Jumping on the Hagrid bandwagon...
Yes, of course I have to get my two cents in! I joined in on this discussion about why people don't like Hagrid, and vulgarweed brought up an interesting point that I responded to there, but here I am saying it here as well. It has to do with Hagrid as a type in children's literature, and I think it brings up something about the types in HP
vulgarweed states, "Hagrid's, um, issues are a convention of children's and YA fiction--the kids have to know things the adults don't, and the adults have to be wrong more often than not and need the kids to figure things out...I think a reason a lot of adult fans don't like Hagrid is that we're reading the books from an adult point of view. From a kid's point of view, a scary-but-cuddly adult who can nonetheless relate to them emotionally (being a big kid himself) and lets them in on important information; takes their side almost always; lets them play with critters every other adult would say are too dangerous for them; allows them to help him, thus equalizing the power balance--he's a hero! A lot of children say Hagrid is their favorite adult character. He represents the adult who transgresses against the adult/child social boundaries that children find odious. From an adult POV, of course, it looks quite different."
It's a good point, but I think the books themselves specifically offer both sides--and that the adult side is ultimately winning out. In PS/SS and CoS Hagrid can indeed be this sort of character. He does relate to the kids emotionally, let them play with scary animals, takes their side against others (Hagrid relates to Dudley and Draco much the way Harry does--that isn't a good thing any more than it's a good thing that Snape reacts to Harry the way Malfoy does). But the fact is, Harry is now 15 and he himself is beginning to see that there's nothing particularly good about being a childlike adult. If you relate to someone well at 11 because they're on your level, what do you do at 15 when you've surpassed them? It's a painful, embarrassing thing and it's getting worse.
I think PoA is the turning point. That's where Hagrid is given a position of authority, one which in Harry's eyes is probably a happy ending. He *should* be the CoM teacher because he loves animals and he's Hagrid and they love him and it wasn't fair he got expelled years ago. Only the reality is quite different. He's a bad teacher. Harry cringes in his class. Someone gets hurt. Hagrid drinks. When personal stress gets too bad he doesn't teach at all or just makes the class boring. He doesn't come out well when his students challenge him. In PoA the kids are just young enough to staunchly defend Hagrid and feel sorry for him losing his pet, ignoring the hard truth that he deserves the sack. They're happily willing to sacrifice themselves for his class-and more than willing to sacrifice Malfoy. By OotP Harry is guilty himself for preferring classes with a competent teacher. He's not excited at the prospect of Hagrid giving him a giant to take care of.
The thing is, the adult view of Hagrid has been presented in the books from the very beginning. Only it was put into the mouth of our resident, "Everything I say is a sign of bad character!" character, Draco Malfoy. Draco's gossip about Hagrid, that he's some sort of savage who gets drunk and tries to do magic and winds up setting the bed on fire infuriates Harry, but it's no doubt the reputation he has amongst plenty of other students. It's the way many adults would see him as well--Hagrid isn't a child in a man's body all the time. Sometimes he's just an irresponsible adult. And his actions more and more fit Malfoy's description rather than Harry's idealized Father Christmas idea. It's true that the childlike adult is a staple of kids' books but no, imo, YA. A childlike adult in YA isn't about wish fulfillment but the pain of growing up. There are many kids who actually do live with adults like this and they can be quite cynical about it. I don't think there are too many kids who find alcoholic adults endearing, for instance. This seems to be more where Harry is in OotP, although he's fighting against it. When Hermione tells him Hagrid's back Harry is thrilled (while I react in horror fulfilled by the interminable "Hagrid's Tale" ;-)) but Hagrid doesn't offer comfort but more stress he dumps on the kids.
