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Jan. 10th, 2006 08:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
spokeI love revisiting old games and books, and lately I've been particularly nostalgic. This works well with my plan to read through all my books - or maybe it inspired it. Probably.
But what really drove me to get started was this:
In his introduction to Twelve Stories, Garcia Marquez mentions that these stories aquried form twenty years ago and then were left to brew. They were gradually forgotten and sprang to life again during his exile in Europe. The "geological" method of composition, typical of his style, highlights one outstanding incident and piles over it layers and layers of memory, achieveing a final effect with the realistic precision of the earth's crust.
It's from a translation of an article in A Memoir of Misfortune, an autobiography by Su Xiaokang. It's a library loan that I've held onto far too long - I should give it back, as soon as I've finished the other book I got with it, which would be a translation of Dante's Inferno. >.>
Reading this was a strange experiance. There are so many points where my heart ached, not for the author so much as for his wife and son. Yet I still felt... disconnected from it, like standing outside someone's window, or watching the wreck from across the highway. A witness to tragedy, yet not touched by it. The biggest cause of this, I think, is how aggravated I was with Xiaokang himself. He is incredibly clueless, inclined to float along the surface of life until something forces him underwater - or something comes out of the depths, usually in the form of a comment from his wife, that makes him aware for the hundreth time that there is more to her than he was aware of. This is a fact he acknowledges in the book, is something he seems to be working on, and yet it keeps happening. I suspect it will keep happening, for the rest of his life, because it's too intrinsic a part of his character. Floating like an insect on the waters of life.
It's about 4:22 and looking at that thought, it occurs to me finally who he reminds me of. In the book The Night Watch by Sean Stewart, there is a character very much like this. The same utter innocense of the depth of the world. The man's name is given as 'Water Spider'.
Continuing with the attempts to round up the nostalgic and re-examining thoughts I've been having - and I'll probably do this with at least half of what I read, if I manage to take my time and do all this properly? But - I had a thought about Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. That scene in Voldemort's Cave of the Undead? What scared me about it - aside from the scenery :p - wasn't something I could really pinpoint at first. Then I was reading some essay or other on![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sistermagpie's journal and it crystallized.
I was afraid Harry would quit, would stop giving Dumbledore the potion. Only, afraid isn't quite the word... I assumed he was going to quit, I was afraid of the consquences of his qutting.
Possibly it would be worthwhile to make a detour for an explanation, here. In fangirling, I tend to go for the anti-heroes and the villains for a specific reason - the heroes in my experiance have always seemed a little hollow, especially in terms of thier tests. Recent years have seen some improvement on this score, but mostly what I'm concerned with here is a specific type of test. The Hero is requred to do something awful - usually but not always to someone they care about - in order to advance their Quest - only not! Because really it was a trick and it was their humanity being tested rather than thier... I want to say ruthlessness, but call it determination.
The way I see it - the Hero's humanity ought to have been established. These tests usually come very late in the game, and if we don't know we've got a Hero by then... well. The test is then of ruthlessness - by now you've proven you can fight, can do harm to others - but can you hurt yourself, even via loved ones, in order to achieve your goal. Because a Hero should stand between the Villain he's fighting and the people that Villain intends to harm, and if you're not willing to take damage into yourself to prevent him reaching them - you might as well stand aside and let him have at it. Of course, I tend to see Heroes as shields protecting the innocent or uninvolved, when in fact most of them are swords to whom the innocent are just bystanders. Occasionally annoying bystanders, at that.
So. Instead, once a Hero has - in my opinion - failed this test, then the coput about testing his humanity comes. This can take as many forms as there are Heroes, but usually involves making us and him feel better - or failing to in my case. He's told he didn't really fail, even in cases where he's angsting because he did and he knows it - he passed because he is a good person. And I should really let go of this point, as I could go on hissing and snarling about it indefintely. Back to the point I started off on, before detouring.
Which would be, Harry passed. Even though I assumed he'd fail, he passed - and yes, I was proud of that. So what if the watch turned out not to be a Horcrux? You know how often Quest-objects gained in that fashion aren't what they were supossed to be? It's a standard during the copout - it doesn't even matter that you didn't do it, because look! It was never really there. *grrrr*
But Harry had help passing that, too. Dumbledore... the way in which I see Dumbledore having most influenced Harry is this - Harry craves acceptance. He wants to be loved, yes, but also just to be accepted for Harry and not The Boy Who Lived. (Whether you can really seperate those two things outside of an AU is another discussion maybe?) Dumbledore does that, and what's more important is that he also accepts everybody. It's one of the things Dumbledore seems to me to represent - universal acceptance. Of people regardless of age, gender, species and really lousy behaviour. He might not like everybody, but he treats them all respectfully and with dignity anyway. Harry, having watched him for years, cannot have failed to notice that even if he doesn't entirely get the reasoning. Granted, most of us are going to fail to meet such intimidating standards - but the standard and the philosophy it represents is there.
