Nova Daily - 24 June 2025: Remake

Hi!

Last week, in a social group I'm in, the following question was proposed:

If you could only watch one Fantasy franchise for the rest of your life, which one would it be?

The possible answers were thus:

• The Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit
• Harry Potter
• Star Wars
• Game of Thrones
• The Hunger Games
• Pokémon
• Other.

This was a rather tough choice for me, because I've loved and followed several of these franchises throughout the years. But, more or less predictably, I ended up choosing Harry Potter after all. Especially with the new HBO series pending: whatever anyone's opinions on it, I'm looking forward to seeing the Wizarding World come alive for a second time.

Remake

Ah, music! A magic beyond all we do here!

- Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Chapter 7: "The Sorting Hat"

Music is an art form like no other. It has the power to move you and provoke and awaken emotions without a single word being spoken. It can even bring up memories of people who lost the ability to speak coherently.

When Mozart had finally found his inner voice withing music and decided to compose for himself rather than for external parties such as the Archbishop of Salzburg, he was able to write music at a murdering pace and create sounds that no-one had ever heard before. As described in Robert Greene's Mastery, the opera Don Giovanni sounded very austere for Mozart's contemporaries, but has grown to become a canonical work of expression and ingenuity, and one of the most popular operas that have ever been written. 

It takes a lot of work to be able to write a sonata, let alone a symphony or an opera. Mozart eventually found his voice within the opera, and a lighter composer like Ludovico Einaudi found his voice in his nature-inspired piano impressions.

The magic aside: composing music is a skill and craft like any other, and not every song is really spectacularly original. The standard four chords progression (E, B, C#m, A) that Axis of Awesome played in the following scene paints that picture very clearly:

Another one is the Pachelbel Rant by Rob Paravonian:

When you first start to create something, you're beginning to do what other people have done. Every natural learning process starts with imitation and repetition. The next step is to start doing things in a slightly different way than your predecessors. You build on what has been done before you and you expand the field by injecting your own unique voice, essentially doing something that has never been done before.

If a cover tries to imitate the original, it's almost always going to be a rip-off, no matter how well it has been executed. The natural exception to this is classical music, and even here the conductor of the piece tries to insert their own interpretation of the piece. But in popular music, artists wind up choosing songs from far outside their own orientation. And sometimes to hilarious effect. I apologise in advance and accept no legal responsibility for any possible sustained damage to your eardrums if you dare to listen to this death metal version of the classic. Listen to this guilty pleasure of mine at your own risk:

The Harry Potter remake has received a lot of principled backlash before one scene had even been filmed. Two of the main concerns have to do with precisely this idea of the remake. It's not that long since Deathly Hallows 2 was on the big screen, so the memory is still fresh. The current movie franchise stands strong on its own. The new have to live up to a lot of expectations.

This matter is much more relevant for content creators than you might be inclined to think at first. Apart from struggling with our own doubts whether our material is good enough, there's the constant worry whether our texts are relevant and add something substantial to the ever growing bulk of content out there. Others might try to do the same as you do, and someone else might be first, taking credit for an idea that you happened to have at the same time. Nylon famously got its name because of this: the substance was independently developed in both New York and London.

Whether the new series will have been worth the effort is something we simply don't know yet. I do hope so. But we'll see.

Yesterday's game

As I expected when looking through my sources and the other analysis tools that I use for my analysis, I made a bit of a mess with the opening. 7...e5 is a bold statement, but not a novelty and not exactly a star move. If I want to find my voice in this variation, I'll have to look at something else. Luckily, I did find some nice ideas here.

Model games:

There were two variations that I wanted to check for model games. The first is the line involving 7...Bf5 8.Nf3 h3. There's only one game in the ChessBase database that involves 9.g3, and that one was a very quick sweep in a blitz game. It's still nice to see it, so I decided to include it here.

The second game starts from the point after white plays 6.h4. The variation with 7.Nf3 isn't quite happy for white, as Bluebaum illustrated.

Source analysis:

During my checking the lines, Chessable collapsed. That's unfortunate, but at least I was able to see the lines in time.

In summary: the game saw a messy opening phase that lead to an interesting resulting situation on the board, with a fair share of Imbalances to work with from both sides. The game was ultimately decided by a few tactical misconducts by my opponent.

What can I take away from this game? 

1. In these 5.Ng3 lines, the h-pawn is ready to stroll all the way down the board to disrupt white's kingside.
2. Should white block the pawn with 6.h4, 6...c5 is the most acute way to challenge white's centre. Defending that pawn with 7.Nf3 invites the very strong 7...Bg4, as in the Bluebaum game.
3. Should white ignore the pawn, it might end up on h3 fairly quickly. This has strategic advantages in the short term (weakening the light squares) and tactical potential in the long run (sacrificing something on g3 to turn our tykę into a passer).
4. Provoking f2-f3 wasn't helpful after all, because white still had the option to use the now-vacated f2-square for the king. It's safe and keeps everything together there.
5. The strategic middlegame was roughly equal. The bishop pair compensated well for the quasi-structure that was my pawn constellation, especially in conjunction with the pair of rooks.
6. Look out for tactics. This goes for my opponent as well as for me: I had almost believed that 20.Rhe1 was alright.