My thoughts on the Twilight series

This essay has been in the works for some time. I was inspired to read the series when my friend John Granger was challenged to compare the Twilight phenomenon to the Harry Potter series. Many have asked if Twilight is the new Harry Potter because both are fantasy series whose popularity increased over time and had crazed fans at bookstores' midnight release parties. Both John Granger and Travis Prinzi have weighed in on their thoughts on the Twilight series, but it has taken me longer to chime in with my response.

In my own humble opinion I see little similarity between the two series. The Harry Potter series is intricately plotted and layered with all kinds of obscure symbolism and rich meaning. The Twilight series appears far more straightforward with its strength on the romantic love story between the lead characters rather than having a complex plot structure with intricate mythological subtext and alchemical symbolism as the Harry Potter series does.

I have read the entire Twilight series as well as the online partial manuscript of Midnight Sun that was abandoned by Stephenie Meyer after it was leaked onto the internet.

I have also watched the movie a few times.

This analysis is a broad overview of the series and contains some spoilers. So those who have not read Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series and were considering either reading it or watching the movie adaptations are forewarned.

Some of the questions I see posed most often is "why is it so popular?" and "why is it less likely for men to like this series as well as women?" That last observation alone makes the Twilight series different from the Harry Potter series, because in my own experience I know many men who are just as obsessed as women with the series (as well as children.)

I believe the answers to the gender gap and the popularity of the series can be discerned by understanding the character of Edward Cullen and his impact on readers.

The other day I overheard a work colleague talking with one of her friends. They were discussing the Twilight series and this woman I didn't know proclaimed that Edward Cullen was her boyfriend. I suppressed a laugh because she would have no idea how much I have over-analyzed this series. If I discussed my thoughts with her, I might have lessened her ardor for him and the series, but then again, maybe nothing would.

That is because Edward Cullen is not only Drop Dead Gorgeous, he is perfect. He is so perfect that no mere mortal man could ever measure up to Edward's perfection as the ultimate fantasy male.

Edward has perfect hair, the perfect smile, perfect chiseled features, perfect six pack abs, and a perfect musical sounding voice.

Did I mention he was perfect? Stephenie Meyers wants to make sure her readers know how perfect Edward Cullen is by using the words perfect and perfection to describe him multiple times throughout the story.

Here are a few descriptions of him:

His hair was dripping wet, disheveled – even so, he looked like he’d just finished shooting a commercial for hair gel. His dazzling face was friendly, open, a slight smile on his flawless lips. Page 43

He smiled widely, flashing a set of perfect, ultrawhite teeth. Page 50.

I was in danger of being distracted by his livid, glorious face. It was like trying to stare down a destroying angel…He paused and for a brief moment his stunning face was unexpectedly vulnerable. page 65

There's more. Much more. Bella Swan as the narrator is quite redundant about her adoration of Edward's physical features.

It is a wonder the filmmakers were able to cast any actor to play the part onscreen. Few living men would feel comfortable trying to measure up to that kind of advance billing. Even Robert Pattinson was insecure about showing his chest for the film because he did not think he could live up to the perfect Adonis-like physique described in the text.

But, there is more than just his good looks which makes him attractive. He is also aloof to the point of being unobtainable. The rare earth element unobtainium makes him even more desirable.

But wait - there's more. Edward is also a virgin.

Not your average run-of-the-mill, "I just haven't slept with anyone yet" virgin. Noooo. He is a Virgin in every way. Not only has he never had sex before, he has never even had sexual thoughts before.

He is pure.

Poor gorgeous Edward has the blessing/curse of being able to hear other people's thoughts. Every vengeful, spiteful, prideful, lustful, deceitful, inane thought someone has is easily discerned by Edward. He can try and ignore the thoughts of others as if it were merely background noise, but no one's mind was ever a mystery to him.

This changes when he meets Bella Swan and discovers he cannot read her thoughts. Even though she has is likely to have similar thoughts to other teenaged girls who are drooling over him, he cannot sense them. This makes her an enigma and she therefore fascinates him. She also has a scent that drives him wild.

Wild to the point of madness. Which makes him all the more dangerous. And Edward is a bad boy. In fiction, and sometimes in Real Life, bad boys = Dead!Sexy.

Bella and Edward clash, but Bella detects mixed signals on his part. This confuses her and makes Edward seem all the more alluring.

She becomes so enamored by his beauty that even after she discovers his Dark Secret, she does not care.

For those unaware, Edward Cullen's Deep Dark Secret is that he is a vampire. However he is not in the Bela Legosi/Christopher Lee/Jonathon Frid/Frank Langella vein of vampires. Nope. Edward is basically a "defanged" vampire and has been rendered almost harmless.

This is the aspect of the series that I find the most problematic. If Meyer didn't like vampire lore, I feel she should have chosen another mythological creature or tried creating a new fantastical creature.

Instead, Stephenie Meyer made her "good vampires" so tame that they lack most of the trademark markers of the cursed Undead.

It is as if she went through a checklist to deep-six anything that made her squeamish. The italics denote my imagining Meyer's thought processes as she determined the rules of her Twilight universe vampires.

Drinking human blood? That is for the bad vampires, but ewww. Not for my hero. I'll make him a "vegetarian" subsisting on the blood of animals. Oh and allow him and his "family" to gorge themselves so they do not have to feed on a daily basis. A few times a month should do it - otherwise it might interfere with plotting. Edward will just have to suffer from thirst because he cannot leave Bella's side when her safety is threatened by the bad vamps.

Sleeping in coffins? Ugh. Creeeeepy. How about vampires never sleep? Yeah, imagine all the things you could get accomplished if you never slept.

Have them be driven away by crucifixes? Nah. That might imply they were demonic. Can't have that with my hero. Instead, I'll feature a gigantic crucifix in the vampire household as a religious relic.

Unable to walk about during daylight hours? Er, no. He just has to avoid the rays of the sun. I shall choose a setting that is overcast most of the time. Edward has to be able to be outside during daylight because otherwise the set up of my romantic couple meeting in high school would not work. And I have to make Bella be a high school student because I want her to be a virgin as well. It would be less likely for an attractive young woman to believably be a virgin by college age. I know, I'll come up with something no one would expect as to why vampires cannot go be seen in the daytime. Vampire skin is iridescent in sunlight like cut diamonds. Sunlight will make their skin all sparkly. :swoons at the thought: Sparkly vampires. Mmmmmm.

The sparkly vampires aspect is something that gave me the most difficulty in the series.

I normally avoid reading urban fantasy novels which have vampires in them. That is because of my tendency to nitpick to death aspects of vampire legend. I grew up watching "Dark Shadows" on tv as well as many vampire movies until I knew the Hollywood vampire lore by heart.

This was best exemplified by the George Hamilton spoof, “Love at First Bite.”

Vampires can’t see their images in mirrors, they sleep during daylight hours, they cannot not stand garlic or crosses, they have to be invited inside someone's home, can turn into bats, and it takes three bites to turn someone into a vampire. Three bites. If a woman who was bitten by a vampire did not receive three bites, she was safe.

At least that was the state of vampire mythology “Hollywood style” when I was growing up.

