DD and the rat: Conspiracy theories compared [LONG]

[nkafkafi]

No: HPFGUIDX 115827


> Pippin wrote:
> 
> I don't know about the average 13 years old reader, but I had to 
> read the ending of PoA three time before I understood what had 
> happened, what with all the time travel.

Neri:
I can speak only for myself, of course, but I didn't find the PoA time
travel that complicated at all, once you accept the assumption that
traveling to the past is possible. It is this basic idea where some
readers get stuck, not the plot. I find it instructive that
the-medium-that-must-not-be-named told the time-travel part in full,
and in fact made it MORE complicated than it is in the book, and still
it was, IMHO, quite easy to understand. BTW, the same medium discarded
much of the animagi and prank backstory.

Of course, sometimes you have to read things several times over to get
everything just right, but once you did it you can easily hold it all
together in your mind. But no matter how many times I read MD and the
other conspiracy theories, they just seem too complicated to hold
everything in your mind at the same time.

> Pippin:
> I needed a chart to figure 
> out where everybody was when Sirius fell through the veil in 
> OOP. 
> 

Neri:
Sure. We also need a chart to figure out the floor plan of Hogwarts:
http://www.alphalink.com.au/~drednort/Hogwarts.html
Which is why mastering it isn't likely to be a key for the Book 7
climax. Mastering the location of everybody when Sirius fell through
the veil is a key to ESE!Lupin. I hope it won't be a key to Book 7.

> Pippin:
> Judging by her past examples, when JKR reveals the truth she 
> won't have characters going scene by scene through their past 
> actions revealing all the clues we should have picked up, which 
> is what we conspiracy theorists have to do, and which is what 
> makes everything so complicated. 
> 
> She will pick out just one clue: "Didn't you wonder why he was 
> living so long?"  or "Your friend Miss Granger accidentally 
> knocked me over..." and leave the rest for us to find. It works 
> because Harry never actually solves the main mystery -- he's 
> always caught off guard, and somebody, either the villain, or 
> Dumbledore, has to fill him in on what really happened. 
> 

Neri:
Quirrell explains to us more than just "Your friend Miss Granger
accidentally 
knocked me over". Actually he explains almost every clue in the way,
and DD fills most of the rest later. Some small clues are left out for
the reader to pick in second reading, such as Harry feeling pain in
his scar during the sorting because he was looking at Snape "past
Quirrell's turban", but these clues are the exceptions. In the
Shrieking Shack almost all the animagi clues are explained (the rest
are explained in Sirius' letter in the end of PoA). As it is, the
Shrieking Shack scene is the most complicated and problematic scene in
the five books BECAUSE of the need to explain a lot of complicated
backstory in the middle of the dramatic climax. But the conspiracy
theories are so much more complicated than the canon version of the
Shrieking Shack that I shudder to think how JKR is going to explain
them in the middle of Book 7 dramatic climax. I expect ESE!Lupin will
have to hold Harry at wand point and then take three chapters to
explain to him how it is possible that he's ESE, including drawing
that chart of the DoM positions. And we can't even count on DD filling
the rest of the details later because he might not be alive by then.

I really hope the resolution of Book 7 will be simpler than that.

Neri