I’m not sure the Draco I’ve been writing for the last few chapters would use the term “bitch” in front of Harry Potter, it doesn’t sound dignified enough for the heir of Malfoy.
(But yes I did explicitly consider that alternative. If I get enough votes for keeping the shock value I’ll put it back in, or figure out something, I guess.)
It is expected that villains, even in the canon of children’s books, will kill and maybe occasionally torture victims in order to establish that they are bad. It is not expected that villains, especially in the canon of children’s books, will permit/condone/commit rape. Additionally, the sorts of emotions that are commonly supposed to precede murder and torture are more familiar than the sorts of emotions that are commonly supposed to precede rape, and so someone unfamiliar with the actual etiology of any of those crimes finds rape less relatable and more shocking.
It is expected that villains, even in the canon of children’s books, will kill and maybe occasionally torture victims in order to establish that they are bad. It is not expected that villains, especially in the canon of children’s books, will permit/condone/commit rape.
Agreed. I also think the original “Which of these characters has crossed the moral event horizon?” question (in one of the Author’s Notes) was a little bit misguided because, as far as most HP readers are concerned, Voldemort is already considered to have passed the moral event horizon from the outset. There’s little he could do that would make us think “Wow, I didn’t know Voldemort was that evil”. And 11-year-old Draco, being the son of a Death Eater, might be expected to hold certain evils as justifiable or compulsory — we expect that he’s been conditioned to find it acceptable to kill, torture, and exploit non-purebloods, and generally to manipulate people for his own ends. And as long as he’s still young, we’re inclined to be relatively lenient in judging him for those attitudes, considering he has never learned anything else, nor been allowed (or allowed himself) to reconsider it. What we don’t expect is for him to talk casually about committing rape, considering that nobody in the series does, even the darkest of the canon dark wizards; it makes it seem like it’s an idea he came up with on his own, like he just heard a definition of rape and thought to himself “Hey, that sounds like a fun thing to do to young female political enemies, and I bet I could get away with it, too”. So I bet most of the objections were based not on thinking “that’s more evil than Voldemort”, but “that’s way more evil than Draco is supposed to be right now”.
What we don’t expect is for him to talk casually about committing rape, considering that nobody in the series does
Those are the children’s books version, and MoR is not a children’s book, nor is most fanfiction. If you’ll pardon the size of the hypothetical: If the Death Eaters actually existed, no way in hell are the males not committing rape.
If the Death Eaters actually existed, no way in hell are the males not committing rape.
This is true. But even among works of fanfiction, the ones that point this out tend to also be the ones that are full of sex acts in general, which MoR is not.
MoR points things out for the sake of pointing them out, by way of trying to teach the art of the awakened mind. Actually I’m not clear on what if anything we’re arguing about at this point.
True. By the laws of fiction, most evil characters are fugly.
Not true. Indeed, Draco is a classic counterexample to this statement. This is part of the reason why there’s a whole trope entitled Draco in Leather Pants. Moreover, the notion that whether people are ugly or not has something to do with whether or not they engage in rape is so wrong-headed I’m not at all sure how to even begin to touch it.
I said most fictional, evil characters are fugly. I stand by that statement.
Correct my “wrong-headed” beliefs if you can, but I suspect the sexually desperate are more likely to rape. This column presents evidence that sex crimes go down when the internet is introduced.
Porn → decreased desperation → less rape
Is there another pathway that explains this evidence I’m not seeing?
Ceteris paribus, girls are far, far less desperate than guys. Supply and demand says an egg produced once a month will have a higher asking price than what guys churn out. This makes me suspect female rapists must be less attractive.
Correct my “wrong-headed” beliefs if you can, but I suspect the sexually desperate are more likely to rape. This column presents evidence that sex crimes go down when the internet is introduced.
Right, this evidence is one of the strong pieces of evidence that undermines the entire rape-is-about-power claim. And there’s other evidence for this also (for example, prison systems that allow conjugal visits have lower rape rates than those that don’t(a citation for this claim would be nice. I’ve seen it before but a quick Google search doesn’t turn up anything useful)). But sometimes, it is about power. Indeed, the type of rape being discussed in this context, by someone like Draco is the classic power situation. And when people are raping enemies that’s more or less unambiguously about power.
I think that depends entirely on particulars that should probably not be discussed here—suffice it to say that a male can be raped in multiple ways, just as a female can, and that rape involves emotional/mental pain as well as physical pain.
I imagine rape is way, way, way more painful for girls than for guys.
What!
Oh, wait. You mean rape of males by females without the use of any paraphernalia.
My impression of approximate rape statistics was along the lines of 90%/9%/1% male->female/male->male/female->male. I don’t know where female->female fits.
