Respect

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 180370

 
>    KJ writes:
> 
>      I think what bothers me is that throughout the books, the 
> characters grew in age, in thought, in moral fibre, and in magical 
> strength.  In the last book, that didn't seem to happen.

Pippin:
They're adults in this book. Personal growth is desirable but it's no
longer their main job in life. Much growth that occurs is kept  subtle.
We're often watching it happen instead of experiencing it through the 
inner life of the characters. As Dumbledore told us in OOP, youth 
should not be expected to understand how age thinks and feels.

 JKR shows us her newly adult characters as she has always depicted
adults in HP, with the reader mostly having to guess what they're
feeling from their actions, except in the moments when they're
being so immature that a two year old could read their minds. <g>

Hermione doesn't go nowhere, IMO. She learns to work with a House 
Elf as he is rather than as she would like him to be, and she not only 
manages to improve things for Kreacher,  Ron finally shows that he
understands that Elvish welfare is worth bothering about. 

Ron, of course, is a comic foil and is never allowed to do anything
either brave or noble without doing something to make a fool of himself
immediately afterwards. Nonetheless he finally learns that he'd rather
feel inadequate and be with his friends than be alone, the best of
any of them. 

Harry learns to do a crucio and then learns  not to do it-- 
no one could have stopped him from  cruciating  every DE he
could get his hands on,  but he does not. He also learns definitively 
that contrary to what Ron once  told him, poisonous toadstools can 
change their spots. He also learns that it's as important to know how
to give up power as how to get it. 

Draco's story is the most subtle. In HBP he was willing to lower his
wand, but only with the promise of rescue. 
In DH he mostly suffers, and it seems pointless, but he learns he can
endure suffering to the point where he is willing to stay by Goyle 
in the RoR whether he gets rescued or not. 

KJ:
>   We are expected to believe that since Snape loved Lily because she was 
> his only friend, that there was no conflict for him over the years in 
> setting out to destroy the only people who took him into their ranks and 
> treated him with respect. 

Pippin:
If it was really him they respected, they would have respected his
feelings for Lily. When he realized they would never do that, I
think he realized that he was nothing in their eyes. Can you
wonder that he broke with them completely when they disappointed
him so badly, when in the same thread we're discussing how readers
could so completely lose their respect for JKR? 

You (I'm using this generically and not to any particular poster)
thought she would care about the same things you cared about. And
when you discovered she didn't, you felt used. And angry. And it
only makes you angrier to realize that you might've known all along.
Right?

KJ:
>     Whether Dumbledore is gay or not makes no difference, which is why I 
> object to it.  If it had been used to show us that the decisions he made 
> with regard to GG had affected his life, I could understand, but as it 
> is, it's pointless.  Any information about a character belongs in the 
> book, it should be clear, and there should be a point to it other than 
> what we fill in as readers.

Pippin:
I'm not following your logic. It's pointless for it to be in the books if
it has no effect, but any information about a character should be in the
books?  The process of character generation can create a lot of information 
that an author may  decide not  to use. Are you saying JKR shouldn't
have even thought about the sexual orientation of her characters, or that
once she had she was obligated to make it relevant to the story? Why?

JKR  has put lots of unused character information on her website, along with
snippets of scenes that were cut and earlier stages of the story. None
of that was the least bit controversial for some reason.

I wouldn't say nobody hates JKR. Few people on this site, because  there's 
more scope for their venom elsewhere. But there's plenty of them out there.

I think if JKR says the book was well-considered, we could
give her the courtesy of suspending our disbelief (if necessary) and try
to understand what she means. 

There's a technique in the movies where the sound track goes dead
while something on the screen should be making a very loud noise, like
a scream or an explosion. It's an effective way of getting the audience
to imagine a noise that would be too loud or too painful to produce literally.

Discussing  DH sometimes feels as if I'm discussing such a move with some 
very literal-minded film goers who keep insisting that explosions have to be
noisy, and either the director forgot to put the sound in or there wasn't 
really supposed to be any explosion at all. And then pointing to every
technical error the director ever made as "proof". <g>


Pippin