http://ferretbrain.com/articles/article-149

I'll quote some of it here:

He expresses many of the disappointments DLP members have expressed, only he does so very elegantly. His reaction seems to be a bit different though, probably because of the fanfiction factor. His conclusion is "fuck Potter". Ours is "how can we make this better?"

 

It was this series of articles on Deathly Hallows that first made me realize a lot of things about good old HP. Highly entertaining and lots of good points made in an appropriately snarky manner. The first article starts:

For those interested in reading the whole series...

Review of chapters 1-12
Review of chapter 13-23
Review of chapter 24 - Epilogue
Afterword / Summary (posted by Taure)

 

I kind of disagree.

To me, Harry being passive would be just walking the f away and hoping the situation with Voldemort just fixed itself. Sure, he didn't pull all the major strings in the battle against Voldemort, but at least when the shit hit the fan, he stuck with the quest to destroy the Hallows and had the courage to let himself die in the end.

If your issue is that he didn't step up and lead the fight against Voldemort single handedly, or go against Dumbledore's (the greatest wizard of all time) strategy then I find that silly. What teenager would do that? What teenager would think that anything they came up with to defeat the most powerful dark wizard ever, would be better than Dumbledore's plan?

The passivity comes from Harry not training - Harry putting all his eggs in Dumbledore's basket and just hoping for the best. Yes, I agree that's passive for sure. But in the end, at least he carried out Dumbledore's plan. He could just as easily have walked away.

 

A paragraph which I feel you should have included, Taure, is this:

Edit: I forgot this, too:

 

If he was craven he would have just ran away; I found the argument to be a bit poor to be honest. So your a guy who has a soul of a dark lord and as long as you have it, he'll still be alive, so you decided to sacrifice yourself. You do this in the hope that he will eventually be defeated. How on earth can that ever be interpreted as cowardly?

EDIT: Also who's dick do i need to suck to be able to give thumbs up, really want to thumbs up rymrock.

 

I disagree. Deciding to run away and hope somebody else does the fighting is a decision. It takes a certain kind of resolution to make big decisions and Harry kind of avoided that by going camping in the hope a way to fight Voldemort suddenly showed up.

Fighting (in some way, guerilla warfare with invis cloak or something) would have needed a decision. So would running away, joining Voldemort or even surrendering autority to the senior members of the Order. Harry very much stayed on his predestined path of somehow searching for Horcruxes for weeks even after it became clear it wasn't working.

He's not actively passive, he's passively passive .
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I find the review very interesting since, in classical mythologie the hero is always more. Not necessarily more moral, but more strength, more clever, more status, more flaws (more woman) and more ambitious too. Cue Theseus setting out to become the greatest hero since Herakles.

 

Basically. Harry is a leaf in the wind, dragged along by the breeze to wherever he is taken. And it's a strange testament to JKR that she managed to make something engaging centered around such a... non-character. Don't get me wrong, Harry has a character, kind of, but in the ways that we see protagonists - them having motivations, ideals of their own, being led and driven by something that makes them the reason we should focus on them as the lead in the story - Harry is... a blank sheet of paper. Just bland and out-of-the-way enough that the plot can be built around him without anything established about him getting in the way and fucking it all up. Which is really strange to me. Because in essence, HP is an example of the plot driving the character instead of the character driving the plot on such a crazy level that Harry Potter is basically a thing because stuff happens to him. If left in a room by himself with no direction for long enough, a part of me thinks Harry would honestly just stay there until told he was supposed to come out.

Makes sense though I guess. It fits the whole character. His life is defined by what other people do to him. If Voldemort hadn't come to attack him, Harry wouldn't have won, obviously. But look at that as a precedent-setter. Harry is reactive, not active.

Makes me wonder. Is a hero with no motivation a hero at all? Even Arthur Dent sacked up and became active after long enough of shit just happening to him. Maybe that's the crux of why HPFF is such a thing and has persisted - people itching to make a character where there was only a mirage, a husk of one.

