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Comment by hatthew | Hacker News Reader

This article is interesting, but feels like a bit of a stretch to me, particularly when making assertions as bold as "I suspect the only reason it’s not spelled out is because Tolkien assumed any reader would understand that intuitively." I am not a master of the LotR lore, but my assumption when reading the books years ago was that Tolkien wanted an idyllic utopian society of rural leisure, and didn't necessarily work out a fully realistic plan for how such a society could be sustainable long-term in the real world with real humans. LotR is a fantasy world, and such worlds are filled with fantasies: imaginary things that are unrealistic and don't need to be physically feasible.

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I don't think it's a stretch. I think the idea that LoTR is highly idealized/idyllic is an interpretation made up by people who didn't notice how carefully it's written and thought he left it out!

Similarly, a lot of later grimdarker fantasy stories try to be "Tolkein but with realistic tax systems and warfare", so something like ASoIaF tries to talk about those things more, but then messes up the actual details so it's inconsistent. But if you follow the analyses on https://acoup.blog/author/aimedtact/, the battles in LoTR are very carefully thought out and realistic (based on Tolkein's personal experience) and Gondor's feudalist system is also pretty realistic (based on his academic expertise). He just talked about the details less.

I would even say they're grimmer than "grimdark" stories, half of the Gondor battle is about the enemy using psychological warfare tactics and the story ends with Frodo having to leave with the elves because he has PTSD.

(I further claim that the reason LoTR doesn't have many women isn't because he forgot about them, it's because they're doing household labor and Frodo doesn't encounter them due to being something between a celibate priest and gay.)

I think there has been an understandable pushback against the trope that Tolkien's world building was too loose and idealised, but we shouldn't take things too far in the other direction and imagine him as fastidiously realist.

Yes, Tolkien was a medieval historian, but he wasn't only that, and LoTR is not a work of historical fiction. Tolkien was also a storyteller, and in his famous denunciation of allegory he makes it clear that he prioritises the story above all other concerns. He was also a lover of myth and legend, which are inherently unrealistic forms. And, perhaps most importantly, he was a Christian, and his entire legendarium is an elaborate reworking of Christian theology.

Indeed, there is something Edenic about the Shire. The Hobbits are portrayed as innocents, literally child-like in stature, and protected from evil by the efforts of the Rangers and Gandalf. And this guarding of their innocence is presented as a fundamentally good thing.

To believe that the Shire was in fact a society built on economic exploitation, and that Tolkien meticulously figured all this out (but failed to mention it), undermines the morality of the tale. And the fact is, nothing truly like the Shire ever existed, so attempting to contrive a real-world explanation for its qualities is impossible. Yes, it was obviously influenced by Tolkien's understanding of and attitudes towards the English class system and rural life, but I would insist that it is basically a speculative creation, intended to portray what an idyllic version of what that society could look like, with exactly how it actually works left deliberately vague and dependent on some contrivances such as the Ranger guard.

> ... and protected from evil by the efforts of the Rangers and Gandalf. And this guarding of their innocence is presented as a fundamentally good thing.

It's easy for me to read Gandalf's motives as almost the opposite, of realizing that their innocence is a danger to themselves and including them in the fellowship not only due to the ring, but for their own growth. So it wasn't accidental that Generals Brandybuck and Took were trained by their adventure sufficiently to lead the scouring the Shire on their return, and that Sam learned to repair the ecological disaster. Gandalf was indeed protecting children from their innocence but by helping them grow out of it, knowing more of the hobbits' capacity than they did themselves.

I think the you need to take that position either.

I think it is likely that Tolkien intended social strata, but simply doesn't veiw it through our modern black and white moral extremism. It's not "economic exploration" its just life, and a good one at that.

I think it's a bit like PG Wodehouse. The world of Bertie Wooster or Clarence Threepwood, 9th Earl of Emsworth is certainly an idyll; at the same time no one would pretend it is a classless idyll.

Tolkien would not refer to that class structure as "economic exploitation" - that is part of his politics. That does not mean he did not understand that society very well, and seek to portray it in an idealized form.

The English countryside of old is exactly the model for the Shire. Its idyllic, comfortable lifestyle contrasted with the dirty, busy, industry of London and the disgusting, disease-ridden horror of the trenches in WW1 (in which Tolkien personally fought).

The mythology of LoTR Tolkien drew from his knowledge as a scholar but the setting was deeply rooted in personal experience. There are plenty of people living today who enjoy an idyllic, rural lifestyle in full ignorance of the industry, politics, and wars of the wider world.

> I don't think it's a stretch. I think the idea that LoTR is highly idealized/idyllic is an interpretation made up by people who didn't notice how carefully it's written and thought he left it out!

I'm confused by this though. I read through a bit of the article and although I could readily buy its conclusions as "plausible" I don't see anything at all that contradicts the idea of the Shire as an idyllic anarchic/collectivist society.

