Twilight: Selfish Love

Content Note: Nice Guyism

Twilight Recap: Edward has explained to Bella that he and his family are "vampire vegetarians" who don't want to be murdering monsters.  

Twilight, Chapter 9: Theory

Every so often, there are pieces of Twilight where I'm not quite sure if I like what's going on in text or not. (I know, blasphemy, but stick with me here.) Chapter 9 is one of those pieces because while Edward is being an utterly self-absorbed, selfish, oblivious jerkface, the narrative almost seems to accept that he's those things. And to maybe call him out as though those things aren't wonderful, romantic, delightful character traits in a lover.

   "Were you hunting this weekend, with Emmett?" I asked when it was quiet again.

The car is "quiet" because Edward is rapidly withdrawing into himself. Bella is trying to keep him talking because she's terrified that he's working himself up into an internal turmoil that will end in an announcement that he can never see her again because it's too dangerous, but she's also trying to walk a fine line between accruing more information before Edward clams up again and keeping everything light and airy so that he will hopefully remain relaxed. The whole situation is very fraught, and the text seems to acknowledge that this is overly burdensome on Bella.

And I want to emphasize something here: Edward absolutely should have a say in whether or not he keeps seeing Bella. I want to emphasize that very strongly; Edward doesn't "owe" Bella a relationship, nor should he be forced into a situation that makes him feel uncomfortable. If Edward comes to the decision that as much as he loves Bella, he can't be with her for his own sake because he doesn't want to risk murdering the woman he loves, then Bella needs to respect that and allow him his space.

However, like pretty much every Edward-need in the series, that is not the direction from which this issue will be approached. Instead of grappling with the actual needs and desires of Edward, almost the entirety of the will-they/won't-they relationship issues will revolve around whether or not Edward has to leave Bella for her own sake and this I do not like at all because once again it's a lazy way of pushing Edward's needs onto Bella and then stripping her of the agency to deal with her own 'needs' (because they never were hers to begin with).

What I can't tell, though, is whether or not the text is aware that Edward is doing this and whether or not it's calling him out for it. Bella's near-panic that Edward is about to quit her cold-turkey and disappear from her life forever is genuine, and I think that concern is realistic: Edward may not owe Bella a relationship, but after all his (broken) promises of explanations, I think he at least owes her the courtesy of a clean break-up and a clear understanding that it's Not Her, It's Him. Bella isn't sure he's going to grant her this courtesy, though, so she's trying to keep him talking and grasping at the first things she can think of: feeding, Emmett, his location over the weekend, etc.

   "Yes." He paused for a second, as if deciding whether or not to say something. "I didn't want to leave, but it was necessary. It's a bit easier to be around you when I'm not thirsty."
   "Why didn't you want to leave?"
   "It makes me . . . anxious . . . to be away from you." His eyes were gentle but intense, and they seemed to be making my bones turn soft. "I wasn't joking when I asked you to try not to fall in the ocean or get run over last Thursday. I was distracted all weekend, worrying about you. And after what happened tonight, I'm surprised that you did make it through a whole weekend unscathed."

And then there's this. It's more victim-blaming, but it's wrapped up in this soft declaration of near-love that is possibly the closest Edward has come to expressing the depth of his affection for Bella. I basically read this as I love you, you inferior clumsy oaf-person, and I think we're probably supposed to interpret it generally along those lines. There's a sweetness to it -- he cares about her, he worries about her when he's away -- but there's an underlying harshness to it as well.

If Edward cares so deeply about Bella, why does he do so little to ensure her safety? Why did he ask her to take care of herself in the most condescending, dismissive manner possible (and therefore guaranteed that she wouldn't register the request as something to take seriously)? Why did he fail to ask any of his dear siblings -- Alice, perhaps, since she's sympathetic enough to be at the "returning Bella's truck home" stage -- to look after her while he was feeding? Why did he follow her all the way to Port Angeles to look after her, and then do such an incredibly poor job of keeping tabs on her that she very nearly was violently gang raped?

There's almost a sense here -- and I can't decide if it's meant to be in the text or not -- that Edward is so privileged and so set apart from the rest of us mere mortals that he simply doesn't know how to relate to someone in a polite, realistic, romantic fashion. He's Mr. Darcy dialed up to eleven! And that's not actually a bad thing: it's kind of a staple of vampire-lit and god-lit and superhero-lit for the overpowered being to need to learn to relate to the heroine on her level, but then we're back to just a few pages ago when Edward was openly dazzling and wooing the wait staff at La Bella Italia and I'm left poking half-heartedly at the text wishing some consistency would shake out.

Does Edward know how to relate to us mere mortals or doesn't he? Maybe this is supposed to be the "good at flirting, crappy at relationships" trope, but doesn't that belong with the highly-sexed playboy hero, not the virgin vampire hero?

   [...] I looked down at my palms, at the almost-healed scrapes across the heels of my hands. His eyes missed nothing.
   "I fell," I sighed.
   "That's what I thought." His lips curved up at the corners. "I suppose, being you, it could have been much worse -- and that possibility tormented me the entire time I was away. It was a very long three days. I really got on Emmett's nerves." He smiled ruefully at me.

I've remarked in the past that the most appealing aspect of Edward as a lover (in my opinion) is his family. This is partly because his family is for the most part filled with interesting people who have intriguing superpowers and varied personalities (as well as being valuable clique members for sharing secrets), but I think it's also because it is through Edward's family that a lot of his love for Bella is expressed. Edward's love for Bella is demonstrated through Rosalie's jealousy, through Alice's visions, through Jasper's innate understanding of emotions, and through Emmett's rowdy acceptance of his new little sister.

But though there is a certain romance here -- both in the explicit demonstration of Edward's love through his family, and in the "buy one boyfriend, get one closely-knit nuclear family free" bargain that Bella seems to secretly long for -- here is still another case of Edward making their relationship about everyone except Bella. Edward was anxious being away from Bella; Emmett was made to be annoyed by Edward's fretting. At no point did it apparently occur to Edward that Bella might be made anxious by his absence or that she might be annoyed by being left out of the information loop or by being yo-yo'd around emotionally as Edward pings back-and-forth in his will-I/won't-I game of deciding whether or not to be friends (or more) with her.

   "Then why weren't any of you in school?" I was frustrated, almost angry as I thought of how much disappointment I had suffered because of his absence. [...] "You might have called me," I decided.
   He was puzzled. "But I knew you were safe."
   "But I didn't know where you were. I --" I hesitated, dropping my eyes. [...] "I didn't like it. Not seeing you. It makes me anxious, too." I blushed to be saying this out loud.
   He was quiet. I glanced up, apprehensive, and saw that his expression was pained.
   "Ah," he groaned quietly. "This is wrong." [...] "Don't you see, Bella? It's one thing for me to make myself miserable, but a wholly other thing for you to be so involved." He turned his anguished eyes to the road, his words flowing almost too fast for me to understand. "I don't want to hear that you feel that way." His voice was low but urgent. His words cut me. "It's wrong. It's not safe. I'm dangerous, Bella -- please, grasp that." [...]

And now we get a glimpse into Edward's twelve-dimensional stickle bricks plan for how he intends to get what he wants (i.e., to spend time soaking in the exquisite misery that is Bella's perfect presence) while still protecting her from himself and being totally morally absolved from emotionally hurting a young woman. He's just going to hang out with her, be her best friend at school, drive her on day trips to nearby towns for shopping, but not get involved with her romantically. And he's going to do all that without having any clear, upfront conversations with Bella about why he's behaving this way. Edward Cullen's plan is, essentially, to be the polar opposite of the Classic Nice Guy but with all the same essential drawbacks and creepiness.

A "Nice Guy", as most of you will recall, is someone who believes that once zie inputs a certain quantity of emotional investment in a relationship, zie is "owed" something by the other party at the end: whether that debt takes the form of a long-term romantic relationship or a sexual payoff will vary from Nice Guy to Nice Guy, but the underlying theory is the same in each case. The Nice Guy believes that human interaction can be boiled down into predictable I/O responses, and that social relationships simply depend on mastering the correct inputs in order to receive the proper outputs.

So while your average Nice Guy is bound to throw a fit at the unfairness of a neighbor failing to fall in love with zem after precisely sixteen instances of holding the stairwell doors open for hir and three car pool rides to the grocery store when the neighbor had car trouble, Edward is going the opposite route: he's going to do all the classic nice inputs that usually signal the potential for a relationship, and then throw a fit when Bella actually suggests that she might like to have a deeper relationship with this guy. And the problem with both these approaches -- or, at least, one of the many problems -- is that each approach basically (a) relies on emotional manipulation and communication avoidance and (b) is utterly unconcerned with whether or not the other party ends up happy.

@xkcd
Your classic Nice Guy hopes that zie can avoid ever having to have that uncomfortable moment of expressing desire and facing rejection. Zie hopes that the object of hir affection -- and let us be very clear that the person they are after is very much objectified in their mind -- will sort of slip and fall into a romantic relationship because it's there and available and comfortable and easier than taking the necessary risks to win big. And your classic Nice Guy doesn't really consider whether or not hir lover will be happy in the end-game because the classic Nice Guy 'knows' that this way really is for the best.

And in a bizarre, backwards-universe kind of way, this is how I see Edward Cullen's relationship plan with Bella. He seems to have it in his head that if Bella is going to be plopped into his lap like this, he might as well stop trying to avoid her and just bask in the excruciating loveliness that is her beautiful soul. But he's going to justify him hanging around her and being her friend and going through all the motions of being a lover without actually committing to same, because it's just his feelings on the line. Bella won't take all this seriously, she won't fall in love, she won't be hurt by Edward slumming around with the humans like this.

He has no evidence for any of this, of course, but it seems to be what he assumes will happen. (I'd say "Because Jasper", but Jasper actually could make this happen, regardless of the ethics involved, so Edward clearly isn't going to go the route that might actually work.) And -- again -- Edward doesn't owe Bella a relationship. His romantic-y inputs into their interactions doesn't mean he has to be her boyfriend now because Rules.

But if he wants to be a decent person, he does owe it to Bella to have a serious sit-down conversation with her about what he does and doesn't want out of his unlife. "I like hanging out with you, and if you want me to I'll gladly stay here until the day you die, but I can't live with the idea of turning someone else into something like me," is communication. But it's communication that features a possibility for rejection -- Well, I don't want to be involved with someone who is going to stay 17 no matter how old I get, so thanks but no thanks. -- and so Edward is cheating by holding off the conversation just a little bit longer. Like you do. 

   "What are you thinking?" he asked, his voice still raw. I just shook my head, not sure if I could speak. I could feel his gaze on my face, but I kept my eyes forward.
   "Are you crying?" He sounded appalled. I hadn't realized the moisture in my eyes had brimmed over. I quickly rubbed my hand across my cheek, and sure enough, traitor tears were there, betraying me.
   "No," I said, but my voice cracked.
   "I'm sorry." His voice burned with regret. I knew he wasn't just apologizing for the words that had upset me.

Edward didn't plan for Bella to become so involved with him that his withdrawal would make her miserable. He thought that he was the only one really drawn into this relationship; he apparently believed that his feelings were the only ones at risk here. It was irresponsible for him to believe that -- he does, after all, live with an Empath and an Psychic and he is additionally capable of reading their minds any time he wants. But he did somehow manage to make himself believe it and now he knows otherwise. Now his character will be defined, in part, by what he does in response, now that he realizes that this very young, very innocent, very vulnerable human girl cares as deeply for him as he does for her.

   "Tell me something," he asked after another minute, and I could hear him struggle to use a lighter tone. [...] "What were you thinking tonight, just before I came around the corner? I couldn't understand your expression -- you didn't look that scared, you looked like you were concentrating very hard on something."
   "I was trying to remember how to incapacitate an attacker -- you know, self-defense. I was going to smash his nose into his brain." I thought of the dark-haired man with a surge of hate.
   "You were going to fight them?" This upset him. "Didn't you think about running?"
   "I fall down a lot when I run," I admitted. [...]
   He shook his head. "You were right -- I'm definitely fighting fate trying to keep you alive."

I suppose a vague, unspecific, non-pology followed by a light-hearted topic change that manages to blame Bella for trying to defend herself from rape because obviously self-defense is way more dangerous and doomed to fail than running when one has a disability that specifically prevents running and what have I told you about remembering?!? is pretty much about what I expect out of Edward at this point.

287 comments:

«Oldest   ‹Older   1 – 200 of 287   Newer›   Newest»
GeniusLemur said...

I think I can explain the charmed waitstaff/withdrawn with Bella thing. Edward is a Mary Sue, so obviously everyone is going to be charmed by him, no matter what. Bella is also a Mary Sue, so she has the power to resist his author-supplied charm. Even if she doesn't do it often. Since Edward isn't effortlessly charming her with his rudeness for once, he's confused and scared and reacts defensively.

Still, this scene is strange. Chapter after chapter of epic fail, and suddenly we get some real emotional content. It's not real well done, but compared to everything before, it's amazing. It also seems like Bella and Edward have vanished and been replaced with actual human beings.

RedSonja said...

Ha, it's like Edward is straight off Skullcrusher Mountain.

I'm so into you
Even though I'm too smart for you
Even my henchmen think I'm crazy
I'm not surprised that you agree

chris the cynic said...

"I don't want to hear that you feel that way."

"Just so we're clear, the problem isn't that a feel that way, it's that you're hearing about? So if I keep on feeling this way that's fine with you, but if should ever tell you, then..." She tried to find a good word, 'boom' came to mind, as did, 'five state killing spree fueled by emotional instability of the vamperic kind' She gave up on finding words. "But so long as I keep my mouth shut, you're golden. Is that it?"

-

"It makes me . . . anxious . . . to be away from you."

"That's a classic withdrawal symptom. Maybe quitting cold turkey isn't the best idea, I'd hate for you to binge. Perhaps we could have a phased removal so that by, say, summer, the two of us can separate without you going having these symptoms."

-

"Are you crying?" He sounded appalled.

Wrong sound. He may be appalled, hopefully at himself for causing such discomfort, but his primary feeling should be sympathy or empathy or something that focuses more on Bella and her feelings than Edward and his self loathing.

Given the lack of focus on Bella when we get tio

"I'm sorry." His voice burned with regret.

I'm not sure I believe that "I'm sorry." I believe the regret, but I don't believe that him being sorry is what caused it, or else it's some strange meaning of sorry that takes Bella out of the being sorry equation. Maybe he's just generally sorry, but I really don't get the sense that he's caring enough about Bella for him to be sorry on her behalf. I suppose he could be sorry

Silver Adept said...

Before I go into the depth here, Ana, I'm going to suggest that Nice Guyism is part of the fabric here, and it's an accepted and possibly expected thing here in our fictional Forks. My evidence for such is Tyler: I just tried to kill you by accident, Bella, let me make it up to you by taking you on a date. You've rejected my date, well, then I'm going to tell everyone I'm taking you to the dance, and everyone will nod and not ask Bella whether it's true, because that's what happens - Tyler is trying to be nice, so it would be Weird if Bella told him no and that she didn't owe him anything.

With that as a rule, Edward's Nice Guyism-in reverse is much less out of the ordinary. (Although, he might have a reason for that Because Jasper - he's seen someone manipulate others emotionally to a desired result. Perhaps he assumes that he can do the same. That would be an interesting perspective.) Provide Bella with the right inputs that make her get emotionally attached, and then give her the inputs that should result in her savagely breaking off the relationship with a permanently broken heart. Bella either can't or chooses not to take the hint.

I guess, then, what I don't get is the same thing Ana doesn't get: why isn't Edward having a nature conversation with Bella about what they want in a relationship? If nothing else, it will tell Edward what he needs to either drive her off permanently or decide he's willing to take a chance with her.

Danel said...

One of the weird things to me is that I could kind of see where the whole fragile clumsy Bella thing is coming from, since to a vampire, perhaps all we humans seem to be so fragile and short-lived, in constant danger for our brief lives. But then Bella is made excessively fragile and accident-prone... I almost wonder if it's an attempt at something like - SPOILERS FOR A SIX-YEAR OLD "DOCTOR WHO" EPISODE - the idea that the central relationship in "The Girl in the Fireplace" is an attempt to show within a forty-five minute episode how any relationship between the Doctor and a human will and must inevitably go, with the human dying in what seems to be an eyeblink. END SPOILERS

And yet... as with Edward being "appalled" at Bella's yucky girl-feelings, it's almost there but not quite... I could buy Edward, having come to rely upon his powers, being genuinely surprised at Bella's feelings for him, were it not for the fact that there's all sorts of reasons why he shouldn't be.

I was myself genuinely surprised at Edward's reaction to Bella's plan to fight, though - even in schlock, I'd expect something like a resounding declaration of "Tiny, yet fierce!"followed by a big boisterous laugh, or a comment that he's impressed by her spunk. Instead he decides to play wise-after-the-event man, in a fashion that's not even especially wise, given the number of ways his alternate suggestion is a bad idea.

depizan said...

I find myself thinking that Twilight would be infinitely improved if Edward had shown up heroically just as Bella was stomping the shit out of the would-be attackers. At the very least, it would put a small dent in their extreme power imbalance.

Edward doesn't treat Bella like a fellow person, which makes me very HULK SMASH about the entire book. (It would be worse, I think, if Bella didn't come off so awful herself. If I'd found her a sympathetic character, I'd probably have engaged in book stomping.) Not considering her feelings is just a small part of his treating her with less respect than a pet. And the power imbalance doesn't help things. She's his inferior in every conceivable way and he knows it. I swear his "I should stay away from you, but I can't. Woe!" *hand to forehead* is Meyer's attempt to level the playing field by giving him a "weakness."

Blargh. I have real problems with the man saves puny woman trope, anyway*, but when it's combined with humans suck and the man being super-everything, I just want to throw things. (Like the book.)

You know, I think Twilight would only have been salvageable for me if Edward were wrong about Bella. If somehow, the plot progressed in such a way that she - and her supposed weaknesses - saved him.

*sigh* I want to participate in these discussions, but it's so hard not to end up just typing #$#@!@@##%%^!!!!!! which really doesn't contribute anything.


*to the point that I find anything resembling it unwritable - I can have women rescued by other women or men rescued by men or women, but I just can't put a woman in a position to be rescued by a man, which means I have tendency toward distressed dude syndrome, but at least that doesn't have unfortunate implications that are twenty feet high and blinking neon.

Ana Mardoll said...

*sigh* I want to participate in these discussions, but it's so hard not to end up just typing #$#@!@@##%%^!!!!!! which really doesn't contribute anything.

It counts as contribution in *my* book. :)

She does, of course, save all their butts in Breaking Dawn part 2, right? I think? But that's FOREVER away.

depizan said...

Sadly, she saves all their butts after becoming an impossibly awesome vampire, which rather detracts, since it leaves Edward still right about her puny human self.

I'm not really one for psychoanalyzing authors based on their works, but it's so hard not to find Meyer's anti-human stance disturbing. At a minimum, I disagree with her completely, mostly because I think the world is more complicated than she appears to think it is.

On her website, she... oh, hell, I'll just quote it: "When a human being is totally surrounded by creatures with supernatural strength, speed, senses, and various other uncanny powers, he or she is not going to be able to hold his or her own. Sorry. That's just the way it is. We can't all be slayers."

But she's wrong!!! She set up a world in which she's as right as possible (her vampires are far more super than most versions of vampires) and she still only looks right because she never actually has any human character try anything clever. I am willing to bet that there are any number of puny human characters who, if transported to the Meyerverse, could none-the-less figure out how to defeat her vampires. Even if it was by turning them all against one another so that most of them were killed off by each other.

Also, this is a huge plot hole problem. No, actually, it's two. Doesn't Carlisle's backstory involve vampire hunters? And there's no reason for the vampires to be secret if humans aren't a danger to them. Which means that they are a danger to them, which means that Meyer isn't speaking from world building, she's speaking from prejudice.

GRARG!

depizan said...

Huh, I'm beginning to see why I find Meyer's stuff (and, for a slightly different, but overlapping, list of reasons, Narnia) so apalling. The author and I are on the opposite sides of pretty much every fictional divide ever.

chris the cynic said...

Her method of saving their butts is standing there, doing nothing while someone she considers family is murdered, and then standing there some more.

It's somewhat more complicated. The Vultures eventually decide that her power might make the fight fair, and a fair fight is one that they might lose, and losing would be bad, so the level headed one thinks they shouldn't fight, goes along with Edward's nitpicking legal argument, and they're all saved. In theory. The Greek dude with a Latin name who wears pants tries to provoke a fight by bringing out his own legal wrangling and killing someone right in front of everyone. The Cullen side takes a stance of, "Eh... what do we care?" and so a fight is averted. Everyone goes their separate ways.

