Christmas / World Building And The Potterverse

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 167358

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "lupinlore" <rdoliver30 at ...> wrote:
he 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.

Pippin:
Convincing babble is still babble. You said it yourself,
it's the genre expectation, not the story itself, that needs it.

There are lots of people who can't get into science fiction (I'm 
not one of them) because real people don't stop in the middle 
of whatever they're doing to explain how something works.

And there are others (I'm not one of them either) who can't find
anything believable  without an explanation of  how it works. I
guess it takes all kinds. 

Lupinlore:> 
> 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.

Pippin:
JKR is under no obligation to imitate Tolkien or to better him. She's
been frank that that kind of world-building is not her interest.
Tolkien took fairy tales out of the nursery and out of traditional
fairylands so he could work with angst and dark melodrama. He took 
pains to depict his faery world in a naturalistic way, chronology
included, though as one who was privileged to read his work
during his lifetime I found the constant tinkering as he struggled
to get things just so  more  distracting than the inconsistencies 
themselves.

 But JKR reminds us, disturbingly, that there is plenty of room for
angst and dark melodrama in the nursery itself. We don't have
to leave the artificial world of children's tales to find it. We just
have to stop pretending that it isn't there. 

Pippin