IMO, not only does "The Shire is a successful anarchic society where resources are plentiful and everybody is afforded a lot of leisure" read have the benefit of requiring fewer leaps of logic from the reader, it thematically makes more sense as a counterbalance to what is happening elsewhere across Middle Earth. This is the last holdout in a world being corrupted by lust for power and greed, after all, so maybe it truly is exceptional?

Yes. But. The Shire’s prosperity was established in text to have been supported (in secret) by the efforts of the Rangers. Recall that Bilbo ran into evil, “cannibal” trolls barely outside of the borders of the Shire. This kind of threat would simply never appear in, say, Hobbiton.

The Shire itself is set in the ruins of a collapsed kingdom destroyed long ago by the Witch King. The last vestiges of the old order, the Rangers, patrol the land to try to push back the monsters. They collect no taxes. They pass no laws. The people of the Shire are largely unaware of them at all.

This is a clear statement of Tolkien’s politics, that an idyllic society like the Shire is the result of the hard work of good people shielded from the evils of the world. The role of the King then is to protect the people from these threats while otherwise not involving himself in the day-to-day lives of the citizens.

>I don't see anything at all that contradicts the idea of the Shire as an idyllic anarchic/collectivist society.

Sam is Frodo's servant. Anarchic societies don't have masters and servants. Then the natural question you should ask is why? Frodo is not a noble and Sam is not a slave, so the only reasonable explanation for why Sam is the servant is because Frodo's family is wealthy and Sam is in their employ.

> I don't see anything at all that contradicts the idea of the Shire as an idyllic anarchic/collectivist society.

The Shire is both an "anarchic" society (what government exists is extremely weak and has little impact) and a class society with a definite social hierarchy, which does play a strong role in organizing people's lives. The social hierarchy is not a government, but that doesn't mean it's weak and that people just do whatever they feel like without regard to it.

> resources are plentiful and everybody is afforded a lot of leisure

It's not at all clear that this is true of the Shire. Wealthy bachelors like Bilbo and Frodo, or heirs of wealthy families like Merry and Pippin, seem to have a lot of leisure, yes, but what about Sam? He clearly has plenty of work to do, as did his father before him. So do the other hobbits of their own class that they interact with. The hobbits that gather at the Green Dragon of an evening do so after a day's work; they don't idle there all day.

> This is the last holdout in a world being corrupted by lust for power and greed

While "corrupted by lust for power and greed" is certainly true of Saruman and the ruffians he gets to infiltrate the Shire, it's not at all clear that it's true of, say, Gondor. Even Denethor in Gondor, while he comes to a bad end, does not do so out of "lust for power and greed". He does so out of his despair, based on what Sauron shows him through the palantir, that he is doomed to fail in his life's task of preserving Gondor. But Gondor as a whole does not despair, nor does it go to the other extreme and use the Ring against Sauron--which, as Tolkien himself pointed out (and had several characters point out in the course of the story), is what would have happened if "lust for power and greed" had been the primary motivator.

Even in-universe the Hobbits aren't fully "realistic"; they are supported by the Rangers keeping the many and sundry threats of Middle Earth off of their borders. Without that protection the whole system actually fell apart even in-universe. There's not a lot places in the real history of the real world where a society had no defense burden, and they don't tend to be long-term stable either.

Iceland is one example. They have a coast guard but no standing military. On the other hand, their independence is formally guaranteed by the US (and maybe others, I don't remember), so nobody's gonna be trying to annex them any time soon. On the other hand, Iceland's only been "independent" since slipping out from Denmark ~WW2.

I guess the US guarantee is what kept the "cod wars" limited to shouldering?

(how well might current DDGs stand up to a similar full and frank discussion?)

Never new about that. Fascinating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cod_Wars

Even without the US guarantee, I strongly doubt the UK would have entered an actual shooting war with Iceland over fish.

But Iceland has decidedly not been stable. They gained de facto independence in 1918 and completely lost their sovereignty only 22 years later when Britain occupied them (that is despite them still having armed forces in 1940). Since WW2 things have obviously been stable-ish (things were really bad in 2009). How long do you think that would last once Iceland tried to exercise their sovereignty, for instance by leaving NATO?

Analogously, how long did the Shire last against a motivated attacker with comparatively little resources?

Sorry, I meant it as an example specifically of this (similar to the Hobbits "outsourcing" their defense):

> There's not a lot places in the real history of the real world where a society had no defense burden

I'm certainly not making an argument that it has signs of long-term stability.

except Icelandic bankers toppled their own government in the 2008 credit crisis due to making a specific haven for certain kinds of crazy leveraged lending in the UK (!) (corrections welcome)

Costa Rica is a bit like that. They have no military but they do have an armed law enforcement agency which maintains internal security and guards the borders. This has been stable since 1948. In fact, Costa Rica has been more stable than many other countries in Central and South America where the militaries are often a breeding ground for coups and civil wars.

Amish would be an example.

