XPOST: Lupin is Ever So Evil Part One -- The Prank (long)
davewitley
dfrankiswork at davewitley.yahoo.invalid
Fri Jun 3 16:49:22 UTC 2005
One post mentions the Gleam, the next the Prank. My brain resists
it, but my fingers cannot help but type a reference to Hermione's
comment to Ron after the Ball...
Eloise wrote:
> Actually (sorry) I blame JKR. ;-) I'm stepping back for a minute
to
> look a this as a piece of writing.
>
> I think it's incredibly hard to set up this kind of thing without
some
> inconsistencies creeping in. Sirius trying to feed Snape to a
werewolf is the
> counterpoint to (and the ostensible reason for) Snape wanting to
feed Sirius to
> the Dementors.
Ah, logic I understand. ;-)
Does it follow that the villain of the prank is the villain of he
Shack in PoA? That means, for most of us, that Pettigrew has an as-
yet undisclosed role in the prank, and for ESE!Lupin aficionados,
that both Pettigrew and Lupin do.
> I'm coming to the conclusion that you *can't* write about magic
> without loose ends and holes in the plot.
In fact, there is a theorem in formal logic that if a set of true
propositions includes a contradiction, you can prove any statement
at all about your universe to be true. Since fictional magic is
usually an assertion that some normal process of nature is
contradicted, I think you are right.
In theory, one could construct an alternative universe based on
consistent rules, and call some of the differences to our own
universe 'magic'. However, since the collective efforts of the
scientific community have not yet been able to describe the real
universe, it's asking quite a lot of an individual author to
construct anything more complex than Flatland consistently.
Ironically, it was Pippin who to my knowledge really first pointed
this out on HPFGU, causing Lexicon Steve to doubt the sense of his
entire project.
David
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