Harry Potter is just as brave as Harry Dresden!

 

Yes he is!

Sadly, he's just not as competent..

...or funny.

 

Dresden is knowingly stupidly valorous. Potter has never said "I should really not do x but do y" before doing x.

I don't know if that is a sign of intelligence(?)/competence(?)/desire-or-lack-of-to-live(?) or not.

 

You mean like trying to go to McGonagall in PS before going down the traphole himself?

Or heading to the staff room in CoS to tell them his information about the chamber, then taking Lockhart down with him?

Or writing to Sirius about his dreams in GoF?

Or trying to confirm Sirius' absence from Grimmauld Place in OotP before acting, and then trying to warn Snape?

... those sorts of things that he didn't do?

 

That's not what he meant. Harry Potter never went "If I was smart I'd really just go tell McGonagall someone was trying to steal the stone...but I'll just go save it myself."

Dresden will sometimes acknowledge a course of action as safe, smart, and optimal and then throw it out to do something totally risky and insane.

Harry Potter just...does things. He thinks he should do X and does X. Or he skips all that and just goes straight to doing X or even Y without thinking about it.

 

Yeah Harry does some stupid things like saving Malfoy in DH. Why would you save your enemy?

 

Russano explains it well. It's not about doing something stupid, but about doing something which you know is stupid and then doing it anyway. There were many times when Dresden acknowledged it consciously or even said it out loud.

Dresden would realise that if he didn't risk his life, and sometimes it seemed quite hopeless, someone was going to die (who shouldn't die). Potter just seems to do it without thinking about himself. It doesn't seem to be a case of selflessness or stupidity as much as it is about self-awareness or something.

Either he is missing the fact that he could really die, or the idea that he could choose to not risk his life doesn't even come up in his decision-making/thinking.

 

Or maybe the Dresden Files are written as a first person monologue, and Harry Potter is written as a third person narrative.

One of these methods allows the writer to easily show what other people besides the main character are doing at the time. It's a movie camera that follows the events that are transpiring. Harry can go to sleep, and then with zero transition whatsoever, Ron can get out of his bed next to Harry's, leave the dorm, and then go downstairs and duel Malfoy in trophy room.

The other allows us to hear what the main character is thinking and feeling, all the time, and listen in to all of their lines of logic and justifications. But it is inherently limited to only following one person at a time, and showing what they see, hear, and experience. The only way to show multiple perspectives, or attempt to show something objectively, is if the perspective keeps bouncing back and forth between multiple observers, which is jarring, and requires multiple narratives.

We never hear Harry's logic because we aren't in Harry's head.

 

Nevermind.

 

Except we kind of are. Harry Potter is told in Third Person Limited. With the exception of a few prologues and a single bit in Philosopher's Stone everything is shown from Harry's POV and tinted by his perceptions. We regularly hear his thoughts. Narration is based upon his understanding. If something is described by the text as 'beautiful' its because Harry finds it that way.

 

I think it is more than just the writing style. In any situation which you could argue that Potter was going something stupid, he doesn't seem to hesitate or think before doing it. So either he doesn't realise it's stupid, or it doesn't even cross his mind that he should care a lot

Edit: If it did happen, then it would have been significant enough for Rowling to include.

 

He definitely hesitates to consider his circumstances before going down the tunnel in PS, and before going to the MoM in OotP. Dumbledore basically gives him a time-machine and tells him to go for it in PoA, and I mean if you were thirteen and Dumbledore gave you motherfucking time magic, you'd probably jump right in too. He didn't really have a choice in GoF, and in CoS, Lockhart was fail and Ginny might have died before he got to the teachers or Dumbledore. Which he did in fact consider before going down the shoot.

 

Looking at the relevent sections, I don't see any hesitation or thinking of an alternative in either of the cases with the first two books.

In this case I mean Dresden might have said something like going down there to face a basilisk was really stupid and he was probably going to die... but he still couldn't not go.

But again, there is a problem when you look at the Harry Potter series. Harry is a kid for most of it. It isn't until the last few books that you can say he is an adult. It really does limit what you can say about him as an adult, let alone for when he gets to Voldemort's or Dumbledore's age.

And for OOTP, I don't just mean hesitate. I mean he has to actually know that what he is doing is extremely likely to kill him (or is a stupid thing to do in some other sense). I don't really think that he understood that in OOTP (unless you can dig out a passage?).

 

He certainly knew the danger of going to the Ministry in OotP, which is why he tried to leave his friends behind him, with the possible exception of Ron and Hermione, who IMO, have less of an understanding of the danger.

And with CoS, I feel like we'd need a larger excerpt, or more, to see what I was saying, but I don't have the books. It takes place over a longer span of time than the one you sampled, across discovering Lockhart and even back to Hermione's revelation that the creature is a basilisk, and within the context of needing to act fast because they know Ginny is either dead or dying and this beast is fatal to anyone who even looks at it.

I don't see how Harry, after facing Voldemort, even for the first consciously recognized time in the Forest, could fail to really know that Voldemort could stomp him. There is, IIRC, always a sense of almost hopeless inevitability coming from Harry whenever he fights Voldemort, even having faced him many times. He knows Voldemort could easily kill him, which I feel to have been one of the sources of his bravery, and the reason for some of its recklessness. He had resolved to fight as hard as he could knowing he was probably always going to lose, and hoping only to save as many friends along the way as possible.

 

What about in the end of Book 6? Going after Death Eaters alone. If it wasn't for Snape they could have taken him to Voldemort or even hurt him badly.

 

Does watching your mentor's life expire before your very eyes not earn you any slack? But the end of HBP also has an example of him not only foreseeing but planning for and preventing fatalities, with his administration of the Felix Felicis.

 

I agree, if Hermione can beat him, and Harry can't. He's obviously not up to Dark Lord Voldemort's level or Light Lord Dumbledore's. That, or Hermione's more powerful than them. But, as he gets older he could get more powerful. It all depends how you look at it.
-DarkPhoenix:fire

 

I think this quote proves Afrojacks point. He thought about it then made the decision, he didn't just jump in without thinking.

 

Shucks, guys, I'd like my two-thousandth post to be meaningful but, well, why start now?

I'll just lay a little folksy wisdom on you: Even a blind pig finds an acorn, now and then.




No? Okay, fine, perhaps something ever-so-slightly wordier: A lot of characters were spoiling for their own personal grudge matches in DH, and Hermione was nearly killed by Dolohov in the Department of Mysteries, after assuming a silencing spell would as good as render him harmless.

Many of those characters were deprived of what some of us assumed were inevitable showdowns with their logical arch-enemies (some because they died before getting that chance). Neville had to settle for making a speech and killing a snake, since apparently Molly vs Bellatrix was the fight everyone was dying to see... :facepalm I guess the somewhat prejudiced and judgmental mama bear taking out Voldemort's right hand psycho-killer was supposed to be more satisfying than seeing Neville avenge his parents. Whatever.

However, there was no way the biggest author avatar in the books wasn't going to symbolically defeat everyone who ever wronged or doubted her, by defeating the man who nearly ended her life in book five.

Try not to look too hard at a plot convenience, particularly self serving ones, in the search for logic; and, definitely don't look at them in order to divine some sort of skill ranking amongst the characters.