The shire didn't had nothing that would deserve going out of the way to loot it (at least nothing known).

Hobbits had a sort of primitive defense systems against occasional invasions of goblins and wolves and LOTR mention their skills in the use of several weapons. A few chickens or tobacco herbs simply don't not worth the mess, specially when men were richer and can just buy it.

In a pre-industrial society, rich agricultural lands and even just this year's produce would count as something worthy to loot. Heck, they might do so now -- I'm sure Russia wouldn't be unhappy to be able to add fertile Ukrainian lands to their dystopia.

Water too. Loot the land, get the water and all that follows and reserve some arid land elsewhere for the Hobbits.

I can only speak to my own interpretations of the text, but this is a setting where magic well and truly exists, if typically in forms that were seldom seen directly. I don't think it's explicitly said, but again, Bilbo the burglar and Frodo somehow sneaking into Mordor, there is a broader underlying implication that hobbits are intrinsically easy to ignore and discount. I was always given the impression this was largely what kept them safe, not any realistic defense mechanism, but a borderline mystical unimportance.

This is something that varied a lot in Tolkien's writing throughout his life.

When he wrote The Hobbit, he was very much writing a fairy tale. So there was very little consideration for things economics and agriculture because it wasn't that type of story, and those types of things aren't important in fairy tales. And when he started to write the early drafts of The Lord of the Rings, he was still very much in that mode - it was intended to be a direct sequel to The Hobbit and the opening chapters have that much more light hearted feel to them.

But the story grew in the telling, and by the time he reached the end of of The Lord of the Rings he was far more invested in realism and consistency within the world - so was paying a lot more attention to this type of thing (including going back and editing and rewriting sections multiple times).

This is also very evident in his other writings. The first drafts of what would become The Silmarillion were very much more fantastical and mythic - we got stories of a flat world and very brief and vague descriptions of the Elves awaking under the stars before the Sun and Moon were made, and marching across the land. The versions of that same story he wrote towards the end of his life had a round world, and carefully planning out of the Elvish aging and reproductive cycles throughout the march, to work out how many generations would be needed for there to be a suitably large host.

Didn't the world start as flat and then Eru made it round to keep Aman away from mortal eyes, being reachable only by those who could see the "straight path" like the elves?

In The Lord of the Rings and the published Silmarillion that's correct. But in some of the later drafts Tolkien wrote he moved away from that towards a story where the world had always been a sphere (often called the "roundworld" versions), seemingly in an attempt to add more realism to the story.

The "flat world made round" was recast as a somewhat primitive Mannish myth (as a way to recon the earlier writings).

I'm pretty glad that didn't make it into the official canon. The evolution of the world is one of the most fascinating things about the legendarium. Imagine living during the age of the lamps.

I completely agree. The stories of the Elves awakening and living of the stars, the first rising of the sun and moon, and the world made round are so evocative it would have been a real shame to lose them in the name of realism.

THough I agree there's no need for any of this to be plausible or realistic I di think that at lest for me, a reader brought up in the british isles in the later half ofthe 20th century those assumptions absolutely do hold. There's not muchI found surprising about the political economic settlement that the author describes in the article, it's more or less what I assumed whilst reading the book.

At some point, suspension of disbelief is the expected behavior of the reader. Nobody would want to read a fantasy about dwarfs, hobbits, elves, and dragons if they first had to get through a complete history of the financial systems within the fantasy world. Most people can't make it through all of the language system within the tomes that Tolkien did include.

Expecting all of the details to work in a FANTASY story is just ludicrous. This is why a lot of people that are not fans shy away from fans having these types of conversations.

On the other hand, Tolkien spent his time creating realistic languages and lore to go with that, above and beyond many fantasy writers.

On the gripping hand, having read through various histories, it's nuts how often historians get things mixed up or wrong, or obsolete with emerging evidence. Our histories, even evidence-based, tells a story of our past, and no narrative can fully describe what happened.

> On the gripping hand, having read through various histories, it's nuts how often historians get things mixed up or wrong, or obsolete with emerging evidence. Our histories, even evidence-based, tells a story of our past, and no narrative can fully describe what happened.

Indeed; the similarity of "history" and "story" is no mere coincidence, they share a root. And in German, both are the same word: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Geschicht

Tolkien himself had a different point of view. In his opinion, if suspension of disbelief becomes necessary, it's a sign that the writer has failed. He preferred "secondary belief" instead. The idea was that the reader should remain immersed in the fictional world, confident that the world works consistently according to its internal logic. That the logic is there, even if the reader doesn't know it, and that the writer doesn't break it for their own convenience.

I lost all interest in Harry Potter when he was hanging outside a window, helpless. Then, his buddy appears with a flying car to rescue him.

I'm not interested in such lazy writing.

That's like complaining that Harry was stuck but magic happened to get him out of a situation. That's kind of like the entire point of the series

Making up random arbitrary things whenever needed to get out of a fix is just bad storytelling.

