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

[ginnysthe1]

No: HPFGUIDX 117557


Hi, Kim here.  I wasn't in on this discussion from the beginning, but 
anyhow here's my two cents:

Pippin wrote:
> <snip> Villains in children's books and movies often don't have 
backstories at all, so even a conventional backstory is an 
innovation. But JKR may not be talking just about Voldemort's 
backstory. The interesting thing about the quote to me is that she 
first says she doesn't want to present him as a typical black hat, 
but then invokes Hitler, who, in fiction, is often made into a 
typical black hat -- not only evil, but a metaphor for evil.< 

[[Here's the quote again:

JK: <snip> ... 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 continued: 

>But one of the scarier things about the historical Hitler gets lost 
when that happens [i.e. presenting Hitler as a typical black hat]. He 
was able to persuade shrewd, sophisticated people who had noble 
ideals and a sense of decency to support him.  If Voldemort is a 
Hitler-style villain, I'd expect him to be able to do that as well 
and to see it demonstrated in Six and Seven.<

>There's some hint that Voldemort has that talent, but we haven't 
seen him exercise it -- he's always characterizing the people he's 
charmed into helping him as naive and gullible. But this is self-
serving -- naturally he doesn't want his current audience to think 
that people as clever as themselves could be hoodwinked.  ...  We 
don't even know if Ginny, Dippet, and Quirrell were as easy to 
mislead as he claims.<

Kim now:
I agree with Pippin.  Voldemort's backstory makes him much more than 
a cardboard cutout villain.  He'd be far less interesting without 
it.  Maybe the lack of backstories for other villains in literature, 
children's as well as adult, is what makes them seem 
like "conventional black hats" in the first place (so it's hard for 
me to see how that would ever work for a ficttonal version of 
Hitler).  In my opinion, making any villain "conventional" would be a 
kind of disservice to the character as well as to the reader, and 
especially to children who may learn to believe at an early age that 
life can be divided into "black and white" when life is usually gray, 
even including situations in which evil seems to have prevailed.  Of 
course if a character is just being used as a metaphor for evil, then 
I guess it makes sense to leave out the character's backstory, but 
that wouldn't work in books as grounded in history (WW history, that 
is) as the Harry Potter series IMO.  Then again I'm something of a 
history fan anyway and think even a cardboard cutout has a backstory 
(i.e. an origin) too... ;o)

As to Voldemort using his talent for persuasion, that may fail him 
somewhat this time around, now that he's come back to life after 
having been defeated 16 or so years ago.  I don't think even the DEs 
view him in exactly the same way they once did (but I could be 
wrong).  They saw him fail once before and may not be able to put 
full faith in him again, though this doesn't seem to apply to the 
likes of Bellatrix and Barty Crouch Jr.  And this time LV will have 
to recruit DEs from the new generation too, and I wonder if he'll be 
quite as successful doing that as he was during his first reign of 
terror.  But who am I kidding, bullies have succeeded in recruiting 
followers from time immemorial...  And there is that big obvious 
difference between LV's first reign of terror and his current one: 
now the (almost) grown-up Harry Potter has entered into the equation.

Cheers, Kim