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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