jack

As children, we're often first taught something by going through the motions of doing it, even if all the heavy lifting is actually done by our parents. If done well, this can be a very uplifting way to be introduced to a new concept; to get to play at it, and go through the general steps in a top-down way, without having to get each intermediate step right. (If done badly it can be very dispiriting, if you want to see if you can do it right, but someone just swoops in and does it for you before you can try.)

Digression on boardgames

This is something that's occurred to me in the concept of teaching people board games. For instance, in teaching someone MTG, especially to geeks, you fairly quickly need to move on to knowing at least a subset of the rules you interact with regularly, as there's lots of rules, and if you don't know them and just try to learn individual situations piecemeal, you're constantly bitten by special cases where your teacher says "no, it does [thing you didn't expect]" and you don't know why.

However, when introducing the game, I think people are often too regimented in explaining the rules. I think it's often better to say something like "each turn, you play a land, cast a creature (paying for it with the land cards you have), and then attack with your creatures", and letting the beginner get an idea of how a game normally goes and why it's fun, before explaining "you can play a land after a creature, but it's normally worse to do so, and you can cast multiple spells a turn if you want to", etc, etc.

Sometimes you really need to explain from the bottom up, but sometimes going through the motions without knowing the detailed rules is enough to give the flavour of the game.

Narnia and LOTR

The reason for this post, is I sometimes feel Aslan and Gandalf are doing that: they both vary in power level, typically being "somewhat stronger than whoever they're facing", partly for in-world reasons, and mostly for plot-reasons.

But I wonder if it's also because doing "just the minimum necessary to win the war" means that everyone else gets the experience of winning (mostly) through their own effort. Which is horrible if you think of it as real life, letting everyone die to make a point, but makes a lot more sense if you think of it as a warm-up before deciding who goes to heaven.

But several people have said they don't think that's consistent with what Aslan and Gandalf actually do.

(Dumbledore doesn't even have an excuse of being God, he really doesn't know best, he just acts like he does. Often because there's a good in-world reason for manipulating everyone, but also because that's just what Wise Mentor Figures do, even when it's blatantly counterproductive.)

What I love about it

That it (sometimes) deals with magic system asking the questions I would ask, if I saw the universe acting in such a suspiciously anthropomorphic way.

That it''s totally hilarious in places about those questions.

That I genuinely care about its version of some of the characters.

What I don't like (so much)

Obviously writing something like this is hit-and-miss, and you couldn't have the great bits without having the rough edges, so I don't mean to criticise the fic by pointing out what worked less well for me.

It sometimes seemed to be pushing Harry's hyper-rationality at the expense of common sense or normal human feeling. Which is understandable, as that's sort of the point. That's what I had a problem with when I first tried to read it, that Harry's father and to some extent Harry dismissed his mother's experiences of magic, and only reluctantly implementing a rational test, which well-characterised or not annoyed me; but I got to like it a lot more when I saw that the fic did expose Harry's own biases (such as always looking for clever solutions that made him shine, rather than sane ones), for instance when the sorting hat points them out.

But there's still a definite tendency to fetishise rationality: for instance, several times there are mentions of extreme torture or other evil stuff, and I feel like (1) yes, it's good that someone can examine this stuff objectively but (2) he needs to be more aware of most people's reluctance to face it, not as "something I'll understand once it's explained to me" but "something I will respect even before I understand why people do it".

I feel someone going around asking questions like "hm, so is torture evil?" is like someone designing an atomic bomb: most probably it will NOT lead them into unrestricted amorality if someone can't justify it quickly enough, or set fire to the entire atmosphere of the Earth, but you want to be careful examining that sort of thing.

And it's good to examine all the questionable premises of a magical story, and a commonly effective way of doing that is to take them to the logical conclusion. But it's not always the best way: sometimes it smacks of someone reading Animal Farm and saying "This doesn't make any sense, animals can't talk, and if they COULD talk, they STILL wouldn't act like that", and then driving that point into the ground. In magic systems, the details vary enormously, but a common set-up is that performing a spell correctly is something like invoking a complicated one-line perl program: incomprehensibly powerful if you don't know the rules, but amenable to a mixture of hard work and aptitude. Now, this is a good metaphor, but not a perfect metaphor, and it's perfectly possible to critique it. But I think everyone understands instinctively, even if they can't articulate it, that examining the exact correspondence between magic words and results won't hold up, and driving that into the ground is funny and may make a good point about how science works but is a dead end when criticising the world-building.

