This isn’t even an attack on JK Rowling. It’s just looking back on it, there are a lot of deeply flawed characters in HP. And I’m mainly thinking of the adults.
Snape is the obvious one, even if he’s technically on the good side. But James Potter was also an arrogant bully, just a charismatic and intelligent one.
Lupin was my favorite DADA teacher and top 5 characters overall, but his struggles in the later books leading him to almost abandon his wife and child due to his insecurity really rubbed me the wrong way. Of course Harry knocked some sense into him, and he did go back and tend to his family, but it permanently left a bad taste in my mouth.
Sirius was cool as hell, and was a very loving uncle/godfather to Harry. But he also mistreated Kreacher which partly led to his demise. I guess the “norm” in the wizard world was that house elves were practically slaves so it was considered “normal behavior”, but his brother Regulus was able to overcome that pretty well.
Dumbledore’s the obvious big target. He knew that Harry was a Horcrux, but still led him on the whole way through. And the whole sending Harry back to the Dursleys thing, even if Lily’s charm only worked then, he still visited the Weasley’s just fine. And of course his past with his family and Grindewald and all. A LOT has been discussed around the big D, I won’t bring up everything else.
There are others, like the two wizard presidents, flawed in different ways.
I’ll look past the main trio’s flaws, because a) they’re kids/teenagers, and b) it’s their story to come of age and mature after trials and tribulations, so they’re better flawed than to be Mary Sue and Gary Stu’s.
On the flip side, some of the supposed “evil” characters also have redeeming qualities. Narcissus Malfoy saved the plot due to her motherly love. Harry’s aunt, despite hating his guts due to her resentment towards Lily, still took him in. I already mentioned Regulus and Snape (the latter I still consider creepy, and he only worked for his personal motivations until the very end, never out of good or evil).
Wormtail is an interesting one, because it’s less that he has a redeeming quality, more that his main character trait ended up becoming his character resolution, similar to the climax of Lord of The Rings which I will consider peak fiction (pun somewhat intended).
There’s the stable characters with no significant divergence: McGonagall was always cool, the Weasley parents were always loving and kind despite their quirks/somewhat overprotectiveness, Moody was the badass paranoid war vet. And the obvious bad guys like Lucius, Umbridge, and Bellatrix made it easy to hate them as villains.
I guess this post developed from “huh, some of the good guys were kinda assholes” into “People are not always black and white, the good have bads and the bads have good”, and I suppose that’s the takeaway.
Turning this around to JK Rowling, I guess this applies to her as well. Despite her views, she still managed to write a sensational series that’s forever ingrained into our culture, and that’s not an easy feat.
What do you guys think? This might have been a fairly basic observation and a topic for middle school essays, but I’m just coming to terms with it, and I wanted to share with a community of readers.
by Megabot555
34 Comments
I agree – but that’s part of coming of age. We idolize our adult mentors and family members when we’re young and as we get older we see their flaws. Lupin, Snape and Sirius, etc were all human and the product of their environment and past traumas. I can appreciate them now because we do what we think is right at the time, but later realize we were wrong or misguided.
Lupin was deadass wrong to abandon his wife and child, but he thought being an absentee dad was better than dooming them to a life of being outcasts in the wizarding community. It was foul of him, BUT in his tortured mind – it was the loving thing to do for his family.
Can anyone of us as adults relate and empathize with making similar (or not so similar) mistakes in life? We get called out on it, learn and move on.
Harry Potter is a series that doesn’t shy away from the harsh realities of life and adulthood, and shows how it can overcome.
I’m glad the adults have flaws.
That was kind of the point. No one is all good or bad. The world isn’t good guys vs death eaters.
Disagree on Sirius, he hated kreachur specifically and was regarded as generally kind to house elves. Kreachur worshipped his abusive family and hated Sirius too for how he rejected the family
If you study anyone long enough, you’ll decide they’re shitty people
I think part of growing up is realizing that you empathize less with Harry Potter and more with Argus Filch
My argument has always been Hagrid stupidly turns a blind eye to how dangerous his creatures are; the very ones he intentionally brings into contact with students.
He’s under the delusion that giant spiders like Aragog are just “misunderstood” when their very nature is that they are predators who will EAT HUMANS. Aragog was two seconds away from eating Harry and Ron even when they told him Hagrid sent them!
