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Being the possessor of a rather hard personality, I am not often sorry for HP characters (any characters, to be honest) but I /am/ sorry for Peter. How could I not be, when he is one of the most human characters in the series? Snape may be more complex than him (and everyone else in the books, for that matter), but Snape has an almost preternatural ability to handle himself. Peter doesn't; no matter what he chooses, all sides are his enemy. Sometimes it is too late to turn back - by embodying that uncomfortable truth, Peter is the presence of the tragic in HP.
I think that Peter has so many detractors because when people look at other characters, they see whom they would like to be, and when they look at Peter, they see who they are. | ||
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The issue of the experiments into obedience is fascinating. I've studied some of those experiments myself, and they provide a bleak but highly accurate portrait of human nature. Frankly, I've always felt that evil happens, most often than not, not because people say "yes", but because they don't say "no" (fans of Lord Vetinari from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series know of what I speak; go and read his soliloquy in Guards! Guards! about the nature of evil - you can find it on-line here).
In fact, that's one of the reasons why I prefer LotR over HP *dodges flying tomatoes* The morality of LotR is much more refined, much more attuned to human realities, for all the book is full of orcs. HP is full of characters whose bravery or loyalty is super-human; not so with LotR, although the heroic is much more present in the latter than in the former. In LotR, everybody is vulnerable to the lure of the Ring. Good intentions sometimes end badly. Look at the Ringwraiths in LotR; I think that, in their emptiness, they represent the bureaucracy of evil, so to speak. The evil that triumphs because good men do nothing - and by going along with it, the wraithing process begins. Simply because it's easier to obey than to say no. Look at the great atrocities in history: they were not carried out by Evil Overlords. Sure, there have been various "leaders" that amply fulfill the requirements of that category, but the actual people who carried out those deeds, who handled the nitty-gritty details - they were just ordinary people following orders they knew to be evil simply because it was easier that way. For all their actions were monstrous, they weren't monsters themselves. They did what most people would do in their situation, and that is what is so terrifying. We want to think that would be able to keep evil at a distance; that, however, is not true, and to confront that fact is very difficult to many people. I think many HP fans don't want to acknowledge that they would behave exactly like Peter if put in his situation. Peter embodies the only occasion in HP in which the main moral theme of LotR is echoed: that, as it comes to evil, this could be you, and if you don't accept that, this will be you. And people call LotR escapist fantasy? I think not. |
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Well, actually... I personally disagree with the idea that Peter makes a great villain. I think he makes a great traitor but I don't think he makes a great villain, for the reasons that follow (this is a bit long and pretensious, so bear with me).
I think that all great villains have an element of the mythical about them. By mythical, I mean something that separates them from the human - if you take a look at the best villains in literature and cinema, they have superhuman powers of endangerment or/and subhuman empathy and vulnerability (generally both). This has the effect of removing them from the human sphere, and therefore both increases the sense of menace they present and severs them from human morality (this later is what causes their ultimate downfall, of course). The best villains are purposefully hermetic - the introduction of a human element would corrupt the separateness of the villain. That's way Mephistopheles is a villain and Faustus is not. You could almost say that the best villains are a reification of evil - but when the human element is introduced, they are humanised and leave the mythical plan to join the mundane. (This is not true only of villains, of course: look at Dream in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series.) In LotR, Frodo finds Gollum a creature worthy of his pity rather than his fear or hatred - so Gollum goes from being a shadow trailing the Fellowship to a pitiable wretch. Notice, too, the effect of Sam's thoughts on the fallen Haradrim soldier: he goes from the "otherness" of a nameless menace to an ordinary person who would have probably have preferred to stay home than being dragged into service of Sauron by lies or threats. (Talking of Sauron, notice another dehumanising feature of villains: the deliberate erasing of their names - He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, Sauron who never allows his name to be spoken or written, She who Must Be Obeyed, etc. - which serves to make them more remote.) So Peter doesn't make a good villain. He's too human for that. |
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