PoA Chapter Six
Mar. 5th, 2010 12:34 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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deathtocapslockThe first thing Harry notices the next day is that Draco Malfoy is doing impressions of him fainting to laughing crowds. I know this joke will soon get old and people will stop laughing? But I can’t believe they’re even laughing at it now. Either Draco Malfoy is a comic genius and we just don’t hear the routine that goes with the fainting, or wizards have been seriously warped without TV, literature or theater. What teenagers would find this funny?
I mean, as much as I hate to defend HBP!Ginny, her impression of Harry falling off his broom at least had a context to explain why it was funny. The joke was that Harry was bellowing at people when he got socked in the head with a metal ball that should have killed him. Nobody saw Harry faint and there was nothing funny going on at the time.
Pansy Parkinson has a face like a pug. And totally deserves it.
Harry consoles himself with the fact that the only time he and Malfoy faced each other at Quidditch, Malfoy definitely came off the worst. I’ll bet he feels even better when he remembers that the same is true for just about anybody stupid enough to play Quidditch with Harry.
How was McGonagall expecting Hermione to keep this secret about the Time Turner, btw? Even if she doesn’t really have any friends besides Harry and Ron, it’s not like she doesn’t make herself noticeable in class. Don’t tell me that not once during the year did two students not complain about her in conflicting classes to each other and figure it out.
My canon is now that the whole school except Harry and Ron knew that Hermione was using a Time Turner. Several of them even stole it a few times to do something fun.
Oh god, here comes Hagrid swinging a dead polecat. Because he only likes giant predators.
On their way to Divination they pass a painting that’s kind of a Don Quixote rip-off.
I don’t care what anyone says. I like the way Trelawney decorates her room.
The fog in the room makes Harry feel sleepy and stupid. Which might be the most self-aware Harry has ever been.
Harry predicts Ron might work for the MoM. He could be right. Maybe Ron’s just got 3 jobs instead of the 2 he gets in post-DH interviews.
Once again Hermione randomly decides that something is illogical while accepting that she can turn a frog into a teacup by waving a stick over it. And naturally she’s kind of right.
Or not. If Trelawney's seeing a big, black dog in Harry’s tealeaves, she’s right. And in HBP she was batting something like .397.
McGonagall then announces that Trelawney’s an idiot and Divination is worthless. Harry Potter: So awesome he makes useless subjects true!
Seriously, all Trelawney's true predictions center around Harry. Which I guess validates the centaurs views as well.
McGonagall also says Trelawney predicts a student’s death every year. Ron must be silently resenting why she had to pick Harry this year, stealing what he’d think was his one chance to be the center of interest.
I do like the implication that Hermione really does dislike Divination because she can’t be good at it, but since it really does seem to be a crock, I can’t like it that much. It seems to basically just be a class for poseurs who like putting on an act.
Ron and Hermione aren’t speaking to each other now. I'm sure the crazy hot make-up sex is the heart of their marriage.
Oh god, give me a second to gird my loins for Hagrid’s dumb class.
If you’re waiting for any parallel to be drawn between Draco’s attitude towards Hagrid and Hermione’s attitude towards Trelawney, stop. They’re exact opposites, because Hagrid’s a noble drunk and Trelawney’s a useless drunk. Or something. Also Hagrid’s a half-giant and Malfoy’s a jerk.
Yup, Malfoy’s a total jerk, even calling into question Hagrid’s being qualified to teach class.
Hagrid leads up the animals and introduces them by saying the first thing to know about ‘em is that they’re proud, so don’t insult one or it’s the last thing you’ll do. Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle are whispering in an undertone, the same way Harry and Hermione and Ron have done a dozen times before. Only it’s totally different to do it in this class, so what happens is totally their fault.
I have to go off on this here, because in the past I’ve gotten in tons of long, detailed lectures on how peoples’ riding instructors gave speeches on how dangerous horses were where they made sure everyone was paying attention, and made everyone show they knew the rules, and watched everyone carefully and if they did anything wrong they made them sit out for the day. Only it’s given as an explanation for how Malfoy is wrong here, as if that’s not exactly what Hagrid doesn’t do, and his whole schtick isn’t not getting how dangerous animals are so treating them as if they’re not.
