Tuesday, October 23, 2007

What Dumbledore and Han Solo have in common...

It would appear that I have been hornswaggled. I say this with great humor, because I do not feel decieved. Rather, I feel cheated. It would appear that much to the delight of the extreme left, and much to the dismay of longtime piner Minerva McGonagall, that the beloved headmaster of Hogwarts, Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore, was in fact, gay.

Now, Dumbledore being light in the loafers really doesn’t really bother me. I could truly care less as to whether the mentor, sometime father figure, and inspiration of Harry Potter was a homosexual, or that his love for another man may have influenced his decision making. The problem that I have with this is, “why reveal it now?”

I’ve never been a big fan of the retread, or the addendum, to existing works. This isn’t the first time that our soft spoken, yet rumored to be bitchy, Englishwoman Ms. Rowling, has changed the work after she was written it. In her interview on NBC regarding the Deathly Hallows, she gives an “update” to the Epilogue that she wrote, which had only come out a week earlier. She told us about the further adventures of our heroes and heroines in the books, and specifically what they are doing in their careers. Why? If it was so important for us to know, then why tell us about it rather than write it in your book? Is it because you didn’t like the original draft that included all that drivel, so it was better to leave it out? That’s what you said, so stick to your guns. Don’t add to the mythology. Which brings me to Sir George...

I didn’t appreciate it when George Lucas decided to “revisit” the original Star Wars trilogy. So, George, you want to update the old films to fix the weird black discolored boxes that float around the spaceships when flying against the backdrop of space? Fine. Bigger explosions? Fine. The strange eraser smear under the landspeeder fixed? Fine. Make it so that Greedo shoots first, and Han defends himself? WHAT?!

What George Lucas did by changing the Han Solo/Greedo fight redefined the character. It made Han Solo much more noble and endearing. He was defending himself, you see. I, however, saw Star Wars in 1977, and I liked the scoundrel. I never wanted to be Luke Skywalker. I wanted to be the badass Han Solo that shot people who threatened him. In 1997, however, George Lucas changed the way that an entire generation felt about that character, and it was criminal.

Now, J.K. Rowling has done the same to Dumbledore. No child or adult will ever reread the Harry Potter series, or look at the Harry Potter movies the same way again. She has brought us along for seven books over the last ten years. We have grown to love Dumbledore, and mourned his passing in Book 6. At the end of Book 7, we feel as if we, and Harry, finally have an understanding of what Dumbledore was, and what he stood for. The fact that he is gay does not change any of these facts. It merely changing how we perceive the character. Whether she intended to or not, she has redefined him. I don’t like Dumbledore any less as a character. I just have to look at him a different way now, as his motivations for his relationship with Grindelwald, the dark wizard, were not out of respect for his skill, but out of his love for the man. Perhaps that means when he spoke of genocide and cleansing, he was doing so because he fell in love and it corrupted him. That’s a serious, serious character shift. If you didn’t include it in the book, Ms. Rowling, why bring it up now?

When speaking about the epilogue, J.K. Rowling said “... it didn’t work very well as a piece of writing. It felt very much that I had crowbarred in every bit of information I could … In a novel you have to resist the urge to tell everything.” You should also stick to your guns, and remember what you said.