I don't know where JKR expects to go with this. On one hand it seems like she strangely adores Hagrid and wants us to see him as a big hero--and I guess given the values that seem given the most weight in this universe Hagrid is a hero: He's brave, he's loyal to the right people, he acts on his emotions, and he's sentimental about animals. But still she writes these painfully realistic scenes where Hagrid is a bad teacher. Has anybody ever had a teacher like this? He reminds me of a Latin teacher I had in tenth grade--what a painful class. He loved Latin and knew it well ("It's English!" he's say when we couldn't get it) so was not very good at actually teaching it. He could not at all control the class, so our resident Draco (Fred, who also had very blond hair--one teacher when we were little used to call him "Lighthouse" because he would always turn around and talk to his friends in class and his head was like a beacon) completely demolished him and dragged him down to his level. And he drank too, which became more and more apparent as the year went on. There is *nothing* endearing about an adult in a position of authority falling apart that way, and we, like the kids at Hogwarts, weren't a particularly bad class to handle. So I'm not sure how we're supposed to take him sometimes. Approve of him because he's a big softie or react like any child or adult who can recognize incompetence? In order to do both Hagrid's incompetence can't continue to cause problems.
This does and doesn't lead into this other point, but I'm putting it here anyway because I see a connection. This comes out of a recent discussion about truth in scenes and basically comes down to the question:
"Abuse" is a word that comes up a lot with HP discussions, and I'm interested in what it means to people and how they use it. It seems like it's one of those important words that everyone is suppose to have the same reaction to--if a child is abused they must be helped and sympathized with. It seems it's often used in discussions of Harry and Draco (and Neville and now Snape sometimes as well). For instance, when people complain about fics where Harry is "abused" by the Dursleys when he isn't. What they mean, of course, is that Vernon is not shown giving Harry forty lashes in the living room, nor is he raping him in his cupboard. When Harry *is*described as being abused it is often in the service of explaining how Dumbledore can't be brushed off as a kindly old man who made a reasonable choice in leaving him with the Dursleys by modern standards. (It's also sometimes used to draw the line between fact and fiction in the series--most kids "abused" the way Harry was growing up would not be as well-adjusted as he is.) With Harry we all know what's done to him, it's just a sticking point of whether or not we call it "abuse."
So what's interesting to me is that this word seems to be so powerful that once it's used we must have very specific reactions to everyone involved. Sometimes in the case of Draco it seems like it can't be used because it requires sympathy for the character (though not always--I'm of course not arguing that somebody can't just have a different idea of what his home life is like than someone else and feel the word doesn't apply). I'm not saying that people should feel this word fits either Draco or Harry at all. It just seems interesting to me that the word itself is so important-like, in the previous thread, we were talking about the B&B scene, where I, as I've said before, think Draco gets treated in a way that would have hurt me very much as a kid, and in a way that I can easily see leading to the personality we see in him. And spare_change brought up the, imo, valid question of how much it mattered whether or not this would be considered abuse.
That does seem to be a question that comes up a lot in discussing the way kids are treated in this universe and really maybe it shouldn't. Maybe "abuse" is just a modern convention that keeps us from dealing with the characters honestly. So rather than looking at the specific kid we're talking about and thinking about how certain things would hurt him or not and why, we just check it against the definition in our heads for "abuse" and if it doesn't fit that definition it's okay and doesn't explain any bad behavior they have. But I'm sure anyone who's ever seen a kid get his feelings hurt, or had their feelings hurt as a child surely remembers that this has an effect on your personality. Just dealing with people in general surely we all know that it's possibly to hurt someone deeply without crossing any lines into abuse. Or that it's possible to feel like someone is seriously damaging another person without calling it "abuse" in our heads.
I guess it comes down to...humans are complicated. Kids are all different. If a parent doesn't have the best intentions towards his children (heck, even if he does!) he can hurt them in all sorts of ways. I'm sure most kids (and perhaps most adults) find it hard to really understand how that can work. It's not hard for a kid to identify with Harry in his situation-Harry himself reacts to it the way any normal kid reading it would react to reading about his situation. Unfortunately I think that the books also have so far made it easy for forget it doesn't always work that way. I mean...families are very important in the books but so far there's not much connection drawn between a child's experiences at home leading to ugly problems. It's very easy to just say that if you're a "good person" you wind up with a particular personality and a certain set of beliefs while a "bad person" fails to do this and would have failed to do this even with good experiences. Percy's experience in the Weasley family becomes indistinguishable from Fred, George and Ginny's. Sirius' rejection of his family simply proves that kids like Regulus and Draco are bad in themselves. Harry "proves" an unhappy childhood is no "excuse" for being a bad person.
