OVERANALYZING THE TEXT

A bit more on the various reasons people might have for "liking" certain characters over others: stock characters, characters who seem to "come alive," characters who break type, various different forms of reader identification...and so on.

--------------

1) Stock Characters

Mahoney wrote:

What generally determines whether or not I like a character is whether or not the character is either well-crafted ("alive" on the fictional plane), or is a particular favorite character type of mine. I.e., I like both Harry and McGonnagal because they're both "alive" to me; but I like...Legolas from Tolkien's Rings books because, even though the character is dimensionless, he's a favorite character type (frufry mystical nature-boy archer guy type, LOL).

"If you like the stock, you'll like the soup."

The Venal Aristocrat, the Good-Hearted Yet Under-educated Rustic, the Wise Old Wizard Mentor, the Grovelling Coward, the Boorish Middle Class Status-Seekers...

Yes. I think that we probably all have our favorite character types, and that our preferences in 'stock' often do go a long way toward determining our liking for certain characters.

I like Pettigrew, for example, largely because he's a favorite character type of mine: I've always been partial to the Grovelling Coward, especially the "capable of ruthless cunning" variant. What can I say? I just like these guys. Even when they're utterly dimensionless, even when they're pure cliche, even when I feel that I really by all rights ought to be finding them irritatingly de trope...I just can't seem to help myself. I always end up liking them anyway. They may be stock, but they're stock that I happen to enjoy. God only knows why.

So even though I do think that Rowling has done a bit of nice work in fleshing out Pettigrew (I liked the way that she depicted his discomfort with Harry in the Graveyard scene of Gof, for example), I suspect that I'd probably feel a fondness for the character even if she hadn't bothered.

Sometimes, though, even a fondness for the basic type can't save a character for me. For example, I ordinarily quite enjoy Boorish Middle Class Status-Seekers as comedic types, but I just can't bear the Dursleys. They're too broad a rendition of the type for my own personal tastes: too grotesque, too Roald Dahlesque. They irritate me, I don't find them amusing, and I'm always extremely relieved when Harry escapes from their clutches, because it means that I don't have to put up with them anymore either...until the start of the next book, that is. With the Dursleys, even my predisposition to like the type was not sufficient to make me enjoy JKR's variations thereof.

Dumbledore's rather the opposite. I don't like Wise Old Wizarding Mentors as a general rule—they tend to grate on my nerves—but Dumbledore has succeeded in overcoming my general resistance to his overall type. I have come to like him as a character—a great deal, in fact—and that really is impressive, because frankly, he had quite a lot to overcome in the way of reader prejudice from the very start.

-----------

2) Characters who seem to "come alive," type-breakers, morally ambiguous characters.

Mahoney spoke of well-crafted characters seeming to come "alive" on the fictional plane. Tabouli also brought up the issue of how well-crafted a character seems.

She wrote:

Ooo, the ol' fictional/factual divide!

An Oldie, but always a Goodie. ;-)

As characters, I like 'em both [Hagrid and Snape]. I look forward to scenes where they appear. Both are interesting and flawed in ways which drive the plot (if you think about it, both Hagrid and Snape have played vital roles in all of the books so far). From a writer's craft perspective, I prefer Snape. The Lovable Oaf is a bit of a literary cliche, whereas Snape is a more singular creation: bitter, complex, unpredictable.

Of course, breaking type was Snape's function for the plot of the first book—and it's a function that he continues to perform—so it's probably unsurpising that he feels less cliched, and thus more "real," than many of the other characters.

Even aside from that functional aspect of his character, though, I agree that Snape does seem unusually vital. And he's also highly charismatic: he tends to dominate whatever scene he's in and can draw the reader's attention even when he's only hovering at the periphery of the relevant action.

And, of course, he's morally ambiguous, which is related to 'breaking type.' The morally ambiguous characters are nearly always favorites. As jchutney wrote:

It seems to me that the "whiter" or "blacker" a character the less interesting. It's the "grey" like Sirius and Snape that provoke discussion (so, is he good OR bad?) and of course, "greys" keep readers guessing. We have no idea what Snape will do next.

