Chapter 76: “And that’s why I can destroy Dementors and you can’t,” said the boy. “Because I believe that the darkness can be broken.”
This is interesting, because it touches upon a thought I had about the Dementors back in Chapter 45. In canon, Dementors are manifestations not of death or even fear, but of despair. (I believe Rowling has said she drew upon her own experiences of depression.) That’s why chocolate helps, why they generate feelings of hopelessness, why they take away happy memories and leave unhappy ones, and why their ultimate power is to put people into a coma rather than to kill them. None of this makes sense for a manifestation of death.
But Harry’s response would work either way. A happy memory, a pleasant thought, can shield against despair, but it can’t destroy it. Hope, on the other hand, true grim hope – the belief that things can be made better and, crucially, the unshakeable determination to make them so, not by thinking ‘wouldn’t it be nice if…’ but by knuckling down and solving the insoluble problem – is the only true cure for despair. And that sort of hope, which Harry shows, is actually pretty hard to hold truly, which would explain why almost no-one else has found the same way that Harry has.
I don’t believe this was Eliezer’s intention. Harry’s views on death are far too close to Eliezer’s own as shown in http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/simplified for me to feel that the Dementors are intended to be anything else. But I quite like my interpretation. Aside from anything else, since that sort of hope can be reinforced by being shared (enhancing both resolve and the feeling that the task is possible), it leaves open the possibility for a Patronus 3.0 by group-casting.
I think what Harry says is heartfelt, but it’s also a decent false trail to prevent Dumbledore from accidentally working out the secret and losing his ability to cast a Patronus.
Not that Dumbledore necessarily needs that. He’s in a great position for doublethink: he can presumably use the Pensieve, label the memory “the secret of dementors and the Patronus charm,” then Obliviate himself. Locking the basilisk away in a secret chamber, if you will.
That’s why chocolate helps, why they generate feelings of hopelessness, why they take away happy memories and leave unhappy ones, and why their ultimate power is to put people into a coma rather than to kill them. None of this makes sense for a manifestation of death.
I don’t know about chocolate, but bad memories are definitely scars you get from death. And what I suspect triggered the idea in Eliezer’s mind to make Dementors be about death is the idea of the Dementor’s kiss, because of the old metaphor “kiss of death”.
In your story they are corpses. In canon, they’re green humanoid monsters wearing hooded robes, that represent despair. Considering Rowling’s own pro-death position, I don’t think it’s likely she would have deliberately created enemies that were supposed to be the physical embodiment of death (although the movies showed dementors and death as looking nearly identical). Given the changes I saw you make to them in order to make your point, I assumed it was just something you were changing completely from canon. Apparently I was wrong. Did you think of dementors as representing death while reading Prisoner of Azkaban, or is it an idea you developed later?
In canon, they’re green humanoid monsters wearing hooded robes,
Um, what? Description from Prisoner of Azkaban, emphasis mine:
“a hand protruding from the cloak and it was glistening, grayish, slimy-looking, and scabbed, like something dead that had decayed in water; the thing beneath the hood, whatever it was, drew a long, slow, rattling breath, as though it were trying to suck something more than air from its surroundings.”
Nowhere does it say that they are green. The best description I can think of is “flying corpses that hide their appearances,” which works pretty well as a symbol of Death.
On a tangential note, despite there being no description to that effect anywhere in them, when I read the first few books I found myself invariably imagining Snape as being purple.
So if MinnibearRex came away with the impression that some entities from the books were supposed to be some entirely different color than the author intended, he’s certainly not the only one.
Despair? I thought JKR mentioned depression, not despair. And the dementors are grey, not green.
And JKR’s own experience with depression was after the death of her mother—so the “death causes depression” is similar in content to “Dementor destroys all positive emotions”. There’s no reason why JKR couldn’t use imagery of death in combination with her emotion.
In the books, an afterlife exists. But the soul-destruction, the true death, is what the Dementor seems to cause. Again—if JKR’s mother had just died, her most depressed thoughts about it would be the ones that involved thinking about the true death of soul-annihilation (the Dementor’s kiss), not an afterlife.
A dead, slimy hand slid out from under the cloak[...]Then it raised both its rotting hands—and lowered its hood.
Where there should have been eyes, there was only thin, gray scabbed skin, stretched blankly over empty sockets. But there was a mouth...a gaping, shapeless hole, sucking the air with the sound of a death rattle.
