JKR's priorities and success- How dark were "those days"?

[pigwidgeon37]

No: HPFGUIDX 31948

David wrote:

<snip>
>I perceive her priority order to be:
>1. Development of the plot, and solving the associated mystery of 
the night Harry was attacked.
2. Character development/revelation of a few key characters: Harry, 
his parents, Riddle, Snape, the Dursleys, probably Hermione and Ron, 
possibly Hagrid, Percy, Draco, Neville, Ginny, probably not much more 
significant on Lupin or Sirius. Some wildcards such as the older 
Weasleys, McGonagall, Pettigrew.
3. Development of the relationships between a few key characters: 
Harry with Dumbledore, Snape, the Dursleys, Hermione, and Ron; 
Hermione with Ron; Dumbledore with Snape. Possibly Harry with Ginny.
4. Semi-random generation of a fun wizarding universe, using (in 
common with fanfic authors!) a great many pre-existing components 
from an incredibly eclectic variety of sources.<

<snip>
>When I read, I subconsciously sort what I am reading according to 
the above scale.  So, crucially, if plot development is happening, I 
tend to discount character and relationship inferences somewhat.  If 
it isn't I give them more weight.  Furthermore, the plot development 
contains misdirection by JKR; we have as yet no evidence of serious 
misdirection in the character and relationship development *except 
when plot driven* (as for example, the case of >Snape).<

<snip>

This ties in very nicely with what I was going to write this morning 
as an answer to Tabouli's post about JKR's success, but then didn't 
do because I was totally braindead. Let's hope things have improved 
by now.
What I wanted to say was this: I think that one of the secrets of 
JKR's success is that she has the instinct of keeping the right 
balance between revealing and not revealing. As this was certainly 
not sufficient to make anyone understand my POV (in fact, it rather 
sounds like one of David's cross-stitch-posts), I'm going to 
elaborate: As David says in the post I quoted (and I can only agree), 
what she wants to confer to us are
-Characters and their development and interaction
-Plot development
-The whole Potterverse, in particular its magical part
Now she has that admirable technique which I don't hesitate to call 
natural or instinctive, to tell us just enough about a person in 
order to enable us to fill in the rest with pieces of our own 
experience- with people we know/ characters from literature/ 
archetypes /our own dreams and fantasies. That's why the books appeal 
to children and grownups likewise. There is enough room for an 
adult's as well as for a child's imagination to fill in the blanks. 
Take Sirius for example (no, for once I'm NOT going to talk about 
Snape- ha!): We know so little about him: He's Harry's godfather, he 
was close friends with James, Peter and Remus, he hates Snape (yes, I 
mentioned him, but only for my argumentation's sake), he spent 12 
years in Azkaban, he's an animagus, he's very fond of Harry, he seems 
to be hot-tempered, he has black hair and black eyes. That's it, more 
or less. It's like having ten pieces of a puzzle that consists of 
10.000, but unlike the puzzle, you don't know what the final result 
should be. So you're free to improvise. A thinks he's cute, B thinks 
he's violent, C pleads he's suffering from post-traumatic stress 
disorder, D doubts his liability, E conjectures he was in love with 
Lily, F strongly suspects him of being gay
 etc.etc. The few outlines 
of the main (to say nothing of the secondary) characters are so 
subtle that the reader can fill them with nearly everything he or she 
fancies.
The same goes for the plot and for the Potterverse: There are certain 
outlines, but within these lies a world of possibilities for 
individual interpretation.



Heathernmoore wrote:

>I'd like to interject a note here to say that, frankly, *we* don't 
have much of a clue how dark those days "really" were. Apparently 
they weren't so dark that the larger society has any clue what was 
going on in the magical subculture; they're still willing to send 
their kids to Hogwarts if circumstances work so that they find out 
about it. They may well have not been as very dark as would turn the 
stomach of an elitist prat like young Draco Malfoy.
I mean, there's what normal people like us would consider dark (say 
antebellum South), and then there's summer-of-sam dark, and then 
there's me-and-the-droogies-out-for-a-bit-of-ultraviolence dark, and 
then there's jews-in-the-Secret-Annexe dark. Somehow I'm suspecting 
that nobody had reached the secret annexe phase as of 1981.<



I'd like to disagree here: Just to simplify things, let's assume that 
there are roughly 1000 students, aged 11-18 years, at Hogwarts and 
that Hogwarts is Great Britain's only wizarding school. Assuming 
further that the average "core family" consists of 7,5 persons (4 
grandparents, 2 parents and 1 child at Hogwarts plus 0,5 younger 
children) that would make 1000 families or a total of 7500 persons. 
Add (liberally) singles of various ages and we arrive at more or less 
10.000 wizards forming Great Britain's wizarding community. To kill 
500 out of 10.000 means to kill 5%. Put together Germany's, Poland's, 
Austria's, Italy's and France's populations (in 1938)and you'll have –
this is a very inexact figure- about 120 million people. To 
deliberately kill 6 million out of 120 brings you again to 5%. (Not 
counting the victims of WWII). So I daresay that Voldemort's reign of 
terror is nothing short of the Nazi regime.
Add what Mr. Weasley tells the children after the QWC: The Dark Mark 
that was "everybody's worst fear" and that most of the Muggle 
killings in those days were perpetrated by DEs- I think you'd get a 
pretty gruesome picture.

Susanna/pigwidgeon37