In high school, I had to write a ten page research paper. We could choose any topic under the sun. I chose vampire lore. Why? I thought it would be fun. I discovered that the Hollywood treatment of vampires does not necessarily follow the legends. You did not need three bites to become a vampire. You could be bitten once, survive the encounter and then when you died eventually you would then become a vampire. Or you could be bled slowly, survive multiple bites over the magic number of three and when you finally died you would become a vampire. I learned lots of weird vampire trivia that I dust off occasionally like parlor tricks to spice up conversations with people. I no longer have the citations, but many of them came from renowned vampirologist Reverend Montague Summers and his books The Vampire in Europe and The Vampire his Kith and Kin.

For instance once werewolves are killed, they will rise up to become vampires.

Frankly, once I discovered that particular bit of lore, I wondered why no one in Hollywood has used it. Come on, we are talking about a built-in sequel here.

You could become a vampire if a cat jumped over your coffin. So be sure to keep the kitties away from Aunt Martha when she is laid out to rest in the front parlor.

Other methods of becoming a vampire included excommunication and weirdly even the gaze of a vampire can sometimes transmit vampirism. Should a vampire gaze upon a pregnant woman, that cursed child is doomed to becoming a vampire after death even if they life a long full life.

Vampires also had an uncontrollable urge to count things, such as thorns or poppy seeds. So rather than making your room smell like a garlic factory, you could just throw a handful of poppy seeds outside your bedroom window rendering the potential night time visitor into the comical sight of a creature picking up individual seeds and saying, "one poppy seed, two poppy seeds, three poppy seeds, ah, ah, ah, ahhhhh."

After learning the strange beliefs surrounding vampire legends, and after having watched Frank Langella as Dracula, I felt that I had no further need to see another vampire movie. To me, no one could ever out do Langella in his prime and I was afraid that I would simply nitpick over a Hollywood screenwriter twisting the legends into directions I would not care for.

Hence my reluctance to read urban fantasy and why some of Meyer's changes to vampire lore bugged me more than it would your average reader and/or movie goer. I dislike it when certain aspects are altered too far from what I consider to be the core vampire lore.

The biggest difference in Meyer’s character of Edward Cullen from traditional Dracula-like vampires is that Edward does not accept and/or revel in his status as a vampire. This ups the angst quotient. He is a vampire who deliberately goes against his own nature.

He is immortal and has been a vampire since his death at age seventeen from the Spanish influenza in 1918. The age difference between Edward and Bella disturbs some of the commenters on the Hogwarts Professor boards. I understood Meyer’s age choice due to the constructs of wanting a believable reason for Edward being a virgin. Impending death by flu was a convenient choice for Meyer since Edward would have died without trauma and it is a time period where we romanticize that men were more gentlemanly toward women and that women were more protective of their virtue. It is doubtful that a really good looking guy like Edward would be a virgin at age seventeen if he lived in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, etc. Then making him live without love for nearly a century increases the angst and Edward Cullen’s character is all about angst.

Edward lived with three other vampire couples for nearly one hundred years while he was alone. He did not realize that he was waiting for his soul mate Bella to be born. Once he discovered that his strange feelings toward this human were due to love, he began doting on her. Edward loved Bella completely, wholly, even obsessively. He loved the blush in her cheeks and the sound of her heart fluttering. If she were to become a vampire, those mortal things would disappear.

Edward loathed his own inhuman existence (oh, the angst!) and did not wish that upon the woman he loves. Instead his preference was to have his own version of courtly love with her. He kissed her and cuddled with her, but refused to go any farther lest he might lose control and possibly crush her skull, pelvis, etc., in the heat of passion.

This is a far different kind of relationship from the Classic vampire/human relationship typified by Hollywood movies. Generally we see a predator seeking to quench his thirst amongst humans and he discovers a woman he finds attractive. He wants her to satisfy more than just one appetite. He stalks, attacks and claims dominion over said prey. Then someone near and dear to the victim tries to rescue her from the fate worse than death. Stalking of the vampire begins and the end of the story is the destruction of the undead.

Not in this story. Because Edward Cullen is not Dracula. He has a conscience and actively denies his own true nature, which again drives up the angst quotient. He is a tortured soul. (That is if vampires have souls.) Because Edward is protective of Bella’s status as a living, breathing human he becomes the antithesis to “normal” vampires. This conflict of normal/abnormal vampire behavior drives the storyline in each of the four volumes and leads to showdowns with “bad” vampires in each book.

Another source of conflict in the story is the differences between what Bella wants and what Edward wants. Edward wants to simply love Bella and watch her grow old, die a normal death and then he would want to have his own existence end so that he did not continue on without her. Bella does not like that scenario. Because Edward not only has immortal life he has eternal youth.

He will always be gorgeous.

He will never get older, fatter and balder.

Being human and alive, Bella will grow older. Her body will start to sag. Her face will become lined. Her hair will thin and grow gray.

In Edward’s preferred future, someone will one day make reference to Edward and assume that he is Bella’s son or grandson.

To Bella, that is a nightmare.

She would rather die and become a vampire so that she can also have eternal youth and eternal beauty. Bella does not have a death wish, nor does she have a fascination with death as I have heard some people contemplate. It is simply Bella wanting to be Edward’s partner in every way and for eternity.

Edward in his sacrificial denial of self, resists Bella’s entreaties. He not only refuses to “turn her” into a vampire, but he continually refuses to satisfy her sexually. This aspect of the book is also a source of great discussion.

I have seen some parents think that Bella and Edward not having sex is something that is good for teenaged girls to read.

:Ahem: I think that this is a perfect situation for parents to read the books and then lead a discussion with their teenaged daughters as to what are realistic expectations from their teenaged boyfriends.

Know that once Bella and Edward openly profess their undying love for one another that they do not want to be apart from each other. This leads to Edward being a regular visitor to Bella’s bedroom. This is done without her father’s knowledge, let alone permission. Edward cannot sleep, but Bella sleeps in his ice-cold arms. She continually tests his resolve to not give into desire and consummate their relationship.

She is the sexual aggressor and he is the one holding out.

Again, this type of thing makes Edward Cullen into the perfect romantic hero. At least for virgins who would like to retain their virtue and “good girl” reputation.

Normal teenaged males with raging hormones will not be interested in simply cuddling if they are invited into a teenaged girl’s bed.

There’s the romantic fantasy of having someone like Edward Cullen proclaiming his undying and unconditional love, being protective, generous, and not taking sexual advantage of a vulnerable girl and then there is the reality of real live boys/men who cannot measure up to such idealized standards.

The strength of the Twilight series lies not in complicated plots, but in showing the depth of feeling between two characters who love each other unconditionally. It is the raw emotion between Edward and Bella that drives this series and created so many dedicated fans. Because there is a desire to love someone in a similar unswerving manner and have that kind of depth of passion returned.

But no human man can ever live up to the romantic ideal of Edward Cullen, which in my opinion is a bigger reason to classify this series as romantic fantasy more than the vampirism.

Your thoughts on this series are welcomed, as well as your questions.

On Criticism

I've been trying to think of what to write for my next post, and had felt particularly uninspired. I felt it best to be silent than to waste time by putting something frivolous on the blog.

Then I read an entry on one of the agent blogs that I follow. Jessica Faust wrote about giving honest critiques to writers at a recent conference.

BookEnds, LLC — A Literary Agency: Critiques

It was a negative experience for both parties involved. She was trying to convey her professional opinion to a writer who voluntarily chose to submit their work for critique.

Unfortunately the writer did not like hearing Jessica's criticism, and became hostile.

That is not the professional front that you should put forward with anyone in the publishing industry.

I understand the human reaction from both the writer's point of view as well as the person presenting the criticism. I've been on both sides of that equation. Well, except that I've never been an agent with fifteen years experience.

