I dunno. I guess I think of addictions as kind of a boring thing to add to a character--very after-school special for me. I like exploring the Achilles' heels that might lead to an addiction to something, but could easily lead to something else as well. Remus... well, Remus has a lot of weakness, and one of his chief ones is being totally self-absorbed a lot of the time. I don't know that Wolfsbane is addictive--we're given no particular cause to assume it is--but it would hardly matter if he's addicted to it, as he has to take it one way or the other anyway if he's going to have anything resembling a normal life. Snape? I can't really see him with an addiction to an intoxicant, because he has a horror of being humiliated, and intoxicated people do humiliating things. He's got quite enough of an addiction to torturing his students emotionally; he doesn't really need a chemical one on top of it.
I guess it just really doesn't seem to fit in the Potterverse, which hasn't tended to deal with these more surface sorts of issues, instead going for the deeper questions of personality and morality that might contribute to them (one of the reasons I like it). A story could include an addiction, but the interesting part of any such story is always what it is about the person that made the addictive behavior attractive in the first place and fed it.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2004-10-29 10:49 pm (UTC)I dunno. I guess I think of addictions as kind of a boring thing to add to a character--very after-school special for me. I like exploring the Achilles' heels that might lead to an addiction to something, but could easily lead to something else as well. Remus... well, Remus has a lot of weakness, and one of his chief ones is being totally self-absorbed a lot of the time. I don't know that Wolfsbane is addictive--we're given no particular cause to assume it is--but it would hardly matter if he's addicted to it, as he has to take it one way or the other anyway if he's going to have anything resembling a normal life. Snape? I can't really see him with an addiction to an intoxicant, because he has a horror of being humiliated, and intoxicated people do humiliating things. He's got quite enough of an addiction to torturing his students emotionally; he doesn't really need a chemical one on top of it.
I guess it just really doesn't seem to fit in the Potterverse, which hasn't tended to deal with these more surface sorts of issues, instead going for the deeper questions of personality and morality that might contribute to them (one of the reasons I like it). A story could include an addiction, but the interesting part of any such story is always what it is about the person that made the addictive behavior attractive in the first place and fed it.