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...on Why I found the last book so anticlimactic, featuring discussions on the Nature of Good and Evil, Snape-centric Examples1, and several Special Bonus Tangents.
My problems with HP: The Series can really be summed up by the anticlimactic resolution to Snape's character. This is a case where it really does matter whether the chicken or the egg came first. I don't just arbitrarily like Snape, I like him because he was the only main character who was faceted, who had good and bad qualities in equal measure2, and who struggled with questions of good and evil--or at least appeared to be doing so until his crappy Chapter of Exposition (more on this below). Harry? Never did. Harry knew from the beginning that Good was Good and Evil was Evil, and never once in seven books did he question this. Knowing the difference between the (rather arbitrarily defined) two is what makes people Good in JKR's world, so much so that it creates blatant double standards3 or results in ridiculous narrative contortions4. And it's BORING. Readers can only maintain so much interest in a character who's too Good to ever be tempted to do wrong and who, due to narrative constraints, is in absolutely no danger of dying for the first six books, to boot.
Snape, on the other hand, had flaws. Not larger than life "I once wanted to rule the Muggle WORLD!!! until I realised that was Bad" flaws5, but human-sized "abuses his position of power" flaws I'm capable of identifying with. Which is what made me think they were going to teach young Harry some important life lessons, like People can be immature and unpleasant without being Unsalveagably Evil, and Things are not always as they seem, and You don't have to personally like someone for them to be on your side, and People can realise they've made Massive Mistakes without the realisation resulting in reflexive kindness to your fellow man.
And that's why I ended up feeling rather shafted when the narrative charged on to the Climax Where We All Know Harry Won't Die without ever really stopping to consider the implications of Snape's choices and actions, of how someone can bully students without necessarily also being irredeemably Evil. (We also see the corollary to some of that in characters like Lupin and Sirius, whom Harry likes but who were far from saints, but they ultimately had much less of an impact on the plot than did Snape, which is ultimately why I don't find the lack of resolution in their cases as deeply unsatisfying.)
What a disappointment. So many pages to read for no character growth or even much tension, especially when it comes to the main characters. No moral quandaries. No dark nights of the soul. No irrevocable mistakes made or lessons learned the hard way...it really was just a 4,000-odd page slog to the point where the bad guy might kill Harry but doesn't. Who cares?
Want another Snape-centric example? Epilogue!Harry's "forgiveness" of Snape6 bugs the hell out of me because it's another example of important lessons learned and character development taking place off screen. Remember--Harry spent all seven years of his acquaintance with Snape hating the man, both for good reasons (he's an obnoxious prick to the students he doesn't like, he's complicit in Voldemort's murder of the Potters) and bad ones (Sirius's death, Dumbledore's death, because Harry's always just known that Snape is Evul), and yet all it takes is one dip in the pensieve, a near death experience and a couple hours for Harry to make the switch from "I've never hated anyone as much as I hate you and you're responsible for killing everyone I care about" to "the man I hate more than anyone in the world spent his entire life harboring romantic designs on my Mum and I'm okay enough with this to taunt Voldemort with it in front of the entire Wizarding world."
Are you kidding me? If there is one single thing that could possibly make Harry hate Snape even more than he does already, it would be the revelation that Snape wanted to get with Harry's mother. Seriously. "Your mama" jokes exist for a reason--because guys can get kinda touchy about what other people think and say about their moms, even people they actually like. You cannot convince me that there is Any. God damn. Way. That Harry would be cool with that. More like "You were in league with Voldemort, you killed my parents and Sirius and Dumbledore and you had this creepy, gross thing for my mom? ACCIO CAPSLOCKRAGE!!!!" Hell, I'd find Snape's endless obsession with Lily, had it been believably handled, creepy and gross and I'm partial to his character. Imagine how Harry would feel about it...if it had been handled at all realistically, that is.
Which takes me to my third bit: could JKR have written a more deus ex machina motivation if she'd tried? A more It Is Thus Because I Said So motivation? Yes, she dropped hints about Snape and Lily throughout the text, but that doesn't make their 10-odd pages of romance any more believable as Snape's sole motivation. Snape did it all for Lily and only for Lily? For his first childhood crush, his first (and possibly only) friend, who incidentally dropped him like a bad habit? Snape is "spiteful" and a "deeply horrible person"--these are JKR's words, not mine. Have you ever met a spiteful, deeply horrible man who spends decades carrying an altruistic torch for the woman who scorned him? Come to think of it, do you know any regular, well adjusted men who have many nice things to say about women who've left them for other guys? I sure don't. And that's not even mentioning the fact that Lily left bully Snape...for a rich, popular, sports hero bully.7 Gosh, I can see how someone with a vindictive, spiteful personality like Snape would have nothing but undying love for Lily in his heart after being treated like that, can't you?
Or to put it more succinctly, I don't buy Snape's motivation because I can't imagine him not wanting to make Lily hurt for "leaving" him for James Potter.
