Resolutions/Ron's Cloak/Slytherins are Bad

[sistermagpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 183461

> Pippin:
> If he didn't care about the students, why remain headmaster when
> Voldemort was taking over? It would have been far easier to organize
> resistance to Voldemort as Minister of Magic. 

Magpie:
No it wouldn't. Dumbledore was in the most powerful position there 
was as Headmaster of Hogwarts. In the center of the action and 
overseeing Harry Potter. He didn't want to be MoM for his own 
reasons, not because he just couldn't leave his students. (Even 
Voldemort took over the Ministry as his second choice.)

Pippin: 
> You're also forgetting his speech in GoF, where he begs the school 
to
> unite and tells them all, looking at the Slytherin Table, that they
> will be welcome at Hogwarts at any time. > Slytherins want to win, 
so the way to recruit them is to convince them
> that Voldemort is going to lose, or that they will lose by joining
> him. Dumbledore never misses an opportunity to emphasize that. He
> wants them on his side, unlike McGonagall, who loses trust in Snape
> once she learns that he was a Death Eater, and who who takes the 
first
> opportunity to get rid of the Slytherins once she's in power. 

Magpie:
I think he misses tons of opportunities. One Significant Look at the 
Slytherin table doesn't come to much (a look that had it been given 
to a normal house would have been an insult!), especially when he's 
not actually doing anything to bring the school together. He's the 
headmaster. He can do more than just beg them after presiding over 
the friction. As it happens that wasn't a big part of his plan and it 
wasn't necessary. 

Pippin: 
> But DD's not about to indoctrinate people against their parents. And
> he isn't about pity either. Dumbledore's own father was an outlaw 
and
> so was his brother; he knows exactly what it's like to grow up being
> treated like you come from a family of criminals. He doesn't pity 
the
> Slytherin kids because he didn't like being pitied himself. Who 
would?

Magpie:
I don't see any evidence that Dumbledore is worried about any of this 
or even why he's supposed to be worried about reaching out to the 
Slytherins and teaching them something like good morals out of fear, 
as if this will somehow make them feel like they come from families 
of criminals. He doesn't have to pity someone to do any of this. 
There's no reason to pity them.

Pippin: 
> People keep thinking that "epitome of goodness" is synonymous with
> sainthood, and it's obviously not. A saint is a living example of
> holiness, as George jokingly reminds us in DH. That's as far beyond
> ordinary goodness as Voldemort is  beyond ordinary evil. > 
Dumbledore is the epitome of ordinary goodness; he expects to do well
> by doing good.

Magpie:
I think people are suggesting he doesn't epitomize ordinary goodness 
either for them. But really, "epitome of goodness" sounds like quite 
lavish praise to me. Do you really think that when JKR used that 
phrase she meant to say that he's challenged in this area but does 
the best he can? She's said he's inherently good as well. I think she 
means just that.

Pippin:
> Yes, Dumbledore had a material as well as a moral reason for 
planning
> to let Snape to kill him instead of Draco. But that plan was spoiled
> when he lost the wand. At the moment  on the tower when
> Dumbledore decides to talk Draco out of killing him, the plan looks
> completely trashed.

Magpie:
Dumbledore hasn't been able to send for Snape, but there was every 
reason to think Snape would arrive. Stalling is the best thing 
Dumbledore can do in this situation. He's not alone with Harry to be 
able to have a heart to heart, doesn't want Harry out in the open, 
and he doesn't seem to have ever planned to tell Harry about the 
sword anyway. His other choice is to just lie there and wait for the 
Death Eaters. (Draco's not going to kill him regardless.) His last 
moments are still good ones, imo. They're not some big sacrifice of 
the plan, but he is, as you say, using those last moments well. 
Unfortunately for me that was the whole meaning of it. 

Actually, it's kind of good putting this speech side by side with his 
speech in GoF, another moment where Dumbledore shows off all these 
great things he stands for without any of it actually needing to be 
effective or dramatized. In fact, in both places we wound up with 
other people not having much response to his speech. 


