Perseus Jackson vs Wolfy McWolface
Jan. 11th, 2021 07:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackI can't figure out why I'm more annoyed with the Percy Jackson characters not figuring out who "Perseus Jackson"'s father is, but not with the Harry Potter characters for not figuring out that the werewolf was "Wolfy McWolface"
I think it's that Lupin's name was clearly supposed to be out-of-universe knowledge. Obviously the characters might know plenty of Latin, but there wasn't a sequence of events where he was called that BECAUSE he was bitten by a werewolf. So I'm happy to treat it as a narrative convention, just like I don't ask, "how come all these novels have a statistically improbably narratively meaningful ending?"
Whereas from book 1, it feels likely that Perseus' name wasn't massive coincidence, but was given by his mother BECAUSE his father was Poseidon. And it makes sense that he didn't make that connection, but CHIRON didn't?
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Or maybe "Perseus" is just such a common name for demigods now it didn't come up?
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In fact, there's a wider literary point here, which is that books are often interesting if there's hints that the reader can pick up on and suspect a connection but not be sure of, or make an unlikely connection.
But having it work depends on how much the reader knows and how much genre awareness the reader has. Hints for a 10-year-old who hasn't read many books will be different to hints in book 2 of 3 you expect a dedicated subreddit to spend 10 years analysing in extreme depth.
And if the hint lands emotionally, you tend not to pick apart the logic, but if it doesn't we often get pedantic, even if it's not less logical, just less interesting to us personally.
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Even now, I often find myself really interested in books that FEEL difficult to figure out, even if the difficulty is in piecing together what they're saying, as well as or instead of the complexity of what they're saying.
I always think of Too Like the Lightning here -- I was SO INTERESTED in it, despite the fact that almost every plot point made me vehemently denounce it But they were all INTERESTING because they raised interesting questions, about that world and about our world.
I think it's that Lupin's name was clearly supposed to be out-of-universe knowledge. Obviously the characters might know plenty of Latin, but there wasn't a sequence of events where he was called that BECAUSE he was bitten by a werewolf. So I'm happy to treat it as a narrative convention, just like I don't ask, "how come all these novels have a statistically improbably narratively meaningful ending?"
Whereas from book 1, it feels likely that Perseus' name wasn't massive coincidence, but was given by his mother BECAUSE his father was Poseidon. And it makes sense that he didn't make that connection, but CHIRON didn't?
--
Or maybe "Perseus" is just such a common name for demigods now it didn't come up?
--
In fact, there's a wider literary point here, which is that books are often interesting if there's hints that the reader can pick up on and suspect a connection but not be sure of, or make an unlikely connection.
But having it work depends on how much the reader knows and how much genre awareness the reader has. Hints for a 10-year-old who hasn't read many books will be different to hints in book 2 of 3 you expect a dedicated subreddit to spend 10 years analysing in extreme depth.
And if the hint lands emotionally, you tend not to pick apart the logic, but if it doesn't we often get pedantic, even if it's not less logical, just less interesting to us personally.
--
Even now, I often find myself really interested in books that FEEL difficult to figure out, even if the difficulty is in piecing together what they're saying, as well as or instead of the complexity of what they're saying.
I always think of Too Like the Lightning here -- I was SO INTERESTED in it, despite the fact that almost every plot point made me vehemently denounce it But they were all INTERESTING because they raised interesting questions, about that world and about our world.
no subject
Date: 2021-01-12 08:02 am (UTC)I don't think it's that obvious. Languages, modern or ancient, do not seem to be taught at Hogwarts.
It's like going to a school run by a religious cult - the education is curated so you can't leave.
I think it's that Lupin's name was clearly supposed to be out-of-universe knowledge. Obviously the characters might know plenty of Latin, but there wasn't a sequence of events where he was called that BECAUSE he was bitten by a werewolf. So I'm happy to treat it as a narrative convention, just like I don't ask, "how come all these novels have a statistically improbably narratively meaningful ending?"
