The Bad Guy[tm]

[Nora Renka]

--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, sean dwyer <ewe2 at a...> wrote:

<snip snip snip SNIIIIP!>

> Bad Guys grab our interest in stories, we choose that. Advancing 
> the Snape cause is going a little far though, he's just a Bad Guy.

Speaking as someone who inevitably and currently gets drawn into 
these threads this is, umm, not something that everyone is accepting 
as 'given'.  In fact, there's been many a spirited defense of Snape 
as completely NOT a Bad Guy, with some Ever So Subtle (ESS?) readings 
of the books for support.

It's going to take some cold, hard, textual revelations to ever make 
a dent in this never-ending battle.  I await the Great Snape 
Apocalypse with a good bottle of French booze, and the right to be 
smug if I end up right (and a nice plate of crow if I don't).

> Maybe that's what takes JKR aback, but it's not as if she'll change 
> him. The League for Anti-Bad-Stuff In Potterverses is equally 
> unrealistic, of course we have bad people doing bad things.

An interesting complaint made on the thread is that the bad sides of 
the good folks have been presented more convincingly and in-depth 
than the bad sides of the bad folks.  I'm not *sure* about that, but 
to go fandom sociologist for a moment, some people certainly have 
picked that up and ran with it.  I'm thinking of the defenses in 
which it is argued that Dolores Umbridge is not that bad, and that 
nothing Draco has ever done has been worse than something that one of 
the Gryffindors have--so, naturally, there's a complete moral 
equivalency at work.  (I'm too lazy to dig up my links--just trust me 
that such arguments exist.)

> Not all bad people are going to get caught or go to Hell either. 
> Some people are acting like it's a writer's JOB to make them pay,
> but it isn't. Or if that's not going to happen, Bad Guys should 
> cease to exist so kiddies don't have sad thoughts. JKR is not 
> responsible for keeping people infantile, that's a parent's problem.

Well, certainly not; and I'm not going to speak for others here, but 
I can almost understand the...desire to have the writer Make the Bad 
Guys Pay.  My own money is actually on this happening in one way-
shape-or-form, in part influenced by some of her own comments.  But 
to get proscriptive towards a writer is certainly to miss something 
of the point, I think.

-Nora tries not to get sick, AND to get some work done!