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Derannimer asked:
Um. . . how are we defining "hate" here?
An excellent question.
What Does It Mean To "Hate" A Character? *g*
My answer to "what characters do you hate" is utterly dependent on what definition of "hating" people are asking about.
Look, here's the thing. There are plenty of characters whose company I would not especially enjoy were I to meet them in real life. But I enjoy reading probably every single character in the books. And I've read people on this thread saying things that give me the impression that some people don't even like to read certain characters.
Well, a lot of the time people really don't like to read certain characters. Sometimes characters just don't work for you: you don't enjoy their scenes, you don't enjoy their shticks, and then you end up resenting them for taking up "page time" that could have been spent on something else.
But a lot of people here are saying that one character or another really irritates them; which I am taking to mean that they really don't enjoy reading them. So is this true?
Oh, absolutely!
I, for example, simply cannot bear the Dursleys. The Dursley sequences are absolutely my least favorite thing about the books. I deeply resent the fact that they open each novel, thus forcing me to suffer through their one-to-three chapters before I can get on to the enjoyable stuff. When they do things like locking Harry in his room, then that is a Good Thing, as far as I'm concerned, because it means that I'll probably have to read less of them than I would if Harry were interacting with them more directly. And I can never wait for Harry to slip free of their clutches, not so much because I'm rooting for him as because I just want to be able to stop reading them already!
Why do I dislike the Dursleys so much? Oh, I don't know. A number of reasons. They're more broadly caricatured than suits my personal tastes, for one thing. They're far more cartoonishly depicted than even the most grotesque of the Hogwarts characters (Trelawney, for example), which means that they also always seem strangely at odds with the more subtle shadings of the rest of the fictive world to me. They don't seem to...fit, somehow. They feel incongruous.
They also strike me as somewhat derivative. They seem very Roald Dahl to me, and while I like Roald Dahl just fine when Roald Dahl does Roald Dahl, I don't like it nearly so much when JKR tries to do Roald Dahl. If you get my drift.
The humour of their sequences also tends to be very broad, slapstick "comeuppance" humour, which really isn't a type of comedy that I enjoy. Dudley comes in for a lot of "fat humour" as well, which similarly isn't a form of comedy that I enjoy.
Did I leave anything out?
No. No, I think that's about it.
Oh. And I also find them a bit irritating as our textual representatives of all things "Muggle." As silly as this may sound, sometimes that does sort of offend me. I take it personally. ("Over-engage with the text much, Elkins?")
This is a different issue, though, than the questions of which characters I think that I would most dislike in real life, or which characters instill in me the greatest sense of moral disapproval, or which characters make me feel the most angry with them, or which characters I find the least sympathetically portrayed, or which characters I secretly (or not so secretly) want to see evil things happen to.
Quite a few of the characters who would fulfill the above criteria also qualify as the characters I most like to read about!
—Elkins
Posted to HPfGU by Elkins on January 31, 2003 4:40 AM
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