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

[nrenka]

--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, "Barry Arrowsmith" 
<arrowsmithbt at b...> wrote:

> 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. 

My dear Kneasy, to a certain extent loose ends are in the eye of the 
beholder.  The fandom has an irrepressible urge to nitpick the most 
straightforward explanations and answers for what they *really* 
mean.  For instance, it's clear that Dumbledore hasn't told us 
everything; however, it's not clear that everything he has told us is 
therefore to be questioned and is radically incomplete.  And do I 
need to get into the level of complication that the maintained 
vampire theory poses?

I am indeed in the crowd that postulates that the most important 
loose ends will be neatly knotted up--if we as readers are willing to 
accept that in fiction, particularly fiction of this sort, the 
explanations that we get as to How This Stuff Went Down are really 
quite authoritative, by the end.  I must admit I don't see much point 
in arguing (to give a hypothetic) that there's a possession loose end 
if the ultimate explanation is that a failed AK murder attempt 
resulted in the connection.

Non disputandum est de gustibus, of course.

-Nora gets back to the late 14th century