Hagrid’s class isn’t really going over well, so Harry has to step in to back him up. I guess to repay Hagrid for all those times he almost got Harry killed or got Harry in trouble and felt no responsibility for it.
For all the stuff about hippogriffs being proud, apparently they’re okay with Hagrid dumping a kid on their back and slapping them on the ass. I guess since it’s Harry it’s a compliment.
Harry has a big ride full of wonder, proving that if you’re a Gryffindor all animals are glorified taxi services.
Now that Hagrid’s demonstrated proper behavior by treating the hippogriff really carelessly, he sends all the kids into the paddock en masse. What would he have done if they’d all had a chance to take off?
Luckily Malfoy calls Buckbeak a “big ugly brute” (much the way one would probably speak to a beloved pit bull) and the thing rips a big gash in his arm, probably heading off a greater catastrophe. Neville was inches from a meltdown with his own animal.
The Slytherins yell about Hagrid being sacked, proving they suck. These are the type of people who would complain about their kid being petrified in school instead of seeing it as character-building. Probably like child proof medicine caps as well.
The Gryffindors, with Malfoy’s blood still wet on the grass, say it was his fault. Okay yeah, obviously the thing was reacting to Malfoy insulting it like he wasn’t supposed to, but could their little black hearts be smaller or stingier? It’s not even like Malfoy gets sympathy until his dad calls for the animal to be put down (since nobody actually cares about the animal besides Hagrid anyway). They immediately blame the victim.
Harry’s had far worse injuries healed by the nurse. All Harry’s injuries are worse, really, because Slytherin injuries don’t count. You have to have a soul to feel.
“Trust Malfoy to mess things up for [Hagrid],” says Ron, which would be okay if that didn’t seem to be the official reading of the scene. To review: the dozen things Hagrid did to create an obviously crazy unsafe environment for 13-year-olds and wild animals are mistakes any new teacher would make. Malfoy’s mild snottiness and acting like a 13-year-old is unforgivable, indicative of his evil nature and deserving of severe punishment.
In fact, obviously he planned to be attacked to hurt Hagrid. Just like he’ll intentionally force Harry to attack in OotP. Buckbeak and Harry are the real victims here. Draco’s just a master of making people hurt him.
Back at dinner, Harry thinks the Slytherins are cooking up their own version of how Malfoy got injured. Which must be where the whole “Malfoy lied” story always comes up, but I don’t see why Malfoy has to lie (even if he’s malingering, the injury speaks for itself so they can check it).
Note we never exactly hear this “Slytherin version” yet there’s always this vague implication that it’s ruining everything for poor Hagrid. Even though the attack had a dozen witnesses, one of whom was Harry Potter, and pensieves exist.
Hagrid deals with the challenge by drinking—-all the more reason his teaching job should be protected apparently.
Why is it that weakness is so often treated with total contempt while Hagrid sits crying in his beer and blaming his troubles on other people and still sits in the center of the inner circle? I think it’s because Hagrid’s like a pet or a baby so has special license to be pathetic.
Naturally the Trio’s all ready to back Hagrid up. It’s Malfoy’s fault he wasn’t listening. Just like it was Ron’s fault for getting bitten by Hagrid’s dragon. And every student’s fault they didn’t know to stroke their books.
The only reason I can even read this annoying chapter again is that at least I know JKR wrote Hagrid as an unpopular teacher that even the Trio eventually admit is terrible.
Also, weird as it sounds, Malfoy spends the rest of his school career listening very carefully in CoMC. Which I’m sure is a sign of cowardice? But is actually one of the book’s only examples of someone learning something from a mistake!
To review, since obviously this scene bugs me, I don’t have a problem with Malfoy getting a lesson in what happens when you don’t listen in class, or when you dick around with wild animals. (Even if what he did couldn’t actually be considered dicking around in any real sense of the word.) But the way Hagrid immediately gets turned into this innocent victim we’re supposed to rally around so he never has to learn anything drives me nuts. And then people wonder why there are fans who think Slytherins might as well be jackasses since the only time the heroes aren’t happy to watch them die is when they see a chance to dramatically rescue them for their own egos.