 

Which is also why there are so many fics that work. You must try pretty hard o be a shitty/stupid writer to get Harry to be OOC. Also, the desire to get Harry to be less of a leaf and become the wind, is the driving force to so many fics, with some of the best being among them. So while it kinda ruined most of the fun of the last 3 books, it also, IMHO, got us this wonderful ficverse. And yes, I'm using two Sturgeon's law here, 10% work and in them, 10% are pretty good to great.

 

Ferretbrain has some pretty good reviews. They also used to do great podcasts. Some articles are a bit too much "social justice" for me, but it's not too bad overall.

I was sure I read a similar article on DLP before and I was not wrong. (It's just that it was quite some time ago.)

Links are here and here.

 

I generally agree with what you said about Harry's passivity except the part where you say it was courage to sacrifice himself and that the passivity is from Harry not training.

I feel Harry was conditioned to sacrifice and accept a lot of crappy things in his life, which is different than being courageous or lacking training. His reaction to the big reveal about him being the sacrificial lamb was very telling. Where was the anger, denial and all the other negative emotions that should overwhelm a normal person when told they've been marked to die from the start?

 

They had been worked out of him by Dumbledore, we all know that. That's why Harry isn't a 'HERO' in so many people's eyes. He's not a mentally balanced person who makes the choice to fight against the darkness despite overwhelming odds... he's a mentally unbalanced person who sacrifices himself to fight the darkness because a manipulative old man with good intentions has shaped and molded him to such a degree that he does not fight his upcoming death.

Harry Potter is a classic case of emotional abuse. My other serious problem with HP is that Harry doesn't act very much like a boy who is being emotionally abused/manipulated. Hate it or not, Boys have a pretty well documented tilt towards how they react to emotional abuse. They become more aggressive, more argumentative. They lie and they cheat, they become defiant and rude. Some become bullies, their tempers become very short.

Harry doesn't exhibit these signs. He exhibits the signs of a girl who has been emotionally abused. That being that he's passive, he seeks approval, he's withdrawn, he's overly dependent on others for his motivations, he has a very low self esteem, and he worries excessively.

I've thought for awhile that this is also a part of what drives FF about Harry being more Independent. We expect ours boys to be BOYS. To react and think and act like boys. But Harry... doesn't for the most part. JKR very much seems only to have an observers understanding of how boys and men think/act.

So FF writers create a Harry with more "Male" characteristics. He's more rebellious, more driven, more argumentative, more destructive, more aggressive.

Of course, Harry is supposed to be a hero, so generally people pick out just a couple signs of emotional abuse that are considered less severe character flaws, in an attempt to justify his purity of character/spirit/intention by showing that despite his emotional abuse he hasn't become an abuser himself.

The article makes very good points, and I agree with them pretty consistently, I'm glad there are others out there who are willing to criticize JKR for her method of writing a 'hero'.

 

Well yeah, JKR's knowledge of a male teenager's psyche is pretty limited. That's why HP is nice read when you're a kid. But when you read HBP and DH as a 15 years old boy (or older), you have several lolwat moments.

I wouldn't say Harry is craven though when he decides to let himself get murdered. Nor was he particularly courageous. It was just blind faith towards Dumbledore. Kinda like Abraham towards God.

Mine. Alternatively, you need 25 posts iirc.

 

Just from the section of the review you posted taure there seems to be a slight misreading of philosophers stone. When the review states "Harry is able to find the Philosopher's Stone because he has no motivation for looking for it in the first place, and this continues throughout the series" it seems to miss that Harry's motivation for finding the stone is to keep it from voldemort. The argument is that harry wants to find the stone but not use it for it's intended purpose. He wants to find the stone so that it cannot be used for evil, which is obviously heoric in a classical sense and active in most senses. Therefore to argue he has no mouth action seems in my eyes false.

 

If his true desire was to keep the stone from Voldemort, he'd see himself keeping the stone from Voldemort. His desire was to possess the stone for no other reason than possessing it - if he had had any other desire, that's what the mirror would have shown, rather than giving him the stone.

 

Yeah, the JKR-is-bad-at-male-protagonists is already pretty well established in the DLP hivemind from the whole fucking chestmonster thing, and you raise a good point that strengthens that conclusion. It's hard to be miffed at a woman for not knowing what it's like in the mind of a pubescent boy, though.