Other fandoms in comparison - What Harry Potter got Wrong, they're getting right?

[mistress_kizuna]

Okay, HP can't be the only fandom we occupy, and it's been a while since anything's been posted, so I decided to revv up a new discussion.

Now I'll admit, there are still things I love about HP and the fandom (those genuinely good parts of the books I can't let go of, really good people to chat up with, non-canon fanfiction, and a few other things

Comments

[ether_bunny]

I think that most of the characters in HP fandom kind of fell through in the end, to the point that a lot of them are incredibly hard to relate to.

I have to agree on most of these points: here are my thoughts.

Female characters - Even Hermione, Narcissa, and Fleur are primarily about their relationships in the end. Look at Hermione in the nineteen years later, what does she become?

JKR defines her female characters by her male characters. In the same way, while Lily is, at first, identified as being unique in her ability to be compassionate and understanding of "undeserving" people (Lupin, Snape, etc), in the end she is defined solely by her relationship to three male characters. The romantic interest of both James and Severus, and the mother of Harry. She has no individual importance outside of them. And in the end, the traits that she is so congratulated for are not evident at all in what we see of her, even from a man who supposedly loved her.

And as for Tonks - remember when she LOST ALL HER POWERS because she was so depressed about Remus' rejection? She is not a strong character at all. An Auror who becomes completely incapacitated because the guy she's crushing isn't interested? That's just pathetic.

One-dimensional villains - I was also disappointed with Peter. Not only does he seem one-dimensional (Lord, he doesn't even get the "credit toward goodness" that James and Sirius do! Despite their seemingly unforgivable bullying tactics, they get to be handsome, clever, talented, inexplicably popular, and always, always win in the end! On top of that, even in their most unforgivable acts such as pranking Severus into nearly being eaten by a werewolf, he gets punished because Dumbledore loves them Oh So Much that it ought to be hushed up instead of properly dealt with! And as far as Girls To Be Got, baby they Got them all! That always means "good", right? In HP-verse, at least, popularity and good looks make the man.)

But we don't even get proper motivations for Peter's actions. We're just supposed to sort of believe that he ~went bad~. If you look at the way his friends treated him, of course, those ties are just waiting to be cut. They treated him like an applauding audience and a kicktoy from what we saw in the memories, and he's even spoken of in fairly condescending terms by McGonagall, being referred to as the talentless tag-along of the group. It would be no surprise to me if there was a heavy layer of resentment under there because of that. And yet he's expected to be endlessly loyal to these people who mistreated him when no human being naturally would, and no attention at all is given to the fact that the things that happened to James and Sirius are in DIRECT RELATION to the way they treated other people.

Badly done human psychology/ Black-and-white morality - These tie in together, I think. Like what I said about Peter, JKR and the rest of the HPverse is functioning in terms of "good" and "evil", wherein ultimately James and Sirius and the Light are "good" no matter how horrible their actions are, and everyone Dark is "evil", no matter how good their actions are. This is inherintly flawed. You can not even attempt to make grey (read: interesting) characters in a black-and-white universe because there's no way to change that they are either on the good or the evil side. And it makes it completely unforgivable to be on the Dark side, and innately easy to be on the Light side. It's always easy to be on the "good" side because you know, in the end, that your morality is the superior one. You don't have to explain your actions. The "evil" side is more difficult to do, basically a person HAS to be evil to be on it, seeing as JKR chose not to give any of her Death Eaters any motivations for joining other than "lol i hate mudbloods!"

[ether_bunny]

But then that brings in the natural reactions that characters like Snape and Peter would have to the bullying and mistreatment they received from the good characters. Why in God's name would Severus join the Light side? Not only did those characters most loudly and self-righteously supporting it treat him like shit, but apparently they were sort of patted on the back for it by DUMBLEDORE and rewarded with things like being Head Boy (even while the bullying continued after the Shack incident and through the remainder of their schooling, according to Sirius and Remus). And Dumbledore has the gall to tell Severus he disgusts him. There is no evidence to support that Dumbledore ever even made an effort to dissuade Severus, Regulus, or Draco from joining the Death Eaters. All he did was 'damage control' by sacrificing other unworthy "evil" characters like Snape for the Greater Good.

