I'm thinking...

[dream_labyrinth]

I am just reading The Room of Lost Dreams over at the exchange.
Of course, the point of fanfiction is to fill in blanks the original author left us (and heaven knows JKR left us enough to last a lifetime), but there is something pretty much all of the stories have in common that JKR didn't touch at all, and that is the simple act of surviving the war.
JKR didn't bother to deal with traumatized, injured, depressed people. She jumped up seventeen years and all was well.
In fanfic, it isn't, and those seventeen years didn't just fly by while everybody who lived lived happily ever after.
No matter whether the writer ignores or uses the epilogue, no matter whether the people who died in DH are dead in the fanfic or not, we try to deal with the inevitable.
Survivor's guilt, Post Traumatic Stress, marrying quickly and having children early, the psychological and the political effects of a war.

And it's not just because we want to be able to write steamy hot lemons and long hurt/comfort fics. Somehow, it feels that in her determination to wrap things up JKR not only put every single character she ever mentioned before into DH to finish the specific plotline more or less cleanly, she also made her characters less human in the end. Even the ones she had taken the time and effort to make nicely life-like, realistic and complex before were turned to mere cut-outs to file away somewhere and leave the desk nice and tidy.

As we want to continue to play, it makes sense we can't leave it at that. But still, I think we're being much kinder to the people and the universe JKR created than she herself was.

Comments

[amokk]

Since the line is meant for children, dealing with the post-war stuff really isn't all that appropriate, regardless of how much adult readers might have wanted to read it.

[dream-labyrinth.livejournal.com]

Well, the majority of at least the last book, if not the last two or three, is inappropriate for children anyway. (At least, if you apply others than the American standards for movies which mean a bare breast is inappropriate, while cutting people to pieces with chainsaws is not.) There's a whole lot of violence and murder in there, but no time for the healing.

[amokk]

Books have a different level of appropriateness than movies to begin with, and I wouldn't apply American movie standards to a book anyway, that's silly. ;)


I don't know how graphic the scenes are in the books, as I haven't read nor care to. But that doesn't change the original intention of who the audience should be.

[dream-labyrinth.livejournal.com]

That depends on whether the "original inention" is merely a label on the book. And it definitely is in this case. HP I was written for children. The story was fairly simple, it was no more gruesome than the average fairy tale (before they were Disneyfied) and it was very well possible to let an eleven year old kid read the book, or even a younger one.
HP VII - well, it didn't go so far as to describe brains being splashed on stones or intestines spilling out of wounds, but you wouldn't want your child read a description of a scene where an evil character cuts one of the lead characters' neck open with a knife, or where a snake digs its fangs into another character's neck and the person ends up lying in a pool of blood.
The publisher might claim it's still a novel in a children's book series, but it definitely isn't a children's book.
And if the author shows those parts, and in other places gets into the less bloody and more psychological effects of fear and isolation and oppression, but not takes the time to show the healing required afterwards, I think the author leaves the reader hanging.

[amokk]

I suppose that's true enough (if it's merely a label). If she's willing to go that far with the books, then yes, it might be appropriate to go through the healing process.

But not everyone knows, understands, or accepts that healing is a process, and many think of it in terms of the end result, not the journey to it. So, "look, they're fine" is more important to a lot of people than, "look, they can work through their problems caused by this major event."

[dream-labyrinth.livejournal.com]

Well, that's true.

[shiv5468.livejournal.com]

I agree

[knight0fswords.livejournal.com]

Excellent point. JKR knew by the time she wrote OotP that she wasn't just writing for children. If you go with the premise that she "grew the books up" with the characters, she had to understand that her readership was growing up as well. By 17 or 18, the readers should be able to grasp the concept of the horrors of war and its aftermath, however, she took the easy way out.

All was well, indeed! My husband suffers from PTSD because of the Persian Gulf and other events from his time in the Navy. He's been retired for 13 years, and he still has nightmares, he still thrashes around and cries out in his sleep, and that's after two stays in a psychiatric hospital to deal with it.

[dream-labyrinth.livejournal.com]

That's exactly my problem. She put in so much else that is unsuitable for children; she deconstructed every single father figure she gave Harry; she even went so far as to announce in an interview that Dumbledore was gay, for heaven's sake; but she never ever, not even in an interview afterwards, admitted that wars don't just end and everybody wanders off to have a good rest of their lives.