A Whisper About Time-Travel

[Barry Arrowsmith]

--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, "davewitley" <dfrankiswork at n...> wrote:
> 
> Well, it is a puzzle: but the question is, why debunk anything at 
> all?  However she replies she is bound to draw attention to ideas 
> that are close to the one she is debunking but not *quite* ruled out 
> by her remarks.
> 
> We have two ways of looking at it, I think.  One is that the 
> debunked speculations are close to the mark and she wants to 
> misdirect by getting naive fans to go somewhere else entirely.  In 
> that case travellers from the past are possibly something she's 
> trying ineptly to draw us away from.
> 
> The other is that the speculations are so far from anything in the 
> books that she (mistakenly IMO) wants to save fans the bother of 
> pursuing them.  In that case the admittedly slipshod deduction that 
> time travellers are ruled out completely is probably safe.
> 
> Similar reasoning applies to the case of Flamel and the putative 
> Potions Master vacancy.
> 
> In neither case does JKR come very well out of it.  The best way to 
> conceal future developments is simply to remain silent about plot 
> matters, and if fans enjoy off-the-wall speculations why should she 
> feel responsible for shooting them down?
> 

Fair comment.
In fact there are fans who originally welcomed Jo's site but have
developed second thoughts. Whether intentionally or not, the overall
effect has been to narrow the breadth of speculation that existed
previously.

Now it's possible that she's a bit worried that what is to come is not
so BANGy, exciting, convoluted or comprehensive as some of the
ideas that have been bounced around the sites and feels that she
needs to put a damper on things. Let's face it, hundreds of thousands
of rabidly imaginative fans can probably out-plot any author born
given the time they've had to play around with the canon. Ideas appear
and are tweaked, modified and developed over months and years by 
some of the most inventive, devious and off-the-wall minds on the web.
What chance does a poor author have against that lot?
Alternatively - she thinks we've gone bonkers and is luring us back
to sanity.

If you browse the sites and their archives and do a bit of cherry-
picking, you'd probably be able to put together 3 or 4 alternatives to 
books 6 & 7 - in broad outline, anyway. So far as I'm aware this is
the first time in history that so many fans have come up with so many
ideas *and* been able to communicate them to other fans for more
or less instant appraisal and comment, leaving the writer trailing in their
wake. In fact, if the author was someone not so strong-minded as JKR,
they might even start to  wonder if some of the wrinkles on the sites
might be worth incorporating into (or even replacing!) original story-arcs.
If an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters can
produce the works of Stratford Willy, what could the collective rat-like
cunning of a million Potter fans produce?

Kneasy