In theory Bella's presence and power was what made the more reasonable of the mass murderers decide not to fight, but if they'd had a mental power blocking stick*, that would have been just as useful as Bella turned out to be.

Bella is a useful object to have on your side. There's nothing about her being a useful character.

-

This is, seriously, the only part of Breaking Dawn I know anything about.

It is also the part where they make the point that the werewolves are not true werewolves, but true werewolves are also immune to silver bullets. According to Edward, silver bullets stopping werewolves is an idea human beings invented because they like to think they have a chance when they totally do not. Ever.

-

*Ok, maybe a mental power blocking amulet would be more likely than a stick, but you get the point.

depizan said...

According to Edward, silver bullets stopping werewolves is an idea human beings invented because they like to think they have a chance when they totally do not. Ever.

How are they against rocket launchers? Improvised Explosive Devices? Industrial meatgrinders? Nuclear weapons?

Man, I really hate the puny human stuff. Hate.

chris the cynic said...

How are they against rocket launchers? Improvised Explosive Devices? Industrial meatgrinders? Nuclear weapons?

Oh, I agree.

Consider the soldiers from Battle: Los Angeles. Picture them against a team up of Edward Cullen, Voldemort, and their various support staff. The vampires and wizards wouldn't stand a chance.

GeniusLemur said...

Actually silver bullets are a Hollywood invention. In a small way, Meyer's lack of research shows again.

To be fair, the whole "puny humans" isn't new or unique to Meyer. The novel Dracula had a vampire with great power and great weaknesses. Then, someone said, "Oh, aren't vampires just SEW KEWL?" From then on, writers and filmakers have been adding powers and removing weaknesses. Meyer just carried the trend to its logical conclusion.

chris the cynic said...

Meyer just carried the trend to its logical conclusion.

Yeah, but when you do that you're supposed to be Tom Lehrer and the result is supposed to be a short hilarious song.

depizan said...

Definitely. As could the protagonists of most things with human protagonists. Heck, we Ramblites could probably make a good showing, with a little time for planning and the proper tools.

That's one of the reasons why I think the whole puny human idea shows a very narrow focus (or a lack of imagination). But that's not why I hate it. I hate it because it's so hostile to humanity.

depizan said...

I'm not entirely sure logical and Twilight belong in the same idea.

Also, I'd expect the logical conclusion of Vampires Perfect, Humans Puny to be a world ruled by said perfect vampires with humans kept as food animals.

GeniusLemur said...

It's hostile to humanity, but I think the broader view is that the entire universe of Twilight is built around perfection for Bella and Edward, and the Hell with everyone else. It's positively horrifying, if you think about it. For example, your family got killed by a vampire, who wants your true love next? Nothing you can do! He's invincible, because otherwise there would be a slight chance that Bella and Edward might get their eternal beauty slightly marred.

Rikalous said...

Meyerpires are flammable, and I'll bet the wolves are, too. That means any schmuck with an aerosol can and a lighter can do some serious damage if they let the "puny human" get close enough. Plus, they've got super senses, which means they should have super-sensitivity to things like stink bombs and klaxons.

As for Potter, I hear that Rowling's on record saying that a Muggle with a shotgun would beat a wizard or witch with a wand. I imagine most witches and wizards don't realize that, because most witches and wizards are stunningly ignorant about the culture they're embedded in and many of their peers grew up in, but that's an entirely separate rant.

depizan said...

the entire universe of Twilight is built around perfection for Bella and Edward, and the Hell with everyone else

Which is disturbing on a whole lot of levels. The first objection that comes to my mind is that only terrible people would be happy in a world where they were perfect, but everyone else was suffering. It's also horribly shallow for physical beauty to be more important than, well, everything else.

It rather makes me want to draw graffitti on Edward. Bwahahahaha.

depizan said...

Man, like many things, I wish Rowling had actually worked that into her books. It is much more clear in her stuff than in, say, Meyer's, that one reason the special group hides is that the mundane people are a threat, but, at the same time that also gets strangely dismissed. Once the Wizarding War starts up, you'd think there'd be a few witches and wizards (especially muggle-born ones) who'd suggest that now's a really good time to get some normal humans on their side with normal human weaponry because Voldie so wouldn't be expecting that.

(Of course, there are so many giant worldbuilding flaws that it all rather hurts my brain. The most important one for this discussion is the question of how, with the continual addition of new muggle-borns, the Wizarding World can stay so incredibly ignorant.)

JonathanPelikan said...

Such a brilliant post and discussion; particularly about the ever so perfect vampires and the ever so puny humans. It seems pretty clear to me; in every way, Meyers seems fairly anti-human, and so that's part of why Bella considers most or all of the humans around her to be little more than furniture at best, and obstacles to what she wants at worse. And always an annoyance to be endured.

(Ramble time~) I've always been a huge hater on the 'puny human' stuff, in a variety of media. In any story, the closer The Bad Guys are to being Perfect or Unbeatable or whatever, the further I find myself detached. When the Borg showed up in Star Trek I started to back away because, well, if one cube can pown almost all of Starfleet, what's even the point of caring about the struggle?

This was always my big problem with the Reapers, too. They were just sold up as bigger and tougher every time Mass Effect showcases them; in the climax of game 1, their vanguard ship almost defeats the entire combined human and Council fleets. Because they're just so like super and like powerful and stuff. For reals. So, of course they had to introduce a deus ex machina ancient superweapon thing in the third one; only something like that could deal with such superlatively powerful enemies. Fighting is pointless. (See the Reject ending in the Extended Cut.)

.......... Eeeeeexcept they do kind of have a weakness. Shepard finds it out and exploits it to destroy several Reapers, actually, over the course of the games. You know what the weakness is? When they're firing their lasers, they expose a weak point which can be shot. They fire their lasers a lot.

Nobody really seems to grasp how critical this information is; we never really see Shepard tell everyone about it or that weakness exploited. Even in the final dramatic battle for Earth, your space forces kind of blow parts of one or two up in return for casualties, and on the ground, it doesn't matter how good things are going, the Reapers' infinite waves of troops are going to push through and leave Shepard as the Lone Person Who Can Do Anything and leave everyone else utterly useless.

That's part of why the sort of horror stuff I enjoy is the stuff where you can fight back, whether that's with guns and testosterone like in Gears of War, or just using a camera like Fatal Frame. It's also why the Lovecraftian end of the scale holds little interest for me at all, really. If we're under attack by forces so far above us that their mere existence drives us hopelessly mad, then.. what's the point of anything? At all?

And yet I'm a fan of the Last Stand, blaze of glory, hold the line, etc stuff.. I don't know.

chris the cynic said...

Beyond the fact that magic seems to cause brain damage (a theory I heard put forward by fans) they recruit when children are still children, wow them into the world of magic, and convince them not to care about the world they left behind.

Their incoming population has a knowledge level of 11 year olds, their adults have their brains skewed in ways that make logic problems 11 year olds can solve an effective deterrent to the wiliest of people who make it passed the three headed dog.

How McGonagall was able to maintain a functioning brain is a mystery.

depizan said...

But they visit that world every summer if they're muggle-born!

It's got to be the magical brain damage theory. If that isn't canon, the world makes no sense at all. Hm, no, I suppose it could work a bit like an addiction, too. The more you use magic, the more you want to use magic for everything, so it's hard to see the solutions that don't involve using magic.

chris the cynic said...

.......... Eeeeeexcept they do kind of have a weakness. Shepard finds it out and exploits it to destroy several Reapers, actually, over the course of the games. You know what the weakness is? When they're firing their lasers, they expose a weak point which can be shot. They fire their lasers a lot.

Nobody really seems to grasp how critical this information is; we never really see Shepard tell everyone about it or that weakness exploited.


I hate it when games refuse to let you do something you ought to be able to do because plot.

I was talking about this earlier, when I was talking about a desire to I have to change the stories. To make it take a sharp left or whatnot and thus feel like my actions matter before the endgame. The examples of things that could have done that that came to mind first were unnecessary deaths.

Like Resident Evil 2, You're going along, you meet your first survivor in a gun shop, cutscene is triggered he dies. You could have saved him, the cutscene is just long enough (seconds) to prevent that. One extra person could have made a huge difference, but you know what could have made a bigger one.

You walk up some stairs, cutscene is triggered. A helicopter arrives and a cop wants to get on it but is attacked from behind by a zombie firing his weapon into the helicopter and thus causing it to crash. You absolutely could have saved him. There was time. And if you did you also would have saved the helicopter, and the helicopter wreckage had blocked things off slowing you down and preventing you from saving another person.

Can you imagine how different the game would have been with three additional allies on the ground and a helicopter at your disposal? And that's leaving out that there was another person you ought to have been able to save (not counting the evil people, and maybe you could have saved them too.)

In order to kill all of these people, and thus keep the plot on track, it usually required you to stand around doing nothing rather than doing what you'd already learned how to do (quickly deal with zombies.)

depizan said...

Awk, how frustrating. If you find a weakness in the super powerful enemies, you should be able to pass it on to everyone and then use that to win the day.

But, yeah, I'm with you on the Borg, the Ori, the Yuuzhan Vong, and any other uber-powerful race/group/whatever that's been thrown into stories for the drama (or whatever it is the creators are looking for).

And the Last Stand, Blaze of Glory, etc are different. It's often (but not always) a sacrifice, but in most fiction, it's a meaningful sacrifice. You take the bad guy with you, you hold the line just long enough for reinforcements to arrive, that kind of thing.

I mean, I'm fine with the bad guys being more powerful than the good guys (in fact, I kind of prefer it), but that's so the good guys can get clever and defeat them in some way other than a straight head on fight.

Rikalous said...

Once the Wizarding War starts up, you'd think there'd be a few witches and wizards (especially muggle-born ones) who'd suggest that now's a really good time to get some normal humans on their side with normal human weaponry because Voldie so wouldn't be expecting that.
Heck, Hermione's enough of a booksmart planner that she might look up gun and explosive manufacturing herself, and by book seven at least she's probably good enough to create or transfigure the necessary components and give a memorable demonstration of exactly how powerful they are.

If the war against Voldie had been won because the good-guy wizards and witches were willing to learn and adapt and work with normal humans, that would have been awesome. Besides the thematic rightness of it, it would provide the opportunity for a scene of Argus Filch defending Hogwarts with a shotgun, which I find inutterably lovely for reasons I'm not entirely sure of.

graylor said...

Also, I'd expect the logical conclusion of Vampires Perfect, Humans Puny to be a world ruled by said perfect vampires with humans kept as food animals.

Maybe that is the real world of Twilight. The Volturi have enough pull for scads of tourists to drop off the face of the earth without anyone apparently noticing, so maybe they just let us do our own thing and cull the herd as hunger demands. Which would make the Volturi work to police the numbers of vampires created and to keep the human herd at an ecologically supportable number. They would also be anti-nuke, I would assume--irradiated blood, fewer humans, fewer healthy humans, etc; pro-vaccinations, and so on. Why do I want to bet they spend most of their time swanning about in robes and cloaks killing people and less on practical management?

chris the cynic said...

Their name is Latin for "Vultures" The Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria they are not.

chris the cynic said...

First response:
Ok, fine. We'll keep the first four books, with some modifications here and there, throw out the rest, and rewrite the series to have a more reasonable end.

Second thought:
Book 2. Also, to a lesser extent, book 1.

Third inclination:
We'll throw out almost everything and then...

Fourth position:
How much of it is really worth saving, and is it possible to save that much while filing the serial numbers off enough to not get sued?

GeniusLemur said...

The big problem with the super-duper-invincible bad guys is they're so overpowered, the only way to beat them is with some ludicrous contrivance or deus ex machina. I think Star Trek TNG managed to pull it off well in "Best of Both Worlds," but the list of god-beings with convenient off switches in the Trek universe is very long.

And some of the super-duper-invincible bad guys I've seen are so overpowered it's hard to take them seriously, or believe the heroes could last five minutes. "We have ten times more ships than you, and one one of our ships can whip your whole fleet anyway. And we're all powerful psychics. And our supreme leader can rewrite reality at will. Plus...

depizan said...

I don't know, but if you write it, I'd love to read it. :D

depizan said...

As deeply messed up as the Twilight world seems to be, I think that does fit.

*shudder*

depizan said...

Not only are they ridiculously overpowered, they all start to sound alike. "We've replaced their regularly scheduled impossibly overpowered enemy with this other impossibly overpowered enemy, now we'll see if they notice."

chris the cynic said...

I have thought about it. In more than one direction. See here for an example I wrote about.

But the thing is, I kind of like the idea of the house system, as something to play off of, and how close to the original can you stick without being stealing? And what exactly would the plots be? And ... stuff. And more stuff. Stuff.

Ana Mardoll said...

If everyone on earth can now do Vampire-Human-Werewolf love triangles, the idea of a magic school must be minor if that's all you wanted to recycle. I say, base them on an elemental system, make the dorms co-ed, have the students choose new placement every year, and ditch the competitive points system, and it's not Hogwarts anymore. imho.

depizan said...

And Rowling wasn't the first to have magic schools, so even if there's some similarity, well, that's what happens with magic schools. Just as there's undeniable similarities with all the stories that have Vampire-Human-Werewolf love triangles.

chris the cynic said...

I'd kind of like to keep the conflicting definitions of the houses though.

Consider Slytherin which is, I think, water, cunning, ambition, and the old rich.

None of those things necessarily mix, and exploring the conflicts seems like it could be interesting. Water wants to flow, but clinging to an outmoded social order is stagnation, isolationism and a bad reputation would tend to cut them off from others, but a truly ambitious person might see the value in networking with the other houses.

I'm not actually sure where to go with it, but the contradictions and confusion seems like it should, at least theoretically, be fertile ground.

-

I also very much like the idea of the final confrontation in first story involving not-gryfyndor person confronting big bad, having a moving conversant that positions big bad back to a secondary entrance, and then finally pointing out that being bait is the courageous thing to do, but actually taking down the big bad will be accompanied by fame and influence and all that stuff, so you really have to watch out for the ambitious ones, at which point not-slytherin attacks from behind. Several shouted bits of Latin later and the evil is vanquished.

That requires houses to be set up around ambition and courage though.

-

Oh, also I have ideas on the not-coed dorms and how that could work into the stories of both otherkin and trans* characters. Though the otherkin wouldn't really be, he'd have just had his wings removed in an unfortunate childhood incident.

Jadagul said...

I rather suspect the heroes in Harry Potter didn't use shotguns because that would involve killing people, directly. Which they seem to be rather staunchly against. Seriously, even in the Battle of Hogwarts, I halfway think that the good guys only kill two characters in the whole thing.

But I also always got the impression that while a Muggle with a shotgun can take a wizard, the wizards don't know that, and the reason they don't know that is that they try very hard not to think about it. So they hide from the muggles because they're scared of them because on some level they know the muggles can take them. But they don't want to admit that to themselves because it would screw up their superiority complex.

depizan said...

Hmm, so wizards can be defeated by draping a towel over your head. *nods* Definitely fits.

depizan said...

I suppose at worst you have really awesome AU fanfic.

Which I see nothing wrong with, having jumped into the "if you're entertaining people, it's a win" school of writing.

Will Wildman said...

I rather suspect the heroes in Harry Potter didn't use shotguns because that would involve killing people, directly. Which they seem to be rather staunchly against.

I think it's more a case of narrative focus. In the final book, Harry is at one point chastised for trying to disarm during a fight, and is explicitly told that if he's not willing to fire lethal shots, he should at least be trying to incapacitate. That and a couple of other moments definitely implies that the good guys are still going for the kill when they can. But that's easier to elide when they're just launching a variety of sparkly bolts around and occasionally someone drops, whereas if they were wielding guns it would be hard to gloss over the killing.

In terms of mage vs muggle, I think it's very much a case where a tactically-minded wizard could be nigh-unstoppable, but the vast majority of them are debilitatingly impractical and thus a straightforward shotgun approach would win by efficiency. (Witches/wizards have been shown to be able to make themselves invisible/blurred, project powerful forcefields, and launch curses that can blow up an entire city block. But these are usually treated more like worldbuilding details than items in the magic toolbox.)

Brin Bellway said...

Oh, also I have ideas on the not-coed dorms and how that could work into the stories of both otherkin and trans* characters. Though the otherkin wouldn't really be, he'd have just had his wings removed in an unfortunate childhood incident.

There is a vague scene in my head of an otherkin mage learning the hard way that when putting together magical ingredients there's a very important distinction between human blood and human's blood. With human blood, humanity is a trait of the blood itself, and you can use your own. With human's blood, humanity is a trait of the blood's owner. You can't use your own, but you can use some ichor from your transmogrified human friend.

That probably wouldn't fit in with Potter-ish magic, though.

depizan said...

Oh, I like that!

DavidCheatham said...

Spoilers for Deathy Hallow:




@Will Wildman
I think it's more a case of narrative focus. In the final book, Harry is at one point chastised for trying to disarm during a fight, and is explicitly told that if he's not willing to fire lethal shots, he should at least be trying to incapacitate. That and a couple of other moments definitely implies that the good guys are still going for the kill when they can. But that's easier to elide when they're just launching a variety of sparkly bolts around and occasionally someone drops, whereas if they were wielding guns it would be hard to gloss over the killing.

Part of the annoyance at Harry's disarming was that he's known for it, so doing it in a fight where the entire point was to hide which 'Harry' was really Harry was not that well thought out. But, of course, Harry has no problem with Stunning people in general (And that would be much less noticeable)...except that he didn't do it there because Stunning people high up on broomsticks almost certainly results in their death.

Basically, Harry and Ron and Hermione, and all the other main characters were required to be 'good guys' who don't kill people. Even in self-defense.

Although we see almost none of the last battle, in the book at least. So who knows what was going on where we couldn't see it? But of the parts we do see, no good guy kills. And we see no bad guy corpses.

So when Hagrid manages to throw McNair across the Great Hall, he slides to the floor 'unconscious'. (Yeah, right.) And other descriptions are vague: Yaxley is 'slammed to the floor', Dolohov 'falls', Greyback is 'brought down'.

There's plenty of stuff that might have been lethal, but it's somehow never lethal onscreen. The rule was apparently ambiguous Disney Deaths for the villains. And quite real ones for the heroes, which is jarring and seems a bit unfair.

At least, that's when it seemed until the end, when that rule stopped apply to Molly Weasley, somehow, and resulted in the only indisputable onscreen death of a Death Eater at the hands of a good guy in the entire series.

There's at least two conflicting tropes going on there, with good guy deaths and lack of bad guys ones, and then blow all to the hell at almost the last second...and then zig-zagged back when Harry doesn't try to kill Voldemort. It really seems a little odd.

Makabit said...

But they visit that world every summer if they're muggle-born!

I always wonder about people who decide at some point to return to the Muggle world. Or, for that matter, wizards who choose to live there.

I don't think the lack of awareness is actually brain damage, though, I think it's cultural supremacy blocking out rational thought. The wizarding folk live in such seclusion that I think they're often simply not aware of anything happening outside...although you'd think that within living memory, they would have been hard put to ignore the damage being wrought by Muggles.

My favorite magic/technology bit ever though comes in Diana Wynne Jones' "The Magicians of Caprona", where the son of a famous magical family who isn't good at spells takes to reading escapist literature about worlds where people do everything by building machines. (Wynne Jones' Chrestomanci novels take place in a continuum of nine universes that run a spectrum from fully technological to fully magical. The child's reality is on the magic end.)

depizan said...

Oh, it's more than a little odd. For someone who was apparently concerned about her heroes not killing on screen, she sure let them do plenty of other non-heroic things on screen, especially in Deathly Hallows. They used two of the Unforgivable Curses, after all - the ones that are supposed to be a guaranteed ticket to Azkaban.

But if I get started on what's wrong with Deathly Hallows, we'll be here all night.

depizan said...

I love Diana Wynne Jones' stuff!


As for the question of the Wizarding World not grasping Muggle stuff, I just don't see how it can be chalked up to anything but some sort of actual effect on them. If the kids never went back to the regular world once they joined the Wizarding one, sure. But every summer they go back and, one assumes, interact with people and the world. They see movies and go play X-Box with their neighbor and drive around in the family car. I have a lot of trouble believing that you could instil enough cultural supremacy in all eleven year old muggle-born wizards and witches to explain the complete lack of any wizards or witches who have any idea about the muggle world at all.