But in reality things don't work that way--everyone is the product of their experiences + their personality. That doesn't mean they're not responsible for their own actions, or that any bad thing they do is excused, just that I don't think we can really decide what does or doesn't count as genuinely hurtful and harmful to someone else, or judge the way they develop because of it.
vulgarweed states, "Hagrid's, um, issues are a convention of children's and YA fiction--the kids have to know things the adults don't, and the adults have to be wrong more often than not and need the kids to figure things out...I think a reason a lot of adult fans don't like Hagrid is that we're reading the books from an adult point of view. From a kid's point of view, a scary-but-cuddly adult who can nonetheless relate to them emotionally (being a big kid himself) and lets them in on important information; takes their side almost always; lets them play with critters every other adult would say are too dangerous for them; allows them to help him, thus equalizing the power balance--he's a hero! A lot of children say Hagrid is their favorite adult character. He represents the adult who transgresses against the adult/child social boundaries that children find odious. From an adult POV, of course, it looks quite different."
It's a good point, but I think the books themselves specifically offer both sides--and that the adult side is ultimately winning out. In PS/SS and CoS Hagrid can indeed be this sort of character. He does relate to the kids emotionally, let them play with scary animals, takes their side against others (Hagrid relates to Dudley and Draco much the way Harry does--that isn't a good thing any more than it's a good thing that Snape reacts to Harry the way Malfoy does). But the fact is, Harry is now 15 and he himself is beginning to see that there's nothing particularly good about being a childlike adult. If you relate to someone well at 11 because they're on your level, what do you do at 15 when you've surpassed them? It's a painful, embarrassing thing and it's getting worse.
I think PoA is the turning point. That's where Hagrid is given a position of authority, one which in Harry's eyes is probably a happy ending. He *should* be the CoM teacher because he loves animals and he's Hagrid and they love him and it wasn't fair he got expelled years ago. Only the reality is quite different. He's a bad teacher. Harry cringes in his class. Someone gets hurt. Hagrid drinks. When personal stress gets too bad he doesn't teach at all or just makes the class boring. He doesn't come out well when his students challenge him. In PoA the kids are just young enough to staunchly defend Hagrid and feel sorry for him losing his pet, ignoring the hard truth that he deserves the sack. They're happily willing to sacrifice themselves for his class-and more than willing to sacrifice Malfoy. By OotP Harry is guilty himself for preferring classes with a competent teacher. He's not excited at the prospect of Hagrid giving him a giant to take care of.
The thing is, the adult view of Hagrid has been presented in the books from the very beginning. Only it was put into the mouth of our resident, "Everything I say is a sign of bad character!" character, Draco Malfoy. Draco's gossip about Hagrid, that he's some sort of savage who gets drunk and tries to do magic and winds up setting the bed on fire infuriates Harry, but it's no doubt the reputation he has amongst plenty of other students. It's the way many adults would see him as well--Hagrid isn't a child in a man's body all the time. Sometimes he's just an irresponsible adult. And his actions more and more fit Malfoy's description rather than Harry's idealized Father Christmas idea. It's true that the childlike adult is a staple of kids' books but no, imo, YA. A childlike adult in YA isn't about wish fulfillment but the pain of growing up. There are many kids who actually do live with adults like this and they can be quite cynical about it. I don't think there are too many kids who find alcoholic adults endearing, for instance. This seems to be more where Harry is in OotP, although he's fighting against it. When Hermione tells him Hagrid's back Harry is thrilled (while I react in horror fulfilled by the interminable "Hagrid's Tale" ;-)) but Hagrid doesn't offer comfort but more stress he dumps on the kids.
I don't know where JKR expects to go with this. On one hand it seems like she strangely adores Hagrid and wants us to see him as a big hero--and I guess given the values that seem given the most weight in this universe Hagrid is a hero: He's brave, he's loyal to the right people, he acts on his emotions, and he's sentimental about animals. But still she writes these painfully realistic scenes where Hagrid is a bad teacher. Has anybody ever had a teacher like this? He reminds me of a Latin teacher I had in tenth grade--what a painful class. He loved Latin and knew it well ("It's English!" he's say when we couldn't get it) so was not very good at actually teaching it. He could not at all control the class, so our resident Draco (Fred, who also had very blond hair--one teacher when we were little used to call him "Lighthouse" because he would always turn around and talk to his friends in class and his head was like a beacon) completely demolished him and dragged him down to his level. And he drank too, which became more and more apparent as the year went on. There is *nothing* endearing about an adult in a position of authority falling apart that way, and we, like the kids at Hogwarts, weren't a particularly bad class to handle. So I'm not sure how we're supposed to take him sometimes. Approve of him because he's a big softie or react like any child or adult who can recognize incompetence? In order to do both Hagrid's incompetence can't continue to cause problems.
