Deathly Hallows, chapter 12

[anehan]

Magic is Might

* Yeah, yeah, the Death Eaters are observing 12 Grimmauld Place. Why don't you cut straight to the story, Rowling?

* I've got to say that it's stupid of the Death Eaters to expect anyone to appear there, not when they are so obvious about keeping an eye on it.

* The kitchen is now polished to perfection, all thanks to the mysteriously changed Kreacher. Even Kreacher's ordering Harry about isn't enough to make me reconciled to this new state of things.

* Well, Snape can't be a worse headmaster than the previous one.

* IIRC, this is the second time that "Merlin" is used as an expletive in this book, this time by Hermione.

* The other teachers won't accept Snape as a headmaster? Oh, come on, Ron, that's naïve even for you. The slightest reflection should make it clear that they have no choice.

* "The quality of Kreacher's cooking had improved dramatically since he had been given Regulus's locket." Nonononono! *whimpers*

* Exposition alert! An infodump about new Ministry policies. Stupid policies, if you ask me; there only so that the Trio can put their plan into action.

* Hermione is worried that the plan will go wrong, because so much relies on chance. Get used to it, Hermione, since that's what you'll be relying for the rest of the book.

* It's so very Harry to have a plan that's likely to go horribly wrong, only to be rescued by luck.

* Am I the only one who thinks that real reason for Ron's reluctance to have Hermione with them is misplaced chivalry?

* Master, Master, Master. Shut up, Kreacher!

* Harry's scar hurts again. It just doesn't make sense that Voldemort suddenly stopped using Occlumency after using it for the previous book. IMO it's there only so that we can get periodical updates about what he is doing. Oh dear, consistency.

* Hermione knows very well that Harry doesn't know how to use Occlumency, so what use is it telling him he shouldn't let Voldemort into his mind?

* Harry gets angry when Hermione suggests that the reason he never really tried to learn Occlumency is because he likes to have this special connection to Voldemort. Oh, I don't know, Harry, I think what she says has some merit.

* It's rather rich of Harry to tell Hermione to forget Dumbledore when he's himself been all about doing what Dumbledore wanted him to do.

* And off we go to the Ministry, armed with a plan with very little chance of succeeding.

* Frankly, the reason why they gave Mr Magical Maintenance Puking Pastilles instead of stunning him makes no sense. The Stunned bodies would be in the empty; they wouldn't be attracting anyone's attention.

* Stupid of them to have Harry impersonate someone who they know nothing about.

* The official entrance to the Ministry is quite stupid. I'm getting bored of these supposedly quirky habits the Wizarding World has, such as this and the moving staircases at Hogwarts. I'm sure they're meant to be funny, but they only make wizards look incredibly stupid.

* The Death Eaters have no subtlety. Magic is Might, indeed.

* Yaxley's face is brutish, and he's dressed opulently. No doubt his Polyjuice Potion would be mud-coloured. After all, blood will tell.

* A very short recap this time, for which I apologise. The chapter was boring as hell. We're only a third way in, and already I am heartily sick of this book.




Atomic Grenade:
Puking Pastilles. Guaranteed instant hurling.

Designated Hero:
Master, Master, Master, Master. Our Hero is so noble that lower life-forms can't help but worship him.

Informed Attributes:
The Trio's plan will word. Really.

Final score: 3.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I have to say that while it is an interesting and well-written article, I largely disagree with it. And since I don't want to register there I'll briefly comment on it here:

In a nutshell, Mr. Hemmens seems to be saying that (urban ?) fantasy authors take their secondary worlds too seriously, while they should always stress that fantasy aspects are metaphorical and that true problems are in the Real World (tm) and that all those adventures only psychologically prepare the heroes to deal with those real problems.

IMHO, it is a completely valid fictional approach to take secondary worlds seriously... _if_ the respective authors go all the way with logical consequences.
The problem is that most authors are stuck in-between and provide their heroes with an arena where they can be special and significant without the responsibility and price that would have been attendant to such a position in RL. Because, hey, the magic can reverse (almost) everything and therefore the hero should be able to repeatedly save the world without watching a significant part of his friends and allies die and suffer in the process or making hard decisions that would haunt them for the rest of their lives. _That's_ where the whole deluded wish-fulfillment comes in.


