The Quest Continues!

*triumphant grin* I have figured it out. The Harry Potter Lexicon. It's the answer to all my personal HP needs. There I can find out everything and anything I ever wanted to know about the HP books, but it's still canon (unlike fanfic), so I don't get annoyed about the characterizations or anything. Everything is highly organized and in-depth, which is kind of nice. Seeing things in that way makes me see patterns I never noticed before, just from reading the books. And I really enjoy the articles, too. They are more annoying than anything else, just because they are based on people's opinions (like fanfic), but somehow it's easier for me to deal with in a non-fiction form. It's clearer to me that they are just speculations and that anything might be completely wrong, and I'm still perfectly welcome to my own opinion.

So, in case you haven't tried it out yet, do so. Here's the link again ... The Harry Potter Lexicon. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

I have also become more and more annoyed lately at the lame attempts that abound on the internet to try and characterize people as personalities from a book. Some are admittedly better than others, but most of them are just wrong. For example, I'm constantly told by these quizzes that I am most like Hermione Granger. But that's really just not true. I'm actually Ron Weasley. I like to read and enjoy school, though, so these quizzes always automatically think that I'm like Hermione. But the way that I deal with life is entirely unlike Hermione, and I rather tend to deal with things more like Ron would.

Much of this is based on my understanding of Peirce and the Peircean paradigm for character roles in narrative. But most other people don't understand these roles, and so they think that the outward signs are the most telling. Thus, since I like school, I am like Hermione. If I liked Quidditch, I would be like Harry. And if I liked humor and joking, I would be like the Weasley twins. But this is completely incorrect -- the underlying motivations are more telling of a person's character. It's not whether I like jokes and humor (I love them), but why I use jokes and humor: how they help me to deal with life and how they make me feel.

All of this very much makes me want to write my own quiz for these things. However, before I do, I'd need to solidify my observations about who's who, or rather who's what, in the HP series. The only ones I know for absolutely certain are Harry and Dumbledore. The rest I'm a little unsure about, even though I sound so positive that my personality is the same as Ron's. (Which is rather similar to Lupin's, actually.)

Anyway, keep a lookout in the future, and I may just write some more of my thoughts about character types in HP.