why people think Cho Chang and Marietta Edgecomb are so awful
They do? Wow. I mean Marietta is obvious, she betrayed our heroes to her mom, but Cho... I always thought she's a character narratively put down yet done so in a subtle enough way that JKR can pretend she portrayed her sympathetically. Apparently, not sympathetically enough to make readers feel they should also sympathize. (Gee, that statement rings several bells...) And I do think it's a definite case of "pretending" to sympathize. Though, again, whether that was JKR's conscious authorial intent is up for debate.
Cho's story arc is disturbing. And not just for her ethnicity. JKR said, completely randomly, that Cho ends up married to a Muggle man, and considering the examples of witch-Muggle marriages, it's hard to take that as a neutral statement. I get a feeling that, conscious or not, JKR's mental storyverse is completely consistent when it comes to her character value hierarchy.
In my own view, she's a character that's telling the female-version tale of "what not to do" in a romantic story arc surreptitiously paralelled with Merope's, in the exact same way that Snape and Malfoy's friendship story arc is completely hidden yet constantly insinuated, structurally paralleling the much more overt plotline of the Dulbmedore-Grindelwald disaster. Merope committed the crime of loving the man that didn't love her back. Cho, while she did first do the right thing and love a man who asked her out of *his* own love, when she was put to the test of getting that man (who was very beautiful, like Tom Sr.) taken away, *failed* to correctly forget about him and hop onto the *next* boy who loves her in a timely manner. This crime bought her the fate of losing Harry (i.e. losing her chance at becoming the narrative romantic heroine) and disappearing from the scene completely in HBP, barely appearing in DH. When I finished reading DH, I thought that narrative condemnation was enough to make me understand how Cho fits into the coherent structure of HP's romantic patternism. But oh, JKR just so happens to see Cho as also somehow marrying a Muggle man sometime in the distant future. It's *coherent*. A very consistent pattern.
Or so I think. My current view is that these messages on correct vs. incorrect heterosexuality and homosociality is what's most fundamental about the HP story structure (because that's the morality story), and then there's a second layer in which there's a whole other nebula of those who "have things" and those who "don't have things" getting consistently depicted as entitled or ridiculed (that's the world view part). And the coherent images resonant of RL ideologies (homophobia, racism/xenophobia, ablism, classism, etc.) are rather a symptom of these two layers. What's causing the whole thing is this me-centric worldview, wherein whichever race, nationality, ability-status, etc. the "me" POV is (be it that of Harry or Lily or Dumbledore, or JKR) becomes the center of the universe and the locus of the narrative's entitlement complex... IMO we have to see the discriminatory patterns but warn ourselves of the temptation of stopping there, because there's more to the story. Ultimately, every single symptom of the tale will probably end up in one coherent structure.
Cho and romantic condemnation, ablism, etc.
They do? Wow. I mean Marietta is obvious, she betrayed our heroes to her mom, but Cho... I always thought she's a character narratively put down yet done so in a subtle enough way that JKR can pretend she portrayed her sympathetically. Apparently, not sympathetically enough to make readers feel they should also sympathize. (Gee, that statement rings several bells...) And I do think it's a definite case of "pretending" to sympathize. Though, again, whether that was JKR's conscious authorial intent is up for debate.
Cho's story arc is disturbing. And not just for her ethnicity. JKR said, completely randomly, that Cho ends up married to a Muggle man, and considering the examples of witch-Muggle marriages, it's hard to take that as a neutral statement. I get a feeling that, conscious or not, JKR's mental storyverse is completely consistent when it comes to her character value hierarchy.
In my own view, she's a character that's telling the female-version tale of "what not to do" in a romantic story arc surreptitiously paralelled with Merope's, in the exact same way that Snape and Malfoy's friendship story arc is completely hidden yet constantly insinuated, structurally paralleling the much more overt plotline of the Dulbmedore-Grindelwald disaster. Merope committed the crime of loving the man that didn't love her back. Cho, while she did first do the right thing and love a man who asked her out of *his* own love, when she was put to the test of getting that man (who was very beautiful, like Tom Sr.) taken away, *failed* to correctly forget about him and hop onto the *next* boy who loves her in a timely manner. This crime bought her the fate of losing Harry (i.e. losing her chance at becoming the narrative romantic heroine) and disappearing from the scene completely in HBP, barely appearing in DH. When I finished reading DH, I thought that narrative condemnation was enough to make me understand how Cho fits into the coherent structure of HP's romantic patternism. But oh, JKR just so happens to see Cho as also somehow marrying a Muggle man sometime in the distant future. It's *coherent*. A very consistent pattern.
Or so I think. My current view is that these messages on correct vs. incorrect heterosexuality and homosociality is what's most fundamental about the HP story structure (because that's the morality story), and then there's a second layer in which there's a whole other nebula of those who "have things" and those who "don't have things" getting consistently depicted as entitled or ridiculed (that's the world view part). And the coherent images resonant of RL ideologies (homophobia, racism/xenophobia, ablism, classism, etc.) are rather a symptom of these two layers. What's causing the whole thing is this me-centric worldview, wherein whichever race, nationality, ability-status, etc. the "me" POV is (be it that of Harry or Lily or Dumbledore, or JKR) becomes the center of the universe and the locus of the narrative's entitlement complex... IMO we have to see the discriminatory patterns but warn ourselves of the temptation of stopping there, because there's more to the story. Ultimately, every single symptom of the tale will probably end up in one coherent structure.