An episode of Buffy usually opens with our heroine facing a Typical Teenage Problem, then getting drawn into a supernatural event which allowed her, at the end, to resolve her Real Life problem

But isn't that where the childishness comes in? Because in RL, being a war hero never helped anybody to deal with interpersonal or day-to-day problems and being brave on the battlefield seldom translated into civil or moral courage. A brief look at history, particularly that of the first part of the 20th century amply proves this.

A mythical journey in which the Hero leaves the real world and then never comes back is always going to seem, to me (and therefore to anybody who matters), to be fundamentally juvenile.

That' what most of the classical hero's journeys are, though, unless the hero was some kind of displaced "true heir" in the first place. Sorry, but the farmer's lucky third son never returns home and becomes a better farmer. For that matter, emigration is a valid RL choice, too, which many make.

you have to let go of the belief that your secret world is the most important one.

Yet our culture and science were in great part created by people who cared more about their "secret worlds" than their material gain or social success. It is entirely OK to spend one's life creating something that nobody is ever likely to appreciate. It carries its personal costs, yes, and those are steep - but we owe a lot to people who were stubborn enough to persist and talented enough to create something memorable.
Again, the point is not that "secret worlds" are unworthy and contemptible, but that the costs are glossed over.

Lord of the Rings loses a lot of its impact if the Hobbits don't go back to the shire.

Hobbits going back and being able to save and restore Shire to it's former glory, but even better, was a self-indulgent lie, though. After the wars, returning European soldiers found their countries irrevocably changed and often not for the better. And whatever they "learned" didn't help them to regain the society they left _nor_ did it help them in their subsequent lives, for the most part. Frodo is the realistic depiction of a returning war hero, not Pippin or Merry.

fantasy (even, or perhaps I should say especially children's fantasy) takes itself very seriously, and it's ludicrous to try to deal with "real" issues in something that's totally divorced from the real world.

What is "real world"? A lot of cultures, separated from us both by time and distance, are a lot more exotic and less comprehensible than most of the fantasy fodder. Did not a lot of cultures glorify suicide, for instance? And I bet that you'd find ideological fervor and fanaticism of Soviet Russia in the 20-ies - 30-ies far more bizarre and less "real" than any number of fantasy settings.

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks for reading.

I think we're actually working at cross purposes here, and I think we actually agree on the fundamentals: that the problem is with authors who fall down the uncanny valley by creating a secondary world that isn't real enough to be, well, real or abstract enough to be a metaphor.

To take the Buffy example, I felt that it fell apart in the later series because it went from being about a girl who "fights demons" as a metaphor for growing up to being about a girl who literally fights demons, which are a concrete part of her alternate reality, and who has essentially been prevented from growing up as a result, and it doesn't make the shift properly. Angel works a lot better as a series because it's a lot more explicitly "real world plus monsters" rather than "real world with monsters as placeholders for real life issues". There's also a really nice episode in (I think) series 2 where Angel runs into Anne (the recurring former Vampire groupie who started off in Buffy) and she gives him a rather nice speech about how, once you've lived in the bad parts of LA for a while, vampires don't seem so scary.

To address a couple of specific points:

Yet our culture and science were in great part created by people who cared more about their "secret worlds" than their material gain or social success.

I actually think that's factually inaccurate. Shakespeare wrote to pay the bills, Aristotle was hugely respected in his day and afterwards, Einstein published his work on relativity and quantum mechanics for review by his peers. Nobody ever did a lick of good for the world by retreating into a secret magic kingdom where they were the Queen of the Fairies.

What is "real world"?

Simply: it's stuff that actually exists (or has existed), actually your various examples (foreign cultures in the real world, the heights of ideological fanaticism in soviet Russia) only serve to highlight the point. There is nothing a Fantasy author can invent that is more alarming, more surprising, or more complex than something which already really exists, and real people have already experienced. Voldemort and the Death Eaters already look stupid and ineffectual, but they look even *more* stupid and ineffectual when you compare them to the actual Nazis.

