FAQ poll answered... (with spoilers for said FAQ poll)

[Barry Arrowsmith]

--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, "Lyn J. Mangiameli" <kumayama at e...> wrote:
> 
> It seems to me that Rowling has set up a spectrum of intrusion 
> into another's being: 
> Legilimancy, Possession, and the Soul Sucking of the Dementors. 
> Now we have this "magical window into Voldemort's mind."  This 
> status strikes me, at a minimum, as somewhere between Legilimancy
> and Possession, and does not at all preclude the latter.   
> 
> It still strikes me as passingly strange that such a "window" would 
> arise from a death curse, as opposed to an attempt to possess (or 
> something a bit more). As Kneasy alludes, if Voldemort's intent was
> to first explore and then remove Harry's powers,perhaps even 
> soul, then it may well be a death of sorts, and of course, nothing about
> a possession necessarily precludes it being so total as to cause death.


Quite so.

Like Lyn, songbird and others I have difficulty finding a simple congruence
between what we have been led to believe and what may have actually
happened at GH, particularly in regard to an AK being a method of power 
transfer.

Detailed discussion of the apparent discrepancies in the partial(!) explication 
of the GH event have figured in a number of my past posts on the other board
so it's not worth going through it all again except to point to one interesting 
aspect. IIRC only one character has ever stated that Harry survived an AK -  
and that was Crouch!Moody. 

All well and good, except that in the same speech C!M reiterates as fact that
there is no protection against an AK. One of his contentions has to be wrong.
All other references to the episode (and that includes Jo I think), talk of 
murder or of the intention to kill but do not specify the methodology.

This is the sort of loophole that a number of posters, myself included, tend 
to embrace with cries of joy (assuming that is, that it's possible to embrace 
a hole - a zen-like exercise IMO). However, during the past few weeks various
factors have combined to limit the amount of time spent bashing out posts
allowing an opportunity to take, well - sort of an overview, a wider perspective
or appreciation of HP. It's been a bit worrying. 

It's not the possibility that the beloved theories clutched to my bosom may
be wrong, that would mean little more than a rueful admission of error, an
"Ah, well..." post closely followed by a few "I told you so's" from others -
something of no significance or importance whatsoever. No, a deeper
apprehension than that has been slowly growing. Most of the fans assume
that eventually all the "i's" will be dotted, all the "t's" crossed, all discrepancies
resolved, all lacunae filled, all questions answered, and in such a manner
that is wholly satisfying - intellectually if not as regards personal tastes. 
Hmm. Anyone like to offer odds on such an outcome?

It's no secret that a number of fans weren't very happy with OoP for one 
reason or another. Not surprising - you can't please everybody. Time was when
all - no matter what their preferences - could speculate wildly or not so wildly 
on how it would all be resolved. Not so now, and in a couple of months options
will be restricted further. An inevitability, you say. Of course, we all accepted 
that. But what if for many of us the final wrap-up is not just an absence of a
personal wish-list resolution but unsatisfactory in the sense of trite, facile and
with glaring gaps all over the place? What if - and here's an irony - it turns out
that fandom has dreamt up potential story threads that are more interesting, 
comprehensive and substantial than Jo's own?  Shades of Thursday Next in 
"The Eyre Affair". At one time that seemed most unlikely; now it's not so certain.

So much detail has been incorporated into the text, so many hints, allusions,
apparent inconsistencies, unspoken (or at least unexplained) references to
past events that it seems there are more loose ends flapping about than would
do justice to a vat of spaghetti. An ending roughly equating to "... and with one
bound our hero was free..." would be likely to cause a riot. Sure, there have been
some posters (Nora among them) who have posited that our expectations are
unrealistic and that passive acceptance of what the author has to offer is the
way to go. That's all very well *except* when it's the author who has introduced
all these flapping loose ends in the first place. Not to eventually tie them up is
pretty sloppy and frustrating IMO - the equivalent of a joke without the punch-
line. 

We'll see.
Meanwhile I'll offer a new syndrome that'll be sweeping the globe over the
next few weeks - PPAS - Pre-Publication Apprehension Syndrome.
Fortunately there is a possible cure; but it's not certain it'll be available.

Kneasy