Interesting debate

[gategrrl]

There's an interesting debate happening on John Scalzi's blog called What Authors Know About Their Characters. It was sparked off by JK Rowling's answer to a question about one of her characters, the now famous "Dumbledore is gay" answer. The main point in contention  seems to be, who is in control of the characters in a book - the author, or the readers? Who dictates the characters' realities? And what role does the reader play in the writer/reader collaboration?

I admit I tend toward Scalzi's point-of-view. I think the writer, whether the answer is there explicitly in the text or not, has the final say as to what a character is, or is not: what the character will be, or will not be. (I'm not including television in this - TV/movies are more of a collaborative effort in production) 

Letter number 2 takes a POV that I only semi agree with. Sure, when I read a book (any book) the mythos and characters and settings and wonderment of being in that author's mind become my own while I am reading; and even if I write fanfic, or read fanfic, or imagine my own adventures for those characters, they still aren't *mine*. They're the author's. The one who imagined it all up is the one who gets to say definitively what those characters are like. And a reader may change them however to suit them in their own imagination - but it's not going to ever be the way the original author/creator considered and "grew" them. 

Anyhow, opinions, anyone?

Comments

[justalurkr.livejournal.com]

I really need to re-read Book 7, which I more or less devoured to see how it would come out, and catch more of the nuances. I was focused more on figuring out what custody of Dumbledore's wand had to do with anything (scenes involving his wand and who had it seemed to stand out) that some of the other plot threads didn't really register. I blush to disclose that I'm unlikely to have remembered Grindelwald's name, or much beyond "big bad before Voldemort" had I been pressed.

Anyway, the series never really was about what the grownups got up to in their spare time. Dumbledore's preferences would only have mattered if the book had an agenda with respect to 'gay people can be good people,' and it didn't that I saw.

Of all the authorial intent-type things to drop after the fact, though, the queer mentor of young people was...interesting, no matter what the context.

[gategrrl.livejournal.com]

I am fully prepared to hear that her background notes include a lesbian background for McGonagle. I'm not sure what the British "coding" for lesbians is these days in fiction, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least.