Harry Potter-OOC or was it the Horcrux? short format
See disclaimer on the long format version
angakkuq_10: There's nothing in the epilogue to suggest that things were all happy shiny rainbows for anybody but Harry and his family.
There are still problems. Harry just doesn't have to worry about his destiny anymore. Nothing to indicate the wizarding world doesn't still have at least some of the same problems. Just saying.
thanfiction: No! Everyone was happy and ever after and babies and shipping and win and sparkles!
ceirdwenfc: There is nothing wrong with that!
NOTHING
kate_lb: And death glares and wank to anyone who says otherwise!
ceirdwenfc: Except the sparkles
Sparkles suck
thanfiction: There are 'ships. Most of the DA winds up marrying each other.
angakkuq_10: Yeah, there's nothing wrong with a happy ending. The canon kind of has one foot in fairy-tale-mode, as Ryan put it once.
kate_lb: What do you have against sparkles?
ceirdwenfc: They're...very...sparkly
angakkuq_10: After Twilight, nobody can ever say "sparkles" unironically again.
kate_lb: Point.
thanfiction: It's just a matter of how you interpret a happy ending. There seems to be a feeling it means nothing bad ever happened to anyone ever again, not even a hangnail, and that everyone skipped away from the battlefield with no scars, inside or out.
angakkuq_10: Yeah, pretty much. Life does not work that way.
faeriegal713: The problem with that version of a happy ending is that means there was no character development what-so-ever. We all come out of the difficulties in our life with a greater understanding of ourselves and the world. If we don't, that's where we discover we're all quite capable of being mean and nasty with envy and greed as our leading sins.
mus.
angakkuq_10: There's also the condemnation of bigotry and small-mindedness, and emphasizing that there's more to people that what's immediately apparent. A theme you could argue DAYD continues and expands on a bit.
thanfiction: You could say that theme runs through all ten books, actually.
angakkuq_10: True.
faeriegal713: *nods* Choice is a huge theme in Sluagh as well, even if sometimes it's a character's inability to see that there is a choice.
angakkuq_10: There also seems to be the theme of the cycle of prejudice, jealousy, and vindictiveness. A cycle that Harry, fortunately, breaks.
thanfiction: I don't know if you can call choice a theme in a work, though, because LIFE is a series of choices, as is every story.
angakkuq_10: Well, it's the choices Harry has made that show how unlike Riddle he is. And, paradoxically, how LIKE Riddle he is.
thanfiction: I think, if you go Daydverse, that there's a lot of untapped comparison, if you want to look at the difference love and friendship makes, between Terry and Riddle as well. Maybe even moreso than Harry, because Harry had love in infancy and he didn't have the kind of genius Riddle did that helped feed the superiority complex.
angakkuq_10: Harry was a prodigy in his own right, really. Give him a good teacher in any subject and the incentive to succeed and he excels.
thanfiction: Yes, but give anyone who is reasonably intelligent a good teacher and a good motivation and they can do most anything. Terry and Tom both have that self-driven prodigy element. They were both doing advanced magic very early, and both driven to understand the roots of magic, find its full potential, and advance it further.
angakkuq_10: Point.
Harry does pretty well, though, for someone who grew up with a family that actively discouraged him from developing his imagination and creativity.
thanfiction: I think if he hadn't found Mike, Riddle would have found that Harry Potter was the least of his problems in that year as far as a challenge to his authority.
ceirdwenfc: He still had an active imagination - he needed an escape somehow, and isn't that the perfect fantasy for an abused child - this isn't my family - I have family somewhere else, and he had Sirius and Hogwarts.
thanfiction: I'm not saying anything against Harry. There's a big difference between saying "he's not a once in generation prodigy" and "he's nothing special."
faeriegal713: I think it would be interesting to explore the differences between Terry and Tom Riddle, they were much alike if you look closely at their back history, the only true difference being that Terry found Mike just before it was too late. They're both incredibly powerful with their magic and it's intuitive to both of them to explore and try to understand it like no one else had. Again, Mike kept Terry from jumping in over his head and gave him a steady ground and most importantly, a human contact who loved and understood him. Tom never had that, much as his top DE would have liked to argue against.
thanfiction: And thus he was meddling in deep Legilimency at 14 rather than Horcruxes.
angakkuq_10: And I can't help but think cutting your soul to ribbons would have an effect on your, well, psyche.
thanfiction: Hogwarts is the cream of the crop.
faeriegal713: Everyone there had to be just a little extra special.
thanfiction: Unless you have your ticket bought by a Malfoy, you're automatically in the highest percentile, so the curve is skewed.
