World Building And The Potterverse

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 167521

 > Ken:
> 
> I cannot believe that JKR chose to make these mistakes. A certain 
> number of mistakes are unavoidable and we would not criticize 
> her for a normal amount of mistakes. The quantity and kind of mistakes
> are jarring. Not killing but jarring. Many of the mistakes are the 
> kind that *could* have been avoided if the timeline had been as
> carefully planned out as she claims the plot was.
> 
> I don't think that Tolkien expected The Hobbit to go anywhere.

Pippin:
We can make allowances for JKR's circumstances too.
 She says that she set aside a certain amount of
time to plan her saga and bring it to market. If she didn't
succeed in that time she was going to give up. Like Harry,
she was living on the deeply begrudged generosity of the 
ratepaying class. You can imagine what Vernon would
think of his tax money going to pay some flighty
divorcee to make up stories about wizards and dragons
instead of holding down a real job.

She couldn't afford an infinite amount of time to
search for errors, nor hire someone to
do it, nor was there at that time an obsessed fanbase 
who would have bid on the privelege of doing it for nothing.

I never  noticed a problem with Charlie Weasley's
age until  it was pointed out to me -- so it's no surprise
to me that JKR didn't spot it. Some people notice stuff
like that immediately -- they probably got a higher 
score on the math portion of their SAT than I did. Good
for them, but we're not all so gifted. Somebody who's
good at math not only makes fewer errors than I do,
he finds and corrects them more quickly. I can be
just as careful in terms of the time and attention I
devote to math, and still get poorer results.

Ken:
> There is no point in criticizing the Silmarillion, Tolkien never
> finished it

Pippin:
If there's no point in criticizing the Silmarillion because
it's not finished, how can there be any point in criticizing
the Harry Potter saga, which isn't finished either?

Most likely the time travel is there because it's thematically
important -- Harry learns that he can't change the past
but  he can reinterpret it   if he can only let go of his 
destructive memories. 

If that plays havoc with the wish to assume the Harry
Potter world is a real place governed by consistent 
physical laws -- well, JKR never said it was. And the
wisest of its inhabitants doesn't believe it is either. 
Dumbledore says there is a power greater than nature's
at work in the Potterverse. It saved Harry at Godric's
Hollow. It saved him  in PoA, IMO, and d'oh, it'll save 
Harry again in DH or I'm a Hobbit. <g>

Betsy:
Betsy Hp:
I really, really don't get the idea that JKR is making continuity
errors (or character inconsistencies or math holes or world building
contradictions) for the *fun* of it.

Pippin:
I didn't mean she was making mistakes for the fun of it.
I mean, she knew that the circumstances in which she was
writing would force her to produce errors in the text,
just like GM knows that its business model will force the
production of a certain number of defective cars.

Knowing that, IMO, she invented a style in which some apparent
mistakes by the author would turn out to be misinterpretations
by the characters  or tricks on the reader, tricks which would
be obvious except that they're concealed by the overall pulpiness.
 I've already pointed out the examples in PS/SS -- are you saying 
these aren't stylistic tricks but are pure coincidence? 

I find that *very* hard to believe. You're saying she changed 
the narrative voice in  chapter eleven naively, not knowing 
that this is considered an elementary mistake in style, and then 
unintentionally it worked out to conceal some crucial elements 
of the plot which she actually meant to tell us about? We were 
supposed to know whether Harry's broom stopped bucking 
before Hermione reached Snape?

::blinks::

Betsy Hp:
So JKR purposefully planned on her reader getting jerked out of the
story in HBP? She's going to bring up that whole Hand of Glory issue
in DH (along with a myriad of other issues) to show us what the real
state of Draco's relationship with his father was back in HBP? (Or,
more properly, back in an earlier book, since it seems Draco had had
the hand for a little while there).

Pippin:
How jerked out are you? You still want to read DH, despite your
fear that it might disappoint you, right? And so do about a 
zillion other people.

 It does jar -- but just enough to make you aware that you 
had some preconceptions about how Draco's story was going to go 
-- and I think she did that on purpose. She wants you to see
that your preconceptions about Draco failed to predict what
he was capable of. It makes Dumbledore's error in failing
to imagine that Draco could smuggle in DE's more credible, no?

IMO, she hasn't got to resolve the technical issue of how
Draco got  the hand. She just has to resolve the state of things
between Draco and his father, and then it won't matter, any more
than it matters how he got the Peruvian Darkness Powder, or
how the Twins got their hands on contraband before
they met Mundungus. It might make an intriguing bit of
fan fiction, but there's no thematic necessity for this info, IMO.
We don't, er, need to know.

Betsy HP:
I do think Dumbledore was badly mishandled. (frex: While I can
accept that magically there was no surer way to protect Harry than
sticking him with the Dursleys, that oddly rude little lecture
Dumbledore gave the Dursleys in HBP shook my acceptence that any sort
of wizard interference would have put Harry on the street. It was an
odd choice on JKR's part, IMO.)

Pippin:
The point is, Dumbledore couldn't *know* how much wizard 
interference it would take to put Harry in the street. He'd
be guessing, and he knows as well as we do that some of his
guesses are wrong. 

The Dursleys may be stultified members of the middle class,
but they aren't Bagginses after all -- you *can't* tell what 
they'll do or say without the bother  of asking them and 
neither can Dumbledore.

He'd be gambling with Harry's remaining protection (which the 
Dursleys did threaten to withdraw in PoA) and he apparently 
didn't think it was worth the risk until there was so little 
protection remaining that a bit of  moral support for Harry 
seemed a fair trade.

Is a  live Harry, troubled by depression and anger,
worth less than a dead Harry and the serene belief that he'd done 
all he could to change the Dursleys ways, so it's their fault if 
they kicked Harry out and let him get killed? Should
Dumbledore wallow in sad memories and might have beens?
If he buried himself in regret for every evil that he failed
to prevent, what use would he be to anyone?


It's discomforting to have Dumbledore
act in ways that make it plain that his nobility is of a human
order, a fragile and difficult choice, not a given like Gandalf's,
but does it detract from him as a character? I don't think so.
It does make it harder to treat the books as chicken soup for
the soul.

I don't, I can't, read the books for comfort any more. Umbridge, 
and Sirius's death took that away. DH may bring it back, or
not. I think that tension has been created purposefully too.
I'm not so sure JKR wants us to be able to lose ourselves in
these books -- read them, learn from them, enjoy them,
yes, but use them as mental comfort food? "It does not do
to dwell on dreams and forget to live, remember that."

Pippin