't work for you: you don't 
enjoy their scenes, you don't enjoy their shticks, and then you end 
up resenting them for taking up "page time" that could have been 
spent on something else.

> But a lot of people here are saying that one character or another 
> really *irritates* them; which I am taking to mean that they really 
> don't enjoy reading them. So is this true? 

Oh, absolutely!

I, for example, simply cannot bear the Dursleys.  The Dursley 
sequences are absolutely my least favorite thing about the books.  I 
deeply resent the fact that they open each novel, thus forcing me to 
suffer through their one-to-three chapters before I can get on to the 
enjoyable stuff. When they do things like locking Harry in his room, 
then that is a Good Thing, as far as I'm concerned, because it means 
that I'll probably have to read *less* of them than I would if Harry 
were interacting with them more directly.  And I can never wait for 
Harry to slip free of their clutches, not so much because I'm rooting 
for him as because I just want to be able to stop *reading* them 
already!

Why do I dislike the Dursleys so much?  Oh, I don't know.  A number 
of reasons.  They're more broadly caricatured than suits my personal
tastes, for one thing.  They're far more cartoonishly depicted than 
even the most grotesque of the Hogwarts characters (Trelawney, for 
example), which means that they also always seem strangely at odds 
with the more subtle shadings of the rest of the fictive world to me. 
They don't seem to...*fit,* somehow.  They feel incongruous.

They also strike me as somewhat derivative.  They seem very Roald 
Dahl to me, and while I like Roald Dahl just fine when Roald Dahl 
does Roald Dahl, I don't like it nearly so much when JKR tries to do 
Roald Dahl.  If you get my drift.

The humour of their sequences also tends to be very broad, slapstick 
"comeuppance" humour, which really isn't a type of comedy that I 
enjoy. Dudley comes in for a lot of "fat humour" as well, which 
similarly isn't a form of comedy that I enjoy.

Did I leave anything out?  

No.  No, I think that's about it.

Oh.  And I also find them a bit irritating as our textual 
representatives of all things "Muggle."  As silly as this may sound, 
sometimes that does sort of offend me.  I take it personally.  ("Over-
engage with the text much, Elkins?")

This is a different issue, though, than the questions of which 
characters I think that I would most dislike in real *life,* or which 
characters instill in me the greatest sense of moral disapproval, or 
which characters make me feel the most angry with them, or which 
characters I find the least sympathetically portrayed, or which 
characters I secretly (or not so secretly) want to see evil things 
happen to.

Quite a few of the characters who would fulfill the above criteria 
also qualify as the characters I most *like* to read about.


Elkins