“Involuntary heterosexual coitus” is the last think of when evaluating the relative expectations of pain.
I think it’s complicated. Even the access to the internet lowering the incidence of rape could be about increased chances of finding partners as well as access to more porn—it isn’t as though porn was rare before the internet.
My impression is that it isn’t as true as it used to be that fictional evil characters are ugly, but I don’t have stats. It’s certainly reassuring to think that the people you find repulsive are also more dangerous.
Interestingly, I actually had a specific female Death Eater that I had in mind when I wrote that post. The character in question, Bellatrix Lestrange, was played by Helena Bonham Carter, who does not strike me as unusually physically unattractive.
If I recall correctly, she was attractive—even beautiful—in the books until she was imprisoned, at which point she became a shadow of her former self. However, she was imprisoned for torturing two people into insanity (I can rot13 that if necessary, but I think it’s a very minor spoiler at best), so I think it’s fair to say that she was evil before she became unattractive and not the other way around.
Ceteris paribus, girls are far, far less desperate than guys. Supply and demand says an egg produced once a month will have a higher asking price than what guys churn out. This makes me suspect female rapists must be less attractive.
There may be different factors going on for female rapists. The statistics you cite don’t separate out male and female rapists, and I suspect that female rapists are less likely to rape out of desperation, rather than being less attractive.
Those are the children’s books version, and MoR is not a children’s book, nor is most fanfiction. If you’ll pardon the size of the hypothetical: If the Death Eaters actually existed, no way in hell are the males not committing rape.
I agree. My point was only that, in the context of the canon, having an 11-year-old boy talk about committing rape seems more jarringly unexpected — narratively, not inferentially — than having him talk about committing torture and murder (or having an adult Death Eater commit or talk about committing rape), relating to my point that the “Which of these characters has crossed the moral event horizon?” question was probably not relevant to people’s actual objections.
(For the record, I’m not arguing the line shouldn’t be there, and I don’t disagree at all with your rationale for including it. I’m just trying to imagine the thinking of people who did react negatively to it.)
There’s little he could do that would make us think “Wow, I didn’t know Voldemort was that evil”.
Would people be shocked if they found out that Voldemort didn’t believe in Pure Bloodism and/or didn’t care whether it was true—he was just using it as a means of getting power and an excuse to kill people?
Would people be shocked if they found out that Voldemort didn’t believe in Pure Bloodism and/or didn’t care whether it was true—he was just using it as a means of getting power and an excuse to kill people?
Huh? That was what I assumed when reading the books. I recall some ‘blood purism’ claims but thought they were just cheers. The sort of thing that only the low-to-mid level death eaters actually believe, before they evolve enough to actually ‘get it’.
I suppose on reflection that in a fantasy story I should expect the ‘evil’ to be blamed on something politically incorrect rather than on universals of human nature.
I’m reading this, which goes into some detail about how carelessly built the Harry Potter universe is.
Still, while blood purism is an obviously easy win for the author, it strikes me as pretty well built into human nature to have a destructive political movement based on amping up prejudice. What would you consider to be a more universal basis for evil?
I have to say, for a blog (?) focused on good writing and story structure, that’s a really terrible essay/brain-dump—highly repetitive, problems mostly alluded to rather than described, fact & citation-free, and very very ranty. (I suspect I’d also find a number of self-contradictions if I cared to re-read.)
If it didn’t have the occasional good insight, I’d never have finished reading it. I did, but I still hate essays which are intermittent reinforcement schedules.
But here’s one good point. By the end, the real sin of Voldemort is not being evil, but in seeking to avoid death. Rowling implicitly seems to be saying: 1) you can’t live forever 2) you shouldn’t avoid death 3) death is good.
LWers may grudgingly accept #1 (‘fine, I can’t live for ∞ but can’t I live for a few thousand years at least?’), but I think we all pretty much vociferously disagree with #2 & 3. And if we were put into the Potterverse, I think we would pretty quickly all go over to the Dark side.
And that observation suddenly changes my interest in MoR from ‘what is Quirrelmort’s grand plan?’ to ‘how does Harry rewrite Good & Evil and fix that sordid little world?’
But here’s one good point. By the end, the real sin of Voldemort is not being evil, but in seeking to avoid death. Rowling implicitly seems to be saying: 1) you can’t live forever 2) you shouldn’t avoid death 3) death is good.
LWers may grudgingly accept #1 (‘fine, I can’t live for ∞ but can’t I live for a few thousand years at least?’), but I think we all pretty much vociferously disagree with #2 & 3. And if we were put into the Potterverse, I think we would pretty quickly all go over to the Dark side.