One of the great things about LOTR is the ring is ascribed various powers, and then the consequences of that play out. The rules within its world are consistent.

HP has no consistency.

Probably why I also prefer hard scifi - it must follow the known rules of physics, or at least have plausible extensions.

I liked GoT a lot as it was driven by human decisions and foibles. But it slowly devolved into convenient magic absurdities, like resurrecting dead people, and I lost interest.

> Probably why I also prefer hard scifi - it must follow the known rules of physics, or at least have plausible extensions.

Well, if you're going to put in plausible extensions instead of following the rules then "i'm not interested in such lazy writing" as you stated. In any fictional story telling, there's going to be some creative licensing involved to tell the story. Hell, even in biopics and "based on true" there's a lot of creative license just to make the story interesting. Following the rules of known physics just limits the imagination to make for bland stories.

> I liked GoT a lot as it was driven by human decisions and foibles. But it slowly devolved into convenient magic absurdities, like resurrecting dead people, and I lost interest.

From the very off of the show, the resurrecting dead people was involved in the story. If it wasn't, "the night is dark and full of terrors" and "winter is coming" would be pointless. Just because the dead coming back was timed to happen with the story is just part of it.

I mean, next, you'll tell me that Zombieland or Shaun of the Dead were pointless since they were resurrected dead people too.

I think you've moved into the comic book guy territory of "worst book/movie/comic ever" type of meme

I was referring to the Jon Snow resurrection, which came out of nowhere.

While I watched all the episodes, my interest in it dropped dramatically after that.

oh, that one. yeah, you might actually have a point with that one! However, at least it gave some purpose to the Red Lady other than smoke assassin.

It very, very clearly came not out of nowhere, even in the show. We had the Brotherhood of Banners resurrecting Bendric several times using the same magic, and in the book we had Lady Stoneheart to show what can also happen after being resurrected.

While the resurrection is probably going to happen if Winds ever comes out, it's not clear if Jon will actually be the Jon we know, or even Jon, after he comes back. Warging into Ghost will probably play a role, as that's a common theme in Dance.

Oh and, we had wights right from the very first book, maybe even Prologue ...

So it's not "convenient", nothing for GRRM is convenient currently, otherwise Winds would be out by now ...

The JS resurrection was not related to the zombies, as JS was able to resume a normal life.

If this could happen in the GoT universe, wouldn't you think that there'd be a massive effort by kings and others to resurrect dead family members? Or even talk about resurrecting them? There was no hint of that.

(Zombies violate the laws of physics, like conservation of energy, which makes it sad that most zombie movies try on some hackneyed explanation for them being the result of some virus. If you're going to try a scientific explanation for them, don't blatantly violate fundamental laws of physics.)

That... didn't come out of nowhere.

The capability of priests of the Lord of Light was established as was the stage for Melisandre to grasp on to the Jon after the defeat of Stannis.

Was it? The exposition of the LoL was that it wasn't clear if they were real or frauds. Sort of like Rasputin.

How does that change anything? If anything that adds a suspense element to the story: we're not sure if all the Lord of Light stuff is true, but finally when Jon is resurrected, we find out that it is.

To be fair, though, it was established before then that it was true, unless you didn't believe that Dondarrion had actually been repeatedly resurrected, and that it was just a story they told to make him more fearsome. Which is also fair, but it still feeds into the point of the suspense: if you had trouble buying the fact of the Dondarrion resurrections, then you finally got your answer when Jon got his treatment.

Also recall -- if you read the books and aren't just relying on the TV series -- Catelyn Stark was also resurrected after her death during the Red Wedding, though her resurrection didn't go quite so well physically, since her body had already partly decomposed in a river, or mentally/emotionally, as she turned into a non-empathetic vengeance machine.

I didn't like the Catelyn Stark resurrection, either. My interest in the books waned at that point, and I didn't finish it.

I liked the GoT where it was about human power plays, action, politics, intrigue, alliances, betrayal, love, death, etc. Suddenly mixing random magic into a well established structure just didn't work for me.

Both the book series and the show open with magic. It (and the fact that the people doing human squabbling, despite having a huge history of warnings about it that have faded into myth, were unprepared for it, and how they respond) is fairly overtly the theme of the series, and marketed as such.

I get not being interested in that theme, but being surprised and disappointed that the series progressively turns out to be about exactly the thing it tells you is the lurking force that most in the setting disregard that it is going to be about is... well, surprisingly poor media literacy.

> I liked GoT a lot as it was driven by human decisions and foibles. But it slowly devolved into convenient magic absurdities, like resurrecting dead people, and I lost interest.

The (inconvenient, in context, for anyone who might be considered a protagonist) resurrecting of dead people is a major point in literally the first sequence of the first episode of the series, which is literally telling you what is coming that the people making mundane human decisions based on mundane human foibles and passing off anything more exotic as superstition were ignorant of to their peril. The return of that kind of magic to a largely unprepared world was telegraphed as the central theme of the series.

