The Journals: Some Questions

[lapin-agile.livejournal.com]

I. How many journals are there?

* I'm puzzled. I thought that the Lord Protector had distributed journals to everyone in Wizardom, even out-of-country wizards and those in hiding (a daunting thing, logistically, but he's Voldemort, so he could probably pull that off).

* Sirius said early on (September 6) that he'd received two: his own and one for his cover identity: "Bloody Hell... another journal. This one to my official persona. Brilliant. It brings up an intriguing question of what to do with this journal."

* Now Frank Longbottom posts to say that "Alice made me get one of these but I'm not certain I know how they work." This statement implies something very different about the journals and how they *do* work.

* Did Voldemort fail to reach everyone (particularly some, like Frank, who are flying beneath the Ministry's radar)?

* Has the Order filled the gap by adding some Order-only-spelled journals to the "network"? That would seem to require a retrofit of some magnitude on top of Bill Weasley's impressive bit of curse-breaking that allowed Order-only posting.

II. How do the journals work?

* I'm not sure whether it's been suggested in the game, but I think we've discussed the likelihood that these journals are like Tom Riddle's diary in having some sort of enchantment to coerce the owner to write -- otherwise, they'd not be much good as a surveillance tool.

* If every witch and wizard received a journal and most are posting in them, there are many posts that we readers are not seeing. (I'm cool with that. I'm not a Ministry drudge assigned to track all of the journals, and I don't want to see every dreary detail of every little life across Wizardom.)

* But... what are we to imagine that each journal owner sees on the pages of her/his journal? Is every post being recorded on every journal like a great and all-encompassing flist on LJ?

* Sirius's Grim Truth posts seem, indeed, to appear in every journal across Wizardom and in the camps, but perhaps that has required a special spell to achieve?

* Perhaps others are able to read only those posts they ask their own journal to show them (aside from Sirius's unavoidably intrusive posts that turn up in your journal without your permission)?

* If everyone's seeing every post by every witch and wizard, then it's hard to imagine anybody being able to keep up with a set of 40+ journals like we've got in game -- it's hard to imagine anybody (besides Ministry drudges and a few extremely disturbed persons) remaining at all curious about what others are posting in that sort of info-dump morass.

* Sirius wrote (in that same September 6 post) that he imagined it would take some time before his posts would be noticed by the Death Eaters, but he was then formulating his plan to make his posts noticeable: "I suppose if I keep posting, eventually some Death Eater will find it, but it seems only fair to give them a sporting chance. All my cousins and in-laws out there, enjoying their fatted calves, hear that? That's right, I'm not afraid of you. Perhaps I ought to use this [journal] as an opportunity to give Malfoy and those Ministry toadies exactly what they want: Information about the state of the Wizarding world outside their fascist, oppressive regime."

III. Why does it seem that some people aren't using their journals?

* The meta-answer is that they haven't been cast yet, but I'm asking about the game's explanation not that pragmatic answer.

* Some, like Ernie and Frank, have entered play with posts that suggest they have not been writing in their journals (Ernie says he's been busy; Frank seems only recently to have gotten a journal at all).

* Might others be able to ask us to assume they've been posting all the time but without our taking notice until now? Perhaps someone has to reply before a writer gets caught up in the web of inter-related journals we can see... or something like that.


* Might some (Snape? The Carrows?) be better equipped to resist the powerful pull of the journal (if that is indeed a feature of these Protectorate-provided devices)?

ETA (11/15): Molly has just remarked in passing that once she learned who the twins dog turned out to be, she "charmed" her journal to allow her to read alt_terry's back posts. So. Molly is capable of cooking up a spell that manipulates what her journal shows her. Interesting!