One thing about Harry that I've never seen personally explored in Meta is how much of that tug of war he always seems to have going on between the "white dog" and "black dog" so to speak, and how that's so often at such an exaggerated level, particularly in OTP, might have to do with having a fragment of LV in him. It can't just have been the Parseltongue, and it's just coincidence that Harry was an erratic, borderline schitzo asshole when that connection was being actively plucked and fucked?
angakkuq_10: Up until HBP came out, people assumed that Harry was going to stay like that for the rest of the series. Hell, a lot of fanfic writers seemed to actively hope for it.
ceirdwenfc: Well yes, he was torn between good and evil, probably more because of the connection that he just didn't understand - not to mention the wrath of puberty
angakkuq_10: People even screamed OoC when Harry wasn't as moody about Sirius' death as he had been about Cedric's.
thanfiction: There's how Harry reacts, and then there's how his little passenger reacts. He's just this side of Quirrell, really, but fandom doesn't seem to take that into account. All of Harry's actions, thoughts, and feelings are his alone despite the knowledge that he was a carrier for a fragment of LV.
angakkuq_10: But it is obvious that Riddle spent most of OP in Harry's head.
ceirdwenfc: Sirius died in battle - Cedric was a complete shock - young kid - his reaction was normal, being that everyone's reaction would be different
ceirdwenfc: I mean to say that Cedric was a young kid and no one expected him to die (none of the characters)
angakkuq_10: And Dumbledore knew it, and tried to prevent Riddle from overhearing any new information through Harry, which only exacerbated the problem, with Riddle's anger reinforcing Harry's.
angakkuq_10: The movie had a nice angle on it, I think.
ceirdwenfc: Absolutely angakkuq_10, I never thought of that - the less that Riddle was allowed to see, the angrier he got, the angrier Harry got also
faeriegal713: *nods* Especially since Harry was already at the stage of "Why won't they /tell/ me anything! I'm doing half the dirty work here!"
thanfiction: Horcruxes have also been shown to have a strong self-protective factor. Yet I haven't seen anyone speculate as to whether Harry's uncharictaristic paralysis in DH and the need to take a chapter and a half and a handful of ghosts to pump himself up for self-sacrifice (when he'd been throwing his life on the line casually at least once a book since he was 11) may have had to do with the Horcrux kicking and screaming and trying not to die.
Except that the wangsting isn't about the "I can't die in battle" it's "OMG I'M GONNA DIEEE!" Which is totally OOC unless you take into account the Horcrux clinging like a hysterical Sumatran Ratmonkey to his cerebellum screaming its head off.
faeriegal713: That would actually make the entire last book make a whole hell of a lot more sense than how we've all been perceiving it the last few years.
thanfiction: I think that once Harry actively got Horcrux hunting, the one wrapped around his head started going "Oh no you don't, bitch!" and so every step from there on was mentally and emotionally more and more like fighting your way uphill through knee-high Jello with a batshit Troll attached to each ankle.
And Harry went more and more erratic, more and more OOC, more and more introverted, more and more selfish, more and more obsessive and concerned with his own survival...more and more RIDDLE, with Harry himself fighting through here and there and occasionally breaching the surface.
So by the time he was actually going to destroy the piece that was in his head, the second to last piece, and had given orders for the destruction of the last one, it took not only ALL his own willpower, but some serious outside help to drag that Horcrux kicking and screaming to IT's death.
thanfiction: We've seen Harry face death. Time and time again. It's not like that.
angakkuq_10: AND Horcruxes are notorious for yanking on one's chain.
thanfiction: Nor is it like him to avoid the battle, nor to shut out so much happening around him. Unless it was one on one combat from Little Hangleton onward, when Voldemort "activated" his soul fragments by returning (and Harry's characterization took an abrupt left turn) rather than from the point Harry dropped the cloak in the Great Hall.
