[HPforGrownups] Re: Deathly Hallows Reaction - Could do Better, Sorry

[Janette]

No: HPFGUIDX 172627

>
> Betsy Hp:
> Wishful thinking I'm afraid.  No healing for the WW.  Where Anne
> Frank was able to look at the world around her and think, "I know in
> my heart that people are good" (or words to that effect), JKR
> apparently looks at the world around her and thinks, "I know in my
> heart that a quarter of the people out there are evil, half of them
> are okay, and there's one quarter that's just unquestionably good."
>
> It's an ugly view of the world in my opinion.  And it cumlminates in
> a rather ugly book with a rather ugly message.  Yeah.  I'm pretty
> much done with the series.


montims:
Anne Frank wrote that, perforce, while she was still in hiding, hoping for
an Allied victory and expecting to become a great writer and have a family
of her own.  She was betrayed, and all the members of her family, except for
her father, died in circumstances of misery and torture and brutality.  How
many Annexe members survived?  And they wouldn't have been discovered if
they hadn't been betrayed by somebody.  Some people still have a problem
with Germans today, 63 years after WW2 ended.  And after WW2, nothing really
changed, any more than it did after WW1.  People just got on with their same
lives and opinions.  Why should the Potterverse be any different?  THAT
would have been unrealistic, IMO.

And look at the world around you now.  I mean the world, not just your own
little part of it (that "your" directed generally at everybody now - not
Betsy - I've opened this out).  People are being tortured and slaughtered in
large numbers because they are different.  And this is condoned officially
and enthusiastically carried out.  Look at JKR's affiliations.  Look at what
Amnesty International works against.  Look at the caged children she drew
attention to a couple of years ago.

I like JKR's cleareyed picture of the world.  I don't want to read
that everybody really is nice deepdown, because that isn't true - life is
not as written by Disney.  The point, surely, is to face it, acknowledge it,
and then battle it.


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