dictacontrion:

devinesis:

dictacontrion:

synonym-for-life:

dictacontrion:

the world isn’t split into good people and Death Eaters

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 yessssss. here are those tags again

#just to be clear for the purposes of Tumblr  #I do not love Snape in the sense of thinking he is a good person #I do think Snape is an interesting character worth exploring  #and think it is a bummer that the Snape hate keeps that exploration from happening 
#like here’s this really bitter lonely angry person  #who sacrifices his chances for power wealth companionship love autonomy and freedom  #and eventually his life  #to atone for this incredibly awful thing he did as a teenager  #while continuing to be a bitter lonely angry person  #and continuing to do other bad things  #that is *fascinating* 
#what makes someone good or bad? what constitutes redemption? what do we do with people who are both good and bad?  #we don’t get to have these (fascinating and timely!) conversations if everyone who  #talks about Snape as anything less than the devil gets branded as an apologist for racism and child abuse and driven of of town 
#and I think Snape is especially interesting to explore because people don’t generally woobify him or erase the bad he’s done 
#so a lot of more nuanced and complex conversation/exploration can happen there and there’s value in that  #anyway I like nuance

and i stand by that. how much more can our conversations be, and our fic and our fandom, if we embrace characters’ complexities? that doesn’t mean pretending that they’re good. it means acknowledging that people can be good and bad, both at the same time.

@dictacontrion This is me saying more, though I am a bit late to the party, but still… a few thoughts on this topic (mind I could
write an essay on this);

So, Dumbledore is one of my favourite
characters, if not even my favourite (I’m not a decision maker ok), because I
feel that he represents the person I’d like to be. But hear me out before
judging me. Dumbledore is a funny, witty, charismatic, powerful persona, he is
clever, to the point one can calmly call him genius, he is also empathetic,
kind, willing to help, and yet he had done things that are the opposite of
that.

No one is denying his immorality when it comes to
Harry; he left a baby in an abusing home knowingly,
he withheld the truth about his destiny from him until the last moment and he
in a way really did raise him like a pig for slaughter. That is undeniable.  

However, one important thing that is often overlooked
is that Dumbledore himself knew all that.
One important thing that is overlooked, when he is portrayed as a manipulative
heartless bastard is that, Dumbledore was a very introspective person and he
thought about the consequences of his actions all the time. He hated himself
for doing this to Harry, but he would have hated himself even more had he left
the wizarding world at the mercy of Voldemort, which is what, in his opinion,
would have happened had he not ‘used’ Harry. That is what he believed. It doesn’t
mean it was right, or just, or moral, but the thing is it worked. It simply worked.
At a great cost, but it worked.

So here rises a question the humanity should discuss
every single day. Does the end ever
justify the means? I will not go on about this, because I trust you can
find examples of this happening in everyday life quite easily.

But I would like to say just one more thing about
Dumbledore. He was very intelligent. He knew he was more intelligent than most people, which to him meant he carried greater responsibility to the
world. He felt obligation because the universe had gifted him a more powerful
brain. He knew this was not his doing, he knew he did nothing that merited him
being more intelligent (yes he did further educate himself, which is v.
important, but let’s not deny the existence of geniuses that are simply out of
this world). A

nd here we are presented with another big question: Does being more intelligent than others
bring more responsibility? Should having a certain talent/skill/opportunity/access
to education/even money automatically oblige you to ‘help the world’? And why?

Why do I look up to Dumbledore, you ask?. Because I
want to be as introspective as he
was. Because I want to be aware of the
fact that my actions do have consequences (however small), because I want
to doubt if what I’m doing is right
every step of the way and still do it if I really consider this the right path.
And last of all, because I want to be able
to see and admit when I am wrong and reassess
the very foundations of my beliefs no matter how hard it is, no matter how
much remorse I feel, no matter how much I as a person feel unsettled in search
for the truth.

(So this turned out to be more about Dumbledore than
about the uselessness of character bashing, but still. It lay heavy on my heart
and now I’m free.)

this is magnificent. and i think it *is* about the uselessness of character bashing.

when we hold to the idea that characters have to be either good or evil we lose the chance to examine everything in between. character bashing kills the nuance that lets us examine human complexity, including our own. If there are two options for a debate and they are: (1) dumbledore or snape: good/best ever or evil/worst ever? or (2) at what point in the pursuit of good ends do your means become unacceptable, and who gets to decide and on what grounds? – then, like, which of those conversations is more important to have? which is richer and more needed?  I would choose option 2 every time. Lists of evidence to say that someone is good or evil doesn’t get us much of anywhere. This though – this does.

This is so awesome and I completely agree—characters are not interesting characters because they are perfectly good or perfectly bad, they’re interesting because they’re flawed. That said, I think one thing missing from this discussion is this:

-Fandom hate for Snape comes from this mainstream view that is very apologetic for Snape, people who are touched and heartbroken when Snape’s motivations become clear at the end of the series, who think that Snape’s actions are romantic. People who go get deathly hallows tattoos with “Always” written under them. Fandom hate for Snape (I almost just typed Trump, LOL, apparently “hate for” defaults to that these days) is only understandable within that context. It’s trying very specifically to act as a correction. And in doing so, people have become really reactionary about him. First an overreaction in one direction, then in the other.

-Fandom hate (or distaste) for Dumbledore seems exactly the same. During the course of the books, Dumbledore is presented as flawed, sure, and Harry is really angry at him for much of it, but he’s also presented as the wisest and most trustworthy person in the series. When he dies, it’s heartbreaking, and Harry (and the reader) is heartbroken. The sense I get is that the fandom wants to make sure people don’t forget that Dumbledore does a lot of shit things–and people do forget that!

The problem, of course, is that throughout all of this, everyone insists on seeing them as all good -or- all bad. Which takes all interesting discussion or consideration off the table, as you both said.

Interestingly, fandom debates about Draco seem qualitatively different than those about Snape/Dumbledore, because Draco is presented explicitly by JKR as a shades of gray character. He is a total ass as a child, and then is completely broken in books 6 and 7, and he doesn’t kill Dumbledore, and he doesn’t reveal Harry’s identity. BUT–and I think this is key in comparing his treatment to the treatment of Snape–there is no “RAH RAH DRACO!” big reveal scene where suddenly Draco seems absolved. There is no satisfying conclusion for him at all. So the reader is almost forced to accept Draco as a shades of gray character, where his arc is up in the air, whereas the final treatment of Snape seems very absolving, and JKR’s treatment of Dumbledore seems absolving from start to finish.

This is fascinating and right on. I’ve never considered the endings like that, but it makes total sense to me. Also interesting to consider in light of some of the more popular criticisms of the epilogue – that it’s too tidy for a generation that’s grown up in a messy world, that it’s simple to the point of being unbelievable. Does that tie in at all to which characters/narratives we want to make more or less complicated?

Completely agree that a lot of that character bashing is reactive. I wonder if that just gets us into an echo chamber, with one side shouting “here are all the bad things you’re forgetting!” and the other shouting “here are all the good things you’re forgetting!” If our conversations were more nuanced, would we feel the same need to do that? When people forget the complexity of a character and paint them as good or bad, is it more productive to argue for the other side, or to argue for nuance that lets these aspects of a character coexist?