Sunday, 18 May 2008
Canon, Fanon and Author's Intent - some interesting links
This blog has an interesting couple of links to discussions of what I tried to talk about below in my smysl rant: - interpretations of the books and who is right when we disagree: writer or reader or both. Check them out here and here!
Thursday, 15 May 2008
Concerning some thoughts (few) about the state of the fandom, personal musings, and smysl
I have read several places about the waning interest and the degeneration into bitterness, warfare and vitriol of the fandom. Where am I in all of this? Why do I not keep this blog up as regularily as I originally intended - is it only because of the demands of my so called "real life" - (it is very real, but so is this place...) - or am I, too, hurting and affected too much by what is happening in the fandom these days?
Honestly - I'm not sure. I am affected by all that is happening, it makes me sad and sometimes overcome by the nostalgic longing for the "good old days" (there will always be a "good old days" for oldtimers, right, no matter what kinds of days those were...)
But I don't want to write much about that here. The conflict and bitterness in the fandom is written about everywhere, no reason to put it up here as well. Personally, I still love the books, although the last two made it harder to be a fan in different ways. (My jury is still out on the last one...) I still debate issues from the books in my mind, and still care about their themes and characters. I have started to write more AU fiction, following "what if" ponderings, which is a way of investigating the books too. This proves that I still care about the characters, even though I do question the plot here and there...
No, I guess the reason why this has not been updated as much as I wanted to, is because I have this feeling that I am too late - "everyone" has moved on to other things. To write here about HP issues and characters will not be taking part in any form of discussion, or mean anything to anybody, it will only be like talking to myself in an empty room about issues others have either debated to death or forgotten ages ago.
Oh well. So be it, then. This is still a place for all my HP thoughts, whether anyone else is interested or not.... and here are some of the latest. (I think I will abandon all these part one, part two headlines for the time being; who knows what I will do in the future, though...)
Hck said in a comment further down that good stories are often better than their writers - and following from this is that we don't have to agree with or listen to anything the writer says about her story - she may not always be the best one to comment or explain it.
I've been thinking along these lines for a while. I'm not even sure I want to read Jo's "8th book", if that is going to consist of all the thoughts that she didn't get to write into the other seven - because I admit that a lot of what she says now in interviews and comments about her characters or her story annoys me. A lot of it is so at odds with my own reading experience.
I think this is the time to revise our ideas about "canon" and "fanon". That distinction was meaningful to me back in the days when we all tried to guess what was going to happen in the last book, and what the underlying plot was really about. If Jo said Snape was not a vampire, then ok, we knew he was not going to turn up as one in the last book. By that answer from Jo in an online chat, the theory "Snape-as-vampire" was officially transformed from canon to fanon.
But now that the books are finished, this has changed. "Canon" now is everything that is actually written on the pages in the seven finished books. But nothing Jo has said outside the books counts. (She even said that something would show up in the last book that didn't - for instance, we never got to see Krum again, even though she said we would) That is now just her opinion, her ideas, and if they conflict with mine, I don't have to change my mind.
I know some fans protest, and say that whatever Jo had in mind when she wrote the books, whatever she wanted to get across, is the correct and only valid interpretation. But I don't agree with this view of literature.
Of course, a writer has different ideas and images and sentiments in her head when she writes a story. Maybe she sees the characters in her "mind's eye" and "knows" the colour of their eyes and the length of their hair. Maybe she wants the characters' actions and fates to be examples of certain virtues or vices, tell a moral lesson or be inspirational for one reason or other. But she has to try and get this across to me, her reader by writing her story, not by giving interviews (not that I think there is anything the matter with her giving interviews, don't get me wrong!) - and then her written words may give me very different ideas and images than what she originally had in her head when she wrote them. That's in the very nature of language. So who is right then - her ideas or her story?
To me, the answer must be her story. If that was not so - why bother to write a story at all? Why not just give us a list of characters, with an explanation of how they look, who is the most virtuous, who's the hero and who's the villain - and then a list of events, what they are supposed to mean and what we are supposed to feel about them. As if the Potterverse was actually real and Jo had seen it all and was able to report back to us in different ways about the various true facts of that world, either in the form of a story or in the form of an interview.
But storytelling obviously doesn't work like that.
An example is when Jo said that she had Mrs. Weasly kill Bellatrix because she wanted to show how she was a very powerful witch even though she was a stay-at-home mum; and that her love of her daughter was more powerful than Bellatrix' love of Voldemort.