Would we go the Dark Side? I’m not sure. I think most people here would not murder someone to get the chance at a few extra centuries of life. And it seems that making a Philosopher’s Stone is not a Dark Side event, although why no one other than Nicholas Flamel makes one is never made clear.
And that observation suddenly changes my interest in MoR from ‘what is Quirrelmort’s grand plan?’ to ‘how does Harry rewrite Good & Evil and fix that sordid little world?’
I’m afraid that still puts us on the Dark Side; even wise and great Dumbledore and Nicolas Flamel weren’t allowed to use a single PS for, at max, more than 4 centuries. Indefinite use by any joe schmoe...
Thanks. I’d been wondering why I was having trouble focusing on the essay, and thinking the problem might be me.
I kept reading it because I thought a lot of the zip in the series faded out in the later books, I hated the epilogue with a passion, and was hoping that I’d get some explanations for why. I think I got some partial explanations, though I got tired of the theories about what Rowling must have been thinking.
Also, at the point when I’d mentioned the essay, I hadn’t gotten to the material about accepting death nor the revolting chunk of resentment about how Rowling cheated to make her books popular by not concealing that she’s pretty.
“Accept death” is a cheap and easy way to add profundity to fantasy and science fiction. I think the anti-immortality stories are pretty much sour grapes, and there are a lot of those stories. Peter Beagle’s built a big chunk of his career on them.
Rebecca Ore’s Centuries Ago and Very Fast is an exception—the main character is non-aging and a time traveler, he likes his life, and he has a pragmatic ability to enjoy it.
I think I got some partial explanations, though I got tired of the theories about what Rowling must have been thinking.
I too was tired—of his incompetence.
There is a lot of value to critically sifting authorial statements over decades about multi-installment works. But his sucked.
If you want to see it done right, in a way that completely revolutionizes your interpretation of the source material and gives you genuine insight, resolving all sorts of continuity issues, plot holes and whatnot, proving its case with citations and points beyond a reasonable doubt, the beau ideal would have to be The Secret History of Star Wars. I doubt you’ve read it, but take this old SW fan’s word for it, it was a masterpiece that that essay comes nowhere near.
I was more interested in what he had to say about the books themselves rather than his guesses about what Rowling was thinking.
I’m not likely to get around to The Secret History of Star Wars, but if there’s a short answer, what happened to Lucas between the end of the first trilogy and the beginning of the second? He seemed to have forgotten most of what he knew about telling stories.
“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” is brilliant. Starting a movie with a scrolling description of the tax(?) situation isn’t.
if there’s a short answer, what happened to Lucas between the end of the first trilogy and the beginning of the second?
The short answer is that A New Hope had nothing whatsoever to do with any grand story about Darth Vader, who was merely a mid-level flunky of the Empire. Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi frantically retcon this, but Lucas simply didn’t have a decent backstory centered around Darth Vader and couldn’t come up with one.
The longer answer goes into the above, and also points out that Lucas’s support network (of beta readers, if you will) which edited and improved his trilogy had largely fragmented or vanished by this point. For example, his wife, a very skilled film editor, had divorced him by the time of the prequels.
Citation? I think I’ve read a fair number of JKR interviews and I don’t remember her saying this. A quick Google search doesn’t turn anything up but my Google-fu may be weak.
Death is an extremely important theme throughout all seven books. I would say possibly the most important theme. If you are writing about Evil, which I am, and if you are writing about someone who is essentially a psychopath, you have a duty to show the real evil of taking human life.
No, because the books heavily imply that Voldemort didn’t believe. He was not pure-blood himself (Adolf Hitler, incidentally, was a very bad example of the Aryan ideal). And, I think that the discussions of how Voldemort chose to interpret the prophecy as referring not to Neville (as pureblood as they come) but to Harry (who, through his mudblood mother, is impure) specifically take this tack.
Interesting. My recollection was that as the books progressed, the plausibility of LV not caring about pure-bloodedness grew larger, but he himself didn’t admit to any such thing onscreen. Then in Deathly Hallows he suddenly did care about it again, because Rowling suddenly realised that he didn’t actually have a motive at all. So any old ill-fitting one would have to do, as part of the overall trainwreck.
Voldemort says so little on-screen that I don’t really get much out of him. His minions certainly do get more pure blood-centric as time goes on—look at Dolores Umbridge even before Deathly Hallows.
Thanks. I really should give up on having opinions about most details in the books—I’ve read them at most three times (once for the last two) and have forgotten a lot of detail.
Do you think the Death Eaters really care about Pure Bloodism?
Is MOR’s Draco being shocked to find out that Pure Bloodism isn’t true just a sign that he’s young and naive?
