Genre WAS: That Bloody Man Again

[nrenka]

--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, "pippin_999" <foxmoth at q...> 
wrote:

> Pippin:
> What if the deep thematic resonance is that the way the magic works
> doesn't matter? 

That's a strong possibility.  It also helps mark this out as not 
really being fantasy at root, but Bildungsroman with fantastic 
elements dropped on top of it.
 
> I do see her subverting the idea of heroes and villains, very
> much. There are, in her world, some uniquely good individuals,
> and some uniquely bad ones, but most people are not so easily
> categorized. They are the sum of their choices, good and bad.
> 'The world isn't divided into good people and Death Eaters' is 
> being expanded into 'the world isn't divided into good guys 
> and bad guys'. There are no Orcs, no  clones, no sentient beings 
> who are  nonetheless vermin to be exterminated.

She's only subverting that if you take a pretty black and white 
baseline to the good vs. evil approach.  Flawed characters in 
fantasy are only shocking if, again, you're somewhere in the 1950's, 
or even before then.  But despite everyone having at least a toe of 
clay, I get the feeling that there is still Good, and there is still 
Evil in Rowling's world.  She's said that she writes about Evil, in 
many of its forms.  She's not doing something as profoundly 
subversive as someone like George R. R. Martin, where there's a 
lurking subplot with genuinely scary evil things Up North, but 
that's taken a backseat (for three books) to the nasty things that 
people can do to each other, with pretty much no invocation of any 
kind of good guys and bad guys--rather, a constant shift in POV and 
thus reader sympathy.

The Order is still on the side of Good, and Voldemort is Evil.  Love 
is Good.  I'll make fairly solid predictions that the scale isn't 
going to be fundamentally upset.  Individuals can wax and wane in 
their adherence to either side.  But I do get the feeling that 
opportunists go somewhere worse than the Vestibule.

-Nora thinks: morally ambiguous characters!  Shock and awe!