It also bugs me that, for all intents and purposes, James is just as big a bully as Snape. (I'd love to make the case that, especially pre-Voldemort, "Slytherin" and "Mudblood" sure seem like two sides of the same pejorative coin to me, but that's a rant for later.) Yes, James Potter might have had a good side and/or mellowed out considerably from what we've seen in Snape's memories. The point is, we the readers don't get to see that happen--it just presumably takes place because Lily ends up marrying him. And this is something that absolutely needed to be made explicit in order to keep people like me from thinking, "Wow, James is an utter prick and Lily must be really shallow, since she's okay him being a prick as long as he's a popular prick." This reaction is magnified in light of the fact that, unlike James, we do see Snape doing things besides bullying social outcasts--like saving Harry and Draco's lives and putting himself in mortal danger for the greater good and framing himself for murder to spare others and giving a shit about the students in his house, to name a few.
So I guess that, in a nutshell, is why I feel so let down by HP. They're the longest books I've read about "the battle between good and evil" that never actually bother to deal with questions of good and evil, or especially how both can coexist in the same person.
1I could just as easily have used Dumbledore-centric examples, but decided to go with Snape, as JKR devoted no small portion of DH to dealing with the implications of Dumbledore's death and the choices he made throughout his life (although I spent no small portion of that ::facepalming:: and screaming "You missed a spot!")
2That JKR seems to have made the conscious choice to write as such.
3The twins bullying people is funny because they're Good, Slytherins/DEs bullying people is bullying because they're Bad; Dumbledore's blatant favoritism to Harry/Gryffindor is Good because he/they are Good, Snape's blatant favoritism to Slytherin/Draco is Bad because he/they are Bad; it's okay for HarryCo/WeasleyCo to hold patronising or derogatory views toward Squibs/Muggles because they're Good, not okay for MalfoyCo/Slytherins to hold patronising or derogatory views towards Muggleborns/Muggles because they're Bad...I could go on and on.
4JKR has the Order fighting Killing Curse-slinging Death Eaters with stunning and disarming charms--they're so Good she can't even bring herself to allow them to fight the people who are trying to enslave and kill them with deadly force.
5That were conveniently resolved before the story takes place.
6Also, am I the only person who thinks Snape would find Harry using 'Severus' as his son's middle name to be a huge slap in the face?
7This especially bugs me because we see a lot more of Hogwarts-era James-the-bully in action than we do Hogwart-era Snape, who does his bullying off-screen. And judging from those old detention records, James didn't limit himself to just harassing Snape or other Slytherins.
これで以上です。
My problems with HP: The Series can really be summed up by the anticlimactic resolution to Snape's character. This is a case where it really does matter whether the chicken or the egg came first. I don't just arbitrarily like Snape, I like him because he was the only main character who was faceted, who had good and bad qualities in equal measure2, and who struggled with questions of good and evil--or at least appeared to be doing so until his crappy Chapter of Exposition (more on this below). Harry? Never did. Harry knew from the beginning that Good was Good and Evil was Evil, and never once in seven books did he question this. Knowing the difference between the (rather arbitrarily defined) two is what makes people Good in JKR's world, so much so that it creates blatant double standards3 or results in ridiculous narrative contortions4. And it's BORING. Readers can only maintain so much interest in a character who's too Good to ever be tempted to do wrong and who, due to narrative constraints, is in absolutely no danger of dying for the first six books, to boot.
Snape, on the other hand, had flaws. Not larger than life "I once wanted to rule the Muggle WORLD!!! until I realised that was Bad" flaws5, but human-sized "abuses his position of power" flaws I'm capable of identifying with. Which is what made me think they were going to teach young Harry some important life lessons, like People can be immature and unpleasant without being Unsalveagably Evil, and Things are not always as they seem, and You don't have to personally like someone for them to be on your side, and People can realise they've made Massive Mistakes without the realisation resulting in reflexive kindness to your fellow man.
And that's why I ended up feeling rather shafted when the narrative charged on to the Climax Where We All Know Harry Won't Die without ever really stopping to consider the implications of Snape's choices and actions, of how someone can bully students without necessarily also being irredeemably Evil. (We also see the corollary to some of that in characters like Lupin and Sirius, whom Harry likes but who were far from saints, but they ultimately had much less of an impact on the plot than did Snape, which is ultimately why I don't find the lack of resolution in their cases as deeply unsatisfying.)
What a disappointment. So many pages to read for no character growth or even much tension, especially when it comes to the main characters. No moral quandaries. No dark nights of the soul. No irrevocable mistakes made or lessons learned the hard way...it really was just a 4,000-odd page slog to the point where the bad guy might kill Harry but doesn't. Who cares?