Things happening twice:
Ron points out Hermione is scheduled for 3 classes at once. Later she and Harry will be in two places at once.
McGonagall mentions Animagi and turns into one, just like Sirius will. Also transformation turns Lupin into a wolf and Peter into a rat.
Ron has a Great Uncle Bilius and that turns out to be his middle name.
Draco’s attitude in Hagrid’s class, though condemned, is pretty parallel with Hermione’s at Divination.
Harry rides the hippogriff, because he’s going to have to do that again later.
Buckbeak’s slashing will be totally outdone by Harry’s own slashing of Malfoy in HBP.
Also in sixth year Draco will again wind up in a pool of his own blood due to a combination of his own behavior and a Gryffindor’s actions, and again the Slytherins will be seen as making Harry’s life hard by caring.
We meet Sir Cadogan here because he’s going to fill in for the Fat Lady later.
Harry barely listens in Transformation and Malfoy barely listens in CoMC, but everyone knows the first is normal and the second is idiotic because WILD ANIMALS!
It’s a gun. No it isn’t! It’s Chekov! No it isn’t!.
Trelawney’s prediction to Parvati
Beware a red-haired man!
Status: Dud. If only it had been Lavender!
McGonagall’s lesson
Status: 20 gun salute. Harry barely listens to McGonagall telling them that Animagi are wizards who can transform into animals, and barely watches her demonstration as she does it herself, because it’s going to be really important.
Designated Hero
We can tell they’re the good guys because they have no compassion for kids whose injuries either benefit, amuse, bore or cause problems for them and their friends while the compassion they show to innocents is lovingly highlighted.
IITS
How come Divination is arbitrarily the one kind of magic that doesn’t really work? It’s in the script.
"Watermelon, watermelon, cantaloupe, cantaloupe"
I’m sure there were a lot of angry watermelons and cantaloupes coming from the Slytherins in that last scene.
Jabootu Score: 3
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Re: Albus and the Prophecy, part 4 - part B
Date: 2010-03-09 07:12 am (UTC)Oh boy. You've got to do a lot better than that to convince me that any of your conjecture gives any solidity to Dumbledore's "guess" that Harry might survive any battle with Voldemort (or anyone). I don't know why you or Terri came up with any of that - I don't recall seeing anything like that at all in the text. Just Dumbledore's "look of triumph" at the end of GoF, I think, and then fast-forward three books to his 'guess' in Limbo. It stands as another no-way-the-reader-could-have-ever-worked-it-out deus ex machina in my opinion. We're told all along that horcruxes are the only way to be immortal (forget the Stone for the moment) but then lo! Shared magic Lily blood will also do the trick in the nick of time to save our hero, wow, gee, who could have seen that coming? With no 'known principles of Dark Arts' expounded by Rowling in her series - she was *never* that detailed about her magic (and the things she *did* try to be clever about, like the Fidelius, blew up in her face!) - I can't see how any reader could have predicted that. Guessed, maybe.
Still, that was always Rowling's style, from the start; the books were never written as 'mysteries' which the reader had a chance of solving. We always needed that penultimate chapter with Dumbledore telling us how it all worked. (And, with the last 2-3 books, Rowling telling us how brilliant/wonderful she was in the follow-up interviews. :-()
In summary, IMO Dumbledore's actions are consistent with the view that he in fact did believe in the prophecy ...
I'm not sure what your position actually is. I think that Dumbledore fully believed in the prophecy - in book 5 - but then his author turned things around, not knowing how to handle it any further, and had him emasculate it totally in book 6, going back on his book 5 position. Which I see as an error of the series. And then the prophecy is mentioned in passing a couple of times in book 7, Rowlling hoping that it would 'stick' and the readers would go wow, gee, there *was* a prophecy, it was somehow connected, this stuff is HEAVY!! -- without realising how inconsistently it had been used, how it never had really come into play once book 5 was done with it.
