Incomprehensible comparison of Sirius and Aragorn

[alshainofthenorth]

No: HPFGUIDX 122887


--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, Juli <jlnbtr at y...> wrote:
> Sure they seem completly different, almost opposites,
> all you said is right (just read up thread), but you
> forgot the goodness in both of them, the desire to
> make things right, not for themselves but for the
> world and those around him. 


Alshain:
But lots of characters in books are good or have good hearts. Lots of 
people want to make the world a better place in the real world, but 
it doesn't prevent them from leading different lives or having 
different personalities and motivations. Compare Oskar Schindler to 
Mother Teresa, for example. For literary heroes it's almost a 
requirement. If I wanted to compare Sirius to anyone it'd have to be 
Edmond Dantès, AKA the Count of Monte Cristo, and even that 
comparison doesn't fit 100 %. Monte Cristo is much colder and more 
calculating, even less a part of the world.  

Then again, it's generally a good sign that one can't find exact 
parallels, isn't it? JKR draws up her characters to be unique, to be 
what the story demands of them, uses bold strokes and vivid colours, 
making all of them stand out even if in a somewhat exaggerated way. 
(I was going to write, "drawn a bit larger than life", but some are 
actually drawn smaller. "Cartoonish" might be a better description, 
but even so, they all seem realistic.) Most of them are three-
dimensional, they have their own voices and flaws.

The only characterisation I really object to is that of the villain. 
The most chilling murderer in D.L. Sayers' Peter Wimsey novels fully 
goes in for the Nietzschean Ubermensch ideal, yet he's praised as a 
saint by a Russian emigré, since he treats her daughter's PTSD for 
free. If I'm allowed another parallel to Middle-earth, Sauron once 
bowed down to the King of Númenor (with ulterior motives, but partly 
from fear), and long before that, wanted to repent though his pride 
got the better of him.

Voldemort/Tom Riddle, on the other hand, has no such humanising 
traits (he doesn't show any in the CoS flashbacks, and Ron points out 
that he commits one of the largest sins a schoolboy can commit -- 
that of being a tattletale and a prig) and IMO that makes him less 
believable. It seems that human inconsistency went down the drain 
with all other resemblances to a human being. It gives me a niggling 
suspicion that JKR conveniently stripped away his humanity to make it 
more OK for Harry to kill him and easier for him to come to terms 
with it. And given that she's dealt with moral dilemmas before, it'd 
feel like a cop-out if she suddenly shied from the largest dilemma of 
all, that there are situations where your only alternative is to kill 
another person and live with that decision for the rest of your 
life.  

Alshain (also madly in love with Aragorn as a 13-year-old)