Why you'll never see "The Science of Harry Potter"

[prog]

A background process I didn't realize I had going returned a value yesterday and told me the point at which the last Harry Potter novel soured a little on me, preventing it from being really great. It was when Hermione, by way of example, explained that if she stuck Ron with a sword, his body might break and die but his soul would remain whole (and commence along whatever post-mortem processes souls go through in HP-land).

This was a girl who, at Hogwarts, shared a building with highly visible ghosts, and had helped battle creatures that quite literally ate souls, and I have never had a problem with any of that. She was also a master spellcaster, breaking real-world physics many times a day while practicing; fine. Despite all this, to hear her so matter-of-factly deny materialism, to do so in a by-the-way where I can't even recall what point she was making? It was like hearing someone you thought you knew well, maybe even someone you considered a friend, suddenly make an analogy based on an implicit belief in young-earth creationism, or in the inevitability of the Rapture. That harshed my enjoyment more than a little, I think, and it never really recovered.

No, it doesn't make much sense, in the greater context of the work. But that's the answer I got!

Comments

[cnoocy]

So is it that you don't mind magic and ghosts, but positing the existence of a soul is too much like what you've heard in this society from anti-evolutionists?

[prog.livejournal.com]

Maybe that's it, that many people - heck, many entirely rational readers of that very book - also have the same dualist view as Hermione, even though nearly all of them would agree that the books' various ghosts, goblins and wizards are pure fantasy.

Complicating factor: When I was the books' target audience age, I was most certainly a passive, never-really-thought-about-it supporter of dualism as well.