Harry's story , NOT Snape's (was Re: "An old man's mistakes")

[lady.indigo at gmail.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 138973

> Lady Indigo:
> > Frankly, up until now Harry has BEEN a puppet to everyone 
> > around him, including Dumbledore, when it comes to the 
> > bigger picture as opposed to the villain of the day.

Nora:
> I belong to a school of thought that thinks this line is 
> overemphasized. Rarely is it that the text comes out and says 
> "This was actually all set up"; more often, this is an 
> assumption folded in by fans (particularly the conspiracy 
> theorists--how is the Safe House these days?) to explain things 
> when the surface explanation (things just *happened* that way!) 
> seem unsatisfactory.
> 
> My own suspicion is that the simpler explanations are more 
> likely to be the actual ones.


I'm not talking about conspiracies here, certainly not presenting 
conspiracies as fact. I'm actually kind of irritated with fans who must insist that a cigar is NEVER just a cigar. I'm talking about simple canon here, the adult wizards who guarded the Philosopher's Stone and decided what to do with Sirius Black and formed the Order of the Phoenix and kept the prophecy a secret. Dumbledore, who 
spent Book 6 telling Harry EXACTLY what was needed from him at that particular moment and got angry when he didn't do it as quickly as asked. Harry knew very little of this, even right up to the end, 
and a number of the books seemed to be him fighting against 
authority to get by knowing very little of what was actually going on. Hence, why Dumbledore had to explain it to him. Slowly, he's beginning to put the pieces together himself, but we have NEVER 
seen him completely do this. People have always just positioned 
him where they want him, for safety's reasons or otherwise, and expected him to obey.

> Lady Indigo:
> > the potential for redemption (Pettigrew can always deal with 
> > this topic, sure, but frankly I don't care about Pettigrew 
> > and I've found few other people who do either)

Nora:
> Peter became immensely more interesting to me post-HBP; he's 
> always been an open question, a wild card, and I think he's 
> going to play a very major role in the denoument. <snip>

Nonetheless, she has spent 6 books worth of material on Snape and barely a few chapters worth on Peter. We know nothing about him beyond an insecure boy who turned his back on his friends for cowardice's sake and is now living a miserable life on the other side. Of course he can redeem himself, and so much the better for 
it, but it's not going to have the resonance of anything that 
could ever happen with Snape if only because it's going to take a *lot* of background material to flesh him out so much it's relevant. 
And doing all that so last-minute might very well be shoddy storytelling.

Nora:
> Hehe--is it Rowling's blindness to what she's put on the page, 
> or have readers cheerfully led themselves astray? The genius of 
> how Snape is written is more in what is implied, what is notably 
> *not* there than what is. 
> <snip>
> Snape is interesting precisely because the reader is encouraged 
> to fill in so many of the blanks. But, as we saw this past book, 
> interesting things happen with fans when the way they filled the 
> blanks turned out to be one not in the text, and even 
> contradicted.
> 
> If you *want* to read Snape as the thematic key to the story, 
> and read *those particular themes*, one solution will be 
> inadequate for you. But that all hinges on those being the themes 
> played out. For example, our ideas about an essentially noble and 
> honorable Snape could well be solidly 100% confirmed...or they 
> could be revealed as only projections on our part.

But that's exactly it. Your complaint here is that it'll turn into Snape's story if there's some key to him, something we have yet to learn, and the focus is put on learning it - but this is a character where there is a LOT left to learn, and what we have learned is rather troubling and actually makes him sympathetic to a reader. 

We have a lot of snark and skulking and terrible things done to children's self-esteem. We also have a boy who was bullied so much 
as a child some readers call it sexual harassment, someone Harry is constantly and immaturely wrong about throughout the books (and at 
one point wishes dead!), someone with the potential to be redeemed. How am I putting unnecessary focus on those themes? I never once claimed they're the key, or what the story will end up being 
"about", but they're all there, and brought up time and time again. Importantly so. You can't have a final battle with Snape and not 
deal with the ambiguities of his character. 

You especially can't deal with the fact that Harry has never taken the higher road, never been charitable to him and rarely tried to understand him. I'm not saying Snape *has* to be dealt with the way that I want, so much as that Snape does need to be dealt with and there is something Harry does need to learn from him. Frankly, I think Harry's decision is going to have to break the cycle of anger and emotional abuse, a choice he's completely failed to make so far.

The strength of Harry Potter, to me, is the diversion from formula. From book one the greasy, unpleasant little man with terrible 
social skills was NOT the evil one. It was someone lurking in the shadows, it was something you'd never expect. Harry's dead father 
was not a saint, and even when he made reparations and got his act together neither he nor Sirius ever acted maturely and tried to apologize to Snape. (It's implied that until they left Hogwarts 
they never even stopped.) Harry has cheated and snooped where he 
didn't belong and acted immaturely. And though good people can sometimes do very stupid, bad things, I do think they have to 
repent for them or at least seem genuinely sorry about them. 

Maintaining that realism also means you can't make it as simple as "You know that man who seemed bad all the time but the guy who knew everything always trusted him for a secret we never got to 
know about? ...Well, the secret was really lame, and the guy who 
knew everything was just an idiot, and the man who seemed really 
bad? Was really bad. And then we killed him, and that's the end." 
If this is the choice JKR makes in the end, I don't know how you couldn't call that bad writing. I'm not saying that Snape has to 
be pure and noble and sainted, in fact he's not. And even if he 
were following Dumbledore's orders, there are a million other ways 
in which he's far from those things. But this can't be all there 
is to him. There are questions there and they need answering.

- Lady Indigo