Thematic Bits

[lapin_agile]

I've just been re-reading the first days of the game (as you do) and was brought to a thinky-halt by something Lucius Malfoy says on Harry's post about Transfigurations (on 3 September):

Very few students can transfigure even a small object on their first go. Keep practising. Part of the trick is to believe there is no great difference between the beginning object and the end.

The mental trick required for successful transfiguring strikes me as being fundamental not only to casting magic... I think it's a pretty good description of the trick of the mind required of ordinary wizards as they settled into comfortable lives in the Protectorate under Voldemort's rule. 'Pretend there's no great difference between the new social contract and the old: things are just better now!' (Look away from the slave urchins! Nothing to see there.)

Also notable there is what Harry has to say about Professor Lockhart: Teddy Nott thinks Lockhart's a fraud; Harry thinks he must be all he says or he wouldn't be teaching at Hogwarts. (Things must be what They tell us. Father wouldn't let it all be Lies!)

(I probably should have put this down on Elise's Fractal post, but that's way down the page now.) Consider this an invitation to talk about other things that strike you if you're re-reading like I am.

Comments

[longstrider]

I've started a full read through as well. I've been struck by just how many things you all managed to lay out from *day one*. Draco/Harry/Ron, all the Weasley dynamics, Lucius's relationship with the boys, Sirius/Remus and so much more. Nothing quite compares to just how much foreshadowing JKR managed to jam into a relatively innocuous first chapter (Dumbledore's broken nose, Sirius's bike, the themes for basically the entire series and on from there.) But still a great deal was firing on all cylinders from day one.

I've been reading Harry Potter to my daughter for a bit now (we'll finish Talons and Tea Leaves in PoA tonight) and it's wonderful to find the bits I'd forgotten about and the bits that point to the future. I'm anticipating similar when reading all of Alternity again.

[reenie]

Re-reading Y1 and Y2 right now, and what strikes me as really significant is the ISS and Order Only locks, which has in turn made me ponder how those were a huge force in our game play and even character development.

Basically, in those first 2 years any character under a lock felt like a 'main character,' because the audience was privy to the full range of their thoughts and reactions to in-game events and to the Protectorate as a whole. Anyone not under a lock feels like a side-character - even Harry. There are simply fewer opportunities for people like Harry and Draco to participate, and the end result is that characters like Sally Anne, Ron, and Neville are WAY more active.

The development of private messages helped open things up more and definitely added for greater range of expression, but I still often felt like Draco and Harry took pretty big risks under that lock - however, it was kind of necessary to show what was going on with them.

[gwendolyngrace]

We've talked about that in terms of mechanics, but in terms of themes and character, it's very much worth repeating, yes! I think a big theme for all of Alternity was appearance vs. reality (which also goes to Deb's original observation), or more on a more granular level: What characters say vs. what they do.

Another thing that strikes me is how nearly every character had fears that they expressed, either blatantly or by trying really hard not to let them show, that were eventually made manifest in the game.

Harry's inactivity is a really special case, though. I think we struggled - and EVERY player who handled Harry struggled - with how to make him an active protagonist without also simply breaking the game. In canon, Harry simply makes up his mind to do things and does them. If Harry had done what he wanted to do, what his impulse told him to do - in Y3 or Y4 or even Y5 and 6, we would have skipped to the end really darn quickly. (I'm reminded of the t-shirt that says, "Neville would have done it in four books" - to a very real extent, that was our problem with Harry in the context of these journals and this structured sort of play. Even after Harry has a forum for his grievances (which, jeez, was way too freaking late, in game terms!), we constantly butted up against the problem of holding him back so that the game would not jump its grooves. As a result, I think Harry wound up spending a lot of time sidelined, and limiting his interaction to characters who didn't really help him become more heroic.

[naomikritzer]

So I started reading the first of the Y1 PDFs and the thematic thing that came up right off was other people being punished in Harry's stead. (This was where Harry revealed that Voldemort had told him that if Harry ever did something really bad, he'd give Draco to the Carrows.)