On the receiving end of criticism.

I remember vividly when I was a freshman in college and sat next to my professor's desk while he reviewed my paper. I stared at his red marker hovering over my words scratching them out repeatedly as he diagrammed all the failings he saw. Try as I might, I could not stop the tears from flowing at the sight of my paper being defaced in such a manner. After he finished his critique, he handed me the paper covered in crimson marks and declared that "he liked it." I was given an "A" on the paper, but was numbed by the ordeal. I staggered back to my chair with no idea what he said to me. I felt like a patient given a terminal diagnosis and couldn't focus on anything said past hearing the words "brain tumor." Even though I did well, I felt humiliated, and this was an Honors level class.

I tried reassuring myself that I couldn't have gotten into the class if I hadn't shown some talent. I could help others restructure and improve their papers, but his class made me feel inadequate when it came to my own.

The professor was an old man with a gray pallor who stood in front of the class hunched over like a vulture. He played with the keys on his belt while he lectured and I can't remember a single thing I learned from him. The only things I took away from his class were my fear of his red pen and the conviction that he was a human bird of prey.

Since I was a science major, I couldn't allow myself to become distracted from my core studies by obsessing over general education courses. The reason why this bothered me so much is that writing comes from your soul and your intellect. Writing is a permanent reminder of what your thoughts and how you articulate an argument or simply tell a story. It is not the same thing as learning to plug numbers into a mathematical equation and turn a crank to get a result. Writing is a reflection of the author, and when professors responded negatively to the product of my intellect, I decided to withdraw from submitting future work to their scrutiny. I took a test and "comped" out of my third term requirement for English. Those negative experiences in college class stifled my muse for close to five years of my life. I can't let that happen to me again.

I have developed a thicker skin since then, but I still understand how callous and careless criticism can wound rather than help.

Now, years later I seek out critique of my work in the hopes that errors that I cannot see will be spotted by a fresh pair of eyes. I also need perspective to know if I am achieving the emotional reactions from my readers that I am striving for in certain scenes. I want to know if the dialogue rings true, and if my pacing is too fast or too slow.

It is nice to receive accolades, but if there is something structurally wrong with my story, I need to hear it while I can still do something about it.

I've belonged to a critique group for several years now and it has for the most part worked well. However, you should never just take someone's opinion as a mandate to change things. You should always take people's suggestions as just that: suggestions.

A few months ago after a critique group meeting I found myself in a terrible funk. It was because one of the members gave me criticism that I not only found unhelpful, but damaging to my psyche. I started doubting my own ability to construct a sentence.

I was suffering from what my engineering friends would say is "analysis paralysis."

I felt as if everything I wrote or attempted to write was dreck. Now, I knew it wasn't true, but this was the level of the funk I found myself.

Anne Lamott in her book Bird by Bird refers to it as listening to KFKD radio. (Think of KF**KD).

As I read Anne Lamott's book looking for inspiration, I realized that she has some massively long sentences. Her style runs counter to Strunk and White's Elements of Style by a mile. One sentence was 94 words long. That can't possibly be thought of as concise. Yet, herbook is one of the most frequently cited favorite reference books by writers, even though she eschews concision in her writing. Why? Because she's funny.

A sentence is supposed to convey a thought, and sometimes thoughts are complex which then will need time and space to be developed adequately. Writers are also advised to have a variety in their sentence structure. Too many short sentences in a row are read as staccato and can be jarring to readers. Does this mean that from now on I will be emulating Lamott's use of humongously long sentences? No, but I'm not going to hang my head in shame if I write a sentence having more than X number of words.

One of my friends told me that he tries not to have sentences longer than 14 words. He literally counts the number of words in each sentence. I am not about to follow that practice. Instead, I shall gauge the effectiveness of my sentences by whether or not the meaning is lost by its end. If the logic train derails in the deep woods, the sentence needs revising. I shall also take into consideration the overall flow of the piece. If the narrative becomes snagged then I'll revise, but not because it went past an arbitrary word limit.

Giving out solicited criticism

I have offered my feedback to other writers and have thankfully not gotten such a visceral response as Jessica Faust received.

My critique group is structured so that we send our writing samples to the other members ahead of time. It allows us to print out and read the submission and make line edits. It also allows for us to have a broader view of the piece rather than a few sample pages being read aloud.

One of my strengths is in spotting continuity errors. That generally comes about when a writer has made some changes in a story, but forgot to incorporate those changes throughout the text or when the writer hasn't thought through all the implications of a plot choice. I questioned the age difference between two characters once because I didn't think that things added up correctly and my friend admitted that he had changed the little sister's age, but forgot to update it throughout his novel.

I've also given critiques to members of my writers club when they ask for my opinion on their writing. Recently I read the first attempt at short story writing by someone who has only written technical papers. He had become inspired by interacting with fiction writers and wanted to try his hand at it.

I had started reading his story and made some line edits before coming to the realization that structurally the whole thing simply didn't work. There was no conflict and therefore no drama. He had two talking heads in a room that were discussing a political issue. Neither character was defined, it was simply a way to have dialogue exchanged which allowed political beliefs to be espoused.

Nothing happened in the scene. It was only an excuse to dress up a position paper as fiction and use quotation marks in the hopes of informing people through entertaining them. It failed because it did not entertain.

I've written political essays in the past, so I know full well the urge to put forth my positions on issues that I am passionate. However, I also know and love drama. If you wish to mix drama and politics, the dramatic needs of the story must always come first.

I wound up explaining those differences to him and suggested he read Audition by Michael Shurtleff which I find indispensable when thinking of dramatic conflict. I also made a few suggestions of how could put his characters in peril. Then, he could slowly draw out the information in a police interrogation, should one of those characters choose to use methods other than peaceful, civil disobedience to further his political goals. By the end of our discussion, he thanked me for my time and my insight. I didn't give him any of my line edits, because I knew that very little of what he originally wrote would survive any second drafts he made on that story.

Sometimes it is the global problems in a piece of writing that is the biggest obstacle that must be dealt with before you get down to the sentence structure level of spelling, punctuation, grammar, pacing, and concision.

Offering Criticism to people you don't know

I became friends with John Granger because of my responding to his open invitation in his first book on the Harry Potter series, The Hidden Key to Harry Potter. He had included his email address in the back of the book and I wrote to him via email.

It wasn't a gushy note that laid the praise on thick. Nope. I wrote him a detailed message where I started out introducing myself and told him what I liked about his book, and then I mentioned errors that I spotted including page numbers for his reference. Some were spelling mistakes, whilst others were factual errors. I then shared my thoughts where I differed with him on areas of interpretation or speculation which could not be classified as errors but instead were differences of opinion. I backed up those reasons with citations from canon, but I was not dogmatic about it. I realize that my opinions on these matters might be proven in the future to be totally wrong. Therefore, I did not try to persuade him to the absolute correctness my theories, but rather to introduce him to other schools of thought on the matters under discussion.

I was trying to be as diplomatic as possible, because I felt that it was the polite thing to do. He appreciated how I comported myself and we have since then have corresponded via email for close to four years. There are many areas of speculation that we disagree on, but we are never disagreeable about it.

Not everyone who has read his books or online essays seems to share that same sense of propriety.

Prior to the Sonorus event, I met up with John and Mary Granger and had lunch with them. John bemoaned the fact that not everyone in the HP online fandom followed what he called the "Linda McCabe school of diplomacy" by contacting someone directly before critiquing their work in public.