If muggle-born wizards and witches were rarer, I might buy it. But we encounter too many, and one is one of the protagonists. The smart one! This does not compute. At all. But by Deathly Hallows, Rowling had so confused how the Wizarding and Muggle worlds interacted that sorting it out is pretty much impossible.

Peter said...

To be fair, having an anti-human stance isn't necessarily a bad thing. Off the top of my head 1984 and Brave New World come off pretty anti-human, and I'm certain there's a lot more in more alieny Sci-Fi where humans are an inherrently flawed race. I think the difference is that in those works, this is portrayed as a bad thing, something that we should rebel against and try to break free of. Whereas in Twilight, as with so many other problematic things, it just is the way of things and the thought of trying to rise above it occurs to no-one

Peter said...

Even in the only film I can think of like that, Daybreakers, humanity comes out on top in the end

Peter said...

Once again going back to the fanfic Methods of Rationality, the explanation given there is that the muggle-borns are too young when taken into the Wizarding World. At age 10 you barely know anything about the concepts of science. you know technology like guns and TV exists, but you don't really know how it works anymore than the entire wizarding society knows how Alohamora works. From a young age you are surrounded by similarly ignorant peers, who have magic and therefore everything they say is cooler and more true than anything you learned before you came to Hogwarts.

Peter said...

House systems are a fairly generic part of British School fiction, and many British schools still in general. Set it over here and no-one will bat an eyelid, might be harder to justify if you set it in the US.

I would love to read such a book

Will Wildman said...

So I'm surprised to find that parts of this section of Twilight don't actually seem like the most awfullest to me. I can see justifications for a lot of things that actually work in-universe - Edward does seem like he's actually being presented here as making real mistakes in terms of understanding Bella, and by rights he should be doing that all the time - for the last century, every single person he meets provides him with a running commentary on their every thought, and suddenly here is someone who's blank to him. I can see why he would have to keep jostling himself to remember that she still has thoughts and feelings even if he's unaware of them, and I can see why, if he was trying not to think about things too hard because it was scary, he might forget to account for her potential to actually develop thoughts and feelings. (One could argue that he always does this, forever, but this is a time when the narrative acknowledges it as an error.)

Maybe this is supposed to be the "good at flirting, crappy at relationships" trope, but doesn't that belong with the highly-sexed playboy hero, not the virgin vampire hero?

I don't think there's any reason it can't be transplanted to a new environment (I wish that happened with tropes more often) and Edward seems like a good analogue anyway - he's still got the ultra-charm and the wealth and power, and I think it's established by now that he's okay with pseudo-flirting with humans in order to get stuff. So he has neither the telepathy that provides most of his confident charm powers nor the social experience that would let him think 'People sometimes feel things that I didn't plan'. Edward should be screwing up - actually, he never really stops screwing up, arguably for exactly these reasons.

Even the bit where he's externalising all their tension is bordering on pretty good: 'I really got on Emmett's nerves' is Bella-ignoring on its face, but if we take it as the remark of someone trying hard to not directly engage with Scary Feelings, then I think it's not unreasonable that he meant for Bella to unzip that file to hear 'I really got on Emmett's nerves (because I was terrified by what might happen to you [because I am obsessed with you {because you are unprecedently special}])'. Given his level of obsession with her, it wouldn't be that unusual if he had these kinds of fears even if she were a nigh-invulnerable vampire already.

Would that he more often expected Bella to operate on an intellectual level above preschool. I don't think the problem is that he says things like that - I think the problem is that he doesn't say things like that enough and instead goes for the more direct and awful 'Also I have noticed you are incompetent and that also scares me, feeble human', which isn't going to get better no matter how you decrypt it.

GeniusLemur said...

Even US schools have dorms, which have symbols, traditions, rivalries, etc.

Ana Mardoll said...

I liked that movie. If I ever do a Mandatory Vampire Novel, I think it would be in a setting like that. Made more sense than *totally secret no really* like in Twilight.

GeniusLemur said...

If I ever put vampires in my writing, I'll make them true to "real" vampires. I'll also make them low-grade scrubs for the bad guys that get stomped into oblivion by good-guy grunts regularly and in great numbers.

The world needs more vampires that get picked up by a saint, kung-fu master, Fairy, or Ki-lin and casually torn in half.

DavidCheatham said...

@Makabit
I don't think the lack of awareness is actually brain damage, though, I think it's cultural supremacy blocking out rational thought.

Part of it is that they don't have to use the same transportation system as anyone else. They can live their entire life without ever _seeing_ a Muggle.

But it's still rather hard to fathom.

The wizarding folk live in such seclusion that I think they're often simply not aware of anything happening outside...although you'd think that within living memory, they would have been hard put to ignore the damage being wrought by Muggles.

One wonders how British wizards felt about parts of the scenery exploding during WWII. Especially since a lot of the British Wizarding world appears centered around London. Or is there some sort of anti-V2 magical shield they could put over Diagon Alley? (A large number of those did go off course...)

depizan said...

At age 10 you barely know anything about the concepts of science. you know technology like guns and TV exists, but you don't really know how it works anymore than the entire wizarding society knows how Alohamora works.

Except, of course, for the 10 (I thought it was 11?) year olds who do have some idea. The ones who worked on the car with their dad, who helped mom rewire the new spare bedroom, who went hunting with grandpa, whose parents teach (fill in any science here) at the university, who got a junior chemistry set for their 8th birthday, etc, etc. Now...this could be a cultural thing, maybe those are all more likely in the US (where I'm from) than in the UK.

Also, Wizards aren't Jedi. This would all work much better if they were. If they took the kids much younger and kept them, then, sure, I'd buy it. But they don't. The kids go home over holidays and go home for the summer and they don't find out about the Wizarding World until they're 10 or 11. Maybe many would find the Wizarding World more interesting, maybe even most, but some would smuggle technology back to Hogwarts to try to figure out how magic and technology interact. And some Muggle parents would try to make up for what their kids weren't learning at Hogwarts - teaching them science over their summer vacation.

I just cannot believe that all Muggle-born Wizards and Witches completely lose interest in a world they spend their summers in - a world that contains people they love and want to maintain contact with. Also, a world they must have had interests in before they found out they had magic. Has there never been a kid who dreamed of being a pilot, a scientist, a race car driver, a computer game designer, an astronaut, a [insert Muggle only career here] only to find out at 10 or 11 that they have magic and must go to a school where they will learn nothing related to that dream?

depizan said...

Part of it is that they don't have to use the same transportation system as anyone else. They can live their entire life without ever _seeing_ a Muggle.

Yep, for pure-blood Wizard/Witches, I can buy it. Mostly. There's still a part of me that says for every Mr. Weasley, there must be a pure-blood Wizard/Witch who competently investigates the Muggle world. People generally have more interest in the world around them than Wizard/Witches are portrayed as having in the books.

depizan said...

Off the top of my head 1984 and Brave New World come off pretty anti-human, and I'm certain there's a lot more in more alieny Sci-Fi where humans are an inherrently flawed race.

That is a very different definition of anti-human. To quote where she states she's anti-human (I quoted part of this already): "I am not anti-female, I am anti-human. I wrote this story from the perspective of a female human because that came most naturally, as you might imagine. But if the narrator had been a male human, it would not have changed the events. When a human being is totally surrounded by creatures with supernatural strength, speed, senses, and various other uncanny powers, he or she is not going to be able to hold his or her own. Sorry. That's just the way it is. We can't all be slayers."

That is very, very different from "humans are flawed" or "humans are capable of terrible things." She's saying humans are incompetent and/or helpless. This does not seem like a healthy message. Yes, she finishes up by saying that Bella saves Edward, but she saves Edward as a vampire, not a human. She's mostly reacting to the accusation that her story is anti-female or anti-feminist. But her rebuttal is to say that humans are hopeless in the face of anything more powerful than them. And that's just flat out not true.

Caretaker of Cats said...

Re: kids from Muggle families: What if the bias against muggle-born wizards is strong enough that the kids learn to stop mentioning anything about them, lest they confirm that they fit a negative stereotype?

chris the cynic said...

I believe that Harry Potter operates on a magic and electricity don't mix system, which is why I have previously suggested Babbage engines for Hogwarts. Apparently that was around two months ago.

Of course electricity is only a part of muggle technology. Older cars function on combustion and mechanical linkages, guns work on chemistry (and mechanical linkages, and basic physics), pogo sticks run on pneumatics, so on.

Electricity is, so far as I know, the only thing about muggle tech that will not work in the presence of strong magic.

GeniusLemur said...

"We can't all be slayers?" In Meyer's world, NOBODY is a slayer. It's woven into the fabric of her world and it's kind of the whole point that no puny human has any chance against the sheer sparkly awesomeness that is vampirism.

depizan said...

Re: kids from Muggle families: What if the bias against muggle-born wizards is strong enough that the kids learn to stop mentioning anything about them, lest they confirm that they fit a negative stereotype?

Doesn't that go back to the question of whether or not some people abandon the Wizarding World despite having magic? I mean, if you're introduced to a world that hates the world you come from, would you want to stay? Hell, you'd almost expect the growth of a group that was the reverse of the pure-blood villains - Muggle-borns who want to overthrow the current order and crush those who picked on them, preferably with the tools of their hated world.

Also, not mentioning things is not the same as abandoning things. How many people go through school not mentioning their uncool interests, yet continuing to be into said uncool things?

Beroli said...

And I want to emphasize something here: Edward absolutely should have a say in whether or not he keeps seeing Bella. I want to emphasize that very strongly; Edward doesn't "owe" Bella a relationship, nor should he be forced into a situation that makes him feel uncomfortable. If Edward comes to the decision that as much as he loves Bella, he can't be with her for his own sake because he doesn't want to risk murdering the woman he loves, then Bella needs to respect that and allow him his space.

However, like pretty much every Edward-need in the series, that is not the direction from which this issue will be approached. Instead of grappling with the actual needs and desires of Edward, almost the entirety of the will-they/won't-they relationship issues will revolve around whether or not Edward has to leave Bella for her own sake and this I do not like at all because once again it's a lazy way of pushing Edward's needs onto Bella and then stripping her of the agency to deal with her own 'needs' (because they never were hers to begin with).

What I can't tell, though, is whether or not the text is aware that Edward is doing this and whether or not it's calling him out for it.
Oh, definitely not. The books are never aware that either Edward or Bella has autonomy, as such.


Edward didn't plan for Bella to become so involved with him that his withdrawal would make her miserable. He thought that he was the only one really drawn into this relationship; he apparently believed that his feelings were the only ones at risk here. It was irresponsible for him to believe that -- he does, after all, live with an Empath and an Psychic and he is additionally capable of reading their minds any time he wants. But he did somehow manage to make himself believe it and now he knows otherwise. Now his character will be defined, in part, by what he does in response, now that he realizes that this very young, very innocent, very vulnerable human girl cares as deeply for him as he does for her.
He will never realize that. Meyer seems to consider it romantic for each of them to be convinced that they love the other one far, far more than the other one loves them. The entire premise of New Moon hinges on Edward believing that, if he just leaves Bella alone, in a week she will have forgotten that he exists and gotten involved with a human, and Bella believing that if Edward leaves, it's because he's gotten tired of her.

Asha said...

There's EC discussion? Whoopee!

I agree on the topic of wanting to stop the human hate. It was one of the reasons I told my sister I wasn't interested when she described Twilight to me. You make the vampires unbeatable, then humans are naturally to be dominated. There is no hope. What's the point of reading it then? I would argue that a story where you have 'good' vampires is still a one where humans are the focus of the story; they've been 'humanized' by making them allies of humanity.

Myers logic that 'we can't all be Slayers' discounts how awesome Xander, or the other humans, were. The anti-human thing is one of the things that kept me from reading the last two Harry Potter books, too. I like my Action Survivors and Arthur Dents.

As for the Reapers, well, they were supposed to be Space Cthulhu. Yet we also knew they could be killed. We saw it happen. We also had our expectations that the bad guys could be defeated raised by the previous two games. The Reject ending was a big fat middle finger to those who wanted to reject the brilliance of the Catalyst. *grrrs*

depizan said...

I'm with you there, though I also enjoy Badass Normals and Guile and/or Science Heroes (who are generally somewhere in the normal person end of things) too. (I have no idea how to link to TV Tropes like you did, though. My computer fu is weak.)

I think the creators who write anti-human stories are people who would like to be more-than-human themselves (or at least enjoy fantasizing about it) . Which there's nothing wrong with, of course, but I'm not sure they quite see how their fantasy looks to people who don't share it. Really half of what's wrong with both the Twilightverse and the Potterverse is that the creators of those worlds never stopped to think about what the world looked like from the point of view of someone who wasn't the main character. If they had, they might have noticed the ways in which the world looked horrific to your average resident.

Amaryllis said...

So I'm reading along two days late, thinking, but what about DRACULA?

The novel Dracula had a vampire with great power and great weaknesses. Then, someone said, "Oh, aren't vampires just SEW KEWL?" From then on, writers and filmakers have been adding powers and removing weaknesses.

Yeah, that's what I meant to say! Used to be that the whole point of a vampire story or werewolf story or whatever would be that ordinary humans could and would defeat the monster. Now it seems that vampires aren't the monsters but the superheroes., and how did that happen?

depizan said...

Anne Rice?

Asha said...

I agree on that point, that they never stop to see how this type of world would look to the average resident. Yet I'm reminded of so many times when it is done right. In the Spider-man movies, for example, you see the residents of New York come to Spidey's aid, even if they can't do much. Or when, in Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz, Relena rallies the population to stand up against the invaders. Being normal, non-powered, is considered bad and wrong. And also, I feel that people like Meyers cannot conceive of giving her characters weaknesses. She needs her vampires to be more like Superman, instead of genuine monsters. Amarie often mentions how the Twilight books want to stay comfortable, and she clearly wants her vamps to be the heroes of the books. They therefore cannot be complete monsters or capable of being defeated. And since normal humans are bad, they don't stand a chance.

I used an html hyperlink. I was worried I might do it wrong, honestly. The code is [a href="insertlinkhere"]Place happy text here[/a] and replace the [] with <>. Been awhile since I've used any html.

I don't think Smeyer can see her vampires, at least her Cullens, as real monsters. And as a result, anyone who opposes them has to be a buffoon. *shrugs* I'm rehashing what other people have said.

I once found a fic that chastised the wizarding world for standing to the side while other heroes in the muggle world took on an invasion of monsters. It was awesome. Anyone else know of any such fics?

Asha said...

I don't know when the focus shifted from monster to hero. I think that's been happening for awhile. However, in most cases the majority of vampires can still be defeated. By making them more complex characters, we've humanized them. I don't think we could say that SMeyer humanized her characters, though. They're just gone from being monsters to being angels and not actual characters.

chris the cynic said...

If it were me, I'd have then proceeded to say that *high levels of electrical energy jam magic*, but anyways...

If I ever get around to making the MMO with the four worlds (think of them as versions of the same world, sliders style) That's going to be the basic rule governing the interaction of magic and electricity. Large levels of one will screw up the other.

Silver Adept said...

The easiest way I can think of for enforcing the Separation is that anyone who has heretical ideas gets a one-way trip to Azkaban prison. Especially when it's Dementor-staffed.

But perhaps, taking the idea of Diagon Alley as a pocket space, maybe the Wizarding and Muggle Worlds are slightly out of phase with each other (like the two worlds in Fringe) - close enough that they can be bridged, but far enough apart that the fundamental rules are different. Muggle technology that requires power won't work there. (That still doesn't preclude someone from figuring out how to store magical energy in a battery of some sort and developing concurrent technology...except, perhaps Because Dementors/Obliviators.)

Will Wildman said...

Super-wizards (I've seen people seriously argue Harry Potter could take on a BOLO) really only work if you assume that all magic is absolute and flawless and, honestly, we don't have any reason to, both for extraordinary claims/extraordinary evidence reasons, and because you'd think we'd see some vague evidence of omnipotence. You *could* say that, for instance, the Impervious charm used to make Harry's glasses more durable can no-sell a galaxy exploding on top of it, and wizards are just awe-inspiringly stupid... or you could just say that, magic or not, their powers most likely have *limitations*.

I don't disagree, but it doesn't need to reach omnipotence to be relevant. Limitations exist (and vary by caster; Dumbledore can turn himself completely invisible while most can just get a kind of 'I'm the same colour as the wall' effect) but can be taken into consideration. What about stacking, for example? Take shield charms. It's established in-universe that items can be enchanted to hold a charm for an extended period - the Weasleys start making Shield Hats for the ministry. Even if we assume that a contiguous object can only hold one charm of a type, we don't know what would happen if, say, twenty people just cast shields on a pile of button pins for an hour and then covered a hat in them. Would you end up with a thousand shields being projected from your hat? How long would it take to break through that? Or would they just short each other out?

Smilodon said...

I really, really liked Bablylon 5's answer to this. SPOILERS.

It's ultimate space battle time. Humans + most of the other regular skill races in the galaxy have teamed up under the command of Sheradon to take on the two god-like races who are demanding that lesser races obey them. The good guys have worked out some of the baddies weaknesses, but there's no way that the good guys could win a pitched fight. But they don't have a battle. Every time the god-like creatures attack Sheradon, a ship from another race will intercept the strike and die in his place. They prove that the galaxy isn't going to sit still and be ruled. The point is that, if you figure out what the all-powerful enemy wants and how to deny it to them, you don't have to actually defeat them.

Smilodon said...

YES. I'm so used to the idea that, when confronted by the impossible enemy, people TRY. I'm re-listening to the Dresden Files, and in Book 7 an ordinary, non-magical, mortal, cowardly human ends up Growing as a Person so that he can make his tiny-but-vital contribution to attacking near-immortal neucromancers.

And the whole "fighting against near-impossible odds because you believe the cause to be just" is a staple of real life, not just books. I've read a little about the resistance in the Spanish Civil War. I remember reading some of the twitter feeds during the Arab Spring. I don't care how sparkely the enemy is. Saying that humans stand no chance, so would react like a moth to the flame denys much of human experience. Sure, some people would act like that. But lots of people wouldn't. And Meyers chose to write a book where being the moth was the right (almost moral?) thing to do.

depizan said...

The easiest way I can think of for enforcing the Separation is that anyone who has heretical ideas gets a one-way trip to Azkaban prison. Especially when it's Dementor-staffed.

Unfortunately, I think this is the only explanation that actually works with Muggle-borns. And fits with my rather cynical take on the Wizarding World (oh, sure, our heroes are better than Voldie - not that that takes much, but from the point of view of the Muggle world, it's AVP's tag line: whoever wins, we lose.)

Really, I think Rowling just forgot to think things through. It's like I said up-thread, Rowling and Meyer are so taken with their respective super-people that they forgot to consider that not everyone would want to be/see themselves as those super-people (and that said super-people reside in worlds filled with not-super-people). Rowling thinks the magical world is awesome and so does her protagonist (for very understandable reasons), so it never occurs to her that, somewhere out there, there might be a Muggle-born witch or wizard who had their heart set on a muggle career or who simply relates to things differently and wants to mix the worlds.

Likewise, it never occurred to Meyer what her world really looks like to a human. She wants Bella and Edward to have a perfect, eternal love, and designed vampires around that. To acknowledge that, even with her best efforts, humans might still be able to harm or kill vampires would threaten that perfect, eternal love. And, actually, I think this is where Bella's disdain for other humans comes in: if she were actually attached to the human world, at all or if the story acknowledged that humans are people, then the whole vampire thing would suddenly have a dark side to it. Bella would have to give something up. To be good, the "good" vampires would have to care about and try to protect the human world. Etc. Things that Meyer didn't want in her story because she just wanted to write a love story (which is fine, but, ow, world building).

DavidCheatham said...

@depizan
There's still a part of me that says for every Mr. Weasley, there must be a pure-blood Wizard/Witch who competently investigates the Muggle world. People generally have more interest in the world around them than Wizard/Witches are portrayed as having in the books.

But it's sorta what we're forced to imagine. There has to be some reason, in the story, that Mr. Weasley has not put on Muggle clothing and gone to visit an electronic's store or whatever. What this reason is, I cannot figure out. But they live in a country where they do not even understand the money.

One theory: It's a societal bubble. A near total bubble that makes it completely unacceptable to even interact with the Muggle world in any way. Perhaps the Statute of Secrecy is a lot harsher than it's implied to be, and _any_ slip can get you fined or imprisoned, or even if you're in compliance with the law it's just seen as 'bad form' to talk to Muggles at all.

Implausible as hell? Yes. Doesn't really make sense? Yes.

Doesn't actually work? Sadly, yes. We see wizards donning muggle-ish clothes and casually walking through King's Cross, the Weasley offscreen have visited Muggle shops in St. Otterly, etc.

