What if Harry dies?

[erinellii]

No: HPFGUIDX 85234

 > Carol:
> I work in publishing and the publishers I know of are interested in
> making money. <snip> Rowling may be a special case, but I'm willing 
to bet that her current publishers have been given her word that she 
won't do anything that will cause a dropoff in readership. Publishers 
want books that sell. Period.

Erin:
Well, Jen Reese in message 85222 quoted the exact same interview I 
was going to, and I can't add much to it.  I can say that I believe 
if Bloomsbury or Scholastic tried to stifle JKR's artistic vision, 
the stink she could make about their censorship would greatly 
outweigh in negative publicity any projected loss of profit from 
Harry's death.


Carol:
 The millions of children you mentioned in the snipped portion of 
this message are not going to want Harry to die, and if they find out 
that he does, they won't want to read the books. <snip> I think the 
children who idolize her now will feel betrayed and many will reject 
both her and her books. You are, of course, entitled to the opposite 
opinion. 

Erin:
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.  I worked in a bookstore up 
until a couple months ago, and the outpouring of enthusiasm I 
witnessed for HP has convinced me that people will buy it no matter 
how it ends.  They'll buy it just to complete their set of seven 
books if it comes down to that.


Carol:
 And believe me, I do know how big this thing is. It's caught me, 
hasn't it?

Erin:
Sorry if I overdid the millions thing.  It just so shocked me that 
anyone would even consider that HP had only sold in the *thousands*. 
Which was also why I thought you might not realize how big it was.  
Just because it caught you is no guarantee you appreciate its size, I 
mean, you've just told me you have a PhD in English and work for a 
publishing company.  You've probably been caught by many books most 
people have never heard of. 


> Carol:
> Sirius, though he's the title character in PoA, was deliberately
> misrepresented throughout that book and appeared in his proper 
person only very near the end. 
He was a distant face and voice in GoF and was present in OoP only in 
the Grimmauld Place chapters and in the DoM battle in which he was 
killed. 

Erin:
Well, I see this is something else we're never going to agree on.  To 
me, a character doesn't necessarily need a lot of screen time to be a 
main character.  The idea of Sirius hangs over books 3-5, Harry 
thinks of him frequently, he is a major player in Harry's emotions, 
and that is enough for me.  



 Carol:
> I have a PhD in English, so I know a bit about tragedy, and of 
course I don't consider Shakespeare to be a substandard author. The 
Harry Potter series is not a tragedy in either its structure or its 
subject matter. If we're looking at genres, I would classify it as 
part fantasy novel, part epic, and part bildungsroman.

Erin:
Do you count bildungsroman (a novel that shows the protagonist 
growing up, for those of you who don't know) as a genre?  Genre, to 
me, is pretty much a marketing term, and I don't recall seeing that 
section the last time I went to the bookstore.  I would say that 
fantasy and epics are the most likely places to find tragedy, which I 
would classify as a style rather than a genre.   I won't deny that 
many authors do write so that you can neatly slot their books into a 
particular genre, but I don't think JKR is one of those. 

 The dictionary's definition of a tragedy is that it is any literary 
composition with a somber theme, carried to a tragic conclusion. I 
would say that thus far, Harry is dealing with some somber themes.  
If he dies, boom, there's your tragic conclusion.


 
Carol: 
 I accidentally snipped the part about Hagrid. I read in an
> interview, which I naturally can't find at the moment, that JKR had 
no intention of killing him off. I didn't invent the idea, you can be 
sure.

Erin:
I found this interview question, possibly it is the one you saw. 

**********************************
Hi, I have a question about Hagrid. 

JKR: Oh, Cool. I like Hagrid. Ask away.

Is he going to be in the rest of the books? 

JKR: Yes.

He's my favorite character.

JKR: Oh, is he your favorite character? I like you because he's one 
of my favorite characters. Yeah, if you take away Harry and Hermione 
and Ron, then I love Hagrid the best definitely. He is going to be 
around. You are going to keep seeing him. I suspect that the reason 
you are asking this is because there is a rumor going around that 
people are going to die in the upcoming books. People are going to 
die and I'm not going to tell you who is and who isn't because--- 
that's for very obvious reasons. 
**********************************

Well, ok, so I conclude that you were right about Hagrid as well.  
I'll take him off my "to die" list for book 6.  Not gonna rule out 
the possibility that he could die at the end of book seven, though.



Carol:
"Romeo and Juliet" is not a valid comparison because it's a play 
intended for an adult audience, not the last in a series of 
children's books with a secondary audience of adults. Theater goers 
didn't wait ten years (or whatever) to find out what happened to 
Romeo and Juliet. They knew at the outset that R and J was a romantic 
tragedy. 

Erin:
Well, if you won't take that comparison, how about this one.  I 
snipped it from the same interview I just quoted.  This is the 
interviewer talking:
*********************
Right, at the top of the New York Best Sellers List, the adventures 
of Harry Potter, and this is just the first 3 of 7. I'm not sure if 
there is anything like this since the high watermark of the late, 
great Charles Dickens. The legend was that when his serialized 
publication of "The Old Curiosity Shop" was coming to America, the 
books would come into the New York Harbor and people would be lined 
up on the docks yelling to people on board "Is Little Nell still 
alive?" People feel this same way about Harry Potter. 
**********************

I don't think people would have stopped buying Dickens if Little Nell 
had died (Did she?  Lol, you can tell I don't have a PhD in English.
I think they would have read on to find out *how* it happened and 
*why*, and I think they'd do the same for Harry if he snuffed it.


> > Erin responded:
> > There are so many things wrong with these statements I hardly 
even know where to start :-)  
 
> Carol:
> I believe you mean that you disagree with me. That's rather 
different from saying that my statements are "wrong." Let me try to 
put my opinions in perspective here despite being rather unhappy with 
the general tone of your responses.<snip>
> It's late and I'm tired so I hope I have answered this post
> articulately and politely, if not to Erin's complete satisfaction. I
> almost left it unanswered.

Erin
Ah, heck, Carol, I'm sorry if I gave you the impression that I was 
being snippy.  I went back and reread my post and it does kind of 
read that way.  I meant the smiley face icon to show that the "wrong" 
was humorous, but I guess I haven't quite mastered its use.  My 
apologies.  Although I would add (just because I love to debate) that 
if me disagreeing with you is pretty much the same thing as me saying 
that you're wrong.  Not the same thing as you actually being wrong, 
as you pointed out.  What I should have done was add an "IMO" after 
the word "wrong".  I hope you will accept my apology.


Erin (who doesn't *want* Harry to die, or even think it all that 
likely, but who refuses to think it impossible)