I actually read a fic once where Lupin was targeted specifically to punish his parents for giving their child a "Wolfy McWolfman" name like it was a joke.
no subject
Date: 2021-01-12 02:10 pm (UTC)In my headcanon, that's why all the spell names are in bad Latin – each one was originated by a past wizard (via whatever Deeper Magic it is that causes a two-word spell to start working for everyone in the first place) who had paid about as much attention to their Latin as they had to the rest of their Muggle Studies. Conjugatio Incorrectus!
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Date: 2021-01-12 10:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-01-12 07:49 pm (UTC)Hmmmm. Yeeeees. I think I was going with, the reasonable adult characters are portrayed as knowledgeable, and have some continuity with ancient wizard cultures, so you'd EXPECT them to know things we think of as educated. That's more based on how the worldbuilding feels, than what it says. But I think that's usually a much better guide...
Lupin was targeted specifically to punish his parents for giving their child a "Wolfy McWolfman" name like it was a joke.
LOL. Yeah, that's a perfect retcon. It doesn't undermine the earlier book, but adds a useful new perspective on it :)
no subject
Date: 2021-01-12 02:16 pm (UTC)This is a total shock to absolutely everybody, even the people with functioning brains, in spite of the fact that the two ostensibly different groups of people have lists of names that obviously very closely resemble each other. Perhaps we're supposed to assume that in the "real" fantasy world they didn't, and it's merely an artefact of translation into English for the reader? But even so, it telegraphs the plot twist quite blatantly.
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Date: 2021-01-12 06:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-01-12 06:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-01-12 07:56 pm (UTC)I'm definitely regularly on both sides of this. I know less greek and latin than a lot of friends, so often there's hints that seem not hidden at all to some people but that were just the right sort of "wait, I wonder if" to me. Or "so obvious" twists that I never thought about. But there's other instances, say plots that seem so clever to some people when I can just reel off what it stated, what it implied, and what it pretended to cover but didn't :)
Now I'm listing examples, I remember people complaining about a netflix series about a supposed messiah somewhere in the middle east, but he was called something like "antichrist" in arabic. And obviously that's a good background bit of worldbuilding for most viewers who don't know any arabic. But it doesn't really make sense in the fiction of the world that none of the people around him would never find that suspicious...
no subject
Date: 2021-01-13 09:08 am (UTC)Yes, the part about "but how come the actually knowledgeable people inside the fiction didn't spot this?" is often the sticking point.
My other standard example of that is the one in The Da Vinci Code where at the start of a chapter our hero is presented with some cryptic writing-like squiggles on an artefact. The book shows a picture of it, and it's obviously mirror writing, because (a) we all know da Vinci was into mirror writing, and (b) it looks like mirror writing at a glance. In spite of this, our hero, purportedly a world-class da Vinci expert, scratches his head over it for the whole chapter before finally realising that it's mirror writing.
no subject
Date: 2021-01-13 03:05 pm (UTC)Yeah. Discussing "should they have known" can lead to unhelpful arguments where people have different ideas how obvious something was -- sometimes people genuinely just don't think of obvious things. But if many readers are noticing that you might have expected them to, suspension of disbelief has started to break down.
a world-class da Vinci expert, scratches his head over it for the whole chapter before finally realising that it's mirror writing.
Yeah... My objection there was, how can you give up before even looking for a simple substitution cipher, and if you did a frequency analysis it would quickly tell you "the most common letter is backwards e, then backwards s". I don't know why I found that more objectionable than not recognising mirror writing, I guess that it's possible an expert might miss something obvious, but no way you could even TRY to decode an unknown diagram without a frequency analysis.
I think this is a case where the author's smoke and mirrors DOES work very at giving the impression of linguistics expert to people with a reasonable amount of intelligence but very little relevant knowledge. But it breaks down fast for people who know enough to recognise how untrue it is. There really SHOULD be books for people who don't happen to know anything about deciphering unknown languages. And they can't all be perfectly scientifically accurate. So this is an example that's MOSTLY done well. But I still found myself crying, you couldn't be a BIT more realisitc and equally engaging?
no subject
Date: 2021-01-23 12:34 pm (UTC)