Ok. That's how it is for Jo, and I can't argue with that. If this was her intention and her opinon when she wrote the scene, then that's how it was. Period. And it is interesting to learn about her take on it, and why she wrote things the way she did. Only Jo can tell me that.
But as a reader of her story, I didn't get these same impressions and ideas in my head when I read about Molly killing Bellatrix. I wasn't thinking "Yay, one for stay-at-home mums!" For one thing, I never thought of Molly as weak in the first place. I didn't need any "proof" of her strength. And my chief reaction at that point in the story was not celebration or admiration, but grave disappointment.
I had thought it was significant that up until the last book, no one on the "good side" had killed anybody. Grindelvald himself was only put in prison, and perhaps had a chance to regret towards the end of his days - the story hints at this. The good guys never used anything worse than stunners, even when the stakes were high, as in the battle in the death room in book five, or at the tower in book six. So I really thought they did see the killing curse as an Unforgivable, an example of the Dark Arts that they tried to be above. Besides, who needs to kill when you may stun?
But then Lupin urges Harry to kill in book seven, even tells him off for not doing so, and Molly kills - and suffers no regret afterwards. No reactions. I am supposed to applaud her, Jo? Sorry, but no. Yes, Ginny was in danger but Molly too could have stunned only - and even if she thought she had to kill, she did not have to be ok with it. A lot of people, even real soldiers in real battles, who are confronted with situations when they "have to" kill, suffer reactions afterwards - it is rarely just: ok, no problem, one more monster down, hooray!
And Harry, who uses the Crucio curse merely because somebody spits at McGonagall - and she, who calls this chivalrous! Somebody involved in human rights movements - I'm sorry I'm not able to find the reference right now - called Harry a war criminal for that, and was worried not so much by the fact that he might be tempted to do a thing like that in the heat of a battle - but much more by McGonagall's reaction and overall by the way the use of torture in a war was dismissed, or even seen as righteous, by everyone in the book, Harry included.
Wizard's are obvioulsy not familiar with the Geneva conventions of the Muggles - but I really thought they were supposed to have their own codes of ethics, and that the Unforgivables were called Unforgivable for a reason. But no - when the "good guys" use them in the books, they are suddenly supposed to be seen as chivalrous and grand, even proofs of Love, instead of Dark or Unforgivable as we are supposed to think when Voldemort uses them. But if Harry may torture Voldemort's followers for spitting at his friends, why can't Voldemort torture Harry for humiliating him in front of his friends, or Bellatrix torture Neville in order to get hold of the Prophecy for her master? Where's the difference in principle Jo?
And if I am to accept this: Molly won over Bellatrix because her love of Ginny was more virtuous than Bellatrix' love of Voldemort - then I also have to accept that Bellatrix' love of Voldemort was more virtuous than Sirius' love of Harry! After all, Sirius lost in his duel with Bellatrix when he fought to save Harry - and a comparison with that earlier duel is even directly made in the text! But I am obviously not going to accept that, no matter what Jo says - I don't think Sirius' love of Harry was in any way inferior, just because the evil Bellatrix was able to kill him! That's not how the description of Sirius' love - in the text of the books - came across to me. So to me, that is not canon, no matter what Jo may say. (And I am not sure she would say that either, it' just that to me, this is what logically follows from her Molly/Bellatrix comparison.)
Besides, I never thought that anyone's ability to fight and conquer in a life-and-death duel had anything to do with their ability to love. Or with any other moral virtue they might have for that matter. To me, victory in a duel has only to do with ability to fight. Period. Sometimes the bad guys win simply because they fight better. That does not constitute any moral victory on their part. True Love is supposed to make you a better killer? Come on, Jo, you don't really mean that - or do you? Very well - we seriously disagree in our views of the nature of love and war then....
In short - my reactions when I read about Molly's successful duel was very different from the writer's confessed intention with that scene. Was Molly a better dueller than Bellatrix in the story? To me, she seemed to win because Bellatrix was a bit too confident when fighting someone like Molly, and thought she didn't have to give it her all - just like Sirius was when he tried to fight Bellatrix before. That's what the text suggests to me. Did I respect Molly as a homemaker more when I read that? No, why? Do I respect her more now, after I have been told that's why Jo made her win that duel? Again, why? Jo can't control my reactions to her words in the story, and her explanations outside her text does not change these reactions one bit. Her words on the pages remain the same, and they still have the same effect on me.
