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maculategiraffeOkay, I was thinking more about this while I was at the grocery store.
The relevance of the four Western elements-- fire, water, earth, air-- is very quickly evident in the Harry Potter books. In basic elemental magic:
Fire represents will, or volition.
Water represents emotion and intuition.
Earth represents the physical and practical.
Air represents learning and the intellect.
Foursomes in Western stories often represent each of the four elements-- earth, water, fire, and air: for example, in The Wind in the Willows, you have Rat (water), Mole (earth), Badger (fire), and Toad (air); in The Three Musketeers, Athos (water), Porthos (earth), Aramis (air), and d'Artagnan (fire); on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy (fire), Willow (water), Xander (earth), and Giles (air). The water person is usually romantic, affectionate, idealistic, and in tune with the unseen (be that literal supernatural/spiritual, or just everybody's emotions); the air person is usually educated, articulate, and prone to overthink/overplan; the earth person is usually practical, grounded (though sometimes with a weakness for physical appetites like eating and sex), and self-deprecating; the fire person is usually temperamental, passionate, and fierce in both love and hate. If the orcs are scheduled to arrive at three o'clock in the afternoon, the air person is sketching elaborate battle plans into the dirt with a stick, the fire person already has his sword (or cudgel) out, the water person is awakening helpful supernatural powers (or awakening hidden inner emotional strength and motivation in the hero, depending on your genre), and the earth person is unpacking the lunch basket that he of course thought to bring, as you can't fight on an empty stomach.
This elemental balancing act is at work in some other Famous Fours, too, like the four canonical gospels (Matthew, with all that research and helpful cross-referencing, = air; Mark = pure asskicking, name-taking fire; Luke, with his And Here Is What We Did About It sequel, = solid, practical Earth; and beloved dreamy mystical John, of course, = water). It's just a very appealing balance on a visceral level, and I think people respond to it (and do it) subconsciously, like the Golden Ratio.
So in Harry Potter, you've got four houses. Gryffindor (whose colors are, incidentally, red and gold) is dedicated to courage and boldness. Hufflepuff is dedicated to solidity and dependability. Ravenclaw is dedicated to the intellect. And Slytherin, whose colors are green and silver and whose common room is located under the lake, is dedicated to... racism. Or possibly, depending on whom you ask, underhanded self-interest.
One of these things is not like the others.
Be that as it may, we've got four houses, that represent the four elements, and they're divided, and they need to be united. But of course. We've also got a band of three protagonists. Now, not every trio is an Elemental Foursome Minus One, but it's fairly obvious that of the three, impetuous Harry = fire, dependable Ron = earth, and intellectual Hermione = air. What's missing is also fairly obvious. For all their sterling qualities-- Harry's courage and passion, Ron's loyalty and dedication, Hermione's books and cleverness-- there are certain very specific qualities that everyone in the trio lacks: empathy, intuition, flexibility, reflection. Water qualities.
Harry, of course, is the POV character, and he also has a natural antipathy towards water. (Fire usually does.) So for the first few books, you could blame the uniformly negative portrayal of Slytherins on Harry's POV. You could even tell yourself that this was going to be the theme of the books-- that the houses were going to unite, and that Harry was going to come to realize that qualities like intuition, insight into others, and flexibility did not, in fact, equal underhandedness, manipulation, and cowardice. The trio was going to acquire that crucial fourth: a water person. Said water person was going to prove indispensable in the fight against evil, just as Slytherin was going to make valuable contributions along with all the other houses, and Voldemort was going to be vanquished By Our Powers Combined and everything in the garden was going to be lovely.