DavidCheatham said...

@Asha
Myers logic that 'we can't all be Slayers' discounts how awesome Xander, or the other humans, were.

Yes, I was just thinking 'I do not understand how anyone can mention vampire slayers and not actually understand the entire premise of the series'. The entire point of Buffy was 'empowerment'. And, no, not always 'magically' empowerment, and never by become something other (aka, 'better') than human. Normal humans killed plenty of vampires. (See also: That was then...this is now.)

So I though it odd, until I remember that Meyer's claims that she had not actually read or seen any vampire fiction at all, and probably heard about 'vampire slayer' via cultural osmosis also.

The anti-human thing is one of the things that kept me from reading the last two Harry Potter books, too.

I have to admit I don't understand this criticism. I've seen it a few times, and I'd understand if we saw Death Eaters mowing down groups of vulnerable Muggles, and only the super-special Wizards can save us! But that's not the Harry Potter books. It could have been, but it's not.

In fact, we don't see a single Muggle get killed onscreen, in the entire series. The worse onscreen is that Muggle family attacked during the world cup. (Which was not technically part of the war, just random bigotry.)

The only reference to the effects of the war on Muggles is a reference in HBP about the Death Eaters having attempted to extort the Wizarding government into stepping down by threatening to kill some Muggles, and the government does not so they blow up a bridge and some giants knock down some houses. (Which happens entirely off-screen.)

I don't think 'Wizard terrorists can blow up a bridge' is attempting to make any sort of statement about the worth of humans. _Any_ terrorist can blow up a bridge or knock down buildings, especially if no one is expecting it, or kill random people in their homes. In the entire series we don't see any wizards attack a Muggle who even knows about them, much less who is armed or aware there's a war going on in a 'neighboring country'.

So saying HP says 'Humans are useless' is like saying a story where a rapid dog shows up and attacks someone says 'Humans are useless'. Pretty much everyone is 'useless' if something randomly attacks unarmed people out of the blue. (Especially since Wizards are shown to be equally 'useless'.)

As for the Reapers, well, they were supposed to be Space Cthulhu. Yet we also knew they could be killed. We saw it happen. We also had our expectations that the bad guys could be defeated raised by the previous two games. The Reject ending was a big fat middle finger to those who wanted to reject the brilliance of the Catalyst.

That, I agree with. And, frankly, I would have been okay with the 'crappy' ending being 'fling a light into the darkness', with it taking one more cycle to stop everything.

Instead, we got the half-baked deus ex machina ending(s).

DavidCheatham said...

@Asha
Amarie often mentions how the Twilight books want to stay comfortable, and she clearly wants her vamps to be the heroes of the books. They therefore cannot be complete monsters or capable of being defeated.

Heh. 'Cannot be defeated' is pretty much the _opposite_ of 'heroes of the book'.

I seem to recall Superman, or possibly some Superman expy, explaining that a lot of times he gets called a 'hero', he is not. To be a hero implies at least some level of risk, and thus any cop responding to any incident is far more heroic than Superman is for picking up a bomb and flying it away.

chris the cynic said...

In response to the B5 spoilers.

You make that sound like sacrificing themselves to save Sheridan Delenn was the plan. That just sort of happened and, as I recall, surprised Sheridan and company as much as it surprised the the godlike races.

Smilodon said...

You're right, I think (I watched that show a couple years ago, so some of my memories about it might be wrong.) But I think my overall point stands - even with most of the races in the galaxy on their side, including a few God-like races of their own, I thought Sheridan et al. would have had trouble winning a straight-up fight. This was a non-Dues Ex Machina way for them to defeat overwhelming military might.

Now I think about it, did Sheridan et al. actually have a plan that they expected to succeed? Or was it just "Go in with as much support as I can get, yell at them a bunch and tell them to get out, hope for the best?"

Beroli said...

I seem to recall Superman, or possibly some Superman expy, explaining that a lot of times he gets called a 'hero', he is not.
I've seen that argument a few times.

It's never struck me as at all valid. I'm far from an expert on comic books, but I know enough to know that there are a lot of people in Superman's world who are capable of hurting him and killing him, ranging from "Lex Luthor with a chunk of Kryptonite and an author who's writing Kryptonite as actually dangerous instead of as mildly annoying" to "Darkseid, who can kick Superman around like he was Kryptonian and Superman was an ordinary human." And he (Superman, not Darkseid) clashes with them regularly, seeks conflict with them in the name of protecting people who don't have superhuman powers at all, and gets thoroughly, brutally, frequently pummeled for it.

Lliira said...

Magic also works on Superman.

But it's not just about who can physically hurt him. Clark doesn't live a normal life -- he gives up everything in order to save people. He pretends to be an entirely different person than he really is every second of every day that he's around other people. He's not really this hopeless nerd, but he's not really an invincible person with no needs or desires or vulnerabilities of his own, either. He's knowingly and with full knowledge of the consequences made the decision to live his life for others and not for himself, even though this decision hurts him. That's why Superman's still interesting after all these years.

chris the cynic said...

Ongoing Babylon 5 spoilers

I think the plan was somewhat open ended but basically amounted to this:

Get the two Godlike armies in the same place at the same time (remember that they weren't interested in killing each other, just killing everyone who had any contact with the other side) I don't remember if there was hope that they'd damage each other enough to be defeat able or not.

Also have there a coalition of everyone else. Which included the last stragglers from the other godlike races, and thus for the first time put the two godlike races in question on a level of dealing with siblings rather than children or pets.

Then, when the godlike races decided to make their cases, they broadcast those cases to everyone. Every race that could be brought to the area. Every, single, one of the "lesser races" that the two sides hoped to influence. What they said in private was made public. Which damaged their public message and that was a big deal because the public message was the whole point.

Both sides had committed genocide stacked on genocide in defense of the public message. The message was everything. What they said, and how they acted, in private undermined that to an immense degree and did a certain amount of invalidating the whole war plan.

That said, it's been a while since I watched it too.

GeniusLemur said...

I think that the coalition actually could take on the godlikes. They had a big battle with one of the races earlier, and the casualties ended up being 2 to 1 in favor of the godlike race, but there were a lot more coalitions than godlikes.

I also think those races count more as "highly advanced" instead of "Super-duper-invincible." If a Vorlon wants to go to Babylon 5, it gets on its ship and flies there. If "Q" (God, I hate him) wants to go to the bridge of the Enterprise from someplace on the other side of the galaxy, he just snaps his fingers, and he's there.

chris the cynic said...

They weren't all powerful, for sure.

There was an entire movie about how the Vorlon's attempt to become even more godlike had been a very, very bad idea.

Asha said...

Warning: Spoilers for Mass Effect 3 and Babylon 5

The episodes you are talking about was when Sheridan and Delenn figured out that the war between the Vorlons and the Shadows was one of ideology. The two species were fighting like a mom and dad in front of their kids, wanting the kids to take sides. They had been left behind by the rest of the elder races as guardians and guides of the younger, and had not yet realized that the younger races were capable of thinking for themselves. They did not, specifically, want complete genocide of the entire galaxy. They wanted to be RIGHT, and were using the kids as proof that they were right in their personal beliefs on chaos and order. The ones who died were the ones who were wrong, in their thinking. They were therefore invested in keeping someone alive, and not fighting each other directly.

That differs from the Reapers. I haven't played the EC yet, but in the original endings you are told (with no ability to argue) that chaos is inevitable due to synthetics arising and destroying their creators, despite two very notable examples in-series. We are told then that the Catalyst was created in order to prevent the rising synthetics. We can't argue with the Catalyst, can't point out loopholes in its arguments, and told we basically can't understand it. They decide to play the story straight at the last minute, when the entire story had been about Shepard overcoming impossible odds and emerging victorious. They also dump a lot of internal consistency to do this as well.

Basically, there was no hope, there was never hope, other than those half-assed nonsensical endings.

A macguffin is introduced at the (sort of) last minute, called the Crucible. The Crucible is so terrible used in-story that I won't even go there.

I had expected something similar to how B5 resolved itself in the Shadow War arc in Mass Effect, given how many tropes they shared in common. That the Reapers reason would be awesome and mind-blowing and make sense. This.... did not. And anyone who tells me I don't get it? Fuck you.

Asha said...

Sheridan getting the Shadows and Vorlons together was his equivalent of Calling the Old Man Out. Also, he had the First One there to act as sort of mediator.

They wanted the kids to fight each other on their behalf, and it wasn't until Sheridan knew they wouldn't directly confront each other that he figured out the actual reason for the war. To pick between order and chaos. *shrugs* I watched B5 like a maniac and nearly memorized it.

DavidCheatham said...

@Beroli
I said 'a lot', not all. Obviously, Superman _does_ risk his life, all the time. I wasn't talking about that.

But him saving someone by flying a bomb out to sea, or stopping a mugging, is no more heroic than if I see someone walking towards an open manhole so I yell 'Hey man, look out, open manhole!'. Or a doctor performing life-saving surgery.

It's certainly a good thing to do, but it's not 'heroic' per se, which has to involve some loss on the part of the hero, or at least the risk of loss. At least in my book. (And the writer of whatever comic that was. Possibly it was the Superman cartoon.)

@Lliira
I do see the argument that Superman is saving people so much he actually _is_ sacrificing something, WRT his time and life. Or that his secret identity is a sacrifice, although at that point we're talking about something that varies by writer, and his fake nerdiness is entirely his own doing. There are plenty of other ways he could disguise himself, like using an actual disguise (And it's worth mentioning that Smallville had him active for two years without a disguise at all, he simple didn't stop moving so no one could see him.), and a lot of writers have Clark being the 'real person', and Superman the 'disguise'.

Basically, all that varies by writer, including how much time he spends each day saving people.

But even if he spends a lot, okay, he's a hero for that, but it's 'Doctors without Borders, giving up a real life in order to constantly help people' heroism, instead of 'risking your life' heroism.

depizan said...

One theory: It's a societal bubble. A near total bubble that makes it completely unacceptable to even interact with the Muggle world in any way.

Except, like every other theory, it crashes hard on the existence of Muggle-born wizards and witches. The interaction of the Wizarding and Muggle world is really where everything comes apart at the seams.

depizan said...

I wouldn't say the Harry Potter books portray humans as useless, exactly, but they sure do portray humans as less than wizards/witches. It's "okay" for the Wizarding World to mostly keep the humans ignorant of the fact that there's a dangerous man bent on conquering not just the Wizarding World but the human one as well, and that can only be okay if we're supposed to assume that humans wouldn't be able to contribute. Certainly the wizards/witches are portrayed as assuming the humans would be no help. Also, humans are regularly Obliviated by wizards/witches to protect the masquerade. Consider the treatment of humans that we're shown in whichever book had the Quiditch Cup in it. Consider that Hermione mucked with the minds of her parents rather than tell them the truth (the fact that what she did wouldn't actually protect them I consider writing fail, not Hermione fail, though). Consider the general way humans are talked about by the Wizarding World - as if they're cute, dumb things. None of this is ever reacted to by either the narrative or the characters - even characters from Muggle families - as bad or wrong.

The Wizarding World is not on the side of Muggles/humans/non-wizards/witches and we're expected to ignore this. It's a subtler anti-human stance than Meyer's, but it's there.

Fluffy_goddess said...

*loves this thread so very, very much*

First off: I've been reading Avengers fanfic lately, and the big trope there seems to be The Non-Superized Humans Are Scarier Than The Norse God, The Hulk, And Captain America Combined. I mean, you can argue that Tony Stark has super-human engineering capabilities and the deus ex machina of being rich, priviledged, and perfectly positioned and thus shouldn't be counted, but he and the other scientists do a lot more saving of the various days than anyone. I love this about so many fans of the Marvel universes. (Well, X-Men sometimes falls into the Humans Are Plot Points, Not People trap, but less often than a lot of fandoms in my experiences.) Tony Stark would not just stomp the Volturi, he would obliterate them in a flaming ball of death and still have time for three drinks before dinner, and then he would turn SHIELD's attention to the Cullen clan, because he is just twisted enough to sic Fury on them.

I will never write this fanfic, but if someone else does I will read it with great pleasure and probably rec it all over the place.

Second: I get the feeling that in Twilight, this is as close to a self-aware, explicitly serious discussion we're going to get. More and more, I get the feeling that vampires are stuck with the brain chemistry they had as humans -- so if Edward was a depressed, conceited teenager, as seems logical from what little portrayal we get of him, he's basically limited to that. He gets some variation in mood because he gets some variety of stimulation, but at heart he's no more likely to show great sensitivity or empathy than he was as a seventeen-year-old human. (I tend to be forgiving of teenagers not having great social skills. They're skills. They take time to learn. Teenagers often haven't yet. Which makes this a horrible, horrible flaw in the Vampires Are Perfect thing, but I don't think youth-obsessed cultures would agree.)

I wouldn't expect a teenager to be able to be rational or reasonable about a relationship without a lot of coaching, and we see zero evidence here that Carlisle or any of the others are trying to coach Edward through this. They're basically either going "Run the other fucking way, you idiot, your lovelorn angst is endangering everyone" or "this is fated, don't fight it". Nobody sits these two down and says "look, this will be difficult because you're the products of different cultures, you have different desires and perspectives, and you can't count on fantastic sex to smooth over the bad times because this is abstinence porn; you're going to have to communicate, and I'm going to offer to mediate a safe space for you to discuss things on a regular basis, at least until you get good at this". There is nobody urging them to make I Statements in this novel, and there really, really needs to be.

Peter said...

I've seen the same argument applied to Captain Jack in DW/Torchwood and it's very convincing. He can never grow or permanently change as a person, because everything about him defaults over time to exactly how he was at the moment he became a fixed point. This explains how he is still so very arrogant, doesn't learn from his mistakes and didn't seem to have any trauma from being buried alive for millenia.

chris the cynic said...

I'd also say the Wizarding* World's frequent violations of muggle's as noted by what they do to their memories and so forth require us to either accept that muggles are subhuman animals as best (objects to be abused at will more likely) or the books wish us to believe that the magic people are all uniformly unforgivably evil with the conflict being evil traditionalists (the "good" guys) vs evil revolutionaries (Voldy and their ilk).

I don't think we're meant to see Harry and co as the soldiers of evil, so I think that the books have a pretty definite anti-(non-magic)-human.

-

Once again, I feel it necessary to point out that wizard was a genderless term, Rowling made it male only, and then named the world after it. Perhaps this was an intentional commentary on something or other, but it just seems weird to me.

Ana Mardoll said...

Nobody sits these two down and says "look, this will be difficult because you're the products of different cultures, you have different desires and perspectives, and you can't count on fantastic sex to smooth over the bad times because this is abstinence porn; you're going to have to communicate, and I'm going to offer to mediate a safe space for you to discuss things on a regular basis, at least until you get good at this". There is nobody urging them to make I Statements in this novel, and there really, really needs to be.

*loves this comment so much*

Will Wildman said...

The Wizarding World is not on the side of Muggles/humans/non-wizards/witches and we're expected to ignore this. It's a subtler anti-human stance than Meyer's, but it's there.

I'm still kind of ambivalent on this. I do think that the wizards/witches treat muggles carelessly, but they treat each other pretty carelessly as well - the entire magical culture is an oversized caricature of anything reasonable, such that brutish harm and something as terrifying as infatuation potions are considered pretty normal. And to a degree I think she expects readers to make up their own minds about this, which seems to have gone about as well as her attempts to explore concepts of slavery, i.e., some people are all "WE GET IT ROWLING, SLAVERY IS BAD" and others are all "Look at this, these characters don't care about slavery at all, this book is horrifying" and it seems like never the twain shall meet. (I would like to meet a Twain.)

I think most everyone can agree, one way or another, that Rowling wasn't actually trying to create a super-consistent and plausible world. (I tend to bump it towards the 'mythology' category along with any story that involves gods ruining everything for everyone in order to make a narrative point.)

---

Once again, I feel it necessary to point out that wizard was a genderless term, Rowling made it male only, and then named the world after it. Perhaps this was an intentional commentary on something or other, but it just seems weird to me.

Rowling was definitely not the first person to treat 'wizard' as male-only. How many times have you ever seen a female magic-user referred to as a wizard in fiction? The only examples I can think of are RPGs where classes are gender-equal (generally tabletops, or most recently Diablo III*). And once it's established that dudes are called wizards and she wasn't going to write a magical culture that was devoid of sexism, calling it the Wizarding World seems pretty much inevitable. Their world is about as equal as ours, which is to say 'sometimes, on paper'.

*Diablo III features female wizards and female monks. And while I've been meaning to blog about its race (goodish) and gender (bad) stuff, I want to note here that when my monk has just finished literally beating evil itself to death with her fists, it is extremely vexing to have the ending cinematic go on and bloody on about the victory of angels and men. All of creation was just saved by epic ladybiceps, people. Ignore this at your peril.

Brin Bellway said...

How many times have you ever seen a female magic-user referred to as a wizard in fiction? The only examples I can think of are RPGs where classes are gender-equal (generally tabletops, or most recently Diablo III*).

And the Young Wizards books. (Still haven't read the most recent one. I really should get around to that.)

DavidCheatham said...

Except, like every other theory, it crashes hard on the existence of Muggle-born wizards and witches.

Except you're supposing that Muggle-born have _any_ place in Wizarding society, something we don't have much evidence for. As there's horrible prejudice against Muggle-born at the very top of society, I don't think the idea that there's enormousness bigotry across society is out of place.

The idea that a large percentage of Muggle-born graduate Hogwarts, look around at the society they've found themselves in, and just give up and head over to the Muggle world, or possible head out to some less-bigoted magical country, is not contradicted by the story. We never really even see an adult Muggle-born wizard.

In fact, it's stated that the reason that Arthur hasn't advanced in his career is that he _likes Muggles_. Imagine how hard it must be to advance if he was considered, culturally, as a Muggle. Any Muggle-born who does make their way in the Wizarding world must be forced to drop every aspect of 'Muggle-ness'. Don't ever talk about. Let everyone assume you're a Half-blood. And, in fact, in the last book, Muggle-born start forging documentation for that purpose.

Perhaps Arthur not going out and to an electronics store is that, if he was caught, he'd basically be fired for it. (Rather, for some made-up excuse.) Maybe taking the kids to Hogwarts is only allowed because he has a _reason_ to interact with Muggles he can point at.

Now, granted, we don't see this mentioned in the stories set at Hogwarts...but considering the war ended just ten year sago, maybe it's something like Antisemitism after WWII. Talking about blatant and open discrimination is not something that's done anymore (Except by the kid of the Nazis who apparently still think it's okay.), but that just now, this very decade, became true.(1)

But pre-1980s, when Muggle-borns went out into the real world, they'd apply to some bigot who'll tell them he doesn't have a job for 'mudbloods'. Not that he's prejudiced, he'll tell you, but some of his customers are..ignoring the fact he just used a slur. At some point the Muggle-born will either adapt by hiding their origin, or go elsewhere.

Remember, this is a society that passes legal discrimination against werewolves, forbidding them from holding jobs.

Granted, I'm one of those people who think Wizarding society is _VERY_ screwed up. This _specific_ way is not supported either way by the text, but it's so obviously broken in so many other ways I don't think it's very far-fetched.

1) Incidentally, it's entirely possible this bigotry was also a recent change, itself due to Voldemort. I.e., before 1940s or so, the Muggle-borns did have influence, and whatnot...then Voldemort arrived, started the wizard version of the KKK, and suddenly Muggle-born were discriminated against. Or perhaps the Wizard world had been sliding that way for a few decades before Voldemort showed up. Wizards seem to be stuck somewhere between 1900 and 1930.

Smilodon said...

That seems very plausible to me, and I think very in keeping with the spirit of the text.

TW: Holocaust, genocide, racism etc.

I see it as having echos of pre-WW2 Europe, and then WW2 Europe itself. Jews (like many other minority groups in Europe) were discriminated against in a lot of European society, though not all. But even people who may not have liked Jews, who were very happy for them to live in ghettos and face a fairly high background level of prejudice, wouldn't have necessarily agreed with Hitler and his plans. Since Lily got angry with Snape for his use of the term "Mudblood" (and this was pre-Voltemort's rise to power, I think), the term and the prejudice must have existed before Voltemort.

Sorry about invoking Godwin's law, guys. Normally I try to find another situation to reference than the Holocaust, but I don't know as much about the other groups persecuted in Europe.

DavidCheatham said...

It's "okay" for the Wizarding World to mostly keep the humans ignorant of the fact that there's a dangerous man bent on conquering not just the Wizarding World but the human one as well, and that can only be okay if we're supposed to assume that humans wouldn't be able to contribute.

