InsaneJournal

On Harry Potter, Part 1: Consequences
Part the first of my late-coming but nevertheless egregiously long opinion on Harry Potter:


Disclaimer:

1. I am a fan. I love these books, I love the movies, I will reread and rewatch and keep them for years. If I weren't a fan, it wouldn't be nearly as much fun to debate, nitpick, fold, spindle, and mutilate the books.
2. These books are not the stuff of timeless classic literature, but they are a rip-rolling good yarn.
3. When I talk about things I wanted to know or see in the books, I am talking about the books. Not the web interviews or the Today Show appearances or the soon-to-be-written Encyclopedia Potterica. It's all very well to mention Harry &c shaking up the Ministry in an interview, but if there's nary a peep about it in all the pages of the published canon, then it's irrelevant to my interpretation. And while I'm here, I'm also not talking about the movies, which after five severe truncations have their own canon distinct from the books. (Hopefully now I won't make some egregiously obvious movie reference when I think I'm talking about the books.)
4. All opinions expressed herein subject to change as other folks chime in, poke holes in my logic, and/or reference bits of the books I'd forgotten. Possibly it might ramble. Not a true review or organized essay, this.

General Thoughts

I have two major problems with the books, especially with Book 7, and they relate to each other in some ways. First is the essential lack of consequences for just about anything that happens, and second is the essential boringness of Harry as a protagonist. Not that I thought the books were boring, by any stretch. There were sufficient other characters and gorgeous set pieces to keep my imagination engaged and my critical mind distracted until the end. And at the end, while I was pretty happy with the final few chapters, I felt a great sense of betrayal over the Epilogue.

This is because I want to see consequences. Real ones. I want to know that while Harry and Ginny did get married and go to work and have children and send them to Hogwarts, there was some fundamental shift within their world in response to the tragic and world-shattering events of which they were part. I wanted to know that the Wizarding World did not just magically (ha ha) turn around from an oppressive year spent killing and persecuting Muggleborns or other "undesirables", but actually had an uphill battle to find peace and balance.
 I wanted to know that while young Albus Severus may feel trepidation at being Sorted into Slytherin, it's because of the ribbing he knows he'll get from all the Gryffindor uncles and cousins, not because he genuinely fears the stigma of the House of the Serpent.
I wanted to know that the veterans of the Battle of Hogwarts, the students who spent a year under the thumbs of the Carrows, the people who spent months on the run, or on the street after wand confiscation, and all the other victims were given years of therapy and maybe had some difficulty adjusting to Life After Voldemort. In some ways the happy Epilogue felt more like a reset button than a conclusion.
Some folks have said that I expect too much of a children's book, but I say that if Jo wrote in the homeless and wandless victims of the Muggleborn Registration Commission begging on the streets, the expectation of some resolution for them is not unrealistic. I understand that Jo wanted to concentrate on other things; she had a different concept of the ending. Too bad for me. I'll have to go find some fanfiction.

On the subject of consequences, though, there are other places where consequences were not addressed or skimmed over, and I did feel like there could have been something more. The biggest moment for me was when Hermione was tortured by Bellatrix Lestrange at Malfoy Manor, and then Hermione takes Polyjuice and impersonates the woman in Diagon Alley. Wow, Hermione was just amazingly resilient. And I don't really buy that. It would have been nice to see something indicating that always-prepared (some would say ridiculously so), book-educated, logical Hermione didn't just bounce back from the experience. I can buy that Harry would shrug off a few rounds of Crucio, he's suffered worse and survived, but he's pretty messed up himself. For Hermione, whose exposure to extreme physical pain and jeopardy had been until then pretty limited, to simply recover and take impersonating Bellatrix in stride threw me a bit out of the story.
This is not to say Hermione doesn't rock - in many ways she has been the glue holding the Trio together over time, and let's face it, no matter how much guy-bonding there is for Ron and Harry, Hermione has been Harry's most loyal and steadfast friend, from troll confrontation to the Battle of Hogwarts. I appreciate that in her. I just also don't think she's made of stone. Maybe Harry didn't notice her pain and recovery because he was so concentrated on Dobby and then on Voldemort's desecration of Dumbledore's tomb, but how hard would it have been to put in an intermediate step between "Fleur took her inside for medical treatment" and "Goodness, Bellatrix tastes terrible."

