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progA 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!
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!
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Date: 2007-08-22 01:50 am (UTC)I can understand how you can have a problem with what Hermione says and not have a problem with dementors and such. She is explicitly saying that the soul can exist outside of the physical self, whereas the soul the dementors capture is more abstract, more like the essence of a person that could be their sort of life-force or whatever; something that a materialist can place his or her own beliefs into without much trouble. Even horcruxes have that magical edge to them that makes them so much less explicitly non-materialist.