Christmas / World Building And The Potterverse

[lupinlore]

No: HPFGUIDX 167348

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "horridporrid03" 
<horridporrid03 at ...> wrote:
> 
> Betsy Hp:
> Yeah, and that's *exactly* what bugs me.  Where does the WW get 
their 
> stuff?  How do they manufacture it, what is their means for paying 
> for it, how do they interact with Muggles if that's what needed and 
> where exactly do the goblins figure in?  I agree, JKR probably 
relies 
> on the easy and sloppy "shesezso".  Which is the cheap way out, IMO.

Exactly.  And I agree it is a severe dampener on the series in that 
it shoots you out of the narrative with its sheer unbelievable 
nature.  You are going merrily along when you run into something that 
is obviously contrived simply so the plot can go a certain way and or 
JKR can explore certain dilemmas, even at the cost of severe 
violations of consistency or even "storybook" plausibility, and you 
go "Oh, bull#@!!"

To disagree with Pippin, I think it DOES matter why the CPS, Muggle 
or Magical, weren't doing their job with Harry and the Dursleys.  It 
DOES matter why Harry wasn't, for instance, sent out of the country.  
For JKR to say, "I want to explore a certain ethical dilemma" invites 
the "bull#@!!" response.  It DOES matter what the alternatives were 
in GoF.  It DOES matter that the WW seems to have a calendar where 1 
September falls on a Monday year after year after year.  It DOES 
matter, to agree with Betsy, that wizards are able to transfigure and 
conjure, yet seem to be as dependent on commerce, money, and 
manufacturing as anyone else.  It DOES matter that huge numbers of 
people in the WW are muggleborn or half-blood, yet the disfunctional 
and backward political and social system shows no reflection of this 
fact.

And the big problem is that much of this could have been fixed very 
easily.  True, it would have required a certain amount of techo-
babble (or magico-babble), but it would have made things much more 
consistent and therefore smooth and believable.  Simple references to 
the difficulty of conjuring or the availability of magical energy 
could have helped explain the need for stores, money, etc.  Five 
minutes with a calendar program could have cleared up the Mondays 
dilemma.  A slight change in plot (i.e. having the Ministry rather 
than Dumbledore make the placement at the Dursleys) would have helped 
the believability of the Dursley storyline, even if it would have 
required creativity to work in the blood-protection angle.  A 
paragraph about what happened to somebody who violated a magical 
contract would have cleared that up.  Unfortunately, the 
disfunctional WW is just a bleeding wound 


<SNIP>
> 
> I used to think that these issues would clear up as Harry got older 
> and took more notice of things.  It hasn't.  It's not a series 
killer 
> (the characters are still important), but it is a series dampener, 
> IMO.  That the WW is a magical world only makes the lack of logic 
> worse, IMO.

Well, herein lies much of the trouble.  In the beginning, and up 
through at least much of GoF, the series was basically a fairy-tale.  
You don't expect fairy-tales to make sense in order to work -- it 
just isn't part of the genre expectation.  Then, as Harry got older, 
things shifted.  The story became much more of a dark melodrama, with 
elements of teen angst and the moral allegory thrown in.  Those DO 
require much more consistency in order to work.  As the genre 
shifted, many of us expected the consistency to improve as well.   
Basically we said, "Okay, XXXX was fine as long as we were dealing 
with a fairy tale, but in this kind of story it's NOT fine, and 
you've got a lot of 'splainin' to do."  Unfortunately, the 
explanations and consistency never came.  And JKR's own comments 
betray that she really didn't understand the boundaries she was 
crossing.  When she says things like "well, I assumed that people 
would understand that if wizards can apparate, they'll be situations 
where they can't" the answer is, "If this was still a fairy tale, I 
guess that's okay.  Since this isn't a fairy tale anymore, that is 
NOT okay."


Lupinlore