So the point I'm making is that while JKR seems to have desperately tried to make her world have the occasional token grey character (Snape), she failed at making him truly grey. In the end, she's basically said that each and every one of his good actions were done because of Lily, and he wouldn't have done them if it weren't for her, which again sets him firmly on the side of evil and simply under extenuating circumstances that cause him to do good actions despite his evil nature, rather than having any innate goodness of his own. And he is so very, very harshly judged by her and all of the other characters in the story when personally I think that his motivations and actions are incredibly easy to understand, and that if anything it was the responsibility of the school to offer him at least the smallest support when the bullying going on was so severe. Given that he was not extended even the most minor levels of acceptance or acknowledgment as... say... a worthwhile human being, it is no surprise he made the decisions he did. You can't blame him for not seeking them out when the Death Eaters surely treated him better than the Order ever did.

wtf am i really this wordy. lame.

[ether_bunny]

Uninteresting/Badly done romantic subplots - I'm going to have to disagree on James/Lily being an exception. It's not that I think that Severus/Lily was well done either (because it absolutely wasn't, it was terrible imho), but in the final book JKR removed all ability of context for the reader to see how Lily could go on to fall in love with James at all. Where, in the past, since there was so little information about him or Lily at all, we were able to imagine that they became more mature and compatible as they grew, she shattered that notion by presenting James more and more in a Draco-esque light, self centered, rich, spoiled, and a bully. I just can't find any real support in the text of the idea that he matured, and I find him and Lily both really difficult to like given what she's written about them.

Another thing is what someone else commented on - not allowed to feel fear, and I'd like to extend that to not allowed to express emotion for virtually all of the "acceptable" male characters. Look at the individuals in Gryffindor tower. Do we ever, in the entirety of the series, see a single one of them cry? And yet this is the house characterized by PASSION! That implies emotion - love, hate, fear, sadness! The "cold" house, Slytherin, is the only house where we see male characters who weep in canon. We get Draco's scene with Myrtle, and Severus Snape with the photograph of Lily. If anything, I find it less believable that someone like Snape would allow himself to weep and someone like Harry wouldn't. Harry certainly has as much (no, more) pressure on him to succeed than Snape does, he's young, hormonal, and is a character who is supposed to be in touch with his emotions.

Snape is represented (and Draco, to an extent) as a character that feels that showing emotion in any form is a sign of weakness. It is startling when he has angry outbursts, and as much as he is represented as a negative personality, an angry man, he almost never raises his voice. There are only a handful of scenes in which he does so, and it is always very surprising because it is so unusual for him. The fact that he (and Draco, according to JKR) are so talented at Occlumency is because they are emotionally reserved.

And yet, they weep where Harry and his friends don't (except the women, of course, because women are innately weaker than men, didn't you know?). Harry and Ron who are known for their emotional outbursts in times of stress, the fire house, and it's because JKR herself seems to hold the belief that strong men don't cry and don't fear. So another reason to add that James and Sirius, Harry and Ron, Fred and George are "good" characters despite their occasional (or frequent, as the pair may be) bad or cruel behaviour, they are good because they are "strong", they don't weep, and they never express fear. They are Gryffindors, and Real Men, where the Slytherin house, related to water (one of the female elements), in the womb of the castle, is a female house filled with female-aligned characters who care too much about their money, their clothes, who wear their hair long, are subject to emasculation in the narrative and by the Real Man characters, and who cry and express fear at times in which they are in mortal peril.

[ether_bunny]

Oh. And there was another one I wanted to say!

Inconsistent Characterization - Pretty self-explanatory, really. Just look at REMUS LUPIN. The Remus we met in book three would have never blown up and magically assaulted Harry the way book 7 Remus did.

The way James and Lily are represented from book 1 to about book 4, when we start hearing more about the kind of people we are, are seriously incongruent with each other. Sirius is the only Marauder who seems to have any kind of consistent characterization.

Severus Snape has about three stages. We get Incompetent Snape, that's from book 1-4, in which he is constantly being foiled by underaged wizards, and his failings are used as comic relief because "lol we set Snape's robes on fire" or "lol lol we knocked him out using Expelliarmus", etc. Then in books 5 and 6 we get the information about Occlumency and his Potions text, which puts him firmly into Super Badass Pimpmaster Snape territory, a sadly shortlived time for him. Book 7 sees the birth of Emo Lovesick Snape.

None of these Snapes really seems like any of the others, and I feel it's more a failing of JKR's writing ability than anything else. I don't think she meant him to have such a fractured personality.

And let's not forget Unforgivable-weilding Harry! So in-character, that one. Right.

[ether_bunny]

And I just realized I had not offered an alternative fandom, but I tend to think that His Dark Materials (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass) beats out HP in every single one of these categories.