Jo's OWN Words/Harry using Crucio/I am about to Rant/Danger Designating the

[sistermagpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 174004

> Jeannie 
> I've read the books and watched all the movies.  My Family is 
under the impression that the writer is a practicing Wiccan and 
therefore not Christian in any sense of the word.  Can someone tell 
me what views she  has expressed in other interviews regarding her 
beliefs.  You can write me  off line if that is more appropriate.

Magpie:
She's stated she's Christian--she's never been Wiccan. 

Asli
I really don't understand that Harry is expected to be perfectly 
good. Every one of us is good and bad inside in some ways, and as a 
real character Harry must be also. It wasn't an extreme situation 
but it was a situation of extreme disrespect, and I think it was 
enough that Harry got out of using the Avada Kedavra.

Magpie:
I don't think people being surprised that Harry used an Unforgivable-
-and the torture spell at that--in this situation translates into 
wanting Harry to be "perfectly good." Most of the characters in 
canon manage to avoid doing it without being anywhere near perfectly 
good. The point is they feel Unforgivables were presented in a way 
that said they were bad, and then suddenly Harry used one just for a 
cool moment and they thought that was significant.

Geoff:
I am not trying to proscribe people from writing complaints. I have
frequently said, especially in the Christian threads, that we have a
perfect right to disagree with one another. Another group member
has suggested to me in an off-list email that my Eeyore reference
might not have been recognised as being humorous - perhaps in
retrospect I should have used a smiley. In the UK, Winnie-the-Pooh
is well known by children and adults alike and to refer to someone
jokingly as an "Eeyore person" is to suggest that whatever happens,
they will always see the gloomy side of it. My father was like this 
in his later years; there was bound to be a fly in the ointment, a 
flip side, a catch. On a sunny day, he always saw the risk that it 
might rain. :-)

Magpie:
I can't speak for Maeg, but I suspect that the problem with the 
Eeyore reference isn't that she didn't get it but that as humorous 
as it is intended to be, it's still suggesting that her reaction to 
the book means that she always sees the gloomy side of things, when 
she might be a perfectly sunny Pigletty sort of person yet saw 
something bad in the book. Conversely, if somebody really liked the 
bok or something in the book they probably wouldn't appreciate being 
told they were just being a Pollyanna.

Neri:
It's a nice speculation, only JKR doesn't support it in DH more than
she does the rest of the series. Phineas Nigellus was a Slytherin
Headmaster before Riddle's time, and he uses the mudblood word 
withouteven thinking about it. Or was his portrait infiltrated too? 
The Sorting Hat is our sole source from the founders' days, and it 
tells us that old Salazar wanted to teach only those "who's ancestry 
was purest". Or was the Sorting Hat infiltrated too? Lets face it, 
the official position of the series is that Salazar left an XXXXX 
class monster in a secret room at Hogwarts so that his heir can 
release it and "purge" the school. I don't see why someone would 
want that kind of family tradition, unless someone still likes to 
believe that his "pure" blood makes him better than the mudbloods.

Magpie:
It is hard not to notice the difference between Slytherin and the 
other houses even without the clear distinction between it and the 
rest of the school in every book including the last one. Not only 
has it apparently always been based on blood Purity, the other 
houses are all Sorted for virtues...and Slytherin isn't. I don't 
think "cunning" or "ambition" have ever been really considered 
virtues the way courage, wisdom and loyalty have been. (I don't 
think the kind of Purity found in the house counts as Chastity!) So 
it's not a surprise that one is at a loss to really think of it 
integrating along with the other houses, or that non-Slytherins 
displaying Slytherin qualities ennoble the Sytherin qualities, while 
Slytherins using the qualities of other houses ennoble the Slytherin.

> >>Pippin:
> The story can be read on different levels. You could see the
> Slytherins as a metaphor for the selfish side of humanity and the
> Gryffindors as a metaphor for the good, and you can think about how
> selfishness always defeats itself. We all have a selfish part that
> needs to be reminded of this.

Betsy Hp:
Exactly. Slytherins are lesser than. They're more selfish than
Gryffindors, more easily corrupted, not to be trusted (unless they're
suitably servile).

> But I think JKR makes it very clear that a problem arises when this
> kind of thinking escapes from storyland and you dehumanize real
> people by seeing them as symbols or metaphors. That's what the
> golden fountain was all about, IMO.
> <snip>

Betsy Hp:
And the green and silver ties apparently. Which means, JKR was
actually rather contradictory, IMO. Though I do agree she'd be
horrified if children went looking for RL Slytherins.

Magpie:
I admit this seems like mixing the message in the very same book. 
How do you create a group of actual people--schoolmates--within the 
fictional world who are a metaphor for the selfish side of human 
nature of people, and then say that a statue shows how dangerous it 
is when this kind of thinking escapes from storyland? Isn't that 
rather "do as I say, not as I do?" That sort of reflects how I feel 
about the way racism was handled in general--it's clearly bad in the 
book, but more like an entity. It's what the enemy does, or 
something horrible that exists in the world outside us, not 
something in ourselves. 

-m