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.
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.