Could Harry Potter walk over the bodies of his friends and classmates mourning how awful it was that he might have to give his life? No. Could Tom Riddle? In a heartbeat. Could Harry Potter shut out everything else around him, including fallen friends, to drag Tom Riddle kicking and screaming towards a metaphorical cliff to throw him off? Yes. That he could.
No one's saying that Harry didn't do his best. The thing that's on the table is why his best suddenly changed so radically OOC in book 5. The kid who stood up to Riddle in the Chamber of Secrets IS the same who stood up to him in Little Hangleton but NOT the same who stood up to him in OotP or DH.
And I personally think it's MORE heroic that Harry managed to slog it through with a Voldecrux hanging from his back like the limpet from hell and getting heavier and heavier, more and more hysterical, impinging on his thoughts more and more than if it was a connection that gave him headaches and visions and parseltongue but was otherwise passive.
Harry's a great flyer, right? It's a major facet of his character from the first book. We all agree there, yes?
To use an analogy, the fans have been demanding why, after flying circles around dragons and ace Quidditch players twice his age for the first four books, Harry's suddenly howling about how hard it is to get off the ground and struggling to pul off the most basic maneuvers on a broom. That's OOC, and when it's been pointed out to JKR, she's said "no it's not," which has made fans and critics both decide it's bad writing, because you don't call someone a flying ace for four books and CONTINUE to praise their amazing broom skillz when for the last three books, they can barely take off. UNLESS in the last three books, they're flying with a massive iron weight on each leg. In which case it IS consistent with mad broom skillz that they can take off at all, and the whinging and howling stops being OOC at all.
None of the Horcruxes we see are passive. They're ruthless and manipulative as you would expect for fragments of Tom Marvolo Riddle. Why should the one in Harry's head be any different?
But that's why we see a very different Harry in Sluagh and AP. The Voldecrux is gone...and with it, a lot of what he thought he was from the end of GoF onward. You really have to look there and back to see HARRY alone, and who you see is heroic, competent with certain areas of brilliance, a little lazy unless it's something he loves and then a little obsessive, fiercely loyal, with an inferiority chip on his shoulder thanks to the Dursleys and a massive hot button about being kept in the dark.
Which makes him a damned good Auror, someone who is still learning leadership but working on it, and who also has a temper for which the biggest button is making him think you're brushing him off..
And the relationship with Neville is particularly tense because what Neville did in the last year is what Harry wanted to do, what he felt like it was his right and his place to do - especially since the DA started out being his - but between the Horcrux and being driven out of school he wasn't allowed to do. Neville did what Harry thought the Chosen One was supposed to mean. It was not supposed to mean wrestling with schitzohorcruxia in a tent until you barely managed to drag yourself across someone else's battlefield.
There was a truce of sorts when they worked together in the Auror Department because HARRY was in his element there, but that all the ex DA still called him Commander, still deferred to him was enough of a sting when they were young, and when Neville calls the entire department away - INCLUDING HARRY'S WIFE - and deliberately doesn't tell him because he "wasn't in the real battle"? Yeah, he still comes to help. Because he's cool like that. But he also shows up with a hella chip on his shoulder and the temper just below the surface.
And when Neville left the Aurors, the whole DA Issue and Chosen One Issues stayed the white elephant in the room between them. They were friends, sure, but it's That Thing We Don't Talk About. In AP, they're having to confront that head on, and Neville's come back into Harry's turf - the department he's not only head of now, but keeping above funding water by the skin of his teeth - and instantly it's "Commander! We've missed you!"
Hear that noise? That's Potter headdesking in the corner.
kate_lb: Just the fact that they still defer to him would probably be a huge isue to Harry. Very Lord of the Flies with the whole "you can't talk unless you have the seashell" thing. And then throwing a huge fit when everyone starts talking anyway.
thanfiction: No, Sluagh Harry and AP Harry aren't DH Harry. But Harry wasn't Harry in DH. The last time we saw Harry Potter clearly - with the exception of the last chapter of DH and the epilogue - was the Third Task. He's mature enough not to throw a fit about it, but it still makes him wince a little. AP is Harry's story of finally getting past DH as much as Sluagh was Seamus'.