while we're about it

When hopelessly submerged in Harry Potter, go with the flow. More (spoiler-free) musings. Or, if you've read it or don't intend to, an extremely scathing and amusing blow-by-blow review.

One of Rowling's major problems in constructing the Harry stories is the way in which she goes about isolating her child heroes from adult contribution or oversight. This is a perennial problem in children's fantasy: for purposes of kiddy-reader-gratification, as well as for a more or less romance plot to work, the hero needs to be testing his/her own abilities against the world without too much input from grown-ups. Quest romance is individualistic: children learning to work with adults, rather than apart from them, moves the whole thing back into the realm of the real.

Various children's writers deal with this in more or less intelligent ways. Options include:

• Giving the kids a good social/structural reason to work apart from adults. Examples: John Christopher's Tripods trilogy or Scott Westerfeld's Uglies: children deliberately escaping a predetermined social fate which hits them at a particular age and to which most adults have already succumbed.
• More or less related: children who cannot work with adults because the adults are more or less assholes across the board. Good example: Diana Wynne Jones, Year of the Griffin: another magic-school story in which the adult wizards are all idiots as a result of the social conditioning of the tours, whereas the kids are bright and able to think outside the box.
• Children with no adults to whom to appeal, i.e. orphans, runaways, children separated from their parents by circumstances. Diana Wynne Jones, again, does this very well in The Dark Lord of Derkholm, in which one parent is enchanted into indifference and the other critically ill, leaving the kids to struggle through an extremely demanding situation on their own. Rowling partially uses this technique, although she flaws it by including an isolated child within a validated system, rather than an isolated child outside an invalidated system (yes, the Ministry gets all totalitarian later on, but Hogwarts under Dumbledore is supposed to be a supportive and nurturing environment): you keep asking why the system doesn't compensate for the isolation, whereas in Dark Lord it's perfectly obvious that the system is unfair and stupid.
• Kids separated from the normal world by particular powers/destiny/what have you - the other half of Rowling's strategy. But I invite you to compare it to Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising, in which Will's realisation of his power and purpose is beautifully cushioned by mentor figures who offer a careful and effective balance of education, testing and support. This is possibly where HP is most flawed: Rowling randomly brings adults in and out depending on the narrative needs of Harry's quest, at the cost of any consistent or coherent relationship he can build up with those adults - or, in fact, with his own identity and abilities. Also, half the adults are idiots, or at least hamstrung by narrative necessity so that they're forced to act like idiots and later unconvincingly come up with justifications.

The problem with comparing HP to other kids' fantasy is that I find myself wondering why I actually enjoyed the series. Phooey. Possibly she's controlling our responses by hypnotic drumming from orbit. (Which reminds me. Major Russel T. Davies rant coming up, once I've fulminated a bit on the last three episodes of Who.)

Last Night I Dreamed About: exploring ruined fantasy Morrowind cities; being nervous late at night in campus corridors; breeding very small horses.