>> Amen to that! One of the things that I hated about the last two HP books is that they had chapters of nothing but useless side tracks that any intelligent reader IMMEDIATELY knew were irrelevant or meant to seem like red herrings. <<
I didn't even get that far. I think I lost interest somewhere in book 3 or 4. The first book was brilliant, an obvious classic, but after the refoulement at the end of it I concluded that the whole of Rowling-Britain ought to be flushed down the loo, so that made it a lot harder to enjoy anything. When the characters aren't likable, the story almost never is. Though I confess that I watched Dark Matter for its sheer brutal honesty about how throwing people together and calling them a "team" when they're not is going to cause a gigantic clusterfuck.
>> But, one of the decisions made when JKR tried to "age the series with the readers" is that each book got longer, when what it needed was much better editing, especially after #4.<<
She didn't really age the series. With a few extremely limited exceptions like the introduction of dating, the characters don't move through a chronological progression of increasingly complex life challenges. It's the same challenges over and over again, which makes them basically pointless. Voldemort was right there in Book 1. Nobody put any real thought or work into what they were going to do after Hogwarts, beyond lip service and vague daydreams. They didn't have time; the mayhem took up all the energy they should have been putting into adolescence. In this regard, fanfic has handled those issues much better.
But I will agree it needed much better editing. Almost everything does nowadays. They fired most of the proofreaders and the editors who curated lines. Now publishers are putting out mostly the same crap, and if you want anything good, you have to hunt through mountains of fanfic or crowdfunding, which means shucking a lot of oysters to find a few pearls. :/
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Re: Plans
Date: 2020-03-01 09:37 pm (UTC)I didn't even get that far. I think I lost interest somewhere in book 3 or 4. The first book was brilliant, an obvious classic, but after the refoulement at the end of it I concluded that the whole of Rowling-Britain ought to be flushed down the loo, so that made it a lot harder to enjoy anything. When the characters aren't likable, the story almost never is. Though I confess that I watched Dark Matter for its sheer brutal honesty about how throwing people together and calling them a "team" when they're not is going to cause a gigantic clusterfuck.
>> But, one of the decisions made when JKR tried to "age the series with the readers" is that each book got longer, when what it needed was much better editing, especially after #4.<<
She didn't really age the series. With a few extremely limited exceptions like the introduction of dating, the characters don't move through a chronological progression of increasingly complex life challenges. It's the same challenges over and over again, which makes them basically pointless. Voldemort was right there in Book 1. Nobody put any real thought or work into what they were going to do after Hogwarts, beyond lip service and vague daydreams. They didn't have time; the mayhem took up all the energy they should have been putting into adolescence. In this regard, fanfic has handled those issues much better.
But I will agree it needed much better editing. Almost everything does nowadays. They fired most of the proofreaders and the editors who curated lines. Now publishers are putting out mostly the same crap, and if you want anything good, you have to hunt through mountains of fanfic or crowdfunding, which means shucking a lot of oysters to find a few pearls. :/