OVERANALYZING THE TEXT

I commented that "everyone else" likes the twins, and Debbie leapt into the fray, crying:

No! No! Everyone else doesn't like the Twins. I don't like the Twins. I do not like them playing jokes. I do not like them hissing folks. I do not like them here or there. I do not like them anywhere.

::appreciative grin::

I do not like them making mock. I do not like them picking lock. I do not like their gambling fix. I do not like their Toffee tricks. I do not like Canary Creams. I do not like their business schemes. I just don't like that Forge and Gred. I do not like them, Elfun Deb!

::smile slowly fades::

Uh, yeah. Well, okay, so that last bit didn't really rhyme. It's, uh...

<Elkins thinks for a moment, then reaches deep down to access her Inner Eustace Scrubb.>

It's assonance.

Really, though. Why don't we like the twins?

Debbie wrote:

I'm probably being a bit Snapelike about this, as in RL I have a tendency to wish for people who flaunt the rules for laughs, and gain enormous popularity for doing so, to be taken down a notch or two. But the Twins are mean...

Yeah, I think they're mean, too. And although I don't share Debbie's feelings about rule-breaking, it really does bother me a lot when people (or fictional characters, for that matter) gain popularity primarily through their habit of abusing others.

But at the same time, you know, Snape is mean and abusive -- and yet I feel a great deal of affection for Snape. So it's hardly the case that meanness is, in and of itself, enough to make me dislike a character. Neither is bullying: Snape is a bully. I feel far more moral disapproval for treachery and murder than for teasing, and yet I still feel a lot more instinctive sympathy for Pettigrew than I do for the twins. And sometimes, trickery in the canon just thrills me. I just love the way Crouch Jr. manages to pull the wool over everyone's eyes all the way through GoF. On rereading, I was all but cheering him on -- and little Barty was, well, just plain evil. Yet, I truly did like him.

So why on earth should it bug me so much when the twins get away with things, or when they trick people, or when they are unkind to others? Why the heck do I dislike them so very much?

Some time ago—quite a long time ago now, in fact—I wrote a post in which I asked people what precisely they meant when they said that they "liked" a character. I came to the conclusion that there are a number of different things that people can mean by that. Sometimes, we mean that we simply enjoy reading about them. Sometimes we mean that we appreciate the narrative function that they fulfill. We can like characters because we identify with them—they remind us of ourselves—or because we associate them with other people we have known and loved. Or, we can like them because we think that we would probably enjoy their company in real life.

One of the things that I hoped to point out in that message was that often, when we talk about "liking" or "disliking" a character, we are actually evaluating them by the same criteria that we apply to real people in real life -- and that if moral virtue is among those criteria at all, it is usually pretty far down on the list.

The message number was 34058. This is an excerpt:

This interests me in part because so much of the discussion here seems to center on the use of canonical citation to evaluate the HP characters on moral grounds. Evidence is presented to support or condemn characters ethically, or philosophically, or even spiritually.

I strongly suspect, though, that more often than not what is really at issue is simple personal affection. We like some characters and dislike others in very much the same way, and for very much the same reasons, that we like or dislike real people; and as in real life, our reasons rarely have all that much to do with moral virtue.

People generally don't choose their friends based on a strict weighing of their moral flaws against their strengths of character. (Surely we all know virtuous people whom we just can't stand to be around?) Attachments are far more often, it seems to me, formed on the basis of things like sense of humour, and temperamental compatability, and shared interests, and even shared dislikes than they are on any strict accounting of moral virtues.

What worries me, I think, is that I suspect that all too often, we form our judgements about the characters based on these sorts of factors first, and only then go searching for evidence of their moral wrongdoings, or their hidden virtues. It's only human, I suppose: we readily forgive the people we like for precisely the same behavior that we roundly condemn in the people we loathe; my friend's Endearing Little Foible is my enemy's Horrible Great Sin.

That was January, and I see that at the time it was "worrying" me.

It's worrying me a bit again here now, actually.

See, Jenny's original question was this: "The twins are really mean. So why do we like them so much? Or do we?"

My response was: "Well, I don't like them. Not only are they mean, I also think they're bullies."