That's a genre requirement for contemporary fantasy with a Masquerade. It's worth noting that both the text and Word of God said the Masquerade is for _wizard's_ benefit, not Muggles.

Certainly the wizards/witches are portrayed as assuming the humans would be no help.

Yes, and I quote Hermione in the very first book, "A lot of the greatest wizards haven’t got an ounce of logic..." ;)

Consider the treatment of humans that we're shown in whichever book had the Quiditch Cup in it.

Yes, a large group of people can terrorize a defenseless family.

Consider that Hermione mucked with the minds of her parents rather than tell them the truth (the fact that what she did wouldn't actually protect them I consider writing fail, not Hermione fail, though).

The idea she didn't tell them is from the movie. In the book, all she says is that she modified their memories. There's not any evidence she did it without their consent.

The fact that Hermione does not think her parents cannot help is not necessarily because they're Muggles. Failure to recruit a loved one into a war that they are currently not involved in is not necessarily due to thinking 'They're not good enough to fight.'. It might just be she doesn't want them in danger.

Consider the general way humans are talked about by the Wizarding World - as if they're cute, dumb things. None of this is ever reacted to by either the narrative or the characters - even characters from Muggle families - as bad or wrong.

The way Wizards talk about Muggles, to me, seems most analogous to how people talk about people in another country. (Or another culture in the same country, really.)

There's plenty of prejudice from the bad guys, and plenty of unintentional Othering from the good guys, but I don't get the idea we're supposed to _agree_ with this.

depizan said...

Except you're supposing that Muggle-born have _any_ place in Wizarding society, something we don't have much evidence for.

Actually, no, it's not about whether Muggle-born have a place in Wizarding society, it's that they exist. They cannot be as confused about the Muggle world as the rest of Wizarding society, because they live in it part of the time. Yet, it still never occurs to them to get any assistance from the Muggle world. Also, you cannot posit that the Wizarding World has no contact with Muggles while simultaneously having Muggle-born kids at school. Contact with the Muggle world is necessary for that to happen. (And both Snape and Voldemort are half-bloods who started out in the human world, which isn't that far off from being Muggle-born.)

You also have the great question of "are there Wizard greengrocers"? If we believe Deathly Hallows there are not. Which raises enormous questions about how the Wizarding World even works. (Either Wizards do interact with the regular world all the time, in which case, WTF?, house elves do (how?), or Wizards steal from the Muggle world directly or through house elves. Or there are Wizard greengrocers and the scene at the Ministry in DH makes no bloody sense at all.)

Mind, I am not in any way defending the world of the Potter-verse. I think it's fucked all to hell (at least in the part we're allowed to see) and that both sides of the war are evil if you look at it from the point of view of a non-magical human or a magical non-human. But the best explanations for the Wizarding World's ignorance seem to raise more questions than they answer (e.g. if Muggle born Wizards do abandon the Wizarding World, do they just do Muggle things, go to a less prejudiced country, or should the Wizarding World be expecting a massive take over by Muggle borns armed with magic and tanks?)

depizan said...

"Consider the treatment of humans that we're shown in whichever book had the Quiditch Cup in it."

Yes, a large group of people can terrorize a defenseless family.


I hope by large group of people you mean the organizers of the Quiditch Cup because I was talking about the Confunded ticket taker guy. You know, the one having his mind mucked with by the side we're supposedly on.

The fact that Hermione does not think her parents cannot help is not necessarily because they're Muggles. Failure to recruit a loved one into a war that they are currently not involved in is not necessarily due to thinking 'They're not good enough to fight.'. It might just be she doesn't want them in danger.

They are in danger because she's part of the resistance - the danger to them is strictly of the "we've got your family" type. Wiping their minds and sending them to Australia will not actually put them out of danger (unless the Australian Wizarding World can kick Voldie's ass, which, again, raises other questions), it will just leave them unaware that they are in danger. Which is not an improvement. (But this could be author fail rather than character fail. Or perhaps Voldie's a Ravenous Bugbladder Beast of Traal.)

Will Wildman said...

Or there are Wizard greengrocers and the scene at the Ministry in DH makes no bloody sense at all.

Which scene is this? I'm blanking, and this seems like an important issue (I was under the impression that there were wizard grocers, and didn't think there had been evidence to the contrary).

depizan said...

I think most everyone can agree, one way or another, that Rowling wasn't actually trying to create a super-consistent and plausible world. (I tend to bump it towards the 'mythology' category along with any story that involves gods ruining everything for everyone in order to make a narrative point.)

I was actually fine with her loose world building in the early books, but the more serious the story got, the more the glaring inconsistencies and holes got to me. Also the more the protagonist centered morality got to me. This is very much a YMMV kind of thing, but for me, if you're trying to tell a serious story, you need to actually build a world that will hold it. Otherwise, you're going to lose me very badly as a reader/viewer and I'm going to entertain myself by picking your story into tiny, tiny pieces.

If she'd stayed with the level of realism/seriousness of the first couple of books, I probably would never have started poking at all the holes. She didn't, so I did. Because her serious plot hinged on people not noticing the holes and not noticing the inconsistencies and not noticing when things were oh so convenient for the author.

(It's a little like my response to the prequel Star Wars trilogy, actually. Though that wasn't a change of realism/seriousness, just a change of consistency.)

depizan said...

When our heroes our sneaking about in the Ministry, they (or maybe it's just Harry...?) see part of the interrogation of a Muggle-born witch*. Voldie's government claims that Muggle-borns steal magic by stealing Wizard's wands (which makes no sense, of course, but what does in DH?), so she's being asked who she stole it from, etc. Part of Umbridge's "proof" that this witch couldn't possibly be a real witch is that her parents were greengrocers. Not "your parents were Muggles, ha!" but "your parents were greengrocers (Muggle status implied), ha!"


*Ah! That proves one exists in the books. Pity I can't recall what she was before Voldie took over, if we're even told in the scene

Will Wildman said...

Ah, okay, I see what you mean. (I guess I processed these things differently - i.e., when the question arises "Are there wizard greengrocers?" I think 'Is there a role in wizard society analogous to that of a greengrocer in muggle society?' and answer 'Yes', but when told "A greengrocer is not a wizard" I think 'The analogous role in wizarding society is not identical and therefore the statement is technically true' and still say 'Yes'. This is needlessly complicated for no good reason, so obviously it's how my brain works.)

So I figure there are no wizard greengrocers in the same sense that there are no wizard doctors - they have a radically different approach to the job* and prefer to be called Healers, but they are still an established healthcare-providing profession. (It's established that food/drink can be duplicated, so while magic folk still need primary producers of foods, a drastically smaller amount should be able to form the 'seed food' that would then feed a whole lot of people. The economics are thoroughly effed.)

*They don't have rudimentary non-magic techniques, such that when a curse prevents healing magic from working properly, they consider stitches to be a radical innovation.

---

I continue to contemplate the story of the small group of witches/wizards who discover that food-duplicating magic is actually pretty easy, become horrified that it isn't already being used to solve all world hunger, and

Will Wildman said...

This was supposed to go in the previous post, but then I misclicked.

I continue to contemplate the story of the small group of witches/wizards who discover that food-duplicating magic is actually pretty easy, become horrified that it isn't already being used to solve all world hunger, and resolve to get it done themselves. The ministries are eventually convinced to allow it, under the supervision of enforcers making sure they don't damage the masquerade. Thus Our Heroes are faced with the task of producing and distributing incalculably vast quantities of food to the world without anyone asking where it comes from or sneakily finding out what amazing agricultural techniques they have invented. Probably a short story on its own, but undoubtedly with vast potential to expand.

chris the cynic said...

No! Don't!

Do you have any idea what you're contemplating? Suddenly large quantities of food appear, but none of the usual places for growing food have increased their output by nearly enough to explain it. It is necessary to pretend that some sort of scientific means has been created to allow not-good growing land to grow like never before. Chaim gets the credit since he's an eccentric wizard who keeps one foot in the muggle world and has managed to pass off some of his magic as the result of proprietary chemical formulas.

This kicks off a nuclear conflict, magic is used to prevent the bombs from reaching their targets (and deal with the radiation.) But the overall point here is that you've set into motion a series of events than can only lead to one thing: The Rapture.

Harry Potter caused the Tribulation.

-

How much of Buck's character could be explained if he was raised by exiled wizards who taught him to hold muggles in as much regard as ordinary wizards did, but never taught him that the priviliged class of "Wizard" existed, thus leaving him not with utter apathy towards the lives and emotions of muggles, but with utter apathy toward the lives and emotions of all humans?

depizan said...

That line of thought may well have been Rowling's. And it is coming from a representative of an evil government that somehow sold the populous on the idea that muggle-borns steal wands from wizards to be come wizards. There is so much wrong with that, I don't even know where to begin. (So it might not be world building at all.) But without any establishment, ever*, of how wizards get food it's kind of a "bzuh?" moment. Or at least it was for me.

Wait a minute, if food/drink can be duplicated, shouldn't the camping trip from hell been a whole lot more pleasant? I could've sworn they ran out of the food they brought and were down to scrounging mushrooms and such. Did they just never learn the food duplication spell? (Then again, I couldn't figure out why they weren't willing to steal a small quantity of food to survive. If food can be duplicated, they'd really not have to steal much at all.)


*Does Mrs. Weasley shop? We don't know. We just know she cooks. Where did Kreacher get food to feed the Trio at Grimaud Place? We don't know. We just know he did. Normally books don't need to address this because, depending on setting, we can assume they shopped, bartered, farmed, or whatever. With this world, though, there is no default assumption. Are there wizard farmers? We don't know. We really have no way of figuring out whether the Wizarding World is self sufficient (your theory that professions go by different names because they're different due to magic), somehow shops in greengrocers (which would explain how the Wizarding World knows the term and what one is), or is completely parasitic, stealing from and living off of the muggle world while giving nothing at all back. Which makes knowing rather important.

Will Wildman said...

Wait a minute, if food/drink can be duplicated, shouldn't the camping trip from hell been a whole lot more pleasant? I could've sworn they ran out of the food they brought and were down to scrounging mushrooms and such. Did they just never learn the food duplication spell?

Well, there's no reason that duplicated food would be fresher than the base-food, so if you've got one loaf of bread and a duplication spell, you've got infinite loaves of bread for the duration that the original loaf is edible. Which is one factor. The other is that magic in HP has Extremely Rigid Rules whenever it Remembers To, so if we're told that You Can't Conjure Food From Nothing, we suddenly have to ask what the definition of Food is. It's explicitly possible to conjure some stuff from nothing, so where's the nutritional cutoff point at which a thing becomes unconjurable? (Answer: eleventy because Astrology Centaurs.)

The only times I can think of when we explicitly see food duplication on-page are when McGonagall creates a tray of self-replenishing sandwiches in book 2 and when Harry quietly refills a bottle of something alcoholic in book 6. He does this without a verbal component in his sixth year, implying that it's mildly advanced but not all that demanding in terms of power, and it shows up in the regular curriculum at some point (presumably Charms or Transfiguration). I always figured Molly Weasley grew base-food in their home garden (canonical) and then duplicated it to an adequate amount (fanonical). A lot of wizards seem to live rurally and could do the same, but given the way wizard transit systems and duplication work, it's not out of the realm of possibility to imagine that there are only a handful of small grocery stores in places like Diagon and Hogsmeade that can provide base-foods for every urban wizard in the country.

depizan said...

Hm, yes, your version makes a good deal of sense. (At least as compared to my memory of what we're shown in the books. If the Weasleys were shown to eat a great deal of meat or other things that couldn't come from a home garden, though, we're in trouble.)

[Edit to note that they should still have thought to bring non-perishable foods that could be duplicated to last at least a year.]

That's pretty much what I was thinking. One simple stop in a store for a small quantity of canned provisions (you'd only need one of each thing, after all), and maybe some boxed goods with long shelf lives and they'd have been in great shape. I think Rowling forgot about food duplication.

chris the cynic said...

(Then again, I couldn't figure out why they weren't willing to steal a small quantity of food to survive. If food can be duplicated, they'd really not have to steal much at all.)

We need a new term for this. A propose, Jesussteal.

For example:
Theif"I have come to rob you, give me five loaves and two fishes."
Victim:"Ok."
Theif, "Ok, multitudes, eat up.
Multitudes: Nom, nom.
Multitudes: What about the left overs.
Theif: Give them back.
Victim: But there's more than you took.
Theif: Just go with it.

depizan said...

Good lord, you're right, they wouldn't have to steal. They'd just have to sneak into a store, duplicate what they wanted, and sneak out again.

*facepalm*

Will Wildman said...

I was thinking it might be tricky to manage that in a subtle way. Then I recalled that Hermione by then has woven a Bag of Holding that could haul around all of their copied food, and they have the flawless Invisibility Cloak to do it under. As long as no one was watching in a given aisle at a time to see, say, a loaf of bread briefly disappear and then be put back, no problem.

The only possible save at this point is to insist that duplication is actually much harder than it seems, note that Molly and McGonagall are both exceptionally powerful, and handwave that Harry has a highly-specific skill for duplicating booze that he has developed because he's 16. Still doesn't exactly pass the Razor, though.

bekabot said...

"Tony Stark would not just stomp the Volturi, he would obliterate them in a flaming ball of death and still have time for three drinks before dinner..."

He would have time for three drinks and a quip before dinner.

"...and then he would turn SHIELD's attention to the Cullen clan, because he is just twisted enough to sic Fury on them."

Because he'd be insulted by their pretensions to snobbery. Dead creatures who ape the habits of living beings are arrivistes. Tony Stark, faced with the Cullens, would be in the position of a lifetime member of the Arrogance club upon encountering a corps of gate-crashers whom he fears will lower the tone of the place. Naturally he'd call upon Fury, in Fury's doorman capacity, to throw them all out.

Silver Adept said...

Which might explain the prevalence of so many different forms of candy in the Wizarding World - the best people to send in and do shelf duplications (for minimum suspicion) are children, who might even come out of the job with some bits for themselves from a kind shopkeeper taking pity on the hungry child. With so much charity candy, the best thing to do is deliver new enchantments for it. Thus, Bernie Botts has been experimenting for years all because of some Jelly Bellies he got as a child that he just kept duplicating...

...imagine what things would be like if the Wizarding World got a Twinkie.

GeniusLemur said...

That goes back to the worldbuilding around Bella and Edward I mentioned earlier. Any vampire in the world wants to grow as a person, become wiser, lose a few cruel habits, take up a new hobby? Can't do it, vampires are forever frozen as the people they were when they were turned. Otherwise, Bella and Edward might stop being teenage newlyweds at some point.

depizan said...

Then how can Carlisle be a modern doctor? How can the vampires drive. Some sort of change has to be possible. Is it really possible to separate out the ability to gain skills from the ability to change as a person?

Asha said...

I... I desperately want to read that fic. Avengers vs Cullens. Almost as good as Alucard vs the Cullens. Fluffy_goddess, that idea is beautiful.

GeniusLemur said...

Because Meyer, like many poor worldbuilders, sets the hard and fast rules, then ignores them when they're inconvenient.

depizan said...

"Voldie's government claims that Muggle-borns steal magic by stealing Wizard's wands (which makes no sense, of course, but what does in DH?)"

About that... it sorta implies that there's at least a belief that would actually work


Which is why it makes no sense. I could sort of see a conspiracy theory that squibs are created by muggles somehow stealing their magic while they're still kids. (Except this doesn't really explain how it is that a non-magical person steals magic in the first place, and presumably long distance at that.) But stealing magic by stealing someone's wand? WTF? This implies that people's magic is somehow contained in their wands, even though they don't get a wand until after they've been shown to have magic, wizards sometimes have to replace their wands, and it's possible (if I remember right) to do wandless magic.

I mean, you're absolutely right. The only way that people would go along with that claim is if there was a preexisting belief that it was in some way possible. But it doesn't even seem to be possible to de-magic someone in the Potterverse. (If it were, that would be my first suggestion for how to deal with Voldie. Can't kill the dude with all the horcruxes? No problem, we'll just unmagic him instead.) Sure, just as with real life conspiracy theories, there might be some people who believe this is possible. But enough to have it as a "fact" in your totalitarian government? Mere months (if that long) after your takeover? What?

I thought it was established that food absolutely *cannot* be created. It can be teleported, but not created. Or at least that magical generated food is not nourishing...
The 'self-replenishing sandwiches' were probably enchanted to draw from a primary source, etc...


Which would put us back at needing wizard greengrocers. And being hard pressed to make sense of the Ministry scene.

depizan said...

See also demon baby. Yes.

*sigh*

I put more thought into my fanfic.

Fluffy_goddess said...

(I still love that list of all the things Caius shouldn't be able to stand.)

I tend to think of personal growth as falling into multiple categories. In terms of Emotional Growth, Meyer's vampires are stuck -- they had a few base rounds as humans to build it as high as they like, but their stats froze where they were when they were turned into vampires. The New Skills category is still wide open : they can level up as many times as they like in subcategories like language, knitting, music appreciation, etc. They can even adapt to new circumstances, at least well enough to survive those circumstances and have to move on to adapting to ever newer circumstances. But if they weren't already capable of saying "I'm feeling this, and that's on me, not you, so I'm going to try to remember that while we have this conversation, and if I forget that's Also going to be on me, not you" when they were turned, that's something they can't learn. That's a level of empathy that requires you to cultivate a personality that plays well with others; it's a set of words that are easily said, but learning how to mean them requires a big awkward chunk of emotional growth.

(You could also argue, of course, that this is because living in isolation from wider culture, even if you're a telepath/empath/mary-sue, means that you don't get the chance to practice interpersonal and reflective skills. You can learn a new language without changing your personality, after all; you can even learn new terminology without changing your personality. But the Cullens would, to my mind, have less chance to practice their interpersonal skills than they would other things they learn, simply *because* they're so ridiculously isolated. There's a reason people say things like "she hasn't learned to think of others yet" of children, and it does reference the fact that that's something you can be told, and you can tell yourself, but it takes time and repetition for it to sink it, much less become instinctive. The Cullens get all the time they want, but they don't get the repetition, so their emotional development would be at absolute best stunted, and at worst frozen at teenaged levels.)

chris the cynic said...

If we are to believe that Edward loves Bella (which I've yet to see any evidence for yet) then he's entered an emotional place he never was as a human (Bella, is canonically I believe, word of Meyer for sure,, his first love) and every time he acts on any part of it his emotional boundaries are expanding.

So I still don't buy the "vampires are locked at a given age" even on an emotional level. If Edward acts like an assholic 17 year old it's because he's been spending the past few decades playing evil peter pan, refusing to grow up and making other people's worlds into his super angsty self loathing Neverland.

Pan at least had to the good sense to do his rejection of adulthood second star to the right and straight on till you hit Captain Kirk.

depizan said...

I buy the living in isolation explanation far more. While there are certainly real people who resist emotional growth, the ones I've met also resist gaining knew knowledge that might force emotional growth on them. And I'm not sure we can divvy up people like role playing characters.

The fact that the Cullens mostly keep to themselves, even when at school, would stunt their growth nicely without there being anything actually different about them. Also, I'm not sure repeating high school ad nausium is really a good recipe for emotional growth. (But that could be because it sounds like it should be one of the circles of hell. And in this circle you repeat high school. Forever. Bwahahahahah!)

Amaryllis said...

"Voldie's government claims that Muggle-borns steal magic by stealing Wizard's wands (which makes no sense, of course, but what does in DH?)"

About that... it sorta implies that there's at least a belief that would actually work


Actually, I always assumed that nobody believed that it would work, neither the speaker nor anybody else. I thought it was supposed to be an example of an obvious lie from a tyrannically oppressive government, saying something impossibly untrue just because it can, and daring anyone to contradict.

depizan said...

Again, that's probably what she was going for. Buuuuut.... This is a matter of, at most, months after Voldie took over. And I have never understood how he took over so fast and so completely. I know it's meant to parallel the rise of the Nazis in Germany, but I don't feel like the parallel really works. The Wizarding World is just so fundamentally not in the same place that Germany was at Hitler's rise to power. For all that's wrong with them, the Star Wars prequels do a better job of paralleling that kind of a governmental shift and it's worth noting that there, the shift took years.

Here, we get Voldie taking over - rather more in the manner of a conqueror - the government and, in a matter of months (if that), has that same government back to business as usual, except evil. Like so many things in the book, it just doesn't make sense. (Actually, that would be my very short review of DH: Nothing in this book makes sense. This is not a good thing.)

Lliira said...

