Whatever happened to nostalgia?

[Barry Arrowsmith]

--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, "pippin_999" <foxmoth at ...> wrote:
> 
> 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. 
> 

I have to concur with Lyn. That Leaky interview was puke-making. Sheer
adolescent huggy crap. It makes any reasonable person cringe.
And frankly, who really gives a shit about SHIPs?
Are they integral (or even influential) to the plot arc?
No. They're a bolt-on extra that allows the romantically-minded to indulge
in fantasies that are unlikely ever to blossom fully in the books. 
And it's pretty jejeune stuff anyway. Just about right for 12 year olds. 
But the extra-canon hints (hints, hell; they're bashes over the head with a
sand-filled sock) have been very useful from Jo's point of view in that they've
kept a fair proportion of fandom occupied on the trivial. 

Those concerned that Ginny is gonna be left alone and paley loitering are 
less likely to get stuffy about tear-along-the-dotted-line souls - something 
which is integral to the plot and something that I can't swallow. Bloody silly 
idea IMO. Either Voldy must know in advance how many bits this 'soul' of his 
naturally divides into (and with no diminution of power! Yet destroying them 
will weaken him significantly) and kills to match, or each succeeding fragment 
must get progressively smaller; a half of a half of a half sort of thing, yet each
fragment is equally powerful.
Nope. Sorry. 
I foresee an awful lot of ropy explication coming up.


> 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 don't think so. She claims never to have read LotR. 
Not sure about the Narnia stuff, but I'd be surprised if she were a Lucas buff. 
IMO her influences are more likely to be straight mythology and traditional
folk-lore. After all, those are the elements that are presented with a twist in HP.

But frankly, influences are a comparatively minor matter, the truly important
question is "Will this tale fulfill its earlier promise?" 
That's something I now doubt very much and is (will be) deeply disappointing.

> 
> 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? 

Yup.
Best part of the book.
I considered Sam a half-wit and Frodo a wanker. 
I'd have made 'em suffer even more, with the addition of a patronising bloody 
elf spouting platitudes over them as they over-acted their way to a nasty death. 
Nothing was too bad for them.
LotR is a very popular book, but it's an error to think that it is universally admired.
It isn't. Some find pseudo-epic dialogue tedious, the characterisations wooden
and predictable - and it's unforgiveable that no important character on the side
of good dies - on a permanent basis, anyway.
Even worse, it's the proximal excuse for uncountable fifth-rate three volume
fantasy epics. Now for waking that pestilence Tolkien deserves to be burnt in
effigy every mid-summer.

> 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."
> 

Getting close to that stage with HP. It no longer engages, the characters
seem less real than before, and I don't care what happens to any of them.
Now that's something I never believed that I'd say.
Unfortunately it's true.

Kneasy