But that wasn't really answering the question, was it? After all, just because someone is a bully doesn't mean that he is at all unlikeable (indeed, most bullies are quite popular, and you don't achieve popularity by being unlikeable). Just because someone is a bully doesn't mean that he lacks redeeming qualities. Just because someone is a bully doesn't mean that one "shouldn't" like him.

HF and Catherine both shared their experience with real life Twin analogues by way of explaining why they feel such great personal affection for the twins. While Catherine's twins were not bullies, HF's RL Fred-or-George, she grudgingly conceded, was rather. She concluded, however, by writing:

But I find that I can't dismiss good qualities wholly in favor of the bad.

No. And there is absolutely no reason why you should.

I'm a little bit worried here, actually, that by arguing so strenuously for my reading of the twins as the Bullies You Know, I may have given the impression that I don't believe that people ought to like people (real or fictional) with bullying tendencies, far less identify with them personally; or that I think that just because someone bullies, that makes them inherently evil or rotten or deserving of nothing but being shunned by all decent folk.

That is not really my belief, and so it bothers me to think that I might have given that impression.

Nor was it ever really my intention to persuade other people not to like the twins. I was most dismayed, for example, to read this, from Jo Serenadust:

In fact, when I finished it, I found that even I had come to like the twins a little less. This was dismaying, since I'm very fond of Fred and George as I am of all the Weasleys, so I decided after reading all the back and forth arguements, to go back to the books to see if I've missed some subtle undertones to the twins antics.

And my feelings of unease were exacerbated when I saw that HF had signed off with:

—who politely acknowledges the power and validity of Elkins' argument, but who will nonetheless remain unconverted and persist in liking F&G.

Oh, dear me.

No. You know, I really wasn't trying to convert people to disliking F&G (although I would like to convince others that they behave like bullies, because I really do think it quite painfully obvious that they do). But that isn't the same thing as wanting to convince people to dislike them.

The question of why different readers like or dislike certain characters is one that absolutely fascinates me, and so I suppose that also I wanted to see if I could put my finger on my own reasons for feeling about them the way that I do.

But these are separate issues, and unfortunately, I did conflate them. Now I'm really wishing that I hadn't, not only because it has muddied the discussion, but also because it wasn't even all that honest. The fact that I believe the twins to be bullies does have quite a bit of bearing on my feeling such a strong personal dislike for them, yes. But it is not the only reason that I dislike them, nor do I even know if I believe that it is the most important reason. After all, I do feel affection for other canon characters who bully. I even feel affection for some characters who are downright wicked.

So leaving out the twins' bullying behavior altogether for now, why else do I dislike them so much? What sorts of things can lead a reader to feel such a strong dislike for a fictional character?

Well. We might want to consider our own personal experience with people who resemble those characters in real life. Fiction relies on the reader's ability to sense patterns, to fill in the gaps in the text with their own understanding of human nature -- understanding derived from real life observations. We know what a character is "like" not only from what the text tells us, but also from extrapolation from what the text shows us. We derive our impressions of character in part by generalizing from type.

Do the twins remind us of anyone?

HF, to whom I misattributed a quote, wrote:

HF DID NOT, but someone else did, write...

AARRGH!!!

Oh, man. I'm really sorry about that, HF. You see what happens when you try to cut and paste from a gazillion posts?

<Elkins shakes her head in disgust. She reaches into a pocket, draws out a ruler, hands it to HF, and then extends one hand, palm up. She looks away, wincing slightly>

Go on, then.

HF:

I think I can safely say I'd be the last person to trust in the parity of older schoolkids to keep the balance of playground power. Partly, that's because I was the kid who hung upside down on the monkey bars until she got a good buzz on from the blood rushing to her head.

Oh, hey, yeah, I remember you! I always wondered how you could do that for so long without being sick all over the macadam.

I was that kid who was always sitting right up against the wall of the school, where the teachers could keep an eye on me, reading my book and only occasionally looking up to glare out over the crowds and entertain myself with Columbinish fantasies of bloody vengeance.

Except right after it had rained, of course. Then I became the kid running around trying to rescue all of the stranded worms from the pavement and put them safely in the grass before Fred and George could organize all of the other kids into a "worm-stomping party."

*

I can pretend to know HF, because I remember the kid who was always hanging upside down from the monkey bars.