I’ve read them at most three times (once for the last two)
Only twice here, but I have a good memory for written material, and the ideology, physics, and philosophy of Harry Potter interested me long before MoR—so this is just an old topic for me.
Do you think the Death Eaters really care about Pure Bloodism?
Some do. The Blacks and Malfoys, probably. Others are in it to ‘back the strong horse’, and others are in it because it gives scope to their sadism.
Is MOR’s Draco being shocked to find out that Pure Bloodism isn’t true just a sign that he’s young and naive?
Yes. Eliezer has written about ‘nonoverlapping magisteria’ before: they are transparent efforts to shrink religion to something which can’t be falsified, an effort at special pleading. Even though religion (especially Western ones) have made many empirically falsifiable claims—which largely have been falsified. A very young person might take those claims seriously and be shocked that they are falsified.
To not know theological explanations of the theodicy (a topic recently relevant because I finally got around to reading Eliezer’s Haruhi story (which was very good)), to not ‘believe in belief’, to not dismiss empiricism, to lack all those sophisticated dodges and excuses that intelligent adult theists use to remain theist—this we call ‘young and naive’.
Sure. What would Lucius worry about disillusioning Draco? The anti-pure blood wizards don’t have a leg to stand on, unlike theists and atheists.
(Think back—do you recall any good arguments made against pure blood, the theory as opposed to the believers? Rowling assumes we’ll instantly identify pure bloodism == racism, and that’s that. If they think any harder, most people will fall into the usual trap of thinking that exceptions/brilliant-mudbloods like Hermione Granger disprove pure bloodism, which of course they don’t. The history of the Wizarding world is even more consistent with pure bloodism than not!)
It wouldn’t just be about Pure Blood. It would be about not having any abstract loyalties of any sort—Malfoys want to be in charge because it’s more comfortable at the top.
Were Robin here, I suspect he would point out that allowing your children to remain innocent and naive is a sign of luxury, and a signal of high status. Lucius would be embarrassed not to have his 11-year-old son appear innocent and naive.
ETA: Childhood innocence is conspicuous consumption!
I’d be somewhat but not entirely surprised if I learned that about canon Voldemort. I’d be pretty surprised if Smart Science-Aware HPMoR Voldemort hasn’t figured it out (not sure how likely it is that he knew all along).
The new wording — “As soon as I’m old enough I’m going to rape her” — makes it sound, in the absence of any alleged biological limitations now, like it’s some sort of traditional rite of passage in the Malfoy family. (Or at least that’s what it made me think of. Probably not the intended meaning.)
Was there supposed to be something after that quote, or did you cast a non-verbal Protego and deflect one of my points back at my own argument? (If that’s the case, I don’t quite see the significance of that line. Is it that we’re supposed to have the same attitude toward Draco?)
Additionally, the sorts of emotions that are commonly supposed to precede murder and torture are more familiar than the sorts of emotions that are commonly supposed to precede rape, and so someone unfamiliar with the actual etiology of any of those crimes finds rape less relatable and more shocking.
Aren’t the sorts of emotions that are commonly supposed to precede rape just extreme sexual arousal, frustration, and anger? Is that what you mean? I’m not sure how accurate that is in real life but that doesn’t seem too unrelatable.
It seems to me that people think rape is preceded by sickness, as in “he must be a real sick bastard”. That’s in large part because the common picture of rape is someone leaping out of the bushes at a random stranger, when a lot of rape is actually between acquaintances who know each other, and like or at least voluntarily spend time around each other.
There are few people above the age of 10 who find the word ‘bitch’ shocking nowadays. What was shocking about it isn’t its ‘naughtiness’ (??), it’s what it revealed about Draco’s mentality, namely that it’s polluted by a good amount of medieval misogyny.
I vote for putting the shock value in. I’d also change it to “When I’m old enough, I’m gonna rape that bitch and knock her up” or “When I get a chance, I’m gonna rape that bitch.” As well as being old enough to get an erection, 11-year-olds are oldenough to rape, though of course this could just be Draco’s bravado.
I have a notion that this bit (especially the earlier version where Draco admits to not having erections yet) was the result of story constraints.
After somewhat about the Malfoys being pretty cool in ways which are important from the point of view of the story, it was necessary to shockingly remind the reader that they’re also morally deficient and seriously bad news. At the same time, it was also a good idea to make this a hypothetical threat—the story line isn’t now (and perhaps not ever) about Hermione being in danger.
Read chapter 22 and 23, then look at what you just wrote. Are you sure that’s the same Draco? If the passage actually does need more shock value (and I’m not quite sure that it does, especially given the wide variance in reader taste and the number who enjoyed the rest of the fic but thought that one part was too shocking) then it has to be more in-character for the later-revealed Draco. There’s a simple way to increase the shock without adding vulgarities that polite young Death Eaters don’t use—namely, substitute “torture and rape” for “rape”—but I already think this whole conversation is getting a bit off-topic for LW.
