Cassidy's #10: History

“And to you, if you have stuck with Harry until the very end.”
Thankfully, we fans have a little more to milk out of this franchise; it’s not quite the end yet. Though the HP movies are but shadows of the books’ brilliance, I still excitedly barf in my mouth a little bit when a new one is released and this is no exception. It’s HP7 part I, you guys!! The beginning of the end! But let’s not talk about the end.
It’s November 9, 2010 (we’ve come so far!) and there are ten days until the Deathly Hallows release. We commence our top ten Harry Potter favorites. Since I can’t possibly narrow my favorite bits of Harry Potter down to ten, I have decided that all of my top tens will be really broad categories. Also, I’ve got to crank this out because I’ve got to do my college applications today. This will be brief and probably ridiculous.

#10: History
Bam.
In the beginning of the series we thought that Harry was just meeting some kid named Ron. Whatever. Oh, and here is the stereotypical bully character, Malfoy. Okay. And Neville Longbottom: just some dummy with a toad. Snape is just a d-bag. Dumbledore’s just the silly, wise, and whimsical old headmaster. NO! Wrong. We were all wrong. Order of the Phoenix. Death Eaters. There’s history there, guys! Ron’s not just some kid; his parents are Molly and Arthur. They were in the OOTP with Harry’s parents. Malfoy’s not just a bully; his father is that idiot Lucius Malfoy, Death Eater! Neville Longbottom’s parents were Order members. Book seven? BOOM! Neville’s a badass! Snape’s not just a d-bag! He was in love with Harry’s mother and hated Harry’s father. Book seven? “LOOK AT ME!” BOOM! Explained. Harry’s eyes, Lily’s eyes. Same eyes. Boom! Okay. Dumbedore. Dumbledore’s not just the normal old beardy wizard character. He’s an Order member, a homosexual, a man who dabbled in the dark arts. BOOM! Each person in this series possesses a depth of character that is absolutely true to life and to humanity. This is why I can’t handle it when people call these books examples of “bad writing.” If Dumbledore were just a beardy wizard then, yeah! That would be super lame and boring and redundant! How many beardy flawless wizards have there been in the history of wizardy stories? TOO MANY! Dumbledore is not one of those. His humanity and imperfections are what make his character multi-faceted and unique. Sure, we were all a little upset when we learned that Dumbledore was not perfect. For a little while I thought about mourning the loss of a hero but then I realized something. While it may be hard to learn that someone we admire has done something less than perfect, in the end it can teach us a valuable lesson: great deeds come from imperfect people like ourselves. But this top ten item is not about Dumbledore, it is about history. My point here is that each character’s history, as it is revealed book by book, is what makes each character complex and, consequentially, human. No character is JUST anything. Dumbledore’s not JUST a wizened old man, Malfoy’s not JUST a bully, Snape’s not JUST a d-bag, Neville’s not JUST the fat kid with a remembrall. Maybe it took him a little while to come out of his shell (his parents were tortured to insanity by Bellatrix LeStrange!) but in book seven his history empowered him to fucking SHANK Nagini. If that's not a testament to the series's demonstrated complexity of character, as seen in real life humans, I don't know what is.