[HPforGrownups] Yule Ball and other dances (or, Are You Tainted by Fanfic?)

[Barb]

No: HPFGUIDX 46704


 twister10_2000 <twisterx at bellsouth.net> wrote:
My question stems from an arguement my sister and I had. She was re-reading the chapter on the Yule Ball, and made a comment about the Yule-ball-to be in Year 5. At this point, I made some form of a rude comment about her intelligence and stated that the Yule Ball only happens in years in which the TriWizard Tournament takes place. At which point she made a rude comment about my intelligence and I ended 
up here, feeling quite unsure about my intelligence/interpretation of the books. 

Me:
Oh, dear!  You should NOT feel intellectually inferior to your sister over this!  (Although neither one of you should be making rude comments to each other. Gah.  Sometimes I'm such a mom.)  You are quite correct that the Yule Ball is particular to the tournament.  The sheer surprise everyone experienced when finding out about the Ball clearly points to that, plus the other things you mentioned about very few people staying at the castle during the holidays in other years.  
 
Dances are clearly NOT a regular event at Hogwarts, however much fanfic writers would like there to be a Halloween dance/masquerade ball, a Valentine dance, an end-of-term dance in June, etc.  In fact, I have to say that it seems your sister's view of canon may possibly have been tainted by reading too many fanfics where these sorts of non-canon school dances occur (plus a recurrence of the Yule Ball).  People who know me may laugh at my saying that, as I've written two very long fics and am writing two others currently, but this is a case in which I can understand very well the aversion some people have to fanfic. (Many say they fear it will color their view of the books or they will begin to consider non-canonical things to be canon.)  There are a slew of fics out there that create these sorts of social events for manipulating the romantic lives of the characters, when there is absolutely no evidence for them in canon.  
 
Now, it might be argued that JKR herself seems to have invented a dance for the purpose of manipulating the characters' romantic lives (Hermione/Viktor/Ron tension, Harry/Cho/Cedric tension, Harry/Ginny/Neville tension, Harry/Parvati and Ron/Padma awkwardness, the introduction of the Fred/Angelina relationship, Ron/Fleur angst, etc.) not to mention revealing Hagrid's "secret" (which Harry never knew was a secret) when he's speaking to Madame Maxime (oh, I forgot the Hagrid/Olympe angst in the above list).  But inasmuch as she's the author, I think she sort of has permission to do this. <g>  
 
While it could be that she will in fact introduce more social events of this sort in future books, especially as Harry and the other students in his year will be fifteen at the beginning of book five, there are still Hogsmeade visits to serve as "dates," and Percy and Penelope seemed to get on just fine when they were in school without the benefit of school dances.  JKR could institute more dances, but I don't really see why she'd need to have annual events.  One more at the most, perhaps in Harry's seventh year (celebrating the fall of Voldemort, perhaps), would probably suffice.  It seems that describing these things would get repetitive and it would be difficult to justify them within the overall structure of Harry both getting an education and fighting evil.
 
 twister10_2000 wrote:
-The tournament is to take place every four years (the rules prior to the cancellation and reinstatement of the tournament) if all goes according to plan. 
 

Me:

Actually, in the book it says every five years.  That would mean that even if it were reinstated, all of the students in Harry's year AND Ginny's year would be out of school before the next tournament.  It's the Quidditch World Cup that's every four years.

 

All of your other arguments against the Yule Ball being a regular event are perfectly logical, the most telling of which is the absence of most students during the holiday.  While it is true that we don't hear of Hogsmeade visits until Harry is in third year, or of elective courses like Divination before he has to choose extra courses, the fact that it is noted in the first three books how few students stay at the castle for Christmas (and it is also specifically noted in GoF that an extraordinary number of students stayed for the holiday because of the ball) it seems unlikely that this would occur if they could attend a social event like the Yule Ball, and indeed, we see that, given the opportunity, few want to miss it. 

 

This is why, when I wanted a Social Event to Manipulate the Characters' Social Lives (TM), I invented a group called "Screaming Haggis" which played at a ceilidh in Hogsmeade on a weekend when the students happened to already be going there....So it is possible to read fanfic without having one's ideas about school dances corrupted and twisted.... <g>  

 

--Barb

 


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