PS Chapter Two

[hafl.livejournal.com]

- The manner in which Dursleys abuse Harry is so over the top, it is hard to take seriously.

- Harry can't understand why would Dudley want to get a bicycle, since he apparently hates sports and is fat. Clearly, Dudley is morally deficient.

- Harry's glasses are held together only by Scotch tape, because Dudley punches him into nose so often. In the previous paragraph, it was stated that Harry is so fast, Dudley can't often catch him. These two sentences don't mesh together well.

- Not only is Harry not afraid of spiders, but also likes his scar. A true Gryffindor.

- Dudley is so fat he is like a pig. Hahaha, fat people are pathetic. Unless they're matronly of course.

- Okay, Dudley has no trouble while counting his gifts one by one, but when he has to add two at once, he is suddenly having problems?

- Harry find it hard to feel sorry that Mrs. Figg has broken her leg. The power of love at work, ladies and gentlemen.

- Petunia "looking furiously at Harry as though he'd planned this" is actually pretty interesting. If I remember Deathly Hallows correctly, Snape had some measure of control over his magic even before he entered Hogwarts and Petunia knew about it. As far as she knows, Harry may have caused Mrs. Figg to break her leg.

- Dudley is so spoiled he knows he only needs to pretend to cry to get all he wants.

- Again, Vernon warns Harry about doing anything weird. This and all the accounts of Harry's mishaps really reinforces the idea that the Dursleys are scared of Harry and think he is in control of his magic.

- Now that's Harry's school is mentioned, how come nobody noticed him being abused by the Dursleys? I don't mean classmates, I mean the school administration. They should know that both Harry and Dudley have the same address and they should know that Dursleys are Harry's legal guardians. Why didn't anyone the teachers notice that Harry's probably malnourished, wears only old clothes and his glasses are constantly getting broken, while Dudley's fat and owns only new things? I don't know that much about British educational system, especially in the eighties, but it probably wasn't that bad.

- In the zoo, Harry feels compassionate towards the snake. At this point, he's still a sympathetic kid.

- Now, after the snake incident, Piers claims that Harry was talking to the snake. Okay, but Parseltongue is apparently just hissing. So is Piers saying that Harry was talking just a simplification to avoid the revelation that Parseltongue is hissing? Or, if Harry was using human speech, why did the snake understand him?

- The Dursleys reaction is actually completely understandable. From their point of view, Harry was using is magic and from all the incidents that were mentioned, this one is the only one, where Dursleys could reasonably think that Harry was trying to attack them.

- And at the end of the chapter, we are again reminded that Harry is lonely and abused and that there's something mysterious about him.

Comments

[sharaz-jek.livejournal.com]

witches get burned (OK, the last one is more of a 1600s thing, but there you go). Rowling's idea of the second half of the 20th century sure is a bit hard to take seriously.

Very definitely. But her belief there was this epidemic of witch-burning particularly annoys me. Yes, some of them were burned in Scotland, but in England they were usually hanged, if they were convicted at all. None of this happened around the time of Hogwarts' founding, of course.

Oh, did not. At least, not in the 1980s when Harry was born.

If your child started doing magic and you knew the myths, wouldn't you at least consider it?

Speaking of poor uneducated lowest class, is it just me, or do the wizards who aren't Snape, regardless of their blood status, always somehow manage to be rich, noble or both by birth?

Do Neville and Luna count?

If you are talking about wizarding kids being real changelings, uhm, now that's an idea I've never thought about... I always thought of magic as a hereditary thing, you know, that the Muggleborns are products of squib genes in the family pool, or the mother's fling with a wizard or something like that. :)

I was speaking metaphorically - though it would be interesting if that's where the legends came from in the Potterverse. Maybe the wizards are the more humanoid fairies to go with the elves, goblins, and banshees.

but after a while, you'll compose yourself and do whatever you must to work things out

Not everyone's going to take "whatever you must" particularly reasonably.

But I don't recall him ever mentioning the Creevy brothers looking malnourished or Justin arriving at Hogwarts with a black eye.

You have a point. But it's still about as believable as the Patronus charm being awesomely advanced magic.

This reminds me of how Neville's family tried to kill him in the hope of bringing out his magic - this is presumably an "It's Okay If You're A Wizard" moment.

[sharaz-jek.livejournal.com]

You would?

Children with mysterious magical powers in a culture with changeling myths have a ready-made explanation. Just because we don't have anything needing such an explanation in real life doesn't mean it wouldn't be worth considering if magical children started appearing.

And anyway, even if you would, don't tell me you'd hurt him just because he might be a species you previously knew only from fairy tales? How about trying to talk to the kid and see how this 'magic' works?

