It's that unwillingness to revise, to say "Oops, that doesn't work any more", that is, at times, mocked.
That's true--and you're right, as we get new information we have to either revise our ideas or just be in denial. In this series at its best the new information make you go back and see things before it differently. Though at the same time, sometimes new information can be given badly or not really work. Like, the reason I used the Lucius example was that was one that sort of worked both ways for me. I think the idea that Lucius was always really smooth and competent could be shown to not really hold up early on in canon, or at least you could see that there were really no examples of him being all that great. But I know in OotP, for instance, in the MoM scenes there were times where I thought he was acting artificially incompetent in order to make the scene work. Given the information we had--that this guy was supposed to have been an important DE, that he'd stayed out of prison the first time, that he should be deadly and the plain fact that he was an adult, I felt like in that scene he seemed like an actor trying to make a go of lines that didn't really work.
So I wouldn't want one confused for the other. Like, I didn't have a problem with his winding up in prison because that made sense--and there's certainly even a precedent for it when he's beaten in CoS. But there were times when I wasn't buying him in the MoM anyway. Similarly, I didn't buy New!Ginny in OotP no matter how many times the author or the narration told me she'd always been this way. It seems like that's part of the challenge of being an author and giving out any new information, really, that you make people see it the way you do. JKR's got plenty of good points to her name on that score--more than once she's given us new information that was a surprise but in retrospect seems like it was always there.
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Date: 2004-12-01 10:12 pm (UTC)That's true--and you're right, as we get new information we have to either revise our ideas or just be in denial. In this series at its best the new information make you go back and see things before it differently. Though at the same time, sometimes new information can be given badly or not really work. Like, the reason I used the Lucius example was that was one that sort of worked both ways for me. I think the idea that Lucius was always really smooth and competent could be shown to not really hold up early on in canon, or at least you could see that there were really no examples of him being all that great. But I know in OotP, for instance, in the MoM scenes there were times where I thought he was acting artificially incompetent in order to make the scene work. Given the information we had--that this guy was supposed to have been an important DE, that he'd stayed out of prison the first time, that he should be deadly and the plain fact that he was an adult, I felt like in that scene he seemed like an actor trying to make a go of lines that didn't really work.
So I wouldn't want one confused for the other. Like, I didn't have a problem with his winding up in prison because that made sense--and there's certainly even a precedent for it when he's beaten in CoS. But there were times when I wasn't buying him in the MoM anyway. Similarly, I didn't buy New!Ginny in OotP no matter how many times the author or the narration told me she'd always been this way. It seems like that's part of the challenge of being an author and giving out any new information, really, that you make people see it the way you do. JKR's got plenty of good points to her name on that score--more than once she's given us new information that was a surprise but in retrospect seems like it was always there.