DH reread CH 12 -- Cracking a Few Eggs.

[sistermagpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 186477

> > Magpie:
> > I think Neville would grimly back Harry up. He's fighting to keep the students from being forced to practice them on others. If Harry did it in this instance I think Neville would grimly stand by the action and maybe even compliment him on it.
> 
> Pippin:
> Gee, and the kids made such a point in OOP that Dumbledore's Army was about fighting the Dark Arts, not about student rights. When do you see them having this change of motivation?

Magpie:
They don't have to change their motivation. Dark Arts is so poorly defined that "fighting Voldemort" means "fighting the Dark Arts" even if you're using unforgivables--as Harry does more than once in canon without being too bothered by it. (He's cracking a few eggs.) We don't know what Neville would have done if he'd been standing next to Harry at that point, but I just don't think it's so unbelievable to imagine him standing by what Harry did. Sure Neville isn't pro-Crucio as a rule, but that doesn't mean he wouldn't give Harry a break in the scene for the same reasons many readers or people on this list do. Harry was angry. Carrow had been doing this to people for a while. He got a taste of his own medicine. It was only for a couple of seconds. 


> > Magpie:
> > In the context that JKR uses it in the interview I think it sounds pretty breezy. She's not being sarcastic that I can see (if she's being sarcastic then she's claiming Harry is a saint.) He's never been a saint and he's got a temper. I don't remember exactly how people use the term in those other instances, so I don't know if they're being defensive.
> > 
> 
> Pippin:
> ' "Honestly, Hermione, you think all teachers are saints or something," snapped Ron.' PS/SS ch 11, reacting to Hermione's contention that Snape wouldn't steal something that Dumbledore was trying to keep safe.
> 
> "Then let me correct you -- your saintly father and his friends played a highly amusing joke on me that would have resulted in my death if your father hadn't got cold feet at the last moment." -- ch 14 PoA
> 
> "Oh, we all know you worshipped Dumbledore; I daresay you'll still think he was a saint even if it does turn out that he did away with his Squib sister." -- Muriel, DH ch 8
> 
> Outside of the  religious senses, my dictionary says a saint is an extremely virtuous person. That's the way it seems to be used here, meaning someone so virtuous that it's unthinkable that they could do something seriously wrong. You seem to think JKR is using it to mean a character that's unrealistically good, or someone so good that their virtue makes people uncomfortable. But it's not used that way in the books. 

Magpie:
All three of those quotes the person is mocking someone else for not believing a person could do anything wrong. Hermione is a fool for thinking a teacher can't do something wrong because he's a teacher. Snape thinks Harry would never think his dad could do anything wrong. Muriel makes the has the same contemptuous view about people and Dumbledore--you can't believe he'd do anything wrong.

To apply that same construction to Harry's scene JKR would have to be answering a person saying that Harry didn't cast a Crucio. Like it must have been someone else or some other curse. Iow, saying that they can't believe Harry did what he did. But the person isn't saying that. They do believe what he did. They're just dismayed that his author had him do it. 

A problem she avoids by answering as if the person was just disbelieving. Iow, she's using the word "saint" here to mean a person who could never do anything wrong. I don't see how that so changes the meaning of what she's saying from how it came across to me the first time. "What, you didn't think Harry could ever do anything bad?" is just as dismissive. It deals with the person's concerns over his behavior by setting up a false comparison to a saint--iow a person so virtuous as to be something more than human. It doesn't at all imply to me that she's agreeing with the reader that we should be disturbed by Harry's action, that it was either OOC for him as a hero or for her as an author based on what she wrote before.

Pippin: 
> Wouldn't it undermine the idea of second chances if JKR didn't trust the ability of the audience to pick up on a moral lapse without having someone  point it out to them?  

Magpie:
There's plenty of things that happen in the books that I think come across as clearly bad without anybody having to point them out. In this case, it's not like I don't think Harry's supposed to having a lapse here. I just think it's the kind of lapse that jkoney describes--a lapse that's not a big deal at all, that's realistic for people in this situation. In fact s/he used the same defense for it, again using the word saint. The difference isn't between thinking Crucio is good or bad--everyone agrees that it's bad. The difference is between whether this is bad in the sense of Crouch using Crucios or bad in the sense of Harry blowing up Aunt Marge or MWPP becoming animagi. I think it's more the latter than the former.

Pippin:
> If there has to be a rebuke or a punishment or an expression of guilt for us to know that wrong has been done, then there is no interior moral sense. In that case, second chances would corrupt people's values by teaching them that no wrong has been done as long as the person in question gets away with it and feels  okay afterward.  But JKR evidently does not agree. 

Magpie:
I think you're giving a blank check to the books to say anything without having to actually say it. Even if they say the opposite that's just tricky JKR putting it on us to figure out that it's supposed to be wrong. I think it's a lot more complex than that. I also think it gives far too much control to the author while giving far too little to the reader. I see nothing in these books to think they're so constantly 8 steps beyond me. The fact that I see nothing in the scene that tells me I should be too worried about Harry's actions here, and that the author's answer to challenges sounds just as breezy is not, imo, evidence that obviously the author's all the time nudging me along the path I think is right. I don't think the lack of subtly throughout the whole series is actually a cover for amazingly subtle books going on underneath. To paraphrase Ron from the above quote, I honestly don't think the author must be a saint or something. I think she just wrote a scene where she had a character use the torture curse and treated it fairly lightly, as not in serious conflict with Harry as hero. And that actually seems pretty consistent throughout the books for me. There's a difference between Crouch's crucios and Harry's. 

-m