Dragons, Produced and Tickled, and Other Pleasantries

[nrenka]

--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, silmariel <silmariel at t...> 
wrote:

> 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. 

He does get a disproportionate reaction in terms of his page time.  I 
wonder if we aren't pinning too much weight and importance on him, 
though.

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

And she has genuine affection for the latter (per interview), which 
seems to grate upon some to no end.  You can't predict everything 
based on who the author likes or not, but it's not a bad heuristic 
for the tone of their ultimate treatment.

> :) 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 that's a rather rarified way of reading the events which 
have taken place, although it's surely one that she's thought of.  I 
have no faith in any of my predictions, but 'hiding in plain sight' 
may well be the strategy.  I can think of all the supposed 
discrepancies and little clues in past books which haven't proven out 
yet.  Given that, it wouldn't shock me that she put a BANG at the end 
of book 6 to work through its side-effects (and not reverse it) in 
book 7.  YMMV.

> 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 so, but does he have the scale and the ferocity.  I don't know 
how Rowling is going to pull off her denoument, whether it's going to 
be death or some other mechanism.

> 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. 

The blood ideology seems to be the dominant form of bigotry in the 
series.  It's the one given a giant past from founding on, and has 
been shown in the actions of any number of characters (Voldie, Lucius 
Malfoy, Sluggy, Fudge, the whole Ministry) to be the primary cancer 
of wizarding society.

> 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)? 

It means that she makes him (IMO) even more bathetic than genuinely 
pathetic.  (Pathetic is a hard word to use in this case because it 
makes me think of both older and newer connotations of the word).  I 
must be one of the only readers who actually found Snape *less* 
sympathetic after OotP: it was a case of "You've been sulking and 
sitting on all of *that* for so many years?"  I guess that he would 
like to present himself as justified and the wronged party, but his 
version of "me me me" is used by Rowling to make him ridiculous, too.

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

About half the time the humor is sharp and cutting, the other half 
it's fifth-grader caliber.  The latter is supremely embarrassing when 
being used by a grown man upon his student charges.  Again, YMMV.

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

One wonders what the fandom fallout will be if Rowling decides to 
puncture that possibility...

-Nora keeps her options open, but notes that there are a lot of fans 
on both sides of issues who would be devastated to be wrong