Want another Snape-centric example? Epilogue!Harry's "forgiveness" of Snape6 bugs the hell out of me because it's another example of important lessons learned and character development taking place off screen. Remember--Harry spent all seven years of his acquaintance with Snape hating the man, both for good reasons (he's an obnoxious prick to the students he doesn't like, he's complicit in Voldemort's murder of the Potters) and bad ones (Sirius's death, Dumbledore's death, because Harry's always just known that Snape is Evul), and yet all it takes is one dip in the pensieve, a near death experience and a couple hours for Harry to make the switch from "I've never hated anyone as much as I hate you and you're responsible for killing everyone I care about" to "the man I hate more than anyone in the world spent his entire life harboring romantic designs on my Mum and I'm okay enough with this to taunt Voldemort with it in front of the entire Wizarding world."
Are you kidding me? If there is one single thing that could possibly make Harry hate Snape even more than he does already, it would be the revelation that Snape wanted to get with Harry's mother. Seriously. "Your mama" jokes exist for a reason--because guys can get kinda touchy about what other people think and say about their moms, even people they actually like. You cannot convince me that there is Any. God damn. Way. That Harry would be cool with that. More like "You were in league with Voldemort, you killed my parents and Sirius and Dumbledore and you had this creepy, gross thing for my mom? ACCIO CAPSLOCKRAGE!!!!" Hell, I'd find Snape's endless obsession with Lily, had it been believably handled, creepy and gross and I'm partial to his character. Imagine how Harry would feel about it...if it had been handled at all realistically, that is.
Which takes me to my third bit: could JKR have written a more deus ex machina motivation if she'd tried? A more It Is Thus Because I Said So motivation? Yes, she dropped hints about Snape and Lily throughout the text, but that doesn't make their 10-odd pages of romance any more believable as Snape's sole motivation. Snape did it all for Lily and only for Lily? For his first childhood crush, his first (and possibly only) friend, who incidentally dropped him like a bad habit? Snape is "spiteful" and a "deeply horrible person"--these are JKR's words, not mine. Have you ever met a spiteful, deeply horrible man who spends decades carrying an altruistic torch for the woman who scorned him? Come to think of it, do you know any regular, well adjusted men who have many nice things to say about women who've left them for other guys? I sure don't. And that's not even mentioning the fact that Lily left bully Snape...for a rich, popular, sports hero bully.7 Gosh, I can see how someone with a vindictive, spiteful personality like Snape would have nothing but undying love for Lily in his heart after being treated like that, can't you?
Or to put it more succinctly, I don't buy Snape's motivation because I can't imagine him not wanting to make Lily hurt for "leaving" him for James Potter.
It also bugs me that, for all intents and purposes, James is just as big a bully as Snape. (I'd love to make the case that, especially pre-Voldemort, "Slytherin" and "Mudblood" sure seem like two sides of the same pejorative coin to me, but that's a rant for later.) Yes, James Potter might have had a good side and/or mellowed out considerably from what we've seen in Snape's memories. The point is, we the readers don't get to see that happen--it just presumably takes place because Lily ends up marrying him. And this is something that absolutely needed to be made explicit in order to keep people like me from thinking, "Wow, James is an utter prick and Lily must be really shallow, since she's okay him being a prick as long as he's a popular prick." This reaction is magnified in light of the fact that, unlike James, we do see Snape doing things besides bullying social outcasts--like saving Harry and Draco's lives and putting himself in mortal danger for the greater good and framing himself for murder to spare others and giving a shit about the students in his house, to name a few.
So I guess that, in a nutshell, is why I feel so let down by HP. They're the longest books I've read about "the battle between good and evil" that never actually bother to deal with questions of good and evil, or especially how both can coexist in the same person.
1I could just as easily have used Dumbledore-centric examples, but decided to go with Snape, as JKR devoted no small portion of DH to dealing with the implications of Dumbledore's death and the choices he made throughout his life (although I spent no small portion of that ::facepalming:: and screaming "You missed a spot!")
2That JKR seems to have made the conscious choice to write as such.
3The twins bullying people is funny because they're Good, Slytherins/DEs bullying people is bullying because they're Bad; Dumbledore's blatant favoritism to Harry/Gryffindor is Good because he/they are Good, Snape's blatant favoritism to Slytherin/Draco is Bad because he/they are Bad; it's okay for HarryCo/WeasleyCo to hold patronising or derogatory views toward Squibs/Muggles because they're Good, not okay for MalfoyCo/Slytherins to hold patronising or derogatory views towards Muggleborns/Muggles because they're Bad...I could go on and on.
4JKR has the Order fighting Killing Curse-slinging Death Eaters with stunning and disarming charms--they're so Good she can't even bring herself to allow them to fight the people who are trying to enslave and kill them with deadly force.
5That were conveniently resolved before the story takes place.
6Also, am I the only person who thinks Snape would find Harry using 'Severus' as his son's middle name to be a huge slap in the face?
7This especially bugs me because we see a lot more of Hogwarts-era James-the-bully in action than we do Hogwart-era Snape, who does his bullying off-screen. And judging from those old detention records, James didn't limit himself to just harassing Snape or other Slytherins.
これで以上です。