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

"Different" vs "plus"

[kahuna-burger.livejournal.com]

Esp in comparison to your Star Trek analogy, maybe the issue (as it often is for me) is whether the fantastic is something added on to the world, or a rearrangement of what you consider the baseline reality. It's one thing to say "Star trek adds transporters and warp drive to our universe, and you just have to accept those additions" and imo a very different on to say "In the star trek world a retrovirus can cause you to grow extra limbs and add up to 200 lbs of body weight, and curing that virus will magicly disolve those additions, and also humans are descended from spiders!"

In the same way "Magic can extract parts of the mind and personality and make them 'real' in a way best described as souls" could be easier to take than "The base reality of the universe is that everyone has a dualistic souled nature." Its reality plus vs reality is different.