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

[Renee]

No: HPFGUIDX 117529


--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "pippin_999" <foxmoth at q...> 
wrote:
> 
> Pippin:  
> 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?) 

> 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

Renee:
Thank you. I supposed that means I *am* disappointed, because as far 
as I'm concerned JKR hasn't succeeded in making Voldemort more than 
a cardboard villain, so far. Everyone has a motive, and lack of self-
acceptance and inferiority feelings strike me as pretty conventional 
explanations for going bad, I'd say. 

Renee