[HPforGrownups] Re: Less than 1000 posts in a month - why now?

[k12listmomma]

No: HPFGUIDX 180222

> Alla:
> But displeasure about JKR saying for example that she wants her
> version to be official, that I do not get and will never get.
>
> I am sorry, but no matter how you look at Snape for example, no
> matter how you view the character without JKR there will be no
> Snape. It is to me as simple as that.
>
> Without JKR there will be no Snape or Harry or Sirius or any other
> character. I mean, I know everybody knows that, but in my mind by
> virtue of that her version IS official. If one feels that what she
> says about characters interferes with their pictures or one does not
> like tone of the interviews, okay, I understand and accept it, but I
> will never agree that our versions of the characters are the SAME
> value as JKR's.
>
> They appeared in her imagination NOT ours, therefore yeah, I totally
> respect that we can look at them and modify as much as we wish, but
> modify is the key for me here. We would have NOTHING to modify and
> argue about without JKR giving them to us to play with.

Alla,
I think people are making an unreasonable assumption with Rowling  that 
hasn't happened with any other author- that she has the right to control her 
characters AFTER she's put them in print. I mean, just look at how many 
books have been made into movies, and look at the sometimes huge and gross 
distortions of those characters. Do those authors complain? Sure, Rowling 
had the right to agree, going into the movies, on the portrayal of those 
characters, but beyond that, how much control should she have? Does she have 
the right to control what the readership will then go on to think about 
those characters? Certainly, with announcing Dumbledore's gayness, it seems 
that her opinion IS THE ONE THAT COUNTS, and people swawking about that 
isn't unreasonable in my eyes. The canon, the books themselves, say nothing 
of his orientation, and people were free to make up their own minds before 
her little announcement. Now, the only choice they have is to read the books 
and ignore all of Rowling's post-books comments, or to take those comments 
as truth and reinterpret all that she wrote previously.

No, I think people are being reasonable in assuming that Rowling does not 
own our imaginations, that she does not own our mind's versions of what she 
wrote, and our interpretations and experiences of these books. She merely 
provided a framework, and like so many movies, we are free to see it all in 
our mind's eye for what we see it as. She own the print, the legal rights to 
the books, but not our interpretation of it. She may have started it, but 
she cannot control that in my interpretation, Snape was a pervert instead of 
a true friend to Lilly, and that I am not sad at all to see him dead, and 
she can't control that in my mind Harry was dead wrong for naming his son 
after that jerk. No one can control my experiences as I read the series, my 
feelings that I developed for Snape, and for how I see him today, after the 
last book was read. No one can control the respect I lost for Harry in book 
7. Generations from now, long after Rowling is dead, people will still be 
forming new opinions for themselves as to who Harry and Snape and Dumbledore 
are, and they will own those characters in their minds. Rowling won't be 
around forever to tell readers what to think, someday she has to realize 
that once a character goes out in print for people to read, it's no longer 
hers but the readers to possess or reject for themselves. She may have 
wanted Snape to be redeemed, but in my mind he is not, and Rowling, no 
matter how many interviews she gives, will not change that. She had her 
chance in canon to express her views, and that's where it ends. The readers 
take from the books their interpretations. The movie that plays in people's 
head's when the read those books will never match exactly the movie that ran 
through Rowling's head when she concocted the idea of the Harry Potter 
world, and the sooner she realizes that, the better.