Was going to respond to the first Shades of Gray thread but it appears to have gotten infected by spoilers.

Disclaimer: Not a Rowling scholar, I. I've read the books about twice. I find the particular combination of boarding school lit and poorly-conceived modern-setting middlebrow fantasy too juvenile to be worth the obsession so many are exhibiting.

Anyway, none of the characters cited here are particularly good, nor particularly evil, and I think that Harry recognizes that even when they get in his way. It's a trinary system - there's good (people that help Harry), there's bad (the people who ultimately are interested in killing Harry and/or the other good guys), and then there's the forces of stupid.

That's what I get out of these books. The people who have chosen sides are the ones who know what time it is, and then there's everyone else. It's amusing that "muggles" was the epithet chosen for those who are unconnected to the reality of Rowling's magical society, when so much of that society allows its perceptions to be so massively muddled, by their own trivial fascinations with their powers or by those who think the public good lies in bureaucracy and obfuscation.

Now... I'm willing to admit that my reading of Harry Potter is massively influenced by my politics. I don't see the real world playing out in the same way, and I'm sure that Ms. Rowling would be writing out of an English/UK context, but the notion that large chunks of the population are willingly disconnecting themselves from a functional grasp of reality... well, that rings pretty true.

My point, though, is that incompetence is not the equivalent of moral complexity. Neon puce is not a shade of gray.

-Ked