PoA Chapter Ten

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Ginny brings Harry a get-well card that sounds far too adorable to have been made by the chick who shows up two books from now as Harry's ideal girl.

Harry now remembers the Grim as accompanying near-fatal accidents. If you’re as confused as me about the first one, Harry now remembers himself being almost run over by the Knight Bus as a near-death experience. There is a lot of examples in the book of how people make this prophecy stuff work, I will say that. Which is weird given it turns out this entire series turns on a bunch of people following a prophecy.

Malfoy’s now doing imitations of Harry falling off his broom until Ron throws a crocodile heart at his face. Okay, that makes me laugh. (The crocodile heart.)

Hmmm. Ginny will be doing imitations of Harry falling off his broom in HBP. She’s definitely studying Malfoy for tips on how to get Harry’s attention. (Note that Ginny will do her imitations after yelling at Dean for laughing at Harry’s fall to begin with.)

When Lupin returns, the class erupts in complaints about Snape having the gall to give homework as a substitute. The really are being ridiculous about this here. They might as well complain that Snape had the gall to teach instead of entertain them making balloon animals all period.

Remus naturally dismisses the assignment he gave. If they doubted that he was one of them.

Seeing the Hinkeypunk, a little wispy creature in a box that squeaks, I can see why the kids were disappointed in having to study werewolves.

Why exactly is Dumbledore so mad about the Dementors on the Quidditch field? I know he’s trying to keep Harry safe so he can kill him in his own time, but it’s not like Harry doesn’t risk a fatal fall every time he plays Quidditch. Maybe he should yell at those guys whose job it is to bash iron balls at his head while he’s 50 feet in the air.

Btw, the Dementors were at the Quidditch field at the same time Sirius was and thus were kind of doing their job.

In case it wasn’t clear already, Lupin assures Harry that the Dementors affect him more than anyone else because he’s had all these horrors in his past. Horrors he’s far too young to remember, actually. I have to say that what happened to Neville’s parents was worse. In fact, if one were making a case for Harry having faced a lot of horror, I'd say it was at the Dursleys.

People recently claimed that we didn’t know how old the characters were when the movies were cast, but this chapter keeps stressing how young Lupin is. Though I don’t know how Harry manages to figure out he’s young despite the grey hair and lines.

Lupin says most prisoners at Azkaban go mad within weeks. A shame that after this book people will come bopping out of the place no worse for wear all the time. Sure Bellatrix is a nut but she appears to have been that way before Azkaban as well.

Lupin says Sirius must have found a way to fight the Dementors. I wonder if he’s considering that Sirius might be innocent?

Hermione’s looking forward to shopping for her parents’ Christmas gifts at Hogsmeade. Not that she’s going home to see them for Christmas. And the thing is, I would never see this as being a bad thing (of course we want her at school) except that it actually does culminate in Hermione mind wiping them both.

Btw, I saw a still from DH where Hermione's in her Muggle room. It makes me nervous they might actually include the mindwipe.

Harry’s been riding a school broom since he lost his. It’s slow and jerky. It’s kind of strange to me the way Quidditch really is a game about equipment, and JKR both gives Harry the best of it and frowns on the Slytherins for their own brooms.

I mean, if Harry's having this much trouble on a school broom shouldn't he feel a bit silly about beating all those other kids who are forced to ride it? It's hardly fair.

Fred and George give Harry the Marauders map since they "know it by heart." Um, guys? It changes every time you look at it. The people in it move.

Don’t suppose they thought to use it to look for Sirius Black at all.

Harry briefly considers whether he should use a map since he can’t tell where it keeps its brain, he naturally decides to use it. I’m proud of Harry for considering it for a second, though.

Once in Honeydukes, Harry thinks about Dudley’s piggy face if he could see where he was. I’m going to give Dudley the benefit of the doubt and say he prefers candy that doesn’t sound like it was all designed to cause internal injury or nausea.

Ron mistakenly thinks Harry’s learned to Apparate. You can’t Apparate from Hogwarts, Ron!

I do kind of love the fact that if Sirius really was trying to kill Harry he probably would have been in that passage since he does know about it. Harry's using a map Sirius himself made to find it, innocently thinking that means Sirius could never ever know about it.

Ron points out that Harry is safe in Hogsmeade because there’s all these other people around, even though Sirius’ big crime was killing a whole bunch of people on the street in broad daylight to get to one person.

Hermione then brings up the far bigger reason Harry shouldn’t be in Hogsmeade. He hasn’t got a signed form!

Typically, Harry has come to Hogsmeade without a coat.

Rosmerta is a "curvy sort of woman" with a pretty face. Ron, at least, probably isn’t looking at her face.

The hardest thing to believe in this chapter is that any of these relatively normal people would want to go for a drink with Hagrid.

Finally people have a discussion about Sirius that includes that they’ve all known him since he was 11. Oddly, no one brings up that his whole family are Slytherin dark wizards and that his younger brother was also a DE.

Luckily, Madam Rosemerta doesn’t know how a Fidelius charm works. Don’t hold it against her. JKR isn’t quite clear how it works either. It changes in every book.

Dumbledore was still worried when Sirius offered to be Secret Keeper, because you know how angry Dumbledore gets when he’s not the keeper of every single secret ever told.

It still annoys me that Hagrid took Harry since he had orders for Dumbledore even though Sirius was apparently Harry’s legal guardian.

McGonagall now feels a little bad about being impatient with Peter. Not so bad she won’t be just as bad to Neville.

Btw, Peter was fat. Which I’m sure has nothing to do with his moral character. But everything to do with his lack of talent.