And the water person in question was going to be-- well, Draco Malfoy, of course. Harry, being the fiery type that he is, took a disliking to him from their first meeting, but we sympathetic readers understood that Draco has Problems at Home; he is a Troubled Boy, Drawn Into Darkness Against His Will. He isn't, despite all appearances, the Heir of Slytherin; not being something evil despite all appearances usually leads to a Snape-like eleventh-hour redemption. He's good at Potions, which is obviously the water-affiliated subject, which only a Slytherin can effectively teach (and at which Harry sucks hardcore). Dobby once belonged to the Malfoys, and could give us great insight into Who Draco Is When He's At Home, so that was all set up. And Draco has silvery-blond hair (Harry/black, Ron/red, Hermione/brown)! Everything seemed set up for an eventual Draco redemption, and with it, a joyous uniting of Slytherin with the other houses, and water with the other elements.
But as the books progressed, it became clearer and clearer that Draco was, in point of fact, a weaselly and manipulative little git, and nearly all Slytherins were, in point of fact, evil stupid racist cowards.
Oops.
So I, for one, hailed the appearance of Luna Lovegood in book five with considerable relief. "There she is!" I said to myself. "There's our Lady of the Lake, bless her. It's getting thirsty up in here. Go, water, go!"
Of course, Luna was a Ravenclaw, so she couldn't be our central Protagonist of Water Redemption. (The Redeeming Water-Person could conceivably have been from Gryffindor-- I thought for a bit that it was going to be Neville-- since the Trio are all in Gryffindor, despite the fact that Hermione obviously belongs in Ravenclaw and Ron in Hufflepuff. It's easier to have all the main characters share a common room.) But she had all the earmarks of water-affinity: she was deeply intuitive, empathetic, accepting, slightly crazy (intuitives often are; they're tuned in to a different channel, you might say), and provided insights that nobody else in the Trio was capable of. She was even silvery-blonde!
Even better, she was a girl, so Harry could marry her after graduation and produce deeply strange children with enormous glasses and eternally mismatched socks! I hadn't expected Harry and Draco to get together, not in a children's series, but once it was fairly obvious Hermione and Ron were going to pair off-- that it was that sort of children's book, with marrying of childhood sweethearts and parturient epilogues-- I was pulling for a water-match for Harry. Ginny, "hard and blazing" Ginny, with her hot temper and face glowing like the setting sun, was obviously another fire elemental, and while I could understand the draw for Harry ("you two have so much in common!") I also felt she was no good as a long-term romantic prospect. There wasn't any balance, there, for his more problematic qualities; Ginny shared them all (along with his good qualities, of course). Too many blazes spoil the quintessence.
So when Luna turned up at the wedding at the beginning of Deathly Hallows and greeted Polyjuiced!Harry without missing a beat, I may have squealed and punched the air a little.*
But then it all went so terribly wrong, and the Slytherins all ran away, and Snape, The Only Remotely Heroic Slytherin Ever (Who Was Still A Bastard, And Also Kind Of Pathetic) got eaten by an anaconda, and Draco... I don't know what happened with Draco, because JKR clearly realized he had to be involved in the climax in some crucial way but fumbled on how to make that happen effectively whilst maintaining her own deeply held belief that water has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. And Luna helped the protagonists, but she never really became one of them, and it never really seemed possible that she could be, despite her contributions, because she was too dotty. (It seemed like she got dottier periodically, as if to remind the reader that she was an amusingly quirky NPC rather than a potential protagonist.) Water never had its day. It just... didn't happen.
This is my theory about why there's so much fic about Draco and Snape-- pairing Harry with one of them, or just having Harry reconcile with them and realize things about them-- because canon made a promise it didn't deliver on. It set up the four-cornered elemental structure, and then it dried up on us. Water, water everywhere-- and not a drop fit to drink. It's no wonder you've got all the fic writers busily worshipping Snape and putting Draco in leather pants and generally trying to salvage something from the Wreck of the Slytherins. There was such a great setup that when it stopped off short, people wanted to fix it.
