[the_old_crowd] Re: Dragons, Produced and Tickled, and Other Pleasantries

[silmariel]

nrenka:
> On the other hand, since when has JKR really cared about which
> dynamic her general readers found most interesting?  

Mmm never? Oh, well. Let's say then that her interests and that of her readers 
converge here. She likes writing him, we like/hate reading him, but few 
people has a no-reaction to him. 

> She loves
> Hagrid, who is always at the top of "should die" polls, and wrote in
> Grawp.  

She loves the characters she kills, that's true. About Grawp, well, she did 
write Dobby, she did write Sirius.

>And what was the end of HBP if not BANG-y--we spent the
> entire book telling ourselves "nah, Snape isn't evil, he was just
> lying"--and then he goes and commits the murder.
>

:) We really think very different. I spent the book -after he made the Vow- 
thinking oh he's gonna be bad after all, and smiled when he killed DD because 
that meant he was good. His position now isn't exactly nothing new for a 
supposed-bad, is the standard: everyone chases you and you've got to flee to 
the baddie's side. And the more hated, the better. We already know the arc 
for book 7, HeroQuest. Something else please, as bangy at least as last book.

> I suspect, although I could be wrong, that the main event on is still
> Harry vs. Voldemort, and that's where the grandeur and emphasis are
> going to lie.  

Of course defeating Voldemort is the front end check box of our hero. He's the 
hero, is his work. Girl check, Dark Lord check.
 
Voldemort is too abstract... only The Bad Thing, imo, lacks the force to be a 
real person opponent. Not for Harry, who isn't used to Dark Lords, but at 
least for me he's only one more in a row of created-to-be-dispatched-DLs.  

Maybe because we have been told how he is and he is a pretty flat case of 
early monster, or exposition to Wormtail, or because his followers have a hit 
failure rate as blatant as the Stormtroopers, the MoM fiasco, the fact that 
he sends teenagers do his work, the absurd Cave, etc. He is dangerous? 
Killing people? But of course, he's supossed to be the Dark Lord, he's got to 
fill a minimun. I haven't seen GoF yet but I suposse movie 'enhancing' can 
help the part a lot.

I think the Harry vs Voldemort construction serves to deploy in big scale some 
themes in the series, as bigotry, hard and soft. Slytheryn > Houses > Muggles 
& Other Magical Species that can't quick your wizard's butts. 

It also serves to provide a link to the previous generation so that marauder 
era characters do feel alive in the sense of not be telling old stories, it 
is the same conflict. So when Harry discovers the truth about GH, it can have 
impact.

> Snape is a character who Rowling continually writes
> with this sharp edge of the pathetic and the ridiculous lurking in
> the background, which frustrates his ability to be all dark and
> Gothic and brooding and reluctantly heroic (at least for me).  In
> some ways he's just too sad a figure to bear the weight of the
> denoument of a heroic quest.  

I feel I'm lost here: "this sharp edge of the pathetic and the ridiculous 
lurking in the background" means the ocassions in which he seems human (and 
pathetic, true) instead of a Gary Stu: "his ability to be all dark and Gothic 
and brooding and reluctantly heroic" (I'd be the first asking for his blood 
if he was in supercharacter mode all the time)? 

I don't particularly like the Goth side, I prefer the sarcastic bastard side.

>It's continually amusing how he's the
> most romanticized and valorized figure in much of the fandom at large.
>

He's the Spock type. Don't ask me how it works, but it always works. 

Silmariel