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Reviews For Shatter
Author's Response: Glad to see that I've succeeded in making the mirror world realistic-- or, if not realistic, a place where it is realistic that Harry wants to stay there for ever and ever...
Author's Response: hmmm... my evil plan to make people sad is working! Mwahahaha!
I have observed in the modern world a worrying tendency to treat children as tiny adults and let them make decisions, even decisions that come at expense of their future health and wellbeing, the full consequences of which they are not yet equipped to understand. In short, people increasingly forget that good is not the same as nice, and nice is not the same as good, and giving a child what he wants is not always the right thing to do. Rowling explored this with Dudley, who always got what he wanted for a long time, and as result is not only incredibly spoilt, but also worryingly overweight. Harry being trapped in a fantasy that makes him feel happier than he ever felt before seems to me like the kind of situation many modern adults would refuse to interfere with, citing that he is old enough to know what he wants, or speculating about him harming himself when he learns the happy fantasy is not true. Severus is pretty much the personification of "good is not nice", so it seems fitting that he is the one to alert Harry to the sad truth and try and get him out of the mirror. I like the idea of the mirror having access to information that the one looking into it does not have - thinking back, it did show Harry's whole family, even though Harry probably had not seen his whole family gathered at any time in his life. Must have been quite a shock for Severus to meet a James Potter who is nice to him.
Author's Response: Yeah, the poor kiddo... thanks for the praise!
Even though to him it would, no doubt, be a dream come true that Lily is alive. Many modern adults would, no doubt, have just let Harry stay in the mirror, his real body slowly wasting away, because after all ... Harry is happy there and wants to stay. Interesting that James is so friendly with Severus. I can't imagine that it's Severus' wishful thinking that makes it so, so whose is it? I would not have thought Harry would want his parents to be friends with Severus, but I suppose after his mother was friendly, which might have been influenced by Severus' wishes, he decided that both his parents would show the same attitude. Author's Response: A nice long review! The readers on this site are just so kind :) I don't know if I would agree with you that many modern adults would just leave him to stay in the mirror-- though Harry probably would love to stay, especially at this age. But being on the outside of the mirror is very different to being inside it, and they can see what is actually happening to him. Probably there would be a pretty huge sense of responsibility for them, because really the only reason that Harry is so susceptible to the mirror is because he is without family. If he had a greater support system (cough Dursleys cough) then it wouldn't have happened-- and I think that the adults around him would be able to realise this. Of course they want him to be happy, but if they just left him Harry's happiness would come at the expense of his life, even if he didn't realise it. If they left him in there then they wouldn't even be giving him the dignity of knowing about the truth of his situation. That was kinda long but you got me thinking about it, which is good. And I just want to write a little about James and Severus-- this gets explained in the next chapter, but the mirror world isn't building itself off what Harry wants... rather, it takes the underlying premise of his deepest desire (for his parents to never have died) and builds the world based off that, using Harry's subconsious memories of his parents. The mirror extrapolates what James and Lily might have been like in 1991, using the data in Harry's head from when he was a baby-- and I like to think that the intervening years would have lead to a good deal more maturity in the relationships between James and Severus-- and also Lily.
Author's Response: None of this story is from Snape's perspective, so we don't really get a great insight into how he is feeling about all of this-- but you would be absolutely right that seeing Lily would be a shock to him. I mean, she's been dead for years, and now she's just there. I think some of just how surreal it is for him will be evident in the next chapter-- if I do my job right! But imagine how discombobulating it would be... Thanks for the review!
Author's Response: :) :) You sure know how to make someone's day! |
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