I'm a big fan of the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (who died of tuberculosis in the thirties, lucky for him, then Stalin never got hold of him...) and his theories of language. He has a term in Russian: "smysl", translated into "word meaning" in English. (No, sadly enough, I don't read any Russian, I have to read him in translation, too...) To Vygotsky (as to several other theorists of language, of course) words are not simply labels on objects. Words represent social interaction directed at or concerning those objects, and they are used to influence and coordinate social interaction in order to make it possible for us to change our environment and our situation. Words may control and direct our attention away from the immediate, and makes it possible for us to bring into the present situation an idea of something that is not yet real, but may become real in the future, or was real yesterday, or will perhaps never be real, like a unicorn or a Potterverse....
Word meaning, or smysl, is not just about the lexical, general, decontextualised meaning of the word that we all share more or less - what Vygotsky called znachenie. Everyone who understands English knows what you can do with a cup, from drinking off it to breaking it to present it as a prize in a triwizard tournament... Smysl is something more than that, it represents "the sum of all the psychological events aroused in our consciousness by the word. It is a dynamic, complex, fluid whole...” To use a quick and dirty example: You will get a very different association from the word "cup" if you yourself has won one in a fierce competition, than you will if you were the one who lost...
I have my own personal history with words, with all the social situations I have been part of where I have used the word or observed the word in use, with all the books and newspapers and films and tvshows I have consumed. And since words as a rule are used to influence others one way or the other: convince them, impress them, make friends with them, control them, scare them, lie to them - words are also connected with the whole range of emotions and feelings. Words are both objective and subjective, both public and private. And it is exactly because of this that a writer may write a story and make me believe it is true for as long as I read it - because when I read, all the psychologial events aroused in my consciousness give colour and life, emotion and value to what I read.
But this also means that what is aroused in my consciousness will not be - cannot be- exactly the same as what is aroused in your consciousness when you read the very same text. We do not have the same history, the exact same experience of social interactions where the words were used. And none of us will have the exact same content in our consciousness when we read the story as Jo had when she wrote it. That is just not possible.
So, in a way, there will be as many Potterverses as there are readers of the books - although the differences between the versions may in many cases be rather subtle....
I have observed one interesting effect of this in myself. I know Jo says in the third book that Sirius had long, dirty, matted hair down to his elbows when Harry first met him. Very logical, very believable, fits with his Azkaban experience where he never got to groom himself, makes him very scary to Harry and to everyone else, and also shows without telling how horrible a place Azkaban is. Brilliant.
When i first read that news announcement at the beginning of the book, I remember I did get an image of a man with that kind of hair in my head. But, the interesting thing is -when Harry met him in the Shrieking Shack and I got to know his background story, his horrible fate - this image changed. I was not able to picture him with that kind of hair anymore. The image in my head started to look more like the hair Oldman has in the movie. And this was long before the movie was even planned, it happened when I read the book for the first time, when only the first movie was out. I suppose Sirius' background story aroused different, vague associations and memories in my consciousness - some of them possibly unconscious - that did not go together with long hair to the elbows on a man. So the associations Jo's words about the look of his hair aroused in my mind were not strong enough to conquer the images her words about his background and fate aroused...
In short, "my" Sirius of book three has hair reaching down to his shoulders only, not his elbows. I know that is not what the text says, so I am not arguing this as the "correct" image - but on the other hand, this is the Sirius I do see when I read, and nothing anyone says outside the books can change that. (And not even this makes a reader "delusional", Emerson...)
This goes to show that a writer cannot really control the image her readers will get of her characters by just stating what they look like. Just like no writer can make her readers think of a character as nice or likeable, just by saying in the text "she was very nice, everybody liked her, she was the heart and soul of the party". That may just as likely make readers puke and cry "Mary Sue!" as it may make them like the person in question... Neither will it change any reader's opinion of a character if Jo says in an interview that she likes or dislikes that character. It's interesting to know what she thinks, but it will not change my own reading.