Even up to and including Voldemort. The thing Dumbledore has with them saying his name is itself a varition of acceptance - if you accept him as the Dark Lord, you're accepting that he has power over you. The whole thing sounds of 'knock it off, dammit!' to me. Poor Dumbledore. What's even better is that face to face, he still calls the man Tom. I love that.
Even though this is the point at which Dumbledore failed with Voldemort. (If he was ever going to succeed, which is about as much a debate as Harry not being The Boy Who Lived) Because Tom Riddle never wanted to be accepted. Acceptance is for the weak, maybe? Tom was already special and aware of his specialness when Dumbledore reached him, and the whole of his life after that seems to be an attempt to massively underscore the point - I, T- no! Voldemort! Dark Lord Voldemort! I am Special, and you will all cower before my Special and Uniqueness!
:x *cracks up*
But back to Harry - and Dumbledore - the biggest thing that Dumbledore did for Harry in HBP is, he upped the stakes on him. Harry had been whining about Dumbledore not trusting him, but when he finally got what he wanted, he learned a new and not entirely pleasant fact - there are different levels to acceptance, and stepping up a level meant putting his comfort zone at risk. It goes from 'no matter what, Dumbledore will always accept me' to 'omg. omg, what if I fail Dumbledore.' This is the reason I think it might be a good thing that Dumbledore waited so long, even though Dumbledore considers it a failure -
And it just occured to me... he considers that he failed at exactly the test described above. Because he couldn't hurt himself and Harry by treating him according to the Phrophecy. ...okay, that thought needs disgesting. @.@
But - if Harry hadn't already felt reasonably secure with Dumbledore, the sudden upping of pressure could have broken him. As it was, he did feel secure - so it became a test of his abilities, rather than the test of himself that he would have seen it as at a younger age. So that when it comes to the crunch, when he knows Dumbledore is suffering but also knows he gave his word, he passes.
Can I just crow about that for awhile? Really, I can only name one other character off the top of my head who passed a test of this nature - Damien Vryce in the Coldfire Trilogy. ...come to think of it, he had help of a sort, too. *hearts Hesseth*
And now I shall leave you with a wonderfully intelligent question! How come Barbie has a little sister, but no parents? >.>
But what really drove me to get started was this:
In his introduction to Twelve Stories, Garcia Marquez mentions that these stories aquried form twenty years ago and then were left to brew. They were gradually forgotten and sprang to life again during his exile in Europe. The "geological" method of composition, typical of his style, highlights one outstanding incident and piles over it layers and layers of memory, achieveing a final effect with the realistic precision of the earth's crust.
It's from a translation of an article in A Memoir of Misfortune, an autobiography by Su Xiaokang. It's a library loan that I've held onto far too long - I should give it back, as soon as I've finished the other book I got with it, which would be a translation of Dante's Inferno. >.>
Reading this was a strange experiance. There are so many points where my heart ached, not for the author so much as for his wife and son. Yet I still felt... disconnected from it, like standing outside someone's window, or watching the wreck from across the highway. A witness to tragedy, yet not touched by it. The biggest cause of this, I think, is how aggravated I was with Xiaokang himself. He is incredibly clueless, inclined to float along the surface of life until something forces him underwater - or something comes out of the depths, usually in the form of a comment from his wife, that makes him aware for the hundreth time that there is more to her than he was aware of. This is a fact he acknowledges in the book, is something he seems to be working on, and yet it keeps happening. I suspect it will keep happening, for the rest of his life, because it's too intrinsic a part of his character. Floating like an insect on the waters of life.
It's about 4:22 and looking at that thought, it occurs to me finally who he reminds me of. In the book The Night Watch by Sean Stewart, there is a character very much like this. The same utter innocense of the depth of the world. The man's name is given as 'Water Spider'.
Continuing with the attempts to round up the nostalgic and re-examining thoughts I've been having - and I'll probably do this with at least half of what I read, if I manage to take my time and do all this properly? But - I had a thought about Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. That scene in Voldemort's Cave of the Undead? What scared me about it - aside from the scenery :p - wasn't something I could really pinpoint at first. Then I was reading some essay or other on
sistermagpie's journal and it crystallized.I was afraid Harry would quit, would stop giving Dumbledore the potion. Only, afraid isn't quite the word... I assumed he was going to quit, I was afraid of the consquences of his qutting.