> Making up random arbitrary things whenever needed to get out of a fix is just bad storytelling.

It is also poor form when you are trying to make a point.

> HP has no consistency.

Perhaps so. Then why did you not choose to criticise something which happens in the actual books?

>One of the great things about LOTR is the ring is ascribed various powers, and then the consequences of that play out. The rules within its world are consistent.

LOTR has not one but three people rescued in the nick of time by enormous flying eagles that can talk. That's technically all fine within the rules of the universe, but it hardly seems any less of a stretch than flying cars in Harry Potter.

True about the eagles, but fortunately they came in at the end. The eagle thing is well known flaw in LOTR.

But I forgive Tolkien because of the many hours of enjoyment I derived from his books!

Not just at the end. They also rescue Gandalf from Orthanc.

> HP has no consistency.

That is just plain false. The rules are not as clearly defined in HP (because it's not trying to be a hard magic system), but when Rowling makes a rule she follows it. For example, you can't bring people back from the dead. That's a rule which is clearly stated and is followed through the series.

In your example, no rule was broken. The book never said "things can't fly in this world". In fact, it's established pretty early on that broomsticks can fly by means of specific enchantment spells. The fact that someone got the idea to apply those enchantments to a car doesn't break the rules of the world. The fact that Harry's friends showed up to rescue him at the right moment is certainly convenient, but also doesn't break the rules of the world. The book explains why they were worried and came to check on him, after all. No rules were broken in this scene, you just don't like it. Which is certainly your right! But it's not poor writing which breaks the rules of the world.

When you sense a deus ex machina ruining your immersion in a story, just think of it as observation selection effect: “if it went the other way, and hanging Harry was not rescued by a friend in a flying car, there would be nothing to write about in the first place”.

Then I'm mentally making notches for every “the story would have ended there”. The story runs off its rails and needs the hand of god to set it back onto the track, and that diminishes the enjoyment of the world-building.

Maybe that's why I never liked Batman. He always just happened to have the exact very specialized tool on his belt to escape whatever contrived setup the Joker trapped him.

Batman was a parody of cop shows, and his utility belt was part of the joke. Get Smart did similar things to lampoon spy movies.

The Munsters had a running gag where Herman would look into a mirror and it would shatter. I'd still laugh every time.

Invert the logic. The universe is in state X with narrator in it to tell the story because a super unlikely chain of events occurred. Call it anthropic principle.

Or, think how in many-words interpretation there is a universe for any arbitrarily unlikely development. The writer picked one that floats her boat.

I think it becomes intrusive into the storytelling when it becomes a constant chain of "and then yet another, even crazier thing happened to this one character". Especially when the character started as an everyman.

It's a problem many book series have - one character keeps being the centre of the universe and surviving insurmountable odds repeatedly to the point of incredulity and usually the ante keeps ratcheting up as well so your original ordinary-human character ends up with some kind of godlike powers.

To me, Harry Potter is actually fairly good in this regard, as the character development is at least not utterly unlike 11-18 year olds at school during the re-outbreak of a traumatic civil war, and from the start, there's a clear, in-universe reason why the main character is always the one near the action in the depicted timeframe.

Star Wars did this quite well originally ("why is this rando farmhand at the centre, oh, cool, that's why"). The prequels did a little worse ("here's how the farmhand's father got to the centre, ok well maybe it's awfully convenient the ship broke down right there and a simple blood test reveals The One, but ok") and the recent films rather worse ("these people are at the centre...how? Why? Genetic predestination?"). Notably, the less you explain the Force, the easier it is to keep the story believable and consistent. Again, Harry Potter's vagueness over the specifics of magic helps it.

Something that seems to be getting more common, though it's not new, as series lengthen in real-world time is to do a Star Trek: TNG and start an in-universe subseries where you can have things happen to someone else entirely for a change, but as part of the overall universe's story. It can be tricky if the universe is very predicated on one person, like Harry Potter is. Star Wars has not done well at this, but have tried. I think they keep trying to bootstrap interest from existing fans by character reuse, but the better series like Andor pick a whole new story to tell.

Iain M. Banks was especially good at this and didn't even really have a main narrative, as he'd hop all over the Culture in time and space so you could have the cool stuff happen that he wanted to show the reader, but didn't need to keep powering-up one person (or ship) endlessly. But space opera has the advantage that you can just go and be somewhere and somewhen else very easily. It's a bit harder if you need the subseries to be nearby without constantly dragging the other main characters in, especially when they're further along their upgrade path as you need to explain why they don't just pick up the phone, pop round and stomp the "mortal threat" flat and it's another kind of deus ex machina. Doubly so if the threat is very obvious and world-ending, because surely they'd turn up to that!

