Suspension of disbelief -Idiots of War

[sistermagpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 182437

> Alla:
> >> you are not seriously suggesting that throwing water at the 
people
> in their offices counts as antiVoldemort resistance?
> > <SNIP of examples I agree with>
> 
> Pippin:
> Set off the sprinkler system in your building, and see how much work
> you get done <g> <<
> 
> Ask any soldier who served in a war, or anyone who served in an 
> "underground" campaign,  and they'll tell you that see it as their 
sworn 
> duty to harass the enemy any way they can. 

Magpie:
To get technical, whoever pulled that prank at the MoM wasn't setting 
off sprinkler systems in a modern office building, just making it 
rain in one person's office. As brave as that itself might have been, 
it's the type of thing we see Wizards doing to each other for fun in 
other books--which is perhaps why it surprises some of us that the 
entire WW didn't become one big jack in the box when Voldemort tried 
to take over.

OotP of course shows pranking on a larger scale interfering greatly 
with the running of things just this way, because Umbridge is always 
having to put out little fires all over the place with the teachers 
not helping to fix them just as I think somebody in DH points out 
how "difficult" it has been to stop the raining. 

Though of course, I think what Betsy is questioning is why this is 
all anybody thought they could manage. It's not unbelievable, for 
instance, that Harry and his friends slip out of the DE's grasp for 
months.

Pippin:
Harry's coming of age was not about learning how to work with other
people. He already knew how to do that -- he was captain of a
Quidditch team, fergawdsake. His coming of age was about learning that
you need to work with other people regardless of whether you approve
of them. Dumbledore, for example.

Magpie:
Not to speak from Betsy, but based on reading her posts I don't think 
by "learn to work with others" she means Harry needed to learn to 
accept help from his loyal friends or captain the Quidditch team. 
That's obviously one line that did go through the books and had 
already been done by OotP. 

Betsy was, I think, referring to Harry having to learn to compromise 
and reconsider his own behavior against people he truly didn't 
disapprove of or didn't like and who truly didn't like him in return. 
He doesn't disapprove of Dumbledore; he's Dumbledore's man throughout 
the series. He loves the guy. In DH he has some anxiety over whether 
or not Dumbledore loved him or was the man he thought he was decades 
before--iow, it's more like having to forgive James for not being 
perfect or for doing things he didn't like. In both cases Harry wants 
to believe the best of the person. 

When it comes to the people he truly dismisses and rejects the most 
that's required of Harry is to accept and acknowledge their own 
service or debt to him, sometimes after their death. I believe that's 
what Betsy was expecting from the Horcrux hunt and said so pre-DH. 
The kind of story that the book wasn't doing at all. Accepting the 
flaws of the people you like and who like you is very different from 
what Betsy was talking about that didn't happen. Harry had very 
smooth sailing around all those kinds of potentially more humiliating 
and humbling conflicts and challenges. The book wasn't ever going 
there, it turned out.

-m