HP/ Spoiler alert - Nothing New Here

[Jim Ferer]

No: HPFGUIDX 129589

mycropht33: "I personally have been a member of this group a long
time, and have lurked for almost 2 years now (or better...can't even
remember when I joined.) I am getting really tired of people using
their "predictions" as some sort of flexing of intellectual muscle. An
educated guess is an educated guess. It doesn't necessarily mean anything.

Sorry for coming off cranky. It's just been a sore point for me for
awhile now."

You're not the only one.  I'm a charter member and it makes me nuts,
but there's no point complaining.  It's not going to stop, any more
than the Jack the Ripper theories will (27 suspect theories and
counting).  No one casting these theories ever seems deterred that
their theories never, ever turn out.

In the 18th and early 19th century a naturalist named Georges Cuvier
claimed he could reconstruct an ancient animal through contemplation
of just one bone. He was wildly wrong, as it turned out.  While he
could make a reasonable inference about a bone that attached to the
one he had, his reconstruction of the next bone after that and the
next one after that and so on quickly deteriorated into a flight of
fancy.  The uncertainties multiplied the further out he went from the
starting point until his science was actually fantasy.   A lot of HP
theorizing is like that.  There's only so much information that can be
squeezed out of one datum.

Actually, IMHO, there's other tools for analyzing the text than
finding tiny little snippets on which castles are built. Here's a few,
and I'd be delighted to see others added.

Parallel literature: JKR's stories aren't the first stories set in a
world where magic works, or in a world that exists in parallel to our
own, or where there's time travel.  How did this literature address
the kinds of things JKR is giving us?  Might it apply here?  BTW,
reading Harry as a history book can be fascinating, especially if the
reader has read the history of war and conflict.  I predicted once
that in the fifth book (we didn't know the name) Voldemort would lay
low, build up strength, and undermine Harry and Dumbledore as best he
could.  LV would try to keep the Ministry helpfully asleep with the
aid of his agent of influence, Lucius Malfoy.  I came up with this
because that's what Che Guevara would have done (did), or any other
cell leader.

What would you do if this was your problem?  Wizards are human, and
magic is their science and technology.  I wondered, "what would I do
if my daughters got Hogwarts letters?" No responsible, loving Muggle
parent would ship his kid off to a "wizardry school" (yeah, right)
because he got a letter in green ink.  If I was Headmaster, I'd have
one of the Muggle families already in school visit and help the new
family get over the shock.  The wizard kid would take the new kids to
Diagon Alley and show them around, that sort of thing. Later, in an
interview, JKR said that people come visit the new families and
explain everything.

What is JKR's theme? Her themes strongly include love, courage and
sacrifice.  These are the truest things we know in the books.  All
theories should be seen in that light.

And one other thing.  Anybody who proposes a theory ought to be the
first trying to punch holes in it.

Jim Ferer