I think you're looking at it the wrong way. If the writer paints themselves into a corner where they need a deus ex machina in order to continue the story, then they've done a poor job of it, and need to back up and reconsider where the story was going. The argument isn't "Harry needed to be rescued in an unbelievably fantastical manner because otherwise he would have died and the story would have ended", the argument is "the story shouldn't have taken Harry to a crisis where he couldn't have gotten out of it in an in-universe-believable way".

(FWIW, I don't really object to this particular part in the story; I think a flying car is pretty consistent with the Harry Potter universe. And the poster upthread must have misremembered the scene; his friends merely came to "rescue" him from being locked in his room. He wasn't hanging out a window and wouldn't have died.)

Well, that’s the idea, to look at it the other way, like the anthropic principle does. Whether you consider that “wrong” is up to you, I think it is highly subjective.

If you don't like that, definitely don't read the first Frontlines series by Marko Kloos! I find it enjoyable, but the main character is like a one-man quantum immortality thought experiment.

As I've gotten older, I've found myself more drawn to history books than fictions. History is more interesting, because it actually happened.

> lost all interest in Harry Potter when he was hanging outside a window, helpless. Then, his buddy appears with a flying car to rescue him.

Hmmm. When exactly does that happen? Are you referring to the very start of chapter 3 in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets? Because Harry most definitely is not hanging out of a window before his friends arrive.

He is kept locked up by his aunt and uncle. Because of that he is not answering his friend's letters. His friend has access to the magical means of busting him out (a flying car) so they do. If he would have decided to rescue him a day earlier or a day later he would have found Harry in basically the same situation.

This is the same in both the film [1] and the novel. Soooo what are you talking about? I think you made the scene up, which seriously undermines your point.

1: relevant scene in the movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-Yi49pHlEo

Yeah, that looks like the scene. Thanks! It was a long time ago that I saw it.

The problem is the existence of the magical car was not previously mentioned.

Why would you mention something while it was not relevant? The Weasley's dad was known to be intrigued by things of the Muggles, and was known to collect items such as the specific Ford (car not available in the US so the reference was a bit lost).

If Ron had told Harry about the car in some random conversation in a previous book, you would probably then complain about some bit of obtrusive foreshadowing ruining the plot line. Okay, maybe not you specifically, but that's another common trope of criticism of fiction.

I don't really see that as a problem, though. This is a world where magic is a thing, and is commonplace. That's the entire point of the world and the story wouldn't exist without it.

A flying car seems utterly unsurprising, especially when we've already seen flying broomsticks. I think I'm more surprised that we didn't see more of the flying car.

FWIW, I interpreted that backwards: There needed to be a flying car, so Harry had to hang out of a window in need of a flying car.

It's the exact opposite though - the world presented a set of rules and then followed them, so it requires your belief not disbelief.

The good example of that "suspension of disbelief" is The Last Jedi, where the film kept breaking rules established within the franchise, so as someone familiar with Star Wars you have to keep suspending your belief to enjoy the film - and at a certain point it becomes too much.

Like if LotR ended with Aragorn just smashing the one ring with a sword, that would be an extremely unsatisfing ending to the story, partially because the books made it very clear earlier that the ring cannot be destroyed this way, so it breaks your set of beliefs that were established. You could say "why does it matter, it's all made up anyway!" but every story requires being consistent to be enjoyable.

I don't want to start a debate about the Last Jedi, but I will just say that the rules that are ironclad in franchises tend not to be the mechanics of the world but rather the emotional expectations of the audience. The kind of rules breaking you describe of Aragorn just smashing the ring is not so different from Dorothy learning she could click her heels together to go home all along, an idea that is silly and also deeply emotionally resonant.

I think it's different for different kinds of stories. To borrow your example, one possible interpretation of The Wizard of Oz is that it's a political and economic allegory around the gold and silver standards. Allegories often by their very nature have to stretch and bend reality (even an internally-defined one) to tell the story they want to tell.

I agree with your hesitation to start a debate about The Last Jedi, but I think your point about what rules are ironclad is why reactions to that movie were so mixed. For me (and many others), the mechanics of the Star Wars world are paramount. I have trouble experiencing strong in-universe emotions when those mechanics are broken, because when that happens, I'm pulled out of the story and have trouble immersing myself in what's happening to the characters. But to others, the emotional impact of what happens to the characters, and how they act, is the most important thing, as you suggest, with all other concerns secondary.

The writers of the Star Wars sequel trilogy had a very tall order on their hands: the "original" Star Wars fans are older (some might say much older) now, and they needed to tell a story that could appeal to those people (such as myself), but also appeal to children and young adults. It's very hard (some might even say impossible) to create a narrative that speaks to superfans who have been steeped in the mythology and mechanics of a world for decades, but also attracts a more casual viewer who just wants to watch a cool story with lightsabers and spaceship battles. My opinion is that they sacrificed the first bunch in order to attract a fresher audience, but it doesn't really matter if my opinion is "correct" or not; the fact that the movie (or entire trilogy, even) was so controversial, with so many opposing views, is all we need to know: they tried to appeal to too many different types of people, didn't do a great job of it (if a great job of it is even possible) and in the end a lot of people were unhappy.