We are not supposed to think that anti-Muggle and anti-halfblood prejudice make sense. Any more than real-world prejudice makes sense. Nor are we supposed to think anti-Muggle, anti-halfblood, and every other kind of prejudice in the Harry Potter books is justified in any way. One of the most important themes of the books is that prejudice is wrong, both morally and in the most basic sense of "incorrect". (The other is that love wins.) The wizarding world is not supposed to be seen as perfect or better than the Muggle world. Even wizarding medicine lacks certain extremely useful things because of the anti-Muggle prejudice that permeates their society, and that is not something the text posits as a good thing.

JKR said that between a wizard and a Muggle with a gun, the Muggle would win almost every time.

Rosieknight said...

To be perfectly honest, I kinda want to see (movie-verse) Black Widow, Peggy Carter, Maria Hill, Darcy, or some combo of that group take out the Cullens.

(Pepper would have either have to raid Tony's lab or the warehouses storing the old SI weaponry, but she's an option, too.)

chris the cynic said...

We are not supposed to think that anti-Muggle and anti-halfblood prejudice make sense. Any more than real-world prejudice makes sense.

I think the problem is when it's not presented as prejudice. A lot of the more horrific things done aren't presented as prejudidce, they're presented as unremarkable back-story. See how the way the world cup was set up being a clear cut case of "Have you ever had someone take your brain and play? Pull you out and send something else in? Do you know what it's like to be unmade?" only it isn't presented as Loki being evil, it's presented as the basic groundwork of the good guys having some fun. No different than paying the roadies so you can have your concert.

The book presents it as perfectly fine, perfectly natural, the kind of thing good guys do. Unremarkable and completely kosher. Compare that with the depiction of Malfoyian prejudice. The book isn't unwilling to hold back about saying, "Prejudice is bad," but it also isn't unwilling to say, "This isn't prejudice."

The problem is that when the book says, "This isn't prejudice," not everyone agrees.

-

JKR said that between a wizard and a Muggle with a gun, the Muggle would win almost every time.

If my quick tired count is correct this is the tenth time that this fact has been either directly brought up or otherwise mentioned. Does it gain power with repetition.

depizan said...

Of course prejudice doesn't make sense, but the claims prejudice people usually make some sense in the context of the world they live in.

And, as Chris points out, there are plenty of horrific anti-Muggle actions that are not pointed out as prejudiced or wrong in the books.

Its enough to make one cheer for the Muggle with the gun.

BaseDeltaZero said...

I put more thought into my fanfic.


I find myself putting more thought into the my fanfic than the original authors often.
(Okay, probably not really - making a good story is a lot of work, especially if you also have to animate (or program!) it...)
My problem is stopping putting thought into it and actually writing.


If my quick tired count is correct this is the tenth time that this fact has been either directly brought up or otherwise mentioned. Does it gain power with repetition.

Yeah. I'd say ten muggles with shotguns would just make it totally unfair...


...
On the 'stealing magic' thing, I could almost come up with a scheme that would make that make a limited amount of sense - if a wand wasn't just a conduit of magic, but in some sense a capacitor... which works a little bit, what with wands having a sort of 'memory', and generally behaving like highly charged objects. Under that scheme, maybe, theoretically, a muggle who picked up a wand a wizard had been using could... probably not 'use magic' (if for no other reason than they wouldn't have any idea how, but perhaps it might release energy in some (maybe even semi-controlled fashion)...
It's not even close to 'stealing magic', but it's just enough of a framework for a racist conspiracy theory to emerge.

Peter said...

I remember reading that post when it was first made and thinking it was brilliant, it still is. But the thought occurs, how many other vampires from that time still exist? Caius is still around because he is adaptable, but do we ever see any other vampires from that period? One assumes that vampire populations remain relatively stable (if there numbers increase much then they should've outnumbered humans at some point, and Edward makes no mention of Vampires being in danger of extinction) but he could be the exception rather than the rule. The adaptable ones survive millenia, the vast majority though die because of a failure to understand the advances in technology that vampire hunters are using.

Rakka said...

The "stealing magic" claim is problematic because, well, I for one don't remember ever having got a satisfactory explanation of how magic actually works, so it may be that they're actually believing it. And since there is this confusion here, it seems I'm not the only one. It's not like there aren't six books to explain the fundamental rules of magic. But all we get is "spells are discovered" and are Dog Latin and wands being really important, only they aren't actually that much, unless they sometimes are.

Will Wildman said...

I thought it was established that food absolutely *cannot* be created. It can be teleported, but not created. Or at least that magical generated food is not nourishing...
The 'self-replenishing sandwiches' were probably enchanted to draw from a primary source, etc...


It's established that food is one of the Four Things that cannot be generated from nothing, but it's definitely possible to 'make more if you've already got some'. Much of the food that shows up in Hogwarts is being drawn from elsewhere (meals in the hall are teleported from the kitchens directly below) but it is definitely possible to duplicate to some degree.

---

I kind of want to hug psychologically-static-Caius and give him some period-appropriate soup and promise he'll never have to wear pants again.

Ana Mardoll said...

I don't even know who he is, yet thanks to Chris, he's my favorite character in the series. Poor Caius.

chris the cynic said...

Assuming that the axiom of choice is true it should be possible to take something, take it apart, and then put it back together as two of the original thing, each identical to the first, without adding any additional material.

However, doing this would require decomposing it into a finite number of non overlapping infinite point sets. moving those sets around, rotating, them, and then putting them back together again. Can't be done. It's impossible. But with magic, why not?

So there's really no reason that duplication shouldn't be withing realm of non-generative magic. To take something and make there be more of it doesn't require making anything, it just requires rearranging what's already there.

chris the cynic said...

What little I know of canon Caius is that he is EVIL. Then again, so too would appear to be the entire vampire population.

Smilodon said...

This will seem odd, but thanks for the spelling help! I've never read the books, only listened to them, and I wondered how "Kincaid" was spelt.

"Harry didn't want that to happen because it would result in a tremendous bloody mess and quite a few police officers dead... but also the almost certain death or defeat of the bad guys." Agreed. Harry Dresden talks quite a bit about how bringing in mortal authorities is the nuclear option of the magical community, since (as they learned in the Middle Ages), enough angry peasants can take out even the strongest of magical beings. The magical community is actually stronger fighting humans if humans are kept ignorant.

At least in book one, Dresden refers to female magic users as "witches". The Dresden-verse does shift between books, though.

Smilodon said...

Content warning: Prejudice against gay people.

I disagree that prejudice people feel the need to make claims that make sense. To use the mildest example I can think of, gay people are accussed of trying to "turn children gay". To me, the idea that "little Sally is gay because she read a book with two gay characters" is about on par, logic-wise, with "little Sally is a Squib because the Muggle stole her wand and thus her power." Both of those are ridiculous, but if you have enough prejudice against those without magic, you might need someone to blame when you discover that your child is a Squib.

Amaryllis said...

Here, we get Voldie taking over - rather more in the manner of a conqueror - the government and, in a matter of months (if that), has that same government back to business as usual, except evil. Like so many things in the book, it just doesn't make sense.
Oh, I don't know. With the Wizarding World being so much smaller than the Muggle world, we're only talking about one government bureaucracy here. I think of Voldie's takeover as more like a sudden coup d'etat than the rise of a political movement. They'd only have to replace the department heads at the Ministry of Magic with their own guys, and between Death-Eater intimidation and bureaucratic inertia, you'd have business mostly as usual. With pockets of resistance, more or less effectual, within and outside of the Ministry.

But it may be that I'm not as sensitive to world-building issues as some. There are things in DH, in all of the books really, that made me raise my eyebrows. But they weren't, for me, bad enough to ruin the story.

Will Wildman said...

With the Wizarding World being so much smaller than the Muggle world, we're only talking about one government bureaucracy here. I think of Voldie's takeover as more like a sudden coup d'etat than the rise of a political movement.

Yes - plus it's not like Voldemort has explicitly put himself in power. He assassinated the previous minister and made sure the replacement was under his secret command, and then started enforcing changes and appointing his followers or followers-of-followers via coercion. He was basically a military dictatorship pretending to be democratic*, scaled down to rule over a population of less than 5000.

*Actually, no, the Ministry of Magic isn't democratic - there's no election for the minister or any other role that we're aware of. It's not at all clear what it is. Hypothetically a meritocracy, I suppose, with a big dose of old-boys'-club?

Steve Morrison said...

JKR said that between a wizard and a Muggle with a gun, the Muggle would win almost every time.
I don't remember Rowling saying this, and can't find it on Accio Quote. Does anyone have a citation?

Smilodon said...

In my reading of the HP books, Voltemort's natural allies were putting themselves in positions of power during the entire time he was away, so they already had powerful government positions when he ended up rising to power (e.g. Umbridge, the Dementors). I can easily imagine that Voltemort's coup would have only involved changing a few faces and some internal promotion.

BaseDeltaZero said...

At least in book one, Dresden refers to female magic users as "witches". The Dresden-verse does shift between books, though.


True. But 'wizard' is a term for people qualified by the White Council, and I'm pretty sure females with such a qualification are referred to as 'wizard'.


*Actually, no, the Ministry of Magic isn't democratic - there's no election for the minister or any other role that we're aware of. It's not at all clear what it is. Hypothetically a meritocracy, I suppose, with a big dose of old-boys'-club?

My presumption would be that it was originally exactly what it says on the tin - a ministry of the mundane British government, with the Minister of Magic being appointed by the Prime Minister. That's pretty clearly not how it works anymore... I believe the Minister is elected by the Wizengamot, or something? And the Wizengamot appoints their own members? Or that might just be a speculation I read somewhere.

depizan said...

Good point.

Though the farther off from reality the claim of a prejudiced group, the harder it seems like it should be for them to convince others of it. (Though that may be me underestimating the latent prejudice level of general population.)

depizan said...

Yeah, somewhere in there, the Wizarding World government of the UK seemed to split off completely from the human government, which confused things further.

And good points have been made about Voldie taking over a small, non-democratic government. If Voldie's policy changes were less extreme, I'm not sure it would have raised my eyebrows. But, too, it could depend on what percent of the Wizarding population with some degree of power is pure-blood (or "pure-blood", since I suspect many lines aren't as pure as people claim, never mind Voldie's own lineage).

In discussion, I can see that the objections (some of them) aren't as bad as they seemed. I think my objections just hit critical mass somewhere around the Ministry scene in DH. Though some of the discussion is revealing further uncertainty about the Wizarding World - how big is it, how does the government work, etc. *sigh*

Amaryllis said...

Yes, those appear to be aspects that JKR was not particularly interested in making clear or consistent.

But I will say, as a career bureaucrat myself, I felt quite at home in the Ministry. (Not that I ever worked for the Office of Cackling Evil, but you know what I mean.)

(And I really wish I could travel to my personal cubicle vie Floo or Apparition or something. Think of the time not spent sitting in traffic. I could live anywhere and still get to work on time!)

(Speaking of which...)

Oh yeah, though, I keep meaning to say something about the wizard/witch usage, though. It's old-fashioned, certainly, but JKR didn't invent it out of whole cloth. At least, I don't think she can be accused of taking previously ungendered terms and "gendering" them. I can't be the only person old enough to have grown up in a tradition where "woman" and "wizard" were mutually exclusive terms. From Tolkien right back to Malory, a wizard was a man, and any woman with magic was referred to as a witch. Even the feminist-leaning, anthropologically-trained Ursula K. LeGuin wrote the wizards' school on Roke as male-only as a matter of course. Terry Pratchett's Equal Rites, which lampoons that tradition, was written in 1987. It's only in the most recent generation of fantasy writers who create women wizards.

At least JKR's witches as presented as equally capable of magic as her wizards. So I just consider the usage as a linguistic example of the conservatism of the Wizarding World.

GeniusLemur said...

Convincing others is seldom an issue. Most prejudice starts off with "everyone knows" and any attempts at justification are seldom convincing to an outsider and often embarrassingly transparent. For instance, 18th century scientists justified ranking whites highest among the human races on the grounds that whites are more attractive. (seriously).

depizan said...

Aaaand the "all was well" ending of DH just got worse. You're right, of course, which makes the general level of prejudice against Muggles, Muggle-born, and half-blood Wizards pretty damn bad. And never dealt with.

(The books really seem to want to portray prejudice as something only bad people do, therefor when Voldie's dies, no more prejudice, yet they depict a world that's incompatible with that. Oops.)

Beroli said...

Caius is the only one of the three Volturi to not have a particular supernatural power. Aro, the mind-reading leader of the Volturi, chose him for his capacity for hatred. Whenever the Volturi act in a coldly power-hungry or manipulative way, as with their framing vampires so they can recruit anyone who has a useful ability, the impetus comes from Aro, but when they act in a vindictive or brutal way, as with their efforts to render the Children of the Moon werewolves extinct, the impetus comes from Caius.

Will Wildman said...

The books really seem to want to portray prejudice as something only bad people do, therefor when Voldie's dies, no more prejudice

How do you figure? Prejudice against house-elves is rampant among everyone and continually engaged. Prejudice against other magical creatures is also pretty consistently visible - sometimes in the form of 'keep those filthy centaurs away' and sometimes in the supposedly-benevolent form of obsessing over the exotic noble savage (as a number of students do when Firenze is made professor). Prejudice against goblins comes up repeatedly among practically all of the cast, heroes included. The only ones who are unlikely to display it are those who suffer it themselves, like Lupin - conversely, Sirius is specifically called out for his jackassery towards Kreacher. If the books are portraying prejudice as something only bad people do, then they're portraying basically everyone as bad people.

Will Wildman said...

Based on this, my new headcanon is that Aro requires Caius to wear pants specifically to maintain his peak murderous rage.

chris the cynic said...

There's a good chance this is coming from a distinctly American perspective, where the most famous witch* I know of is John Proctor. There's also the fact that Rowling has Hogwarts be older than the English language as it is known to us and what you describe would be a tiny blip taking place primarily in muggle fiction, and seeing significant pushback in the generation before the one Rowling is actually writing for.

But then there's also this. I don't even remember how often the term is used in the text and honestly do not care. What I do note is how often it's used outside of it. When Rowling is speaking, and this goes way beyond just talking about the world in capital letters and as a proper name, she uses one term for normal people, and another term for female people. That doesn't sit right with me.

Even if both groups are magic people refereed to by terms with involved literary histories. The way she uses the terms in interviews it is like she's saying people and women, and that really, really does not feel right.

-

*Well, accused, convicted, executed, but presumably not actually a witch.

Beroli said...

Indeed. Killing Voldemort and reversing his takeover makes the world better, it doesn't make the world perfect by any means.

chris the cynic said...

Content warning: Prejudice against gay people.

I disagree that prejudice people feel the need to make claims that make sense. To use the mildest example I can think of, gay people are accussed of trying to "turn children gay". To me, the idea that "little Sally is gay because she read a book with two gay characters" is about on par, logic-wise, with "little Sally is a Squib because the Muggle stole her wand and thus her power." Both of those are ridiculous, but if you have enough prejudice against those without magic, you might need someone to blame when you discover that your child is a Squib.

The idea that gay people are trying to turn children gay didn't spontaneously pop into the world on its own though. It needed a foundation of prejudice on which to build. It grows out of the idea that being gay is so contrary to nature/god/thingy that it cannot be something people are born with but instead must be the result of a later change.

That underlying bit of misinformed bigotry then leads to the requirement that all gay people must at some point have been turned gay. Then that leads to the question of what could be turning them gay, and from there it's a short leap to the idea that the gay people are doing it. After all, if the bigots were right then gay people would cease to exist if nothing were turning people gay, so it makes a certain amount of twisted sense that they wouldn't want to leave it up to random chance and instead try to actively recruit.

Then you combine that with the fact that seeing gay people positively portrayed in fiction does generally make people more accepting, and some of those people may be gay themselves and so become more self accepting and thus more willing to come out, and it even seems to have confirmation.

Which in turn a bigot is able to fit in with the larger trend in society. An increase in positive examples of gay people has historically led to increases in openly gay people, and if you don't believe that there's such a thing as not-openly gay then you believe that that increase in openly gay people is actually an increase in gay people in general, their ranks drawn from straight people. So what you see seems to confirm the idea that positive examples of gay people are indeed turning people gay and that's why you see so much more of gay people today than you did a mere [insert time period here] ago.

If we're seeing the same thing going on with respect

Smilodon said...

The (poorly articulated) theory in my head was less "steal a wand from a person, they lose their magic". Instead, the bigots believed there was a certain resevoir of magical energy. And if a Mudblood steals a wand and with it the associated magic, then a Pureblood must become a Squib to make up for the loss. Your explanations make just as much (or as little) sense. You're right, that bigotry requires a backstory, but my point was just that it doesn't need to be a very good one.

chris the cynic said...

So a sort of, "Every time a wand is stolen an angel loses it's wings," sort of thing? I suppose that could take root.

Ana Mardoll said...

Which is interesting, because I would have thought "the witching world" would be just as flowing off the tongue. Maybe it's protagonist-focused since Harry is a wizard.

Laiima said...

If Rowling had used 'the witching world', though, her books would've faced even more blowback from people in our world screeching about Witches as being Satanic baby-killers, because the Bible says so! Wiccans have been trying to reclaim the word 'witch' for how long now? and reclaiming is necessary precisely because so many people have negative associations with the word. Witches in black pointy hats, with warts on their noses, and black cats as familiars. The Salem witch trials. No-good feminists corrupting young minds, and leading them away from Jesus.

Using 'the wizarding world', however, avoids all of that. Because there's never been any real suggestion in our history that we have had wizards.

The gendered way the terms are used is doubly unfortunate, I grant you.

depizan said...

The problem is, there's acknowledged as bad prejudice (against muggle-born wizards, werewolves, centaurs, maybe house elves) and then there's all the other prejudice that gets displayed that I can't tell if the narrative notices. The attitude toward and treatment of Muggles (no comment that I recall even from muggle-born characters) which even extends to the narrative treatment of them - mostly we encounter buffonish Muggles, mistreatment of them is "funny" (even in the epilogue where we find Ron only got a driver's license by Confunding the examiner), and they only seem to exist sympathetically as nameless victims. I can't decide if what happens at Gringots in DH is supporting the protagonist's prejudice (the goblin's treatment of the dragon leans it that way, to me) or is meant to be a result of their prejudice. Lupin is the only non-evil werewolf.

And then we're given an all was well epilogue that seems to just underline how selfish Harry actually is. So Voldie's gone and been gone for ten years or whatever, but the Wizarding World is still a pretty terrible place, and is still mistreating humans (and presumably magical non-humans). But it doesn't feel like we're supposed to look at it that way. On the surface the books are anti-prejudice, but they're so full of unacknowleged prejudice that the message vanishes under the pile of WTF.

Will Wildman said...

I can't decide if what happens at Gringots in DH is supporting the protagonist's prejudice (the goblin's treatment of the dragon leans it that way, to me) or is meant to be a result of their prejudice. Lupin is the only non-evil werewolf.

I think it's oversimplification to expect the situation to boil down to 'this is definitely because prejudice is totally right' or to 'this is definitely the fault of prejudice', but on the whole rather a lot of stuff goes wrong specifically because Harry and Griphook don't trust each other, so drawing a conclusion in the direction of 'prejudice ruins things' doesn't seem outlandish. It's possible for anti-goblin prejudice to be wrong and for goblins to do terrible things at the same time.

Lupin and Greyback are the only werewolves we meet onpage as far as I recall, and Lupin explicitly spends time in werewolves communities advocating for the anti-Voldemort side, which succeeds as far as he convinces them to largely stay out of the fight. Werewolves are continually presented as victims, both of prejudice (and bigoted government) and of other werewolves (Greyback is noted as uncommon or unique for the lengths to which he goes to target specific people to attack).

And then we're given an all was well epilogue that seems to just underline how selfish Harry actually is. So Voldie's gone and been gone for ten years or whatever, but the Wizarding World is still a pretty terrible place, and is still mistreating humans (and presumably magical non-humans).

I do wish that the epilogue had included much more of the information that Rowling apparently settled on for what happens (careers, politics, etc), since she was happy to explain to people in interviews that Hermione went on into magical law and kicked up a major reform in the treatment of nonhumans, etc. The degree to which witches and wizards carelessly zap each other seems to remain pretty steady before and after, and, as I've said elsewhere, is really more about the style of storytelling than any sociopolitical commentary. (It's not going to work for some people, and it'd be unquestionably horrendous in a realistic scenario.)