We're in agreement that Dumbledore believed in the prophecy up to the end of OotP, and since nothing really happened with the prophecy after that point I guess we're in rough agreement (although I disagree with some of your points, as per the above). But if Dumbledore *did* believe in the prophecy - as more than just a bit of bait for a gullible dark lord - why tell Harry what he said in HBP? And if Dumbledore was consistent in his view that prophecies mean nothing, have no importance other than what we ourselves might atttribute to them, why not say that at the end of book 5? Rather than let Harry wallow in dark despair for months that he was fated to be 'murderer or murdered', etc?
Re: Albus and the Prophecy, part 4 - part B
Date: 2010-03-09 04:30 pm (UTC)Or to rephrase--it is important, very important, but only in the past. It's important because it gets Voldemort to target Harry, which makes Snape realize he's gotten Lily killed, and that gets him to go to Dumbledore. For the Snape story it's important, but not as a prophecy of how Voldemort will be defeated. It's important because it forsees Lily being targetted.
Re: Albus and the Prophecy, part 4 - part B
Date: 2010-03-09 06:12 pm (UTC)If prophecies get recorded automatically then both Dumbledore and Voldemort knew, through their respective Ministry ties, that on that particular night a 'true' prophecy was made.
If Dumbledore himself put it there we might know more about his intention if we knew when he did so. Did he put it there in order to lead Voldemort to act on the prophecy? Did he put it there so Harry would have the record in case Dumbledore died before Harry turned an appropriate age (did an earlier version of Dumbledore's will include instructions about telling Harry to go and listen to the prophecy when he came of age?) Or was it placed there entirely as bait for Voldemort?
When the prophecy records are described it says "Some of them had a weird, liquid glow; others were as dull and dark within as blown lightbulbs." Harry's prophecy was among the glowing ones. (Could it have been otherwise?) Is there significance to this difference? Do prophecies glow until they come to pass?
Re: Albus and the Prophecy, part 4 - part B
Date: 2010-03-09 06:36 pm (UTC)To me it reads just like a handy place to have the prophecy so we should just assume that it's there because Dumbledore decided to follow procedure that time even though he's got a history of not doing that. I think it's there mostly because it helps the plot, explained through the kind of beaurocracy joke we always get with the ministry.
Re: Albus and the Prophecy, part 4 - part B
Date: 2010-03-09 07:30 pm (UTC)If Dumbledore wanted Harry to listen to it later I'd imagine he'd leave it to him in his own way rather than putting it in the Ministry.
Good point. So placing it in the Ministry (if done by Dumbledore) was entirely for Tom's sake.
And if it was there for bait why didn't they have any sort of clever plan that involved using it as bait? As it was it was Voldemort who used bait in the scene.
The plan relied on Voldemort not daring to show up at the Ministry himself. The plan was to have him believe there was information he was not aware of (which was actually true) to keep him lying low. Buying time for the Horcrux hunt.
Re: Albus and the Prophecy, part 4 - part B
Date: 2010-03-11 04:14 am (UTC)Well, hey, if Albus was deploying it as bait in '80 *as well as* during OotP, of course he would have done the good citizen thing and gone down to the DoM to file a report that he'd been the witness of a Prophecy. Consequently, if Tom sent one of his moles to double-check on Snape's story, then yup, sure enough, there's a prophecy that has something to do with the Dark Lord there in the record archive.
Re: Albus and the Prophecy, part 4 - part B
Date: 2010-03-11 06:56 am (UTC)Yup. Which suggests another way Voldemort might have gotten the prophecy, if he'd been a more creative thinker.
Lucius says, in the DoM, "the only people who are permitted to retrieve a prophecy from the Department of Mysteries, Potter, are those about whom it was made." But does the magic of the shelves really interact with the prophecy itself? Or just the labeling? Considering how vague prophecies are, it'd be pretty risky to have people hurt for thinking a prophecy was about them, and being wrong. (Not that the WW would never have a pointlessly risky policy, but you know.)
And prophecies can be relabeled, if only by one person.