I feel that I know the twins, because I remember the kids who resembled them.

I didn't like them much.

*

[HF's real life Twins]

And if that's too personal a statement to make in an otherwise psychosocial debate... the heck with it. So be it.

Yes. So be it. I don't really see how we can speak honestly about our reasons for liking or disliking certain characters without occasionally bringing up their real life analogues. When characters remind us strongly of people we have known in real life, that has an enormous impact on how we view them. To refuse to acknowledge that fact just constrains the discussion, IMO.

Needless to say, I had my own twins. They lived up the street from me, and were quite a few years older. Not that that ever held them back. They were downright mean, they were, and yet strangely, they had this reputation as kind, good-hearted, chivalrous protectors of the weak. They were indeed very nice to their younger brother and his friends, and to the other kids that they liked. In fact, they even did mentoring work with disadvantaged children! What a pair of saints! But how they treated younger kids they didn't like? ::shudder:: It was impossible to get anyone to take complaints about them seriously, of course. Everyone knew, you see, that they were such good guys. Jokers sometimes, yes. But harmless. No harm in 'em. Hearts of gold, they had. Honest.

One of my closest childhood friends also had two younger brothers who remind me far too much of the twins (or should I say, vice versa?). They were just as merciless as could be, and they made his life one great big ball of agonized stress, until he finally escaped them by leaving home.

The twins also remind me a good deal of my third grade teacher. Boy, did everyone love him! Except for the three or four kids he regularly reduced to tears in the classroom, that is. But you know, those were just the priggish humorless kids, the ones who couldn't take a joke. Their loss. I'm sure that he was just trying to teach them to lighten up. ::snort:: Yeah. Sure. Right. It's a funny thing, though, see, because I was certainly a priggish and humorless child, and yet I was virtually impossible to reduce to tears -- or, for that matter, to force any response out of at all. I would just stare at him blankly until he looked away. Now surely, if anyone needed to be taught to "lighten up," it would have been me, don't you think? And yet I noticed that after a while, he stopped dealing with me at all. He just kept teasing the kids who would get visibly upset. Yup. Funny how that works. But I'm sure that he had their best interests at heart.

And then there was a summer camp counsellor who didn't actually bully the kids in his care, but who did in a whole host of ways encourage bullying among them. Since he was officially the authority figure, I really didn't appreciate that. And he was a lot like the twins too. So much fun! So well-liked!

So yes. The Fred and George analogues that I have known in real life certainly do contribute to my feelings of profound dislike for the characters. No question about it.

What else can contribute to a subjective feeling of dislike for a character?

Well, dislike of the narrative function that they serve is another really big one, I'd say. Oliver Wood, for example, is a bit of a flat-liner for me, not due to anything intrinsic to the character, but more because the Quidditch subplots don't interest me all that much, and that is the milieu in which he appears. I have no strong emotions one way or the other about the Quidditch scenes. Therefore, I have no strong emotions one way or the other about Oliver Wood.

I simply loathe comeuppance humor, though. I always have, ever since earliest childhood. I can tolerate it now that I am an adult, but as a child, I detested it so profoundly that I was truly incapable of enjoying any form of fiction that utilized comeuppance humor. I would never have been able to read these books when I was a child.

I don't hate it that much anymore, but it is still by far my least favorite aspect of these books, and the twins, as many have pointed out here, are often used as the author's agents of the books' slapstick comeuppance humor sequences. That is one (although unlike Abigail, I do not believe that it is the only one) of their narrative functions within the text.

So that contributes to my sense of dislike for them as well. I don't like their narrative function; therefore, I do not like them.

Sometimes readers just have plain old preferences in personality, preferences that influence their tastes both in real life companions and in fictional characters.

I, for example, always prefer the sensitive and the neurotic to the callous and the Tough. I prefer the twisted to the straight, the sly to the straightforward, and the Edgy to the blunt.

So this influences my tastes in characters as well. Even the downright Evil characters can inspire fondness in me if they happen to possess the personality traits that I favor. I love Crouch Jr., for example, who is as malicious as they come. He is sadistic, but that is a type of cruelty that at least requires a certain degree of sensitivity and cleverness and insight, all of which are traits that I like.