Possibly it would be worthwhile to make a detour for an explanation, here. In fangirling, I tend to go for the anti-heroes and the villains for a specific reason - the heroes in my experiance have always seemed a little hollow, especially in terms of thier tests. Recent years have seen some improvement on this score, but mostly what I'm concerned with here is a specific type of test. The Hero is requred to do something awful - usually but not always to someone they care about - in order to advance their Quest - only not! Because really it was a trick and it was their humanity being tested rather than thier... I want to say ruthlessness, but call it determination.
The way I see it - the Hero's humanity ought to have been established. These tests usually come very late in the game, and if we don't know we've got a Hero by then... well. The test is then of ruthlessness - by now you've proven you can fight, can do harm to others - but can you hurt yourself, even via loved ones, in order to achieve your goal. Because a Hero should stand between the Villain he's fighting and the people that Villain intends to harm, and if you're not willing to take damage into yourself to prevent him reaching them - you might as well stand aside and let him have at it. Of course, I tend to see Heroes as shields protecting the innocent or uninvolved, when in fact most of them are swords to whom the innocent are just bystanders. Occasionally annoying bystanders, at that.
So. Instead, once a Hero has - in my opinion - failed this test, then the coput about testing his humanity comes. This can take as many forms as there are Heroes, but usually involves making us and him feel better - or failing to in my case. He's told he didn't really fail, even in cases where he's angsting because he did and he knows it - he passed because he is a good person. And I should really let go of this point, as I could go on hissing and snarling about it indefintely. Back to the point I started off on, before detouring.
Which would be, Harry passed. Even though I assumed he'd fail, he passed - and yes, I was proud of that. So what if the watch turned out not to be a Horcrux? You know how often Quest-objects gained in that fashion aren't what they were supossed to be? It's a standard during the copout - it doesn't even matter that you didn't do it, because look! It was never really there. *grrrr*
But Harry had help passing that, too. Dumbledore... the way in which I see Dumbledore having most influenced Harry is this - Harry craves acceptance. He wants to be loved, yes, but also just to be accepted for Harry and not The Boy Who Lived. (Whether you can really seperate those two things outside of an AU is another discussion maybe?) Dumbledore does that, and what's more important is that he also accepts everybody. It's one of the things Dumbledore seems to me to represent - universal acceptance. Of people regardless of age, gender, species and really lousy behaviour. He might not like everybody, but he treats them all respectfully and with dignity anyway. Harry, having watched him for years, cannot have failed to notice that even if he doesn't entirely get the reasoning. Granted, most of us are going to fail to meet such intimidating standards - but the standard and the philosophy it represents is there.
Even up to and including Voldemort. The thing Dumbledore has with them saying his name is itself a varition of acceptance - if you accept him as the Dark Lord, you're accepting that he has power over you. The whole thing sounds of 'knock it off, dammit!' to me. Poor Dumbledore. What's even better is that face to face, he still calls the man Tom. I love that.
Even though this is the point at which Dumbledore failed with Voldemort. (If he was ever going to succeed, which is about as much a debate as Harry not being The Boy Who Lived) Because Tom Riddle never wanted to be accepted. Acceptance is for the weak, maybe? Tom was already special and aware of his specialness when Dumbledore reached him, and the whole of his life after that seems to be an attempt to massively underscore the point - I, T- no! Voldemort! Dark Lord Voldemort! I am Special, and you will all cower before my Special and Uniqueness!
:x *cracks up*
But back to Harry - and Dumbledore - the biggest thing that Dumbledore did for Harry in HBP is, he upped the stakes on him. Harry had been whining about Dumbledore not trusting him, but when he finally got what he wanted, he learned a new and not entirely pleasant fact - there are different levels to acceptance, and stepping up a level meant putting his comfort zone at risk. It goes from 'no matter what, Dumbledore will always accept me' to 'omg. omg, what if I fail Dumbledore.' This is the reason I think it might be a good thing that Dumbledore waited so long, even though Dumbledore considers it a failure -
And it just occured to me... he considers that he failed at exactly the test described above. Because he couldn't hurt himself and Harry by treating him according to the Phrophecy. ...okay, that thought needs disgesting. @.@
But - if Harry hadn't already felt reasonably secure with Dumbledore, the sudden upping of pressure could have broken him. As it was, he did feel secure - so it became a test of his abilities, rather than the test of himself that he would have seen it as at a younger age. So that when it comes to the crunch, when he knows Dumbledore is suffering but also knows he gave his word, he passes.
Can I just crow about that for awhile? Really, I can only name one other character off the top of my head who passed a test of this nature - Damien Vryce in the Coldfire Trilogy. ...come to think of it, he had help of a sort, too. *hearts Hesseth*
And now I shall leave you with a wonderfully intelligent question! How come Barbie has a little sister, but no parents? >.>
