Bad guys and black hats (was Re: Unreliable narrator)

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 117510


Pippin:  
> > I realize it's very unconventional to make a sympathetic 
character  the villain, especially in what some of us think of as a 
children's  book. In that sense, considering Lupin as a potential 
villain  requires a subversive reading. But JKR has said all along 
that  her bad guys are not conventional black hats.
> > 
> 
> Renee:
> Did she put it exactly like this? (Quote, please?) Because I 
can't  help thinking that a lot of JKR's bad guys, including the 
chief  villain, *are* fairly conventional black hats. I'd be 
disappointed  if she really said this, and it would reinforce my 
opinion that  authors should refrain from explaining their own 
texts.     <

http://www.quick-quote-quill.org/articles/2000/0700-cbc-solomon
.htm

With Voldemort, I didn't want to create this cardboard cutout of a 
baddie, where you put a black hat on him and you say 'Right, 
now you shoot at that guy because he's bad.' 

E: Like the Dursleys are more of a cutout bad people? 

JK: Yes and no. You will meet Dursleys, in Britain. You will. I've 
barely exaggerated them. Yeah, Voldemort. In the second book, 
Chamber of Secrets, in fact he's exactly what I've said before. He 
takes what he perceives to be a defect in himself, in other words 
the non-purity of his blood, and he projects it onto others. It's
like Hitler and the Arian ideal, to which he did not conform at all, 
himself. And so Voldemort is doing this also. He takes his own 
inferiority, and turns it back on other people and attempts to 
exterminate in them what he hates in himself. 

Pippin