But more to the point, you seem to be saying that the phrase 'all was well' is objectionable unless everything is entirely good for everyone everywhere, which, while perhaps literally true, would probably prevent those words from ever being strung together to describe any existence whatsoever. (Discussions at Slacktivist have demonstrated, for example, just how hard it would be to try to get people to agree on a coherent concept of paradise.)

A kid, whose parents were murdered when he was a year old, and who was then raised by abusive relatives until he was introduced to a secret subculture that was increasingly dominated by terrorists who wanted to kill him and most of the people important to him, who fought in an insurgent war and let himself be (kind of) murdered at 17 for a chance to protect some of his (few surviving) friends, has grown up and just put his own kids on a train to school, which is one of his own fondest childhood memories. No one has been horribly murdered lately: this is Harry's idea of a good time. I'm not sure it's unforgiveable to summarise his life at that moment as feeling pretty okay.

chris the cynic said...

The degree to which witches and wizards carelessly zap each other seems to remain pretty steady before and after, and, as I've said elsewhere, is really more about the style of storytelling than any sociopolitical commentary.

Will, am I missing something or are you completely removing the treatment of muggles from consideration? I mean I picked that out because it's about careless zapping yet totally ignored that the non-magic people being zapped might be worthy of consideration (scope limited to "each other") but if I'd quoted your post there would be nothing about the kind of prejudice depizan was specifically talking about:

then there's all the other prejudice that gets displayed that I can't tell if the narrative notices. The attitude toward and treatment of Muggles (no comment that I recall even from muggle-born characters) which even extends to the narrative treatment of them - mostly we encounter buffonish Muggles, mistreatment of them is "funny" (even in the epilogue where we find Ron only got a driver's license by Confunding the examiner), and they only seem to exist sympathetically as nameless victims.

-

If you disagree with that that's one thing, but to completely ignore it seems weird.

Will Wildman said...

I think the treatment of muggles is thoroughly problematic and complicated. Rowling is on record as describing the magic/muggle dynamic as being representative of misfit/conformist frictions, wherein aggressive conformists persecute the magical misfits for being unashamed of their outlandishness, and so a lot of magic/muggle interactions are intended to be perceived that way: the wizards trying to live their lifestyle without bothering or being bothered by outsiders. I haven't really put together a lot of thoughts on how much I think she may have failed or succeeded at this overall. The characters can certainly seem like jerks (I never really stopped thinking Ron was rather a jerk, so the bit about him Confunding his driving examiner was the primary facepalm moment of the ending for me).

Muggles are definitely showcased as buffoonish in many cases, which is a problem. It's less clear to me that abuses of them are routinely presented throughout the books as unquestioned good fun. There are the Dursleys, explicitly horrible people throughout most of the series (yes, they took Harry in and that was good, but they then spend the next decade abusing him). There are Vernon Dursley's clients in the second book, whose cake-splattering is basically treated like a cake-splattering of anyone else. There's the aunt in book three, again presented as a horrible person, though Harry is severely reprimanded by various legit authority figures for attacking her. Book four has the people who run the campground, who get terrorized by the Magic KKK. In book five, there's Dudley's gang, but nothing happens to them. Book six, no one new comes to mind, but large parts are vague to me.

(TW: nonviolent rape)

Oh, we do get told in book six that Voldemort's mother used a potion to mind-control his father, making it the only case in the series where it's acknowledged that 'love potions' are basically the ultimate tool of date-rape. This is again presented as bad and tragic, but probably not as horrifying as it should have been.

(End TW)

Book seven, Hermione Obliviates her parents, which is presented as a shocking and tragic move by a desperate teenager; probably a bad choice, clearly an exercise of Witch privilege, but not hilarious. And in one of the earlier books, again I forget which, Harry reads about the callousness of witches during the days of burning at the stake, which is definitely presented as comedy that glosses over the muggles killing other muggles.

Throughout the series we have references to evil people killing muggles whenever it's convenient, or as a method of asserting their power against other magic folk. We're told that Arthur Weasley proposed the Muggle Protection Act in the second book, to the rage and opposition of bigots like Lucius Malfoy. We're told that there are government departments set up to keep muggles from learning about magic stuff, like Obliviating people who see dragons, and I guess there's room to debate whether magic people have a right to keep those aspects of the world hidden (we're also told there are witches/wizards who oppose the masquerade and think muggles deserve to know). It probably is supposed to be comedic when we're told that there was someone who once tried to make Muggle-hunting a legal sport, but said person was being presented as comically evil, so not sure if that's a grey area or what.

Maybe it's been too long since I've read the books, but I'm just not remembering that much casual abuse of muggles by the cast - most of the casually horrible stuff that happens seems to be targeted at other magic people, human or otherwise. Which parts am I forgetting?

chris the cynic said...

It's probably going to be a while before I get a chance to respond to this post (and it's probably been longer since I read the books than you, so response may be spotty anyway) but I just wanted to thank you for making it.

I feel like I might have come across as combative in my previous post, if I did I'm sorry. Part of it is I have a bad headache, part of it is libertarians at Slacktivist, and part of it was I was looking forward to seeing you address depizan's point* about the seemingly unacknowledged prejudice when I saw you responded, and when you didn't I was disappointed.

-

* Because I knew that whether I agreed or disagreed it would be worth reading.

Ana Mardoll said...

Keeping in mind that I've not actually in fact READ Harry Potter, this conversation looks to me like Depizan is having some problems with HP that I have with Twilight. To wit, the series seems to end with the protagonist saying, "Yay! I'm glad that I've left [Marginalized Group] to join [Privileged Group]. Nary shall I spend another thought on the plight of [Marginalized Group] again!"

To someone who is reading the series as escapist literature into the world of [Privileged Group], this isn't going to be jarring, but to someone who identifies strongly with [Marginalized Group], this can be problematic on the face of it.

The "Ron/Bella has always been a jerk, so jerkiness is not out of character" concept is a statement about in-text characterization; I think the out-of-text issue at hand is that Rowling/Meyer seems to expect people to not view Ron/Bella's actions as jerkiness. So the complaint becomes not "X is a jerk!" but "X is a jerk and Author expects me not to think so!" (It is, of course, tricky to nail down what Author expects.)

Mind you, I've read neither Deathly Hallows nor Breaking Dawn so I DO NOT ACTUALLY KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT. LOL.

Will Wildman said...

You did sound a bit miffed, but considering that we're talking about whether a powerful and privileged subculture is routinely abusing thousands of people because it's fun and easy (and you have clearly come from the books with a 'yes, they are' impression), I could understand it even without the other circumstances, so no worries. Thankya for the compliment.

(Libertarians would frustrate me too.)

Ana Mardoll said...

{{hugs}}

Smilodon said...

That's a nice way of breaking down the problem. I read it as Rowling expecting me to see Ron as a bit of a jerk, and Hermione as a bit naiive. At least in the House Elf situation, where Ron orders the elves around because he's doesn't think of them as full people who might not want to do his every bidding, and Hermione tries to help them without ever asking what they want. But Ana's right, if I had read it as "Rowling endorses Ron's actions" then I'd be kind of upset about the racism.

Will Wildman said...

The "Ron/Bella has always been a jerk, so jerkiness is not out of character" concept is a statement about in-text characterization; I think the out-of-text issue at hand is that Rowling/Meyer seems to expect people to not view Ron/Bella's actions as jerkiness.

Going by how Rowling wants us to view the characters is probably fraught, because (as the stuff about the ending demonstrates) she's got a lot of the story tha mostly exists inside her head, and I don't think she always transplanted that to the page flawlessly (or, in some cases, I think she expected us to make up our own minds and so presented things in a way that didn't explicitly call out the Awful, which is fine in some ways but runs into trouble when there are readers who don't see something as awful).

So there is a parallel with Twilight, I think, except that I think Twilight does vastly more glossing-over-the-awful and explicitly telling us that people are wonderful while they're doing terrible things. The HP books are a heck of a lot more critical of Ron than Twilight is critical of Edward, is what I'm saying, so when something doesn't get touched on in Twilight, the default is 'because it's perfectly okay', and when something doesn't get touched on in HP, I think it's rather more open to interpretation.

Mind you, I've read neither Deathly Hallows nor Breaking Dawn so I DO NOT ACTUALLY KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT. LOL.

Forget about gushing/complaining about shows you don't watch; 'round here our schtick is Critically Analysing Books We Haven't Read! That's the new thing. (It'll catch on, just you wait.)

I have said far too many things about Twilight and Narnia on this blog to ever criticise anyone for trying to analyse HP without reading the whole text.

Ana Mardoll said...

Forget about gushing/complaining about shows you don't watch; 'round here our schtick is Critically Analysing Books We Haven't Read! That's the new thing. (It'll catch on, just you wait.)

This made me laugh. It reminds me of... There's a Monty Python skit where it's a murder mystery but they keep going on about train schedules and train amenities. And then it cuts away to a critic discussing the author's work and how all the train stuff is a searing analysis of the temporal human soul or something. And the artsy-critic is John Cleese and he says something like "clever people like me, who talk loudly in restaurants".

This made me think of that for some reason. And that makes me happy. :)

Smilodon said...

When I was a teenager, I had one of the lower allowances of my friends. (My parents are good people, just not rich people.) And nytimes.com film reviews were free. So if there was a movie that I knew everyone was going to see, but I couldn't afford it, I'd read the review. I'd never expressly lie about having seen the movie, but reading a well-written review was enough to let me stay in the conversation. "When you saw it, did you think that the characters breaking the fourth wall was out of place? I know the movie was about how the audience is immoral for watching gory movies, but do they really need to have the characters talk directly to the audience?"

I was young and foolish! Also, I don't regret it, and would do it again if the situation required.

Ana Mardoll said...

Heh. When I was an English major in school, my senior year I was in a class where we read a novel a week and then discussed it on the Tuesday night session. (Which was ~3 hours long, being the only day the class was held.)

My senior year was also the year of my divorce and near-nervous-breakdown, so I wasn't able to read "Bleak House" -- one of Charles Dickens' longest novels -- the week we were supposed to. But I couldn't keep silent, because I was talky enough that the teacher would know something was up.

I managed to pick up enough in the first 30 minutes to hold forth a very strong viewpoint about the problematic elements inherent in plotline B -- which I couldn't remember now to save my life -- and held forth long enough and well enough that I had several people vocally agreeing with me by the end of class and the teacher, bless her kind soul, never realized I hadn't read the book.

Given the circumstances, I don't feel bad about it, all things considered, but... yeah. :)

chris the cynic said...

I did that kind of thing my entire senior year of high school because I couldn't make myself read (combine depression with a similar pace) but damn could I pick up on things fast. I was able to pass quizzes based on listening to people talking before class, and be active in the discussion basically every class. (I read more of the books cracking them open during class to support or refute points than I ever did outside of class.)

Its surprising how involved one can be in a conversation based on no knowledge other than what other people bring up in that conversation.

depizan said...

I'm afraid I'm going to leave a whole pile of comments because it's easier to respond to each comment at a time. Sorry!

you seem to be saying that the phrase 'all was well' is objectionable unless everything is entirely good for everyone everywhere

I find "all was well" jarring when placed so close to evidence that it's not even close to true. Evidence I'm still not certain the narrative realizes. (I'm reluctant to comment on what Rowling realizes because I don't read minds and we do know from interviews that all kinds of things never made it on the page.) I also feel like it reduces the entire story down to "whether things are good for Harry" which I find problematic. A person who defeats a Dark Lord so that he can have a better life seems much less heroic than a person who defeats a Dark Lord so that many people can have a better life. Not that there aren't very good books about selfish heroes, but the sudden swerve is, well, sudden. (Though it's hardly the only swerve, and, honestly, all of the swerves are really where the series lost me.

If we hadn't learned that Ron was risking the lives of every Muggles non-magical humans* every time he drives, I might not have even noticed. Or if we didn't learn that, hey, they're still sorting kids into houses despite the sorting hat thinking that might not be the best move. And being prejudiced based on the houses. As it stands I want to reach into the book, grab Harry by the lapels and say "You didn't change anything! The totally screwed up world that Voldemort was able to take over so easily, because it's so fucked up and prejudiced is still fucked up and prejudiced! You're the boy who lived, do something!"

The contrast is what's so very upsetting. Especially as it seems to further underline that the narrative is absolutely fine with non-magical human abuse (that at best it's a value neutral activity) and being prejudiced against some people based on which house they're sorted into a school. (If this is a justified thing, then we shouldn't have a Slythern House, if it's not, it's just prejudice.) This bothers me.

Yay, no wizards have been horribly murdered! Of course, they're still abusing non-magical humans for fun and profit, but hey, they're not horribly murdering each other!


*I really feel like it's a slur, not a neutral term, so I'm switching to this.

depizan said...

Rowling is on record as describing the magic/muggle dynamic as being representative of misfit/conformist frictions, wherein aggressive conformists persecute the magical misfits for being unashamed of their outlandishness, and so a lot of magic/muggle interactions are intended to be perceived that way: the wizards trying to live their lifestyle without bothering or being bothered by outsiders

But, thanks to magic, the power dynamic doesn't really work the way she thinks it does. There isn't anything in real life to compare it to, because you have a relatively small group of people, with a great deal of personal power, who, as a group would probably be in danger from the larger group, but who are a danger to individuals of the larger group in a very disturbing way. The closest I can think of, actually, would be to colonial situations, even though the wizards do not actually rule over the non-magical humans. But it's the only place I can think of where you've got anything remotely similar as far as power dynamics. In real misfit/conformist frictions (at least every one I can think of), it is the larger group - the conformists - who have the power, full stop. They've got the numbers (or at least the support of the numbers) and they're the group in power.

And the only abuse of a magic user by non-magical people that I can think of is the abuse of Harry by the Dursleys. Which really isn't the best way to make me think that the non-magical world at large is just waiting to persecute wizards.

Also, they do bother outsiders and otherwise have impact on the non-magical world. See the oft forgotten non-magical human(s?) at the campground who are being used as ticket takers for the Quidditch Cup. See Ron's behavior as an adult. See wizards choosing to be fake burnt at the stake for fun while non-magical humans are suffering and dying around them.

Even keeping other magical creatures hidden from the non-magical world is really problematic since the non-magical world isn't hidden from them. See the dementors nearly killing Dudley in whichever book that was, and Voldie's crew killing people.

There's also the question of whether the Wizarding World is self-sufficient or entirely dependent on the world they despise. I still don't know. There just isn't enough in the books to tell us for certain.

I just keep reading the wizard/non-magical human situation the exact opposite of how she wants. It's the non-magical humans that my brain wants to map onto the persecuted groups of the real world, not the wizards. Granted, that's probably because no real world persecute group can erase my memory or kill me with a couple of words. But that's still a rather important difference.

(She may have been aiming for something like the X-Men-verse, but, for me, anyway, she really missed the mark. In X-Men, it is the majority, the non-mutants, who are prejudiced. In Harry Potter, it is the minority, the wizards, who are prejudiced. And that just screws everything up. For me.)

depizan said...

TW: Mention of triggery things like abuse and torture

To someone who is reading the series as escapist literature into the world of [Privileged Group], this isn't going to be jarring, but to someone who identifies strongly with [Marginalized Group], this can be problematic on the face of it.

YES! THIS! Also the whole rest of your post.

For all that I like fantasy stories, I really have trouble leaving behind that IStar Wars prequels was the lack of a non-Jedi protagonist. (No, Padme doesn't count, she got deprotagonized pretty darn fast.)

In the early, sillier, less realistic seeming Harry Potter books, I could go along with the magical fantasy ride. There was a, I don't know, Loony Toons-ness to the whole thing that kept it very much in the realm of fantasy, not just in the "hey magic" sense, but in the "not real" sense. The more serious the books became, the more I noticed that, in the world of Harry Potter, I belong only as the butt of a joke or as a tragic victim. DO NOT WANT.

Also, with the seriousness of the books and what sort of story they are zig-zagging all over the map, I stopped being carried along by narrative momentum and started picking at the seams. This happens when stories lose me. I mean, I stayed interested enough to read all of the books, but damn did I not like most of the "heroes" or their world by the time I'd read them all.

It's kind of like what I was talking about with the epilogue, only writ large. Time and time again, I felt like the stories were saying A and not-A. In some ways, the stories became more grim and gritty and gray verses gray, but at the same time they continued to be (supposedly) black and white and about the power of love. Except the power of love turned out to be the power of Horcrux and nobody seemed to learn anything and the "good" guys ran around doing decidedly not-good-guy things and I couldn't tell at any point whether the narrative realized any of this. I could list a whole bunch of WTFs that I squawked at the books (especially DH) as I read them, but they all boil down to conflict between what we're told and what we're shown that the narrative doesn't appear to notice. (eg were we really supposed to think that Harry was right and "gallant" for using an Unforgivable torture curse on someone for spitting on McGonnegal?)

Maybe Rowling wanted to present everything neutrally, but too much of what she presented isn't neutral. Slavery is not neutral. Torture is not neutral. Abuse is not neutral. Brainwashing and mind control are not neutral. Prejudice is not neutral. Belief in the superiority of one group is not neutral. To me, presenting them neutrally comes too close to saying they're acceptable. And too many people already think these things are acceptable. (Well, the ones that are actually possible, anyway.)


(On a lighter note, somewhere in my ranting I realized that wizards are all Sith. Explains so much....)

Will Wildman said...

And yet after all of that:

To me, presenting them neutrally comes too close to saying they're acceptable. And too many people already think these things are acceptable.

I get how this is a problem. I am deeply sad that there are people in the world who could look at HP and think there isn't anything wrong with wizards magically abusing muggles. But I just can't bring myself to be sad that the HP books aren't even preachier.

depizan said...

Wait, you're just glossing right over the bit where Harry allowed himself to be murdered like three chapters earlier for the sake of weakening the magic terrorist who was murdering everyone he cared about?

Did I say he didn't help defeat the Dark Lord? By having him be all "everything's peachy!" in the same epilogue that clearly shows that everything's not peachy, it makes it sound like he only cares about what effects him and his. Of course Voldie being gone improved things for the Wizarding World. The question is did it improve things for anyone else, and the books imply no.

But neither Rowling nor I were talking about power dynamics, only social ones - part of the escapist fantasy of HP is about a world in which the misfits in question do have the power to remove themselves from the situation where they're in danger of persecution.

Except that's not really what they do.

(Also, really, mutants in X-Men aren't prejudiced? Isn't that kind of the entire deal for Magneto and everyone who's ever helped him?)

Magneto is the hero? (Yes, I should have specified the good guys, who generally are not portrayed as being prejudiced.)

The extent of the abuse originally being done to the people running the campground was that they got record business and a lot of their odd customers tried to pay them with giant slabs of gold.

Repeated magical brain altering isn't abuse? I...really don't know what to say to that.

No, we weren't. This is what I was talking about earlier - Rowling in many cases leaves it up to the reader to make moral conclusions rather than telling us And That's Terrible every time

Okay, well, I made the moral conclusion that Harry and the Wizarding World suck and are, well, not good. Sometimes saying "And That's Terrible" is a good idea if you're a writer, otherwise it can look like you're endorsing things you're not.

I felt none of this contradiction - the morality of the world remained good/evil with love conquering all, but the heroes became steadily greyer as they failed to keep to the principles they were supposed to be championing.

How do you have good vs. evil when no one is good?

I see what you're saying about love interfering in Voldie's plans. But I so thoroughly hated everyone (except Nevile and Luna) by that time that it all seemed so much more cynical to me, what with Dumbledor looking after Harry only so he can die at the right time and Harry following Dumbledore's orders as much as anything that I was mostly hoping for "rocks fall, everyone dies" by that point.

But I just can't bring myself to be sad that the HP books aren't even preachier.

Wow, preachy? Really? I so did not get that from them. But we clearly came at the stories from such different places that we might as well have read entirely different series.

Amaryllis said...

Harry and the Wizarding World suck and are, well, not good. Sometimes saying "And That's Terrible" is a good idea if you're a writer, otherwise it can look like you're endorsing things you're not.

I thought JKR spent a fair amount of time saying "And That's Terrible," myself, in the way she shows the results of prejudice and fear.

A Harry who never did or said anything problematic wouldn't have seemed human; an author who interjected a "he shouldn't have said that!" after every incident who be pretty intrusive. I can see for myself when someone's being an ass.

