~~ "his own little snivellus"...

reading sistermagpie's utterly brilliant post-ootp essay on draco, i was initially all impressed because it seemed to be so refreshingly objective and yet not in any way demeaning to harry. people usually either love harry or can't really dig him at all (he's a brat, he's self-absorbed and sulky and arrogant and so on), but as i went on, the greater insights (and the point of the essay) were about draco, who she obviously sees with a clarity borne of love.

and i guess it just makes me wonder, not for the first time, whether the greater clarity and originality of vision comes from love or from distancing oneself from it. i think it's only when you love a character that instead of saying, "he's sulky", for instance, you say he has a "disconnect between who he wants to be and who he is". it's love that lets you -imagine-, trace the reasons behind their behavior, makes you want to explain how -yes-, this is unacceptable, but it's a -sad- thing, it's a sign of a problem, a life gone astray, someone who's lost and unable to figure out how to help themselves. if you don't want to put in the effort to understand someone, that's when you say, "look, he's acting unreasonably". because in the end, no one -is- acting unreasonably, even in their complete lack of -rational- reason, are they. everyone is a person like any other, living a life that's made them into who they are just as inexorably as it's done for everyone else.

i think the best writing, the best understanding, does come from an acknowledgement of commonality, an attempt at empathy. i myself can easily identify with a draco who's the product of a frustrated, feverish imagination, a need to be more than he is-- more loved, more needed. i can empathize with someone's need for attention and approval, their need to reinvent themselves to fight the reality of their defeat, their resentment of their own ineffectualness, their need to shift the blame towards someone else. in the end, we've all got bits of these things, elements of all possible characters, especially archetypically heavy ones, within ourselves. i've always believed love to be a triumph of imagination, a partial recognition of oneself in the other, a sudden flush of understanding, conscious or not. it's this sense that i could be this person that makes people smile, relax around someone, feel close to them. and harry feels he could never be this person, around draco, which is where the antipathy comes from, doesn't it. sort of the anti-identification. you look at someone and you say, "but this is everything that i'm not". and if you feel insecure, if you feel like you're -missing- something, or that you're easily threatened, not settled into your place in the scheme of things-- then you would defend yourself, you would make an enemy and start marking territory, wouldn't you. there is only room for one and never both of you, then.

and what a weird twist it would be, then, to realize that you can share space not just out of some high-minded tolerance of differences but because of a kinship-- a realization that you're actually more alike than you are different. a necessary twist, even.

( oh yes. harry -must- like draco, it's all very simple really >:D )

~~

also... i'm starting to take things i read people saying about luna personally. this is kind of disturbing -.-