That discussion came up due to several online fansites I read recently with topic threads discussing the concept of literary alchemy in the HP series. There were some people who had done a lot of researching and theorizing on the issue, and had been inspired to begin their inquiry into the subject by John Granger's work. However, the difference is that they never tried to engage him in a discussion and see if their underlying assumptions had any validity to them.

Some who posted mentioned his work in unflattering terms and dogmatically stated that he was incorrect in his interpretations, and that they knew how these things worked.

I've read enough on the subject to realize that alchemy is a complex subject that cannot be fully understood in an afternoon's worth of reading or even a month or year. It can and has been the lifelong pursuit of many people over the centuries. Alchemical symbolism is deliberately complicated and understanding it is not like simple mathematics where you place numbers in an equation and churn out a result. Nope, it is more like higher mathematics where there may not yet be a solution to given problem, but the trick is to try and focus your intellect on how to approach solving the problem.

Which means that when you are trying to predict future plot lines using the various characters in a series following a literary alchemy framework isn't as easy as it looks, and there are many, many ambiguities which can be resolved in multiple if not an infinite number of possibilities.

Only J.K. Rowling will truly know what influences she drew upon when she made her detailed plot of the series. Only JKR knows what details in her story such as the mention of the herb dittany is there for symbolic meaning or simply there to dress up the narrative.

She is like a magpie with mythology and takes things from a myriad of sources and then twists them to fit her own plot needs. She is not bound by any rules that force her to follow any predetermined formula. In fact, having unforeseen plot twists is exactly what her fans have come to expect from her. Expect the unexpected.

John decided against posting a rebuttal post in that forum to defend his scholarship in this area for he felt that the standards of polite discourse had not been followed. If they had tried to engage with him from the beginning in a discussion about Harry Potter and literary alchemy, he would have responded. Instead, they simply attacked him in a public forum and put forth their own interpretation as if it was the only credible possible explanation.

I enjoy having layered symbolic meaning to stories. It adds a richness and depth to its meaning. However, there can be more than one meaning derived from symbolism and it is wise to remember that.

Later, while reading my literary blog subscriptions, I came across a link to an article written about how best to approach people you don't know by email. There are a lot of good points in the article and I would hope that these precepts would soon become a standard part of netiquette.

Reasons why I have not warmed up to the Harry / Ginny ship, Part I

Jo Rowling’s authorial intent was that the readers along with Harry would “gradually discover Ginny as the ideal girl for Harry.” This is a quote from her interview given after the publication of HBP in 2005.

Unfortunately, I didn’t respond in the manner which Jo Rowling had hoped. I’m going to explain why.

In my first post about the Harry Potter series I detailed my initial and subsequent response to reading the first four volumes sequentially.

I was so impressed by the series that I no longer would casually dismiss the books as simply “kids’ books.” After I had read a quote attributed to J.K. Rowling as saying that she wrote something that she herself would have liked to read as an adult.

I figured that it was marketed for children because the story starts with the hero being an eleven year old child. Concerns about marketing in the publishing world sometimes trump all other concerns, and therefore I was not treating the series as simply YA.

I was treating it as if it was a book written for adults, but that it was accessible for children as well. That meant that she would be cognizant of what would be inappropriate for children and avoid crossing those lines, but that it would live up to the standards of adult entertainment.

Are you seeing why I feel that I had unreasonable expectations now? I expected her romance to live up to the standards I had from authors who write for adults. That doesn’t mean that I expected explicit descriptions of amorous activities, but I did expect that I would be drawn into the romance and be allowed to feel a broad range of emotions in regards to love and attraction.

I didn’t experience those things, nor was I brought to the conclusion that Ginny was Harry’s equal. I would not have described Ginny's character as being “very warm and compassionate” and I especially would not say that we have seen examples of her being a “gifted witch” who does “pretty impressive stuff here and there.” All those things that JKR said about Ginny.

I don’t feel that way because in my opinion, JKR dropped the ball on developing Ginny’s character.

:Sigh: and it didn’t have to be that way.

Jo could have made me love Ginny the way that I loved Hermione in the first five books. It’s not that I hate Ginny’s character, it’s just that the Harry/Ginny (H/G) romance felt forced in book 6. As if Jo finally got around to dealing with Ginny and had to do massive catch up and couldn’t pull it off well.

Let’s start at the beginning now, shall we?

Book 1, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone / Sorcerer’s Stone (PS/SS)

Ginny has two cameo appearances. She’s at the train station when Harry leaves for Hogwarts and when he returns. She’s only ten years old and is still holding her mother’s hand. Once Fred and George come out and tell their mum that they’ve met the famous Harry Potter, Ginny becomes excited and pleads desperately to go onto the train to meet him, as if he was a rock star. Then when Harry returns from Hogwarts she’s pointing and squealing at him when he gets off the train.

Impression: little fangirl.

Book 2, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (CoS)

Ginny’s big book where she’s the unwitting villain because she’s possessed by Tom Riddle. We start out the story with Ginny being tongue-tied in Harry’s presence, blushing, diving under the table, putting her elbows in butter, and being teased mercilessly by her brothers. She’s got a BIG CRUSH on Harry. Everyone knows it and Harry tries to ignore the teasing he gets as a result.

She shows a little spunk when they are at Flourish and Blotts when Malfoy teases Harry, and she sticks up for him. In fact, it is specifically mentioned that it was the first time she had spoken in front of Harry.

Then we see precious little of Ginny, but we read offhand mentions of her. She is bullied into taking Pepperup potion by Percy, which then makes steam pour out of her vivid red hair making her look as if her head were ablaze. We also hear that Ginny was disturbed by the petrification of Mrs. Norris because she was fond of cats. She was distraught at what happened to her classmate Colin Creevey. I mean, those are natural reactions, why wouldn’t anyone be upset about those turns of events in the castle.

Then the singing Valentine. It’s cute and we see Ginny embarrassed again.

The constant theme throughout this book is that Ginny hearts Harry. Of course, she hasn’t really spoken with him at all, so she doesn’t know him. She’s infatuated with his legend. Harry’s uncomfortable about that, but doesn’t want to humiliate her either. He’s a gentleman about it, but he clearly would rather not be idolized.

He saves her life, she cries, and then she’s given hot cocoa and all is well.

She has precious little page time in the book, but is integral in the overall storyline of the plot for CoS.

Impression: she's a fangirl who now cannot find her tongue and blushes whenever she's around the object of her affection. She doesn't really know him, but is enamored of him. She was also a victim of Voldemort. Poor thing.

Book 3, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (PoA)

Ginny is shown again as being red-faced and tongue-tied when she sees Harry. This is not a secret; Ginny still has a crush on Harry. We also see her giggling at Fred and George’s jokes as well as sharing a laugh with Hermione and Mrs. Weasley about love potions. There is also a nice exchange where Ginny and Harry exchange a look and a laugh at Percy’s expense. If only Jo had done more of these exchanges with Ginny. Shortly after that, Ron dismisses his sister when the Trio goes in search of a compartment on the Hogwarts Express. Ron could have stuck up for Ginny and insisted she be included, after all she had survived possession by Voldemort. He didn’t and she was gone.

Ginny was “shaking like mad” from the dementor attack, but she didn’t faint like Harry. She did not join the Trio in their trip to the castle. We don’t read about her again until the flight of the Fat Lady when Ginny has the immortal line of, “What’s going on?”

