Oh, TV Tropes...!

[sweettalkeress.livejournal.com]

Quite honestly, the Harry Potter stuff on that site has gotten to the point where I can't read it because just about everything is fawning over how great and super-special-awesome the series is, oh, and how Snape is an evil douchebag who wanted to get Harry and James killed so he could keep Lily. But this... this makes me want to scream:

"Hermione... [is] one of the smartest and more pro-active females in the whole Harry Potter canon and English literature in general"

WHAT THE FUCK?!?!?!

How could they make such a claim?! Hermione is a better heroine than, say, Tiffany Aching?! How about Eliza Doolittle?! And I'm sure you could come up with other examples.

No, no, in Harry Potter it seems fairly obvious that the most powerful women in the series are antagonists. Sure, Hermione's perfectly independent and capable, but in the last several books it's like she becomes Harry's servant because he's too lazy to do anything himself!

God damn it, Harry Potter wouldn't bother me so much if everyone didn't insist it was the greatest thing since sliced bread!

Comments

[sharaz-jek.livejournal.com]

If James got the girl he wanted--not to mention status and acclaim at school--by being a self-centered, dishonest, misogynistic, exploitative bully, he had no reason to improve either his conduct or his character. He just needed to get better at lying so he could continue to get away with his bad behavior.

Which canonically he did, attacking Snape behind her back. (Allegedly Snape attacked him as well, which is pretty likely, but it's not like the Head Boy didn't have other, non-violent ways, of retaliating.)

[oneandthetruth.livejournal.com]

Allegedly Snape attacked him as well, which is pretty likely,

I don't blame him if he did. After six years of being relentlessly terrorized, he probably had a "hex first and ask questions later" mentality. He'd be like those women who murder their abusive husbands, not because they're being beaten or having their lives threatened now, but because they know that, sooner or later, he's going to kill them, so they figure they'd better kill him first.

In another nice example of a JKR sycophant being prejudiced against Snape, one of them called dontgiveahoot once insisted to me that the bullying was "100% MUTUAL." (Hir emphasis.) That's more BS. Even canon makes clear James was the aggressor towards many students, not just Severus. We have NO incidents of Severus bullying other students when he attended Hogwarts.

[for-diddled.livejournal.com]

"Allegedly Snape attacked him as well, which is pretty likely,"

Maybe, although if James managed to keep Lilly from finding out about his feud it seems likely that their fights were mostly at times and places of James' choosing. If Snape did attack James, he probably didn't do so very often.