Chances are, if you get at that one person who can relabel the prophecies, then anyone can be the one to take a prophecy off its shelf. And the keeper of the Hall of Prophecy would probably get easier to get at than Harry Potter -- or at least quicker.
It'd at least be worth a try, considering that Voldemort could use imperiused people to take the risks, and that he could've pursued his strategy of luring Harry to the DoM at the same time.
Re: Albus and the Prophecy, part 4 - part B
Date: 2010-03-11 07:18 am (UTC)Have Rookwood, who worked there, put the head of the archives under Imperius, have him relabel it to himself, pocket it, obliviate the exchange, and who knows, maybe just tell the archivist to go on about his work, and leave him under Imperius in case he came in useful at some future point in time. When he got off work if the marks went both ways back then as well as they did in DHs, he'd report that he'd got it and turn it over at once.
Of course none of the rest of the story might have got off the starting blocks, since no way was Tom going to "mark" his own vanquisher. But he might have managed to get someone else to kill the kid without getting near him.
Re: Albus and the Prophecy, part 4 - part B
Date: 2010-03-11 03:49 pm (UTC)Re: Albus and the Prophecy, part 4 - part B
Date: 2010-03-11 03:48 pm (UTC)Albus has very few 'moves' in his arsenal. Wait for his enemy to solve his problems for him or bait the enemy and attempt to frustrate the enemy's pursuit of the bait. Harry learned the first one very well.
Re: Albus and the Prophecy, part 4 - part B
Date: 2010-03-09 07:21 pm (UTC)It was a point that came up in a discussion about what the Dark Arts in the Potterverse were and why there is so much confusion and inconsistency about this definition. So no need to get into this side discussion now. We have Dumbledore's gleam of something like triumph when he hears about the ceremony. Perhaps the first thing that mattered was that the stalemate of the Quirrellmort/Harry encounter can be broken, and only later Dumbledore arrived at his other conclusions.
I'm not sure what your position actually is.
My position is that Dumbledore believed in the prophecy all along. Just like Voldemort - each was basing his plans on it, whether by trying to avert it or by trying to make it come true in a way most favorable to himself. And IMO Dumbledore was still doing it in HBP.
But if Dumbledore *did* believe in the prophecy - as more than just a bit of bait for a gullible dark lord - why tell Harry what he said in HBP?
Because there was one important fact Dumbledore wasn't sharing with Harry and which might be gleaned from the prophecy: that Harry was Tom's Horcrux. Fortunately for Dumbledore, Harry never repeated the actual wording of the prophecy to Hermione and Ron. If Hermione had given the wording half as much thought as she gave the identity of the Half-Blood Prince she would have realized there might be something fishy about Harry being Voldemort's *equal*. In what way are they equal? So when the story of the Horcruces comes up she might connect the dots and figure out that they are equal in that they both have Tom's soul. After all, in OOTP Dumbledore still believed he will be there to hunt down Horcruces and all the way to the last shoot-out. In HBP he knew this was highly unlikely. So he played down the prophecy as a bluff at Harry, to distract him from paying close attention to the words.
And if Dumbledore was consistent in his view that prophecies mean nothing, have no importance other than what we ourselves might atttribute to them, why not say that at the end of book 5?
This is not true in the general case, as Trelawney's other prophecy proved. Nobody would have done anything different the night of Peter's escape had they known of that prophecy - as Fudge said earlier in the book, it was accepted commonly that all Voldemort needed to return was one loyal servant. Those who thought Sirius was the servant were trying to stop him, once it was revealed that it was Peter those who knew that were trying to stop him. Well, maybe Harry would have allowed Remus and Sirius to kill Peter? (would he have been willing to risk losing Sirius again, as well as Remus, if it meant delaying Voldemort's return? and would Hermione have let him go ahead?)
As to the first prophecy - Dumbledore isn't entirely honest when he says it was *only* Voldemort's belief in the prophecy that started the chain of events leading to Godric's Hollow. His own belief in the prophecy had much to do with the events, and it is possible that even without Severus' presence at the Hog's Head Voldemort would have eventually gone after Harry or Neville - because he would have noticed Dumbledore paying extra attention to those two families.