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The HMS STFU - What's Love Got to Do With It? Everything!
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| Harry experiences storgē from and towards the people who have become his family. (Little side note: some of you may remember one of the possible titles passed around for Book 6—Harry Potter and the Pillar of Storgē, which is now quite humorous in hindsight. Hell, even JKR thought it was funny.)
Liked that one, by the way. :)
I read through the analysis piece here, and I think the points are well-made; the problem of having only the single word for a very broad range of concepts ("love") does create a kind of situation of cross-purposes where people who believe it must be romantic love that would save the day end up finding that JKR has employed a different concept of it - almost a totally abstract one, of a love for humanity as a whole - to show Harry's true importance as the one who will defeat Voldemort.
Romantic love is a bit too narrow of a concept to really fill the bill, and in any case I think JKR demonstrated it has its own flaws; consider Dumbledore/Grindelwald, or for that matter, Bellatrix/Rodolphus (*shudder*), or Bellatrix/Voldemort (*double shudder*). It's a very much eye-of-the-beholder thing, whereas the broader kind, Harry's saving-people thing, as Hermione pots it, encompasses what is needed to match Voldemort's particular brand of hate and enmity. | | (Reply to this) (Thread) |
| Do the other kinds of love have flaws and pitfalls like romantic love's?
Also, I'm reminded of the manga Monster, which starred a surgeon who also had a "saving-people thing," and contrasted him with a villain who basically had a "destroying-people thing." (This guy was a handsome, charismatic orphan, like another young villain we know, but he was also a self-made orphan, and he didn't just kill -- he would make fifty people kill each other without lifting a finger himself, or get a recovering alcoholic to go back on the bottle just before shoving him off a roof. And there was more than one occasion when he faced someone with a gun and just smiled and pointed to his forehead.) | | (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread) |
| Hmm. Point taken. I think a better way of saying what I was trying to say is that for the purposes of understanding why shipping isn't the central key to Harry Potter is that romantic love can, in principle, be between any two (or more, as squicky as that may seem to some) people be they good guys or bad guys (JKR did write these books as a children's series, at least nominally).
It takes a different kind of love to be effective against someone who has consciously rejected the common bonds of humanity, such as against Voldemort.
Does that help? | | (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread) |
| (Anonymous) | | Link: | (Link) | | Time: | 2009-05-11 04:15 pm (UTC) |
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| | I don't think it's just love for humanity as a whole: Harry is impelled by his love for various individuals, such as his parents, Sirius, Ron and Hermione - and also Ginny, though that's not emphasised at the cost of the others. It's interesting how many characters are 'saved' in some way or another by their love for an individual - Dumbledore's for Ariana, Regulus' for Kreacher, Snape's for Lily, Narcissa's for Draco - though in only one of those cases is the love romantic. | | (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread) |
| (Anonymous) | | Link: | (Link) | | Time: | 2009-05-11 05:18 pm (UTC) |
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| | Whatever would you call Snape's feelings towards Lily, Regulus' love for Kreacher was definitely romantic. | | (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread) |
| (Anonymous) | | Link: | (Link) | | Time: | 2009-05-11 06:53 pm (UTC) |
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| | They definitely had that element to them but I think there had to be some pure affection/love for him to be able to conjure a Patronus from memories of her. That charm doesn't seem to work unless there are genuinely happy memories to use. | | (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread) |
| (Anonymous) | | Link: | (Link) | | Time: | 2009-05-31 02:33 am (UTC) |
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| How does Snape being stalkerish and creepy have *anything* to do with whether his feelings were romantic in nature? 'Cause they sure weren't platonic.
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| | You made me have to enact an emergency clean-up around my keyboard as I was drinking 7-Up at the time. :P | | (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread) |
| | Eh, I would, in the sense that he loved her in a way that demanded a romantic relationship. It wasn't pure and sacrificial and asexual and it wasn't platonic. It wasn't romantic in the sense that I'd want it for myself. | | (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread) |
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The HMS STFU - What's Love Got to Do With It? Everything!
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