It didn’t bother me. If Malfoy was thinking about self-control and wasn’t really bothered, he wouldn’t be using a curse at all; once your self-control is lost, it doesn’t matter whether you use ‘bitch’ or some amusing Elizabethanism like ‘trull’ or ‘maculate hobbyhorse’.
The new sentence is a bit lacking in the original’s shock value. I would have left the “that bitch” part in.
I’m not sure the Draco I’ve been writing for the last few chapters would use the term “bitch” in front of Harry Potter, it doesn’t sound dignified enough for the heir of Malfoy.
(But yes I did explicitly consider that alternative. If I get enough votes for keeping the shock value I’ll put it back in, or figure out something, I guess.)
Rape isn’t nearly shocking enough. We need naughty words.
This, unfortunately, is precisely how most people’s minds work.
Correct. Do I need to point out again that no one even noticed the thing with the monastery?
It is expected that villains, even in the canon of children’s books, will kill and maybe occasionally torture victims in order to establish that they are bad. It is not expected that villains, especially in the canon of children’s books, will permit/condone/commit rape. Additionally, the sorts of emotions that are commonly supposed to precede murder and torture are more familiar than the sorts of emotions that are commonly supposed to precede rape, and so someone unfamiliar with the actual etiology of any of those crimes finds rape less relatable and more shocking.
Agreed. I also think the original “Which of these characters has crossed the moral event horizon?” question (in one of the Author’s Notes) was a little bit misguided because, as far as most HP readers are concerned, Voldemort is already considered to have passed the moral event horizon from the outset. There’s little he could do that would make us think “Wow, I didn’t know Voldemort was that evil”. And 11-year-old Draco, being the son of a Death Eater, might be expected to hold certain evils as justifiable or compulsory — we expect that he’s been conditioned to find it acceptable to kill, torture, and exploit non-purebloods, and generally to manipulate people for his own ends. And as long as he’s still young, we’re inclined to be relatively lenient in judging him for those attitudes, considering he has never learned anything else, nor been allowed (or allowed himself) to reconsider it. What we don’t expect is for him to talk casually about committing rape, considering that nobody in the series does, even the darkest of the canon dark wizards; it makes it seem like it’s an idea he came up with on his own, like he just heard a definition of rape and thought to himself “Hey, that sounds like a fun thing to do to young female political enemies, and I bet I could get away with it, too”. So I bet most of the objections were based not on thinking “that’s more evil than Voldemort”, but “that’s way more evil than Draco is supposed to be right now”.
Those are the children’s books version, and MoR is not a children’s book, nor is most fanfiction. If you’ll pardon the size of the hypothetical: If the Death Eaters actually existed, no way in hell are the males not committing rape.
This is true. But even among works of fanfiction, the ones that point this out tend to also be the ones that are full of sex acts in general, which MoR is not.
MoR points things out for the sake of pointing them out, by way of trying to teach the art of the awakened mind. Actually I’m not clear on what if anything we’re arguing about at this point.
I see no need to limit that claim to the males.
True. By the laws of fiction, most evil characters are fugly.
Not true. Indeed, Draco is a classic counterexample to this statement. This is part of the reason why there’s a whole trope entitled Draco in Leather Pants. Moreover, the notion that whether people are ugly or not has something to do with whether or not they engage in rape is so wrong-headed I’m not at all sure how to even begin to touch it.
I said most fictional, evil characters are fugly. I stand by that statement.
Correct my “wrong-headed” beliefs if you can, but I suspect the sexually desperate are more likely to rape. This column presents evidence that sex crimes go down when the internet is introduced.
Porn → decreased desperation → less rape
Is there another pathway that explains this evidence I’m not seeing?
Ceteris paribus, girls are far, far less desperate than guys. Supply and demand says an egg produced once a month will have a higher asking price than what guys churn out. This makes me suspect female rapists must be less attractive.
Right, this evidence is one of the strong pieces of evidence that undermines the entire rape-is-about-power claim. And there’s other evidence for this also (for example, prison systems that allow conjugal visits have lower rape rates than those that don’t(a citation for this claim would be nice. I’ve seen it before but a quick Google search doesn’t turn up anything useful)). But sometimes, it is about power. Indeed, the type of rape being discussed in this context, by someone like Draco is the classic power situation. And when people are raping enemies that’s more or less unambiguously about power.
That’s a good point. However, I think there’s a false equivalence in there.
I imagine rape is way, way, way more painful for girls than for guys.