Hagrid would be the Tiger King of the Wizarding World.
She did this on purpose, she made plenty of good guys do terrible things, and plenty of bad guys do good things, and still more random characters who are bad on one level and good on another level.
Also I don’t think James Potter was presented in a positive light. He was a classic school bully and that was a disappointment for Harry. But Harry would have been one too if he grew up with privileged wizard parents instead of growing up as an unwanted nephew. At the end of the day what mattered more was that James joined the good fight of fighting Voldemort while Snape joined Voldemort. And this was brewing even while they were in school because Snape was getting more into the idea of wizard purity while James would have been totally against that stuff.
I agree with pretty much all of your examples except for Sirius. Kreacher was a hateful little shit that 100% supported the Black family and the Death eaters. Iirc in the books, Hermione suggests freeing Kreacher but Sirius is like “Lol hell no, he will immediately snitch on us to Voldemort.”.
>I guess this post developed from “huh, some of the good guys were kinda assholes” into “People are not always black and white, the good have bads and the bads have good”, and I suppose that’s the takeaway.
I think you arrived at the right conclusion. These characters had depth that could be accessed for readers outside of the target audience and also grew with the audience. They wouldn’t be well written characters without these flaws.
Personally, I’ve always thought that was the point. That people are messy and no one is perfect.
Bellatrix was just insane and still, she loved her sister. Even Voldemort, I could feel for him as a child because of the rejection and things he faced. Aunt Petunia, she was jealous and scared and she loved her son into foolishness. Dudley, jealous and mean and a bully but he did show gratitude. Wicked Snake, capable of loving Lily even when she didn’t love him back.
There was no perfect character and that’s why I love HP so much.
Isn’t that the whole point? It starts off very black and white about good and evil, but as the series matures then gets into how the ‘good’ guys made mistakes and contributed to the ‘evil’ that came later – eg snape would likely not have become evil without the bullying.
Dumbledore is the best example, his backstory shows he is a compromised person (admits he enjoys power) and he attempts to deal with that. The whole point of the story is that everyone is flawed and (almost) everyone has redeemable qualities.
Even for Voldemort, there’s a somewhat understandable backstory for why he’s basically an unfeeling psychopath.
As an aside, the story begins on motherly love defeating Voldemort and somewhat ends on Narcissus’ motherly love helping to defeat Voldemort. So these are long term payoffs. Voldemort cannot understand such love because he was born of a love potion and abandoned. And so misses it every time.
Edit: typo
Wait til you find out about people in real life
Complicated characters do be complicated.
It’s almost as if she wrote characters with real human characteristics.
So like the real world?
That’s actually the opposite of an attack on JKR. It shows that she is able to write very realistic characters while still having obvious heroes and villains. Which is amazing, especially considering the scale of Harry Potter.
I think thats part of good writing. Angels dont exist. We all have potential for good and bad. Depending on the circumstances or environment you are in your character changes because humans are very adaptable or impressionable depending on how you see it.
Good and evil was a prominent theme in the franchise right down to Harry being sorted. Its about our humanity.
You are not an exception.
Lupin makes a pretty good stand in for that adult that is wonderful when clean but a monster when doing whatever drug he falls into. Trying to get clean but faltering at stressful moments where his past keeps coming back.
As another comment put it it: it’s part of the “coming of age” ritual. When you’re young, you think in very simplistic terms: these people are good and helpful; the others are bad and mean. But as you get older and learn more about the world, you see everything is really many, many shades of gray. The people you thought were good turn out to be less than ideal after all, and the “baddies” actually do something good once in a while.
Which is just like real life, and a core part of the HP books is based on reality- specifically, UK boarding school life and all the drama and school politics that happen there, from my understanding.
I mean, the world is filled with shitty and complex people that can’t just be put in the category of “good.” It’d be weird if not? Because no one and no interactions would be relatable.
One of the things that made HP popular was this, I think. The characters are human, with good and bad feelings, and a struggle between them.
Had they been one-dimensional, it’d have been just a kids thing.
And children and teens also detected that – they could immerse themselves on the story because of the people, the magic was the extra.
In the end it is a story about overcoming evil, but also how evil is not always black and white.