Jo is usually not very elaborate about the looks of her characters, or buildings or places or landscapes for that matter - yet most of us do get very vivid images of them anyway, just from all the associations her storytelling arouses in our minds. I like it better that way. Just as I like it better when the judgement of whether someone is weak or strong, good or bad, heroic or pathetic, immature or the opposite, is left for me to decide from the story itself - because I will do that anyway. I don't like to have it pointed out to me, in the books (which, to be fair, really does not happen very much, except for one glaring example in the epilogue...) or in interviews.
Ok - essay over. It says in the header this blog is for TLPs, right?
Honestly - I'm not sure. I am affected by all that is happening, it makes me sad and sometimes overcome by the nostalgic longing for the "good old days" (there will always be a "good old days" for oldtimers, right, no matter what kinds of days those were...)
But I don't want to write much about that here. The conflict and bitterness in the fandom is written about everywhere, no reason to put it up here as well. Personally, I still love the books, although the last two made it harder to be a fan in different ways. (My jury is still out on the last one...) I still debate issues from the books in my mind, and still care about their themes and characters. I have started to write more AU fiction, following "what if" ponderings, which is a way of investigating the books too. This proves that I still care about the characters, even though I do question the plot here and there...
No, I guess the reason why this has not been updated as much as I wanted to, is because I have this feeling that I am too late - "everyone" has moved on to other things. To write here about HP issues and characters will not be taking part in any form of discussion, or mean anything to anybody, it will only be like talking to myself in an empty room about issues others have either debated to death or forgotten ages ago.
Oh well. So be it, then. This is still a place for all my HP thoughts, whether anyone else is interested or not.... and here are some of the latest. (I think I will abandon all these part one, part two headlines for the time being; who knows what I will do in the future, though...)
Hck said in a comment further down that good stories are often better than their writers - and following from this is that we don't have to agree with or listen to anything the writer says about her story - she may not always be the best one to comment or explain it.
I've been thinking along these lines for a while. I'm not even sure I want to read Jo's "8th book", if that is going to consist of all the thoughts that she didn't get to write into the other seven - because I admit that a lot of what she says now in interviews and comments about her characters or her story annoys me. A lot of it is so at odds with my own reading experience.
I think this is the time to revise our ideas about "canon" and "fanon". That distinction was meaningful to me back in the days when we all tried to guess what was going to happen in the last book, and what the underlying plot was really about. If Jo said Snape was not a vampire, then ok, we knew he was not going to turn up as one in the last book. By that answer from Jo in an online chat, the theory "Snape-as-vampire" was officially transformed from canon to fanon.
But now that the books are finished, this has changed. "Canon" now is everything that is actually written on the pages in the seven finished books. But nothing Jo has said outside the books counts. (She even said that something would show up in the last book that didn't - for instance, we never got to see Krum again, even though she said we would) That is now just her opinion, her ideas, and if they conflict with mine, I don't have to change my mind.
I know some fans protest, and say that whatever Jo had in mind when she wrote the books, whatever she wanted to get across, is the correct and only valid interpretation. But I don't agree with this view of literature.
Of course, a writer has different ideas and images and sentiments in her head when she writes a story. Maybe she sees the characters in her "mind's eye" and "knows" the colour of their eyes and the length of their hair. Maybe she wants the characters' actions and fates to be examples of certain virtues or vices, tell a moral lesson or be inspirational for one reason or other. But she has to try and get this across to me, her reader by writing her story, not by giving interviews (not that I think there is anything the matter with her giving interviews, don't get me wrong!) - and then her written words may give me very different ideas and images than what she originally had in her head when she wrote them. That's in the very nature of language. So who is right then - her ideas or her story?
To me, the answer must be her story. If that was not so - why bother to write a story at all? Why not just give us a list of characters, with an explanation of how they look, who is the most virtuous, who's the hero and who's the villain - and then a list of events, what they are supposed to mean and what we are supposed to feel about them. As if the Potterverse was actually real and Jo had seen it all and was able to report back to us in different ways about the various true facts of that world, either in the form of a story or in the form of an interview.
But storytelling obviously doesn't work like that.
An example is when Jo said that she had Mrs. Weasly kill Bellatrix because she wanted to show how she was a very powerful witch even though she was a stay-at-home mum; and that her love of her daughter was more powerful than Bellatrix' love of Voldemort.
Ok. That's how it is for Jo, and I can't argue with that. If this was her intention and her opinon when she wrote the scene, then that's how it was. Period. And it is interesting to learn about her take on it, and why she wrote things the way she did. Only Jo can tell me that.
