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NancyLebovitz comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread - Less Wrong
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I have to say, for a blog (?) focused on good writing and story structure, that's a really terrible essay/brain-dump - highly repetitive, problems mostly alluded to rather than described, fact & citation-free, and very very ranty. (I suspect I'd also find a number of self-contradictions if I cared to re-read.)
If it didn't have the occasional good insight, I'd never have finished reading it. I did, but I still hate essays which are intermittent reinforcement schedules.
But here's one good point. By the end, the real sin of Voldemort is not being evil, but in seeking to avoid death. Rowling implicitly seems to be saying: 1) you can't live forever 2) you shouldn't avoid death 3) death is good.
LWers may grudgingly accept #1 ('fine, I can't live for ∞ but can't I live for a few thousand years at least?'), but I think we all pretty much vociferously disagree with #2 & 3. And if we were put into the Potterverse, I think we would pretty quickly all go over to the Dark side.
And that observation suddenly changes my interest in MoR from 'what is Quirrelmort's grand plan?' to 'how does Harry rewrite Good & Evil and fix that sordid little world?'
Thanks. I'd been wondering why I was having trouble focusing on the essay, and thinking the problem might be me.
I kept reading it because I thought a lot of the zip in the series faded out in the later books, I hated the epilogue with a passion, and was hoping that I'd get some explanations for why. I think I got some partial explanations, though I got tired of the theories about what Rowling must have been thinking.
Also, at the point when I'd mentioned the essay, I hadn't gotten to the material about accepting death nor the revolting chunk of resentment about how Rowling cheated to make her books popular by not concealing that she's pretty.
"Accept death" is a cheap and easy way to add profundity to fantasy and science fiction. I think the anti-immortality stories are pretty much sour grapes, and there are a lot of those stories. Peter Beagle's built a big chunk of his career on them.
Rebecca Ore's Centuries Ago and Very Fast is an exception-- the main character is non-aging and a time traveler, he likes his life, and he has a pragmatic ability to enjoy it.
I too was tired - of his incompetence.
There is a lot of value to critically sifting authorial statements over decades about multi-installment works. But his sucked.
If you want to see it done right, in a way that completely revolutionizes your interpretation of the source material and gives you genuine insight, resolving all sorts of continuity issues, plot holes and whatnot, proving its case with citations and points beyond a reasonable doubt, the beau ideal would have to be The Secret History of Star Wars. I doubt you've read it, but take this old SW fan's word for it, it was a masterpiece that that essay comes nowhere near.
I was more interested in what he had to say about the books themselves rather than his guesses about what Rowling was thinking.
I'm not likely to get around to The Secret History of Star Wars, but if there's a short answer, what happened to Lucas between the end of the first trilogy and the beginning of the second? He seemed to have forgotten most of what he knew about telling stories.
"A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away" is brilliant. Starting a movie with a scrolling description of the tax(?) situation isn't.
The short answer is that A New Hope had nothing whatsoever to do with any grand story about Darth Vader, who was merely a mid-level flunky of the Empire. Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi frantically retcon this, but Lucas simply didn't have a decent backstory centered around Darth Vader and couldn't come up with one.
The longer answer goes into the above, and also points out that Lucas's support network (of beta readers, if you will) which edited and improved his trilogy had largely fragmented or vanished by this point. For example, his wife, a very skilled film editor, had divorced him by the time of the prequels.
Me too. I stopped reading the essay because of this.