Also, some of the pop culture references, while nice, are a bit forced.

To what extent do you think authors interpretations of their own works relevent? Do authorial statements count as canon (facts within the work). Unsurprisingly, I'm going to take a middle line.

I think the authors conceptions when writing the book are relevant, and probably count as canon. If they intended so-and-so to have this reason for doing things, it's polite and probably most accurate and informative to think so when you read it. Things will probably make most sense when you assume this background.

But that what they say doesn't *necessarily* reflect what they were thinking. As annoying as it is for an author to be deconstructed, sometimes the right interpretations may lie in assumptions never consciously adopted (eg. the author's morality informs the book's morality), or conceptions at the time later changed (eg. uh, no, the Ender's Shadow prequels were totally canon, honest), or even, potentially, things the author deliberately lies about (eg. no, no, I'm not misogynist and racist, it's art).

Of course, there's still room to interpret the book in different ways -- people do this even when something's clear from the book itself as well as authorial pronouncements.

For that matter, much the same argument applies to small points of continuity (here you said "three days", but there you said...) as large background motivations (so, all the way through, there's this unrequited...) Sometime it's best for the author to just come clean and say "whoops, it doesn't work, just pretend it does, ok?". That's not wonderful, but mistakes happens, and it's better than trying to patch it up later in even more confusing ways.

Of course, this leads to the unpalatable conclusion that consistency may not be the be all and end all of fiction sometimes consistency has to be set aside. If the author intends so-and-so to have this motivation, but half the time forgets and gives them that motivation instead, and then admits it when we deconstruct the book -- you may find both intertwined halves of the book are great with the motivation intended at the time, but there's no consistent interpretation that makes sense all the way through.

Do you have to accept an author's pronouncements? I don't think so. They probably (assuming you decide they're accurate) represent an improvement, but if the book is what you have the book is what you read.

I work through every incident I can find. The conclusion is at the end. Both major theories seem plausible, only one piece of evidence really leans, though there are several important gaps to be filled.

( Spoilers 1-6 )

I'll do a follow-up about which I think is *narratively* most likely.

* Millions of homages: 2001, water world, starwars.
* I liked the level of humour.
* Sometimes the whole audience giggled at the slashy bits. Some amusing sexual references were deliberate, some were just us (Ferret/Crabbe!), some were ambiguous -- Cedric asking Harry to have a bath.
* I thought people must be exagerating when they said this, but the plot was eviscerated. The core plot was there, and indeed I liked a lot of the little changes they made to make it more obvious; indeed, when you see wormtail, I thought that was alastor, which would be a large change, but possibly a decent one.
* However, most everything else was cut. It wouldn't make much sense to someone who hadn't read the book. Some characters were gone, poof, and some, eg. Rita, were barely there. The number introduced in the first few minutes would be bewildering enough.
* A lot of the casting -- Amos Diggory, Alastor Moody, Barty Crouch Sr -- seemed a bit more laughable than I had imagined them, though all were reasonable.
* Krum was quite good. I imagined him more brooding and less arrogant than he looked, but he was great in the quiddich match. I'm not sure about him and hermione, though; though I know some people with much more of an age gap than that.
* Cedric was ok. Sometimes he seemed fine, but a lot of the time he seemed more "dumb rich pretty (and knows it) nice oaf" than the "hardworking dim pretty (but doesn't know it) nice oaf" I thought.
* Again I assumed the trailer was misleading wrt the sexes of the foreign students, but no; it seemed the film did intend Beauxbaton to be female and Durmstrang to be male. I admit it made for a pretty scene where they were introduced, but it seems like an odd choice.
* The action was all pretty well done. Though they could have showed any of the quiddich, and maybe the other champion's fights.
* Some of the children's interactions seemed very Biker Grove, other soap, or Enid Blyton :)
* Voldemort looked really stupid imho.