Right vs. Easy (Ron WAS: Re: DH reread CH 4-5)

[sistermagpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 186347

> Zara:
> And the appeal is what makes it *easy*. I am sorry, but I still find your interpretation of what it means for a choice to be "Easy, not right", amazingly strained.

Magpie:
As I said, it's more just very specific. It's not like the characters fail on the morality scale if I don't see them motivated by the ease of the wrong choice. As I said to Alla, I can see the 'easy' element. You're right, we can make just about every choice in the series into right vs. easy. It's still not anything that ever entered my mind upon reading most of them at the same time, but as an exercise, these things can be encapsulated in "easy" vs. "hard." I think, for instance, that the importance of the cowardly choice is that it's cowardly not that it's easy. I can actually totally buy this reading if Dumbledore is just using "easy" as a synonym for "cowardly." Because cowardice etc. is definitely something the books focus on for me.
 
> Zara:
> I see. I guess where we disagree is that I do not think Rowling, in giving Albus that phrase, was having him talk about some sort of very specific type of moral dilemma (one I confess I still do not understand) that she would then never again bring up in the remaining 5 novels of her series.

Magpie:
And I do, so it doesn't really bother me that he says it. She could just be using the phrase in a general way, as I said above. Maybe she really does see it as applying whenever somebody does something that's both hard and good and assumes the bad alternatives are easier and not see a contradiction when the good guys do the wrong thing because it's just easy and helps them out in a pinch and nobody really gets hurt that they can see. 

I'm not going to say that's wrong or that these choices can't be framed that way. But for me I'd still be using that translation that you suggested above--if for these people 'easy' means 'cowardly' I can just translate the wrong word for the right one and that's the books I read and it all fits together.

-m