She’s gone from sight again until Harry’s in the hospital wing and Ginny comes blushing and bearing a shrill singing get well card that he keeps under a bowl of fruit. No dialogue, just a quick narrative mention in a single sentence.

And then she’s nowhere to be seen for the rest of that volume.

Impression: still a fangirl.

Book 4, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (GoF),

Ginny’s first mention is once again prefaced with her having “been very taken with Harry” and blushing. Once again, there is no mystery. Ginny-> Harry. (Fandom shorthand for the direction that love arrows go in. Ginny -> (loves) Harry.

We know that, we’ve known that at least since CoS, if not in PS/SS.

Then we see Ginny talking with the Trio. This is a good sign if we want Harry and Ginny to get together (also known as Harry/Ginny or H/G). Ginny has got to be a part of their inner circle. Yet, as soon as Ron makes reference to Sirius, he’s shot a look from Hermione to shut up. Ginny doesn’t know and she’s not going to be taken into their confidence.

The Quidditch World Cup shows the Trio walking amongst the fairgrounds without Ginny. There is one brief mention of her being horror-struck during the game as she sat near Charlie. Then she falls asleep and spills her hot cocoa as the boys re-hash the highlights of the game. When the chaos happened with the Mugglebaiting, the Weasleys got split up and once again it is only the Trio who are together. Ginny is not with them, and so we do not get her reaction to Winky’s inquisition.

That’s the pattern that Jo established. Have a bare mention of Ginny in the narrative, show her blushing around Harry, and then make her disappear.

The best example of Ginny’s character building I think was in GoF when she was trying to soothe Ron’s feelings after his rejection by Fleur Delacour as a date to the Yule Ball. Ginny was comforting to him, once she heard Harry asked Cho Chang to the dance she stopped smiling. It hurt to hear that he liked someone else. She was also protective of Hermione and challenged Ron when he said insensitive things. Ginny also showed integrity by not reneging on her promise to Neville in order to be Harry’s date for the dance.

That was good. Really good. If Jo had only kept up with scenes like that for Ginny, I might have felt that indeed Ginny was the “ideal girl” for Harry. Unfortunately, right after that, she went back to the same pattern of mentioning Ginny in passing. We have no idea what Ginny’s dress robes looked like, for there is no description whatsoever. All we know is that Neville stepped on her feet while they were dancing making Ginny wince.

The next mention of Ginny was in the luncheon before the third task when she once again is mentioned in the narrative as simply being there. Then I do not think she appeared again in that volume.

Overall impression: Ginny as a character was pretty skimpy on detail because she lacked page time.

She has cameo appearances in books 1 and 3, is the key to the mystery in book 2, but is not shown very much, and in book 4 she has one good scene. That was what I had to really work with once I was hooked on the series. Little fangirl sister, and not much else.

Hermione on the other hand had hundreds of pages of characterization and dialogue, etc.

Book 5 – Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (OotP)

For the first time we have Ginny’s introduction as a character without her blushing or overtly saying that she’s “taken with Harry.” I noticed that immediately from its omission. She also showed some spunk by interacting with Fred and George while admitting to using Dungbombs. Then she unblushingly lies to her mother about Crookshanks being the culprit behind using Dungbombs. We also see Ginny and Hermione joking with Tonks, later Ginny playing with Crookshanks. So we see a playful and jesting side to Ginny. This is good, too bad Jo didn’t keep up with this.

Page 100 of the Scholastic paperback version shows how Jo started to slip into using hearsay evidence to advance Ginny’s characterization. I hate this literary choice with a passion.

“Yeah, size is no guarantee of power,” said George. “Look at Ginny.”

“What d’you mean?” said Harry.

“You’ve never been on the receiving end of one of her Bat-Bogey hexes, have you?”

--

We have never seen a Bat-Bogey hex cast by Ginny. Not once, but we’ve heard that she’s cast them several times. In that example in passing, then she did one on Malfoy at the end of OotP. We didn’t see it. We only read that he had “giant flying bogeys attacking him.”

Then JKR repeated the hearsay testimony in HBP as to how wonderful that hex is by having Slughorn invite Ginny into his compartment because “I saw this young lady perform the most marvelous Bat-Bogey Hex as I was passing her carriage! I wouldn’t cross her!”

Okay. Can we just her cast it already? I mean, I loved reading about Dudley’s incredibly long tongue which was the result of the twins’ Ton Tongue Toffee. Why can’t I read about flying boogers emanating from someone’s face? As well as Ginny's look of defiance after she cast it?

It is hearsay, and I feel cheated. And Jo has done this three times!

Similarly, I thought it was a bad sign for the Harry/Ginny ship in OotP when Hermione kept telling us information that might have better come from elsewhere.

We heard Hermione tell us what Cho’s emotional state was. It could have come from Cho. She could have broken down in front of Harry and told him what her jumble of emotions were as she sobbed and made his shoulder wet, making him feel uncomfortable and inadequate.

Nope. We had Hermione say everything that Cho was feeling as well as a report that Cho was flying poorly and worried about being kicked off the Quidditch team. See my previous post as to why Hermione didn’t care about the sport of Quidditch unless it related to Harry. That detailed analysis helped convince that Hermione was keeping close tabs on Cho because she saw Cho as a romantic rival for Harry’s affections. I never thought it was because Hermione wanted to keep tabs on Cho on Ginny’s behalf.

We then learned from Hermione that Ginny had been dating Michael Corner, and that they met at the Yule Ball. We also learned from Hermione that Ginny “used to fancy Harry” but had given up on him. To Harry, all that meant is that he now understood why she could actually carry on a conversation in front of him.

Another example of hearsay evidence where it should not have been used to further Ginny’s characterization is when Fred and George were wondering how Ginny had gotten so good at playing Quidditch.

“She’s been breaking into your broom shed in the garden since the age of six and taking each of your brooms out in turn when you weren’t looking,” said Hermione from behind her tottering pile of Ancient Rune books. P. 574 Scholastic paperback.

I mean how much more difficult would it have been for the question by Fred and George have been said in Ginny’s presence and for her to give a retort, then flounce her hair and leave the room? I would have liked that. Similarly I would have liked to have seen Ron’s evolution from team goat to team savior in the Quidditch Cup final. We didn’t.

Harry could have used his omnioculars and shown how Ron screwed up his courage, fought his self-doubts, and was victorious. Instead, we learned second hand that Ron’s character made some leaps and bounds but it was done off the page.

I know, I know, OotP was long enough, and we didn’t need another blow by blow Quidditch game to fatten up the page length, but still…Ron is a major character in the series and this was a major change in his characterization from the beginning of the book to the end and we did not get to read it. Instead it was summarized for us. I felt cheated.

The best scene in OotP to advance Ginny’s characterization was the eating chocolate in the library with Harry. It moved the plot and it showed her being worthy of being Harry’s confidante for the first time. It was a good scene, I just wish there were more of them showing Harry and Ginny interacting together for me to warm up to Harry and Ginny as a couple.

Ginny had some good lines in wanting to leave Hogwarts on the rescue mission, but so did Luna. In fact, I think that Luna in the space of one book was a more completely drawn character than Ginny's who spanned five books.

Another bad sign for H/G for me in OotP was when Ginny became the Bellatrix’s taunting and threats to torture, Harry’s reaction when he caused a diversion wasn’t to try and make sure Ginny was safe, instead he grabbed a fistful of Hermione’s robes and pulled her forward. As the sextet became separated, Ginny was with Ron and Luna and not Harry.