Of course I wouldn't. But not everyone is nice and accepting, and there's undeniably room in the human psyche for prejudice against the different. Just because neither of us would abuse our hypothetical magical children doesn't mean others wouldn't.

People who would hit their 'special' offspring would probably hit their up-to-Dursleys'-standard normal children too, if they displeased them in any way. In a world where magic exists, same would go for magical children. Most people would learn how to live with them, some would hate them for being different or even for existing. Nothing to do with magic.

For these people, it's not magic in itself that would prompt abuse, just unwanted difference. But just as some people might be homophobic but not sexist, or transphobic but not racist, some people will see magic as an unwanted difference whereas they wouldn't see dyslexia, blindness, or being gay as such.

As always, despite what Rowling says, the text clearly shows that wizards are much more inclined to crimes of prejudice and hate than Muggles. What a surprise. :)

Depends where said Muggles are and against whom they're prejudiced, really. And who knows - maybe foreign wizards are enlightened and tolerant, and the real reason so much diplomacy was needed for the Triwizard Tournament is that every other wizarding nation looks down on Britain.

[sharaz-jek.livejournal.com]

Don't forget Easily-Angered-Pen-Pal-land in South America!

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

They still killed the kid. And there have been other things not related to religion, like the child who died from a lack of salt because his parents bought into the whole "salt is bad for you" pseudo-science. Most parents, even in the old days, were concerned for their children. How they showed this concern differs only by society. Keep the kid locked up and he or she won't be harassed by others; feed them poorly or don't vaccinate because that's the latest scare going around - it doesn't matter. The effects are the same. Remember, more parents who physically abuse their children think they're teaching them not to be bad so they won't get into a lot more trouble later on.

[cured4life.livejournal.com]

I think most parents who do abuse children are not thinking of the children at all. There is a big difference between discipline and abuse.

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

Depends on your era and definition of abuse, I'd think. True abuse, yes - beating the kid, for instance. But many more-modern definitions of abuse include spanking, which, a couple or three decades ago, would not have been considered abuse except by a few. When discussing the HP books in particular, since I don't usually discuss any other books on-line so have no reference to those particular discussions, the definition of abuse for each participant comes into play. Parents who spank believe they are doing the child a service. In much earlier times it was believed by society(though not necessarily by individual members of society) that a good beating did a bad kid good. "Spare the rod and spoil the child" was an adage people believed because they thought it was good for the child though today we'd see it as abuse.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Or the parents tried many other things that failed and one day gave in to the people who kept telling them spanking would work. And then fell into the pattern.

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

But many Potter discussions get that radical. I've read or been in eleventy-one too many, I think. Some people feel that Snape is an abuser because he had Neville test some youth potion on Trevor. It helps, I think, to find out exactly what a person means by "abuse" and what that person doesn't mean. I think I ended up rolling my question as to what is abuse to you into the discussion as a whole and it ended up splitting itself to shards here. Sorry!

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

Lack of salt has been known for centuries to be detrimental. Smothering is well-known to kill. The beliefs that brought about these deaths are more modern and go against established thought. A lot of beliefs which have gone against the establishment have later taken hold and even been right - think about the early experiments on human cadavers or the Sol-centric vision of the solar system - so it isn't odd to see people who should know better embracing new thought and practice. In the case of salt, for instance, it's well-known now that too much salt can be detrimental, too. Those parents could easily have known better since they knew about a newer theory (salt is bad for the heart) - they chose to follow the one and not the other and to go to extremes rather than taking the middle road. I sincerely doubt they put their beliefs above their child - I think that, because of their beliefs, they did the wrong thing mistakenly believing they would benefit the child. Same for the smothering death.

When someone does not accept their child's condition and instead tries to "cure" that condition (using "condition" to mean something that is a part of the person, not a temporary or potentially curable thing like pneumonia or the plague) they are bashing the child for having a condition which makes them different. The child is not good enough the way he or she is, the child must be brought within the parameters of "normal."

I agree that lack of sufficient information mitigates the intentions such as in the early blood transfusions. They needed certain information which they did not possess at the time. I also agree with you that there are other selfish reasons people may do things against their own, most certainly in the areas of belief and opinion or in Petunia's specialty, "what will the neighbors think?"

[sunnyskywalker]

For the parents around during Voldemort's first and second rises (and on the Continent, maybe Grindlewald's too), there's also the possibility that they noticed something was up and put the pieces together once their kid started showing signs of magic. Since their only other experience with real magic is scary, violent things getting hushed up, I can imagine some of those parents freaking out and wanting to protect their children from the wizarding world in any way they can - including trying to scare the kids out of using magic or trying to keep them hidden. Which could cause plenty of harm even if they are desperately trying to protect the kids from what they see as a worse danger. Considering how ultimately futile it would be, too, it would be quite sad.