The Wizarding World sucks? That's because the Wizarding World is our world, which sucks sometimes too. It's our world in a miniature mirror. They've got infatuation potions? We've got data-rape drugs and perfectly legal alcohol (as Ogden Nash famously observed , "Candy/is dandy/but liquor/is quicker"). They've got Rita Skeeter? We've got Fox News. They've got the Daily Prophet? We've got David Brooks being annoying all over the Washington Post. They've got cowardly bureaucrats? We've got Congress and every government agency I'm a career bureaucrat myself, and I'd much rather have a more-or-less functional government than anarchy or libertarianism (which in practice seems to work or to corporate oligarchy) but there's no denying that government gets it wrong a lot). They've got schools so stuck in their ways that they don't see that they're harming children? So do we. They've got a Sorting Hat? We've got kindergarten entrance examinations, and exam barriers at every level of education from there up to the SAT and the GRE, not to mention whole schools "sorted" on bases other than their students innate capabilities..

Wizards are prejudiced? That's because people are prejudiced. And defeating one particularly extreme manifestation of prejudice and power-grabbing doesn't immediately turn the world into paradise. Sometimes, "all is well" just means, "we're not all either slaves to or agents of a fascist tyrannical regime." For most of us, most of the time, "all is well" just means being able to bring up our children in relative security while we go on trying to make the world better in small ordinary ways in our small ordinary ways.

(I admit the memory-altering incidents bother me, though. But then, my memory seems to be altering all by itself these days. )

Will Wildman said...

Repeated magical brain altering isn't abuse? I...really don't know what to say to that.

I had forgotten that someone confunded him several times before everything went to hell. That was indeed not okay, and very much in-character with the arrogance of the magic world. What other incidents come to mind? Given that you've characterised all magic people as "abusing non-magical humans for fun and profit", I suspect you might be able to help fill in any more holes in the list I was putting together earlier.

Ana Mardoll said...

There is a game reviewer for The Escapist called Yahtzee. I enjoy him personally, but any link to him would need a thousand Content Notes for male, white, able privilege, so there's that.

But I mention him to mention this. He strongly objects to karma meters in games because they always portray evil as Cackling Malevolence when Yahtzee believes that evil is more a matter of taking the simpler path and not caring who gets hurt.

So when I read Ron fails hits driving test, it seems to me that the good-but-hard answer is to take the test again. The evil-but-easy answer is to just magically scramble another person's brain without their permission.

But it does seem like all this will be very YMMV based on how you feel about brain altering. See our discussions on Narnia and body altering, for that matter. Some people don't mind it happening to them; others see it as a Moral Event Horizon of stripping agency away.

Now I'd love to see a discussion on Men In Black, which carries a lot of the same issues with memory altering. And I just saw an X Files episode where Fox's memories are forcibly removed by the government and it's treated as a genuinely terrible thing.......

chris the cynic said...

And as a reminder, none of this hindered my enjoyment of the books in the least. I have little problem liking problematic works. Book Four was probably the worst on screen offender and I loved it most of all. (Or it could just be that I remember it best because I loved it most of all, and thus on screen offenses in other books have faded from memory.)

And really, honestly, the tense there is wrong. I still love book four. Even given how little I now like the series. Everything I just said, it doesn't detract from that love in the least.

chris the cynic said...

But it does seem like all this will be very YMMV based on how you feel about brain altering. [...]

Now I'd love to see a discussion on Men In Black, which carries a lot of the same issues with memory altering. And I just saw an X Files episode where Fox's memories are forcibly removed by the government and it's treated as a genuinely terrible thing.......


The thing is, as I just wrote a post noting (our posts crossed) it doesn't bother me in Harry Potter in the least in the story. Not the violations, not the double standard, none of it.

Treating it like it's not there though, that seems to bother me a lot.

But I mention him to mention this. He strongly objects to karma meters in games because they always portray evil as Cackling Malevolence when Yahtzee believes that evil is more a matter of taking the simpler path and not caring who gets hurt.

Jonas Waever, an (amateur*) game designer has argued against balancing the difficulty of good and evil paths in games. His argument is that the reward for being evil is that things are easier, the reward for being good is that you're good. So if you decide not to do bad-but-easy thing because it's bad, the game shouldn't turn around and give you compensation. The compensation is that you maintained your morality.

Sounds like a similar thing. And I know of Yahtzee (quite possibly through Jonas), though not that argument by him.

I definitely buy the argument. The allure of the dark side is that it makes things easier, not that you want to cackle, so the dark side shouldn't be presented as cackling. It should be presented as the easy path where the price of that ease is the damage done to others.

-

*Last I heard.

Will Wildman said...

I get the impression that I'm coming across as saying magic people in HP aren't prejudiced, which is not what I'm trying to say at all. They are thoughtlessly cruel in their dealings with non-magic people, just as they are in their dealings with each other. My point of contention is whether the cast in general routinely treats abuse of non-magic people as harmless or irrelevant compared to abuse of magic people, and there I don't see great inconsistencies.

Before I go further, I should probably say: I'm not entirely sure what I think of memory and confusion charms. We never find out what it's like to have one put on you. The idea that there could be invisible teleporting people roaming the world erasing people's memories is indeed terrifying. I haven't seen The Avengers, but I'm not sure that means the best way of approaching the concept of HP memory magic is via the statement of a superhero from an entirely different continuity. (I have no idea what was done to Hawkeye, so I can't really engage on that.)

Continuing on the example of the people running the campground - the initial purpose of the confusion charms was to keep him from further investigating all of his customers, thus maintaining the magic masquerade, which is implicitly for the safety of everyone involved. It was the wrong way to do it, as I said before, but it was to a purpose, not just for the hell of it. Later, when he thinks it's Christmas-in-summer, this is after a more intense charming, and I think the idea is supposed to be "Well, he's confused, but at least he's not left with the trauma of having been tortured by evil wizards". I'm guessing people will disagree on whether this is better or worse.

Memories being unreliable things already (as Amaryllis noted), I will admit that I don't feel like casting charms that make people lose their train of thought or forget the events of the last five minutes is grossly worse than many of the other methods people (magic or not) use to coerce others to do what they want.

Isn't that textbook protagonist centered morality? So long as he's willing to sacrifice for those he cares about, Harry must be a good person.

No, protagonist-centred morality is 'whatever the protagonist does is good'. That's different from 'if the protagonist does any good thing, they are obviously a saint' or 'if the protagonist is happy in the ending and there are other people who might not be happy, they are obviously evil'. Additionally, my point was that depizan characterised the ending as 'Harry defeats the villain so that he can have a better life', which I thought was ignoring the fact that Harry's actions were supposed to result in him not having a life.

On the subject of the witch-burnings, we're told very little of what they may or may not have done, and we are definitely not given any evidence that magic people were promoting the idea that magic existed and people accused of using magic should be 'burnt' because they personally found it fun.

Will Wildman said...

Karma meters in games continue to vex me greatly - this happened in TOR a lot, where the darkside option very often had no incentive other than 'hurting people is fun'. On the Jedi I kept neutral, I had a hard time not going light simply because those options were more fun (or offered more experience).

My bounty hunter was intentionally hard lightside and always great fun. There were only a tiny handful of cases where I picked the darkside option, usually because my new questgiver was a fundamentally terrible person and so I had a choice between 'go do a long monster-hunting quest to assuage the offended sensibilities of this bigoted aristocrat' (lightside) or 'rough up this jerk and make him help you like he already promised to do' (darkside).

I feel sometimes like karma choices should play off the old dynamic that people observed with fighter and caster RPG classes, only instead it would be Linear Evil, Quadratic Good: if you go the evil route, you can be lazy and get quick power, but if you go good, your short-term weakness is compensated in the long run with ridiculously greater success. (E.g., the people you helped early on are constantly showing up to save you and give you free stuff later, and you can learn the spell at level 20 that lets you play such an epic guitar solo that all of your foes surrender immediately.)

Ana Mardoll said...

I think the main reason I liked Dragon Age was that the karma meter wasn't there, and I could role play more creatively. Yes, you had influence gained/lost with companions, but you could usually leave them back at camp.

It was refreshing to be able to occasionally say, "that's a foolish idea and you are foolish for considering it" without having to worry that my Force Lightning or whatever would be nerfed by my resulting karma adjustment.

Smilodon said...

I firmly believe that the final chapter of the HP series is non-canon. In my mind, the only possible explanation for that chapter is that Rowling's editor put the completed manuscript down on top of a piece of fan fiction she was reading, and it accidentally got included in the envelope that went to the printers.

Will Wildman said...

Sorry for not responding to more of the comment right away; I can't really put together an appropriate response to much of it at the moment. I know you're not fishing for sympathy, but the first thing I do want to say is how sorry I am for the abuse you've had to endure.

---

They could have simply lit a fire under themselves and got the same sensation, but they preferred (for reasons never stated) to use the existing witch burning as a method. Which means that there was a group of people actively trying to be burned as witches, which means that there was a specific group of people actively trying to make the mundane world believe that the kind of witches it thought it was burning actually existed by pretending to be such witches, which means that there was a specific group of people providing confirmation of the misinformation that resulted in the burnings in the first place.

This is very much plausible and horrifying, but it's also not in canon - it's extrapolation. I found online the extent of the description:

On the rare occasion that they did catch a real witch or wizard, burning had no effect whatsoever. The witch or wizard would perform a basic Flame- Freezing Charm and then pretend to shriek in pain while enjoying a gentle tickling sensation. Indeed, Wendolin the Weird enjoyed being burnt so much that she allowed herself to be caught no less than 47 times in various disguises. (HP & the Prisoner of Azkaban)

There's nothing about intentionally luring people in with actual magic. There's very little stated at all about how or why they did it this way rather than just toasting themselves at home. I could extrapolate in a different direction and close the logic gap by suggesting that Wendolin made a habit of identifying people who had been targeted as (not real) witches, transfigured herself to resemble them, took their place and sent them on the run with a bag of gold, thus saving 47 lives and treating herself to flame-tickling to boot. I have no evidence for that, but it would explain the choice to get caught rather than sit in the fire at home. If this was what they were doing, then that would be important information to include, but if there were witches using real magic to spur on the witch-hunters, that would also be important information to include. None is. On the whole I think Rowling was using it as a random worldbuilding joke, which was thoughtless on her part, but the conspiracy-to-provoke-witch-hunters hypothesis is not canonical.

DavidCheatham said...

Memory alterations is one of those things that speculative fiction has entirely invented, like time travel. And like time travel, it has a lot of complicated questions linked to morality. This is not because either of those exist in some morally ambigious world...it's because both of those _work in ways we don't understand_.

Time travel is obvious: When Marty McFly alters the Biff-owned universe in BttF2 back to his (mostly) original one, was that ethical, or did he just erase billions of people from existence? Or are they in some other timeline, or do they get 'edited' back, and is _that_ ethical? We do not know, and thus all suppositions about time travels morality are just that...suppositions.

But memory alteration has exactly the same issue. Specifically, we have no idea how much of 'us' are our memories, or how memory alteration would even work.

People who stand there and say 'The ethics of memory alteration are bad' and others who say the opposite probably have different mental models, in their head, of a _completely imaginary_ thing.

And there is also the fact that several of the 'memory alterations' that take place in real life are things like rohypnol and drugs like that, despite the fact the abuses at the hands of those drugs don't have a lot to do with the memory erasure, but instead are due to the resistance removing aspects. (The memory erasure is just a 'good' side effect for rapists.) So there's a sort of 'This must be bad because the closest real life analogy is bad' thought.

But things are not their analogies, and we have no way of knowing how disruptive memory alterations would be in real life unless we actually had a way to make them happen. (And then we have to assume that fictional magical alterations are the same.) They might be right up there with cutting off an arm...or they might be closer to cutting hair, or even telling someone a story. We really have no idea.

And real memory research, incidentally, tends to lean towards the idea that memories are so compressed that they're basically made up when we remember them. Forget mp3 quality...memories like a telephone conversation that is transmitted via crappy telegraph shorthand, rewritten as text, and run though text-to-speech in the computer of our mind, whereupon we 'hear' their voice.

That is not the end of the matter, by far, but tends to support the idea that memories are not as important as we might think.

@chris the cynic
The first is that I think the clearest example that there is would be what I already brought up: Lockhart using a memory charm on Ron and Harry one time to erase an almost insignificant amount of their memory == bad

Erm, I have to suggest that you have, in fact, misread that. Lockhart said they would have 'tragically lost their mind' at the sight of Ginny's body. He was planning on erasing _all_ their memory. (Which is why the backfire erased all of his.)

Ana Mardoll said...

TW: Rape

I can't remember, and I've only seen the movies, but don't the Weasely (?) twins make their living selling, among other things, date rape potions? And isn't one of the twins tragically killed in battle?

That bothered me, well, a lot because they were my favorite characters - a bright shining spot in a bleak world. But I myself am not one to mourn the deaths of men who made their living crafting date rape drugs, so that detail was quickly removed from my head-canon. (And I could be remembering wrong.)

Of course, it could be argued that's the beauty of the series, that the protagonists are flawed and morally ambiguous. But it's hard for me to see that the series sees that. I'm trying to think when the last time I was asked to mourn for a man who made and sold date rape drugs, and I'm coming up blank. It feels more like the love potions and memory charms are meant to be amusing and not taken seriously. Except that, as you point out, analogous stuff exists in our world, which makes it hard to NOT take seriously.

Rowling herself has expressed dismay, I think, at some fan fiction that has Hermione raped by a magically-forced Snape? (I have a vague recollection of this.) But she seems not to notice that she crafted a "heroic" character who makes his living creating such horrible magics and selling them to anyone who could pay the asking price.

(Really, we're all just fortunate that Umbrage didn't pour love portions into the school punch and make them all look at a picture of Voldemort.)

Will Wildman said...

The love potions are handled very unevenly in the text. Rowling introduces them comedically (and yes, the Weasley twins deal in them), and then the seen in which Ron is dosed with one flipflops back and forth between how hilarious and how terrifying it is, and the story of Voldemort's mother using one to control his father is treated as a tragically awful move by a desperate and deluded person. (No time at all is spent on how Tom Riddle Sr felt about it, aside from his fleeing when it wore off.)

The things are @#$%ing terrifying and I really wish Rowling had consistently presented them as such, because as you say, there is Critical WTF Mass to have the Weasley twins deal in that stuff and yet remain sympathetic characters. I get that it's a 'classic' bit of magic that she wanted to incorporate, but: no. Just no. Not okay.

Beroli said...

I thought the Weasley twins were always (and presented as) pretty creepy, myself.

If "gave Ron an Acid Pop which ate a hole in his tongue" hadn't been enough, "deliberately beat his pet to death with a Quidditch bat" definitely would have been.

Definitely not a lot of mourning for Fred here. (In fact--since both of the incidents I just mentioned were clearly presented as Fred, not "George" or "the twins" or "one of the twins"--I was inclined to think George might become a much better person for not having Fred around anymore.)

DavidCheatham said...

The whole Ron under-a-love-potion got overshadowed by the fact he immediately got poisoned by something unrelated, so no one ever calls the twins out on the love potion, so we don't even know if it was actually their product, despite the fact they're in the very next scene. (I doubt it simply because the twins are good at testing things and seem to have high quality products, and this love potion has apparently strengthened over time, which I suspect theirs would not.)

Love potions are one of those things we know how they work at the upper end...you can keep people basically enslaved with an obsession for you. But we don't know how they work at the lower end...although it's rather hard to come up with a way that drugging someone could be ethical.

Trying to imagine a non-horrific 'love potion': The weaker ones might work sorta like putting a song in someone's head...you find yourself constantly thinking about someone, but it doesn't actually make you _do_ anything. Your thoughts just keep looping back to that person. Which goes along with the idea that they work based 'on the attractiveness of the girl', and the fact they are actually 'obsession potions'.

So perhaps there is some ethical level of 'bending people's thoughts towards' something, something akin to follow someone around and constantly whispering a name in their ear. That might be _somewhat_ ethical, maybe.

But I doubt it. The entire concept seems somewhat dubious to me.

In fact, it seem a bad idea from the POV of the person using them! I don't think creating ready-made stalkers of yourself who don't take rejection well is particularly a clever idea. (Perhaps that's why they're not regulated...they're a really dangerous idea to use anyway, at least the stronger ones.)

Will Wildman said...

Yeah, there's really no ethical way to do it. The absolute best one could manage is to work their way from 'mind control' down to 'irritating but ineffectual'. If Rowling wanted to feature love potions (and I can see why she went with that in Merope's story) she should not have tried to play them as mildly michievous but hilarious in the main storyline.

depizan said...

Memories being unreliable things already (as Amaryllis noted), I will admit that I don't feel like casting charms that make people lose their train of thought or forget the events of the last five minutes is grossly worse than many of the other methods people (magic or not) use to coerce others to do what they want.

Does it have to be worse to be bad or unacceptable? (Never mind what one could do to people and then make them forget. As you noted, the idea of invisible people teleporting around errasing people's memories is really disturbing.) It's also unclear whether or not it causes brain damage - see the person who was left thinking it was Christmas in the middle of summer. That sounds like more than a bit of confusion to me. (I really wish I could take a look at that scene and a few others, since - ha - people seem to have somewhat differen tmemories of them, but I don't own any of the books and none of the right ones are currently at my library branch.)

Additionally, my point was that depizan characterised the ending as 'Harry defeats the villain so that he can have a better life', which I thought was ignoring the fact that Harry's actions were supposed to result in him not having a life.

Again, there's some confusion between the two of us. I was talking not about the facts of what happened, but how those facts are presented. That line shrunk the people Harry was apparently fighting for. Which would have been a better way for me to phrase it.

depizan said...

Regarding the karma meter in Tor - it seemed to me that it worked better (for varying definitions of better) in some classes than others. Sith Dark Side options do tend to boil down to "hurting people is fun" (though that seems rather appropriate for what we know of the Sith), but with some of the other classes they seemed to be more about expediency, revenge, greed, or even "hard person making hard choices."* Not that it's aways consistent, of course.

And, once in a while, Light Side choices do result in extra help battling an enemy or other bonuses. And sometimes they result in the Sith you're working for having a fit and not giving you a quest reward. *shrug* I actually kind of like that sometimes it's beneficial and sometimes it's not.

Granted, I wish they'd be a little more consistent about what's Dark and what's Light. Every so often, I come across quests where the Light/Dark choice seems backwards, sideways, or seriously in need of a third option. But what bugs me most are the quests that feature what appear to be the same choice (eg the quests that give you the option of turn someone in alive knowing they'll be tortured or kill them) but assign Light and Dark differently. But it's the same choice!


*I will never stop being amused that, while the Dark Side choices for the Imperial Agent class can generally be characterized as "hard person making hard choices," "Lawful Evil," or "stone cold killer," the Light Side choices can generally be characterized as "fluffy bunny naive optimism" with a side of "screw the rules (laws, assignment), I'm going to do what's right" while you leave a trail of live bodies across the galaxy. It's spy fiction slid awfully far toward the idealism end of the spectrum (in that you get away with behaving in ways that get "silly rabbit, idealism is for kids" reactions from everyone who has any idea what you're doing.) Okay, I'm more than amused, it's flat out my favorite class in the game. (Even if I also enjoy/am amused by the reverse rogue cop Light Side Sith Warrior for similar reasons, and enjoy, well, pretty much everything I've played except Troopers and Inquisitors.)

depizan said...

All the karma meter in SW:TOR does (besides make you look undead if you go Dark Side and leave the "show corruption" option checked) is give you access to a few Light Side or Dark Side goodies. (And there's some talk of adding Neutral ones, so those who opt for Neutral aren't left out.) And, unless you just dingged some level of Light or Dark, one choice wouldn't make a difference for your goodies, anyway. (I'm playing "good" with all but one of my characters, but I still have a few Dark Side points on most of them.)

The game also has affection with your companions. Which, depending on your class, can lead to a lot of +50 Light Side -40 companion affection results.

Though between your comment and Will's, I find myself contemplating a full on D&D style alignment meter. You'd have to have more options, but it would be rather interesting. (And, in an ideal game, exist more as color than something that effected the game. Your choices should effect the game, but not necessarily your alignment, because that's more of an internal thing. Though a reputation meter could be kind of interesting too... what if your tendency to shoot first and ask questions later got around, or your tendency to be diplomatic or whatever... Huh... That could be very interesting.

depizan said...

I have more stuff to comment on, but I am out of lunch break. Boo.

chris the cynic said...

Erm, I have to suggest that you have, in fact, misread that.

Misremebered is much more likely.

It's been a while, and that was my second least favorite books of the ones that I read which tends to make the memories less vivid, so that's not entirely unsurprising, but I stand by the significantly longer section of my post where I argue that it doesn't actually matter.

There's a reason that section was two sentences and the other, the one saying that it didn't matter, was 11 paragraphs.

«Oldest ‹Older   1 – 200 of 287   Newer› Newest»

Post a Comment