Fudge worries about Voldemort with his most trusted servant and shudders to think of it. You’re right to shudder, Fudge. Voldemort + Peter + Barty = a villain the entire British WW will have to work hard to keep in power.

Things that happen twice
Harry deals with a second object that can interact with people--and he (or JKR) actually remembers the warnings he gave about it.
I think we’ve got a competitor in the race for "most convenient eavesdropping moment" here, but DH is still in the lead.
Harry gets a second singing card from Ginny, which is presumably validation that the first one was from her too, if that wasn’t already obvious. This is the way Ginny I showed affection.
Apparently the Whomping Willow also gravely injured people. Clearly the same mind that decided to plant that on school grounds hired Hagrid and vouched for him having no responsibility whatsoever for the time that animal went after a student.


It’s a gun. No it isn’t! It’s Chekov! No it isn’t!

It's the Grim!
Status: Fired. Nicely woven back in here!




Jabootu Score: 0

Shocking, I know, but it’s mostly because nothing really happens, but Harry gets two really important things so you have to appreciate that.

Comments

[montavilla.livejournal.com]

Why exactly is Dumbledore so mad about the Dementors on the Quidditch field? I know he’s trying to keep Harry safe so he can kill him in his own time, but it’s not like Harry doesn’t risk a fatal fall every time he plays Quidditch. Maybe he should yell at those guys whose job it is to bash iron balls at his head while he’s 50 feet in the air.

Btw, the Dementors were at the Quidditch field at the same time Sirius was and thus were kind of doing their job.

I'm sensing a theme here. The people one should be mad at--always--are the ones doing their jobs. Like Snape, for teaching. Oh, I suppose one can do work, as long as one makes it look like something else. A field trip or a trip to the zoo. But work? Going to an office and selling drills all day? So middle class!

People recently claimed that we didn’t know how old the characters were when the movies were cast, but this chapter keeps stressing how young Lupin is. Though I don’t know how Harry manages to figure out he’s young despite the grey hair and lines.

Hmm. How can that be? Didn't we know already that James and Lily were only a few years out of school when they died? And everyone else was pretty much tied into their ages. By the end of this book, Lupin, Snape, and Sirius Black are known to be born within a year of James and Lily. We also knew that Hagrid was in his sixties because of the memory in CoS. Even in PoS, we knew that Snape and James were in the same year, because of Dumbledore telling Harry about how they hated each other from day one.

We don't know any other adult's age. But then we could guess that Minerva was old, and Dumbledore was really old.

Sure Bellatrix is a nut but she appears to have been that way before Azkaban as well.

Maybe she just picked up the baby talk in there.

Lupin says Sirius must have found a way to fight the Dementors. I wonder if he’s considering that Sirius might be innocent?

The impression that I got from the book was that Lupin had had his moments of doubt about Sirius back when everything happened and no one knew who the spy was and then when the evidence against Sirius was so overwhelming... but that he gradually came to realize that the story didn't make sense given Sirius's character. But there was nothing that Lupin, poor, struggling, and halfway under suspicion because of his dark creature condition, could do to go about disproving it.

So, when he was hired by Dumbledore, he was ambivalent about catching Sirius, and yet not brave enough to confront Dumbledore about the possibility of Sirius's innnocence. So, he protected Harry as well as he could, while hoping that Sirius would show up and explain everything.

I think I got that all from the line, "Yes, I knew Sirius Black. Or I thought I did."

That's what gave me the notions that a) Lupin was a thoughtful person, and b) Lupin was a patient person, and c) Lupin had empathy for others, a quality all too lacking in every other person in the books.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

I like that view of Lupin. It's still the thing that I really love about the character the most and it's mostly in this book. He really is carrying the Marauders torch of being faithful to their friends and trusting their own experiences and judgment and not thinking Dumbledore needed to know everything. Go Lupin!

On the ages thing, I think it was a comment I'd seen where people were talking about the casting, as if we didn't know Alan Rickman was too old. But since he's too old to be Harry's father, really, it should have been obvious from Book I. Or, that is, he was too old to be his likely father since I thought we always kind of got that Harry had young parents.

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

One of the weird things I see in my college writing course is that college-age people have an exaggerated idea of "old people," their own parents. Grandparents of five year olds are gray-haired and slow-moving; grandparents of college-age protagonists are Korean War veterans or older. I can totally see someone up to and even including college age thinking that Alan Rickman represents an average middle age - they tend to see older people as being really old.

I guess I did that when I was a kid, too.

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

Um - yeah, except that Snape never reached middle age in the books - none of that generation did - and James and Lily were apparently teenagers when they married and no older than said college kids when they died.

I don't know - I think it is important to the story, such as it is, that this generation is really young and, for one reason or another, those who survived adolescence never had a chance to really grow up emotionally. The casting in the movies simply undercuts that idea, and it's always bugged me.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

I tend to agree about the casting, though the movies don't, in general, seem to care about that whole idea. One of the things that's cool in the books, imo, is that as a kid Harry doesn't naturally see people in his dad's generation as ever being kids like him. But as adults reading you can get a sense of what these guys should come across as in person. To Snape Harry should just look like a mean teacher, but to an adult you'd quickly place his age as 30s--young. Same with Lupin. You probably would be able to look at the 4 of them in a room and them as young men who still aren't that old, especially compared to the more powerful players.

[va32h.livejournal.com]

>He really is carrying the Marauders torch of being faithful to their >friends and trusting their own experiences and judgment and not thinking >Dumbledore needed to know everything.

And this is why he had to DIE.

And not just die, but die in such a lowly manner that it wasn't even worth actually describing, warranting only a passing mention.