Whose side are we on?? :was: Arthur right or not?

[Ceridwen]

No: HPFGUIDX 156000

Alla:
> What I find amusing is that while **good guys** are held to the 
highest ethical standards of behavior, Snape and Draco's behavior
gets excused pretty much for everything IMO.

So, Ron is very bad when he says Get away from me werewolf, for 
example, but Draco just does not know any better than to call 
Hermione "mudblood" for example, he could not help himself when he 
was so excited to start serving Voldemort. He just does not know any 
better.

Ceridwen:
I hold the Good Guys to a higher standard because, in these fictional 
books, the Good Guys are the ones kids who read the books should be 
looking toward as role models.  No kid wants to be a teacher everyone 
calls a 'greasy git', and no kid wants to be the stuck-up student who 
does not like the hero and who is also known as The Incredible 
Bouncing Ferret to some fans.  Kids want to be heroes, to be proven 
right, to have some worth and some value and something they can pull 
out of their back pockets and say, 'Now I'll show *them*!'

Draco and Snape are not the Good Guys on the primary level of the 
school story.  Snape is the teacher who picks on Our Hero, Draco is 
the well-connected student who has it out for Our Guy.  We're adults, 
and most of us here are reading much deeper than the surface story, 
looking for clues, admiring the way JKR has crafted her characters 
and her plots.  Kids don't do that too often, even with tons and tons 
of book reports ordered from them in school.  What they see is Our 
Hero and Goat Who Hates Our Hero.

I think my thoughts about this gelled during the debates about 
whether JKR intends for Harry to sacrifice himself because he is a 
horcrux (for the self-sacrifice line to work, he would have to be a 
horcrux), or take the plunge and kill Voldemort.  It was asked what 
sort of message JKR would be sending out to kids if the hero in 
effect killed himself or killed someone else.

So of course I went through all the usual mental arguments - other 
childhood heroes die at the end, or kill the villain because there is 
no other way, and this hasn't affected kids...

But, heroes getting away with breaking rules and not learning from 
their mistakes?  Sure, the Bad Guys do bad things, we expect it.  It 
sets their characters in the beginning, and reinforces our views of 
them through the story.  Our Heroes are never wrong as many times as 
the Evil Teacher says they are, and they're innocently egged into bad 
behavior by the Bad Kid.  But, when they're egged into bad behavior, 
they're caught, and given the stern yet loving lecture (or the 
punishment), and they reflect and realize what it is they did wrong.  
They go through the mental processes for the (child) readers, so both 
can learn from the characters' mistakes.

Parents can talk to their kids about what Fred and George did, that 
it was wrong, and why it was wrong.  But as long as Fred and George 
don't get called on it except for a stern word or two from their 
father and continue to do it, all of the dire potential for such 
behavior that parents have seen and then tell their kids about, falls 
flat.  Fred and George didn't get hit by a car running into the 
street after a ball, for an instance not in the books.  The 
books 'prove' that dire consequences do not follow even mildly bad 
behavior.

I don't particularly like 'for the children' arguments, so I feel 
very compromised posting this.  But as a parent and grandparent, I am 
worried about the message that these things send to kids.  Show the 
Bad Guys in all their horrible glory!  Show the kids that they don't 
want to be like them, see the comeuppance the bad guys get!  But 
don't show the Good Guys, the guys  who should be the role models for 
juvenile readers, *getting away with* questionable behavior.

Ceridwen.