Less than 1000 posts in a month - why now?

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 180201

 
> Carol:
 Unfortunately, JKR has Harry see Lucius
> *refusing* to buy it for Draco, then later takes for granted that
> *Ron* would know that Draco owns the Hand his father refused to buy
> for him.

 She could at least have had Harry mention the Hand of Glory
> to Ron, but she never does even that much. It's just one example of>
JKR's forgetting what she actually wrote and not bothering to consult
the earlier book. Another example is the mention of skulls in the
Slytherin common room in DH, when in fact, no such skulls are
described in CoS. Possibly she was thinking of Borgin and
Burkes.(Andher statement in an interview that the Slytherin common
room has an
> eerie beauty is not consistent with skulls, either

Pippin:
But it's a major theme of the series that the assumptions
we make on the basis of incomplete information (and information is
always more incomplete than we think it is) are often wrong.

Skulls can have an eerie beauty; consider the works of Georgia
O'Keefe. But I thought that Harry was improvising. The 
interrogator was obviously waiting for something and Harry, 
perhaps drawing a bit of inspiration from the Voldie bit, 
guessed what it was. I would expect the Slytherin CR to be
looking more like Grimmauld Place or Borgin and Burkes if
Crabbe had anything to say about it. 
 

Carol:
 (I, for one, never expected the House-Elves to be freed, but 
I do wish it had been clearer that at least one Slytherin student
fought for Hogwarts.

Pippin:
The return of the Slytherins is symbolically important to fans
of the House, but I've yet to hear why it should, at that moment, have
been important to Harry. He's thinking of the battle, not the future
of the House system, and the arrival of a number of fully qualified
wizards has got to be far more important to him than the return of
some underqualified students that he barely knows. 


The eyes of history often aren't focused where we would like them to
be. There is, for example, a dearth of information about Jesus's
existence that would satisfy a historian, and yet subsequent events
are somewhat difficult to explain otherwise.<g>

We have to explain Hary's changed attitude towards Slytherin, the
willingness of everyone to sit without regard to House (surely the
Slytherin table would have had pariah status if all its former
occupants  were regarded as traitors) and Phineas Nigellus's reminder
that Slytherin played a part. Now all the portraits already knew about
Snape, and none of them have had a chance to hear about Regulus, so
what can he be talking about?

It strikes me that if the House Elves and the Slytherins had
clearly embraced liberal values of tolerance and equality, or been
shown to actually have them all along, there would be little dispute
about JKR's message and whether she'd managed to get it across. 

Instead the House Elves and Draco really do have different values.
Most Elves believe they really are inferior and many purebloods think
they really are the top drawer. 

That, I realize, challenges a cherished bit of liberal dogma. If 
it's  self-evident that all are created equal then the House Elves
and the purebloods must be either really stupid or really wicked not
to realize it. But the WW split from the Muggle world before this
assertion was made, much less accepted on either side of the pond.
For most of history hierarchical societies have been the norm not the
aberration. We forget, IMO, that we had to be taught to believe in
equality just as we had to be taught to reason critically and trust in
logic. The WW hasn't learned to do either.

As the story closes, the WW clings to its old values,
Ron wavers, and it's Harry and Hermione whose liberalism has had to
stretch to accommodate them, not without some strain and questionable
compromises. But really, if the WW needs greater tolerance, and who
would claim that it does not, how likely is it that it would come from
closed minds like Kreacher's or that not very great thinker Draco?
So it has to come from Harry and his friends. 

Harry was great at fighting Voldemort, but he's not the sort of person
who could change a culture over night. Harry isn't Jesus, but even
Jesus didn't do that.


JKR has several times admitted to errors and inconsistencies: Flint's
age, the wand order glitch, the ancestor/descendant glitch and most
recently the missing twenty-four hours. It doesn't bother me that
she took a while to own up to it -- after all she still had the
option of working it in. She now has the option of thinking out
loud about the story without worrying about misleading people
about what's going to happen in the books. So why shouldn't she?
  
The WW is a work of the imagination, not just a set of novels, and
it exists both inside and outside of what JKR wrote in them.
I've just had great fun putting together my Order of the Phoenix
Lego castle -- I followed the directions but of course the building
blocks can be put together differently. Am I supposed to be upset if
the Lego company puts out some additional ideas for the play set? Will
they be intruding on my fun? Of course not! 

I have to say I am bewildered that a few of JKR's erstwhile fans  no
longer have anything good to say about the work they once praised so
expansively. The cynic in me wonders if it's just the reaction of a
largely female fan base to the bitter truth that so many juicy
characters are now dead or spoken for. <g>

Or is it just that the wizarding world was  revealed to be (gasp!)a
flawed and struggling society instead of the escapist paradise some
readers longed to join? I no longer wish that the wizarding
world were real -- but that doesn't mean I'm tired of hearing about it. 

It seems that the declaration that canon was closed may have been
greatly exaggerated -- and for me at least that's not a cause for dismay.

Pippin