The Relativity of "Canon-Compliancy"

Oct 23, 2005 21:34

Speaking of JKR's canon, of course; I don't see it too often in other fandoms ( Read more... )

harry potter, canon

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fernwithy October 25 2005, 22:00:09 UTC
We've barely seen Pansy at all. With a lot of characters, we see enough of their actions to make a reasonable mental adjustment for the "Harry filter." Some people, Harry sees pretty well--he likes Hagrid, but knows he's unreliable and not terribly bright. And that's what the audience can see as well... Hagrid is not secretly studying Aristotle at night. But Pansy? She's very minor, seen entirely in the context of a relationship with Draco. "Pug-faced" is an ugly-sounding term, but it could be applied to someone with a cute, slightly upturned nose... but who the observer doesn't at all like. Someone else might describe her as "button-nosed," which sounds a lot more flattering and is describing the same thing. All we've seen from her is that she was genuinely worried when Draco got hurt third year, and has been on his arm more or less ever since. It could mean anything. It's hard to get Pansy "wrong," per se, because we don't know much about what's right, except that she dislikes Harry and the Weasleys. If she suddenly goes around waxing poetic about the noble house of Weasley, I guess that would be wrong...

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czeri October 26 2005, 06:05:33 UTC
The thing is, even Pansy becoming a Weasley fan could be sold by a good enough reason for her to do so. I've encountered a number of stories in which Pansy is shown to dislike Draco very much, and I couldn't very well accuse the author of writing OOC because there was a reason given for Pansy to act like Draco's number one fan in spite of her true feelings. So the moral of the story is, the less cahon about a character, the more freedom an author has to twist and bend them any way she likes.

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