And while I'm at it, a similar thing happened with the Marauders. There were four of them: Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs. Once we found out who they were, though, it turned out there weren't exactly four, were there? There were three, and a pathetic little groupie who "hero-worshipped" the rest of them. Lupin, with his books and cleverness and becoming a professor, strikes me as the air element there; Sirius is obviously fire (the head in the fire, in fact!), which explains how much he had in common with Harry; and James, who found himself unable to go through with the crazier schemes of Sirius that would have ended up getting Snape killed, is good dependable earth. That leaves Peter-- the snivelling little turncoat-- to be water. I also think this is why you get a fair amount of Marauder fics involving Lily as a sort of honorary girl-Marauder. People want a balance; they want there to be four, because there should be four, and there were four, only JKR punked out on us when it came down to it, and made it so Peter was never really One Of Us in the first place so who was surprised when he turned into a rat and went grovelling off to Voldemort.
Fanfic exists to fill in gaps in canon, and this is a huge gap-- a Canon Canyon, in point of fact, which needs to be filled with the life-giving rain of fic in order to become a thirst-quenching river of elemental balance. I believe![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mistful, bless her unmitigated brilliance, gets this on a very deep level, which is why nearly all of her uniformly fantastic Harry Potter fanfiction is Harry/Draco, with Draco as a total water element in all the best and Slytheriniest ways, and her hilarious Marauders fic-- well, I won't spoil it, except to say that while she seems to see James more as air and Remus more as earth, her Peter is... um... watery. (edit: actually I just went and reread that fic, and I think she's got James as fire, Sirius as air, and Remus as earth.)
In conclusion: J.K. Rowling hates water, and everyone should go read Drop Dead Gorgeous, in which Harry turns out to be part veela and it explains so much. And I never rec fanfic, so there.
*Or possibly a lot.
(My husband, on pre-reading this: "You think a lot about Harry Potter, huh?")
The relevance of the four Western elements-- fire, water, earth, air-- is very quickly evident in the Harry Potter books. In basic elemental magic:
Fire represents will, or volition.
Water represents emotion and intuition.
Earth represents the physical and practical.
Air represents learning and the intellect.
Foursomes in Western stories often represent each of the four elements-- earth, water, fire, and air: for example, in The Wind in the Willows, you have Rat (water), Mole (earth), Badger (fire), and Toad (air); in The Three Musketeers, Athos (water), Porthos (earth), Aramis (air), and d'Artagnan (fire); on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy (fire), Willow (water), Xander (earth), and Giles (air). The water person is usually romantic, affectionate, idealistic, and in tune with the unseen (be that literal supernatural/spiritual, or just everybody's emotions); the air person is usually educated, articulate, and prone to overthink/overplan; the earth person is usually practical, grounded (though sometimes with a weakness for physical appetites like eating and sex), and self-deprecating; the fire person is usually temperamental, passionate, and fierce in both love and hate. If the orcs are scheduled to arrive at three o'clock in the afternoon, the air person is sketching elaborate battle plans into the dirt with a stick, the fire person already has his sword (or cudgel) out, the water person is awakening helpful supernatural powers (or awakening hidden inner emotional strength and motivation in the hero, depending on your genre), and the earth person is unpacking the lunch basket that he of course thought to bring, as you can't fight on an empty stomach.
This elemental balancing act is at work in some other Famous Fours, too, like the four canonical gospels (Matthew, with all that research and helpful cross-referencing, = air; Mark = pure asskicking, name-taking fire; Luke, with his And Here Is What We Did About It sequel, = solid, practical Earth; and beloved dreamy mystical John, of course, = water). It's just a very appealing balance on a visceral level, and I think people respond to it (and do it) subconsciously, like the Golden Ratio.
So in Harry Potter, you've got four houses. Gryffindor (whose colors are, incidentally, red and gold) is dedicated to courage and boldness. Hufflepuff is dedicated to solidity and dependability. Ravenclaw is dedicated to the intellect. And Slytherin, whose colors are green and silver and whose common room is located under the lake, is dedicated to... racism. Or possibly, depending on whom you ask, underhanded self-interest.
One of these things is not like the others.
