Now that the Potterdammerung has passed...

[NB: This page will still be mostly nonspoilery, but the links are full of plot sekrits, so if you haven't read the book and still want a little mystery, caveat lector.]

RockNinja and I have been going back and forth about several of the major plot themes in Deathly Hallows, and in my efforts to defend my POV (which, of course, is Right and True and Deeply Moderately Insightful) I've been following Cleolinda's threads. Well, that and the fact that the woman is funny. Probably because she's more invested in the books and because she's working on her own novels, she's noticed and written up a number of points that I hadn't caught in my first tear through the book, including one that sent RockNinja into preverbal shudders.

Cleolinda also recently posted her opinion of why the books are so unbelievably madness-of-crowds successful, and I think that she nails it:

...I really think the reason the Potter books have succeeded is because Rowling wrote them from her heart and, on some primary level, for herself. She probably needed these books as much or more so than anyone else who's read them. She's mentioned in the spate of interviews this week that her own mother died fairly soon after she began writing the series (at age twenty-four!), and that her own parents are what she'd want to see in a real Mirror of Erised. And there she was on public assistance, writing about a lonely, hungry, neglected, unappreciated boy who wakes up one day to find someone telling him, "You're actually a wizard, and a really good wizard, and we're going to take you away to a place where you'll flourish and excel and make friends and find a family of your own. Here, have some cake."

The Harry Potter books are absolutely about that wish fulfillment, but if that were all, then they wouldn't have sold as well as they did; a book about someone who gets everything his or her own way would be insanely dull. Instead, they're about what you can face if you've got that one basic need filled, that base from which to work. Harry can have his mano a mano faceoffs with Voldemort because his friends—a substitute family, really—are as much a reason to fight as they are allies. If he didn't have something to lose, the battles wouldn't be worth much to the reader or to Harry himself. Then too, like Joss Whedon (Joss you bastard!), JKR is willing to ice sympathetic characters, upping the ante and creating a greater sense of reality, and personal struggles that might seem clearcut (he's the protagonist, of course he's gonna make the right decision in Book 3) are nonetheless left in some doubt until they're resolved.

There's a pretty good counterexample in some of Orson Scott Card's recent work. In Ender's Game, the stakes felt high: Ender got some of what he needed, in the form of escape from his older brother and a place to do what he was good at, but he still had to struggle to win as a commander, to reach other students, to save the world, to live with the aftermath. Over time, though, Card has slipped into creating either impervious supermen (summary of the Alvin Maker books: Alvin faced his greatest challenge. Surely he could not win. He drew on a well of strength he hadn't known he had. He won. Lather rinse repeat) or situations in which nobody is actually at risk, because they're being watched over or manipulated or it's a holodeck or some damn thing. It speaks well of Card as a person that he's uncomfortable with the idea of children in real danger, but for a writer it's a tremendous Achilles heel. Plus there's the part where he's turned into a raving fruitcake, but that's an ad hominem issue that doesn't necessarily carry over into his writing (although it does affect the odds that I'll buy his books).

Now I have to release my copy into the wild, the better to loan it out to the people who held off on buying it, and move on to the rest of the birthday haul. Pat Parelli training techniques! I hope Doc's up for some games.