Brutishness, on the other hand, I find utterly distasteful. It leaves me feeling cold and unsympathetic; I find it so completely charmless that, as weird and irrational as this may sound, the slightest hint of it in a character can instill in me feelings of profound dislike that even the most flagrant displays of sensitive viciousness are powerless to inspire. This is not so much a matter of morality as it is one of aesthetics.

The twins aren't very witty. When they are mean to people, they are mean in blunt, direct ways. Their practical jokes are well-crafted, but they don't strike me as really all that clever. I mean, sweets that make you turn into an animal, or that make your tongue swell up? Dressing up and jumping out to go "boo!" at people? Wands that go all floppy? They're all just rubber chicken gags, really, aren't they? And as for their verbal humor...

Eileen (with whom I really do sometimes disagree, you know. Honest, I do. We don't see eye to eye on the Crouch family!) gave a perfect example of their verbal humor here, in message #43155:

"It's because of you, Perce," said George seriously. "And there'll be little flags on the bonnets, with HB on them - "

"-for Humungous Bighead," said Fred.

Everyone except Percy and Mrs. Weasey snorted into their puddings."

Oh yes, Percy really was just asking for that one, wasn't he? So remarkably witty too.

<Elkins snorts into her own pudding>

Yeah, that was pretty much my reader reaction as well. I rolled my eyes and thought: "Oh yes. How terribly clever."

Eileen quoth:

"Then Fred said abruptly, "I've told you before, Ron, keep your nose out if you like the shape it is."

And again, yes. That's nice, isn't it? Nasty, brutish, and short.

This is a place where aesthetics and morality collide. Brutishness is a type of aggression that I find particularly unsympathetic. I therefore may well judge it far more harshly than I judge sadism.

Sometimes we like or dislike characters based on whether we think that we would enjoy their company in real life. What determines our taste in casual companions is rarely ethics. It is sense of humor, shared interests, shared dislikes.

Obviously, the twins' sense of humor does nothing for me. Nor do I suspect that they would care very much for my own. They seem to believe that Percy is humorless, for example, while I see a good deal of dry wit in many of Percy's lines. I therefore suspect that they would think me humorless as well -- and vice versa.

We don't share interests. The twins are interested in...well, let's see. Quidditch. Practical jokes. Gag items. And, uh, well, that's about it, really. All of those topics bore me. What sorts of topics bore the twins? Well, Percy tries to talk about the WW's safety regulations, and they make fun of him for it. They think that he's being boring. Now me, I would much rather talk about that sort of thing than about sports. In fact, it always rather irks me when Percy's monologues on the legal ins and outs of the WW get shut down, because I want to hear them. So there's not much common ground there. We don't share interests, we don't share likes, we don't share dislikes.

That contributes to my lack of affection for them too, surely. It's hard for me to avoid the suspicion that we would not like each other much in real life, and that in turn makes it hard for me to avoid the suspicion that they'd probably be very aggressive towards me, because as far as I can tell, the twins seem to believe that simply not liking someone is grounds for abuse. They don't just ignore people who annoy them. They actually go after them. They think that it's okay to harass people just because they have a personality that they find obnoxious. That's why they tease Percy. So that makes it hard for me to like them as well. I figure they'd probably be going after me if I lived in their reality.

And then, finally, there is a meta-textual phenomenon that probably has more to do with the depths of my feelings of dislike for these characters than any other factor.

You see, the thing about charismatic bullies that makes them so incredibly infuriating is that nobody will ever believe that they are bullies. Everyone except for their victims (and maybe the one or two by-standers who have caught onto them) thinks that they are the nicest guys imaginable.

Now, I had always assumed that everyone more or less read the twins the same way that I did. Certainly all of my housemates read the twins as bullies. All of my friends read the twins as bullies. My husband was never bullied as a child, and yet even he immediately identified the twins as bullies. He identified them with his own brother, in fact, whom he absolutely adores (as do I), but who was a bully as a child—albeit one of those terribly useful Bullies You Do Know—did I mention that my husband was never bullied? Yup. One man's bully is another man's bodyguard. ;-)

I mean, I just figured that everyone read the twins as bullies. In the post-GoF evaluation within my circle, when the subject would turn to the twins, the conversation would always go pretty much along the lines of: "Oh, I know, those horrible great big bullies, aren't they just awful? And they're really getting worse, too."

