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[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 178197

> va32h:
> 
> 
> To an extent, I do blame the readership.  JKR honestly answered that
> Harry's grandparents are all dead because she needed Harry to be an
> orphan.  Plain and simple.  But many, many readers won't just accept
> that and continue to ask why and how they died.  So it's half our
> fault for not being able to (as I said earlier) use our own
> imaginations for these incredibly minor, petty details. 
> 
> But JKR certainly did not help, with her winking and vamping and "ooh
> I can't tell you" type answers.  

Pippin:
She was under no obligation to tell us which missing answers were
important and which weren't. That in itself would give things away.

va32h
> And on a whole other level, I find it sort of rude.  It would take
> minutes to pop onto the Lexicon and solve these "Flints".  That JKR
> could not be bothered to take that time (when fandom has taken the
> time to create something like the Lexicon) just strikes me as rude. 
> If we can waste the space in our brains to remember the definition of
> a Secret Keeper, why can't she?  Or at least employ someone to
> remember it for her?


Pippin:
Popping into the lexicon only works if she's uncertain, not if she
remembered something wrongly, or if, as seems to be the case
with the Secret Keeper thing, she changed her mind. That's an
author's perogative even after a book has been published. Tolkien
largely rewrote The Hobbit to support The Lord of the Rings. He
continued to revise LOTR for years afterwards. I haven't heard 
any serious critic complain that it compromised the integrity
of his message. 

I have read that there are editors at both Bloomsbury and Scholastic 
charged with catching continuity errors, and of course we don't know 
about the ones they caught. But if JKR was under deadline, as she says,
then so were they. 

I don't know *why* there needed to be a deadline for DH. But my guess
is that three reasons might be Dan, Rupert and Emma. Time waits for 
no youth  and I think she's on record as saying she hoped they could 
play the parts to the end.

Pippin