Playing the game (was Some shipping questions... )

[caliburncy at yahoo.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 30163

A little late on this reply: I actually wrote this a couple days ago, 
but heavily deliberated on whether or not to post it.  Although I 
still have misgivings, here it is:

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., "David" <dfrankiswork at n...> wrote:
> I would be really disappointed if, on reading OOP, or book 7, I
> would finish the book and think "Well, it's exactly as Cindy
> predicted in message 43556, as qualified by Penny's message 3 in
> the old archive."  Worse still would be finding my *own*
> predictions verified.
> 
> So, I love the debates we have, but when it comes to solving the 
> mysteries JKR has posed, it's a game that I really hope we lose.
> 
> Any thoughts?

I always have thoughts.  The real question is whether I will make 
opportunity to post them.

This is of course a legitimate concern, and while I cannot comment on 
it from the perspective of someone who was engaged in hefty 
analytical discussion of HP before one of the books came out (like 
some list members were pre-GOF), I do have something to say.

The likelihood here, by my estimation, is not so much which, if any, 
of our predictions will prove well-founded.  The more likely problem 
is just a differing of mindset as we approach future installments.  I 
expect our predictions to be less of a problem because the plot 
twists within the HP books are mostly in-book, not cross-book (as you 
and I recently brought up, David).  So I anticipate several of our 
predictions will become not so much true or false as simply 
immaterial.  Of course not *all* of them will be immaterial; 
particularly those predictions that involve innocuous appearances of 
what may later become plot devices have a certain degree of 
plausibility.  But, for example, anyone that predicted Moody as the 
culprit in GOF, did so entirely based on in-book clues--and no degree 
of HP4GU speculation could have ever spoiled that, simply because he 
did not exist in the previous stories in order to be speculated 
upon.  Same thing with most of the HP plot twists so far.

So the real problem is going to come thus: how will having analyzed 
HP to death affect the mindset in which we read Books Five, Six and 
Seven?  I can comment on this a bit, albeit indirectly.  I basically 
predicted a great majority of the plot twists in HP.  That of course 
is not the fault of joining HP4GU, since I did not join here until 
long after the release of GOF.  The fault is, ultimately, just a 
matter of the state of mind I am in when I read books.  Several 
people have likened the art of story-telling to that of hypnosis, and 
I don't know how familiar everyone here is with hypnosis, but I can 
tell you from personal experience that it is very easy to spoil when 
you apply conscious energy to it.

If you are like me, you read PS/SS and knew right away that there was 
no way on earth that Snape was really the culprit, but because you 
were still not in an entirely "conscious" state when reading, you did 
not take that to its logical extension and try to determine who was 
instead--you just kept reading.  So Quirrel was not really predicted, 
but far from surprising.  It was just a kind of "nodding of the head" 
moment.  But now, having read PS/SS, you are aware that future HP 
books have similar misdirective elements, and it becomes easier to 
pick up on them.  This is where the subtle change in mindset came for 
me.  I therefore read the other three existing HP books in a slightly 
more "conscious" state than I did PS/SS and had an even easier time 
predicting those (though I did not predict everything, of course--
Scabbers as Pettigrew, for example, went completely over my 
head . . . and I am still trying to figure out how "Moody's" use of 
Polyjuice snuck past me in GOF--I easily figured that Moody was the 
culprit, but assumed this was literal, not that he was Crouch posing 
as Moody).

I think I explained once when I first came here that the ultimate 
difference, therefore, between predicting and not predicting things, 
has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with intelligence of any sort.  It has 
to do with "where you are sitting" when you read.  I, unfortunately 
for me, sit a little further distanced, a little less "hypnotized"--
and the result is that I am a little bit more likely from that stance 
to pick up on several of those little clues that I'm not supposed to 
catch until the second time around.

So anyway, the point of this is not to talk about my experiences--the 
point is that if anything in future books is spoiled for us because 
of HP4GU, I think it is more likely to be the result of HP4GU making 
us read in a more analytical state--by picking us up and moving us to 
sit in a different place when we read HP, one that is a little 
further away and more "conscious".

But there's hope.  We've all been hearing stories for a *long* time, 
many of them with twists of pretty much every nature that is possible 
to exist, and most of us are still fooled, time and time again, by 
the same plot twists with new faces.  Thank goodness.  And that's 
because most of us have never shifted our reading state (my 
recommendation is *don't*).  So, if (while reading PS/SS) the 
realization that HP had a misdirective element to it did not change 
how you read future books (unlike me), then it is quite likely that 
having joined in HP4GU discussion won't shift your book-reading 
mindset either.  So you can probably still be surprised, and be glad 
for it.  It's much more fun that way.

But for the poor souls like me who can never go back and can only 
hope to never go *farther* (because at least for me there is still a 
great deal farther to go--again, thank goodness, and I hope I *never* 
get there), I can say that it really doesn't take the enjoyment out 
of reading like you'd think it might.  After all, we all re-read 
things that we love, and if those things we re-read had plot twists 
that we now know the answer to, why do we re-read them?  Obviously 
there's something more, something that brings us back again and 
again.  And that part, which is in my opinion the best part, is still 
available to anyone, whether you predict things on your first read or 
not.

-Luke