Be that as it may, we've got four houses, that represent the four elements, and they're divided, and they need to be united. But of course. We've also got a band of three protagonists. Now, not every trio is an Elemental Foursome Minus One, but it's fairly obvious that of the three, impetuous Harry = fire, dependable Ron = earth, and intellectual Hermione = air. What's missing is also fairly obvious. For all their sterling qualities-- Harry's courage and passion, Ron's loyalty and dedication, Hermione's books and cleverness-- there are certain very specific qualities that everyone in the trio lacks: empathy, intuition, flexibility, reflection. Water qualities.
Harry, of course, is the POV character, and he also has a natural antipathy towards water. (Fire usually does.) So for the first few books, you could blame the uniformly negative portrayal of Slytherins on Harry's POV. You could even tell yourself that this was going to be the theme of the books-- that the houses were going to unite, and that Harry was going to come to realize that qualities like intuition, insight into others, and flexibility did not, in fact, equal underhandedness, manipulation, and cowardice. The trio was going to acquire that crucial fourth: a water person. Said water person was going to prove indispensable in the fight against evil, just as Slytherin was going to make valuable contributions along with all the other houses, and Voldemort was going to be vanquished By Our Powers Combined and everything in the garden was going to be lovely.
And the water person in question was going to be-- well, Draco Malfoy, of course. Harry, being the fiery type that he is, took a disliking to him from their first meeting, but we sympathetic readers understood that Draco has Problems at Home; he is a Troubled Boy, Drawn Into Darkness Against His Will. He isn't, despite all appearances, the Heir of Slytherin; not being something evil despite all appearances usually leads to a Snape-like eleventh-hour redemption. He's good at Potions, which is obviously the water-affiliated subject, which only a Slytherin can effectively teach (and at which Harry sucks hardcore). Dobby once belonged to the Malfoys, and could give us great insight into Who Draco Is When He's At Home, so that was all set up. And Draco has silvery-blond hair (Harry/black, Ron/red, Hermione/brown)! Everything seemed set up for an eventual Draco redemption, and with it, a joyous uniting of Slytherin with the other houses, and water with the other elements.
But as the books progressed, it became clearer and clearer that Draco was, in point of fact, a weaselly and manipulative little git, and nearly all Slytherins were, in point of fact, evil stupid racist cowards.
Oops.
So I, for one, hailed the appearance of Luna Lovegood in book five with considerable relief. "There she is!" I said to myself. "There's our Lady of the Lake, bless her. It's getting thirsty up in here. Go, water, go!"
Of course, Luna was a Ravenclaw, so she couldn't be our central Protagonist of Water Redemption. (The Redeeming Water-Person could conceivably have been from Gryffindor-- I thought for a bit that it was going to be Neville-- since the Trio are all in Gryffindor, despite the fact that Hermione obviously belongs in Ravenclaw and Ron in Hufflepuff. It's easier to have all the main characters share a common room.) But she had all the earmarks of water-affinity: she was deeply intuitive, empathetic, accepting, slightly crazy (intuitives often are; they're tuned in to a different channel, you might say), and provided insights that nobody else in the Trio was capable of. She was even silvery-blonde!
Even better, she was a girl, so Harry could marry her after graduation and produce deeply strange children with enormous glasses and eternally mismatched socks! I hadn't expected Harry and Draco to get together, not in a children's series, but once it was fairly obvious Hermione and Ron were going to pair off-- that it was that sort of children's book, with marrying of childhood sweethearts and parturient epilogues-- I was pulling for a water-match for Harry. Ginny, "hard and blazing" Ginny, with her hot temper and face glowing like the setting sun, was obviously another fire elemental, and while I could understand the draw for Harry ("you two have so much in common!") I also felt she was no good as a long-term romantic prospect. There wasn't any balance, there, for his more problematic qualities; Ginny shared them all (along with his good qualities, of course). Too many blazes spoil the quintessence.