I don't disagree that there is a divide between people who prioritize mechanics and those who prioritize emotions, but I think it's overstated. I think if you're thinking about mechanics, it's because the emotions failed you on some level. For example, I thoroughly enjoyed the JJ Abrams Star Trek, even if I don't think it's a great movie, because it's basically dramatically functional. Halfway through Into Darkness I was squirming in my seat thinking about the plot holes, because the movie doesn't work on any level.

With the Last Jedi, I honestly don't think the central problem is that the creators were trying to appeal to everybody at once. I think that better describes the Force Awakens, which miraculously succeeds at doing so at the cost of being kind of forgettable (see my point about Star Trek 2009 above). I think the issue with the Last Jedi is that it makes a very specific set of choices that don't please everybody.

The thing is, in some ways I'm the kind of old fan you're talking about, though I may be younger than you. I pored over books of EU spaceship schematics, read the Star Wars Legacy comics, played the video games, etc. Maybe my experience was different than yours because I watched the prequels at a similar age to the originals, because they were coming out in theaters when I was a kid.

I am not a casual fan, but I'm also not a superfan. I think it's easy to dismiss people who liked The Last Jedi as casual, but Star Wars is such a dominant cultural phenomenon that there is a massive spectrum of how much people care about it and what it means to them.

This has all been kind of a scattered argument. I'm not sure what my conclusion is. Maybe that the real issue with The Last Jedi for many people isn't that it ignores the lore. The prequel trilogy already directly contradicts loads of aspects of the original trilogy that EU creators and fans had to no-prize away. I think it's more to do with how The Last Jedi conceives of Star Wars as a story, and what it considers important and what it does not.

>The kind of rules breaking you describe of Aragorn just smashing the ring is not so different from Dorothy learning she could click her heels together to go home all along

I disagree: in LoTR, it was made abundantly clear that the ring could not be destroyed this easily. Gimli even tried it with his axe. Ending this way would have been internally inconsistent.

However, I don't remember anything in Wizard of Oz which prevented Dorothy from clicking her heels together to go home. She just never knew this trick until the end, and it's not an immediately obvious thing to do anyway.

> in LoTR, it was made abundantly clear that the ring could not be destroyed this easily. Gimli even tried it with his axe. Ending this way would have been internally inconsistent.

FWIW, Gimli trying to destroy the ring with his axe is a Peter Jackson invention -- it's not in the books, and it's not at all consistent with the Ring's effect on people in the rest of the story, e.g. Bilbo was not capable of casting the ring into his fireplace (that was nowhere near hot enough to melt gold). So Gimli even attempting to destroy the Ring with his axe required me to suspend disbelief in an annoying and immersion-breaking way.

LotR is such a lightning rod for these kinds of debates because there are so many layers of "true fans." I know two fantasy nerds who are boomers with a deep attachment to Tolkien's work, one of them loved the movies and one of them hated them. It's not about how much you do or do not care about "immersion." I suspect it's a facet of personality. I'm not enough of a know-it-all to try and armchair analyze these two men, but I am enough of a know-it-all to gesture in that direction and slink off.

Just to be clear, I love the movies! I think they're incredibly well done and a great adaptation of Tolkien's work. I find that one bit with Gimli striking the ring to be one of the most irritating part, because it's so obviously inconsistent with the rest of the story -- but it's just one moment that I can easily ignore without it affecting my enjoyment of the movie.

> In his opinion, if suspension of disbelief becomes necessary, it's a sign that the writer has failed

I mean on the base universe level there are tiny ink blobs on paper. There is no Frodo, there is no Middle Earth, there is no words or sentences just ink marks on paper. Anything other than that is the "suspension of disbelief" already.

That feels reductive to me.

Any story -- fiction or non-fiction -- that is written down is just tiny ink blobs on paper. I don't need to suspend my disbelief to read a textbook about anatomy.

Reading fiction isn't about believing that the created world it's real, only that it's plausible, given the natural laws, constraints, and logic present in the world that's been built.

Put another way, when I read LoTR, I don't believe that Tolkien is asking me to suspend my disbelief that elves, dwarves, and fantastical creatures once populated our Earth; instead, he's built a world where such things exist, and he's asking me to read a story about them, while promising that his stories will maintain the internal consistency of the world he's built.

I like the GP's use of the term "secondary belief"; I think it very much encapsulates that middle ground where an author creates rules for a fantastical world that are always obeyed during storytelling, vs. an author who creates a fantastical world, but bends and breaks that world's rules (if there even are any to begin with) in order to serve the story they want to tell, which does require suspension of disbelief.

> he's asking me to read a story about them

But that is the thing. We all learned that in order to enjoy a story we kinda pretend to believe it. Just sticking with Tolkien, you read the first line of the Lord of the Rings: “When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.” And you can right there and then say: “What a load of bollocks. There is no such a place as Hobbiton.” And then you close the book. And you are right! There is no such place as Hobbiton.

