Whatever happened to nostalgia?

[pippin_999]

Lyn:
> A line from his well written essay: 
> 
> "I find myself thinking especially of something I have already mentioned: the draining 
away  of delight from the books, the narrowing of Harry's horizons to a point, that point 
being  an ultimate encounter with Lord Voldemort." 
> 
> This line really resonated with me. It is not just Harry's horizons which have narrowed, 
but  also the horizons of a subset of us fans who had found our own delight in exploring, 
> explaining and attempting to predict the events of the HP universe. The scope of 
> exploration and explaining have decreased, not only because of Harry's reduced 
horizons,  but because JKR has taken to giving disjointed but ever so authoritative drizels 
of HP  "fact." As just one of the more infamous examples, we don't come to learn of the 
"ships" through and in the context of the story line, but have them rather inelegantly 
pronounced  to the annointed in a gigglefest. 

Pippin:
Are you telling me you were in some doubt about whether H/H and H/G were
serious about one another after reading HBP? You really needed the interview
to tell you that? Maybe the ships didn't resonate with you -- in which case
I can see that it would be annoying to be told that they should. But I think
the point is that JKR had done all the convincing she planned to do in the
text to persuade us that those couples were going to happen. 

Stories often lose some of their hold on us. I still adore Tolkien, but I no longer try
to fill in all the missing corners of his universe the way I now try to fill
in Jo's. Part of what I see in Rowling is a dialogue with Tolkien and Lewis, and
maybe with George Lucas too -- where she took what she liked about their
worlds and their philosophy, but also illustrated where she had her differences.
No doubt other authors will do the same with her work in the future. Or if
you had the ambition, you could do it yourself.

 I'm not convinced that Vampire!Snape wouldn't make a
good story, for example, but if I want to find out, I'm going to have to decide
what would be intriguing about such a character, (obviously, the person
I have in mind isn't Jo's character, I just thought he was, so no worries there) 
invent a world for him to exist in, just as Jo had to invent a world for her 
Harry instead of planting him in Narnia or Middle Earth, and see what 
happens to him there.

Of course that would be a lot of work -- but who said Jo has to do
all my imagining for me?

I think the sense of delight is supposed to be missing right now--were
you delighted when Frodo and Sam were dying of thirst as they struggled
towards Mt Doom? As Frodo says, it is all too likely that some folks will
say, "Shut the book now, dad, we don't want to read any more."

Pippin