ESE! JKR ?

[Ken Hutchinson]

No: HPFGUIDX 154746

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "justcarol67" <justcarol67 at ...> wrote:
>
> Ken wrote:
> > 
> > At times I wonder if JKR is trying to avoid the criticism that has
> been leveled at Tolkien that he killed off too few of his main
> characters. If so, she is overcompensating. I don't see where any of
> the deaths that have happened to date are needed to move the plot
> forward. We are not dealing with a war here in spite of how it is
> described, we are dealing with a gangster and it is possible to bring
> a gangster to heal without any deaths. <snip> For me the most telling
> death in the book was the casual killing of the fox at Spinner's End.
> Maybe it is just the canine lover in me but that one struck home for
> me where the others just seem artificial. It almost seems like JKR
> kills because she needs to, not because the plot needs to. <snip>
> 
> Carol responds:
> I disagree. JKR has described Voldemort's first reign of terror as a
> war and has said that the second war is beginning. For that statement
> to appear valid, she must have deaths, most of them offstage and
> reported in newspapers but a few of them involving characters close to
> the hero and the reader (Cedrid, Black, Dumbledore). <snip>

Ken:

I know what JKR and her characters say, but she has not sold me on 
the notion that this is a war and I know I am not alone in this. The 
DE are not an army, they hardly number 50 even counting those who
have gone missing. They have allies that swell their numbers somewhat 
yet they are still hardly an army. They are a street gang. Maybe you
could consider them terrorists. They are opposed by the Order which
even though they are the white hats could be considered a rival 
street gang. You might consider them a citizen's committee or a 
posse, I suppose. Neither group represents a government. It is not
clear to me that the MoM is a government either. It seems more like
a free standing bureaucracy with self declared police powers. It is 
almost a third rival street gang.

If none, or at most one, of the three organizations that are engaged 
are a government this cannot be a traditional war. It can't be a 
civil war, the closest thing the WW has to a government is not splitting.
In fact it has hardly been engaged at all to this point. LV may be 
attempting a coup as he apparently intended the first time around 
but a coup is not a war either.

I'm not as familiar with the body count as many of you are but my 
impression is that the DE are the only side that is slaughtering 
their rivals. Aren't the order capturing DE's as often as they can 
rather than killing them? Police capture thier opponents, soldiers
do not capture when they can avoid it. Soldiers would prefer to 
seriously wound the opposing soldiers if possible, kill them if
they have to, and capture them as a last resort. A soldier's prime
mission becomes capturing the opposing army only in the final
stages of a war when mass captures will quickly end the conflict.

Another defining characteristic of a war is that military equipment
is used. What military equipment does the WW world have? The
closest thing I have seen so far is time turners and the less said about
them the better. Thank goodness they are gone. Like policeman
and gangsters this conflict is being waged with civilian equipment.
It is curious how powerful the WW's civilian equipment is. All the
more so when you consider that the society it is embedded in
restricts ordinary civilians to using airguns of very limited power
unless some very difficult hurdles are jumped. An ordinary wand
is much, much more powerful than the weapons US citizens can
easily buy, but it is considered civilian, not military equipment.

JKR has said these books are about death. Any serious attempt
to consider death has to be limited to very few, preferably one, 
death(s). When death is given to the reader wholesale it loses 
its meaning. War cheapens death as much as it cheapens life. 
Neither death nor life means much in a war. The death of 
Harry's parents was a totally sufficient platform on which to 
build a story about death. Because of Harry's partial responsibility
Sirius' death could have been added to the mix. All this additional
killing will just detract from the story, if its point is indeed 
to consider death. It would have been better if LV's return 
had been permanently thwarted or his second defeat quickly 
and easily accomplished in fact. I think the Harry/Snap relationship
could be a very powerful framework on which to build a story
about life and death and the choices we make. It seems to me
that the noise of all the deaths that have happened and apparently
will happen in the next book will drown out the message JKR 
says is central to the story.

Ken