What's right and wrong with OOP; a prediction (woof!)

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 70966

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "barbara_mbowen" 
<Barbara_Bowen at h...> wrote:

> And in OOP, I think she did drop a few.  Dumbledore's behavior 
> towards Harry is inexplicable.  Unless DD has become almost 
> paranoically secretive (possible, given his age and history, but 
> she didn't show it), there was no reason not to let Sirius or 
Mad-Eye or SOMEONE tell the poor kid what they were all afraid 
of.  

Telling. Harry. Is. Telling. Voldemort. Dumbledore did *not* want 
Voldemort to know what he, Dumbledore, feared Voldemort 
could do. Even if Dumbledore had a secure means of 
communication, the information would not have been safe from 
the Voldemort-Harry mind link until Harry had learned 
Occlumency.  Once the prophesy is destroyed and Harry 
discovers another means of banishing Voldemort from his mind,  
the situation changes.

What Dumbledore should have done was teach Harry 
Occlumency long before Voldemort returned to power. But Harry 
was horrified at the idea that part of Voldemort was inside him, 
and Dumbledore couldn't bear having to make Harry deal with it.

  It was also 
> a mistake, I think, to kill off Sirius.  You don't kill off
interesting 
> characters two books from the end.  However you felt about 
him,  Sirius was a complicated and very interesting character.  In 
order  to doom him like she did, she had to change his 
personality,and t just didn't work for me.  The authors heavy hand 
was only too obvious; first you make him suffer, then diminish 
him, then kill  him off.  Not fair to character, not fair to
readers.<<

Sirius was never okay. But all we know is how it feels to be Harry. 
For one brief moment in GoF, Harry glommed onto his godfather 
and all was right with the world. Harry knew all along  that it was 
hideously reckless of Sirius to come back to Britain, that 
Pettigrew was at large and knew Sirius's secret, that normal 
people do not eat rats and grin about it, that it would be hard to 
accept Sirius as a substitute parent. But for that brief shining 
moment, it didn't matter. Love is blind.




 >  And then  there's Harry.  In the earlier books, Harry's 
resilience to the  extreme abuse he took from the Dursleys 
would be utterly 
 unbelieveable in the RW.  Okay, suspension of disbelief 
perfectly acceptable; that is, until in Book 5 JKR shoves cruelty 
and abuse in our faces and demands we take them seriously.  
Snape was  abused, Sirius abused, James was a monster, all 
this  awfulness is NOT to be taken humorously or lightly.    So, 
how  do we explain Harry?<  

Harry was always angry. He didn't know it. It was never safe for 
him to admit how angry he was. He can't hear the cheeky tone in 
"I think Hermione knows. Why don't you ask her?" (just imagine it 
spoken the way Draco would) because he doesn't know it's 
there, and he's utterly shocked when Snape docks points for it.  I 
can sympathize with this. It took me a long time to understand 
why my teachers thought I was sassing them. I'd been treated to 
a lot of sarcasm at home and I didn't realize how disrespectful I 
sounded. 

OOP is the first time that Harry lets out his anger and learns to 
deal with it in a straightforward way. It's also the first time that 
he's able to give Snape a straight, truthful, non-sarcastic answer.

JKR told us repeatedly that this was a dark book, that it had a 
major character death, that Harry was going to have to look at 
death more closely. She never promised us an entertaining bit of 
light reading. OOP is tragedy. 

Pippin