About a boggart…

[Finchbearer]

Specifically a river boggart.

What do we think of my creation of a boggart who is a hero in this particular story?

So in my story he falls in love with what he thinks is a river nymph but is actually a human woman, and so he endeavours to find out what happened to her, eventually tries to help her.

He can move unseen and so uses this to his advantage, but his actual appearance is the essence of the river, and humanoid, so beast-like. Except he is actually harmless, and more of an archaic guardian of the river.

So far, my story has overtones of beauty and the beast, and explores the theme that appearances can be deceptive.

I am asking because I have only ever found boggarts to be depicted as nuisances at best, and malignant beings at worst, and of course they have been brought to the forefront in popular culture through HP, but actually have a much older place in English folklore.

 

[BearBear]

So Harry Potter bogarts shape-shift to your worst fear. Otherwise a general ne'er-do-well boogeyman. So yours would have kind of an identity crisis.

I love to think of redeemable qualities of villians so maybe we just don't understand the true and complete nature of bogarts. Perhaps they've been unjustly villified.

I mean... we eat veal and suckling pig. Just saying it sounds villainous out of context.

 

[pmmg]

Could not a Boggart be both malevolent, and a hero?

I think the reason you find them always depicted as a nuisances, is cause that is kind of how they are defined. If they are not those things, are they really a Boggart?

Anyway, similar to the half-angel thread, I am sure it could be done. It would play well into the fairy tale aspect of beauty and the beast, as you already said. That has had great success.

 

[Devor]

So far as fairy tales go, boggarts are pretty badly defined. It's one of those catch all words that means different things in different stories. Harry Potter's version kind of plays on that.

River - things are typically known for having long arms that pull people in for a drowning. That goes a bit beyond mischievous, so as a reader there's already a tension there, wondering how you're going to handle that without crossing some likeability factor in the character. If it were me as a writer, I'd want to do some tragic misunderstanding, maybe he drowned someone because he was reaching for a friend and didn't even understand yet that people can't be in the water.