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]

Hmm. I don't know of a lot of series that try to do that. The one that leaps to my mind wasn't planned as a series. I'm thinking of the Little Women books by Lousa May Alcott. In the beginning of Little Women, Meg and Jo are sixteen and fifteen, Beth is 13, and Amy is nine or ten, I think. By the end of the second book, Good Wives, (which is now published together with the first as a single novel), Amy is old enough (18 or 19) to get married. Jo gets engaged, but only after resigning herself first to becoming a "spinster."

There were two more books in the series, Little Men and Jo's Boys. In Little Men, Meg's baby twins from the second book are about ten years old. In Jo's Boys, they are about twenty and starting to get married. By the end of the book, they are mentioned as eventually having children. So, in the course of four books, she takes her heroines from childhood to grandparenthood.

There are also the Little House books, which take Laura Ingalls as a child of what, six? seven? to the young mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Oh, and d'oh! The Chronicles of Narnia do take the Pevensie children from childhood to adulthood--twice!

And then there's the Prydain Cycle, which takes Taran and Eilonwy from either tweenhood or teenhood to the brink of maturity. Actually, that's a great example of a character growing up in a five-book series. Taran starts out as a headstrong kid who longs for adventure. In the fourth book, he grows through a kind of identity crisis and takes on a number of apprenticeships in order to "find himself."

The Sword and the Stone likewise takes Wart from childhood to his destiny as King Arthur.

So, yes, it has been done. Quite a bit, really.

[condwiramurs.livejournal.com]

Yes and no, though, IMO. We do have a lot of stories where the protagonist grows up - it's a classic trope of fiction. The bildungsroman is all about this journey. However, they don't usually shift widely in the viewpoint of the narrative itself (versus the character's perspective).

That is: in HP we start out in an almost cartoonish world where violence doesn't seem quite so real, it's all a grand fantasy with the castle full of magical things. They can be dangerous at times, but we never really fear for the protagonist. We also don't judge the world or other characters according to real-world, mature perspectives - I mean, we *laugh* when Dumbledore tells kids that going into that one corridor could kill them. If that happened in book six it would be a point of real drama and fear, not a joke. Because by then violence has become much more real, and we are asked to judge things according to a different standard that at the beginning of the series. And...the transition doesn't quite work, IMHO. It's too awkwardly done.

I guess I see the difference RE your standard bildungsroman being that, although the *character* may have a childish view at first, the author or narrator does not. There is a level of maturity there that the character eventually attains - closing the gap between *character* POV and *narrative* POV. This is how we see that the character has an immature POV at first. Whereas in HP the *narrative* POV starts out in that same immature POV, and then tries to reach a more mature perspective, at the same time that it's supposed to be telling us how *Harry's* POV is changing. So there is not such a gap between character and narrative.

If any of that makes sense. ;)