All shall love me and despair...

[rj_anderson]

This is an interesting review of my HP fic(s). lizbee has already made a couple of comments on one remark she felt was misleading; but it was another part of the review that particularly baffled me.

Here's the remark in question:

I was really hoping that Maud would redeem her MS qualities or something... but no-- she's the tortured girl that everyone can't help but love.

This is the second negative LJ review to make this accusation, and I am sincerely perplexed by it. "Everyone" loves Maud? I stated quite plainly in the story that she had few friends at Durmstrang and even fewer at Hogwarts, and the only students who even attempt to befriend her are the Weasley twins. Her roommate Muriel beats her up and her other roommates spread malicious gossip about her. Draco regards her with supercilious contempt. Even in the later fics, Maud's dealings with other students are merely civil at best (as when she meets Hermione in the library in PR), and at worst downright adversarial. She doesn't acquire a single friend apart from George Weasley until she leaves Hogwarts. So who is this mysterious "everyone"?

Maybe the reviewer really means that all the adults in the fic love Maud. Well, there are only four of those in TPMA. Mad-Eye raised Maud and she's his niece, so I guess he has to like her. (I should mention, for those thinking of writing fic, that heaven forbid your OC should be related to any canon character, even a lesser canon character; that automatically makes her Special, and therefore a Mary Sue. And here I just thought it would be a good excuse for having lots of Mad-Eye Moody in the story.)

Moody's got a reasonable excuse, that leaves Snape, Dumbledore and McGonagall. I think my logic behind having Snape treat Maud with considerably more decency and respect than he does Harry & co. is explained in the fic. Obviously the reviewer doesn't agree that Snape could or would treat anyone with civility or respect, much less love or be loved by anyone, so that aspect of the trilogy doesn't work for her. Fine, I can live with that. Personally I don't think even JKR takes that extreme a view of Snape's character, for all that she enjoys playing up his negative qualities through Harry's eyes. But I guess only time and canon will tell.

So back to the supposed Maud Moody love-in. McGonagall, for her part, does nothing but politely guide Maud to a meeting with the Headmaster. Unless that counts as "love" in some strange subtextual way, we're left with only Dumbledore. Who, as we know from canon, is kind and generous and benignly meddling with all his students, so... where is this "loved by all" stuff coming from again?

I don't mind having my work reviewed critically. Some of my favorite reviewers have been quite direct in pointing out flaws, as well as being honest about things they personally don't like to see in stories (Oi! for instance, never gave a fig for Snape and didn't particularly warm to Maud either, and I still loved her reviews). I can even think of some pretty severe criticisms myself (for the record, those include wobbly characterization of Maud in the first story; a number of embarrassing continuity gaffes involving numbers, dates, and architectural layouts; a really cringe-worthy bit of dialogue in the first chapter of IWS; and too much schmoop in Snape's letters, among others).

But I do object to the reviewer misrepresenting the content of my fics and disparaging faults of which they are not in fact guilty. As lizbee pointed out, that's not a valid form of criticism.

Comments

[ex-ajhalluk585.livejournal.com]

Well, actually there are two keys incidents in the HPverse where the Trio are led to make that mistake - the Quirrell/Snape stuff in PS, where Snape's hostility to Harry makes him effectively the only suspect, and the Moody ferret-juggling incident, which makes the Trio (well, Harry and Ron, anyway) utterly convinced of Moody's bona fides and general all round Jolly Good Egg-ness. And the plot of Pride and Prejudice depends on Darcy being snobbish about Elizabeth, and Elizabeth disliking Darcy.

But I did mean "bad" as in "morally suspect" rather than "likeable". Once again, I go back to Honor Harrington for examples. Honor in the first book is widely disliked by her crew because they think she's responsible for them having been handed the hiding of a lifetime in some wargames. In fact, it's because the wrong-headed materiel theories of a pigheaded admiral has gutted her armament. The pigheaded admiral hates and resents her because she thinks Honor should have done better with materiel given, and so sends her off to a dead-end posting. She's dumped in an impossible situation at the dead-end posting by a cowardly and inept superior officer who resents her for having broken his nose and several ribs when he tried to rape her at military school. In the course of the first book she has to win back the crew's respect (and those whose respect she doesn't win are unquestionably presented as bad - they only don't respect her because she reveals their laziness, cowardliness or ineptitude), demonstrate her superior moral integrity (making an enemy of the industrialist Klaus Hauptmann, whose ships she intercepts smuggling furs on the protected species list, and whose respect she wins in a subsequent book by her self-sacrificing defence of his ship), win a battle against tremendous odds despite the duff armament, protects a planet from invasion and ends up with promotion, the personal thanks of the queen, and a chance to tell the pigheaded admiral face to face how she got the armaments wrong. Oh, and she agonises with guilt for days over the deaths caused in her defence of the system against impossible odds, comfortedd only by her empathic alien tree cat, to whom she is psychologically bonded.