- Dan Hemmens

[(Anonymous)]

I haven't seen either Buffy or Angel beyond maybe a couple of episodes each, but I have to say that I dislike the trope of battle in imaginary worlds somehow helping a person with RL problems. Yes, it is a time-honored trope, but IMHO it is very false and mainly exists due to fear of writers of a certain era to take imagination and fantasy seriously. It had to have a "practical" application to justify it's existence.

Nobody ever did a lick of good for the world by retreating into a secret magic kingdom where they were the Queen of the Fairies.

I am not sure what you mean by this, to be honest. If you mean that masses or establishment can't be wrong, then I disagree. Ergo if you infer that art that "doesn't pay bills" is somehow inferior. Van Gogh never sold a picture in his life and he was, IMHO, a genius. Nor did any but the most long-lived of the impressionists see any real return for their life's work.
Mendel's work was ignored and forgotten by scientific community only to be rediscovered a few decades later and shake the world.
Da Vinci's inventions were never appreciated beyond a couple of mechanical toys used in the pageants.
Even Einstein had his problems with finding work in academia for a few years after graduation.
Sure, all these people could have given up and done something more immediately profitable. Mendel eventually did and became an abbott instead. But they were right, damn it, and society that didn't appreciate their contributions in time, was wrong.
I won't even mention lots of talented creative people, who lived under opressive regimes and continued to create despite knowing that most likely their works would never reach a wide audience.

If you mean just imagining one's "specialness" without actually _doing_ something, putting in the actual work behind the possibly contraversual ideas, then sure. And of course one shouldn't forget that for one person who was right there may be hunderds or thousands who were wrong and sacrificed their time and effort for nothing. And that even being right doesn't guarantee any return during one's lifetime.

There is nothing a Fantasy author can invent that is more alarming, more surprising, or more complex than something which already really exists, and real people have already experienced.

I would like to point out that sf writers did invent some stuff that didn't yet exist and the attendant problems. Writer's imagination _can_ sometimes trump reality and fortell future developements.
I'd also point out that ironically enough RL and historical stuff that exists has too high an entrance threshold for many. Setting may be too incomprehensible, psychology too alien, movers and shakers too unsympathetic. OTOH, it is not a coincidence that among the adult fantasy readers many are also interested in historical fiction or even non-fiction. But there is that snag with historical fiction - the ending is set in stone, as are, to a great degree, personalities of important characters.

[(Anonymous)]

I am not sure what you mean by this, to be honest.

I mean that Van Gough painted stuff that actually existed, da Vinci studied actual anatomy, Mendel studied real plants that were really in front of him.

Modern fantasy, however, places primacy on this nebulously defined concept called "imagination" which all too frequency means "thinking you're awesome".

I would like to point out that sf writers did invent some stuff that didn't yet exist and the attendant problems.

No, SF writers extrapolated from present trends to produce ideas which wound up looking a bit like things that got invented in the future. People are pattern matching animals, and we're good at seeing the connections between real things and their fictional antecedents, but William Gibson did not invent the internet.

- Dan Hemmens

[(Anonymous)]

Modern fantasy, however, places primacy on this nebulously defined concept called "imagination" which all too frequency means "thinking you're awesome"

Yes, but it is imagination, in the sense of either looking on things from a different angle than everybody else and getting new insights or imagining things that don't yet exist and trying to create them in reality, that is the source of all progress. Delusions of awesomeness don't have much to do with imagination, really.

Most stuff around us wasn't real at some point in the past. People imagined it, then people (sometimes the same, sometimes different ones) built /discovered it.
You seem to stress the whole "reality" thing, forgetting that reality can change, sometimes very abruptly. When you read private journals of people just before the WW1 - well, they would have thought that future awaiting them in just 3-4 years was just some crazy, impossible mightmare. Unfortunately for everybody, it wasn't.
Which is why exploring "what if?" scenarios is actually a somewhat reasonable endeavor. And it isn't terribly important whether the "ifs" are justified by techno-babble or by unapologetically fantastical elements.

Urban fantasy actually touches a lot of themes that always interested and excited people - secret societies, life on the fringes of the law or by exotic laws of their own, as well as supernatural elements. I don't see what's so "inferior" about it.