I think that depends entirely on particulars that should probably not be discussed here—suffice it to say that a male can be raped in multiple ways, just as a female can, and that rape involves emotional/mental pain as well as physical pain.
What!
Oh, wait. You mean rape of males by females without the use of any paraphernalia.
My impression of approximate rape statistics was along the lines of 90%/9%/1% male->female/male->male/female->male. I don’t know where female->female fits.
“Involuntary heterosexual coitus” is the last think of when evaluating the relative expectations of pain.
Wikipedia on motivations for rape
I think it’s complicated. Even the access to the internet lowering the incidence of rape could be about increased chances of finding partners as well as access to more porn—it isn’t as though porn was rare before the internet.
My impression is that it isn’t as true as it used to be that fictional evil characters are ugly, but I don’t have stats. It’s certainly reassuring to think that the people you find repulsive are also more dangerous.
Interestingly, I actually had a specific female Death Eater that I had in mind when I wrote that post. The character in question, Bellatrix Lestrange, was played by Helena Bonham Carter, who does not strike me as unusually physically unattractive.
True. But I still think Harry Potter is a traditional melodrama in that evil is very hard to miss. Bellatrix’s boss looks like this.
That is the movie.
(Warning: TV Tropes)
If I recall correctly, she was attractive—even beautiful—in the books until she was imprisoned, at which point she became a shadow of her former self. However, she was imprisoned for torturing two people into insanity (I can rot13 that if necessary, but I think it’s a very minor spoiler at best), so I think it’s fair to say that she was evil before she became unattractive and not the other way around.
There may be different factors going on for female rapists. The statistics you cite don’t separate out male and female rapists, and I suspect that female rapists are less likely to rape out of desperation, rather than being less attractive.
I don’t see what that has to do with my post, and I also don’t think it’s true.
I agree. My point was only that, in the context of the canon, having an 11-year-old boy talk about committing rape seems more jarringly unexpected — narratively, not inferentially — than having him talk about committing torture and murder (or having an adult Death Eater commit or talk about committing rape), relating to my point that the “Which of these characters has crossed the moral event horizon?” question was probably not relevant to people’s actual objections.
(For the record, I’m not arguing the line shouldn’t be there, and I don’t disagree at all with your rationale for including it. I’m just trying to imagine the thinking of people who did react negatively to it.)
Would people be shocked if they found out that Voldemort didn’t believe in Pure Bloodism and/or didn’t care whether it was true—he was just using it as a means of getting power and an excuse to kill people?
Huh? That was what I assumed when reading the books. I recall some ‘blood purism’ claims but thought they were just cheers. The sort of thing that only the low-to-mid level death eaters actually believe, before they evolve enough to actually ‘get it’.
I suppose on reflection that in a fantasy story I should expect the ‘evil’ to be blamed on something politically incorrect rather than on universals of human nature.
I’m reading this, which goes into some detail about how carelessly built the Harry Potter universe is.
Still, while blood purism is an obviously easy win for the author, it strikes me as pretty well built into human nature to have a destructive political movement based on amping up prejudice. What would you consider to be a more universal basis for evil?
I have to say, for a blog (?) focused on good writing and story structure, that’s a really terrible essay/brain-dump—highly repetitive, problems mostly alluded to rather than described, fact & citation-free, and very very ranty. (I suspect I’d also find a number of self-contradictions if I cared to re-read.)
If it didn’t have the occasional good insight, I’d never have finished reading it. I did, but I still hate essays which are intermittent reinforcement schedules.
But here’s one good point. By the end, the real sin of Voldemort is not being evil, but in seeking to avoid death. Rowling implicitly seems to be saying: 1) you can’t live forever 2) you shouldn’t avoid death 3) death is good.
LWers may grudgingly accept #1 (‘fine, I can’t live for ∞ but can’t I live for a few thousand years at least?’), but I think we all pretty much vociferously disagree with #2 & 3. And if we were put into the Potterverse, I think we would pretty quickly all go over to the Dark side.
And that observation suddenly changes my interest in MoR from ‘what is Quirrelmort’s grand plan?’ to ‘how does Harry rewrite Good & Evil and fix that sordid little world?’
Would we go the Dark Side? I’m not sure. I think most people here would not murder someone to get the chance at a few extra centuries of life. And it seems that making a Philosopher’s Stone is not a Dark Side event, although why no one other than Nicholas Flamel makes one is never made clear.
Mass produce Philosopher’s Stones maybe?
I’m afraid that still puts us on the Dark Side; even wise and great Dumbledore and Nicolas Flamel weren’t allowed to use a single PS for, at max, more than 4 centuries. Indefinite use by any joe schmoe...
Thanks. I’d been wondering why I was having trouble focusing on the essay, and thinking the problem might be me.
