« Previous Post | Index | Next Post »
Kimberley asked:
Oh - while I'm at it... why do people see the canary cream thing with Neville as mean? . . . .Those of you who consider it to be mean, why is that? Did it seem like ridicule to you?
Not necessarily like ridicule, no. As you point out later, the canary cream was on a public plate, so no one was being particularly targetted by the prank.
I did see it as rather mean, though, mainly because of the way that Fred gave Neville reassurance that the custard creams really were safe. I didn't like that much.
Then, I admit that I'm not a big fan of practical jokes in general, and of food tampering in particular, so I'm probably biased. Maybe I'm just unusually squeamish and humorless when it comes to my food, but food tampering is a form of practical joking that I tend to find particularly nasty and unamusing. That bit in PoA about the Twins slipping beetles into Bill's soup...ugh. Not funny.
And Neville would seem to feel much the same way. When Fred tells Hermione that "it's the custard creams you've got to watch—" while Neville has just bit into one of the custard creams, he immediately chokes and spits it out. To my mind, that indicates quite clearly that whatever the twins have done to the sweets, he really wants absolutely nothing to do with it.
And then Fred reassures them that no, really, the custard creams are fine. Just to trick him into eating one.
And...oh, I don't know. That really does seem mean to me. Springing booby-trapped sweets on people isn't my idea of a funny joke to begin with, admittedly, but I still find that far more acceptable than reassuring someone who obviously finds the idea dismaying and distasteful that their food has not been tampered with — when in fact it has.
I also see a significant difference between simply springing a joke on someone (when you are, after all, a notorious prankster), and convincing someone to trust you...only to then spring a joke on him. The latter is meaner, to my mind, because it forces the victim to look doubly the fool: first for being trusting enough to swallow the trick to begin with; and then a second time, for being naive enough to trust in the prankster's deceitful masquerade of sincerity.
I am very protective of Neville, he's one of my most beloved characters and I hate that the trio leaves him out all the time and when McG was so mean to him about the passwords I wanted to shake her.
Yes. All of my buffoonery over his backstory aside, I, too, love Neville. I was a weird little semi-autistic space-cadet of a child myself, and so I tend to identify very deeply with him.
(Did I even once remember to bring in one of my permission slips in grade school? No. I don't believe that I ever did. Not once. I was just notorious for that sort of thing as a child. And I used to get lost a lot, too. I would get off the school bus at the wrong stop and then wander around for hours, trying to figure out where my house could have disappeared to. No, not joking.)
When I read the bit about the canary cream, I thought it was great because while Hermione treats Neville with great kindness, it also seems rather condescending to me.
Really? Oh, I'm so glad that someone else feels that way! I was beginning to think that was just me.
Yes. Hermione is kind to him, and of course he appreciates that, because really, she's the only one who is, and he doesn't have any other friends. But at the same time, I do see a certain condescension in her treatment of Neville. When she approaches him after Fake Moody's DADA class, for example, that particular way that she explains to Ron and Harry "Neville," before marching purposefully towards him—as if he's just the Cause of the Week, you know, or a chore that must be taken care of—I don't think that Neville is at all obtuse when it comes to interpersonal matters. He's well aware of the condescension. And frankly, it really didn't surprise me that he chose to try to gloss over his distress. I don't know if Neville would want to confide his family history in anyone at this point in his life, but even he did, I still don't think he'd be willing to talk to Hermione about it. She's shown him kindness and support, but not much of the type of respect that inspires personal revelation, IMO.
I'll even let you in on a little secret here. I thought that Lupin's oh-so-blatant "let's bolster Neville's confidence" was kind of condescending too, to tell you the truth. And you know how much I adore Lupin!
To me the canary cream thing wasn't Fred and George singling out a "weak" person to pick on. I think at best it was them not differentiating between "poor weak Neville" and everyone else who would be a target of their jokes, and at worst it was them putting out canary creams and Neville being the one to pick one up, meaning that they had no particular target in mind.
You know, you've got a very good point there. The fact that Neville is pudgy probably was a large part of what made the joke seem so particularly unkind to me, but of course, you're quite right: Neville wasn't singled out to serve as the target originally. And I agree with you that from Neville's own point of view, the way that his housemates generally single him out for pity and condescension (when they're not simply ignoring him) is probably only marginally more pleasant than the way that the Slytherins single him out for abuse.
So yes. Point taken. Not sparing Neville their practical jokes any more than they spare anyone else is a point in the twins' favor for me.
What's more, the incident showed Neville in a very good light, as I see it. We see that Neville is a good sport who's comfortable enough with himself despite his insecurities that he can appreciate a good joke, even if the joke is him.
I agree that the incident shows Neville in a very good light. It does show him to be a good sport, and to possess a certain generosity of spirit. I don't know if I really believe that Neville thought the joke itself all that "good," though. I didn't get the impression that he liked the idea of the tampered sweets at all. And as he couldn't himself see what he looked like as a canary, it strikes me as unlikely that the metamorphosis could possibly have been nearly as amusing for him as it was for everyone else.
But of course, once one has become the target of a practical joke, the best course generally is to laugh along with everyone else, even if one didn't personally find the joke all that amusing. After all, assuming that there was no malice intended, and nothing at all personal about the joke, then why put a damper on everyone else's fun by refusing to laugh along with them?
—Elkins, who has indeed finally learned to laugh at practical jokes even when she finds them profoundly unamusing, but who suspects that she still can't do so terribly convincingly.
Posted to HPfGU by Elkins on March 7, 2002 3:58 PM
« Previous Post | Index | Next Post »