Quote from Naaga on August 6, 2023, 1:36 am

Source of Transcript: J.K. Rowling talks about Dumbledore and Snape (Excerpts from “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling: Episode 2”)

You can listen to original episode on Apple and Spotify podcasts.

There are plenty of stories, you know, especially children’s stories where the heroes are the heroes and the villains are the villains, and the only real question in the stories is whether the heroes can defeat the villains. But that’s not the Harry Potter story at all. You know, the heroes are flawed. Some people we think of as villains turn out to be the ones who save the day. And, you know, so many characters that we at first glance think are bad or scary are actually just misunderstood. And one of the early themes of the books is that if you want to figure out the truth, you shouldn’t jump to conclusions that your prejudices can betray you, and that your first judgment might not be accurate. You really seem to have this deep awareness of this type of human behavior that, you know, the temptation to fall into this like very simplistic, black and white kind of morality. But there is also a clear presence in the books of the reality that there is such a thing as good, and that there is such a thing as evil. And even though it’s not always easy to tell, you ultimately have to. How do you discern when a behavior falls on one side of that line or the other?

I mean, that’s such a deep question, and it goes to the heart of “Potter”, and it goes to the heart of much of my worldview. The irredemably evil character in “Potter” has dehumanized himself, so Voldemort has consciously and deliberately made himself less than human. And we see the natural conclusion of what he’s done to himself through very powerful magic. What he’s left with is something less than a human, and he’s done that deliberately. He sees humane behavior as weakness. He has reduced himself to something that cannot feel the full range of human emotion.

There’s a huge appeal, and I try to show this in the “Potter” books to black and white thinking. It’s the easiest place to be, and in many ways is the safest place to be. If you take an all or nothing position on anything, you will definitely find comrades. You will easily find a community, I’ve sworn allegiance to this one simple idea.

What I tried to show in the “Potter” books and what I feel very strongly myself, we should mistrust ourselves most when we are certain. And we should question ourselves most when we receive a rush of adrenaline by doing or saying something. Many people mistake that rush of adrenaline for the voice of conscience. “I’ve got a rush from saying that, I’m right.”

In my worldview, conscience speaks in a very small and inconvenient voice, and it’s normally saying to you “think again, look more deeply, consider this.” And I was struck early on actually in the “Potter” phenomenon by how the two characters that cause the most furious debate, and I’m actually using the word furious quite literally there at times, were Dumbledore and Snape. People wanted Dumbledore to be perfect. He’s deeply flawed. But to me, he is an exemplar of goodness. He did wrong. He learnt. He grew wise. But he has to make the difficult decisions that people in the real world have to make. Very difficult decisions.

Meanwhile, you have Snape. Incontrovertible a bully, he can be mean, he can be sadistic, he’s bitter. But he is courageous. He is determined to make good what he did terribly wrong. And without him, disaster would have occurred. And I have had fans really angry at me for not categorizing Snape in particular. Just wanting clarity in simplicity, let’s just agree this is a really bad guy. And I’m thinking when I can’t agree with you because I know him. But also I can’t agree with you, full stop, because people can be deeply flawed.

People can make mistakes. People can do bad things. In fact, show me the human being who hasn’t. And they can also be capable of greatness. And I mean greatness in a moral sense, not in a fame or an achievement sense.