Saving Harry was Secrecy (Was: Re: It's over, Snape is evil)

[nrenka]

No: HPFGUIDX 137601

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

<snip>

> Pippin:
> That percentage of readers will be revealing their ignorance of 
> chivalric legends, from which all three works are derived. 
> Lancelot could be considered the ancestor of all
> traitorous comrades who eventually come to the kingdom's aid.
> TH White even conceived him as being ugly and sadistic, though 
> there's no basis for that in Mallory.

This assumes, of course, that JKR is interested in such strict 
correspondences.  The way it's put here smacks of far too much Joseph 
Campbell structuralism for my taste--by which I mean that everything is 
reduced down to the points where things correspond, and everything that 
doesn't match (and is usually what makes the milieu of each story 
different and meaningful) is elided out.  'Derived' in this case seems, 
IMO, so vague as to be almost meaningless.

Gollum is an originally innocent character warped by an outside evil, 
but also by his own avarice, who does the good deed out of the wrong 
motivation, almost out of accident.  Vader is a (now even more 
revealed) fallen character who has retained touches of humanity, and 
acts to redeem his blood kin.  Neither of them kept a live, solid, in-
discussion connection with the good side, as it seems your Snapetheory 
postulates.

Aside from the "evildoer does good" aspect, I don't see much deeper 
linkage between those characters, and a whole lot of difference because 
of context.  I don't think we can say for certain that JKR is following 
that model with Snape at all; but alert readers of pop culture are, as 
Lupinlore mentioned, certainly alive to similarities (as is JKR, the 
whole "you all are thinking too much Star Wars").  But given that 
Rowling's cosmology is not that of Lucas and not that of Tolkien 
(mercifully), why are we assuming that an action similar on the surface 
would *mean* the same thing at all?

-Nora professionally loathes Hero With A Thousand Faces, to be honest