This does and doesn't lead into this other point, but I'm putting it here anyway because I see a connection. This comes out of a recent discussion about truth in scenes and basically comes down to the question:
"Abuse" is a word that comes up a lot with HP discussions, and I'm interested in what it means to people and how they use it. It seems like it's one of those important words that everyone is suppose to have the same reaction to--if a child is abused they must be helped and sympathized with. It seems it's often used in discussions of Harry and Draco (and Neville and now Snape sometimes as well). For instance, when people complain about fics where Harry is "abused" by the Dursleys when he isn't. What they mean, of course, is that Vernon is not shown giving Harry forty lashes in the living room, nor is he raping him in his cupboard. When Harry *is*described as being abused it is often in the service of explaining how Dumbledore can't be brushed off as a kindly old man who made a reasonable choice in leaving him with the Dursleys by modern standards. (It's also sometimes used to draw the line between fact and fiction in the series--most kids "abused" the way Harry was growing up would not be as well-adjusted as he is.) With Harry we all know what's done to him, it's just a sticking point of whether or not we call it "abuse."
So what's interesting to me is that this word seems to be so powerful that once it's used we must have very specific reactions to everyone involved. Sometimes in the case of Draco it seems like it can't be used because it requires sympathy for the character (though not always--I'm of course not arguing that somebody can't just have a different idea of what his home life is like than someone else and feel the word doesn't apply). I'm not saying that people should feel this word fits either Draco or Harry at all. It just seems interesting to me that the word itself is so important-like, in the previous thread, we were talking about the B&B scene, where I, as I've said before, think Draco gets treated in a way that would have hurt me very much as a kid, and in a way that I can easily see leading to the personality we see in him. And spare_change brought up the, imo, valid question of how much it mattered whether or not this would be considered abuse.
That does seem to be a question that comes up a lot in discussing the way kids are treated in this universe and really maybe it shouldn't. Maybe "abuse" is just a modern convention that keeps us from dealing with the characters honestly. So rather than looking at the specific kid we're talking about and thinking about how certain things would hurt him or not and why, we just check it against the definition in our heads for "abuse" and if it doesn't fit that definition it's okay and doesn't explain any bad behavior they have. But I'm sure anyone who's ever seen a kid get his feelings hurt, or had their feelings hurt as a child surely remembers that this has an effect on your personality. Just dealing with people in general surely we all know that it's possibly to hurt someone deeply without crossing any lines into abuse. Or that it's possible to feel like someone is seriously damaging another person without calling it "abuse" in our heads.
I guess it comes down to...humans are complicated. Kids are all different. If a parent doesn't have the best intentions towards his children (heck, even if he does!) he can hurt them in all sorts of ways. I'm sure most kids (and perhaps most adults) find it hard to really understand how that can work. It's not hard for a kid to identify with Harry in his situation-Harry himself reacts to it the way any normal kid reading it would react to reading about his situation. Unfortunately I think that the books also have so far made it easy for forget it doesn't always work that way. I mean...families are very important in the books but so far there's not much connection drawn between a child's experiences at home leading to ugly problems. It's very easy to just say that if you're a "good person" you wind up with a particular personality and a certain set of beliefs while a "bad person" fails to do this and would have failed to do this even with good experiences. Percy's experience in the Weasley family becomes indistinguishable from Fred, George and Ginny's. Sirius' rejection of his family simply proves that kids like Regulus and Draco are bad in themselves. Harry "proves" an unhappy childhood is no "excuse" for being a bad person.
But in reality things don't work that way--everyone is the product of their experiences + their personality. That doesn't mean they're not responsible for their own actions, or that any bad thing they do is excused, just that I don't think we can really decide what does or doesn't count as genuinely hurtful and harmful to someone else, or judge the way they develop because of it.