Ok, onward to my second problem: Harry's essential boringness as a protagonist. Let's get this straight - the books aren't boring. Harry isn't even boring, most of the time. But as a protagonist, he has no arc. This is because Dumbledore is a manipulative bastard, and Harry is essentially an instrument rather than a person. The qualities that allow him to defeat Voldemort in Book 7 are the same qualities that allow him to gain the Philosopher's Stone in Book 1. He has gone nowhere, because if he grew out of that essential innocence he would be unable to do his job. In many ways what I feel we saw in the Forest at the end of Book 7 was Dumbledore's unending block on Harry's adulthood. Growth from Harry would have wrecked Dumbledore's game, so Harry seems to exist in a sort of cookie-cutter hero stasis for the entirety of the series. Even his great "choices" that seem to mean so much are usually hollow or false dilemmas. Harry is not truly presented with choice - or if he is, the choice is not active, but passive - does he stay on the path laid out for him, or does he give up?

Harry was isolated as a child, so that when he arrives at Hogwarts he is basically a blank slate upon which Dumbledore writes in the necessary variables - the "saving people" thing, the risk-taking, the sense of entitlement regarding adult matters, the distrust of adults that leads to so very many tragedies. It's not unusual in YA or children's literature for adults to be the enemy, but there is often that mentor or role model figure which the children can use to ease their fears of growing up. We can't all be Peter Pan, and it helps to know that adulthood doesn't automatically place you on the other side of the war between the generations. In the world of Harry Potter, adults are the enemy absolutely. Every adult he trusts betrays him in some essential way, all of the adults in authority treat him with a level of neglect and contempt that makes one wonder how he is ever going to come out of this experience sane. The only adult Harry feels any connection to is not even really an adult, but is stuck in a limbo of madness and immaturity. Sirius, too, has been in statis for years, and is unable to be the role model because he, like Harry, has not grown.

Harry goes through the entire series with very few lasting moments of change and maturity, acting almost entirely on instinct and winning his battle not because he has learned or grown emotionally, but because of a coincidence of Expelliarmus and the superstitions of a population that believes in Prophecies.

It could have been anyone in that role. Harry was there because it's his name in the title. There didn't seem to be anything essentially Harry that made his victory possible. It was chance and the manipulations (from beyond the freaking grave!) of a Master Planner.

Some characters do change. Some make hard choices. Hell, Ron changes. Neville grows into a hero, claiming the birthright of Gryffindor. And yet we don't see any of that growth, and very little of Ron's. We certainly don't see much of Snape's choices, and when we do the revelation makes him pathetic rather than heroic (which I consider a betrayal of his character). Sometimes I think I would give a lot to see what went on inside Hogwarts that terrible year. There were true moral battles happening, characters' depths being plumbed, and we see only a sliver of it. Alas. I worry a bit about JKR's consistent playing down of her other characters, as if Snape's years of espionage and Neville's transformation into a leader aren't worth the same respect as Harry's inherent innocence and bravery. Why did Neville thrill me so much? Because he changed so much. I loved to root for him because I knew him when he was cowed by his fear, and then I saw him grow until he could lead through his fear. I just love Neville.

And let's talk about bravery as the ultimate virtue for a moment. Dumbledore at one point tells Snape that perhaps they Sort too soon, implying that Snape would have been in Gryffindor for his courage in the ongoing war. I really, really, really hate that essential denigration of Slytherin. I hate the fact that the books treat Sorting as a sort of Predestination, wherein no House but Gryffindor will show such great courage. I understand that JKR has her own ideas of what is virtuous, but the damning subtext in the books is that Slytherins are by nature bad, disloyal, cowardly, and sly. And Hufflepuffs, of course, get the short end of the stick as well, as if loyalty and diligence were negligible in the greater scheme of things. Would that all that Gryffindor bravery were tempered occasionally by some Hufflepuff loyalty, and a bit of Slytherin guile! It seriously burns me up that there's such tremendous bias within the books - not that bias isn't realistic in characters. It's the fact that it's not just characters with the bias. We as readers are practically explicitly told that the characters' biases are justified and true.



I think that's enough for now. Feel free to comment and blow my opinions out of the water.
Next time, on zephre's Harry Potter Show, Character Moments: Good and Bad, with quotes from the text. Mostly Deathly Hallows, but may hark back to earlier volumes.  Learn why Neville and Luna beat everybody else to the "My Favorite Character" title, why I still like Remus, love Snape, and call disbelief on Hermione.