Pippin:
 No wonder that  Snape  hesitates. They are way,
> way  off plan.

Magpie:
I thought he just hesitated because he still didn't want to do it. 

Pippin:
> But with all this going on, Dumbledore chooses to save Draco's soul,
> the action with the most moral importance but the least obvious
> benefit to the war. If it had turned out that saving Draco had some
> major material benefit, we would think that Dumbledore could have
> foreseen it, as he did with Pettigrew, and that would diminish the
> moral impact of his choice.

Magpie:
Least obvious benefit--this is what I thought was going to be key, 
but it wasn't. In the end I was surprised that there was far less 
benefit than I would have expected, if any at all. Dumbledore 
actually could have just sat there and waited for the DEs and gotten 
exactly the same benefit. He just wasn't making a big gamble here. He 
saw an opportunity to give this lecture, did it and noted it. A nice 
thing to do, and not interfering with the plan already in place. But 
Draco himself wasn't important except for Dumbledore to say he was 
important.

With Peter we also get the "save his life even though he doesn't 
deserve it" with the emphasis being on "he doesn't deserve it." Harry 
lets Peter go and as a reward he'll die later because he's in Harry's 
debt and so Harry has some power over him.

Pippin: 
> It could have been powerful and dramatic for Draco to do something
> positive to help Harry. But it would have been completely off 
message,
> IMO, both in showing us through Dumbledore what moral behavior is
> supposed to be, and in showing us through people's reactions to
> Slytherin how morality can be subverted.

Magpie:
I don't see why it's off message to demonstrate the lesson "save 
people even if they don't deserve it" by showing that maybe they do 
deserve it--so stop thinking of them that way. Or perhaps suggesting 
that someone could actually learn goodness because it makes sense 
when they've been brought up otherwise, and become better. 

I know that superior people demonstrating textbook virtues just 
because they are textbook virtues (like a code of chivalry) should 
make it all the more selfless, and in some contexts that would be the 
way it came across. But here it feels just frankly masturbatory to 
me. Draco can be saved because he's too weak to cause any real harm 
to the good side-watch us save his sorry arse. If he were stronger, 
he'd have to be taken out. But since he shows he doesn't have it in 
him to harm people, the last time we see him he's being punched for 
not behaving as he should, having been rescued by Harry and Ron. Did 
Dumbledore's talk have any good effect on him? We don't know and it 
doesn't matter. What matters is admiring Dumbledore performing his 
goodness. 

I actually think JKR might be a bit repulsed by the idea that Draco 
might have actually approached being a good person as a result of any 
of this. Not because I know what's in her head, but honestly, reading 
the books and listening to many things she's said in interviews it 
does seem important to her that too much transformation doesn't 
happen and he doesn't steal anybody's thunder. Again, I'm not trying 
to read her mind, I'm looking at stuff that she's said about these 
subjects. And obviously, she wasn't interested in writing that story 
in the book.

Pippin:
With the Slytherins,  JKR is more interested in the ways that
> decent people can be persuaded to ignore that message. One of them 
is
> to slant everything that they hear about a certain group towards
> making them think that group is both scary and inferior. IMO,
> Slytherin is her thought experiment for that. 

Magpie:
Is the "thought experiment" the Slytherins? Because Slytherins are 
scary and inferior. That's canon. She can't say, "I tricked you into 
thinking Slytherins are scary and inferior by inventing them by 
showing them consistently being that way!" They don't exist in any 
other way. What's the trick of creating a group of fictional people 
who are always one way and winding up with the audience associating 
them with those traits?

Alla:
And I just do not get how this is showing that Draco's soul is
valuable because it exists, it sounds more like tit for tat to me. Oh
Dumbledore saved him and Draco in turn did something because he
understood how Dumbledore was trying to do something for him.