So I was absolutely shocked—shocked and indeed more than a little disturbed—when I first discovered that in fact, outside of my immediate circle, these characters are wildly popular. It came as a very nasty revelation, and it led me to dislike them even more, because it had the effect of actually replicating the charismatic bully dynamic, only now on the reader level, rather than on the character level. Not only doesn't Harry realize that the twins are bullies, and not only doesn't Dumbledore realize that the twins are bullies -- but even the readers don't realize that they are bullies! They actually think that they're funny! They actually think that they're cute! They actually think that they're nice! And they actually think that Percy is asking for it!

Yes. Well, that's a dynamic that touches on quite a few hot buttons, and quite a few raw nerves as well. It does have the effect of making me feel a great deal more hostility towards the twins than I ever did before I encountered the fandom -- because oh, don't you see? Don't you see what's happening? They're getting away with it. They're getting away with it yet AGAIN!

Debbie wrote:

Well, the Twins are not lacking in charisma.

<Elkins, thin-lipped, nods grimly>

No. No, they most certainly are not.

So even aside from their bullying, that's why I don't like the twins.

But this raises another issue. Is it even considered okay to talk about ones reasons for feeling dislike for characters on this list? Is it okay to wish ill upon them? Is there some language short of profanity that is unacceptably vituperative to direct towards fictional characters in this forum?

Some people have taken some umbrage with my tone on this thread. Both Pippin and Catherine registered objections to my use of the word "cads" to describe the twins. Someone else (sorry, can't remember who) protested my choice of vocabulary overall.

Too harsh. Too insulting. Not nice.

Um. Well, as someone who tends myself to sympathize and identify with and "like" extremely unpopular characters (and as the founding member of S.Y.C.O.P.H.A.N.T.S.), this accusation interests me very much because honestly, in comparison with the pure ranting and raving abuse that some of my favorite characters regularly receive on this list, words like "cad..." Well, words like that strike me as downright friendly, to tell you the truth.

So I do find myself wondering if my own tendency to identify with terribly unpopular characters may have desensitized me somewhat to how other people feel when they see verbal abuse hurled at some of their own. You see, I've grown used to that. I've had to get used to it. I've even had the experience of declaring that I identify with a character, only to have the very next reply first quote my statement of personal identification, and then follow it up with a stream of vituperative language. That has happened to me more than once.

I always figured that this was okay. A little bit insensitive perhaps, but still well within the bounds of okay. After all, when people do this they are abusing the character, right? Not me. So while it might have been nice for the people who have done this to have prefaced their screaming rant with some statement along the lines of "yes, Elkins, but I'm sure that you're not a..." before they just started venting, I never really considered it obligatory. I just took it as read that they were exempting me, in spite of my points of identification with these characters, from their abuse.

But now I am beginning to wonder if perhaps this real/fictional distinction isn't quite as clear as I had thought that it was.

HF, for example (who might want to rest assured that—in my experience, at any rate—most people really don't grow more vindictive and spiteful as they grow older), wrote:

I find it difficult to understand how you can so eloquently argue against F&G based on their mean-spirited thuggishness and then conclude a post that seems toned in such a way as to echo that mean-spiritedness condemned earlier.

Mean-spirited?

Heh. Oh, that was nothing. Debbie once, I seem to recall, spoke with understated yet undeniable relish about the possibility that the twins' cooperation with DEs in future canon might be coerced in part by someone shoving their own Ton-Tongue Toffees down their throats. Gave me a real chuckle, that did.

But forget the twins. You want to talk about mean-spririted, check out some of the fates that people on this list have wished on Pettigrew in the past! Man! Some people around here have some pretty twisted imaginations, I can tell you.

All I said, in comparison, was that the thought of the twins Getting What's Coming To Them makes me smirk. Just like so many readers smirk—or even laugh out loud—when Dudley or Draco get what's coming to them. Is that the same as what the twins do?

No, see. It isn't. Because there is a very big difference between wishing ill upon a fictional character, and taking hostile action against a real person.

