small mistake

[vjmerri]

Original Yahoo! HPFG Header:
No: HPFGUIDX C6777
From: vjmerri
Subject: Re: small mistake
Reply To: [Yahoo! #6687] small mistake
Date: 8/13/00 2:10 pm  (ET)

By: ausclub7
Date: 8/12/00 4:04 am

harry potter being a very 'in depth' sort of series, i feel that JKR is
somewhat bogged down by her own mythology!

Or perhaps this is just me being clever and obsessive :)

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Yes and No. Certainly I do the same thing on occasion so would definitely
NOT want to comment re obsession. :-) But I commented about this on the
GoF list. JKR is writing books to entertain us. She is NOT JRR Tolkien,
who created an entire universe, languages, timelines and biography for
each character prior to writing (or shortly thereafter. Not sure of
Tolkien's own history.)

She herself does not analyze these books the way we do, and may think
we're not sensible to do so. So if a sentence sounds good in book 3, or
book 4 (when some of the comments made by Bill, Charlie and Mrs. Weasley
_really_ caused some time line scrunching), then JKR puts it in.

Such as the motorcycle comment. Or the whole problem with Nick's death
day and the playstation.

JKR thinks about an awful lot of things in her books and much of what
happens in her books seems to be planned well in advance by at least
a book or two. Certainly there are tons of sentences that seem like
small comments in previous books, that wind up foreshadowing other
happenings. Some of these I believe are deliberate, and some may just
be fortunate happenstances that are either chance or that she takes
advantage of later in book 3 or 4 or whatever.

One I thought of was the first spell that Ron did to try to turn Scabbers
yellow "turn this rat yellow." Well, Scabbers was NOT a rat, never one
was, so the whole thing failed. On the other hand, it could just be that
JKR didn't think about it as such precisely in book one and I'm reading
too much into the books. In any book or situation, hindsight is 20/20
and we can find reasons to link up the past with the present.

The bottom line, in my opinion, is that JKR, while planning ahead a
great deal, is basically writing books to entertain us. She did not,
and does not expect them to be analyzed as though she was attempting to
prove the theory of relativity.

So SOME small comments and happenings will simply fail to match up. I
don't think there is anything wrong with it. We just have to accept
it. The bottom line purpose of the books, after all, is to entertain us.

Vicki