Overall impression: I liked Ginny better because she was no longer a silly fangirl, but I still did not feel that she was up to the task of being Harry's girlfriend.

It seemed once again that it was Harry and Hermione sharing adventures together. I truly thought that if there was a mystery to be solved as to whom Harry would fall in love with that it would be his best friend who had always been there by his side from the beginning. A girl who was dedicated to him to the point of obsession and that he had taken for granted. I thought he would have the realization that no one could ever understand him and love him the way that Hermione did. That is one of the underlying premises that I had in thinking that Jo Rowling was writing Harry/Hermione. Then again, I saw lots and lots of evidence from the text that confirmed my assumption of Hermione ->Harry and Harry being clueless until the end.

Like I said before, I was wrong. And I know because JKR told me so in an interview.

This post is getting too long and I haven’t even started discussing HBP in earnest. I shall finish my thoughts Ginny next time. I shall also in a subsequent posting talk about the Interview from Hell and why I characterize it in that manner.

If anyone wishes to chime in on the subject in the meantime, feel free.

Sins of Commission in the Harry Potter series or “What happened to Hermione’s character in Half-Blood Prince?”

Those of you who know me from my time debating in the Harry Potter fandom know that I was a fierce advocate of the Harry/Hermione (H/Hr) ship.

I honestly, truly thought it was the final romantic relationship of the series and that the Ron/Hermione (R/Hr) and Harry/Ginny (H/G) pairings were literary red hair-ings.

I was wrong.

What I really didn’t like was that I wasn’t certain at the end of reading book 6 that Jo had wanted us to realize for certain that the pairings were destined to be R/Hr and H/G from the text, but instead I learned that from an interview.

Honestly, once I finished reading Half-Blood Prince I had the sinking feeling, but was still a little uncertain. I couldn’t think of how I could possibly articulate a good defense of H/Hr, but I was wondering “What the hell happened to Hermione’s character in book 6?”

Quidditch

Hermione had only shown interest in Quidditch when it came to Harry being involved. In book 1, this was evident by the rare change in narrative voice from 3^rd person limited to omniscient narrator.

PS/SS, Chapter 13, “Nicholas Flamel,” Scholastic paperback, p. 222-224,

“Little did Harry know that Ron and Hermione had been secretly practicing the Leg-Locker Curse….”

We return to Harry with:

“Back in the locker room, Wood had taken Harry aside.”

Then later that page we leave Harry’s side again to join Ron and Hermione in the stands.

“Perhaps that was why Snape was looking so angry as the teams marched onto the field, something that Ron noticed, too….”

What is so important about this scene is that when Harry goes into his “spectacular dive” that Hermione was so obsessed with watching him in the game that she was oblivious to Ron and Malfoy literally fighting under her feet.

Wow.

She was focused intently on Harry, but forgot all about her other best friend who was engaged in a fist fight in her presence.

There are other examples of her obsession with Quidditch as it relates to Harry, but the next best one comes from Order of the Phoenix (OotP). Harry, Fred and George had all been kicked off the Quidditch team by Umbridge and were discussing the prospects of their upcoming game with Hufflepuff when Hermione made this statement:

OotP, chapter 26, “Seen and Unforeseen,” Scholastic paperback, p. 574-575.

“That’s the trouble with Quidditch,” said Hermione absentmindedly, once again bent over her Rune translation, “it creates all this bad feeling and tension between the houses.”

Her opinion wasn’t welcomed by the boys. She followed it up with this statement.

“(A)t least my happiness doesn’t depend on Ron’s goalkeeping ability.”

BAM. End of story. Her happiness did not depend on Ron’s goalkeeping ability.

Uh huh, and that was consistent with her inability to stay awake and celebrate with Ron when he made the Quidditch team earlier in book 5. See Chapter 13, “Detention with Dolores.” She was asleep when Ron would have preferred she bask in his glory.

Harry woke Hermione up to tell her about the nasty sensation he felt when Umbridge touched his arm, and she went through a variety of emotional states from bleary-eyed to listening closely to looking alarmed to looking relieved at the idea of Harry going to bed and not staying at the party. She felt she could then leave without being seen as rude, because she was tired. Oh, and then she asked Harry if he wanted to help her knit hats, and at this point her face was shining with glee.

It seems to me that she was awake enough at this point to join Ron for his big night, if she had any interest in him and his success on making the Quidditch team. However, she didn’t seem to care about Ron, only Harry that night.

Then, comes HBP and she makes an about face when it comes to Ron and Quidditch. All of a sudden she cares about his success, and she hexes a fellow student to assure Ron makes the team.

Huh?

That was wildly out of character for Hermione.

I honestly was wondering at the end of this book whether or not Malfoy was sitting in the bleachers in Polyjuiced!Disguise and putting her under the Imperius curse in order to hex someone else. That way she would not be as close to Harry and he wouldn’t have her undivided support that he had in years 1-5.

At the beginning of that chapter, “Hermione’s Helping Hand” she is telling Harry that he has never been more “fanciable” and that it didn’t hurt that he had grown about a foot in height over the summer.

Ron kept trying to assert himself into the conversation and she ignored him.

Because she once again was focused on Harry and not Ron, I mean I could see exactly how I was going to debate this book. Until the hexing incident, and when she sicced a flock of yellow birds on Ron.

All of a sudden, Hermione has become obsessed with Ron and does not really care about Harry, his troubles or solving mysteries with him.

My theory about the Imperius curse by Malfoy started to seem pretty attractive to me. It explained her sudden character transplant. She was under a curse!

The other thing that bugged me about Hermione’s character was her abandonment of political interest in house-elves.

In Goblet of Fire (GoF), Hermione tried starting a political movement. She had no idea what she was doing and she alienated more people with her inept, but enthusiastic manner. Then in OotP, she had a new strategy which also was ineffective, the idea she could knit their way to freedom.

Ron was openly hostile to her political beliefs and insulted her at nearly every opportunity. Harry was different, he seemed more put off by her pathetic political organizing skills than her desire to see an oppressed class of magical beings liberated. Harry stopped short however, at having compassion toward the mentally disturbed Kreacher.

I had loved the house-elf subplot in Book 2 and Book 4. I thought it was a great addition to the Potterverse to show that even a magical world has inequality and a need to struggle for social justice. Because I think it is important to introduce these concepts of societal problems to children so that they will want to work to change our system.

I liked the politics, but I just wished that Hermione was given some political organizing skills and not just passion. However, I figured in OotP, it was simply a place marker to show that she would help to lead a house-elf rebellion later in the series.

Then it seemed in HBP that Hermione simply forgot about them. As if it was simply a passing phase and now that she’s discovered boys she doesn’t have time to care about their oppression any more. It made me sick.

Truly, I was disappointed. This was not the feisty character that I once knew and championed. She was sobbing about Ron kissing Lavender, and becoming vindictive enough to ask McLaggen out for a date to make Ron jealous.

This from the same character who was deliberately vague about her relationship with Viktor in books 4 & 5?

To me, it was as if Jo Rowling looked back at her plot outline to see that HBP is when she started to have Hermione have a go at jealousy over Ron while Harry got to start feeling jealous over Ginny. So she had to all of a sudden take these characters she had been writing for five previous books and make them fit into her predetermined plotline.

It felt as if she picked up trains from parallel tracks and moved them where she needed them to be. I found it incredibly abrupt, and I really missed Ron and Hermione trying to help Harry solve the mysteries of the year. Instead, the Trio was different and Ron and Hermione dismissed Harry’s concerns and theories all year long.