I kept reading it because I thought a lot of the zip in the series faded out in the later books, I hated the epilogue with a passion, and was hoping that I’d get some explanations for why. I think I got some partial explanations, though I got tired of the theories about what Rowling must have been thinking.
Also, at the point when I’d mentioned the essay, I hadn’t gotten to the material about accepting death nor the revolting chunk of resentment about how Rowling cheated to make her books popular by not concealing that she’s pretty.
“Accept death” is a cheap and easy way to add profundity to fantasy and science fiction. I think the anti-immortality stories are pretty much sour grapes, and there are a lot of those stories. Peter Beagle’s built a big chunk of his career on them.
Rebecca Ore’s Centuries Ago and Very Fast is an exception—the main character is non-aging and a time traveler, he likes his life, and he has a pragmatic ability to enjoy it.
I too was tired—of his incompetence.
There is a lot of value to critically sifting authorial statements over decades about multi-installment works. But his sucked.
If you want to see it done right, in a way that completely revolutionizes your interpretation of the source material and gives you genuine insight, resolving all sorts of continuity issues, plot holes and whatnot, proving its case with citations and points beyond a reasonable doubt, the beau ideal would have to be The Secret History of Star Wars. I doubt you’ve read it, but take this old SW fan’s word for it, it was a masterpiece that that essay comes nowhere near.
I was more interested in what he had to say about the books themselves rather than his guesses about what Rowling was thinking.
I’m not likely to get around to The Secret History of Star Wars, but if there’s a short answer, what happened to Lucas between the end of the first trilogy and the beginning of the second? He seemed to have forgotten most of what he knew about telling stories.
“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” is brilliant. Starting a movie with a scrolling description of the tax(?) situation isn’t.
The short answer is that A New Hope had nothing whatsoever to do with any grand story about Darth Vader, who was merely a mid-level flunky of the Empire. Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi frantically retcon this, but Lucas simply didn’t have a decent backstory centered around Darth Vader and couldn’t come up with one.
The longer answer goes into the above, and also points out that Lucas’s support network (of beta readers, if you will) which edited and improved his trilogy had largely fragmented or vanished by this point. For example, his wife, a very skilled film editor, had divorced him by the time of the prequels.
Me too. I stopped reading the essay because of this.
J. K. Rowling once said that Harry Potter was a story about death.
Citation? I think I’ve read a fair number of JKR interviews and I don’t remember her saying this. A quick Google search doesn’t turn anything up but my Google-fu may be weak.
Your Google-fu is weak; a search like http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=%22J.K.%20Rowling%22%20%22Harry%20Potter%22%20death%20interview turns up Wikipedia linking to several interviews, and then some quick C-fs turn up:
http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/2001/1201-bbc-hpandme.htm
No, because the books heavily imply that Voldemort didn’t believe. He was not pure-blood himself (Adolf Hitler, incidentally, was a very bad example of the Aryan ideal). And, I think that the discussions of how Voldemort chose to interpret the prophecy as referring not to Neville (as pureblood as they come) but to Harry (who, through his mudblood mother, is impure) specifically take this tack.
Interesting. My recollection was that as the books progressed, the plausibility of LV not caring about pure-bloodedness grew larger, but he himself didn’t admit to any such thing onscreen. Then in Deathly Hallows he suddenly did care about it again, because Rowling suddenly realised that he didn’t actually have a motive at all. So any old ill-fitting one would have to do, as part of the overall trainwreck.
Then again, my perspective on HP has been thoroughly polluted by the brilliant essays over at http://www.redhen-publications.com/.
Voldemort says so little on-screen that I don’t really get much out of him. His minions certainly do get more pure blood-centric as time goes on—look at Dolores Umbridge even before Deathly Hallows.
Thanks. I really should give up on having opinions about most details in the books—I’ve read them at most three times (once for the last two) and have forgotten a lot of detail.
Do you think the Death Eaters really care about Pure Bloodism?
Is MOR’s Draco being shocked to find out that Pure Bloodism isn’t true just a sign that he’s young and naive?
Only twice here, but I have a good memory for written material, and the ideology, physics, and philosophy of Harry Potter interested me long before MoR—so this is just an old topic for me.
Some do. The Blacks and Malfoys, probably. Others are in it to ‘back the strong horse’, and others are in it because it gives scope to their sadism.
Yes. Eliezer has written about ‘nonoverlapping magisteria’ before: they are transparent efforts to shrink religion to something which can’t be falsified, an effort at special pleading. Even though religion (especially Western ones) have made many empirically falsifiable claims—which largely have been falsified. A very young person might take those claims seriously and be shocked that they are falsified.