And for the first appearance of a dementor Rowling talks about drowning. I don’t know about the skin over the eyes, but the rest of it explicitly points to death.
bad memories are definitely scars you get from death
That’s backwards. I suppose experiencing the death of someone close to you could leave a mental scar in the form of a bad memory. But that’s hardly the definition of a bad memory. Nor is a painful memory an inevitable outcome of someone’s death.
Chapter 76: “And that’s why I can destroy Dementors and you can’t,” said the boy. “Because I believe that the darkness can be broken.”
This is interesting, because it touches upon a thought I had about the Dementors back in Chapter 45. In canon, Dementors are manifestations not of death or even fear, but of despair. (I believe Rowling has said she drew upon her own experiences of depression.) That’s why chocolate helps, why they generate feelings of hopelessness, why they take away happy memories and leave unhappy ones, and why their ultimate power is to put people into a coma rather than to kill them. None of this makes sense for a manifestation of death.
But Harry’s response would work either way. A happy memory, a pleasant thought, can shield against despair, but it can’t destroy it. Hope, on the other hand, true grim hope – the belief that things can be made better and, crucially, the unshakeable determination to make them so, not by thinking ‘wouldn’t it be nice if…’ but by knuckling down and solving the insoluble problem – is the only true cure for despair. And that sort of hope, which Harry shows, is actually pretty hard to hold truly, which would explain why almost no-one else has found the same way that Harry has.
I don’t believe this was Eliezer’s intention. Harry’s views on death are far too close to Eliezer’s own as shown in http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/simplified for me to feel that the Dementors are intended to be anything else. But I quite like my interpretation. Aside from anything else, since that sort of hope can be reinforced by being shared (enhancing both resolve and the feeling that the task is possible), it leaves open the possibility for a Patronus 3.0 by group-casting.
I think what Harry says is heartfelt, but it’s also a decent false trail to prevent Dumbledore from accidentally working out the secret and losing his ability to cast a Patronus.
Not that Dumbledore necessarily needs that. He’s in a great position for doublethink: he can presumably use the Pensieve, label the memory “the secret of dementors and the Patronus charm,” then Obliviate himself. Locking the basilisk away in a secret chamber, if you will.
I don’t know about chocolate, but bad memories are definitely scars you get from death. And what I suspect triggered the idea in Eliezer’s mind to make Dementors be about death is the idea of the Dementor’s kiss, because of the old metaphor “kiss of death”.
Erm, I’d guess what gave my brain the idea originally was the fact that in canon they are flying corpses in grave shrouds.
In your story they are corpses. In canon, they’re green humanoid monsters wearing hooded robes, that represent despair. Considering Rowling’s own pro-death position, I don’t think it’s likely she would have deliberately created enemies that were supposed to be the physical embodiment of death (although the movies showed dementors and death as looking nearly identical). Given the changes I saw you make to them in order to make your point, I assumed it was just something you were changing completely from canon. Apparently I was wrong. Did you think of dementors as representing death while reading Prisoner of Azkaban, or is it an idea you developed later?
Um, what? Description from Prisoner of Azkaban, emphasis mine:
Nowhere does it say that they are green. The best description I can think of is “flying corpses that hide their appearances,” which works pretty well as a symbol of Death.
On a tangential note, despite there being no description to that effect anywhere in them, when I read the first few books I found myself invariably imagining Snape as being purple.
So if MinnibearRex came away with the impression that some entities from the books were supposed to be some entirely different color than the author intended, he’s certainly not the only one.
Snape dresses somewhat similarly to Count von Count.
Despair? I thought JKR mentioned depression, not despair. And the dementors are grey, not green.
And JKR’s own experience with depression was after the death of her mother—so the “death causes depression” is similar in content to “Dementor destroys all positive emotions”. There’s no reason why JKR couldn’t use imagery of death in combination with her emotion.
In the books, an afterlife exists. But the soul-destruction, the true death, is what the Dementor seems to cause. Again—if JKR’s mother had just died, her most depressed thoughts about it would be the ones that involved thinking about the true death of soul-annihilation (the Dementor’s kiss), not an afterlife.
Green? No. From the American edition of PoA:
And for the first appearance of a dementor Rowling talks about drowning. I don’t know about the skin over the eyes, but the rest of it explicitly points to death.
That’s backwards. I suppose experiencing the death of someone close to you could leave a mental scar in the form of a bad memory. But that’s hardly the definition of a bad memory. Nor is a painful memory an inevitable outcome of someone’s death.