OVERANALYZING THE TEXT

I said:

We know that there is really nothing in the least bit amusing or good-natured about the practical joke, that far to the contrary, it is just one of the many means by which the socially popular assert their dominance over their less charismatic peers.

Tabouli wrote:

I agree wholeheartedly with the overall sentiments of this, but also I think practical jokes aren't always that. It depends on their content and style of execution.

Well, of course it does. But that was a rant, you see, and one can't ameliorate or qualify in the midst of a rant. It's...well, it's just not done.

I think that practical joking is a lot like 'teasing,' actually. It is often used as a means of asserting dominance through ridicule. It is also sometimes used to share humor and express affection. The problem with both teasing and practical joking, of course, is that it is horribly easy to get it wrong, and so to offend where you meant to do no such thing. When that happens, then the only decent thing to do, IMO, is to humbly apologize. Unfortunately, people tend to get defensive instead, which is when you get "can't you take a joke?" and "must you always be so sensitive?" and similar remarks which do absolutely nothing for anyone's good humor.

(And people do vary a great deal in their sensitivity to teasing, not always for explicable reasons. My husband, for example, cannot bear to be teased, not at all, not even lightly, not a bit of it. If you know him—and if you know what's good for you—then you do not tease him. I, on the other hand, can tolerate a good deal of teasing, which is strange, really, because I was mercilessly and cruelly taunted by evil small people all through my childhood, while he was never teased in anything but good-humor by very loving family members. ::shrug:: So go figure. I don't understand it either, but there it is.)

Getting back to canon, I think that the twins' behavior is interesting for the extent to which it does show a very wide range of teasing/joking behavior, from the mild and affectionate to the downright bullying. The twins are not very sensitive, and they often get it "wrong." And they can sometimes be malicious, sometimes nastily so—although we've never seen them indulge in the sort of wholly malicious and unceasing harrassment that I (and Tabouli as well, it would seem) have experienced first-hand.

Their attempts to cheer Ginny up in CoS by jumping out at her from behind pillars and the like, for example, strikes me as quite clearly a case of simply "getting it wrong." There's no intended malice there that I can see—I think that they really were trying to cheer her up—but she's headed for a nervous breakdown, and they're just too insensitive to notice the effect their behavior is having on her. When it is pointed out to them, they do stop.

Their constant attacks on Percy, though...well, there's malice there. There's definitely malice there, and more than a shade of harrassment, as well. But it's nice that even within their treatment of Percy, we see a wide range. When they manhandle him into his Weasley jumper and insist that he spend Christmas with them because they're "family," their behavior is certainly bullying, and I'm sure that it was very annoying to Percy—but I'm equally sure that it made him feel loved. Unlike, say, their unceasing attacks on his badges, which I don't think made him feel in the least bit appreciated or valued.

But fictional characters often suffer from guilt by association. If they remind us of people we have known in real life, then we tend to draw certain assumptions about their behavior. (We just saw a bit of this happening on the Ginny thread, I think.) And for what it's worth, I don't think that that's at all a "wrong" way to read fiction. It's inevitable: fiction depends on the reader's habit of forming gestalt impressions of character; that's a large part of how it works. It's really only when you run into the highly idiosyncratic readings that perhaps it starts making sense to wonder whether you might have "misread" the text—and even then, I think that "misreading" is a misnomer. So long as the characters and their interactions and their motivations continue to make sense to the reader, so long as the work still carries the reader along emotionally and logically, then as far as I'm concerned, the question of authorial intent is moot. It's only when things stop making sense that "misreading" is problematic.

As for the twins, I grew up down the street from a pair of pathological pranksters, quite a few years older than me, who were malicious (to me, at any rate) and who lacked chivalry towards the smaller and the younger (when it came to me, at any rate). But they were also very popular, and extremely kind and supportive of their younger brother and his friends and other younger children whom they liked, and they did a lot of charity work mentoring younger children as well, so everyone thought they were these all-round great guys. No harm in 'em. Good-hearted. They had this rep—as chivalrous and kind-hearted and protective to the small and the weak and all of that. No one ever seemed to notice that they...well, that they just plain weren't.

So yes, my reading of the twins may well be far more personal than canonical, as may be my ugly suspicion that they can be mean as all get-out when it comes to, say, the Slytherins. But the text has borne me out so far—I still say that the Hissing of Malcolm Baddock was a DEAD GIVEAWAY, they showed their true natures there, all right, oh yes, indeedy—and so my admittedly-biased reading is not "problematic." It isn't contradicted by anything in the text. It can therefore remain a satisfying reading for me without having to be "revised."

