encourage me
Are these the opinions of the author? Does it matter? One might say an idea should be judged on its own merits, not on the existence, or lack thereof, of the person suggesting it.
Luna is being pretty blunt here. Do you think ze's oversimplifying how society works? Or do you think ze's using just the right amount of simplification?
Would you like to be Dark Lords with Luna?
On another note, I've got a question for y'all about the transcript. (UPDATE: I have already begun making this change.) So far, I've mostly avoided referring to specific colors (green, blue, etc); I think that's a bad idea, and I'd like to have the transcript say what the colors on the page are. But describing the colors is a bit of a problem. For instance, I could describe the color of Voldemort's cat's eyes (when it was alive) as “orange”, but there's a lot of different shades of orange; just saying “orange” doesn't specify that the eyes are exactly the same color as the Cruciatus Curse, which is symbolically semi-important. So I want a way to specify that, but how do I do it? I could refer to that color by the same phrase everywhere (e.g. “The orange of Voldemort's cat's eyes”), but that's very awkward and unnecessarily gives more weight to one specific use of the color. I could give its HTML code ("#ffc800"), which is exact, but that's obviously a bad idea. Any suggestions?
Approximate readability: 5.93 (1054 characters, 247 words, 17 sentences, 4.27 characters per word, 14.53 words per sentence)
Comments
(For the moment, it'd be a nontrivial bit of work to go back and update all the old transcripts, and until I can set aside some time to do that work, I'm not going to try to do it for each new page that comes up - figuring out the right color descriptions deserves a bit of time to itself, not to be done haphazardly with each page.)
Lack of death, destruction, and fear is important to me, so unless Luna has a definition of “dark lord” that doesn't require that, I would not want to be a dark lord with zem.
It also seems likely that there are other options besides being a dark lord and being in a position of power. I wonder if writers of any sort would be in a better position to change things (by influencing public opinion, in turn influencing voters and parents and thus influencing headmasters and ministers and such), or if inventors would (by making inventions that give control to groups that previously didn't have much).
In the seventh book of the original series, Xenophilus temporarily climbs back onto the Seat of “writer who is taken seriously” by writing about what the people resisting Voldemort's dominion want to hear, and leaving out the things that most of them still consider crackpot theories. Is that the right decision for Xenophilus? To what extent is it advisable for a person to censor themselves in order to be more effective in supporting a lesser of two evils?
Do you think death, destruction, and fear are the worst things in the world? Would it be justifiable to cause a bit of death and destruction if it could prevent something worse from happening? Or do they inherently lead to enough problems that it's never worth it in the long run to use them?
In the long run, of course, people may well react differently in the two situations. I suspect the populace as a whole would harbor more resentment if a dark lord enslaved and worked to death 70 medical researchers to provide a cure for cancer than if the dark lord just let people continue dying on a regular basis. I wouldn't be surprised if there were people who refused to use the cure anyway, once it was provided in that way. So it's important, when measuring the net benefit, to take into account the future differences as well.