But as a reader of her story, I didn't get these same impressions and ideas in my head when I read about Molly killing Bellatrix. I wasn't thinking "Yay, one for stay-at-home mums!" For one thing, I never thought of Molly as weak in the first place. I didn't need any "proof" of her strength. And my chief reaction at that point in the story was not celebration or admiration, but grave disappointment.
I had thought it was significant that up until the last book, no one on the "good side" had killed anybody. Grindelvald himself was only put in prison, and perhaps had a chance to regret towards the end of his days - the story hints at this. The good guys never used anything worse than stunners, even when the stakes were high, as in the battle in the death room in book five, or at the tower in book six. So I really thought they did see the killing curse as an Unforgivable, an example of the Dark Arts that they tried to be above. Besides, who needs to kill when you may stun?
But then Lupin urges Harry to kill in book seven, even tells him off for not doing so, and Molly kills - and suffers no regret afterwards. No reactions. I am supposed to applaud her, Jo? Sorry, but no. Yes, Ginny was in danger but Molly too could have stunned only - and even if she thought she had to kill, she did not have to be ok with it. A lot of people, even real soldiers in real battles, who are confronted with situations when they "have to" kill, suffer reactions afterwards - it is rarely just: ok, no problem, one more monster down, hooray!
And Harry, who uses the Crucio curse merely because somebody spits at McGonagall - and she, who calls this chivalrous! Somebody involved in human rights movements - I'm sorry I'm not able to find the reference right now - called Harry a war criminal for that, and was worried not so much by the fact that he might be tempted to do a thing like that in the heat of a battle - but much more by McGonagall's reaction and overall by the way the use of torture in a war was dismissed, or even seen as righteous, by everyone in the book, Harry included.
Wizard's are obvioulsy not familiar with the Geneva conventions of the Muggles - but I really thought they were supposed to have their own codes of ethics, and that the Unforgivables were called Unforgivable for a reason. But no - when the "good guys" use them in the books, they are suddenly supposed to be seen as chivalrous and grand, even proofs of Love, instead of Dark or Unforgivable as we are supposed to think when Voldemort uses them. But if Harry may torture Voldemort's followers for spitting at his friends, why can't Voldemort torture Harry for humiliating him in front of his friends, or Bellatrix torture Neville in order to get hold of the Prophecy for her master? Where's the difference in principle Jo?
And if I am to accept this: Molly won over Bellatrix because her love of Ginny was more virtuous than Bellatrix' love of Voldemort - then I also have to accept that Bellatrix' love of Voldemort was more virtuous than Sirius' love of Harry! After all, Sirius lost in his duel with Bellatrix when he fought to save Harry - and a comparison with that earlier duel is even directly made in the text! But I am obviously not going to accept that, no matter what Jo says - I don't think Sirius' love of Harry was in any way inferior, just because the evil Bellatrix was able to kill him! That's not how the description of Sirius' love - in the text of the books - came across to me. So to me, that is not canon, no matter what Jo may say. (And I am not sure she would say that either, it' just that to me, this is what logically follows from her Molly/Bellatrix comparison.)
Besides, I never thought that anyone's ability to fight and conquer in a life-and-death duel had anything to do with their ability to love. Or with any other moral virtue they might have for that matter. To me, victory in a duel has only to do with ability to fight. Period. Sometimes the bad guys win simply because they fight better. That does not constitute any moral victory on their part. True Love is supposed to make you a better killer? Come on, Jo, you don't really mean that - or do you? Very well - we seriously disagree in our views of the nature of love and war then....
In short - my reactions when I read about Molly's successful duel was very different from the writer's confessed intention with that scene. Was Molly a better dueller than Bellatrix in the story? To me, she seemed to win because Bellatrix was a bit too confident when fighting someone like Molly, and thought she didn't have to give it her all - just like Sirius was when he tried to fight Bellatrix before. That's what the text suggests to me. Did I respect Molly as a homemaker more when I read that? No, why? Do I respect her more now, after I have been told that's why Jo made her win that duel? Again, why? Jo can't control my reactions to her words in the story, and her explanations outside her text does not change these reactions one bit. Her words on the pages remain the same, and they still have the same effect on me.