Of course you will be poorer for it. But that thing, where for the sake of the enjoyment of the story we pretend that “Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End” exists enough to hear the next sentence is the suspension of disbelief! Where you keep reading instead of calling the writer a liar is where you suspended your disbelief. It is the basis of all fiction. It is so inherent that you often don’t see it. The same way a fish don’t see the water. But it is there.

What you are talking about, the importance of having an internaly consistent story, is not where suspension of disbelief is, but where by abusing it the writer breaks it. And suddenly as it is shattered you realise its previous existence.

The goal is not to not have suspension of disbelief. Because you can’t tell any fiction without it. The goal is to not abuse it in order that the reader can enjoy the work.

In the Hobbit movie, Smaug's gold hoard was so vast that if it actually went into circulation, gold would be cheaper than iron. The citizens would be making roof tiles and plumbing out of it.

(Although iron ore is plentiful, it is expensive to refine and smelt.)

Even the relatively few Spanish gold ships hauling gold to the Old World resulted in massive inflation, not wealth.

>Although iron ore is plentiful, it is expensive to refine and smelt

Might explain why the land around the Lonely Mountain was unforested*. This is what happened in ancient Greece -- deforestation largely due to charcoal production for smelting iron. Topsoil got eroded and it still hasn't recovered today. Prior to metallurgy, Greece was densely forested, and must have had some biggish trees, judging by the construction of temples etc.

* IIRC. Also a fire breathing dragon taking up residence probably didn't help.

> Nobody would want to read a fantasy about dwarfs, hobbits, elves, and dragons if they first had to get through a complete history of the financial systems within the fantasy world.

Japanese fantasy works on a system where you look at whatever novel is currently popular, copy every surface/world detail from it, then add exactly one thing you wanted it to be all along and just talk about all the time. It's basically done for SEO reasons, but it means you can save all the setup time if every story is in the same medieval isekai that vaguely feels like Dragon Quest.

So yes, there are stories that are just about forex speculation with elves or whatever. Spice and Wolf is one.

I feel like Western writers also used to do this, but the difference is they'd copy D&D and instead make the story about the super complex magic system they made up, and frankly I don't want to hear about your magic system.

Isn't that fanfic?

No, it's not fanfic. It's not set in another continuity, it's just their own fantasy worlds are even less unique than ours. They have fanfic too of course.

> it's just their own fantasy worlds are even less unique than ours

They do have many more fantasy worlds though, not being as unique means they have room for many many more and better ones. I do feel western authors focuses too much on being different so often they make things bad just to not be like the others.

Do copyright rules exist differently in Japan than the US? Can you imagine if I created a movie that occurs within the accepted Star Wars universe so that my protagonist was from a planet called Tatooine who had a sister that was a princess? I would be sued into oblivion.

Of course you do the copyright scrubbing. Tatooine/Force/Jedi becomes Batoone/Energy/Cyberist(or something similarly inexplicable).

They're stricter in Japan if anything, but companies are better at knowing where their creativity comes from. (Domestically, I mean. They're pretty bad at it internationally.)

The Shire is idylic but not exactly utopian or paradisic. Clearly most people have to work - they are farmers, gardeners, millers etc. There is a clear social hierachy but nobody is exploited.

Perhaps the hobbits enjoy a bit of work. Perhaps a society need not be perfect to count as a utopia. Perhaps I used the wrong word. Hopefully my meaning was clear enough regardless.

> Perhaps the hobbits enjoy a bit of work.

Well the workers, farmers etc seem to largely be content with their lot in life just like the leisure class enjoy their life of leisure.

The Shire represent Tolkiens ideal society where everybody are happy with their lot and the lower classes take pride in serving and working for their masters.

In 1966 (less than 64 years ago), that wasn't just Tolkien's ideal society, judging by Cleese and the two Ronnies (or, for that matter, the 1960 Chatterley trial; was Rule 34 only un truc for Berliner/Parisian/Viennese Bohos back then?)

> I get a pain in the back of my neck. —RBC, CBE

> ...would you approve of your young sons, young daughters –because girls can read as well as boys– reading [Chatterley]? ... Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read? —JMGGJ, CBE MC

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcCb3BFp85w

EDIT: it might be easier to understand why those last 4 were considered revolutionary by comparing their act to the Eurovision entries of the time, eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632aaGy8QGk&list=PL5EC4F7D0E...

IIRC the attorney arguing against Chatterley seemed grossly out of touch by mentioning servants reading it and it didn't help his case. LCL was a bit of an attack on the impotence of the upper class and the lawyer was oblivious to the context of his remarks.

That was my first reaction too, but I have to admit that the book quotes he was able pull out to support his argument took me by surprise.

I agree, the argument seems plausible. Just not as definitive as it purports to be.

Yes, the author has made a category error.

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