It comes down to the difference that HF described here:

I personally find it strange that I'm going to bat for the twins, mostly because if I knew them in real life I probably wouldn't be able to stand them. I would wish long, agonizing deaths and unspeakable torments for them in their afterlives, and place curses on their firstborn children. . . .Now however, I find myself reacting... well, in a maliciously juvenile sort of way, much like Harry. Maybe it's because F&G are very safely on the printed page, whereas I am not, I don't know.

I think that's it, really. Although, um, kind of in reverse. ;-)

See, from my perspective, Fred and George are just fictional people on a page. That means that I can feel free to hate them to my heart's content: to think ill of them, to wish all manner of evils upon them, to snigger at their misfortunes and fervently hope for their bloody demise. Because they are fictional, I can wish all sorts of things upon them that I would never be able to wish as purely or as intensely or as comfortably upon someone I knew actually to be real.

From the twins' perspective, though (and yes, I do realize that this is, on the face of it, a rather absurd notion), people like Percy and Dudley and Quirrell and little Malcolm Baddock are real people. They occupy the same degree of reality. They live in the same fictional space. So the twins' attitudes towards the other canon characters strike me as significant in a way that listmembers' attitudes towards those same characters really just don't.

You'll notice, for example, that I have never once insinuated that Jenny, say, is callous or thuggish or vindictive or mean-spirited just because she happened to find the Ton-Tongue Toffee scene funny. Jenny isn't any of those things. She's just someone who took cathartic pleasure in the "just desserts" slapstick humor of that particular scene. I didn't happen to share that reaction, but I don't think that makes me a better or a more compassionate person than Jenny at all. It just means that as readers, we have very different instinctive reactions to certain types of scenes.

Similarly, I don't hold it against listmembers if they snicker at Draco getting ferret-bounced, or if they're hoping to see Snape hideously tortured before the series ends, or if they feel furious at even the notion that Draco might be redeemed in canon (thus avoiding the fate that they feel he so richly deserves), or if they want Pettigrew to die really hard. Indeed, people on this list express violent and bloody desires toward the canon characters all the time -- Draco, the Dursleys, Voldemort, and especially Wormtail come in for a lot of that treatment.

In fact, I seem to remember people planning some kind of barbecue a month or so back, in which everyone was joking around about burning books, and hanging people in effigy, and things of that nature. I gather that this had something to do with readers not liking Draco Malfoy, probably because they think of him as a future member of an organization that is kin to the Nazi party, or to the Klan.

You know, organizations that do Bad Things. Bad Things like burning books and forming lynch mobs.

::shrug::

Hey. Whatever. It's okay by me. I know that none of you people are really book-burners, or the sort of people who form lynch mobs. I feel fairly well convinced that nobody here (well...very few, anyway) would really enjoy watching someone killed or horribly tortured. Not in real life. It's all just in fun, isn't it? These are fictional characters. As far as I'm concerned, serving as an outlet for those sorts of emotions is a big part of what fictional characters are for.

I do find it interesting, though, that when I express my dislike of the twins, or when Jenny admits that she just can't stand Hagrid, people do tend to object in ways that they simply don't when others articulate similar feelings about Draco or the Dursleys or Pettigrew or Rita Skeeter or Fudge, or even really harmless characters, like Lavender and Parvati. It's okay not to like certain characters. It's okay to verbally abuse certain characters. It's okay to joke about fantasizing about the death and even torture of some characters -- a few of them characters with whom I happen to sympathize a great deal.

But, boy! You really do have to watch your step when you talk about characters who happen to be popular, don't you? Jenny disses Hagrid, or I call the twins great big bullies, and suddenly all manner of strange accusations are coming out of the woodwork. Accusations of misreading the text. Accusations of distorting the story. Accusations of "over-analyzing." Accusations of engaging in "unconscionable" behavior. One or two "I don't want to hear your unpopular views, so why don't you just shut up already?" posts. And a couple of straight-out ad hominem attacks.

Yup. I'd say that people really are held to different standards when it comes to their discussions of popular characters than they are when it comes to their discussions of unpopular characters.

The relevance of this observation to the entire question of the character of the twins themselves, as well as to the question of whether or not their aggressive behavior towards a few of the less popular characters in the canon can be said to constitute "bullying behavior," is one that I will leave as an intellectual exercise for the astute reader.

—Elkins