Dark Book - Blood and Cruelty/ Draco

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 177241


> > >>Carol responds:
> > Can you please point out a single reference in canon to Harry (or
James, who looks just like him) as "handsome"?
> 
> Betsy Hp:
> God no.  Harry's not going to sit around thinking about his own 
dreaminess.  But everytime there's a date-able event, Harry's having 
to run away from the womens.  And James was popular with the ladies 
too.  Ergo, they're both handsome devils.  (I'm not talking GQ 
spread, just athletic with non-freakish features, which is about all 
it takes.)
> 
Carol again:
But Harry is not the narrator, who is just a voice usually reflecting
Harry's point of view. Our descriptions of Harry are among the few
things that do not reflect his perception because the narrator steps
outside Harry's pov to provide them, sometimes when he's asleep.
Here's a charming one:

"Harry Potter was snoring loudly. He . . . had fallen asleep with one
side of his face pressed against the cold windowpane, his glasses
askew and his mouth wide open. . . . [T]he artificial light drained
his face of all color, so that he looked ghostly beneath the shock of
untidy black hair" (OoP am. ed. 38). Not a flattering description, but
a surprisingly honest one.

Or how about "[Harry] peered into the mirror on the inside of the
door. A skinny boy of fourteen looked back at him, his bright green
eyes puzzled under his untidy black hair" (16). No indication of
handsomeness here, either. He's clearly a very ordinary-looking kid
with rather unusual eyes. The emphasis is on the traits that link him
to his mother and father respectively. But his skinny build resembles
that of Severus Snape at the same age; he, too, was small for his age
and skinny and black-haired. (I don't think that's coincidental.) The
key feature is, of course, the "scar shaped like a bolt of lightning"
mentioned earlier on the same page--not likely to make Harry handsomer
than he would have been without it, but certainly likely to draw the
eyes of anyone who sees it, at least anyone familiar with Harry
Potter's story, which is pretty much everyone in the WW.

"Handsome" is used for specific characters: Cedric, Tom, and Sirius in
particular. It is never used by the narrator to refer to James or
Harry. Nor does *any* character *ever* refer to James or Harry as
handsome, including those who liked and admired James or the two girls
who have crushes on Harry, Cho and Ginny. ("His eyes are as green as a
pickled toad." Charming, Ginny.)

*Was* James "popular with the ladies"? We see a girl making goo-goo
eyes at handsome, arrogant *Sirius* and being ignored by him in SWM.
We see Lily, who does seem to be flirting with James while also
calling him a "toerag," but there's no indication that she thinks he's
handsome, either in that scene or "The Prince's Tale." He may (or may
not) have a charismatic personality (I see no evidence of it in SWM).
My reading is that the Gryffindors admire his Quidditch skills, which
would make him popular in his own House, and anyone else who laughs at
his bullying either dislikes Severus or fears being hexed by James in
the corridors for annoying him. At any rate, we don't see a group of
girls following him around the way they follow Cedric, Viktor, and
Harry during his cycles of popularity (in GoF and HBP). James's
biggest fans are his best friend, the werewolf who wants them to like
him, and the sycophantic tagalong who drools over his reflexes. No
girls except Lily even enter the picture, and he's the one with the
crush on her, not vice versa (yet).

Again, the girls follow duck-footed, hook-nosed Viktor Krum around,
not because he's handsome (he isn't) but because he's a famous
athlete. And it's made clear in GoF that Harry would be no more
successful in getting a date for the Yule Ball than Ron (who has to be
fixed up with Parvati's sister as a last resort, Hermione being
already taken) if it weren't for the TWT: "Harry doubted very much if
any of the girls who had asked to be his partner so far would have
wanted to go to the ball with him if he had't been a school champion"
(GoF Am. ed. 389). Harry is not introspective, but he does know that
his popularity with the girls is a very recent phenomenon, and its
cause is not difficult to discover. Granted, Cho likes him even in
PoA, but that's probably because he's an excellent Seeker and she's a
Seeker herself, and Ginny has worshipped "the boy who defeated the
Dark Lord" since she was ten, but she's an exception to the general
rule. People point at Harry because he's the Boy who Lived or the
Chosen One or that crazy kid who thinks You-Know-Who is back, but no
one is swooning over Harry's *looks* the way they swoon over, say,
Gilderoy Lockhart.

"Athletic with non-freakish features" I'll accept. But "handsome
devils" for Harry and his lookalike father is an exaggeration, not
justified by the text. Harry is pale, skinny, short, bespectacled,
with hair that sticks up in the back. No one in the books likes him
because of his looks (in marked contrast to Cedric and Sirius). Either
they like him because he's a Quidditch champion or they want to be his
date because he's a TWT champion (after the First Task--before that,
they're suggesting that he put his own name in the Goblet and is lying
about it) or because he fought Voldemort and survived (HBP). Romilds
Vane and her friends don't like Harry either for his looks or as a
person; they just want to make the other girls jealous because they've
been chosen by the Chosen One. 

I agree that JKR makes Harry a great athlete who never loses a game
unless he's injured. She can't bring herself to let him lose any more
than she can bring herself to kill Mr. Weasley. But Harry *isn't*
handsome. His ordinariness is supposed to be part of his appeal. The
skinny kid with glasses isn't the nerd this time. He's the hero. And
at the same time, he's Everykid.

Carol, who was also a skinny kid with glasses but, unlike Harry, was
chosen last for any team sport because she was notoriously "afraid of
the ball" :-(