It bugged me, because it didn’t feel right to me at all.

I felt disappointed with the resolutions of the mysteries as if Jo just wasn’t trying hard enough in the sixth volume to come up with plot twists. It was Draco all along? Like I thought? Okay, I solved it and felt like it wasn’t all that difficult to solve. Just don’t get thrown off by red herrings and you’ll be fine.

That’s when I considered the idea of Malfoy and the Imperius Curse on Hermione. I was warming up to it, and started to comb the text to find examples that might serve as evidence.

Then I read the infamous TLC/Mugglenet interview and realized that it wasn’t the case at all.

Jo intended Hermione’s character to act in a manner which I found to be “out of character.” It is after all, Jo Rowling's character so anything JKR writes for Hermione is by some definition "in character," but it still was jarring for me as a reader to see what I felt were discrepancies in character motivations.

At another time, I’ll talk about why I was unsatisfied and disappointed with character building of Ginny throughout the series and why I did not feel as though I was carefully brought to the conclusion that she was the perfect girl for Harry. I know that was Jo’s authorial intent, because she said so in an interview.

It didn’t work for me, and I’ll explain why in a future posting.

Anyone have other quibbles about Hermione’s character that I didn’t touch on?

Linda

P.S. In the Bloomsbury cover there appears to be Dobby on Harry's back, so hopefully there will be some more mention of house-elves joining with the "good guys" in the war against Voldemort.

Problems I had with the Harry Potter Series, Take Two

Today I’d like to deal with leaps or lapses in logic. I'm only dealing with Order of the Phoenix (OotP) in this posting, but I do bring in examples from the first four books as well.

Magic outside of school by under age wizards

Jo has spun this incredible universe of a Wizarding world that lives parallel and sometimes overlaps with the Muggle world. Trying to understand the rules that she has set up for these worlds is complex, and we've only seen a portion of what her incredible imagination has created.

However, it doesn't always seem to work smoothly.

Case in point: Harry being charged with performing magic outside of Hogwarts.

How does the Ministry of Magic determine when magic is being performed, and who performs it? We had testimony that Fred and George were exploding things at the Burrow over the summer trying to invent things. Did the Ministry cite them as well?

Hermione's character introduction in Philosopher/Sorcerer's Stone suggested that she had done "simple spells" at home. Did she not get any warning that she shouldn't try this at home?

Petunia also gave testimony in the first book that Lily came home from school and turned teacups into rats.

So we saw Dobby do a Hover charm in the Dursley's home and then an owl came almost immediately from the Ministry. As if they had operators standing by to generate letters of reprimand and owls at the ready to start flying.

It seemed to me that this intelligence to the Ministry was done by a site specific magic detector, that couldn't tell the difference between elfin magic and wizard magic.

But in OotP, Harry is cited for a repeat violation for using magic outside of school, but he is in a Little Whinging neighborhood outside of the Dursley household.

So how did the Ministry of Magic know that Harry performed "the Patronus Charm at twenty-three minutes past nine this evening in a Muggle-inhabited area in the presence of a Muggle" ? What was the mechanism for detecting the exact spell, the caster of the spell and the location? It doesn't seem like it's a site-specific monitor, therefore how does it work and why didn't it work in other cases?

Because well, you'd think that if they had that kind of technology to perform that kind of detailed surveillance that they'd have known back in Year Two that the Hover charm was not cast by a wand, nor by Harry. The Ministry might also have known that say, Harry cast the Expelliarmus spell in a cemetery in Little Hangleton, also technically off the grounds from Hogwarts.

Or that Voldemort cast other spells in Little Hangleton, such as Avada Kedavra which could then prove that Harry was telling the truth.

But then...prior to Harry's hearing on performing magic outside of school, we have the Order of the Phoenix stop by the Dursley household and rescue him. Nymphadora Tonks uses magic to help Harry pack.

Huh?

Why didn't that use of magic set off alarm bells with the Ministry and have them add to the list of complaints against Harry?

Somehow adults who cast magic spells are not under the Ministry's surveillance, but minors are? :Scratches head.: It doesn't make sense to me. Especially since the adults are more likely than children to use dangerous spells such as the Unforgivables.

It bugs me that I can't follow Jo's logic on how her universe is set up.

When I wrote my fifth year fic, I came up with this elaborate idea about out-of-date magical detectors on the roof top of the Dursley home that could only detect that magic was performed but not by the person.

That explanation worked for me, but that's not what Jo chose.

My line of logic would allow for Arthur Weasley's use of magic defending himself against flying porcelain in Goblet of Fire, to just go back to the office and explain what happened while having the Dursleys' fireplace taken off the Floo Network.

I wanted consistency in how these rules of the Potterverse were supposed to work. I don't care if the Ministry plays favorites and turns blind eyes to certain things, but I'd like to know that is the case and not just a lapse in logic.


Harry incriminating himself, Hermione, Sirius and Dumbledore in committing crimes.

What you say? When did Harry incriminate himself, his best friend, his godfather and his headmaster?

Well, we never read Rita Skeeter's cover story in The Quibbler, so we're not really sure what he said versus what she wrote. We do have however this quote from Percy Weasley when Harry was facing down the Minister of Magic, Umbridge, and others in Dumbledore's office.

"Or is there the usual simple explanation involving a reversal of time, a dead man coming back to life, and couple of invisible dementors?"

Let's break that down into three parts:

1. a reversal of time
2. a dead man coming back to life
3. a couple of invisible dementors

Now, I'll dispatch things in reverse order. Harry's hearing before the school year started in OotP dealt with his claims of dementors being in Little Whinging and trying to attack himself and his cousin. Fudge and Percy didn't believe Harry, but they were overruled by the majority in the Wizengamot.

The dead man coming back to life was the testimony of Sirius Black and both Harry and Hermione in Prisoner of Azkaban (PoA) prior to the time when Hermione was given the instruction by Dumbledore to try to change the course of events by messing with time.

Fudge thought the children were Confunded and left the infirmary.

Then Hermione broke her word to the Ministry and used the magical object for something other than she had agreed. I believe that would be a crime and that it should be classified as a Misuse of a Magical Object.

In telling the story of Voldemort's return to Rita, Harry would not have to divulge that he was instrumental in breaking a notorious prisoner out of confinement in Hogwarts, and that he did this with Hermione as his accomplice and with the knowledge and approval of his headmaster.

The further criminal implications is that he has aided and abetted a fugitive of justice.

Just that one line makes me go crazy.

If I were Fudge and there was such a publicly made confession by Harry Potter, you bet I'd start an investigation. Especially if it could lead to the ouster of Dumbledore, which is what he was trying to do all year long.

BAHHHH.

Did anyone else notice these things? Or am I just insane from looking too closely at the minutiae?


Stay tuned. Next time I'll tell you my problems with character development. Now, that's a whole different topic.

Linda

In Defense of L.O.O.N.ish-ness and problems I have with the Harry Potter books

In trying to think of a good title for my blog that was different from others, I harkened to the term League Of Obsessive Nitpickers from the Harry Potter for Grown Ups (HPfGU’s) list serv.

Last night I was talking on the phone with a local high school student whom I agreed to mentor in her senior writing project. In the course of our conversation, she brought up the subject of the Harry Potter series and asked if I was familiar with it. There was this awkward silence when I tried to figure out how to politely say, “yeah, in fact I’m in recovery from having overdosed in Harry Potter fandom politics.”