Moody always annoyed me because his whole character isn’t actually Moody, it’s a guy pretending to be the moody character
We barely ever see actual mad-eye-moody, just a couple scenes in books tOotP onwards
Honestly, i sort of agree, but i really dont think its a bad thing. Its realistic, its almost good prep for becoming an adult. Having them as flawless people who are perfect is misleading and wouldnt fit the story or world very well, esp as it gives characters like harry a chance to see this and correct the adults which has personally happened with me in my life.
I will say, Molly Weasley was kinda a bitch when it came to Fluer marrying Bill – J K Rowling’s narrative in HP made it out that if you were a woman who liked feminine things, you were either evil or looked down on
The slut shaming of fluer always rubbed me the wrong way
What do you call a “problematic character” who isn’t incorruptible and doesn’t live up to all ethical norms?
A person.
I hated Dumbledore and I used to see him used as an allegory for god or whatever, like lawful good, and I disagree. I think that’s a child’s perception of him and that’s kind-of the point. As an adult I see him as well-meaning but a morally gray character and we don’t get to see a lot of his internal struggles that would make that obvious.
I used to think Sirius was a cool uncle, but when I re-read the books in my adulthood, I kinda don’t think that anymore. To me, Sirius never dealt with James’s death and projects James onto Harry A LOT. An unhealthy amount. It’s like he is trying to relive his friendship with James via Harry, tries to push Harry to be more like James to make the immersion better.
I think this makes their relationship pretty toxic, especially since Harry is just a kid and desperate for a father figure.
That doesn’t make Sirius a bad person, or even a completely bad uncle, but he is the adult in the relationship and I think he shows very little self-awareness around this. But to me this is a pro, it makes the character more realistic and layered. He’s a good man, but he is damaged and not dealing with some of his problems well.
I always thought Harry’s dad was a huge dick.
Arthur Weasley is my favorite adult character in HP and one of the very few who I feel understands the prejudice wizards have against muggles and has rejected it. So many “good” characters, including Molly, casually view muggles as inferior, they just don’t want to hurt them like Death Eaters do.
McGonagall: “I’ve been watching them all day, they’re the worst sort of muggle.”
Molly: “How do those muggles manage?”
Hagrid: “I wouldn’t expect a great muggle like you to understand.”
Quoted from memory more or less accurately, those are some lines I find show exactly what these characters think of muggles. Primitive, not necessarily bright, potentially prone to aggression or selfishness. In LOTR, Frodo remarks that before meeting Aragorn, he considered all humans “kindly and stupid”, like Butterbur, or “wicked and stupid”, like Bill Ferney. Gandalf of course ensures him that Butterbur is not stupid, but Frodo’s prior assessment of humans is just about what most wizards see in muggles. Even those who are pro-muggle rights and pro-integration of muggleborns frequently use the term muggle as something close to a slur.
Arthur is one of the very few (along with Dumbledore) who recognizes and actively reject this narrative. He also understands how pervasive the anti-muggle attitude is in society, and freaks out at Fred and George for their bullying of Dudley, correctly assessing that what they’re doing is just a very low level of petty crime on the same spectrum as muggle slaughter. They meant it more as a personal vendetta against Dudley himself, but they took advantage of his powerlessness against them to make sport of him for Harry’s and their own amusement. A few chapters later, we see real Death Eaters suspending an entire muggle family upside down and parading them around like puppets, physically and psychologically torturing them for fun. The young characters who laughed at Dudley are horrified to see it, but Arthur doesn’t really push the issue at the moment.
The one real criticism you could level at Arthur is that he somewhat sacrifices his family’s wellbeing for his own passion and values. While his family doesn’t suffer, it’s clear that being poor is something that weighs on them, and that it isn’t something that’s necessarily unchangeable. Both Arthur and Molly come from old pureblood families and have the means and the connections to move up, but Arthr refuses to abandon his career in pursuit of money, which is both admirable and selfish.
The fact that the adults wre assholes too, from my perspective products of what they have been through, in my opinion constitutes good writing. Unfortunately, people living trough such times are deeply flawed, and she represented that well.
If you’re going to overlook the main trio’s flaws because they’re kids, then shouldn’t James be given the same leeway? He was also just a kid, after all.
So they’re like real people? Because people are complex and have good and bad sides.
I don’t know why people expect every fictional character to be completely unrealistically flawless. These aren’t “shitty people” they’re normal complex individuals.
To quote Sirius
“The world isn’t split into good people and Death Eaters. We’ve all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That’s who we really are.”