An essay that takes itself far too seriously (as per the usual. ^^)

[static_pixie]

Wow, there are so many disclaimers on this thing it's uncanny. If two is uncanny. Anyway, I just wanted to mention that I most likely was not the first person to look at the interview this way and I'm not trying to claim I was. It's just a personal example I happen to have.

Comments

[sistermagpie]

You know, at times it's not even not taking her at face value but the opposite. Because as a Draco fan my experience was often that her words would be interpreted for her to be something that they weren't.

I mean, she is keeping secrets. She doesn't lie, but she's cagey. The one line I thought was clever was her "You're all getting entirely too fond of Draco...the darkness is coming!" Everybody interpreted that as Draco being evil but she wasn't saying that (in retrospect we can see that she probably more meant Draco was going to have to face up to the wages of sin pretty soon). Even if you take her at face value she wasn't saying it, she was saying something more vague, impossible to be understood really until you know what she means. Yet people were fine acting as if she had told us that in the end of the book Draco died choking on a kitten he had killed himself to eat.

Most of her quotes are like that, unless she's already tipped her hand. And yet I regularly hear lots of them stated as more than they are. Just recently I heard somebody say that JKR had revealed that Snape was working for Voldemort (referring to the quote where she is actually just confirming that DD is really dead), that she's promised we'll hear exactly what Dudley saw when the Dementors were near. Meanwhile, ironically, things where she does seem to be more emphatic are made out to be less so--like the R/Hr hints, but more importantly stuff about Snape not being a vampire or Petunia being a Muggle.

[nemesister]

Sorry, I replied in the wrong place. Again. Just a warning that you don't have to read my tl;dr, it was meant as a comment to the post.

[static_pixie]

Yeah,I guess that's true, people do tend to twist interviews to mean something they don't. It's just that, with the IoD, anyway, I've seen people throw a quote from JKR in and say, 'voila! my point is proven' without actually then explaining the quote or even thinking more about what it might mean. I guess this essay is more about the interpreting that goes in the opposite direction of what you've sited, because I think that, given the quote, thinking Draco is just evil is still the more obvious way to go, even if it's twisted.

Like I guess it's people twisting her words to prove a point and thus disallowing free interpretation that gets to me. When proving the point becomes more important than actually looking at the evidence (guilty as charged, I know I do it with Draco ^^), so that any other examination of whatever it is that's being looked at becomes a threat. Like it's like the way all those ships got dissed over at the OC simply because they offer up a different interpretation of what we've got, thus obliterating the idea of interpretation at all

And it could be that because she's so emphatic about certain things, fans want it to be that way across the board, so they're more likely to try and offer up something concrete for something that's clearly not.