[HPforGrownups] Inconsistancies was Re: Royal Family only for muggles?

[ksnidget at aol.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 40865

Heidi Tandy writes:

>I have seen what I personally feel is an urge by some readers of the books - 
>including some posters here - to pass off everything that didn't make sense 
at the >end of one book as a flint (error) or inconsistency, and while I 
don't deny that jkr's >made her share of glitches (wand order?) I think the 
overarching decisions really do >hang together.

There are several traditional approaches to story telling.

The child who is raised unaware and then is tossed back
into the world they belong to is one of the fairly traditional ones.

One cool advantage is that it gives the author a handy way
to explain the world to the reader.  As the child discovers
things about the world they are also explained to the reader.

(The Harry says something, Ron reacts to it and then has
to explain it to Harry just what the deal is sort of thing.)

However this tends to mean we only know this world based
on how it becomes exposed to the main character.

IMHO some of the "what doesn't add up" may be that there
are some pieces to the puzzle (rules for magic, history
of characters, etc.) that Harry  hasn't encountered yet and
so far (to use a fable/folk tale) he has felt the ear and the
tail of the "elephant" and that incomplete sampling of the
entirety that is the wizarding world IMO tends to make
things perhaps appear more inconsistent than they may,
in the end, turn out to be. 

JKR seems to love dropping little bits of puzzle pieces here
and there in the story whose meaning only really becomes
apparent much later (sometimes books later) and some of
what appears inconsistent or incomplete may (I certainly
hope) become much clearer as more pieces to the puzzle
get filled in.

However that same tendency makes it hard to overlook anything
as something that is potentially very important. Who knew
when Harry first talked to the snake where *that* was going?

What *could* have been just a detail that helps to establish that
he is an unusual boy turns out to be very important later on.

>I do wonder if people who read all 4 books right through are more prone to 
this, >whereas those of us who waited for books 2, 3 and 4 to come out are 
more >accepting of the fact that there are Things We Don't Know.

Not sure how that alters one's view of the books having read them
straight through.  I'm fairly comfortable with the "we just don't know
yet" view because I like this type of story telling where things 
unfold in layers.  And a piece may sit for chapters or books 
without making a whole lot of sense.

That and my learning style is *really* random so having a piece here
and a piece there with a big gap to be filled in later pretty much matches
my approach to the world, so inconsistancies/unknown things is
exactly the way *I* think things *should* be (much to the annoyance
of some of my concrete-sequential friends).  So some of what is 
going on may be more of how people approach things, rather than
how long they had to wait between books.  The more people on
the list, the more the approaches are going to vary.
Ksnidget.


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