Tabouli was approaching the Snape vs. Sirius disagreements along these lines, I think, when she wrote about her own experiences with Victimizers Who Never Accept That They've Done Wrong and Ex-Victims Turned Bully. And I think that she was quite right in suggesting that people's personal experiences with these types have informed that on-going debate.

She wrote:

I have met quite a few ex-charismatic-victimisers who, like Sirius, are well into adulthood and show no signs whatsoever of remorse. Indeed, they engage in almost exactly the same behaviour as Sirius - a bit of a smug, callous snicker and a "God, but they were just so revolting and pathetic, they were just asking for it!"

::shudder::

I remember a year or two ago finding myself in a discussion at work with a co-worker, a woman I'd always got along with quite well, about the film "Welcome To the Dollhouse" (if you've never seen it, Tabouli, you might want to be warned: it just might make you feel physically ill. It did me.) The discussion was going great, no problems, we had both liked the movie a good deal, and then suddenly she said something along the lines of: "God, you know, I felt so bad for that poor girl, but at the same time, she was just asking for it, wasn't she? The way she dressed, and the way she acted? She must have known better. I mean, we always used to just torture people like that when I was in school, and I can't really say that I blame all the other kids for treating her that way. She was so letting herself in for it."

Cheerfully, she said this. Cheerfully, and not without a certain hint of smug nostalgia.

And I just couldn't respond somehow. My throat felt very tight, and I could feel the blood draining from my face, and...well, I simply wanted to be elsewhere. Anywhere elsewhere. I would like to be able to claim that, like Tabouli, I tried to engage this woman on the issue. But I didn't. I absented myself from the conversation at the next decent opportunity. And I can't really say that I've ever felt quite the same about her since.

I think that a lot of people here have met those types, and that it accounts for a great deal of the anti-Sirius sentiment we see here on the list. I myself, for example, tend to share Judy Serenity's gut feelings about Sirius, while also acknowledging all of the pro-Sirist's arguments against them as perfectly canonically sound. No, there's no canonical evidence that the guy ever harrassed or teased less popular students. No, there's no canonical evidence that he ever even did a thing to Snape, other than that one (admittedly potentially lethal) "prank." No, there's no real canonical evidence that he is the sort of person who cares only for the people he has designated as "his people," and not so much for anyone outside of that magic circle.

But he gives many people the impression of being that sort of person, and impressions are important—we form our opinions of fictional characters largely on a gestalt basis anyhow—so I think that "he gives the impression of being this sort of person, and I just don't like people like that" is a valid response to the canon. It's a perfectly legitimate, and indeed, unavoidable aspect of ones reading of the text.

As for the Ex-Victims Turned Bully...

(Tabouli, again):

However, I have also observed another subset of people who impress me almost as little... the victim-turned-bully.

::shifts uncomfortably in seat::

Well...yeah. I went through a stage of this myself—although not with any racial agenda attached, thank God. As a teenager, I got pretty mean, in both senses of that word: cruel and petty. I'm not in the least bit proud of that. It's shameful.

But interestingly, the logic one uses to rationalize such behavior is much the same. Rather than 'they were so pathetic, they deserved it, they should just get over it already,' you get into 'oh, people like that are so insensitive that they can't possibly really be hurt anyway, all they're really upset about is that they just aren't winning for once in their lives, and maybe they should get used to that and...well, and get over it already.'

You don't think of it as bullying—although that's precisely what it is.

It's equally despicable behavior, of course. And for what it's worth, I did grow out of it.

In fiction, naturally, I tend to enjoy ex-victims-turned-bully. I can identify with them, although it's an uncomfortable sort of identification. In real life, though, I just can't bear them. They upset and anger me beyond all reason: I desperately want them to come to the same conclusions about their rotten behavior that I eventually did, and when they won't, or can't, then I become very distressed. And like Tabouli, I've had representatives of the type crushing on me (more than one, actually, which is sort of disturbing in its own right—as if our shared characteristics are some kind of pheromone, you know—as if they could smell it on me), but fortunately never reaching quite the scary stalker level that Tabouli described. (That sounds frightening, Tabouli -- you have my sympathies.)

In fiction, as in Sirius (My Cocky Charisma) and Snape (Mr Victim turned Bully), I'm quite happy to accept this sort of thing as an interesting portrayal of things I've observed myself in real life. In reality, however, I brew with disapproval...

Indeed. But then, the people I would disapprove of most strongly in real life generally do make for interesting characters...

—Elkins