To not know theological explanations of the theodicy (a topic recently relevant because I finally got around to reading Eliezer’s Haruhi story (which was very good)), to not ‘believe in belief’, to not dismiss empiricism, to lack all those sophisticated dodges and excuses that intelligent adult theists use to remain theist—this we call ‘young and naive’.
Is it plausible that Lucius would allow Draco to be that much of an idealist?
Sure. What would Lucius worry about disillusioning Draco? The anti-pure blood wizards don’t have a leg to stand on, unlike theists and atheists.
(Think back—do you recall any good arguments made against pure blood, the theory as opposed to the believers? Rowling assumes we’ll instantly identify pure bloodism == racism, and that’s that. If they think any harder, most people will fall into the usual trap of thinking that exceptions/brilliant-mudbloods like Hermione Granger disprove pure bloodism, which of course they don’t. The history of the Wizarding world is even more consistent with pure bloodism than not!)
It wouldn’t just be about Pure Blood. It would be about not having any abstract loyalties of any sort—Malfoys want to be in charge because it’s more comfortable at the top.
Were Robin here, I suspect he would point out that allowing your children to remain innocent and naive is a sign of luxury, and a signal of high status. Lucius would be embarrassed not to have his 11-year-old son appear innocent and naive.
ETA: Childhood innocence is conspicuous consumption!
Yes, and note that Draco expects to spend his life catering to idiots. Harry’s upbringing is clearly higher status.
That sounds exactly right to me.
I’d be somewhat but not entirely surprised if I learned that about canon Voldemort. I’d be pretty surprised if Smart Science-Aware HPMoR Voldemort hasn’t figured it out (not sure how likely it is that he knew all along).
My deduction was that the Malfoy family culture included rape for spite, not that it was something Draco came up with.
The new wording — “As soon as I’m old enough I’m going to rape her” — makes it sound, in the absence of any alleged biological limitations now, like it’s some sort of traditional rite of passage in the Malfoy family. (Or at least that’s what it made me think of. Probably not the intended meaning.)
I wouldn’t be surprised if it were one.
Was there supposed to be something after that quote, or did you cast a non-verbal Protego and deflect one of my points back at my own argument? (If that’s the case, I don’t quite see the significance of that line. Is it that we’re supposed to have the same attitude toward Draco?)
I suspect that Eliezer may be taking that statement as a challenge.
I certainly hope so.
Also, murder can be presented in fiction with enough distance to be fun, but this isn’t true of rape.
Note that there are mystery weekends for solving murders, but not for solving rapes.
Aren’t the sorts of emotions that are commonly supposed to precede rape just extreme sexual arousal, frustration, and anger? Is that what you mean? I’m not sure how accurate that is in real life but that doesn’t seem too unrelatable.
It seems to me that people think rape is preceded by sickness, as in “he must be a real sick bastard”. That’s in large part because the common picture of rape is someone leaping out of the bushes at a random stranger, when a lot of rape is actually between acquaintances who know each other, and like or at least voluntarily spend time around each other.
There are few people above the age of 10 who find the word ‘bitch’ shocking nowadays. What was shocking about it isn’t its ‘naughtiness’ (??), it’s what it revealed about Draco’s mentality, namely that it’s polluted by a good amount of medieval misogyny.
I vote for putting the shock value in. I’d also change it to “When I’m old enough, I’m gonna rape that bitch and knock her up” or “When I get a chance, I’m gonna rape that bitch.” As well as being old enough to get an erection, 11-year-olds are old enough to rape, though of course this could just be Draco’s bravado.
I have a notion that this bit (especially the earlier version where Draco admits to not having erections yet) was the result of story constraints.
After somewhat about the Malfoys being pretty cool in ways which are important from the point of view of the story, it was necessary to shockingly remind the reader that they’re also morally deficient and seriously bad news. At the same time, it was also a good idea to make this a hypothetical threat—the story line isn’t now (and perhaps not ever) about Hermione being in danger.
Read chapter 22 and 23, then look at what you just wrote. Are you sure that’s the same Draco? If the passage actually does need more shock value (and I’m not quite sure that it does, especially given the wide variance in reader taste and the number who enjoyed the rest of the fic but thought that one part was too shocking) then it has to be more in-character for the later-revealed Draco. There’s a simple way to increase the shock without adding vulgarities that polite young Death Eaters don’t use—namely, substitute “torture and rape” for “rape”—but I already think this whole conversation is getting a bit off-topic for LW.
It didn’t bother me. If Malfoy was thinking about self-control and wasn’t really bothered, he wouldn’t be using a curse at all; once your self-control is lost, it doesn’t matter whether you use ‘bitch’ or some amusing Elizabethanism like ‘trull’ or ‘maculate hobbyhorse’.