"But what I don't understand, Inspector..."

[Barry Arrowsmith]

--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, GulPlum <hp at p...> wrote:

with lots of snipping - hopefully sufficient remains to folllow the lines
of discussion

> I felt as if 
> we're doomed to repeat the same arguments over the same theories forever 
> (or until Book 6 gives us some salient facts for some people to change 
> their minds, whichever is sooner...). In particular, the metaphor of the 
> jigsaw puzzle I mentioned yesterday was already done to death. :-)
>


Yup.
Those who've worked on the HPfGU catalogue project can testify to that.
Even few months the same subject matter gets more or less the same
treatment, the same questions are asked and only rarely is a new insight
offered. That's the definition of an enthusiastic fan I suppose - a willingness
to chatter endlessly about the same old same old. The appearance of a new
book generally adds to the list of questions without resolving many of the
outstanding ones. Oh, it'll rubbish a few of the theories that have been
formulated,  but everyone expects that anyway.

> 
> >Jo has created a marvellously complex and
> >detailed world, so much so that some have a hankering to prise the back
> >off and see what makes it tick. 
> 
> Except that, as has been stated over and over again, JKR's universe is not 
> entirely consistent. [...] given JKR's tendency to leave things unsaid all over
> the place and 
> her simultaneous tendency to make mistakes means that we simply don't know 
> which bits are clues and which bits are mistakes. Hence the importance of 
> her non-book statements which occasionally clarify things. 
>

All part  of the fun and games.
Besides, what a marvellous excuse for someone whose favourite theory has 
just been shot down in flames. Blame the author. After that rack your brains
to come up  with a few tattered shreds of canon that will allow you to keep
it on life-support. Specious arguments and illogical connections can be a
great help. Then in 4 months re-launch hoping that in the meantime the 
counter-arguments have been forgotten. Some hope. But it is a fairly
innocent pastime.
 
> 
> Except that, as you yourself stated in the thread I referenced above, 
> Aggie's whodunnits are very unsatisfying for the reader because she always 
> keeps a vital piece of information to which whichever Sleuth the story 
> features has access, but the reader doesn't. And her plots frequently 
> involve such leaps of logic that the thing simply doesn't make sense.


True. Can't stand her myself. And Jo's confessed affection for such does tend 
to be a warning flag to the cautious reader. Alternatively - since the likes of
Aggie often contrived their tales so as to produce an unexpected result,
might not that also be the case in HP? So it's possible to contend that any 
theory, no matter how daft, is still in the running until all is revealed. We
all (well, many of us) want an intellectually satisfying conclusion but there's 
no guarantee that we'll get one. Others are pinning their hopes on an 
emotionally satisfying conclusion, much more likely IMO, and in the afterglow
of emotional catharsis critical faculties often tend to be somewhat blunted. 

> 
>There have been very few theories which I consider to be 
> even possible, and fewer which I consider to be even slightly probable. I 
> do, however, like and admire the intellectual game of putting together a 
> theory which is both internally and externally (i.e. thematically) 
> consistent. And the vast majority of them are not.
> 

Of course.
Theories are an intellectual exercise, little more. Many are a consequence of
hanging around waiting for the next book to arrive. It's fans twiddling their
thumbs, trying to find something moderately entertaining to do while they
wait. All the HP discussion boards as now constituted are a temporary 
aberration and wouldn't exist in their present form if the epic had been 
released in its entirety. There would still be discussion but it'd be post
facto criticism whereas now it's heavily weighted towards pre-emptive
speculation. Once all has been revealed/explained (assuming that it will
be) about Snape, Harry, Sirius, Lupin et al, 90% of the posts we see now
would be eliminated. But expect an explosion in Fanfic.

I don't think that there are many posters who take the theories all that 
seriously. Sure, you'll go into the lists to defend your own mutant offspring
against all-comers, you wouldn't be much of a theorist if you didn't, but
it's a battle of wits more than anything else, a game with certain rules
that are unspoken but generally understood. It's noticeable that when
there's a poster who starts to get too intense and dogmatic then the
number of responses to their posts drops off markedly - except from
those that agree with them. I can think of 4 prime candidates on the 
other list.

