Sofaspud Wrote:Doug feels a little different -- a little less keen on going off half-cocked, perhaps? -- and at the same time seems amazingly willing to take things at face value. It's hard to reconcile these two viewpoints, but that's the impression I got from the piece so far. I'm not sure if that's deliberate or if it's my misinterpretation.I neglected to address this earlier. Remember that Doug has almost a month off-screen between the first and second times we see him in the story. This is time he uses not only to play shepherd to big lizards, but to learn -- at his leisure, for once -- about the world and culture he's been dropped into this time. He doesn't have to scramble to get an ID or a place to live, and he can still go out and about and get a feel for this timeline. And do a little independent research. Although he's enough of a realist to know that the biographies of public figures and histories in general are going to be a bit biased and sanitized, he's pretty sure by the time Charlie takes him to the Burrow that he's got a good feel for who're the good guys and the bad guys. Plus he has a good gut feeling about Charlie from the first, and ends up trusting his judgment as well. So you're seeing something relatively unusual -- a Doug who's prepared to enter a new world's culture, for once. (I should probably put words to this effect somewhere in chapter 2.)
His knowledge still has holes you could drive a truck through -- most importantly, he has only a general idea about the fall of Voldemort, and passed right over the whole "Boy-who-lived" thing in the one book he read about recent history. (It was a French work, and was not as fawningly worshipful of Harry as a British book would have been.) As a result, he has at best a sort of peripheral view of the "historical" Harry Potter and if he thinks of him at all ends up with a vague mental image of an adult, mostly informed by a mild confusion with James. Doug has certainly not connected the "historical" Harry Potter with the teenager at Grimmauld Place; at no point "on screen" does anyone even use Harry's surname around Doug (nor offscreen, either).
By the time he finally gets to Hogwarts, Doug has acquired more books of history (British-written, even), but in what I'm suspecting will become a running gag for the early part of the story never seems to actually get around to reading them. And to be honest, the statue in the Ministry atrium has got his bullshit detector running at full when it comes to "official" accounts. He's going to be intensely suspicious of anything that looks too "mythic" in the accounts.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.