I'm a big fan of the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (who died of tuberculosis in the thirties, lucky for him, then Stalin never got hold of him...) and his theories of language. He has a term in Russian: "smysl", translated into "word meaning" in English. (No, sadly enough, I don't read any Russian, I have to read him in translation, too...) To Vygotsky (as to several other theorists of language, of course) words are not simply labels on objects. Words represent social interaction directed at or concerning those objects, and they are used to influence and coordinate social interaction in order to make it possible for us to change our environment and our situation. Words may control and direct our attention away from the immediate, and makes it possible for us to bring into the present situation an idea of something that is not yet real, but may become real in the future, or was real yesterday, or will perhaps never be real, like a unicorn or a Potterverse....
Word meaning, or smysl, is not just about the lexical, general, decontextualised meaning of the word that we all share more or less - what Vygotsky called znachenie. Everyone who understands English knows what you can do with a cup, from drinking off it to breaking it to present it as a prize in a triwizard tournament... Smysl is something more than that, it represents "the sum of all the psychological events aroused in our consciousness by the word. It is a dynamic, complex, fluid whole...” To use a quick and dirty example: You will get a very different association from the word "cup" if you yourself has won one in a fierce competition, than you will if you were the one who lost...
I have my own personal history with words, with all the social situations I have been part of where I have used the word or observed the word in use, with all the books and newspapers and films and tvshows I have consumed. And since words as a rule are used to influence others one way or the other: convince them, impress them, make friends with them, control them, scare them, lie to them - words are also connected with the whole range of emotions and feelings. Words are both objective and subjective, both public and private. And it is exactly because of this that a writer may write a story and make me believe it is true for as long as I read it - because when I read, all the psychologial events aroused in my consciousness give colour and life, emotion and value to what I read.
But this also means that what is aroused in my consciousness will not be - cannot be- exactly the same as what is aroused in your consciousness when you read the very same text. We do not have the same history, the exact same experience of social interactions where the words were used. And none of us will have the exact same content in our consciousness when we read the story as Jo had when she wrote it. That is just not possible.
So, in a way, there will be as many Potterverses as there are readers of the books - although the differences between the versions may in many cases be rather subtle....
I have observed one interesting effect of this in myself. I know Jo says in the third book that Sirius had long, dirty, matted hair down to his elbows when Harry first met him. Very logical, very believable, fits with his Azkaban experience where he never got to groom himself, makes him very scary to Harry and to everyone else, and also shows without telling how horrible a place Azkaban is. Brilliant.
When i first read that news announcement at the beginning of the book, I remember I did get an image of a man with that kind of hair in my head. But, the interesting thing is -when Harry met him in the Shrieking Shack and I got to know his background story, his horrible fate - this image changed. I was not able to picture him with that kind of hair anymore. The image in my head started to look more like the hair Oldman has in the movie. And this was long before the movie was even planned, it happened when I read the book for the first time, when only the first movie was out. I suppose Sirius' background story aroused different, vague associations and memories in my consciousness - some of them possibly unconscious - that did not go together with long hair to the elbows on a man. So the associations Jo's words about the look of his hair aroused in my mind were not strong enough to conquer the images her words about his background and fate aroused...
In short, "my" Sirius of book three has hair reaching down to his shoulders only, not his elbows. I know that is not what the text says, so I am not arguing this as the "correct" image - but on the other hand, this is the Sirius I do see when I read, and nothing anyone says outside the books can change that. (And not even this makes a reader "delusional", Emerson...)
This goes to show that a writer cannot really control the image her readers will get of her characters by just stating what they look like. Just like no writer can make her readers think of a character as nice or likeable, just by saying in the text "she was very nice, everybody liked her, she was the heart and soul of the party". That may just as likely make readers puke and cry "Mary Sue!" as it may make them like the person in question... Neither will it change any reader's opinion of a character if Jo says in an interview that she likes or dislikes that character. It's interesting to know what she thinks, but it will not change my own reading.
Jo is usually not very elaborate about the looks of her characters, or buildings or places or landscapes for that matter - yet most of us do get very vivid images of them anyway, just from all the associations her storytelling arouses in our minds. I like it better that way. Just as I like it better when the judgement of whether someone is weak or strong, good or bad, heroic or pathetic, immature or the opposite, is left for me to decide from the story itself - because I will do that anyway. I don't like to have it pointed out to me, in the books (which, to be fair, really does not happen very much, except for one glaring example in the epilogue...) or in interviews.
Ok - essay over. It says in the header this blog is for TLPs, right?
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