How complicated does a plot need to be? 9/11 is the standard black swan, and took fairly complicated plotting, though it doesn’t involve the level of misdirection that you’re attributing to Voldemort.
It may just be a case of me not being fully aware of the common uses of the term, then.
I would consider 9/11 a black swan event from the US’s perspective, but not from al-Quaeda’s—it’s rare for a terrorist group to make (or at least succeed at) a display of that scale, but it’s not hard to predict such things when you’re the one planning them, and that seems to me to be the more relevant characteristic. The term also seems to be used specifically for events with primarily negative outcomes. So, in the case of Harry Potter, the traditional take on the event would be a black swan from Voldemort’s perspective—rare, unpredictable, and deadly—but it wouldn’t be a black swan from the perspective of the rest of the wizarding world, because the outcome was good for them. If I’m right about MoR, the event still isn’t perceived as a black swan by the majority of the wizarding world (because the outcome appears to be good), but it wasn’t a black swan for V, either. (It would be perceived as a black swan event by the Death Eaters, but I’m considering V’s perspective to be the relevant one.)
But, like I said, I may have my definition a bit wrong.
How complicated does a plot need to be? 9/11 is the standard black swan, and took fairly complicated plotting, though it doesn’t involve the level of misdirection that you’re attributing to Voldemort.
It may just be a case of me not being fully aware of the common uses of the term, then.
I would consider 9/11 a black swan event from the US’s perspective, but not from al-Quaeda’s—it’s rare for a terrorist group to make (or at least succeed at) a display of that scale, but it’s not hard to predict such things when you’re the one planning them, and that seems to me to be the more relevant characteristic. The term also seems to be used specifically for events with primarily negative outcomes. So, in the case of Harry Potter, the traditional take on the event would be a black swan from Voldemort’s perspective—rare, unpredictable, and deadly—but it wouldn’t be a black swan from the perspective of the rest of the wizarding world, because the outcome was good for them. If I’m right about MoR, the event still isn’t perceived as a black swan by the majority of the wizarding world (because the outcome appears to be good), but it wasn’t a black swan for V, either. (It would be perceived as a black swan event by the Death Eaters, but I’m considering V’s perspective to be the relevant one.)
But, like I said, I may have my definition a bit wrong.