What would a successful AK mean?

[nrenka]

No: HPFGUIDX 142918

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Sydney" <sydpad at y...> wrote:

> Obviously Voldemort is the A plot.  But B and C plots still follow 
> the same rule. I reitreate, the end of the 2nd act would be an 
> extremely weird place to tie up a plotline.

I guess I'm just not of the opinion that finding out that wow, Snape 
really did kill Dumbledore and he didn't do it for some fuzzy reason 
is necessarily 'tying up the plotline' regarding Snape.  I can see it 
going either way; exploration of the reasons and results of Bad!Snape 
killing Dumbledore, or reconsideration and clearing of Good!Snape 
having to do it.

> As I said in the post, what's missing is the TRANSITION.  The moment
> WHEN the realization hits Dumbleodore.  The 'pleading' would have to
> be moment just after.  

I don't see that fitting into the dramatic pacing of the scene, but I 
also don't see her taking that much time to drop us really into 
Dumbledore's head: it's all about Harry's perceptions thereof, and 
that keeps it moving.

> *furrows brow*.  Do you mean the 'spiky discomfort' of Dumbeldore
> reduced to pleading?  Heck, yeah, I would smooth out that spiky
> dicomfort.  Why introduce an entirely new note into a major 
> character 10 seconds before he dies?  Especially when there's a 
> world of rich, yummy drama left to milk on the guy who's still 
> standing?

Because it's maximally BANG-y (and OotP was lacking in something of 
the BANG department) to *not* get the fanfiction method of having 
everyone spend five to ten pages thinking about what is happening, 
and how it reflects on their past and their emotions, etc.  She 
shocks us with the 'pleading', and then she cuts it off.  There's no 
mitigation.  It plays with raw urgency; the end of the book is nearly 
breathless.  Why inject slower pacing into it?

> Well, that would assume the series was written so the reversal shock
> would mainly hit the 10 percent of her audience who are Snape fans.
> And that to this end, she was willing to have the reversal shock
> bypass, you know, Harry.

Harry's got enough shock of watching his mentor murdered in front of 
him by the man who the mentor insisted in categorically trusting.  We-
the-audience are shocked because we've been going "Nah, we're with 
Hermione, we trust Dumbledore, Snape was obviously lying for Bella's 
benefit" for the entirety of the book.  I'm not saying that I don't 
see the logic for having Harry undergo a reversal, but I don't see it 
as inevitable, more logical, or better writing.  It just takes the 
story a very different place.

This is a very heavily end-loaded series, after all.

> Yeah, but who cares?

Readers, because it's a place where we tend to put ourselves.  We 
trust in Hermione as usually right, and in Dumbledore as Basil 
Exposition and moral center.  Rowling's actually set it up so we're 
tempted, when reading, to go "Oh, Harry--he's always wrong..."  Ergo, 
when he's not, the Destroyer crew does a dance of joy.

> It's not a 'little different'.  It's "once upon a time there was a
> wolf, and the wolf was about to eat a little girl, and then the 
> little girl had lunch".  It doesn't end the sentence.  

I'd argue that it may cause you to re-think the sentence that you 
thought you were reading. :)  If I can use a musical analogy again, 
it's like trying to label some harmonic passages in Strauss.  You 
have one set of loose functional labels that you really like, until 
you realize that you've shifted and you now have to reconsider 
everything that you read before, because it's not going where you 
thought that it was.  [Strauss does this a lot; there's a chord 
series that you can read in, say, three keys--but you move towards a 
cadence in one of them, and the effect is realizing retrospectively 
that's the key you were always pointing towards.  Position-finding.]  
Iser talks about this stuff in _Act of Reading_, how readers have to 
adjust what they thought they knew.  Rowling makes a LOT of use of 
this technique; think about how different it is to re-read the 
earlier books knowing what you know now.  [Puts a different spin on 
the Shack scene in PoA when you know that Snape was a Death Eater, or 
that Legilimency exists, nu?]

-Nora recommends the Metamorphosen for some profitable attempts at 
the above, and goes off to iron her hands now