Yes, I will read the seventh book, but I’m not as excited as others to read the final installment. Because I’ve been greatly disappointed with the last two books. I admit that it is due to my own unreasonable expectations.

I haven’t spent anytime yet on this blog telling about my not so secret obsession with the Potterverse. Many of you who have stopped by and read my blog have come from my dear friend John Granger’s website where he does an amazing job of analyzing aspects of the HP books with a particular emphasis on alchemy and Christian symbolism.

First off, I want to stress that I adore the Harry Potter series. I do. I was floored when I first read the books to realize that the plot lines were intricately woven not only in each volume, but between the volumes. I had never read a series where things that were introduced in a previous book were clues laid for subsequent books.

I had initially read the books in November 2001 when the first movie came out. Having had experience in trying my hand at writing and adapting screenplays, I actually enjoy reading books and then seeing how a screenwriter condenses the plot, characters, etc. to fit the running time for a movie. I had read the first two books and was about halfway through Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban when I saw the movie.

I remember sitting in the movie theatre and watching as Hagrid fell out of the sky in the flying motorcycle and then feeling floored. I remembered then that he had said that the motorcycle belonged to young Sirius Black. A character briefly mentioned in the first chapter of the first book and then never again until book three where he was the titular character.

I went home and confirmed that indeed he was mentioned in the first chapter, in a throw off manner. As if it wasn’t really important. Just an amusing aside, except it wasn’t an aside at all. It was a clue for future plot points.

I was impressed.

I finished reading the third and fourth books (the series was only 4/7^th completed at the time), then I began reading again from the beginning. I was so impressed that I began analyzing the plot structure. It was during my third or fourth read of the series and that I began dissecting things. I made lists of all the characters, all the potions, all the animals, etc. I didn’t realize that I was reinventing Steve Vander Ark’s wheel. I could have saved myself the trouble and merely looked at his website. However, it was good practice for me and honing my analytical skills.

After doing that, I started talking with others whom I knew had read the books. None seemed to share my intense interest in examining the evidence for clues of future plot points. I started to feel a little weird. Then I went online and discovered the global online HP fandom.

It was then I found my niche with the HPfGU list, which led to my writing online fan fiction at Fiction Alley, Portkey, Fanfiction.net and becoming a prominent ship debater. (Ship is slang for relation-ship and an immense amount of bandwidth was/is consumed with people arguing for various romantic pairings of fictional characters.) I spent a lot of time arguing why I felt the Harry/Hermione ship was the ultimate romantic pairing of the series. For those who are wondering, in the online community I am known as either Athena or Pallas Athena, and yes, I did represent the H/Hr ship at the Nimbus Symposium in Orlando in 2003.

My nerdy fandom creds are showing.

Back to L.O.O.N.s…I spent about eight solid months reading the HPfGU’s list and was fascinated by the level of discourse and intense scrutiny of the text (AKA canon.) People would ask a question and if they didn’t have a solid grasp of canon then others would chime in and cite from the books showing that their premise was wrong due to X,Y and Z in chapter 12 of the Chamber of Secrets (Cos). People were polishing their imaginary League Of Obsessive Nitpicker badges, and since I had taken the time to create my own schematic of the series I felt like I was one of their kindred spirits.

I wrote my own fifth year fic based on different theories I happened to favor that were spun on the HPfGU’s list, and one that was truly my original theory. Most have been totally eviscerated by new canon, but a few other minor points still might come true.

Thing is, I spent a lot of time considering where I thought canon was going to go in book 5. There are a few aspects that I didn’t know where Jo Rowling was going to go and so I consciously decided not to explore them. I expected that she would deal with it, but she didn’t and to me it is a gaping plot hole.

Most people don’t even recognize that there are things missing that bother me intensely. It is only when I point them out do they realize their omissions. The things that bother me the most were sins of omission and not sins of commission.

In my talk last night with the high school senior, she said how much she like Half-Blood Prince (HBP) and I felt guilty to say that I didn’t like it. Then I told her a few of the reasons why and afterwards she felt like she should have noticed these things as well.

Okay, here’s a list of what bothered me:

Barty Crouch, Jr.’s soulless body.

What happened to it? Here we have prima facie evidence that something grossly wrong had occurred. This man had been declared dead and buried at Azkaban prison years ago, and yet his living body is found at Hogwarts after the death of a student in the TriWizard Tournament. What? No investigation? And where did this zombie-like thing go? Is it hooked up to feeding tubes in St. Mungo’s?

Lack of penalty for assaults on students.

At the end of Goblet of Fire (GoF) and Order of the Phoenix (OotP), Harry and his friends attacked Draco Malfoy and his gang of Slytherins. They were left on the floor of the Hogwarts Express with footprints on them, or they were stuffed into an overhead bin.

So, why wasn’t there any disciplinary action taken after these assaults? I tell you I if went to the train station to pick up my child after a year of being in a boarding school and he didn’t come off the train safe and sound, I would hold the school accountable. If I had to go onto the train and I found my child unconscious after being attacked, I’d be livid.

I’d want to see those responsible punished. Severely.

I actually worked that into my fifth year fic, and I was critical in my reviews of others fifth year fics for not including something which I felt would naturally follow in the continuing narrative.

Jo didn’t see it the way I did. She not only forgot to have that in the beginning of the school year in OotP, but again in HBP.

No punishment followed Harry and friend’s physical punishments of the bad boys. What kind of message does that send to children? If you are favored by the headmaster you can do anything you like?

As a parent, I don’t like that at all.

Lack of respect for Sirius Black.

Okay, I’ll admit that I adored the fictional character of Sirius Black. I was just a sucker for a handsome man who was wrongly accused and imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit. I felt sorry for him having to live in Azkaban for 12 years, live in the Forbidden Forest for another year, and then subsist on rats and live in a cave for another.

I wanted so much more for his character. I wanted him to be safe, warm, well fed, have a romantic partner, and yes, I wanted him to be exonerated.

My fate for his character arc was so much different than Jo Rowling’s. She made him suffer, suffer, and suffer.

Then she killed him.

Then she really made me mad. Killing him was one thing, but her treatment of Sirius’s character after his death is what really infuriates me.

No funeral.

No memorial service.

No formal anything for Harry to grieve, or for anyone else to grieve the loss of Sirius Black.

Now, if there’s no body, it makes it hard to have a funeral, but you can gather people together to talk about that person’s life and what they meant to you.

She didn’t do that. Jo did have a funeral for Albus Dumbledore, which she needed to do.

Jo also had Hagrid blubber over the death of Aragog. Harry attended the service that his friend had for a monstrous man-eating spider.

Nice. Yet, no one could do the same thing for Harry’s godfather.

And what really bothers me the most about this is that I know that Jo knows better. She was asked after Goblet of Fire about bringing Cedric’s corpse back.

Saving Cedric's body reminded me of the Hector Patroclus Achilles triangle in the Iliad.

JKR: That's where it came from. That really, really, REALLY moved me when I read that when I was 19. The idea of the desecration of a body, a very ancient idea... I was thinking of that when Harry saved Cedric's body.

--

So Jo drew upon the classical poem the Iliad for Cedric, and yet she did nothing for Sirius after killing him off.

There is still a question in my mind as to whether or not Sirius was fully exonerated by the Ministry of Magic.

I Don’t Know The Answer. And it bugs me.

Okay, that’s all the time I have today to state the problems I had with the last two books. There are more, but that’s enough for people to chew on right now. If you’d like to share your thoughts with me, please feel free.