Abuse of parentheses

[mrissa]

Amber and Em have been and gone, and timprov was well enough to see Amber, albeit not well enough to get up and go see Em downstairs as well. (He knows Amber much, much better, since we lived in exile California at the same time, without anybody else from college around the Bay Area. We all miss the Amber and are working with the Emily to try to get her to move here.)

I have been on the phone trying to get things figured out for timprov and am still waiting for a call back. I am exhausted, though not particularly by the phone or Amber and Em. (I'm still trying to refer to them in that order, because in college it was always "EmmanAmber," because they are that kind of best friends, and then Em went and married Aaron, so now it's "EmmanAmb--err, Aaron." And I think putting Em second is the solution to this.) (gaaldine and I were a good deal more like Janet and Molly: close, but with distinct nomenclature throughout. And also we sometimes left out a third person without meaning to, freshman year, which is why I thought of Janet and Molly in the first place.) (I think this might make me Molly. This thought pleases me. I would cheerfully whack things with a stick if given the chance -- maybe with just a wee nap first.) (But then, so would gaaldine, so that really gets us nowhere, as distinguishing features go.)

Do you know what has been upsetting me lately? (Among the things I haven't mentioned, I mean. Except I think in a couple of e-mails.) The trope that pure hearts win the day. Bah. Bah, I tell you! It's a pernicious lie, and it's particularly common in books aimed at children, and it's even worse to tell children, because they have less experience to see that it's a lie. I was glad to see Terry Pratchett take it on with Tiffany in one of her books. The things I'm doing against it seem to all be more indirect and mostly for grown-ups. (And why am I writing for grown-ups anyway? Elephino. Because something broke my brain in that direction, don't know what.) The focus on the power of purity of heart and purity of love in the latest (sixth) Harry Potter book made me roll my eyes halfway out of their sockets. Love is a very powerful thing, but so is knowing what the hell you are doing.

Three things, then: any similar messages driving you disproportionately nuts? Any thoughts on pure hearts? And anyone who was powerfully affected by the deaths in the HP books: can you explain to me why they mattered to you in the context of the series? Why they were important and either surprising or powerful beyond need for a surprise? Because they did not hit me right at all, and I know they did hit some people in the solar plexus, and I'm trying to get a handle on why.

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

As much as people quote Lois McMaster Bujold about figuring out the worst thing that could happen to your character next and then doing it, she doesn't actually do that: Miles does not have to watch Cordelia and Aral die of torture, for example. That would be worse. Or Cordelia, Aral, Ivan, Gregor, the Koudelkas...well, point made: there are all kinds of bad things she doesn't do to her characters because it would just be piling on, not doing anything more interesting.

And I think you're right on both counts with Dumbledore: he is the powerful mentor character and can't be around to save Harry's bacon -- as with all powerful mentors, he has to somehow be removed and probably die. This is a standard path of plot. And letting Snape continue -- you know what? Even if all the people who are speculating that Snape's actions are all at Dumbledore's behest are correct, Snape is still not good to his students. Acting for the best of the whole world? perhaps, but by being a total shit along the way. We are in yet another Ender's Game scenario, where the fate of the world conveniently rests on the torment of children, and I just don't buy it.

In Lord of the Rings and the original Star Wars trilogy, we are not asked to believe that Gollum and Vader have been good all along. We are asked to believe that they have capacity to do good in the end, which is a different proposition entirely, and a much more reasonable one.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

I'd be happy with Snape as, say, head of Potions research at the Dumbledore Institute of Advanced Magic or whatever, that happens to be on the grounds of Hogwarts where D. can get hold of him when necessary.

I think it speaks for itself that my response to Cedric's death in book 4 was to forget it completely when asked to give my thoughts on the deaths in the books. :P It made sense (the Death Eaters would certainly have killed any extra baggage) but I never cared about Cedric as a person, so his death was just another plot event.

My point earlier about "too much bad stuff happening to one person" often leads me to abandon a series before the author is ready to. For example, I stopped reading Raymond Feist's Midkemia books because I was simply no longer prepared to believe that this family could go on suffering these things and being the nexus of these world-altering events without SOMEONE cracking up.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

there are all kinds of bad things she doesn't do to her characters because it would just be piling on, not doing anything more interesting.