So when Luna turned up at the wedding at the beginning of Deathly Hallows and greeted Polyjuiced!Harry without missing a beat, I may have squealed and punched the air a little.*
But then it all went so terribly wrong, and the Slytherins all ran away, and Snape, The Only Remotely Heroic Slytherin Ever (Who Was Still A Bastard, And Also Kind Of Pathetic) got eaten by an anaconda, and Draco... I don't know what happened with Draco, because JKR clearly realized he had to be involved in the climax in some crucial way but fumbled on how to make that happen effectively whilst maintaining her own deeply held belief that water has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. And Luna helped the protagonists, but she never really became one of them, and it never really seemed possible that she could be, despite her contributions, because she was too dotty. (It seemed like she got dottier periodically, as if to remind the reader that she was an amusingly quirky NPC rather than a potential protagonist.) Water never had its day. It just... didn't happen.
This is my theory about why there's so much fic about Draco and Snape-- pairing Harry with one of them, or just having Harry reconcile with them and realize things about them-- because canon made a promise it didn't deliver on. It set up the four-cornered elemental structure, and then it dried up on us. Water, water everywhere-- and not a drop fit to drink. It's no wonder you've got all the fic writers busily worshipping Snape and putting Draco in leather pants and generally trying to salvage something from the Wreck of the Slytherins. There was such a great setup that when it stopped off short, people wanted to fix it.
And while I'm at it, a similar thing happened with the Marauders. There were four of them: Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs. Once we found out who they were, though, it turned out there weren't exactly four, were there? There were three, and a pathetic little groupie who "hero-worshipped" the rest of them. Lupin, with his books and cleverness and becoming a professor, strikes me as the air element there; Sirius is obviously fire (the head in the fire, in fact!), which explains how much he had in common with Harry; and James, who found himself unable to go through with the crazier schemes of Sirius that would have ended up getting Snape killed, is good dependable earth. That leaves Peter-- the snivelling little turncoat-- to be water. I also think this is why you get a fair amount of Marauder fics involving Lily as a sort of honorary girl-Marauder. People want a balance; they want there to be four, because there should be four, and there were four, only JKR punked out on us when it came down to it, and made it so Peter was never really One Of Us in the first place so who was surprised when he turned into a rat and went grovelling off to Voldemort.
Fanfic exists to fill in gaps in canon, and this is a huge gap-- a Canon Canyon, in point of fact, which needs to be filled with the life-giving rain of fic in order to become a thirst-quenching river of elemental balance. I believe
mistful, bless her unmitigated brilliance, gets this on a very deep level, which is why nearly all of her uniformly fantastic Harry Potter fanfiction is Harry/Draco, with Draco as a total water element in all the best and Slytheriniest ways, and her hilarious Marauders fic-- well, I won't spoil it, except to say that while she seems to see James more as air and Remus more as earth, her Peter is... um... watery. (edit: actually I just went and reread that fic, and I think she's got James as fire, Sirius as air, and Remus as earth.)In conclusion: J.K. Rowling hates water, and everyone should go read Drop Dead Gorgeous, in which Harry turns out to be part veela and it explains so much. And I never rec fanfic, so there.
*Or possibly a lot.
(My husband, on pre-reading this: "You think a lot about Harry Potter, huh?")
no subject
Date: 2013-10-13 04:23 am (UTC)But, you should have done a bit more research:
In terms of Astrology:
Harry - Leo (fire)
Hermione - Virgo (Earth)
Ron - Pisces - (Water)
Draco - Gemini (Air)
You say that Rowling "hates" water. Well, she has said on many occasion her favourite character is, in fact, Ron.
Ron represents all the water qualities you listed above. Many fans view him as the "heart" of the trio. He is moody, idealistic, at a stretch romantic (personally, I am not a Ron fan, but I respect others insight into his character, and can see where they're coming from).
I'm sorry, but while your piece started out very strong, and you certainly brought up some interesting points, you lost me after the whole "Haryr-Luna" thing.