------------

3) Identification With Real People, Ourselves Vs. Others

Tabouli, who identifies strongly with Hermione, wrote...er, whoops! I seem to have lost the citation. Well, as I seem to remember, she wrote something about how while she generally does not think of fictional characters in terms of how she might get on with them in real life, she does sometimes draw analogies between them and real people she has known; and that characters can either gain or lose emotional brownie points based on those associations. (Was that right, Tabouli? If not, then apologies.)

She then went on to describe how this differs, for her, from identifying herself with a character:

Identification breeds empathy, certainly....I feel I understand Hermione intimately, and get defensive if people misinterpret her in the way they misinterpreted me. Nonetheless, for me it's not the same as "liking" a character....I mean, you could say I "like" Hermione, but it's more complicated than that - it's more that I want her to be happy and get what she hopes for in life, independently of liking or disliking, because she's me!

Does that make sense?

Absolutely! (And I hope that you don't feel that my snippage violated your intent in any way—that was a great paragraph, but it seemed a bit long to cite in its entirety, as I would have liked to.)

I don't identify nearly that strongly or completely with any of the HP characters, but I can imagine what it might be like—you describe the phenomenon very well.

There would seem to be a number of different ways in which one can personally identify with characters. The three characters I most strongly identify with create very different dynamics for me as a reader, because I identify with them on completely different levels, and in completely different ways, each of which inspires a slightly different relationship with the text.

There's Snape. I identify strongly with Snape, but in a wholly negative sense: he is the sort of person I feel (or fear) that I might well have grown up to be, if my life had taken a rather different turning at around the age of 15 or 16 or so, and he's the person that I'm always on some level terrified that I might become. The points of identification are nearly all the things that I like the very least about myself: they're things that I'm relieved to have overcome, or things that I work very hard to suppress. He's a bit like a cautionary tale. ("If you start slipping, you're going to end up just like poor Severus—so for God's sake, Elkins, watch yourself!")

That's a painful sort of identification, because it breeds empathy without approval. When Snape is on his worst behavior (end of PoA, for example), he can make me cringe with something very akin to personal embarrassment; when he manages to behave admirably (end of GoF), what I feel is not so much pride as a profound sense of relief.

Hermione, on the other hand, is a character I can identify with in a positive sense. I am not all that much like her, but there are enough points of identification to allow her to serve as a protagonist for me in a way that Harry simply cannot. (I'm just nothing like Harry. We're completely different types of people.) I am not as kind as she is, nor as generous—and I am not in the least bit brave—but I would like to be all of those things, and I'm enough kin to her in other ways that she can serve as a kind of exemplar. When Hermione behaves badly, I feel disappointed in her in a way that I just don't when Ron or Harry show their flaws; and when she does something particularly admirable, I feel gratified on a far more personal level.

And then there's Neville. My identification with Neville is value-neutral—it is neither positive nor negative; it is just there. Primarily it makes me anxious with the text, anxious and also extremely irritable, because I so often find myself thinking that Rowling just really doesn't get people like Neville—or therefore, by extension, people like me. She really just doesn't understand us at all. I am often deeply irked by the things she does with Neville—crazy though this may sound, I feel that she frequently "gets him wrong"—and I'm deeply fearful over her plans for him in future books. Whatever she ends up doing with him, I feel almost certain that it will anger and offend me.

This last type of identification is probably the closest thing I have to what Tabouli describes with Hermione. The difference, of course, is that while Tabouli's identification is canonically sanctioned (presumably she does not feel that Rowling ever gets Hermione "wrong"—how could she?), mine with Neville is both canonically indefensible and indeed, on the face of it, utterly absurd.

But then, you know. Reader identification can be like that. It's hardly a rational phenomenon to begin with.

—Elkins