Magpie:
Well, Draco understanding that somebody tried to do something for him-
-which he seemed to be understanding at the time--would represent 
some logical progression. For me, just as I thought (wrongly) 
Dumbledore was actually risking something with Draco with no clear 
benefit, I thought Draco would just as adamantly *not* have done 
anything good *as a payment.* He would just have demonstrated the 
things HBP seemed to have been teaching him. It's not about debts. 

Instead, he and Peter are both basically hopeless, but it's 
strategically okay to let them be. Peter because "saving him" was 
actually just sending him off with a booby trap that will have 
benefit at a later date. With Draco he's just not a threat so he can 
live and be inferior. Much as James Potter could die assured he had 
heroically saved the non-deserving and ungrateful Snape. It actually 
feels to me sometimes like none of these characters fully taking the 
opportunity for redemption offered was important from the get go in 
the series. The appeal is partly in their remaining safely awful and 
forgiven for it. 

It may sound counter-intuitive to say that the bad person should show 
themselves to deserve it--and I'm not saying that's always the right 
way to go in every story. It doesn't always happen that way. But to 
me having a good result from this type of offer creates a story with 
more humility. And those stories are often more about why this is 
the "right" thing to do. It requires granting the bad person some 
quality independent of the good person. For all the talk of good 
characters doing things for the bad characters without expecting pay 
back, the story is clearly very aware of how much everybody owes 
Harry and Dumbledore at all times. I think it's very concerned with 
that on the meta-level. 


Jerri
> I know that lots of people in the past few days have been writing 
> about this comment of Ron's, and I don't remember who said it 
first, 
> but I am certain that it was never made, and certainly wasn't made 
on 
> the first Christmas when Harry got the cloak.

Magpie:
I know I've been doing a lot of writing about it and I can tell you 
that I didn't get it from the books. There was a comment that quoted 
Ron saying something about it but I didn't look up the quote myself!

But I, too, never thought Harry's cloak seemed extraordinary. We 
didn't have any other ones to compare it to, and I especially 
remembered Moody's being able to see through it. How can Moody see 
through it but not Death?

Lynda:
There are textual references throughout the books that Harry's cloak 
is not wearing out, though, which led me to wonder, early on, what 
was so different about it, compared to other invisibility cloaks

Magpie:
Where are these references? I don't remember them. I also don't 
remember any reference to other invisibility cloaks that *do* wear 
out. Why would I assume they were different than Harry's? And how 
would I even know how old or used Harry's was so that it should have 
worn out?

bboyminn:

Not quite sure where to step in here. So, to the general subject,
let me remind you that we can't say 'all Slytherins are bad'
because we haven't met 'all Slytherins'.

Even at the school, Harry primarily interacts with a select
group of Slytherins. There are several Slytherins in his year,
even in his class, whose names he doesn't know. Which tells me
that THOSE Slytherins minded their own business and didn't get
in Harry's face. It is Draco and his immediate circle that are
the main problem, but the rest of Slytherins, aside from
laughing at a joke now and then, stay in the background and
mind their own business.

Magpie:
Sure we don't know every Slytherin, but as a group they're 
consistently portrayed negatively. Even minor characters show up to 
be negative. We've got the Quidditch team, including the substitute 
Seeker, all the people in the IS, various crowds who don't just laugh 
at an occasional joke but cackle nastily at the heroes and enjoy 
their distress, the other two boys in Draco's year being either tied 
to DEs or blood prejudice, even Hermione casually worrying that "some 
Slytherin" will go to Umbridge and rat them out, the flag 
conspicuously absent from the RoR, Voldemort proudly wanting 
everybody to be Slytherin, their password being Pureblood, the gang 
of Slytherins who all became DEs Snape hung out with, etc...

No, we don't know everyone. But they're a fictional group who are 
always consistently characterized with at least some qualities from a 
negative constellation of traits. Even the "good" Slytherins have 
ties to the worst of these qualities. It would be silly to do that 
all the way through and then expect people to not just get that 
there's something wrong with Slytherins. 

-m