 
> 
> Ahh, but *are* they ultimately deducible? I don't think any of the 
> who-how-why mysteries in the individual books to date were deducible before 
> Harry received the key piece of information right at the end, *after* the 
> "who" had revealed themselves and explained the "how". 
> The one thing we do know is that it's never the individual Harry suspects.
> 
> A few examples:
> 
> Quirrell can't touch Harry, but why are we to deduce that this is salient, 
> considering few people shake his hand or otherwise touch him (the 
> stereotype of the non-tactile Brit has a huge element of truth in it).
>

Actually he can touch Harry. He shakes hands with him in the Leaky Cauldron.
"P-P-Potter," stammered Professor Quirrell, grasping Harry's hand, ..." 
It's probably another author error, though it does allow such as myself to
speculate whether or not Voldy is permanently positioned above Quirrell's
back collar stud, or if he has quiescent phases - at least until an errata slip
arrives. Kind of cocks up the denouement, though.

> We don't even know that the central mystery in CoS is not the Chamber 
> itself; but who's attacking the pupils (and yet more importantly, how). And 
> we have no basis to assume that Ginny is responsible until we're told.
> 

Hmm. The importance or otherwise of the Chamber may well ultimately rest 
on whether it makes a reappearance in books 6 or 7. Some suspect it will.
Since (apparently) only Harry and Voldy  can get in, it'd be a fine place for
the final showdown. Could be wrong, of course. Ginny - she's just the 
believable motive for Harry strapping on his wand, jutting out his jaw and
dicing with death. I've never been very impressed with that Ginny/Diary 
sub-plot. It leaves a lot to be desired IMO. 

But in some ways it gives a sort of back-handed credibility to many of the 
fan theories. Imagine the reaction if that had been posited as a plot-line 
before the event. The poster would have been laughed off the site. 
Hindsight is so wonderful.
 
> 
> So now, waiting for HBP, we have lots of ideas floating around, and lots of 
> ideas of what bits of OotP may have been clues, but I'm fairly sure that 
> nobody will be able to guess which until it's too late. Heck, we're nowhere 
> near a consensus on who the dratted titular royal personage might be.
> 

No. And I don't expect anything else.
The book titles refer to major plot-lines or devices within the relevant book.
Usually there's no lead up in the previous volume; no hint of the Chamber
in PS/SS; or Azkaban - let alone the prisoner, in CoS, or the Goblet in PoA,
and so on. The HBP will follow the rule, I expect.

My guess is that important clues will refer *back* rather than forward. We're
rampaging forward towards the beginning, is my bet. The clues not specific
to individual volume plots, the bits about James, Lily, Tom, Voldy, Snape -
it's all those continuing conundra that are really the guts of the thing IMO.
Sorry to keep harping on about it, but it's the past in HP that is shaping
the present and will shape the future. The past is where all the 'whys' and 
'becauses' hide. And it's the part I'm mostly interested in. And I'm willing
to bet it's the part that Jo has crafted most carefully - allowing for the
occasional cock-up like the wand-order in the graveyard, though even
that didn't negate the significance of GH, just confused us with a minor
contradiction.

I'm not really fussed whether Harry, DD, Voldy or whoever dies or survives,
though a major massacre or blood-boultered mayhem would raise a smile.
But if you've been paying attention then you may have noticed that the theories
I keep vapouring on about are an attempt to dig into the past, to construct
moderately credible scenarios that explain what the hell is going on and why
so-and-so behaves the way he does. I much prefer archaeology to crystal-
ball gazing. Isolated hypotheses don't grab me. For example the Vampire!Snape
idea - it may or may not be valid - but unless it can be used to credibly explain 
in terms important to and congruent with the storyline as we know it, such as 
why Snape left Voldy and joined DD, then it's not high on my list of things
to think about. 

Hopefully there'll be a few snippets of info in HBP that will allow me to hone, 
modify or junk existing theories. But the final yea or nay will probably have
to wait until the final chapters of the last book, wiith the probability that
they're wrong anyway. 

Ah, well, it keeps me out of mischief.
Sometimes.

Kneasy