Hogwarts by Committee
I finished the seventh and final installment of the Harry Potter series this afternoon. No, I didn’t go and reserve a copy and camp out in front of the local Barnes & Noble. Eileene did that. Left to myself, I might have picked a copy up within a few weeks, or I might have abandoned the series long ago, but if you want to have a civil conversation with a Potter fan after a new release, you need to know the difference between a Ravenclaw and a Hufflepuff, and why a hoarcrux is important. Fortunately, all I had to do was go to bed as normal on the night of the release, and by morning, the book was available for a second reader.
I’m not going to review the book here; my review isn’t yet finished. Without giving away too many secrets, however, I think I can talk about an odd sense that’s been growing in me since volume 5. I feel like Rowling didn’t so much write the last books as she transcribed them from some kind of majority opinion in the fan base.
I can’t prove it, of course. Rowling has been cagily tight-lipped, so there’s no way to know how much she planned in advance. Still, I can point to the character popularity contest. Apart from the mandatory trinity of Harry, Ron, and Hermione, the other characters appear in almost direct proportion to their popularity. Also, several big questions were resolved, less in a way that made narrative sense than in a way of which the fans would approve. Exposition is rife. The action stops dead before the climax, just so we can see a long flashback of the life of Severus Snape, the most controversial and interesting of characters. It’s hard to prove that small wrenches to the plot every few chapters were the result of stringing together the not-entirely-consistent events that fans hoped to see; consistent plotting never was Rowling’s strong suit. But it feels that way, for reasons I can’t always put my finger on.
The awareness might not have come to me at all, had I not been made aware of a growing feedback between fan phenomena and the fans themselves. A producer (or editor) taking a cue from the fanboys is nothing new; one of the original Star Trek episodes—“All Our Yesterdays”—was not written by the usual staff, but by a fangirl who wanted to see Spock in a romantic role. (Slashfic writers, take heart!) But, ever since George Lucas demonstrated the marketing power of good geek material, that interaction has increased. The hack paperbacks written for the Star Wars and Star Trek series are essentially fan works made canon. Chris Carter began writing X-Files scripts in reaction to internet buzz about the show. Managed well, as Joss Whedon did with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this form of “buy-in” builds community, and creates a series that people really, really want to see more of. Managed poorly, as in the Lost television series, it leaves the audience feeling manipulated and, ironically, disappointed in the trash they themselves asked for.
Perhaps, too, I’m especially sensitive to the feeling that the fans were writing the book because I’m using a sneaky variation on this technique in my current RPG campaign. But wherever it came from, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Potter’s grand story arc never existed in the first place, that it was generated by smoke and mirrors from reader suggestions. And, even without particularly being a fan of the series, I feel somehow cheated.