Watching people gloat about how mean they are to their characters...does nothing for me. Turns me off, if anything, for pretty much this reason. I don't think people should shy away from the hard stuff just because it's hard, but...

I don't like watching people be nasty for nastiness's sake when they're being nasty to imaginary people any more than I like watching them do it to real people.

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

Agreed.

There's something to be said for being willing to put characters through the wringer, and I don't discount the power of damaging or disposing of sympathetic characters. But once the stakes have been established, I don't think it's necessary to follow through and be nasty to characters just to prove you're serious or to "make the threat real". If the story demands it, that's a different matter, but an aesthetic where terrible things always happen to the protagonists is just as flawed and predictable as one where they never happen.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes. There's a difference between turning away from hard stuff to write and seeking out difficult stuff for the characters just to make things worse. "And now they have to climb Mount Everest!" would add very little to most stories that aren't about it -- its emotional equivalent the same.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

I don't think Snape has been presented as maybe being bad or maybe being good, but as maybe being bad or maybe being just-not-bad-enough. (He's quite clearly been bad in the past and doesn't seem to have given up many of the character traits he had then: ambition, resentment, etc. etc.) It interests me that the straight-out good characters wouldn't get anywhere without Snape (he makes the anti-werewolf potion, plays double agent, etc.), and I can hold out hope that Rowling won't just drop that piece of the story, that the reason some characters can be righteous about having clean hands is because he provides the use of his dirty ones.

As for the teachers, they all seem a menace of one sort or another. (I don't buy the "Hagrid is so cute to have the students work with hippogriffs!" view, for example). Supposedly that's an Archetypal English Boarding School trope, though I wouldn't really know.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

You know my opinion on the "worst thing that could happen to Miles," and we don't know it won't happen yet. Much worse than having everyone tortured to death in front of him.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

And now I'm dying to know what it is.

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

Emperor Miles?

Just saying.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

People have come up with some interesting ideas here, but I think they're still secondary.

The worst thing that could happen to Miles is for his kids to be stupid.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

Aiiieee!

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I think finding out that he had been genetically damaged such that a) he could not have healthy children and b) he was a "mutant" by Barrayaran standards is the worst thing I can imagine happening to Miles.

I was kind of hoping, round about Memory, that the direction the series was going in would end up with Miles becoming the classic Barrayaran villainous mutant, because at that point I could see him put in a position where Gregor gave him very clear orders he knew were the wrong thing to do in the given situation, and him trying to work around them in ways that went wrong and put him outside the law permanently; don't see a way of getting to there from where theseries is now, though.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

As much as people quote Lois McMaster Bujold about figuring out the worst thing that could happen to your character next and then doing it, she doesn't actually do that

I think she has a rather nicely judged sense of worst thing that can happen to them from which they can still recover and react and grow, as opposed to things that would break them outright.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes.

[columbina.livejournal.com]

As much as people quote Lois McMaster Bujold about figuring out the worst thing that could happen to your character next and then doing it, she doesn't actually do that.

No. Philip Pullman does that, which is why I have never finished the third book of Dark Materials, and I get the impression that Lemony Snicket does that and it's supposed to be ironic or funny or something, so I haven't read those either.

I have this problem with adult protagonists too, as I think you have seen me gripe elsewhere - some adversity is character development, but there comes a line when you just like doing bad things to your heroes, and it makes me hurt because I mostly enjoy fiction by empathizing with the protagonist, so I don't try. About the strongest thing I ever managed to sit through on that scale was James Morrow's Only Begotten Daughter because there I was JUST barely convinced the suffering was necessary.

To bring this back on point, one of the many problems I have with Rowling is that her idea of plot seems to be "throw a lot of adversity at Harry and see what sticks." I refer to this now as Thursday Next Syndrome (which see). A lot of her supporting characters deserve good subplots of their own, but aside from Fred and George, the only ones she seems to enjoy playing with, when we do get a subplot we get stuff like the SPEW story.

Oh, yeah, and I thought both Cedric and Dumbledore's deaths served a plot purpose but neither of them were especially well handled.

We are in yet another Ender's Game scenario, where the fate of the world conveniently rests on the torment of children, and I just don't buy it.

Oh, good, yet another reason not to read Card.

Yes, I am mean and nasty today, why do you ask? I proffer a grain of salt.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, Dumbledore's death was very plotty. But that's not the same thing as affecting for me at all.