a sandwich

[Lee Kaiwen]

No: HPFGUIDX 178698

Steph:
> Part of the problem here is that, with the exception of the
> Epilogue, which is just a small snapshot of the future, we
> actually don't know what happened to the house elves after
> Voldemort's defeat.

This is probably the crux of the problem. The whole house-elf/slave 
storyline was introduced, dealt with across several books, was, by JKR's 
own admission, a stand-in for slavery and hence a Very Important 
Message, and then was never resolved on-page.

As far as we can tell from canon, nothing changes. House elves just go 
on being house elves as everybody else loses interest in them as an 
Issue. Sure, canon leaves room to speculate otherwise, but that hardly 
seems a fitting conclusion to something JKR herself once declared to be 
a VIM. Hmm, guess it must not have been so Important after all?

But as others have pointed out, HP is full of unresolved story arcs -- 
themes JKR introduces and then just walks away from (the whole 
unresolved goblin-wizard feud was another one that left me wondering 
what was the point?) -- so the house elves plot is hardly unusual in 
that respect. It just strikes me as messy writing. JKR claims she's had 
the whole thing planned out for a decade, but it hardly seems possible 
that in all that time she could have failed to notice all those dangling 
loose ends. If she introduced them, she should have resolved them; if 
she never intended to resolve them, she should have left them on the 
cutting room floor. If she introduced them then later discovered she 
didn't have room to resolve them, that sounds like poor planning. In any 
case, Resolve your story arcs! seems like a pretty basic requirement of 
Good Writing.

I agree it seems a bit over the top to accuse JKR of nefariousness or 
hidden evil messages when disorganization would seem a more than 
adequate explanation.

--CJ